Remarkable Creatures Read Online Free PDF

miss?”
    “I scrubbed the mud off.”
    “But did you scrape it with a blade?”
    I frowned. “What kind of blade?”
    “Oh, a penknife will do, though a razor’s better. You scrape at the inside, to get the silt and such out, and give it a good shape. I could show you.”
    I sniffed. The idea of a child teaching me how to do something seemed ridiculous. And yet . . . “All right, Mary Anning. Come along tomorrow with your blades and show me. I’ll pay you a penny per fossil to clean them.”
    Mary brightened at the suggestion of payment. “Thank you, Miss Philpot.”
    “Off you go, now. Ask Bessy on the way out to give you a slice of her fruitcake.”
    When she was gone, Louise said, “She remembers the lightning. I could see it in her eyes.”
    “How could she? She was little more than a baby!”
    “Lightning must be hard to forget.”
    The following day Richard Anning agreed to make me a specimen cabinet for fifteen shillings. It was the first of many cabinets I have owned, though he was only to make four for me before he died. I have had cabinets of better quality and finish, where the drawers glide without sticking and the joins don’t need to be reglued after a dry spell. But I accepted the flaws of his workmanship, for I knew that the care he neglected to put into his cabinets he put into his daughter’s knowledge of fossils.

    SOON MARY HAD FOUND her way into our lives, cleaning fossils for me, selling me fossil fish she and her father had found once she discovered I liked them. She sometimes accompanied me to the beach when I went out hunting for fossils, and though I didn’t tell her, I was more at ease when she was with me, for I worried about the tide cutting me off. Mary had no fear of that, for she had a natural feel for the tides that I never really learned. Perhaps to have that sense you must grow up with the sea so close you could leap into it from your window. While I consulted tide tables in our almanac before going out on the beach, Mary always knew what the tide was doing, coming in or going out, neap or spring, and how much of the beach was exposed at any given time. On my own I only went along the beach when the tide was receding, for I knew I had a few clear hours—though even then I often lost track of time, as is so easy to do while hunting, and would turn to find the sea creeping up on me. When I was with Mary she naturally kept track in her head of the movement of the sea.
    I valued Mary’s company for other reasons too, as she taught me many things: how the sea sorts stones of similar sizes into bands along the shore, and which band you might find what fossils in; how to spot vertical cracks in the cliff face that warn of a possible landslip; where to access the cliff walks we could use if the tide did cut us off.
    She was also handy as a companion. In some ways Lyme was a freer place than London; for example, I could walk about town on my own, without needing to be accompanied by my sisters or Bessy, as I would in London. The beach, however, was often empty save for a few fishermen checking crab pots; or scavengers of debris whom I suspected were smugglers; or travelers walking at low tide between Charmouth and Lyme. It was not considered a place for a lady to be out on her own, not even by independent Lyme standards. Later, when I was older and better known in town, and when I was less bothered about what others thought of me, I went out alone on the beach. But in those early days I preferred company. Sometimes I could persuade Margaret or Louise to come with me, and occasionally they even found fossils. Though Margaret hated to get her hands dirty, she did enjoy finding chunks of iron pyrites, for she liked the glitter of fool’s gold. Louise complained of the deadness of rock compared with the plants she preferred, though she did sometimes scramble up the cliffs and study blades of sea grass with her magnifying glass.
    We spent much of our time on the mile-long beach between