The Bone Hunters

by Joanne Burn

Genres: Historical Fiction; Gothic

Synopsis

THE ESSEX SERPENT MEETS AMMONITE IN THE STUNNING HISTORICAL NOVEL EVERYBODY IS TALKING ABOUT:

'Singular and astonishing . . . I've never met a character quite like Ada' ANNIE GARTHWAITE
'The Bone Hunters has cemented Joanne Burn's place as one of my favourite writers' SONIA VELTON
'Joanne Burn is fast becoming my go-to historical fiction writer' EMMA CARROLL
'The Bone Hunters is that rare combination . . . beautifully written but also a gripping page-turner' LAURA SHEPPERSON
'An extraordinary book . . . I fell in love with Ada from the first page' ELIZABETH LEE

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In 1824, Lyme Regis is as tumultuous as the sea that surrounds it. When twenty-four-year-old Ada Winters - poor, peculiar and brilliant - uncovers a set of unusual fossils on the cliffs, she believes she has found the answer to her scientific frustrations and her family's financial struggles.

Meanwhile, Doctor Edwin Moyle has come to Dorset in search of the discovery that will place him amongst the greatest geologists of the age. What he finds instead is a strange young woman who seems to hold the key to everything he desires.

But what is the creature that Ada and Edwin seek to unearth? And will it lead them to greatness, or destruction?
________

'Delicate and beautiful, I loved it' POLLY CROSBY
'A beautifully written tale of obsession, friendship, betrayal, ambition and love' ROZ WATKINS
'So beautifully and brilliantly written. Every word dripped with atmosphere' CAROLE MATTHEWS

Release date: February 8, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

Lyme crowds a narrow combe, caught between hunched hills. In the shipyard to the west, beyond warehouses and timberyards, within spitting distance of the customs house, amongst the clatter of mallets and hoarse insults from heckling throats, rocks are crushed for ballast. To the east, on the foreshore, sea masons quarry. And stonemasons tucked away in dusty workshops chip at lintels and fireplaces, finials and corbels.

On the distant horizon, Portland, from where stone is daily chiselled for the grandest halls and houses, slumps stony-faced, the colour of a bruise. And in the quiet of the woods far above the town, water purls over pebbles in the River Lim before plunging for the Waterside Factory and the fulling mill, Old Factory and Town Mill. It murmurs, stealthy, past the back entrance of the Kings Arms and under Buddle Bridge (where smugglers flit, swift as bats), trembling at last upon the beach, thirsty for salt and the clean sea breeze.

In the harbour, a customs official throws tobacco onto the king’s pipe, and fishwives mend nets upon the beach, waiting for the men to return, wondering if this is the day they won’t. The waters are a fisherman’s nightmare, but the better sorts know nothing of that. When they tire of the frivolities of Bath they flock to Lyme on the new roads built especially for them, to fill their bellies with Purbeck oysters, Newfoundland cod in butter sauce and shrimp pink as their rosy cheeks. Those reliant on parish charity make do with clams, or mackerel if they’re quick to help with hauling in the catch when the cow horn sounds. And a scattering of those folk, in the pale dawn light, now skirt the boats and tangled nets and lobster pots, looking for nuggets of coal, for anything dropped. Above them, graves like jagged teeth line the top of Church Cliffs: crooked stones and monoliths that teeter where the earth is wont to crumble, threatening to bring down those interred, tumbling bones of the long deceased onto the doorstep of the cottage below. It has happened before, this calamity. When Ada Winters was small and curdle-haired. When her father was alive and her mother was happy. When Gramfer perched all hours between nuncheon and supper on his stool by the range: milky-eyed, twitchy as a tin of crickets, speaking tales of piskey-folk and sea buccas and the wild wolf woman of Lyme. Tales as ancient as the town itself.

Ada swings her pickaxe into the cliff, rocks tumbling to her feet. She passes for a man at a distance: tall, and bold enough to wear her dead father’s breeches and working smock. Hewn from hard graft and the four winds, she keeps her sun-weathered, freckled face shaded by a wide-brimmed black hat. No flimsy mobcap, no bonnet with ribbons. Beneath the smears of grey clay, she has the colouring of a lion, all fawn and gold – but that is something of a secret.

Soft in the head, Lyme folk say.

But Ada isn’t soft. She carries a stone in the pit of her belly and sometimes in her throat, which gets in the way of eating as frequently as lack of coin. Her mother says if her smile weren’t quite so stony then maybe she’d be married by now. Hag stones line her pockets, not for protection from witches, but because there’s nothing so pleasing as plunging one’s finger into the middle of a stone and out the other side.

Sweat prickles her face and armpits as she rummages in the fallen earth. Her mouth is dry and her belly rumbles, but she won’t return home for breakfast until she’s found something to prove to herself she’s worthy of a place in their society.

Their society.

Her bitterness is gritty as the shingle beneath her feet.

The crisp cream paper had looked so incongruous in her muddy hands, although that sense of oddity was only evidence that she is what they say she cannot be.

She is a geologist.

Church Cliffs seem to think so. Black Ven, too – its dark, forbidding crag face looming high above her, and stretching eastwards in the direction of Charmouth. These ancient tombs give up their treasure to her in a way they don’t give it up to others: tooth and skull, rib and claw.

She had hoped to strike up a correspondence, at the very least. She’d gone so far as to imagine hosting those men of science on this very beach, where she knows better than anyone what is what.

She should have listened to her mother, who’d been tamping down Ada’s hopes with her quiet disregard, saying only one thing on the matter: ‘They won’t ’ave ye.’ Ada had protested, sensibly and logically, that the society exists for the purpose of making geologists acquainted with each other, of stimulating zeal, of facilitating the communications of new facts.

‘It don’t matter,’ said Edith. ‘They still won’t ’ave ye.’

Josiah and Annie Fountain, owners of Fountain’s Muse: Binder & Bookseller, had all along been telling Ada much the same – that she was wasting her ink and paper (their ink and paper, in truth, not to mention the tuppence for postage).

Along with her letter, Ada had sent a slim volume of her ammonite drawings, bound in cloth by Josiah, describing what she knows to be two new species. She’d made sure to tell the society that she’s been reading their transactions for the past thirteen years, since they were first published in 1811. Since I was eleven, she told them. Josiah and Annie suggested leaving that detail out. ‘They’ll probably not believe it,’ they said.

But it’s true, so she included it.

She swings her pick again, plunging it into the crumbly black earth, pulling it out. She growls with the effort, her neck as tight and knotted as it was yesterday when the postboy proffered the letter and she felt her hope, quick as a hare, kicking in her chest. She’d cracked the wax seal where she stood, pausing briefly to consider the man who had written out her name so carefully; observing the precision of his hand, that he dipped his nib at regular intervals and didn’t let his pen run dry. Then she unfolded the single sheet of paper, and all hope was dashed.

‘Is that all?’ she muttered. ‘What about my drawings?’

Her pickaxe now leans against her leg like a tired child. She licks her lip, tasting salt, rolling her aching shoulders, gazing upwards.

What she notices then is straight as a finger bone, flaring out into a knuckle. It’s ten feet off the ground in the cliff face, beneath a grass-strewn ledge. She scrambles towards it, pulls away a loose tangle of grass, brushes at the dirt and follows the line of the fossil with her fingertips. She digs it out, turns it over, brushes it free of mud. It’s too long for a human finger bone, but that’s what it resembles, laying there across her palm, pointing at her heart.

Ada startles at the rapping on the door, irked that their landlady’s regular Saturday-evening visit still makes her nerves jangle so. She longs for the courage to ask Mrs Hooke whether she really must hammer at the door with her brass-tipped walking stick – the cottage is small and they’re not hard of hearing. If she had the nerve she’d ask why she even feels the need to come at all; surely it’s beneath her, to traipse her silk and furs through the grey mud that clings to the pebbles this side of town?

Ada looks to her mother, not long back from the mill. Strands of damp hair have escaped her mobcap and exhaustion drifts from her as tangibly as the smell of soap and wool-grease. Her arms are raw from her week of washing fleeces, florid from fingertip to elbow, and she inhales slowly and deeply, as if strength can be found that way. Ada gives her a little nod, then turns away, breath hitching as she lifts the latch.

Every week without fail, Mrs Hooke allows Edith only the time she needs to collect her weekly wages (six shillings and six pence), pay the grocer what she owes on her way past, and make it home to eat her evening meal before counting out every coin in the house. And here she looms in the doorway in her narrow-waisted, full-skirted gown; the black silk flashing a beetle-like, iridescent green. The fur stole she always wears, no matter the season, is draped about her neck. She pushes past Ada into the house, rustling as she goes, like the scurry of so many chitinous feet on the stone floor.

She casts her cold appraisal about the room, letting it slide across the birds’ nests, and the feathers pasted to one wall with bluebell glue: undulations of blacks and browns so the effect is of dark rolling waves tipped foamy-white. She glances, too, at the collections of shells separated into species, and further separated along lines of patterning and hue. There are blanched skulls of stoat, rabbit, vole and hare. And there is seaweed drying on the table: slender wart weed, egg wrack, Irish moss and wireweed. Mrs Hooke wrinkles her nose, but, in truth, there is something intriguing about it all – something that brings to mind the cabinets of curiosities to be found in the drawing rooms of some of her friends (those better travelled and à la mode than Mrs Hooke). Of course, Ada’s collection lacks objets d’art, ivory and ebony; she has only what she can forage for herself.

‘A mess, then, as always,’ Mrs Hooke says.

This is how they conduct themselves each week: Ada putting herself as best she can between Mrs Hooke and Edith, steeling herself to look Mrs Hooke in the eye and do whatever talking needs to be done because Edith can never find her words in the presence of their landlady (cannot truly find her words in the presence of anyone but Ada and Pastor Durrant).

‘Your rent is going up,’ says Mrs Hooke, swaying slightly, as if they are together at sea. She plants her feet wide, leans forward on her cane.

Ada swallows down a rush of nausea.

‘How much?’

‘An extra shilling a week.’

Mrs Hooke shrugs, as if shillings are pennies.

Ada shakes her head. ‘That’s too much.’

‘Everything’s on the up.’

‘But it isn’t worth that.’ Ada gestures to the floorboards where the water’s coming in, the damp rising up the walls like dark shadows. ‘And the roof still leaks.’

‘I sent a man.’

‘I keep telling you, he didn’t come. You can see from the outside that the roof is bowed, the slates are loose.’

‘I’ll send him again.’

Ada wants to say that it isn’t good enough, that it isn’t fair, but she isn’t so bold to risk a fight with Mrs Hooke.

Edith is busy at the drawer where they keep their coin in a small wooden box, and when Ada drags her gaze from Mrs Hooke’s painted face, it comes to rest on the hunched figure of her mother. Her backbone is visible through her clothing and Ada cannot take her eyes from it – has she always been so thin? As Edith counts pennies and farthings, and Ada counts her mother’s vertebrae, Mrs Hooke’s gloved fingers reach for the reticule dangling from her arm. She unties it, and holds the fabric open for Edith’s handful of coins (four shillings in all). Ada watches the money gobbled up and the throat of the reticule pulled tight once more.

Before the clock strikes for midnight, Mrs Hooke loses those four shillings at the assembly rooms on the roll of the dice. And as she throws that money away, an old crone watches idly from the dark beach, water lapping at her bare feet.

The great bay window of the assembly rooms looks out to the restless sea but, of course, once the night closes in, from within those rooms one can see nothing of the outside world. To stand in the mizzle, however, out in the darkness, gazing in, everything is illuminated – the young women in flowing chemise-dresses, diaphanous petticoats shimmering beneath flimsy muslin, pink coral beads nestling against their throats; the men in frock coats with fur-trimmed lapels (some of those coats turned inside out for good luck at the carding tables), white shirts fastened at the cuffs with gold, cravats of coloured silk. They are silent players on a stage, and that suits the old crone just fine; she has no interest in their conversations. They discuss the cost of housebuilding and canal-building and whether Lyme needs yet more hotels. They don’t speak about the cost of a loaf, but talk about the labourer riots and what can be done to snuff them out. There is always much gabble about steam engines and the wonders of electricity, and sure as eggs are eggs, any gentleman who still favours breeches and stockings will fall eventually into the old tattered talk of Waterloo and La Belle Alliance. Arrangements are made to meet the following day for tea or to take the waters. And beneath the oak beams of the cellar and the limestone foundations, below four feet of sullen earth and clay, in a wet passage cloaked in shadow, three bone-tired smugglers bring twenty kegs of rum, six bales of tea and a dozen geese stuffed with lace into town.

Who would imagine that letting one’s young son scrat around in the local quarry could lead to the ruin of everything? It seemed a harmless enough activity at the time, especially for a boy who erred on the side of caution and inactivity. But undeniably it has led to what Edwin’s father considers the strangest and most ungodly of obsessions. He ruminates on this day and night, as if the decades can be rolled back and matters altered through sheer magnitude of regret. His son was so bloody quiet, as if butter wouldn’t melt. Dr Moyle Senior had always harboured a concern about his son’s reserved nature, how suspiciously amenable he was. He put on a fine show of falling in line, but all along he evidently had ambitions of his own. Dr Moyle sits on the edge of his bed, looking down at the wasted muscle of his calves, the liver spots and bruises. In a moment, when he has gathered his energy, he will reach for the bell and ring for assistance. And then, once he’s dressed in the best of his authority, he’ll give Edwin one last talking-to before his only son throws away everything they have worked so hard to achieve.

Edwin looks down at the open trunk, mentally riffling the papers within. What will he need, and does he have it all? The closer he gets to leaving for Dorset, the more Harley Street seems to be crowding in on him; as if the houses themselves have shuffled just that little bit closer together. As if he might drag this final trunk down the stairs only to find that the front door no longer opens – that the house opposite has lifted from its very foundations and lumbered across the road to block his exit. His consulting room has never felt so stuffy, and he flings open a window, rubbing at his temples. At any moment his wife, Christina, will slip in and enquire how he’s getting along. His father will soon be up and about and hot on her heels. Between the two of them they will mither and harangue, and he simply doesn’t have the energy for it. He reminds himself of his promise to Christina to clear the parlour of his fossils before he leaves; she doesn’t appreciate them scattered everywhere. They are, in fact, ordered meticulously, but he has ceased pointing that out. He glances around his consulting room, at the many shelves crowded with rocks and fossils in here also: Oxfordshire pound stones, fern leaves, crystal corals, fish skulls and lizard bones. He ponders the troubling possibility of returning to find everything boxed up, and is assailed then by an urgency to pack it all away himself, to protect the careful sequences and classifications. But he still has his books and periodicals to select and wrap. With perfect timing, all around the house, the clocks begin their chiming conversation to mark the passing of the hour – and Edwin’s own, inner mainspring tightens incrementally with the loosening of theirs.

He takes a deep, purposeful breath and reminds himself that by the end of the morning he’ll be bound for Lyme Regis. The temporary physician who is to run the family practice in his stead will have arrived, and the place will be in safe hands (he finds himself rehearsing this mantra, in preparation for the inevitable quarrel that will occur with his father over breakfast). Their good reputation will not suffer. Dr Moyle Senior’s impressive rise from Oxfordshire country doctor to one of the most respected physicians in London will not have been for naught. And Edwin is coming home in three short months. Goodness, he is not, after all, leaving for ever. Does he not, after seventeen years of attending patients, deserve to attend to himself a little?

Steam rises from the clam broth, and Ada opens the door to watch her mother trudging home – the tired rise and dip of her stiff-hipped walk. Ada sighs, preparing herself for the inevitable conversation. After Mrs Hooke’s visit on Saturday night she’d made herself scarce to avoid a difficult exchange with her mother about the increased rent. And yesterday after chapel she went straight to the beach, throwing her energy into the precise area of Black Ven where she’d found the peculiar finger-like fossil. All afternoon and into the evening she’d pulled apart the earth in search of anything more, but to no avail. Today, however, has proved more fruitful. She pushes her hand through her skirt and petticoat and into her pocket, grasping the bones she unearthed a few hours previously, just a few feet from where she found the first. These three almost identical fossils provoke a confusion of questions and, as she moves about the kitchen, they knock in her pocket like fingernails tapping on a table.

A weary bustle at the door, Edith looks straight into Ada’s eyes.

‘Wretched girl,’ she says, through a half-smile.

Edith grasps the knotted hank of rope that hangs from the doorframe (put there by her own mother the year that Ada was born) and anchors herself against it for a brief moment, resting her forehead wearily against the damp hemp. Then she releases it, and enters the kitchen.

She gives a tug of her head: a silent instruction.

Ada follows her into the parlour, waiting for Edith to ease into her chair and rest: limp as her bedraggled hair. Her mother closes her eyes, and inhales tremulously as if it is the last breath she will ever take. Ada imagines what her mother has previously described – how the mill haunts her body long after leaving it behind at the end of the day, so that she lies in bed at night rocked nauseously by the wet echo of water and wheel.

Ada sits in her chair and waits. Eventually, Edith opens her eyes. Pushing herself upright, picking up her skirt so she can fiddle with its hem, she looks at her daughter.

‘We need to discuss it, Ada. I don’t know fer how much longer we can make ends meet. A crown a week fer this place! The price of everythin’ these days … ’

Ada looks to the empty hearth, thinking of autumn soon on its way and how they haven’t set aside any fuel yet this summer. She wishes she’d made more effort to do so – she’d have been in a better position to reassure Edith about their declining situation if their scuttles were full of coal and the kitchen was piled with drying wood. But she finds it almost impossible to go scavenging fuel when there are fossils to be searched for.

‘I can do more selling,’ says Ada.

‘Yer curios bring in pennies, ’tis not enough.’

‘More than that sometimes.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘There’s broth if you’d like—’

‘Don’t ye move!’

Ada sighs, leans back in her chair, reaches for the mending basket, snatches out a stocking, a needle, a length of yarn.

‘I be workin’ hard fer us,’ Edith says, ‘and ye need to do more.’

Ada bristles, although she only has to look at Edith to be reminded that her mother pays a high price for her lowly job at the mill. She pays not only with her health but with her dignity – to be washing fleeces still, after ten years of labouring hard at it.

‘Ye could ask again fer work at the Old Factory,’ says Edith.

‘There’s coin in these cliffs, and you know it.’

‘How long since ye spoke to Mr Muir last? He has no complaint with me, I don’t put a foot wrong.’

And yet, Ada wants to say, he promotes every good-for-nothing layabout ahead of you.

‘He might ’ave something fer you now, Ada. And think if we were both bringin’ in a regular wage … ’

‘I couldn’t … ’ Ada shakes her head. The graft is not beyond her. It’s the thought of being shut in all day. Trapped in with all that noise, and so many people. The thrum of all those bodies. Sometimes she stands in the woodland by the river, near the wishing tree, and listens to the drum and rumble of that huge stone building; it is terrifying, even from the outside.

‘I have my fetching and carrying.’

It is Edith’s turn to bristle; she doesn’t approve of Ada helping the smugglers bring their lace into town, even though the rum they pay her puts fish on the table three times a week.

‘We’ve managed these last ten years, and we’ll continue to manage,’ says Ada.

‘ ’Ark at thee! ’Tis easy fer ye to say. ’Tis time to sell all this rubbish!’ Edith gestures through into the parlour.

‘I am selling it.’

‘No, you be collecting it. Pastor Durrant has told me some rich folk would pay a pretty penny fer everythin’ ye have in that parlour. It needs to go! We cannot keep on and on. However frugal and industrious we be, ’tis not enough, not with the extra rent to find.’

Ada swallows down the dark horror of what her mother is saying, and the insult of Pastor Durrant’s suggestion. She couldn’t part with all she has brought into this cottage. These objects are the cottage. Just as her father’s beautiful cabinets, stretching across the whole back wall, are the cottage. Ada’s gaze flickers across the shelving where once upon a time her father’s leather-bound volumes leaned one against the other and his periodicals were stacked in neat piles. Science fascinated him, but liberation was his theme. The works of Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Essays by Ben Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. He was more than a cabinetmaker; he was a thinker. She looks from one cabinet to the next, then from drawer to drawer, as if she might find him there. He would share her consternation. Why did he teach her to read and write, if not for something better than the tyranny of the mill?

‘Ye cannot have it all ways,’ says her mother. ‘We need bread on the table.’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘ ’Tis not a matter for thinkin’! Ye need a job, my girl, or a husband. ’Tis not some riddle to be fathomed.’

Ada slaps the arm of her chair. . .