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The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009
Copyright © Tracy Chevalier 2009
Chapter head motifs © Neil Gower
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover image © Den Reader / Arcangel Images
Tracy Chevalier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007178384
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007341108
Version: 2019-06-07
This is for my son, Jacob
Table of Contents
1. Different from all the rocks on the beach
2. An unladylike pursuit, dirty and mysterious
3. Like looking for a four-leaf clover
5. We will become fossils, trapped upon beach forever
6. A little in love with him myself
7. Like the tide making its highest mark on the beach and then retreating
8. An adventure in an unadventurous life
9. The lightning that signalled my greatest happiness
Postscript: The reader’s patience
Lightning has struck me all my life. Just once was it real. I shouldn’t remember it, for I was little more than a baby. But I do remember. I was in a field, where there were horses and riders performing tricks. Then a storm blew in, and a woman – not Mam – picked me up and brought me under a tree. As she held me tight I looked up and saw the pattern of black leaves against a white sky.
Then there was a noise, like all the trees falling down round me, and a bright, bright light, which was like looking at the sun. A buzz run right through me. It was as if I’d touched a hot coal, and I could smell singed flesh and sense there was pain, yet it weren’t painful. I felt like a stocking turned inside out.
Others begun pulling at me and calling, but I couldn’t make a sound. I was carried somewhere, then there was warmth all round, not a blanket, but wet. It was water and I knew water – our house was close to the sea, I could see it from our windows. Then I opened my eyes, and it feels like they haven’t been shut since.
The lightning killed the woman holding me, and two girls standing next to her, but I survived. They say I was a quiet, sickly child before the storm, but after it I grew up lively and alert. I cannot say if they’re right, but the memory of that lightning still runs through me like a shiver. It marks powerful moments of my life: seeing the first crocodile skull Joe found, and finding its body myself; discovering my other monsters on the beach; meeting Colonel Birch. Other times I’ll feel the lightning strike and wonder why it’s come. Sometimes I don’t understand, but accept what the lightning tells me, for the lightning is me. It entered me when I was a baby and never left.
I feel an echo of the lightning each time I find a fossil, a little jolt that says, “Yes, Mary Anning, you are different from all the rocks on the beach.” That is why I am a hunter: to feel that bolt of lightning, and that difference, every day.
Mary Anning leads with her eyes. That was clear even the first time we met, when she was but a girl. Her eyes are button brown, and bright, and she has a fossil hunter’s tendency always to be looking for