Pride and Prometheus - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Kessel lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, novelist Therese Anne Fowler. He is a professor and the director of creative writing at North Carolina State University. He is the author of The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Moon and the Other, and Pride and Prometheus.

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Pride and Prometheus

ONE

When she was nineteen, Miss Mary Bennet had believed three things that were not true. She believed that, despite her awkwardness, she might become interesting through her accomplishments. She believed that, because she paid strict attention to all she had been taught about right and wrong, she was wise in the ways of the world. And she believed that God, who took note of every moment of one’s life, would answer prayers, even foolish ones.

Thirteen years later, below the sea cliffs at Lyme Regis, among the tangled driftwood and broken shale exposed by the retreating tide, Mary found a flat stone plate that, when broken open by a tap of her hammer, revealed four Devil’s Fingers.

“Mr. Woodleigh!” she called.

Three days of rain had softened the cliffs above Pinhay Bay, and a recent avalanche had scattered heaps of shale across the stony beach. Behind her the early March surf broke continually upon the shingle. Seabirds cried. A cold offshore wind rustled the stunted trees on the verge of the cliff above. Mary’s hair came loose from her bonnet and fell into her eyes; she brushed it away with the back of the gloved hand that held the hammer.

At her call, Charles Woodleigh, bent over the rocks some twenty feet away, raised his head. “What is it, Miss Bennet?”

“See what I’ve found!”

He laid down his hammer and came to stand beside her as she crouched over her discovery. In the face of the stone plate were four slender conical shells, the shortest an inch or so, the largest, completely intact, at least four inches. It looked not so much like a finger as the point of a spear. She rubbed her thumb over the hard, smooth surface, whose color ranged from rusty brown to dark gray.

“Lovely,” Woodleigh said. “I believe you have discovered something, Miss Bennet.”

“I have!” Mary said.

The rock containing the fossils was roughly a foot across. Together they pulled it from beneath the rubble and placed it into her canvas satchel. It was not so heavy, but Mr. Woodleigh carried it toward the dogcart they had left at the foot of the road, where his man Daniel and Alice, Mrs. Bennet’s maid, waited. As they approached, Daniel saw them, hurried over, and took the satchel, carrying it the rest of the way.

Woodleigh had him set it on the floor of the cart. The gravity with which Alice had taken her duties as chaperone was evidenced by her staying with Daniel rather than braving the blustery seashore. Now she was all concern. She tucked the lap robe around Mary while Mr. Woodleigh told Daniel to take them to the inn.

“A very lucky find, indeed,” Woodleigh told Mary as they rode back to town, his feet resting on her discovery.

The rear seat of the cart faced backward, and as it bumped up the rutted path, their view of the bay expanded. The tide would soon cover the beach where they had spent the last hours. The sinuous masonry of the Cobb, the famous seawall, embraced Lyme’s small harbor and its fishing boats. Below the Promenade the beach lay devoid of the bathing machines of summer. The high street pitched steeply up from the harbor, not half so busy as it would be in that season. Daniel maneuvered their cart around a man waiting anxiously with a groom alongside a chaise and four. Under the overcast sky the town lay steeped in twilight. Some servants could be seen at the fish market and butcher’s shop, while men in work clothes came out of the ironmonger’s. Outside the Assembly Rooms, a boy was lighting the lamps at each side of the entrance.

At the King’s Crown Inn they dismounted. Woodleigh sent Daniel to stable the horse and cart; Mary allowed the shivering Alice to hurry indoors while she stopped at a table set up outside the inn. On the table were displayed baskets full of Dudley Locusts, verteberries, and several such Devil’s Fingers as Mary had discovered. A large, flat stone leaning against a table leg showed the skeleton of some ancient fish. A girl of perhaps fifteen years of age, wearing a well-worn dark green wool dress and an unadorned bonnet, minded the table. Her ungloved hands, which she kept crossed before her, were rough, her knuckles red. This was the celebrated Mary Anning, the girl the locals said had survived being struck by lightning as an infant, and who had acquired such a reputation for her ability to find fossils that enthusiasts from as far away as Edinburgh frequented her stall.

Mary had made her acquaintance earlier. Mary Anning was shy around her betters, but at moments her intelligence broke through their difference in station. Mary wanted to tell the girl what she had found, but hesitated, and in a moment Woodleigh arrived. A basket on the table contained a dozen Devil’s Fingers. Woodleigh selected one. Mary Anning’s hopeful eyes watched his every move. He addressed the girl.

“You ask a shilling for one of these? Yet this lady has found several herself this very day.”

Mary Anning’s eyes met Mary’s, a glimmer of excitement in her gaze. “Did you go where—”

“Excuse me?” Woodleigh interrupted. “I believe I asked you a question.”

“Beg pardon, sir. The lady asked me how she might look for such as these and I told her.”

Woodleigh nodded. “Yes, indeed. It’s remarkable that there are any left to find, since you deprive this beach of antiquities the moment that they appear. Those of us who study fossils can only travel here at great trouble, on certain occasions, while you have the Blue Lias cliffs at your disposal every day of the year.”

Mary set her satchel on the edge of the table, opened it, and showed the girl her find. “I think this must have been exposed by the recent fall.”

Mary Anning studied the plate. “These is very fine.”

“They are not really fingers, are they?” Mary asked.

Woodleigh said, “No, Miss Bennet. These are the horns of some ancient sea creature.”

Miss Anning said, “They comes from some sort of cuttlefish.”

“I doubt that very much,” Woodleigh said.

The girl did not argue the point.

Woodleigh surveyed the fossils laid out, including one very fine example of what the locals called a “snake stone,” a spiral shell rather like that of a nautilus. Woodleigh haggled with the girl until she agreed to sell it for two shillings.

Mary Anning wrapped the snake stone in brown paper while Woodleigh pulled the pittance he had offered from his purse. From their conversations, Mary knew that the girl’s family depended on the meager earnings from such sales for their living. Upon entering the inn, she ventured to speak to Woodleigh about it.

He shook his head. “Your kind heart speaks well of you, Mary. The girl has no learning, yet she presumes to correct her betters. She is unwilling to do work more fitting to someone of her station, and lucky to get what we give her.”

“But Mr. Woodleigh, you know this is the girl who discovered the fossilized crocodile that was the talk of the Geological Society.”

“It was no crocodile. It was an ichthyosaurus.”

“Which she discovered. Doesn’t she deserve some credit for that?”

“Would we say the beggar who finds a sovereign in the gutter earned it? She could not pronounce...