Remarkable Creatures Read Free Page A

comfort, like holding on to a walking stick or a staircase banister.
    At the end of Monmouth Beach, just before Seven Rocks Point, where the shoreline turned out of sight, we found the Snakes’ Graveyard. It was a smooth ledge of limestone in which there were spiral impressions, white lines against the gray stone, of hundreds of creatures like that which I held, except that they were enormous, each the size of a dinner plate. It was such a strange, bleak sight that we all stared in silence.
    “Those must be boa constrictors, don’t you think?” Margaret said. “They’re enormous!”
    “But boa constrictors don’t live in England,” Miss Durham said. “How did they get here?”
    “Perhaps they did live here, a few hundred years ago,” Mrs. Durham suggested.
    “Or even a thousand years ago, or five thousand,” Mr. Durham ventured. “They could be that old. Perhaps the boa constrictors then migrated to other parts.”
    They did not look like snakes to me, or any other animal I knew of. I walked out onto the ledge, stepping with care so as not to tread on the creatures, even if they were clearly long dead and not so much corporeal bodies but sketches in the rock. It was difficult to imagine them as alive once. They looked permanent, as if they’d always been in the stone.
    If we lived here, I could come and see this whenever I liked, I thought. And find smaller snakestones, and other fossils as well, on the beach. It was something. It was enough, for me.
     
     
     
    OUR BROTHER WAS DELIGHTED with our choice. Apart from Lyme being economical, William Pitt the Younger had stayed in the town as a youth to recover his health; John found it comforting that a British Prime Minister would think highly of the place he was banishing his sisters to. We moved to Lyme the following spring, with John securing for us a cottage high above the shops and beach, at the top of Silver Street, which is what Broad Street becomes farther up the hill leading out of town. Soon after, John and his new wife sold our Red Lion Square home and, with the help of her family’s money, bought a newly built house on nearby Montague Street, next to the British Museum. We had not meant our choice to cut us off from our past, but it did. We had only the present and the future to think of in Lyme.
    Morley Cottage was a shock at first, with its small rooms, low ceilings, and uneven floors, so different from the London house we had grown up in. It was made of stone, with a slate roof, and had a parlor, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor, with two bedrooms above as well as a room in the eaves for our servant, Bessy. Louise and I shared one room, giving Margaret the other, for she complained when we stayed up late reading—Louise her botany books, I my works on natural history. There was not enough room in the cottage to fit our mother’s piano or sofa or mahogany dining table. We had to leave them behind in London and buy smaller, plainer furniture in nearby Axminster, and a tiny piano in Exeter. The physical reduction of space and furnishings mirrored our own contraction, from a substantial family with several servants and plenty of visitors, to a reduced household with one servant to cook and clean, in a town with many fewer families with whom we could socialize.
    We soon grew used to our new home, however. Indeed, after a time our old London house seemed too big. Its high ceilings and huge windows had made it hard to heat, and its dimensions had been larger than a person truly required, the grandeur false if you were not grand yourself. Morley Cottage was a lady’s home, the size of a lady’s character and expectations. Of course, we never had a man live there and so it is easy to think that way, but I believe a man of our position in society would have been uncomfortable. John was whenever he visited; he was always bumping his head on the beams, tripping over uneven doorsills, ducking his head to look out of the low windows, wavering on