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asked where it was written in Holy Scripture that the price of a bushel of corn was five shillings sixpence. He’d dropped them in it and then he acted as though he had no memory of it ever happening. Everyone retreated confused to the Three Cups and Richard went out and mended the cobblestone in the square, which lay a mudhole since they’d pried up stones to throw at the soldiers. He was the one who’d got their blood up and it was their blood that turned him against rioting. So Molly said. There was more grain strewn along the road those nights, she explained, than was ever carried home for the children.
    Mary glanced back and saw that Walter Jones was finally turning up to town. He had cast his head over his shoulder for one last look at Richard. In that look, she felt the pull of the chapel, as though James Wheaton or God himself had sent Walter Jones to summon them. Richard saw where Mary’s eyes had gone. “An hour in the chapel, the week with the Devil,” he said.
    Mary looked closely at her father’s thin face. We try to explain him, she thought, but he does not hold to reasons as other men do. His causes were wordless, sealed shiny and hard inside him. No one would ever hold him. He’d been a rebel and he rebelled against the rebels. He’d been a Dissenter and now he was a dissenter of the Dissenters and went to chapel no more. Walter Jones and all of them watched him in wonder – Richard Anning, misfortune’s favourite, walking boldly down to the shore on a Sabbath morning.
    It was a relief to encounter the plump spectre of Mr. Buckland on the shore, floating a foot or two above the shingle with his popping eyes fixed on the stones – Mr. Buckland, the manwith the blue bag who had come to the curiosity table, who disputed the Devil’s hand on any living creature and said that what they called dragons were really just crocodiles, made by God and migrated now to warmer climes. He was lodging in town; they would often spy his big hairy-hocked horse munching weeds along the cliff. Mary was always startled at first by the sight of him drifting over the shingle in his gown and top hat. When you worked your way closer, you could see that he
was
attached to the earth; it was just that the bottom of his gown up to his knees was white with dust.
    He was a clergyman, she knew that now, and as soon as they were close enough, she called a greeting and asked him, “Be ye not in church this Sabbath morning?”
    “Of course I am,” he said. “And so are you. We’re worshipping in the
Lord’s
chapel.” And he gestured to the east, where mist veiled Black Ven and Golden Cap shone high above as though it dangled from the sun. He seemed to be addressing her, but really he was directing his cleverness to her father, darting eager smiles in Richard’s direction. “Here on this shore is all the bounty of the Lord made manifest,” he cried.
    “This shore?” Mary said. “But there were grand wickedness done on this shore.”
    “There’s been wickedness done on every shore of the seven seas,” said Mr. Buckland. “Man will use the earth for his purposes, for God gave him dominion.” Light sparkled silver off the edges of the black cliffs, and the sky was a high dome of blue over them, and it seemed that what Mr. Buckland said was true – Mary could hardly look at the shore for the beauty of it.
    The first time Mary and her father talked to Mr. Buckland at the shore, he’d tried to trick them. Richard asked him what he’d found that morning and he reached into his blue bag and showed them a Devil’s toenail sticking out of a bit of red shale.
    “What do ye take me for?” said Richard, passing it back. “You never found that on this shore.” The limestone and shale cliffs rose behind them, all blue-grey. The
blue lias
, people called it.
    Buckland laughed and confessed he’d bought it from the curi-man who stopped the coach on the Exeter Road. Mr. Buckland asked their names and he told them his, and