Curiosity (13 page)

“If he chided your mother, it might be that harsh words would be his last,” James Wheaton said. “It is a good man’s death he longs for.”

When he was gone, Mary did not go back into the house. She walked quickly through the rain down Bell Cliff and stood against the seawall. It seemed clear that a curse had been visited on their father, the old witch’s curse:
Ye will die by inches
. She
was filled with fury at her mother, who opened the door to fear, who sucked them into witchery, who had tried to work a charm so hideous Mary could never tell James Wheaton, a charm too dark for his ears, worked in the darkest hour of a dark night. Mary had woken up and saw her mother gone from her bed, and a gasp came through the darkness. She thought then, This is his death come. She was wearing her cloak in her bed for warmth and she got up and stepped over Lizzie to go down, and from the stairs, she saw Molly on the cot, crouched over Father, rocking, her nightdress pulled up along her thighs. Mary melted back upstairs, but the image of their faces was pressed into her mind. It was not a coupling such as she had seen in dreams from her pallet; it was something different, the way Father lay, the orange light from the hearth on his face, his face and his shining eyes so alive, and Molly with her hair clutched back and her face like a skull, as though she was taking his death into her.

Her father died in a kitchen where a brown hen pecked and the prisoners roared outside the door. Molly wanted him to be carried upstairs to die peacefully in his bed, but he was in too much misery to be moved. In the last month, he was transformed to lizard, heated from without, and they begged what wood and coal they could and piled all the blankets over him. They tried to keep a fire going in the night; they crept back and forth up the stairs, Mary and Joseph and their mother. If his eyes were open, one of them would sit with him. Mary sat one night, and when it seemed he was asleep, she laid her head wearily on the cot beside him. He lifted a hand and rested it on her and she was soothed into sleep by the weight of his hand on her shoulder. When she woke up in the grey light of morning, he had lifted his hand to his eyes. “The poor man’s clock,” he said faintly when he saw she was awake. “What?” she whispered. “When ye can
pick out the veins in your hand, it be time to rise,” he said. That was the last time he spoke to her. He was gone before Michaelmas, his spirit was gone, although it was winter before his breath ceased. It was God’s grace to them that Percival died the afternoon of the same day and could be buried in the crook of his father’s arm, where he so often lay in that last year.

How Mary’s father had provided for his family through the last years of his living and the months of his dying then became clear. He had borrowed from every tradesman on Broad Street, and some in Charmouth and Uplyme.

The first to come to the door was Mr. Dobson. The week after the funeral, he stood on the doorstone and told Molly that he’d been lending Richard money, quite a lot of money, in all eighteen pounds, six shillings, tuppence. Not that he was trying to collect. He simply wanted her to know of his regard for Richard and the lengths he’d been prepared to go to see Richard comfortable, although he had seven children himself and his youngest babe not thriving.
Eighteen pounds
, Mary thought in wonder. But he was just the first. Some had chits of paper with Richard’s signature on them. One man came from Axminster riding on an ass with a boy walking behind to whip it. Men
and
women – the laundress at the Monmouth Inn alleged a debt of ten shillings. And they found they believed her. There had always been coin in the tin box, even when their store of curiosities was long gone. A bit of money, like the bit of flour in the widow’s flour barrel in the Bible, that never got to be more but was never used up. It was always there, and they’d spent it as they had to. Like children, they’d never asked.

The Widow Anning, Molly was now. Every morning, she washed carefully and pinned up her plaits and dressed herself in her Sabbath dress. In the face of their creditors, she was curiously
composed. She received them in the workshop and called Mary in to help her, to write the sums down. She thanked them for coming to tell her, as though it were only the lack of this piece of information that had prevented their being paid in full. Mary had never attended to her face before, the oblong face with its long nose and her large, pale mouth. She was a stranger to Mary, an agent sent from the Overseer of the Parish Poor to manage things.

Mary used her father’s account book, opened to a new page. She entered a line for Henry Jefferd, joiner, for her father’s coffin. And for James Jessup, stationer – the account book itself had apparently never been paid for. She kept two pages, the way her father had, although for a different purpose.

There were more. Three or four letters were brought to the door but went undelivered because it cost thruppence to receive a letter.

They’d surely have been sent to the workhouse, but by God’s grace it had burned down. Instead, they were accorded outdoor relief by the parish, by applying to a table set up on Fridays in the churchyard. Poor relief of three shillings a week. Again Molly seemed to know the proper demeanour. When she went to collect the poor relief, she pulled her shawl up over her head, she kept her eyes cast down and declined to greet her neighbours, who paid the Poor Rate as hard as their own lot was, who lived within their means, who had not called such misfortune down upon themselves. When the poor relief was spent (as it was by Tuesday of each week), Mary went to the Williamses’ shop three times a day because one spoonful of tea was all she could bring herself to ask for on credit. She kept her eyes down as well, so that May Williams would not be ashamed if she had to refuse her.

Mary reckoned the debt at 120 pounds, most of it over her father’s signature. Mary asked Joseph to verify the sums, but he would not. He said it might as well be 1,000 pounds as 120, because neither sum would ever be paid. Harry Tupper was in the Cockmoile for a debt of 15 pounds. He’d been imprisoned as a prod to his three idle sons. Would it occur to someone that the Annings might benefit by Joseph Anning being moved next door to the Cockmoile?

They would need to become a different sort of family. They stood in the workshop (not Lizzie, she was in bed) and it seemed to Mary that they had met to decide what they would become. They looked first at Richard’s tools lying along the workbench.

“If I was a boy, he would have taught me,” Mary said, and saw pain blow across Joseph’s face, for he had never taught Joseph. She did not repent saying it. For he would have, and why lie?

“When my father died,” said Molly, as though she had not heard, “my oldest brother had to go out to tell the bees. He had to knock on each of the hives until a buzzing started up within. Then, after the funeral, we brought cake out to the bees. We sewed a hood of crepe for each hive. Without it, the bees would have swarmed, they’d have gone out to seek him.” She stood straight and tall and calm, Percival no longer hanging from her.

“I told Armstrong I’d not be back,” said Joseph. “I’m going to sea.”

“You will never go to sea while I draw breath,” said Molly. “You will go to Armstrong, as you have been.”

“I’ll go to the shore at first low tide,” said Mary. “I’ll look for the crocodile Mr. Buckland wants.”

“No,” said Molly, rounding on her. “You will not go collecting. You will not die on the cliffs as your father did. You will stay and help me at home.” What she would do at home Mary did not ask, for there was no answer. When Molly was a girl, all the girls and women sat in their doorways and made lace, but the lace had gone north to the steam mills.

Molly turned back to the workbench and ran her hand over the tool box. “I’ll offer the planer to Henry Jefferd,” she said. “It’s not worth one pound let alone eight, but if he has any sense, he’ll settle for it. He’s in dire need of a new one. That coffin were a dishonour to the trade.”

One hundred and twenty pounds
. It was a fortune to have associated with their name. Mary could not comprehend it. She had tried to understand her father, but she had failed. She thought of a day they had walked up to Ware Manor Farm to buy eggs. Richard had lifted Lizzie to his shoulders and she was drooping, she lay over his head. “Sit up,” he said. “You make yourself heavy.” He was singing as he walked up the path where a huge sycamore leaned, Mary trotting along behind. When they came
up on the sycamore, he was still carrying Lizzie a-pisty-poll and he did not slow his pace. He gripped Lizzie by her bare ankles and strode on with springy step. The tree was pruned for passersby, but Lizzie sat high and free on Father’s shoulders, she rode innocently towards the lowest limb with her hands in Father’s hair (he is only playing the fool, thought Mary as Lizzie rode towards the limb), and Mary screamed “Watch!” and he ducked just at the last moment, and the branch skimmed over Lizzie’s bonnet. He staggered a little getting his footing, and Lizzie’s laugh rang out, and he tipped her like a package to the ground, where she recovered herself and ran ahead of him up the path. And Father kept on walking with jaunty step, kept on with his song without missing a single word.

He had imagined himself a man to whom rules did not apply. He had imagined himself a man who could carry the weight of a fortune. He had put off their disgrace until he would not be there to witness it.

NINE

onths pass and spring drapes itself over Bristol, and still his mother does not send for him. Mornings he reads for a couple of hours (he’s read through Clement’s books and started into Alger’s) and then he sketches and paints. The birds from the hearth lie in a box on the desk. It’s a sturdy casket with fitted joins the maid found,
MELTON TEAS
stencilled in black on the side. The skeletons are arranged in two rows. They’re dressed in aromatic shreds of tea: tea-coloured bones, smelling of tea. Rescued from the hearth, they continue their passage towards dust, drying and loosening, their joints unhinging at the slightest touch. In his palm, Henry holds a weightless, intricate basketry of bones. It’s a dunnock. He knows it by its tiny beak, and because it’s written up in a folio in Alger’s drawing room:
Prunella
modularis. He’ll do a line drawing in India ink, and then a sepia wash.