Read Online Curiosity by Joan Thomas - Free Book Online

to climb the hill or devise a means to be carried up it, while the poor had the ease of the shore. Even Morley Cottage climbed the hill, the parlour windows being higher than the dining room windows, although (Mary knew, from having been inside) the floors themselves had been built straight, not in accordance with the slant of the hill.
    Miss Elizabeth Philpot came to the door in an orange gown. The cabinet was to go in the drawing room, she said, and led them down a hall to the room where pressed flowers hung in frames on the walls and curiosities from the shore and cliffs lay on every surface. Devils’ toenails were splayed out in sets of five on the mantelshelf (Miss Elizabeth’s little joke) and thunderbolts arranged in patterns on a tray.
    “How grateful we will be for a bit of order in this room,” said the middle Miss Philpot while Mary’s father unwrapped the shallow drawers and slid them into the cabinet. “We can hardly reach for a book without knocking something to the floor,” said the eldest. The middle sister Mary had seen before, but not the eldest. In spite of her scars, she was the most handsome, with fine eyes and fine arching eyebrows. They had lived all three in London when they were girls, and were rich enough to pay for the pesthouse, but their father was a pious man and thought it a sin to try to thwart the will of the Almighty. “And so the Almighty had His way with the three of us,” said Miss Elizabeth Philpot, the day she told the story of her own pox to Mary.
    There were fine curtains in the drawing room and a carpet on the floor, and Mary stood calmly in the midst of it. “Ye have twelve drawers but only five different curiosities,” she said to her Miss Philpot (counting on her fingers:
thunderstones, thunderbolts
,
verteberries, Devil’s toenails, snakestones
). They were partners in collecting. Miss Philpot did not go to the shore herself; she bought from the Annings or sent her groom down to the lime quarry to inquire of the quarrymen whether they had turned up anything of interest in their labours. She always asked Mary eagerly what Mr. Buckland had to say. The Ammon Knight, she called him, because of the story Mary told her about the snakestone he put over his head.
    Miss Philpot stood in her puckered gown with the sleeves that swelled like pumpkins on her shoulders, frowning over the cabinet. “Twelve drawers,” she said. “Yes. How is everything to be arranged?”
    “There be ammonites with ridges and ammonites without,” said Mary slowly, for she was thinking. “There be the golden ammonite curled up in stones. And the pyrite ammonite that we find clean on the shore. And the grey ammonite, made of stone like the stone it lies in, and brown ones, the ones we find past Charmouth.” And then it seemed a lamp had begun to glow in her mind. “But in each of these materials, there be ammonites with ridges or ammonites without.”
    “Yes!” cried Miss Philpot. “We could sort them by substance or sort them by form. But let us begin by identifying each one as to form. In such a fashion, we will learn.” She sprang over to the bookshelf and pulled a large book down and laid it on the table. After she had leafed through it for a moment, she called Mary over and showed her, and Mary saw with a lurch that Miss Philpot was inviting her to read.
    On the open page were two illustrations of ammonites. Mary bent her face over the book and stared at the print that filled the bottom half of the page. The two other Miss Philpots, sitting on either end of a divan, turned their faces towards her, and her father looked sharply up from the corner where he was givinga last polish to the cupboard, and she put her finger to the lines, the way Joseph did when he read.
The ammonite shell
(she said in a forceful voice, as from the pulpit)
contains a series of progressively larger chambers. Only the final and largest chamber was occupied by the animal at any given time. As the animal grew, it