Galapagos Regained (65 page)

Throughout the epic battle with the Cape Horn weather, from the 29th of June to the 3rd of July, Chloe repeatedly visited the phantom volume, perusing the chapter titled “Reading the
Rubáiyát
with Ralph,” even as she observed his present performance as first officer. There he stood, the dauntless mariner, hurtling imprecations into the wind's teeth whilst pounding orders into the sailors' heads. Thanks to Ralph, the canvas was sufficiently reefed to keep the
Apogee
from foundering, though not so short as to prolong their voyage through the Strait of Magellan. She had loved him once. Their interludes in Manáos had transported her to realms more rapturous than a resin dream. And yet even when she gave fleeting credence to his ambition of becoming an actor, she felt no more prepared to wed this footloose gallant than she did the Gallic balloonist.

Upon escaping the grasping seas off Tierra del Fuego, the
Apogee
tacked north, reaching Trindade Isle (linchpin of the Martin Vaz archipelago) on the 31st of July, which happened to be Solange's birthday. There was, to be sure, a facet of Chloe that wished to make the sea-witch a
bonne anniversaire
present of an amorous declaration—
Dear friend, let us live together as woman and wife
—but whereas Pirate Anne, Queen Cleopatra, or Carmine the vampire might have embraced this
modus vivendi
, Chloe could not align her imagination with such an outcome, and, moreover, what sense did it make to predicate her happiness on a person even more harebrained than her father?

The ides of August began with a gaudy sunrise, as colorful as Capitán Torresblanco's macaw. Later that morning, having assembled the crew and passengers on the weather deck, Ralph announced that the
Apogee
was but two days from the line, and so anyone wishing to mark the crossing with a pageant had better start laying plans. Mr. Chadwick stepped forward and declared that if the ship's company were very lucky their resident actress would organize a spectacle of the sort she'd produced ere the
Equinox
went down.

“Truth to tell, Reverend, I'd forgotten about my equatorial pageant,” Chloe informed him as they stood together on the quarterdeck that evening. The heavens were studded with stars, as if some cosmic knight-errant had spread a hauberk of luminous mail across the sky. “I'm pleased that you retain agreeable memories of our effort, but it was still a trifle.”

“Though lacking the complexity of your Lost Thirteenth Tribe masquerade, that pageant is by no means the least of your
oeuvre
,” said Mr. Chadwick.

“And what
is
the least of my
oeuvre
?”

“May I speak candidly, Chloe? I must express disappointment with the prologue to your Mount Pajas extravaganza, ‘An Atheist Vicar Proposes to an Erstwhile Actress and Is Rebuffed.'”

“Then it's time you heard about the epilogue.”

And Chloe wondered: if I tell him what he wants to hear, will I be allowing a mere poetic conceit, the Mount Pajas eruption as three-act drama (plus prologue and epilogue), to trump the truth of the matter? No, she decided. No, not at all. For in fact she cherished Malcolm Chadwick, this person who'd ministered to her guilt over Mr. Flaherty's death on the Rio Amazonas, convinced her she wasn't responsible for Captain Runciter's suffocation by an anaconda, and defended her against Ralph's and Solange's aggressive critiques of her Manáos revelation.

“Epilogue?” he asked.

“It's called, ‘The Erstwhile Actress Realizes She Would Be a Fool Not to Wed the Atheist Vicar.'”

“Do my ears deceive me?”

“Call me your darling, and credit your ears—those vessels into which I intend to pour my endless admiration for the brave and subtle Malcolm Chadwick.”

“Excuse me, my darling, whilst I visit the moon,” said the vicar.

“You must take me with you,” said Chloe. “Give me a moment to find my hat.”

Thus it happened that instead of an equatorial pageant a different sort of ceremony occurred aboard the
Apogee
. Asserting a sea captain's most venerable prerogative, Hugh Pritchard united Chloe and Malcolm in a variety of matrimony not precisely holy but unequivocally legal. Once the vows were exchanged and the bride duly kissed, Solange enfolded both partners in an immoderate embrace, whilst Ralph presented the couple with a wedding gift, his well-traveled manuscript of
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
.

“‘Know your own wonder—worship it with me,'” he recited, addressing Chloe, then turned to Malcolm and said, “A great responsibility lies upon your shoulders, Reverend. You are charged with making your bride know her own wonder.”

“I already know it,” Chloe protested.

“My darling, you know the marvel of the theatrical arts and the magnificence of the Tree of Life,” said Malcolm, “but your own wonder still eludes you.”

Solange cupped Chloe's jaw in her hands and administered her most piercing sea-witch gaze. “I hereby require you to have an exceptionally happy life, Mrs. Chadwick, though I suspect you will remain an object of my adoration for many years to come.”

*   *   *

Like a ray of pure and perfect possibility streaming forth from Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point, a glorious realization flowed into Granville Heathway's brain. By his calculation, young Bertram would arrive forty-eight hours hence, on the 5th of September, the very day that the dear boy had come into the world. Moreover, the perfect birthday gift lay to hand: eight gifts actually—the pigeon missives Bertram had sent from Constantinople and Paestum, each destined to become a chapter in an enthralling memoir, irresistible to any serious publisher in London or New York.

On the pretext that he wished to write a treatise preserving the ornithological knowledge he'd acquired whilst turning his pigeons into circus performers, Granville cajoled a stack of foolscap from Dr. Earwicker, then sat down at his escritoire and got to work. Hour by laborious hour, he transmogrified the dispatches, converting them from his son's infinitesimal scrawl into his own neat hand, sustaining himself throughout the arduous task by eating the Book of Genesis.

Shortly after ten o'clock on the morning of the fifth, he copied out the final sentence, “Schopenhauer took leave of me, being much in need of sleep.” According to Bertram's last
communiqué
, he would be in Warwickshire by five o'clock, which meant that the boy would indeed receive the gift on his twenty-sixth birthday. In considering what to call the book, Granville rejected Mustafa Reshid's playful confection,
Hookahlucinations
(too pleased with itself) and also Teilhard's poetic phrase,
The Axis of Eternity
(hopelessly obscure). Eventually he settled on
Decrypting the Descent of Man
.

“Happy birthday, son!” declared Granville as a youthful figure (more weathered than when he'd left for Constantinople but still unmistakably Bertram) strode into the cell. “On the morning you came into the world, I felt blessed by every angel in Heaven.”

“Dearest Father, how gratifying to see you looking so well!”

Granville and Bertram indulged in a prolonged embrace.

“I must credit my vigor to Scripture,” said Granville. “Two days ago I started at the beginning, eating my way from Eden to Jehovah's curse on Ham—Ham the son of Noah, I mean, not the pig meat, though evidently our Creator is equally contemptuous of swine flesh and Ham's descendants. This morning I consumed Leviticus.”

“If you want me to have a happy birthday, Father, you must promise to drop God from your diet.” Bertram gestured towards the dovecote. “Eight birds, splendid—all my messages got through. At the end of the week I shall travel to Oxford, there to present Lord Woolfenden with Doktor Schopenhauer's letter.”

“Tell me, Bertram,” asked Granville, “when on Crete did you perchance encounter the Minotaur?” Apprehending his son's woebegone face, he added, “They're everywhere, you know, Minotaurs. We've got one in the cellar.”

“Please, sir. Mother will stop visiting if you persist in saying things like that.”

Granville frowned, inflating his lower lip into a pout. “I have a gift for you!” Retrieving the manuscript from its hiding place behind the dovecote, he deposited all seventy-two pages, plus the title sheet, in his son's hands.
“Voilà!”

“Well, well, what have we
here
?” said Bertram with affected delight. “It seems to be a book.
Decrypting the Descent of Man
. My, my.”

“It's
your
book, son. I transcribed all eight messages, so they might be read without a quizzing-glass. I daresay, you'll find a publisher in a trice.”

Perplexity shadowed Bertram's face. “I sent you no more than two hundred words altogether. This stack contains dozens of pages.”

“You wrote in the tiniest hand imaginable.”

“How could my brief messages undergo so spectacular a transformation?”

“Don't you like your gift, son?”

“I like it, Father, but I don't
understand
it,” said Bertram, leafing through the manuscript. “What's this business about a monk named Mendel?”

“You don't remember Gregor Mendel? He traveled to the Hookah-Den of Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin from the year 1864.”

“During my sojourn I occasionally visited Yusuf Effendi's establishment, but I met no monks there, certainly none from the—uh—future.”

“What about a twentieth-century scientific mystic called Teilhard de Chardin?”

“The name is not familiar to me.”

“The British crystallographer Dr. Franklin? She made daguerreotypes of God's ideas, hence the helices on my wall. She was dying of a malignancy. You grew fond of her.”

“Your helices are beautiful. I had no such encounter.”

Granville sucked the insides of his cheeks, drawing the spongy tissues into the void above his tongue. Slowly he paced his cell, following an ellipse marked by Bertram at one focus and the dovecote at the other. “I shall never get well,” he moaned, tears coursing down his face. “I shall never be more than my disease.”

“Oh, my poor distracted father.” Now Bertram, too, was weeping. “Know that in your time you brightened the lives of countless parishioners. You visited them when they were sick, clothed them when they were naked, fed them when hungry, cheered them when despondent.”

“Someone should start a religion based on such principles.”

“Tell me more about your Minotaur.”

“He's really not so terrible a creature,” said Granville, daubing his tears with his sleeve. “He's merely lonely. My fellow madmen are loath to befriend a pagan chimera.”

“Then
we
shall become the Minotaur's friend.”

“Do you mean that?”

Bertram said, “Quite so. I'll ask Dr. Quelp to let us visit the cellar—unless you fear we'd get lost in the labyrinth.”

“That maze is devilishly complex,” sighed Granville, nodding. “We'd best avoid it. The Minotaur will understand. Happy birthday, son. Or did I say that already?”

*   *   *

What most astonished Chloe about Algernon's choice of Oxford abode was its general want of luridness and its marked deficiency in the grotesque. Given her twin's affection for decadence, she thought perhaps he'd purchased an abandoned brothel on the outskirts of the city or a shuttered abbey frequented by itinerant vampires. Instead Three Manor Place proved to be a staid and respectable town house situated on the banks of the Holywell Mill Stream. Were it not for Algernon's membership in the Shelley Society, just around the corner, she might have worried that his environment had become so wholesome that his health would deteriorate, shocked by this assault on his customary dissolution.

Stomach a-flutter, she strolled through the garden gate, Malcolm at her side, and rapped on the front door. When this gesture met with neither footfalls, voices, nor barking, she proceeded to the back lawn, a grassy tract hedged with boxwood and bathed in the beams of a surprisingly warm September sun. Algernon and Papa were engaged in a croquet match, along with two Oxonians already known to Chloe—Lord Woolfenden and his mistress, Lady Isadora—plus a sunburnt young man and a plump cleric, the latter being, of all people (or so Malcolm asserted), Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.

The instant Chloe saw her father's aged but agile form staring in bewilderment at his recently roqueted ball, she knew that the Transmutationist Club's odyssey from the docks of Plymouth to the gaming tables of Manáos—that farrago of angry protestors, tropical hurricanes, rickety boats, suffocating heat, nasty sand flies, and voracious mosquitoes—had been worth every attendant hardship. As she and Phineas embraced beside the mill stream, tears rolling down their cheeks like raindrops healing a parched farm, it seemed to her that (per Mr. Browning) the lark was on the wing, the snail on the thorn, the hillside dew-pearled—and a great deal was right with the world. Should Phineas ever again find himself incarcerated in a workhouse whilst facing debtors' prison, redeemable only at a cost of £2,000, she would immediately look about for a band of rakehells offering a large cash prize to anyone who could prove the Earth flat, the moon inhabited by Epicureans, or everyone in Lord Russell's cabinet a werewolf.

“Praise Heaven for my daughter's love of adventure and my son's luck at cards,” said Phineas, addressing Chloe in a hoarse but cheery voice. His hands, though callused, were free of workhouse blisters, and he'd gained at least a stone in weight. “My dear children have snatched me from the depths of Perdition and deposited me on the shores of Elysium.”

“From which place, Papa, you must promise to go a-wandering no more.”

Brother and sister were equally forthcoming in their sentiments, Algernon extolling Chloe for her choice of spouse and also her decision to withdraw from the contest. They broke their embrace, then drifted towards a freshly painted wooden pavilion, where Papa was taking tea with Bishop Wilberforce, Lord Woolfenden, Lady Isadora, and the sunburnt young man. Drawing within earshot of a conversation between her husband and her father, Chloe overheard Malcolm apologize for not obtaining Phineas's permission ere marrying his daughter.