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Yuletide 2021
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Published:
2021-12-23
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1,500
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Reconstruction

Summary:

Some things are buried to be forgotten—fossils, achievements, romances. But Mary and Elizabeth were, after all, experts at unearthing what should have been lost to time.

Notes:

Happy Yuletide, Beatrice_Sank! My fossils-obsessed self found this prompt fascinating and so I leapt at the chance to write about women in science and the geology of the Jurassic Coast, as well as, er... paleontology as a metaphor for a whole host of things? Hope you enjoy!

I own no rights to Ammonite.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Time, they assume, erases many things.

A single glance at the shoreline confirms as much.  Slice into the land in this corner of England, and see how the quiet contortions of the earth have heaved upwards seams of sandstone and quartzite and limestone and slate and chalk.  Time has covered the rolling hills of Dorset with topsoil and grass, bucolic and all but indistinguishable from any other county.  Only at the very edge of things, the place where mindless certainty drops off into the violent roil of the ocean, can one see the strata in their brilliant displays of rust red and blinding white and rich gold.  Only here, where the winds buffet and the waves crash and things are somewhat more disturbed than usual, is time shoved rudely aside so that its lost treasures are revealed.

Once, when Mary's hands were very small, her father had taken her out onto the shore to sift through the mud and pebbles and silt, patiently pushing aside the grime to reveal the hypnotic swirl of a fossil's shell.  Years later, her hands had grown, but her father's steady touch had trembled on the face of a cliff and gone cold at its base.  Grit speckled the undersides of Mary's fingernails, black and unsightly, and her fingers ached with the chill that came of having no firewood in a biting winter on the coast.  But then the warm and callous-free grip of a gentlewoman slipped around Mary's rigid fingers—a hand that at first offered comfort, then later offered a book on geology, silently inviting Mary to knowledge that, for a girl of her status, was all but forbidden.

Time erases what it can, and when its secrets are wrested from the depths of its relentless flow, it rarely yields them whole.  A special triumph must be accorded to the eleven-year-old girl who stood beside the full skeleton of the ichthyosaur and stared down with fierce, silent pride at the perfect match of its stone-torn bones.  A pyrrhic victory, some might say, as the bones were carted away and placed behind glass for a full year's keep, and the girl continued on with only the memory of having forced such a disclosure from history.  But it was something to hold close, a small flame of internal warmth, through the blasts of freezing sea spray and the squelch of cold mud between frozen fingers and the long and lonely nights with the wind howling round the corners of the house.

Only so many pages can be squeezed between the leather covers of each history book; with each new edition, a little history is lost, a little history is gained.  Time scooped the words of praise for the young paleontologist up in one gesture and let the remnants scatter to the endless winds.  She, selling petrified seashells by the eternal seashore, smiled bitterly and soldiered on with life.  Being ignored was all she had ever expected, as a woman and working class and a Dissenter, to boot.

But it was one thing to be ignored by society, by history, by time.  It was another thing entirely to be ignored by the woman who trudged up and down the rocky shoreline of Lyme Regis, laughing into the wind, wisps of fair hair escaping from her coiffure and dancing about her face as she stooped to tease coarsely hewn ammonites and belemnites from the stones.  Fame, the type of fame that endures the eroding waves of historical memory, could only be chiselled out by the men whose names were written down in the annals of the Royal Society; it was useless to seek such a thing.  But love—might that not still be within reach?

It begins with a hand brushed against a wrist, an arm pressed against an arm; barely perceptible invitations to grasp, to hold, to seek warmth and tenderness.  Even the treasures of ages past remain obscured when left untouched on the beach; only with the most careful and insistent strokes can the build-up of hard sediment be worried away to reveal the beauty beneath.  Time erases all but the hard structures beneath things, impersonal and and rational and ripe for scientific classification, leaving only the faintest trace of a life lived.  Lost to the ages are the softness of flesh and the heat of flushed skin, breathless whispers through kiss-swollen lips, moments that history was not meant to remember.

And yet.  Even if history refuses to record such things, those who live them can bear witness.  The affair was not fated to continue, of course.  Mary—young and passionate, fierce and desperate—demanded that Elizabeth be anything and everything for her; and yet, mortified by her own poverty and inadequacies, she kept Elizabeth just far enough away to prevent any illusions from being shattered.  Elizabeth, exhausted from battering herself to pieces against Mary's barricades, quietly acknowledged that she could never live up to Mary's towering expectations and ended things as kindly as possible.  One can kill with kindness, though, and the rejection sent Mary hurtling back into the wind and rain and mud, fleeing from her pain, fleeing from her unending loneliness, gratefully surrounded by the petrified dead whose stories were over, who could never hurt her as much as the living could.  Still.  Mary—shivering alone in her bed, knuckles scraped raw from caressing the rough exteriors of her uncaring ammonites—held close the flickering memory of Elizabeth's bright hair tangled in Mary's fingers and Elizabeth's breath warm on Mary's neck.  The moment was no longer alive, but the memory lingered long after the soft and vulnerable core of the matter had been hollowed out, the empty space still cradling the faint scent of flowers in spring.  (Not enough, perhaps, but still at least something.)

The saying goes that time heals all wounds.  But healing implies forgetting, and forgetting demands suppressing what made the danger worth it, in the first place.  Mary tended her wounds without the aid of Elizabeth's salve and moved forward with grim, icy determination.  It took someone more vulnerable and alone than she, to teach Mary that those jagged scars made her not monstrous, but brave and beautiful.  And once Charlotte and her naïve fantasies had retreated back to the velvet-and-walnut splendour of her London life, Mary walked along the Cobb on a blustery but sunny day, reflecting that perhaps she had once been just as young and foolish and unrealistically reliant, to expect the entire world from an older, ostensibly wiser person, who was likely just as lost and confused.

Mary was most comfortable with beautiful, secret treasures wrested with sweat and grime from deep beneath the earth; Elizabeth decked her home in vivid-hued flowers that turned their faces luxuriously to the sun and were rewarded with a quick and easy death.  And yet, Elizabeth had been the one who encouraged Mary to see the beauty and the value in the hard-earned bounty from the shores and the cliff faces.  When Mary tentatively appeared at Elizabeth's home, not to buy or barter, but simply to be, Elizabeth welcomed her back without question.  And so the two slowly unearthed something that had gone into the ground freshly ended and too painful to examine—something that, with enough time and pressure, re-emerged stripped down to its essence and solid as stone, coarsely hewn from its resting place, but possible to refine into something polished and clear.  Elizabeth, the unreachable goddess set impossibly high on the pedestal, had finally come into focus as merely another woman, one who accepted and respected Mary precisely as she was, and far from the figure that Mary had venerated and resented in nearly equal measure, all those years ago.  Free of any expectations or dependencies, it was surprisingly easy to simply sit in companionable silence as equals—as scientists—as they sketched in Elizabeth's light-drenched parlour, pens scratching down the outlines of delicate bones using ink revived from the sacs of belemnites from another age.

Time guards most of its secrets close.  Countless fossils, histories, achievements, lives, remain buried forever—bones layered between sediment, misattributed relics in the British Museum.  The ammonites embedded in the cliffs of Lyme Regis are the oddities, the rare time-travellers discoverable by chance, where past meets present at the end of the world.  They are the treasures to be cherished most, the things long put to rest that insisted on making their presence known again, in a new era, with a new and perhaps more resilient form.  Mary traced their unwinding spirals with the end of her pen, a continuous sweep of outward growth; glanced across the table at the parallel forms on Elizabeth's paper; caught the joyful and oddly understanding smile that Elizabeth tossed back her way.  And even if the secret worlds and desires of women too often are erased, even if time has long since disintegrated any softness to their ending, perhaps they somehow reconstructed something equally transfigured and beautiful, in what time remained to them.

Notes:

And I guess the U.S. Library of Congress has debunked the theory that Mary Anning was the inspiration for the tongue twister as 'metafolklore' (aka, something that sounds like an overly self-aware Taylor Swift album). But too late, the reference is already written into this and there shall stay, because I am lazy.