Galapagos Regained (22 page)

Although impossible to ignore, the commotion in Malcolm's guts was as nothing compared to the turmoil in his soul. Two aspects of St. Paul's Rocks had particularly troubled him: the unhinged Miss Kirsop—that pitiable harlot who'd made a religion of her own depravity—and the resident animals. The castaway was indubitably the lesser evil. True, Miss Kirsop was delusional, and yet Malcolm believed that through God's grace she might escape the dark heathen wood in which her mind now wandered. By contrast, the archipelago's seabirds and crustaceans had caused him unutterable distress, each such creature a reminder of the Oxford Diocese's designs on the supposedly maleficent fauna of the Encantadas.

Dressed in a burlap shift, Miss Kirsop emerged from the forecastle and proclaimed that she was Amphitrite, “a nubile nereid who in my naïve youth allowed an oafish sea-god to take me as his bride.” Malcolm would admit that she'd scrubbed up well, her bronzed skin glowing in the tropical sun, her lustrous raven hair flourishing on a scalp no longer infiltrated by weeds. On hearing Amphitrite's epithet, the sailors in the audience applauded. (It seemed probable that none could define “nubile nereid,” but apparently the term sounded gratifyingly lewd.) Miss Kirsop then explained that the pageant concerned “the eternal battle between my glorious companion, Athena, mistress of wisdom, and my doltish husband, Poseidon, master of maelstroms.”

An instant later Miss Bathurst, cast as Athena, came on stage dragging a canvas sack. She wore a
peplos
of bedsheets and a helmet improvised from a bailing bucket. Next to appear was Ralph Dartworthy as Poseidon, gripping a trident and dressed in a sailcloth robe, an oakum beard swaying from his jaw. After sticking her tongue out at Dartworthy, a gesture that set the audience to chortling, Miss Kirsop invited them to travel with her through time and space to Cecropia, an ancient Greek city. “Behold King Cecrops,” she said, whereupon Algernon Bathurst stepped forward wearing a cape that was once a Union Jack, “who has brought prosperity to his people by refusing to propitiate Zeus with the blood of birds and beasts.”

Malcolm grimaced, pained by an irony of the sort Miss Bathurst relished. Although the pagan ruler Cecrops disdained animal sacrifice, the Anglican clerics Wilberforce and Hallowborn embraced it—for what term other than “animal sacrifice” adequately described the Great Winnowing? Ever since his visit to St. Paul's Rocks, Malcolm had grown increasingly miserable over the vow of silence he'd made in the bishop's conservatory. By acquiescing to the Oxford Diocese's scheme, had he struck an accord with the very same Satan whose progeny allegedly infested Galápagos?

“The rivalry between Athena and Poseidon came to a head when the King announced that whoever offered his city the best gift would become its patron deity,” narrated Miss Kirsop as Mr. Bathurst assumed his throne, which strongly resembled a cook's stool. “Poseidon straightaway appeared in the palace yard and drove his trident into the ground.”

Dartworthy approached a bloated wineskin that lay on the deck like a basking seal, spearing it abruptly and releasing a dozen gallons of seawater.

“A majestic fountain gushed from the Earth,” Miss Kirsop continued, “but when the King drank thereof, he found it salty.”

Mr. Bathurst soaked a sponge in the puddle, brought it to his lips, and feigned to suck up brine. An expression of disgust contracted his features.

“And so the King rejected the gift,” said Miss Kirsop.

Bathurst hurled the sponge at Dartworthy.

At first Malcolm wondered why Poseidon was faring so badly in the equatorial pageant. How peculiar that the ship's company took pleasure in the humiliation of the greatest maritime deity. But then he apprehended the obvious. A sailor did not love the sea. A sailor loved a dry bed, fresh meat, painted women, and full measures of grog. For the crew of the
Equinox,
mocking Poseidon was a splendid sport—their way of avenging themselves for soggy hammocks, rancid food, carnal privations, and relentless drudgery.

“Now Athena presented her gift, a sapling bursting with olives,” said Miss Kirsop.

Miss Bathurst opened her canvas sack and removed a miniature tree (not unlike the prop she'd brought to Alastor Hall) complete with belaying pins for branches and rum corks for fruits. Her brother plucked an olive and pretended to consume it.

“King Cecrops understood not only that Athena's gift supplied delicious food,” said Miss Kirsop, “but also that the pits would germinate more such trees. And so he accepted it, making Athena the city's patron deity and changing its name to Athens. My enraged husband then attempted to slay the King, an ambition that, I am happy to report, Athena stood ready to thwart.”

No sooner had Miss Kirsop completed her speech than Dartworthy rushed at Miss Bathurst's brother with his trident. The intended victim stepped aside. Before Dartworthy could attempt a second thrust, Miss Bathurst removed her helmet and aligned it with Poseidon's weapon. Dartworthy lunged, skewering the helmet, just as Miss Bathurst had doubtless intended—for she instantly wrested the encumbered trident away. Freeing the trident from her headgear, she hurled it across the stage, driving the prongs deep into the larboard gunwale. The wooden shaft vibrated like a tuning fork. The crew whooped and clapped, reveling in Poseidon's disgrace.

As the cheering faded and the phantom curtain fell, an urgent breeze wafted across the weather deck. Captain Runciter, rising, ordered the crew to provide the yardarms with maximum canvas. Assuming that the wind held true, Malcolm calculated, the
Equinox
would gain Fortaleza within four days. He wondered what sorts of currents, zephyrous and aquatic, had thus far accompanied the Reverend Simon Hallowborn and Captain Adrian Garrity. Most likely the
Antares
was already coursing southward along the coast of Brazil, her crew practicing daily with their fowling pieces, rehearsing the Great Winnowing by blasting seabirds from the sky.

A crude and un-Christian hope took form in Malcolm's imagination. He pictured the
Antares
coming apart in the churning seas off Cape Horn. The brig's company survived unscathed, including Simon Hallowborn, as did all ninety-two Mephistropolis convicts, everyone washing ashore on Tierra del Fuego. Mindful that their rescue probably lay many months in the future, the castaways founded a self-sustaining colony—and then one glorious day Mr. Hallowborn experienced a change of heart, the scheme to slaughter the Galápagos creatures now striking him as woefully misguided. The redeemed rector fell to his knees, clasped his hands in prayer, and thanked the Almighty for sinking his ship.

*   *   *

The days that followed the presentation of her equatorial pageant were the most satisfactory Chloe had yet known aboard the
Equinox
. Although she'd relished the sailors' applause, her happiness had less to do with the pageant's reception than with the adulation her acolyte was lavishing upon her.

“Your forthcoming performance in Oxford will rank with the achievements of Catherine Clive and Sarah Siddons,” said Solange, kissing Chloe's cheek. “My she-devil navigates by the brightest light in the heavens, a star called aesthetics.”

“Exactly,” said Chloe, squeezing the courtesan's hand.

“The aesthetics of theatre and the aesthetics of deicide,” said Solange. “I needn't tell
you,
of course, I needn't tell the Covent Garden Antichrist, but a world without God will prove more pleasing to our eyes and more nourishing to our minds. We must love the butterfly for its own sake, not as a testament to some nonexistent deity's tedious omnipotence.”

“And the dung beetle, too, and my ugly iguanas back in County Kent,” said Chloe. “Oh, Solange, do I really have fortitude enough to win the day? My Cleopatra could win it, and my French castaway, and Pirate Anne, and perhaps even Carmine the vampire, but I am none of those people.”

“Darling, I think you are all four,” said Solange. “But should you feel your courage falter, remember the boon you're bringing to humankind. If there exists a species of ignorance certain to keep increasing the premiums on the bliss it buys, then a belief in God is surely that creature.”

“My dear Solange, let me invite you to stand by my side when I address the Alastor Hall judges.”

“You do me a great honor.”

Chloe decided that she'd never been in so gratifying a
tête-à-tête
—an exchange made all the more marvelous for taking place on the 24th of December. It was as if Solange were making a Christmas gift to Chloe of her sea-witch's wit. If this conversation could somehow continue forever, she would count herself the happiest of women.

But the idyll did not endure. Indeed, it ended abruptly. For the very next morning a hurricane descended on the
Equinox,
a celestial maelstrom that in turn whipped the equatorial Atlantic to an unimaginable fury, as if the ocean were a soup set a-boil in Lucifer's own kitchen.

Hour by hour, the tempest increased in violence, its thunderclaps rattling the air like Judgment Day trumps. Believing that by imagining herself as Pirate Anne she would get the better of her fear, Chloe traded her chemise for her buccaneer ensemble, then ventured into the gale. Although she'd endured numerous stage-bound aquatic catastrophes, most memorably the tidal wave that had drowned blind Nydia in
The Last Days of Pompeii,
nothing had prepared her for the present spectacle. Towering fountains of rain blew across the
Equinox
from gunwale to gunwale. The torrents saturated her clothes and drenched her skin, then penetrated more deeply still, diluting her blood, turning her marrow to paste.

Peering through the cataract, she saw that the weather deck was deserted, as if the crew had been swept overboard. She looked heavenward. Like monkeys clambering about in treetops, dozens of sailors labored amidst the yardarms, reefing the canvas. She steeled herself, vowing to remain steadfast before Nature's wrath. Defiantly she opened her mouth, admitting the squalls, for she-devils must traffic in audacity—they grew strong by kissing volcanoes, eating fire, taking suck from storms.

Algernon and Mr. Chadwick stood near the mainmast, gripping a ratline to keep from toppling over, evidently awaiting orders, though to Chloe it seemed obvious that they could best serve the ship by staying out of the way. “We've already been dragged north of Fortaleza!” her brother informed her, yelling above the screaming wind. “Runciter's hoping to make landfall at Parnaíba or São Luís!”

In a spasm of anger Chloe pulled her grandfather's bayonet from its scabbard and plunged it into the mainmast. Damn this hurricane! Damn each lightning bolt and thunderclap! Owing to this unthinkable cataclysm, the Mayfair Diluvian League would beguile the judges with their confounded ark long before the
Equinox
returned from Galápagos.

“We've learned our lesson, haven't we?” she shouted, her words borne by a bitter laugh. “Never offend Poseidon with a pageant!”

“It's God we've offended!” cried the vicar.

She returned to her cabin, shed her sodden costume, and climbed into her bunk. Soon her disciple joined her, so that they became proximate as newborn twins. The sea continued to roll and pitch, as if to rid itself of the
Equinox
as would a bull determined to throw its rider. Stuck fast by terror, Chloe and Solange embraced more tightly yet, but then a half-dozen raps on the cabin door disturbed their wretched privacy.

“Miss Bathurst!”

“Yes?” replied Chloe, recognizing Mr. Dartworthy's voice.

“We're sinking!”

“Impossible!”

“I agree! We're sinking anyway! There's a place for you and Miss Kirsop in the launch! Hurry!”

Hurry,
bien sûr
—no other course made sense. Chloe quit the bunk, secured her Panama hat with a piece of twine, and once again costumed herself as Pirate Anne, the wet fabric raising goose bumps on her arms and legs. From her trunk she retrieved the boxed transmutation sketch and the Pirate Mary costume, passing the garments to Solange.

“Meet me on the weather deck!”

Fleeing her cabin, Chloe entered a scene of utter pandemonium, dozens of frightened sailors scurrying every which way, combers of foaming white water spilling across the planks. Atop the forecastle, several midshipmen attempted to lower the quartet of jolly boats. Was the
Equinox
truly sinking? The dreadful fact could not be doubted, for the weather deck now listed so radically that a chaotic mass of ropes, buckets, barrels, and sea chests lay jammed against the starboard gunwale.

Suddenly Solange appeared, and together the women climbed to the poop deck, great waves rising on both sides like Red Sea ramparts in thrall to Moses's magic. Mr. Dartworthy emerged from behind a swirling spout of rain and, taking Chloe's hand, guided her aft. She looked over the rail, beholding the longboat that had conveyed them to St. Paul's Rocks, now crammed with mariners and nearly swamped. Descending the rope ladder, Solange and Mr. Dartworthy in train, Chloe bemoaned her situation, as bereft of aesthetics and devoid of justice as any she'd ever known. She was supposed to be moving horizontally just then, off to the Encantadas, not vertically towards some pathetic launch.

The women clambered over the keelson and assumed their seats, whereupon Mr. Dartworthy presented them with tin buckets and told them to start bailing. Chloe surveyed her fellow evacuees, the cream of the ship's company. Captain Runciter sat in the bow, arm curled about the tiller. Mr. Dartworthy held the mooring tethering the longboat to the
Equinox
. Whilst Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Flaherty deftly nocked the forward oars and slipped them into the sea, Algernon and Mr. Chadwick struggled to likewise position the aft oars.

“Cast off!” shouted the captain over the din of the gale.