open in his acceptance of what science tells us. For these very fossils must put paid to the Bible's notion of the world being formed in only seven days; the age of these cliffs, and their silent inhabitants, speak of thousands upon thousands of years’ passage before creatures like ourselves walked this earth.”
We were silent a moment, in gazing upon the chalk heights, and the excavations of Mr. Crawford's labourers; and it was then that Mr. Sidmouth turned to me, and took my hand. He turned over the palm, and pressed into it a fragment of rock, perhaps six inches across, with the barest impression of a life-form. A shell, it seemed to me; the remnant of a forgotten sea creature, curled like a ram's horn. The sensation of movement was palpable— whorling away within the rock for thousands of years, adrift in the seas of time.
“What is it?” I enquired.
“The rock is Blue Lias,” Mr. Sidmouth said. “Much of these Char mouth cliffs are formed of it.”
“And the creature?”
“An ammonite. Though a very small one. Crawford has others, full six feet across.”
I looked, and marvelled. (And I am still gazing at it, as I write—having propped the bit on the bedroom dresser at Wings cottage.) “Thank you,” I said, looking into Mr. Sidmouth's grave dark eyes. Our discord of the drive appeared entirely forgotten. “It is very beautiful.”
“There is something of eternity in it,” he said.4
IT WAS SEVERAL HOURS LATER, AFTER THE CRAWFORDS’ EXCELLENT repast was consumed, and we had listened with as much sympathy as we could muster to Miss Crawford's sad history of her blighted romance with one Jonas Filch—who died of a fever, thus leaving his fiancee to wear black for the subsequent thirty years—that Cassandra and I persuaded Eliza to walk with us along the water. We had left poor Henry and Miss Armstrong in Miss Crawford's grip (while she recounted for their edification the good works she superintended as the head of St. Michael's Ladies Auxiliary), and coursed along the beach. We discovered, to our delight, a small cavern not far from the fossil site, its entrance marked with a cairn of stones; but Cassandra lacked the courage to venture inwards, and I would not go alone. I could look for no aid from Eliza's quarter— she was delighted with the cave's discovery, but too concerned with the possible ruin of her apparel to try its interior. “A cavern, Jane, as foetid and dank as Mrs. Rad-cliffe5 should make it! Shall we venture within, at the very peril of our lives?”
“You know very well, Eliza, that a heroine must be alone to invite peril,” I said; “but let us venture all the same. We may fancy ourselves exposed to mortal danger, and so achieve a modest victory in braving the cavern's terrors together.”
But Eliza's attention, as readily let slip as it was secured, had already wandered. She preferred gossip to trials of courage, and made a very poor adventuress indeed.
“I am quite taken with your Mr. Sidmouth, Jane,” she declared, having traded the cavern for a seat on a weathered log. “Such tempests of emotion as are graven upon his countenance! First, the darkest of clouds; and then, as if under the influence of a warm breeze, the threat of rain is swept away, and sunlight breaks! Upon first espying his countenance before the Lyme Assembly, I thought it quite ugly; not a single feature may be called handsome. And yet the whole is not displeasing. I could watch the play of his emotions for hours.”
“It would appear that you already have,” Cassandra observed.
I feigned disinterest, and prodded at some seaweed with a piece of driftwood I had seized for a walking stick.
The tide being quite low, all manner of sea-life was washed up upon the shore, and every step afforded new wonders.
“And so much the man of the world,’” Eliza continued, as though Cassandra had never spoken. “I felt myself almost returned to Paris, in the course of our nuncheon!”6
“You were singularly engrossed.” Cassandra straightened up from the sand with a bit of sea-glass in her hands. “This appears to be a fragment of a bottle, Jane—cast overboard from a passing ship. Only think, if it should have fallen from one of our brothers’ hands!”
“Mr. Sidmouth is quite an habitue of that dear city,” Eliza resumed. “It seems he has occasion to travel to France fairly often—or did, before the peace ended.”
“Indeed?” I was compelled to attend to her chatter despite myself. “And