Curiosity by Joan Thomas Read Free Book Online

explained that he was a clergyman and a scholar at Oxford University. “What age is the lass?” he asked.
    Mary told him she was eleven and asked with all courtesy, “And you, sir?” and Mr. Buckland and her father both laughed, but he did tell her. He was six-and-twenty. “Sharp as a blade!” he said, and now Mary, who was coming to know his tendency to reuse his words, did not put so much stock in it.
    “Ye’d not have said so, mind,” said Richard, “if ye’d seen her as a babe.” But Mary did not want to hear him tell the story of the lightning again, dwelling on her wondrous dullness, and she rushed in with a question: Could Mr. Buckland explain why the snakes had all curled up in the same attitude to die, so neatly, like the curled horns of a ram? For she’d seen more than one snake dead on the turnpike road and they were not curled tightly up but were laid out like whips.
    “Were the ammonites snakes at all?” Mr. Buckland asked. “By their form, you might conclude they were molluscs. You’ve seen a garden snail with its shell on its back?”
    “If they were like garden snails, how did they come to be stone?” she asked.
    “Ha!” said Mr. Buckland. “I could ask you the same question, if they were snakes.”
    “Saint Hilda turned them to stone,” Mary said. “When she started the convent at Whitby. She rolled them down a hill and their heads broke off.” But even as she said it, she saw the amusedlook on Mr. Buckland’s face and realized how very foolish this story was.
    Mr. Buckland asked her father then about the stony jaws often found on the shore. Crocodile jaws, he called them. He wanted a complete example that he could carry away to study.
    “You’d best ask at the quarry at Church Cliffs,” Richard said. “They’re grinding them up for lime morning and night.” Her father must have taken hard against Mr. Buckland to refuse such a chance.
    “I’d be prepared to pay handsomely,” Mr. Buckland said, and Mary studied his face, trying to gauge how many shillings
handsomely
might mean.
    “The lass with the anthracite eyes,” he called her. She asked him what anthracite was, and he said a kind of coal. Mr. Buckland was from another world; he’d been born in Axminster, six miles away. He did not know the Annings, the ill fortune they were marked out for, although the news of the first Mary’s death in a fire had been written up in the paper – not in Lyme (where they thought the tidings too dismal for Christmas) but in Bath. Molly had the newspaper, so old and dry and yellow that it was splitting at the folds. She kept it in the cupboard and, when she was in the mood to look at it, showed Mary, though neither of them could read it. Mary studied it, marvelling that the whole sad story was hidden in those tiny lines of print. Strangers in Bath had moved their eyes over it while their Christmas goose spit and dripped on the fire, and knew about the Annings. But that was long ago.
    Asking for salve was just a pretext to knock on the door of Morley Cottage that afternoon, for Mary’s arm was healed. All the same, Miss Elizabeth Philpot helped her hang her jacket on the back of a chair and roll up the sleeve of her grey dress.While Miss Philpot applied the salve, Mary told her a story about Mr. Buckland. Grey snakestones as big as cartwheels were bedded on the western shore, and Mr. Buckland had found a broken one with the centre whorls washed out of it. He hoisted it up and fitted it over his head like a ruff, and then he called to Mary, “How does my lady for this many a day?” The tide was coming in and he walked straight out onto the foreshore and disappeared around a point, wading ankle deep in water with the snakestone round his neck. Mary was worried he’d be caught by the tide, but all her father said was, “He’ll swim to France, the thin-faced martel.”
    Miss Philpot was daubing the salve delicately and without fear on Mary’s pox-marks. Her own cheeks were marred with