Free Curiosity by Joan Thomas

up her tools and scrambled over the rocks, they’d have separated before she reached them.
    “How could a creature turn to stone?” Mary asked her father while they walked home one day. She was thinking of the mushy bodies of snails rotting in broken shells on the path.
    “Drop by drop, the flesh washes out and the stone washes in,” said her father. “So the fellow says. He shows me a verteberry and says it’s the backbone of a crocodile. Are ye telling me the curiosities be the remains of ordinary martel creatures? I says to him, and he says, I’d never dare tell ye that. A man said it once and they locked him in the Bastille and starved him to death.”
    “Why would they lock him up?”
    “It’s alchemy, ain’t it. Flesh rots, it don’t turn to stone.” The sun was high, it shone crimson through her father’s nostrils. His thin face was pale, the skin under his eyes was smudged. She thought of Mr. Buckland with his fleshy, high-spirited face. Beside Mr. Buckland, her father was a ragged sparrow.
    They angled up the foreshore to where the way was smoother, and Richard began to sing his walking song:
    Think’st thou that I have any need
On slaughtered bulls and goats to feed,
To eat their flesh and drink their blood?
The sacrifices I require
Are hearts which love and zeal inspire
And vows with strictest care made good
.
    It was his only hymn and he never sang it right through, but brought out a verse of it from time to time. Two years before, he’d been up on Church Cliffs when the land fell away under his feet. But he was not like other men – he’d ridden on top of the landslip and landed unhurt on the shore. Now he’d had a taste of death on the cliffs, the way Joseph and Mary’d had a taste of the pox, and he was safe from it.
    As Mary lay in the dark, she turned her thoughts to the seventh son in Exeter, dislodged from his place in the family by the death of another. At first, it seemed he had been chosen, as she had been. At a time when she was too young to know what she was, a lightning bolt had killed three others, but Mary Anning it had taken from one sort of child and turned to another. Even her hair was improved, becoming a rich, glistening black. The lightning bolt did not heal – it transformed. But whether its transforming powers had been exhausted in her on that August day ten years ago, she did not know.

SIX
    n Uncle Alger’s house in Bristol, he’s given a bedchamber that was shut up for years, a perfectly square, whitewashed room with one wide window. The bed itself is a hulking affair, two hundred years old and fitted with brocade. The fireplace is still boarded over and a smell of must exudes from the curtains. Henry keeps the window open when he can. It looks onto the garden of the house next door, where a tangle of blackberry vines and the dried spikes of delphiniums rise out of the mist.
    This is the house where his father was raised. It’s not one of the great merchant houses of Bristol, but a two-storey thatched cottage. The heyday of sugar was past by the time the De la Beches came to the trade. It was as chief justice that Henry’s grandfather went to Jamaica, leaving his twin sons in Bristol with their mother. He had accepted a four-year term, but he took to island living and found the money to purchase Halse Hall and never set foot in England again. When he died, the Bristol house was left to Alger and the plantation to Henry’s father, an uneven bequest on the face of it, for the plantation comprised four and a half thousand acres, and its hundred-year-old great house wasthe finest in Clarendon County. But not so unfair when you consider that Henry’s father had to sell his commission to go to Jamaica, and that when he arrived, he had first to remove a Creole wife and his father’s five natural children from the great house and set them up in the nearby town of May Pen, then to arrange a mortgage to settle the generous bequests to these surprising relations, a branch