the workshop I’d rather work on the croc than listen to them, with their plan to take Joe off the beach I had work to do With head and body together again, the monster was almost eighteen feet long Getting it out of the cliff had been an ordeal that took three days, the Days and me working flat out whenever the tide let us The whole thing was too big to lay on the table, so we’d spread the croc out along the floor In the dim light it was a jumble of stony bones I’d already spent a month cleaning it, but I still had some way to go to release it from the rock My eyes were inflamed with squinting at it so much and rubbing dust into them At the time I was too young to understand Joe’s choice, but later on I come to see that he had decided he wanted an ordinary life He didn’t want to be talked about the way I was, sneered at for wearing odd clothes and spending so much time alone upon beach with just rocks for company He wanted what others in Lyme had—security and the chance to be respectable—and he jumped at an apprenticeship There was nothing I could about it If I were offered the chance like Joe—if a girl could be apprenticed to a trade—would I have chosen the same and become a tailor or a butcher or a baker? No Curies were in my bones For all the misery that come to my life from being upon those beaches, I wouldn’t have abandoned curies for a needle or a knife or an oven “Mary.” Miss Philpot was standing over me I didn’t answer; I was still angry at her for siding with Joe Picking up a blade, I begun to scrape at a verteberry It were one of a long line, stacked one against the other like a row of tiny saucers “Joseph has made a sensible choice,” she said “It will be better for you and your mother That doesn’t mean you can’t continue to look for creatures You don’t need Joseph to help you find them, you, now that you know what you’re looking for? You can do that yourself, and then hire the Days to extract them, just as we did with this one I can help you with that until you are old enough to manage the men yourself I offered to help your mother with the business side as well, but she says she will do it herself And she was rather good with Lord Henley.” Miss Philpot kneeled by the croc and ran a hand over its ribs, which were all flattened out and crisscrossed like a willow basket “How beautiful this is,” she murmured, her tone softer and less sensible than before “I am still amazed at its size, and its strangeness.” I agreed with her The croc made me feel funny While working on it I’d begun going to Chapel more regularly, for there were times sitting alone in the workshop with it that I got that hollowed-out feeling of the world holding things I didn’t understand, and I needed comfort