Galapagos Regained (48 page)

The rector glowered at Chloe. “You don't
look
like a thorn. More like a blossom.”

“I am a thorn and a rose, a prickle and a lily, a briar and a dahlia.”

“We seek word of the wayward
Equinox
and her company of freethinkers,” said Captain Garrity.

“According to a broadsheet beside the Colnett barrel, the
Equinox
went down in a hurricane, all hands lost,” said Ralph, deftly dissembling—and thereby kindling Chloe's admiration: how clever of him to preclude any speculation that Lady Omega and the Transmutationist Club's leader might be the same person.

“All hands?” said Hallowborn, struggling to purge his voice of glee. “Including Chloe Bathurst?”

“The name is not familiar to me,” said Ralph, “but the ship's entire company was reportedly drowned.”

The rector grew suddenly somber. “Allow me a moment of silent prayer, for the passenger manifest included Malcolm Chadwick, Vicar of Wroxton. I barely knew the man, but I am always aggrieved to lose a colleague in Christ.”

For a brief interval not a syllable was spoken in Black Turtle Cove, the quietude broken only by the cries of the boobies and the coarse whisper of the surf. Chloe took the opportunity to survey the prisoners and the brig's company. To a man, the convicts wore their hard lives on their damaged faces: patched eyes, missing teeth, broken noses, livid scars. Even as they trained their pistols on the convicts, the crewmen glanced furtively at the machetes and garrotes, evidently anxious for the slaughter of the Devil's menagerie to begin. The attendant irony—armed guards eager to equip their prisoners with weapons—did not escape Chloe's notice.

Hallowborn set a bony hand on the Governor's sleeve. “This afternoon, with your permission, our convicts, now ninety in number—we lost two south of the line—our convicts will practice their cleansing skills here on Indefatigable, eradicating several score iguanas and tortoises. Tomorrow we sail to Albemarle and begin the extermination in earnest.”

“I understand your desire to move swiftly,” the Governor replied, “but it happens that theological conditions on our little segment of the equator have grown complicated of late. There will be no exterminations in Galápagos until Lady Omega, Professor Cabot, and Miss Quinn tell you of their recent adventures. Ergo, I must ask you to send Garrity and the convicts back to the ship.”

Hallowborn went suddenly flush. There was blood in his veins after all. “You promised Wilberforce we would enjoy your complete cooperation!”

A truculent thrumming echoed through Stopsack's nasal passages. “Whilst the prisoners return to the
Antares,
my servants will paddle you to my hacienda, where we'll down a glass of
pisco
and give Madame Prophet our rapt attention.”

“I cannot believe my ears!” wailed Hallowborn.

“Shall I draw you a picture?” said Stopsack. “Someone get me a stick.”

“Your proposition is outrageous! Are you aware that I speak for the Anglican Communion and by extension God Almighty?”

“I, on the other hand, speak for Lord Russell and by extension the Queen of England,” said the Governor, “and at the moment I would rather risk God's wrath than Her Majesty's. Be of good cheer, Reverend. You'll probably get your massacre. But before we put any reptiles to the sword, I must impose my hospitality on you.”

*   *   *

The third and presumably final performance of the masquerade commenced at sundown. Assembled in Stopsack's front parlor, the troupe reached an unprecedented pitch of conviction (or so it seemed to Chloe) as they sought to bedazzle Simon Hallowborn. Lady Omega told the rector, “Heaven is as dismayed by priests who would scour the Encantadas as by pagans who scorn the Almighty.” She declared that every slaughtered bird and beast would be “an offering not to the Lord but to Lucifer.”

As usual, her disciples muddled their speeches, so that Lot's wife circumcised the Tower of Babel, and the ram in the thicket crucified Cain. Like Eggwort and Stopsack before him, though, Hallowborn seemed more charmed than perturbed by these aberrations, and after the curtain fell he declared, “The harrowing will be deferred by a day at least, perhaps a week, perhaps two, during which interval I shall pray and fast.”

Later that evening, sprawled across her bed in the Governor's guest suite, her stomach churning like the turbulent surf of the Bahía de Cormoranes, Chloe once again opened her heart to Heaven, imploring her sacred entity to extend its aegis from one edge of the archipelago to the other. Having prayed, she slept. The Presence visited her dreams, promising to soften the rector's heart and scrub all demonology from his brain.

She awoke at dawn, in thrall to doubt and engulfed by misgivings. Infinity, she feared, was no longer on her side. Her dreams had partaken less of prophecy than of yearning. Inevitably she recalled an immense fishing net hanging from the spars of a half-sunken brigantine in Pacasmayo Harbor. So cryptic, that grid, more space than substance, more air than essence, good for catching puffers but not for holding prayers.

*   *   *

With a machete in his hand and a rumbling in his gut—he'd been fasting for forty-eight hours—Simon Hallowborn wandered amidst the coastal rocks of Indefatigable Isle, sucking in the salty afternoon breeze as he surveyed the huddled iguanas. Their hides displayed tell-tale demonic hues (the splotches ranged from terra-cotta to bright red), and their claws were as sharp as Lucifer's own. Questions haunted him, ambiguity's obstreperous imps. His gift for recognizing Heaven's enemies was indisputable—but did it testify to an analogous talent for knowing God's allies? If so, what did this rarefied sense tell him about the woman who'd transfixed him in Stopsack's parlor?

By the law of averages, this so-called English mystic was a fraud. False prophets, after all, were ubiquitous. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ had addressed this scandal directly, warning of miscreants “which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” Professor Cabot's news that the
Equinox
had foundered, dragging Chloe Bathurst to the bottom of the sea, constituted another reason to judge Lady Omega a fraud. Surely the storm bespoke a divine decision to terminate Miss Bathurst's quest, which meant that the Great Winnowing—conceived not only to thwart the actress but also to discourage her fellow freethinkers from following in her wake—in fact enjoyed Heaven's blessing.

And yet he was not at peace. Like the temptations endured by Saint Anthony, a thousand taloned uncertainties clawed at his breast. Against all reason, a peculiar harmony ruled these shores, belying any notion that Satan had made the archipelago his protectorate. Roaming the wild terrain, Simon had observed not only acts of predation but also gestures of affection: a pair of albatrosses doing a courtship dance, a quick-tongued lizard flicking flies from the eyes of a basking fur seal, a finch removing parasites from a giant tortoise's toes. Even the wretched aquatic iguanas had allies, brilliant scarlet crabs who harvested nettlesome bugs from beneath their scales. Why would the Devil permit such benevolence in his
pied-à-terre
? Why would he trouble himself about the comfort of a fur seal or the prosperity of a tortoise? What possible investment could Hell have in the next generation of albatross?

Then there was the indubitable charisma of Lady Omega herself. With her mesmerizing voice and bizarre utterances she really did seem touched from on high. And her story made sense—a forgotten shoot of Jacob's line crossing the Atlantic in Noah's ark, guarding the vessel generation upon generation, receiving God's reward for their constancy: a female prophet, eager to dissuade them from shrinking human heads, eating human flesh, and otherwise risking their immortal souls. The previous afternoon, at Professor Cabot's invitation, Simon had visited the ark, and he'd immediately known it for a consecrated vessel. Descending into its depths, seeing the stalls and corrals, he'd grown delirious with joy, overwhelmed to be standing where once had dwelt the Adam and Eve of all the world's giraffes—the Adam and Eve of its elephants, zebras, lions, tigers, and rhinoceroses.

Tightening his grip on the machete, he approached an especially fearsome iguana, a four-foot dragon with a gelid eye and ghastly wrinkled skin. He raised his arm. According to Garrity, the blade was sharp enough to behead the reptile in a single stroke. Show me a sign, O Lord. Give me a reason not to begin the harrowing here and now.

For a full minute he maintained an executioner's stance. And then it happened, the requested theophany. A vast, clamorous, bulbous form coasted over a stand of banyan trees, casting a shadow as dark as Beelzebub's, and now the intruder drew closer still—a kind of flying-machine, the
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
boiler whistling, engine chugging, propellers grinding. The wind rippled the ovoid hot-air bladder, widening the smile of the decorative Man in the Moon. Slowly the airship descended, until the gondola hovered barely twenty feet above the beach. A rope ladder spilled forth. Waving to Simon, two human figures climbed down.

He lowered the machete.

Recognizing the woman, Simon was taken aback. How strange that a creature so ethereal and otherworldly as Lady Omega would place herself aboard a machine so oily and profane as the
Lamarck
. The male passenger, meanwhile, was amongst the last people Simon had ever expected to meet again. But here came the Reverend Mr. Chadwick, presumed dead, full fathom five and all that, striding across the scattered pumice.

“Top of the morning, Simon!”

“Good heavens, Malcolm, is it really you?”

“Yes, but it almost wasn't,” said Chadwick, shaking Simon's hand. “The sinking of the
Equinox
nearly did for me. Sad to say, the storm drowned Captain Runciter, Miss Bathurst, and everyone else, or so I surmise. By God's grace I grabbed a floating spar, which bore me to the mouth of the Rio Amazonas.” The vicar pointed towards the
Lamarck
. “I was rescued by the master of this ship, who invited me to accompany him on his travels.”

“We may have our theological differences, Malcolm, but I'm pleased to see you,” said Simon. “Wilberforce's drawing-room seems six thousand miles away, doesn't it?”

“Wilberforce's drawing-room
is
six thousand miles away.”

Resuming his tale, Chadwick explained that Capitaine Léourier had in recent years become fascinated by legends of El Dorado, eventually concluding that the object of his quest lay hidden beneath Albemarle Isle. And so the vicar and the aeronaut had flown the length of the Amazon basin, crossed the mountains, and tracked the Humboldt Current to Galápagos. Soaring over the Bahía de Cormoranes earlier that afternoon, the adventurers had spotted a ship that corresponded to the average Christian's mental image of Noah's ark. Curious, they'd touched down here on Indefatigable, soon meeting the Governor, who introduced them to Lady Omega, messenger to the Serugites.

“Quite the most remarkable woman I've ever met,” said Chadwick.

Simon faced Lady Omega, who now stood atop a lava rock, aquatic lizards arrayed at her feet as if waiting to receive the Sermon on the Slag. The setting sun enveloped her in a rosy-gold halo, the coruscations dancing along her brilliant white robe and bountiful chestnut hair. Perhaps she was an imposter. Perhaps he should raise his machete and dispatch the immediate iguana. It was all so perplexing.

“More than remarkable in fact,” Chadwick continued. “I believe God has blessed the ark keepers with a divine prophet. If I were you, I should heed her every word.”

“For he who liveth by the sword shall perish by the sword,” said Lady Omega, pointing to Simon's machete.

“My heart quavers,” he said.

“I do not doubt it,” said Lady Omega.

“My soul trembles.”

“Blessed are the marine iguanas,” said the prophet. “Blessed are the land lizards, domeshelled tortoises, saddlebacks, slopebacks, mockingbirds, flycatchers, and finches. For they are all of them, each and every one, children of God and beloved of Christ.”

“She's telling you to cancel the massacre,” said Chadwick.

“I am aware of that,” said Simon. “I shall render my decision within a fortnight.”

 

12

Ralph and Solange Are Charged with the Capital Crime of Blasphemy, a Crisis That Rekindles Our Heroine's Passion for the Tree of Life

The dazzling extravagance of the dinner party through which Governor Stopsack sought to celebrate Mr. Chadwick's safe landing in Galápagos, likewise Capitaine Léourier's arrival, at first puzzled Chloe, but by the middle of the feast her confusion had evaporated. To account for the Governor's prodigality—which extended not only to devil-ray soup and breast of flamingo but also to sally-lightfoot crabs, hammerhead-shark fillets, and vintage claret—one need merely consider that he'd probably never before hosted simultaneously an Anglican priest, a Cambridge professor, a Gallic aeronaut, a Peruvian aerialist, and an English mystic.

“A veritable banquet,” said Solange, her sea-witch voice chiming above the heron cries wafting into the dining hall.

“If not a bacchanal,” said Ralph.

“Tonight's pleasures will come at a price,” said Stopsack. “You must sit and listen whilst I outline a scheme designed to serve my material ambitions—and yours as well, I hope. I shall begin by asking Mr. Chadwick whether he tracked down Mr. Hallowborn yesterday.”

“We found him on the point of decapitating an iguana,” the vicar replied. “Ultimately he relented.”

Forgoing the soup, Chloe speared a shark fillet with her fork and transferred it to her china plate. “I believe he's now in rebellion against Wilberforce's theology.”

“Alas, Madam Prophet, I would not wager one peso on Hallowborn sheathing his machete for good,” said Stopsack. “There's more to this affair than you imagine.”