He was looking eager and expectant, gazing here and there, and I realised he thought the croc was still on the beach. “It ain’t here, sir. We got it back at the workshop. I’m cleaning it,” I added with pride.

“Are you, now? Well done, well done.” Mr Buckland looked disappointed for a moment that he wouldn’t see the croc right there, but he soon recovered. “Let us go to your workshop, then, Mary, and on the way you can show me where you dug up the creature.”

As we started along the beach towards Lyme, I noted all the hammers and bags hanging off his poor, patient horse. There was also, tied to the bridle and flopping against the horse’s side, a dead seagull. “Sir,” I said, “what you doing with that gull?”

“Ah, I’m going to have the kitchen at the Three Cups roast it for my dinner! I am eating my way through the animal kingdom, you see, and have had such things as hedgehogs and field mice and snakes, yet in all this time I haven’t had a common gull.”

“You’ve eaten mice!”

“Oh, yes. They are rather good on toast.”

I wrinkled my nose at the thought, and at the smell of the bird. “But-the gull stinks, sir!”

Mr Buckland sniffed. “Does it?” For such a keen observer of the world, he often overlooked the obvious. “Never mind, I’ll have them boil it up, and use the skeleton for my lectures. Now, what have you found today?”

Mr Buckland got very excited by the things I showed him-some golden ammos, a fish’s scaly tail I would give to Miss Elizabeth, and a verteberry the size of a guinea. He asked so many questions, mixing in his own thoughts as he did, that I begun to feel like a pebble rolled back and forth in the tide. Then he insisted we turn round and go back to the landslip to look for more. The mare and I followed him until he stopped suddenly, just a stone’s throw from the slip, and said, “No, no, I won’t have time-I’m to meet Doctor Carpenter at the Three Cups shortly. Let’s come back this afternoon.”

“Can’t, sir-the tide’ll be in.”

Mr Buckland looked puzzled, as if a high tide were nothing to consider.

“We can’t reach the landslip along this side of the beach when the tide’s high,” I explained. “Because of the cliffs bulging out there. The beach gets cut off.”

“What about coming from the Charmouth end?”

I shrugged. “We could-but we’d have to go all the way round along the road to get to Charmouth first. Or take the cliff path-but that’s not stable now, as you can see, sir.” I nodded towards the landslip.

“We can ride my mare to Charmouth-that’s what she’s here for. She’ll take us quick as you like.”

I hesitated. Though I had accompanied gentlemen upon beach, I had never ridden on a horse with one. The townsfolk would certainly have things to say about that. Though Mr Buckland’s high spirits seemed innocent to me, they might not to others. Besides, I didn’t like being upon beach at high tide, hemmed in between cliff and sea. If there were another slip there was nowhere to escape to.

It was hard arguing with Mr Buckland, for his enthusiasm ran roughshod over everything. However, I soon discovered he changed his mind so often that by the time he reached Lyme he’d had about a dozen other ideas of how to spend the afternoon, and we didn’t return to the landslip at all that day.

Mr Buckland didn’t get to see where I’d dug up the second croc, as the tide had covered the ledge by the time we passed it. I did show him the cliff where the first one had come from, though, and he made a little sketch. He kept stopping to look at things-silly, some of them, like ammo impressions in the rock ledges that he had surely seen many times before-so I had to remind him of Doctor Carpenter waiting for him at the Three Cups, as well as the much more interesting specimen sitting in the workshop. “Did you know, sir,” I added, “that Doctor Carpenter saved my life when I were a baby?”

“Did he, now? That is what doctors often do-dose babies when they have fevers.”

“Oh, it was more than that, sir. I’d been struck by lightning, see, and Doctor Carpenter told my parents to put me in a bath of lukewarm water-”

Mr Buckland halted on the rock he was about to jump from. “You were struck by lightning?” he cried, his eyes wide and delighted.

I stopped as well, embarrassed now that I had brought it up. I did not normally talk about the lightning to anyone, but had wanted to show off to this clever Oxford gentleman. This was the only thing I could think of that would impress him. It was silly, really, for it turned out later I were more than a match for him when it come to finding and identifying fossils, and his feeble grasp of anatomy sometimes made me laugh. I didn’t know that at the time, though, and so I spent an uncomfortable time being questioned by him about what had happened to me in that field when I were a baby.

It did have its effect, though, for Mr Buckland clearly respected me for my experience. “That is truly remarkable, Mary,” he said at last. “God spared you, and gave you an experience almost unique in the world. Your body housed the lightning and clearly benefited from it.” He looked me up and down, and I blushed with the attention.

At last we got back, and I left Mr Buckland in the workshop, hopping round the crocodile and calling out questions to me even as I went up to the kitchen. Mam was at the range, boiling another family’s linens. Doing laundry brought her just enough money for coal to keep the fire going so that she could wash another set of linens. She never liked it when I pointed out this circle to her.

“Who’s that downstairs?” she demanded now, hearing Mr Buckland’s voice. “You get tuppence off him to see it?”

I shook my head. “Mr Buckland’s not the tuppence type.”

“Course he is. You don’t let anyone see that thing without paying. Penny for the poor, tuppence for the rich.”

“You ask him, then.”

Mam frowned. “I will.” Handing me the paddle she used to stir the linens, she wiped her hands on her apron and headed downstairs. I poked at the washing, happy enough for a little break from Mr Buckland’s questions-though it would have been funny to see Mam try to cope with him. She was fine with some of the other gentlemen. Henry De La Beche, for instance, she bossed about like another son. But William Buckland defeated even my mam. She come up a time later, exhausted from his constant chatter, and without tuppence. She shook her head. “Your pa used to tell me when that man come to the workshop, he’d give up getting any work done and settle back for a sleep while Mr Buckland went on. Now, he wants you back down to tell him about the cleaning and what we’re going to do with it. Tell him we want a good price, and don’t want being cheated by a gentleman again!”

When I come in Mr Buckland was leaving by the door that led onto Cockmoile Square. “Oh, Mary, I’ll just be a moment. I’m fetching Doctor Carpenter here to see this. And a few others this afternoon who I’m sure will be most interested in it.”

“Just as long as it’s not Lord Henley!” I called after him.

“Why not Lord Henley?”

I explained about the first croc, with its monocle, waistcoat and straightened tail as Miss Philpot had described it. “That idiot!” Mr Buckland cried. “He should have sold it to Oxford or the British Museum rather than to Bullock’s. I’m sure I could have convinced either to take it. I shall do so with this one.”

Without asking, Mr Buckland took over the selling of the croc from Mam and Miss Elizabeth. Before Mam could stop him he’d written enthusiastic letters to possible buyers. She were cross at first, but not once he’d found us a rich gentleman in Bristol who paid us forty pounds for it-the museums having said no. That made up for all that Mam and me had to put up with from Mr Buckland. For he was about all summer, fired with the idea of crocodiles entombed in the cliffs and ledges, waiting to be freed. While we had ours in the workshop, he was in and out all day as if the room were his, bringing with him gentlemen who poked about, measuring and sketching and discussing my croc. I noticed during all the talk, Mr Buckland never once called it a crocodile. He was like Miss Elizabeth that way. It made me begin to accept it were something else-though until we knew what that was, I would still call it a crocodile.