Galapagos Regained (10 page)

She froze—a futile gesture, immobility being a poor approximation of invisibility. The essay rattled in her fingers. Blood thundered in her ears. Involuntarily she relaxed her grasp. The thirty-five pages cascaded to the desktop and lay still, shimmering silently in the moonlight, exhibit number one in her forthcoming trial for intellectual larceny.

“Remain silent,” said Mr. Darwin firmly. “You're a clever girl with your tongue, and I want no commerce with that organ right now. Nod if you understand.”

She nodded.

“Mere words could never mitigate this act.”

Again she nodded.

Suddenly he was by her side, leaning on his walking-stick as he gathered up the scattered sheets. “Your offense could not be clearer. Against my explicit instructions you slipped in here and appropriated my essay. Your intention, no doubt, was to take these pages back to your room and copy them ere they were missed.”

Chloe nodded a third time—not a mendacious reply, she decided: prior to copying the pages, she had indeed intended to do so.

“My responsibility to this household is self-evident,” Mr. Darwin continued. “I cannot abide so reckless a schemer beneath my roof. Tomorrow you must delegate your zookeeping duties to Mr. Kurland, as you will be leaving Down House the following day.” He secured the essay beneath the beetle jar. “Until the hour of your departure, I shall hide my sketch in a place you would never dream of looking—and the same goes for the scrivener's copy of the longer treatise. Do you understand why I'm compelled to banish you? You may talk now.”

“I understand,” she rasped, a tear trickling down her cheek.

“I am sorry, Miss Bathurst. Truly.”

She swallowed audibly. “I shall miss Master Willy and Miss Annie.”

“I know. They speak highly of you.”

“Now that I think on it, I shall also miss our lizards and tortoises.”

Mr. Darwin caressed the beetle jar. “I realize this was not a common burglary, nor are you a common burglar. Should you find another situation involving either reptiles or children, I shall say nothing of this incident to your new employer. Moreover, I intend to place two months' pay in your pocket ere you depart.”

“I don't deserve your generosity, but I shall accept it.”

From his robe Mr. Darwin produced a packet of cigarettes, then removed one stick and inserted it between his lips. “Attend my every syllable,” he said, his voice grown cold again. “Beginning on Sunday, this estate and its grounds are forbidden to you.” The unlit cigarette bobbed up and down like a semaphore. “I shall instruct Mr. Kurland to keep an eye peeled for enterprising actresses seeking to abduct my animals.”

“Were our situations reversed, I would take the same precautions,” said Chloe, wiping her tears with the sleeve of her gown. “Upon returning to my room I shall pray to God that my former employer might one day forgive me.”

“No need to entreat Heaven, Miss Bathurst—your former employer stands before you, and he grants his forgiveness.” He extended his arm and splayed his fingers. “I hope we might part as friends.”

“I am humbled by your graciousness,” she said, shaking Mr. Darwin's hand. And by the way, she declared silently, I mean to win the Great God Contest. I have your essay, and I shall win. Though I must take Bluebeard as my husband, hire Satan as my solicitor, and dance a fandango with the Angel of Death, the prize will be mine.

*   *   *

As he strode through the leathern splendor of the Alastor Hall library, that arena in which he'd spent so many hours defending both the honor and the actuality of his Creator, the Reverend Malcolm Chadwick, Vicar of Wroxton, brooded on the paradoxical fact that he actually admired the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society. Their banquets partook of a primordial gluttony, their clothing of a quintessential vanity, their comportment of transcendent sloth. The Devil himself might profit from a visit to Alastor Hall, where he would likely learn a thing or two about genuine aristocratic dissolution, as opposed to the predictable drunkenness and tiresome fornication pursued in less professional dens of iniquity.

Tonight, as always, the rites had begun in the drawing-room, Lord Woolfenden officiating alongside his present mistress, the buxom Lady Isadora, the rakehells smoking their opiates, declaiming their execrable sonnets, and listening to a recitation honoring their late, lamented idol. Although the revelers normally preferred to hear a scene from
Prometheus Bound
or a passage from “On the Necessity of Atheism” or “A Refutation of Deism,” this evening they'd experienced Lord Clatterbaugh reading from Shelley's favorite philosophical work,
De Rerum Natura
by the Roman poet Lucretius, its six chapters celebrating the irreligious teachings of the ancient Greek sage Epicurus. Clatterbaugh had selected Lucretius's account of the fate of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her own father, Agamemnon, so that the gods might grant the Achaean war fleet fair winds during their voyage to Troy.

Dumb with dread, her knees giving way, she fell sinking to the earth.

In that dark hour it availed the hapless daughter nothing

That it was she who'd first bestowed the name of father on the King.

Uplifted by royal attendants, she was straightaway borne to the altar

Though not to play her part in joyful marriage rites

Or hear the happy sound of nuptial songs.

Instead the stainless maiden, at the very age of wedlock, was taken

To the holy stone to die beneath her father's knife,

Lest his ships endure a perilous crossing to Ilium.

Such are the monstrous deeds inspired by faith's fell promptings!

Next everyone had repaired to the banquet hall, there to consume suckling pig, roast pheasant, and gallons of champagne, whilst Lord Woolfenden's brace of peacocks strutted freely about, their gaudy plumage spreading behind them like the flags of a fabulous Oriental empire. At eight o'clock, goblets in hand and lovers in train, the Byssheans had adjourned to the library, sprawling across the velvet divans surrounding the arena in which would be waged this evening's war of wits.

“I am stuffed with pork and famished for gossip,” said Malcolm as he mounted the steps to the dais, seating himself on the Anglican side of the judges' bench between the Reverend William Symonds and Professor Richard Owen. “What argument will our Christian petitioner submit tonight?”

“At dinner Lady Isadora told me we are to witness the most rational of all God proofs,” replied Mr. Symonds, the geologist whose magisterial
Old Stones
contended that volcanoes attested to a loving Creator, for without a divine hand modifying their eruptions would not human civilization have been long ago smothered in lava?

“The most rational?” said Professor Owen, the scowling anatomist who'd put a name,
Dinosauria,
to the immense lizards who, if the fossil evidence spoke truly, had once inhabited Sussex. “Ah, then it's to be the Cosmological Proof, splendid! Of course, my loyalties will always lie with the Teleological Proof. What a piece of work is a man—and a marigold as well.” During the past year the judges had heard dozens of contestants argue that, given its innumerable instances of meaningless and even absurd design, from flightless birds to soft-shelled crabs, the world hardly bespoke the purposeful aims of an omnicompetent Deity. Owen had in every instance flummoxed the petitioner with teleology, adducing hundreds of creatures so perfectly fitted to their habitats that one could almost see the Almighty's fingerprints on their feathers, pelts, hides, and scales.

“And what dish might our Godless petitioner be serving?” asked Malcolm.

“When I put the question to Woolfenden, he told me it would be the most powerful of all such arguments,” piped up Harriet Martineau as she joined Henry Atkinson and George Holyoake on the atheist side of the bench. From her ear bloomed an enormous brass trumpet, which she steadied with one hand whilst the other clutched a copy of her book,
Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature,
with its brazen insistence that
Homo sapiens
was not necessarily God's favorite creature. “We all know what
that
means.”

Of the freethinking judges, only Miss Martineau exhibited by Malcolm's lights a subtle mind, hence his resolve to befriend her once the prize was awarded. At a previous Shelley Society gathering, when the Christian contestant had offered up a bundle of cast-off crutches and other evidence of medical miracles, she had flustered him with a question to which Malcolm had yet to form a riposte. If God was so eager to dispense supernatural remedies, Miss Martineau had wanted to know, why were there no recorded instances of His healing an amputee?

“And what
does
it mean?” Owen inquired.

“Cancers and cataclysms,” replied the squirrelly Mr. Atkinson—Miss Martineau's co-author—laying a hand on her sleeve. Try as he might, Malcolm could not fathom what virtues Miss Martineau saw in Atkinson, whose contributions to their collaboration must have been perfunctory at best. “Plagues and poxes. Toothaches and earthquakes.”

A shudder traveled through Malcolm's frame. Of all the classic disproofs of God, the problem of unmerited pain was the one he most feared. Merciful Father in Heaven, deliver us from the Argument from Evil.

“Mumps and mosquitoes,” said Mr. Holyoake, editor of
The Oracle of Reason,
genially joining the game. “Ticks and rickets. Tubercles and tumors.”

It was obvious why the Byssheans had been drawn to Mr. Holyoake. Two years earlier, during one of his Socialist lectures, he'd noted that Her Majesty's religious institutions were costing the Government £20,000,000 annually, even as the national debt hung like a millstone about the people's collective neck. England, Holyoake suggested, was “too poor to have a God,” and it might be prudent “to put the Deity on half-pay until our finances are in order.” In Malcolm's view the freethinker's subsequent fate—six months in gaol for blasphemy—was unjust, for his remarks could hardly have offended God Almighty, who was after all not some prickly parson from Swindon but the Creator of the universe.

The judges' conversation was interrupted by the simultaneous arrivals of Popplewell of the
Evening Standard,
who took his customary seat in the ancient-history alcove, and Lippert, majordomo of Alastor Hall, who handed his master a slip of paper. Holding his goblet aloft like a torch, Lord Woolfenden rose from his divan—no simple operation, given his girth. (Everything about the man was excessive, his great stomach, froggish eyes, booming voice, prolix poems.) He tossed his mauve silk scarf insouciantly over his shoulder, glanced at Lippert's note, and faced his fellow sybarites. “Taking the field on God's behalf, we have the Reverend Terrance Sethington of Berkshire, who will attempt to sway the bench with a version of the Cosmological Proof.”

The cleric in question, a towering figure with eyebrows so bushy they suggested caterpillars inching towards the ark, swaggered into the library pulling a child's wagon whose cargo lay beneath a gauze veil. Self-confidence radiated from Mr. Sethington like warmth from a winter hearth, and Malcolm speculated that tonight, at long last, the entire bench might come to agree that God had been substantiated.

Reaching under the veil, the petitioner drew forth a croquet mallet and a wooden sphere. “The Cosmological Proof is the soul of simplicity,” he began, setting the sphere on the floor. “As Thomas Aquinas reminds us, nothing moves of its own accord. We can stare night and day at this croquet ball, waiting for it to change position, and it won't budge by a cricket's whisker.” Mr. Sethington applied his mallet with a force considerably short of the supernatural but sufficient to send the sphere ricocheting off the dais. “None would doubt that my mallet moved the ball, that I moved the mallet, or that my impulses moved me. Ah, but what moved my impulses? And what moved that which moved my impulses? Learned judges, we have fallen into an infinite regress, an abyss from which we can escape only by assuming the existence of a divine agency. Saint Thomas reasoned that this Unmoved Mover is perforce the Creator-God of Christian revelation.”

“Even when that Creator-God resembles a Berkshire parson playing croquet?” inquired Miss Martineau, eliciting from the Byssheans a peal of contemptuous laughter.

“Saint Thomas pondered not only the problem of movement but also the riddle of causality,” said Sethington, undaunted. He returned to his wagon and yanked the veil away, revealing a wire cage in which a ruffled hen sat atop a clutch of eggs. “A hen can never cause herself, but only her eggs. These eggs can never cause themselves, but only those creatures we call chickens.” The contestant seized the cage and paraded it before the judges. “Once again we find ourselves in the valley of the shadow of infinite regress.”

“Which came first, the chicken or the croquet ball?” said Holyoake.

“To circumvent that void,” Sethington persisted, his voice rising to a crescendo, “we must posit a First Cause—God—the nonphysical being from whom all physical things sprang!
Quod erat demonstrandum
!”

As the petitioner sat down on the dais, Lady Isadora quaffed champagne and addressed the bench. “Our Christians will now render their verdicts.”

“Bravo, Mr. Sethington,” said Owen. “You have my vote.”

“
Quod erat
indeed,” said Symonds.

“Although the Cosmological Proof has a venerable history,” said Malcolm, “I cannot believe Saint Thomas would wish to see it illustrated with either poultry or sporting implements, and so I shan't endorse this presentation.”

“Mr. Sethington, you have favorably impressed two of our Anglican judges,” said Lady Isadora. “If two of our freethinkers are similarly moved, the prize is yours.”