Galapagos Regained (67 page)

“Do my eyes deceive me? Can this be Fanny Mendrick?”

“Chloe!” cried Fanny, throwing down a handful of sunflower seeds.

“Do you no longer tread the boards at the Adelphi?”

“Alas, the company fell on hard times, and I was let go.” Fanny rubbed her oily palms on her trousers. “But, happily, it is a truth universally acknowledged—to paraphrase your paraphrase—that a naturalist who has lost his zookeeper must be in want of a replacement. So I wrote Mr. Darwin, reminding him that he'd enjoyed my performance in
Via Dolorosa
, and he summoned me.”

“Today I am likewise summoned, though I know not why.”

“I read of your adventures in the
Evening Standard
. Up to a point, I'm glad you found your Tree of Life.”

“Had I not found it, my friends might have died on the gallows,” said Chloe. “Their salvation was abetted by six newly minted transmutationists.”

“I sometimes imagine Mr. Darwin hired me so his wife would have an ally in her efforts to bring him to Christ, which I'd say speaks well of the man.” Fanny pointed east, then scratched her brow with the same muddy finger. “When last I saw him, he was in our new potting shed, adjacent to the vegetable patch. Oh, Chloe Bathurst, 'tis so
marvelous
to clap eyes on you again. I should like nothing better than to reforge our former bond.”

“It would be petty of us to allow the origin and purpose of the universe to stand in the way of our friendship. But before we part, I must ask—”

“About Annie?”

“Yes.”

“Her soul is now in Heaven.”

“Her soul, yes.” Chloe's throat congealed as if invaded by a tumor. “And where is the rest of her?”

“Mr. Darwin buried his child in Malvern. He'd taken her there last spring for Dr. Gully's cold-water treatment. Mrs. Darwin had to stay home—she was carrying Horace, and the other children needed her as well. It was all entirely awful.”

“Cold-water treatment—faugh,” said Chloe as a different sort of water, warm and briny, trickled down her cheeks. “Poor Mr. Darwin,” she sobbed. “Poor Mrs. Darwin.”

“Poor Annie.”

Drawing forth her handkerchief, Chloe daubed her tears and blew her nose, then kissed Fanny good-bye and made her way back across the meadow.

The new botanic facility was no mere potting shed but an elaborate greenhouse, complete with a sloping glass roof and a network of boiler pipes that, being patterned after the vivarium's heating system, endowed the air with an agreeable tropical warmth. She found Mr. Darwin, outfitted with canvas gloves and a straw hat, in a compartment devoted to orchids. He was securing a large species labeled
ANGRAECUM SESQUIPEDALE
in a terra-cotta pot, its long white petals radiating outward like the propeller vanes on Léourier's airship. Glancing up from his labors, he offered a wistful smile, thanked her for coming, then asked, doubtless in response to her reddened eyes, “Who told you?”

“Miss Mendrick.”

“Did she mention that I had to bury her—”

“In Malvern, yes.”

“Shortly after Easter.” Mr. Darwin clenched his jaw and winced. “I lowered the coffin into the ground myself. She still had that
Petit Chaperon Rouge
doll you gave her. The stone in the churchyard reads, rather blandly, ‘A dear and good child.'”

“‘Dear and good'—that she was, sir.”

“I didn't know what else to say,” he rasped, weeping.

“Simple is always best.”

“‘Dear and good—'” Mr. Darwin blotted his tears with his sleeve. “Up to a point my work sustains me. My pigeons and my barnacles and—”

“And these orchids, too, I'll wager.”

“My orchids, yes.” He swallowed audibly. “I believe I've demonstrated that, for most plant species, attracting a unique pollinator is an evolutionary priority. The nectar of this comet orchid resides within so deep a cavity that only an insect endowed with a thirty-centimeter tongue might hope to feast upon it. And yet so highly does Nature prize cross-fertilization over self-fertilization, I'm confident that such a moth or butterfly will be found.”

“We should sponsor a competition. Two hundred pounds to whoever nets the pollinator in question. With an entry fee of sixpence, we're certain to turn a profit.”

Mr. Darwin laughed gaily and said, “Dear Mrs. Chadwick, how delightful to have you about the place again. Did you truly experience all the adventures Popplewell described?”

“Plus several I never told him about.”

“I was surprised to learn you married a man who'd spent a year dismantling atheist arguments at Alastor Hall.”

“It was one of those Newtonian romances,” said Chloe breezily. “Mr. Chadwick and I found ourselves on the same swirling planet, and one day we said to each other, ‘As long as we're here, let's make the best of it.'”

Having finished potting the
Angraecum,
Mr. Darwin inhaled with Epicurean appreciation, savoring the ambrosial aroma of the greenhouse. “I was particularly intrigued by your friends' trial. Of the twelve jurymen in
Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn,
half proved sympathetic to the evolutionary view—did Popplewell get that right?”

“Upon my soul, I believe I gave the performance of a lifetime,” said Chloe, nodding. “Of course, only three of my six converts decided that evolution calls God into question. The others found no enmity whatsoever between monotheism and mockingbirds.”

“Mrs. Chadwick, by now you should know I simply don't
care
whether my idea calls God into question.” Absorbing her chiding smile, Mr. Darwin added, “Very well, I
do
care, but my
point
is that, back in Galápagos, an entire courtroom—”

“A tabernacle, actually.”

“So much the better. An entire tabernacle sat still whilst you mounted a defense of transmutation. People listened. They learned. Mrs. Chadwick, you have demonstrated that, despite my promise to Mrs. Darwin, I mustn't wait till I'm dead before publishing my species theory. Tomorrow I'll hunt up the scrivener's copy of my old manuscript, dust it off, and start turning it into a book.”

“How pleased I am to have made my small contribution to God's demise.”

“Stop it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I picture a mammoth tome, bursting with evidence drawn from every sphere of science.” Mr. Darwin took Chloe's arm and guided her towards a door marked
CLIMBING PLANTS
. “The title, of course, will be
Natural Selection
.” As they entered this second compartment, he directed her attention to a row of unassuming potted specimens, each snaking up its own trellis. “I'll devote a whole chapter to my wild cucumbers.
Echinocystis lobata
exhibits an adaptation I call circumnutation, gyrating about an axis as its tendrils ascend. Even stronger than that urge is heliotropism, whereby a sunbeam will halt a plant's upward aspirations and cause
horizontal
motion instead. My research has persuaded me that virtually all members of the vegetable kingdom key their lives to the sun. When night comes, some of them even sleep.”

“If orchids and creepers sleep, does that mean they dream?”

“I have no opinion, but you've asked a splendid question.” With his dirt-smudged fingertips Mr. Darwin caressed the nearest
Echinocystis
. “By the by, it was Wilberforce, wasn't it? The schemer behind the planned massacre was Soapy Sam—am I right?”

“Per my husband's wishes, I must decline to reveal his identity,” said Chloe, nodding.

“I pray you, madam, continue that policy. I make my request in deference to Sam's father, a tireless crusader for the abolitionist cause. A mile from here stands the oak where the Reverend William Wilberforce was called from on high to fight the slave trade.”

She promised Mr. Darwin that her lips were sealed. Satisfied, he began to hum, then led her into a third compartment, labeled
INSECTIVOROUS PLANTS
. A dozen exemplars of the sundew,
Drosera rotundifolia,
a bulbous creature spouting dozens of sticky tentacles, rested on the benches in terra-cotta pots.

“Now that I think on it, sir, there's a
second
reason you may wish to publish sooner rather than later,” said Chloe. “Whilst in Manáos I had lunch with a naturalist, one Alfred Wallace of Hertfordshire, who makes his living feeding the English appetite for stuffed specimens. He was keen to find a law explaining why different marmoset types inhabit opposite banks of the Rio Negro.”

An expression of alarm flashed across Mr. Darwin's face. “I assume you told him nothing of my own species theory?”

“Not a peep—though I confess I was less interested in protecting your future reputation than in learning whether Mr. Wallace planned to enter the Great God Contest. In retrospect I realize that, being en route to the East Indies, he posed no threat.”

“Having friends in both the Geological Society and the Linnean Society, I am well situated to become the
paterfamilias
of natural selection—certainly better positioned than an itinerant taxidermist from Hertfordshire. I'll tell my colleagues to be on the lookout for a packet from the Spice Islands bearing a scientific paper by an
arriviste
called Wallace.”

“So that they might suppress it? Isn't that rather predatory of you?”

“Competition is the way of the world, Mrs. Chadwick, a point you doubtless made during the blasphemy trial. That said, please understand I have no wish to disrupt the man's career. But I cannot allow him to gain preeminence over me.” Mr. Darwin gestured towards the tentacled plant. “Now here's a
real
predator. My sundew can wrap her arms about unsuspecting flies and gnats—an essential adaptation, her aboriginal soil being poor in nitrogen. I've taken to feeding her egg white, bits of raw beef, even fingernail clippings. Mrs. Darwin says I won't be satisfied till I've proved that
rotundifolia
is not a plant but an animal.”

“A hideous creature, by my lights,” said Chloe, adding, with a wry grin, “and yet there is grandeur in this view of life—is there not, Mr. Darwin?—with its powers of growth, assimilation, and reproduction having been originally breathed into one or a few kinds—”

“Good heavens, Mrs. Chadwick, you stole and transcribed my essay after all, didn't you?”

“That I did, sir.”

He smiled softly and said, “And that whilst this our planet has gone circling according to fixed laws…”

“That from so simple an origin…”

“Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being—”

She said, “‘Are being'?”

“I added that flourish recently. Also, I now prefer ‘beginning' to ‘origin.'”

“So do I,” said Chloe, and together they recited, “That from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“I miss her so much,” said Mr. Darwin.

“Of course.”

“She defied the world with her joyousness.”

“Truly.”

“To bring her back I would give up my work, my sanity, my breath. But the universe doesn't work that way.”

“No, sir, it doesn't. Allow me to suggest that you defy the universe with your book.”

*   *   *

Of all the rejoinders to Genesis that Chloe had encountered in her career as a Shelley Prize contestant, the one that had most captured her fancy was the Chelmsford apothecary's inversion of Saint Anselm's Ontological Proof. The only thing more awe-inspiring than a universe created by a
bona fide
supernatural being would be one created by a nonexistent supernatural being. The longer she thought about this absurd argument, this Nontological Proof, the more it enchanted her. By the time she'd settled into her new life in Oxford, she imagined that her fortunes were being supervised by the Nontological God, the Nog, of the apothecary's whim.

During the eight years that elapsed between her reunion with Mr. Darwin and the publication of his book, Chloe and her colleagues created and sustained Holywell Academy. What had begun as a modest school housed at Three Manor Place, catering to boys ages nine through eleven, evolved into a plenary institution embracing ages seven through fifteen, both genders accepted, so that its founders became obliged to employ more instructors (including the irreproachable Fanny Mendrick, hired to teach penmanship and ethics) and take over the premises of the recently failed St. Philomena's Ladies College in Cowley Place. Whilst Chloe and her family moved into a town house across the street, Bertram made his home on the top floor of the school, where he passed his evenings devising lessons, caring for his aged mother, and—during most of the year 1858—grieving for his late father, the Reverend Granville Heathway, who'd died of an apoplectic seizure at Wormleighton Sanitarium on St. Valentine's Day.

Of the many felicitous events overseen by the Nog with characteristic detachment was Phineas Bathurst's decision to start taking himself seriously as a puppeteer, enriching the Holywell Academy curriculum with his talents. The old man's British history lessons were particularly memorable. Although the Holywell students were generally a rowdy breed (and had therefore been denied admission to more venerable Oxford educational establishments), even the most fractious young scholar found himself caring about the Long Parliament when its vagaries were explained by a puppet representing Oliver Cromwell. As for the fortunes of Charles I, his execution proved singularly absorbing when the presentation included the puppet's head falling off its shoulders and rolling across the classroom floor.

Of the other happy occurrences surveyed by the Nog with its usual indifference, three brought Chloe particular satisfaction—the first being Malcolm's resolution to finally forgive himself for killing two mercenaries during the attack on Castillo Bracamoros, the second being the marriage of Ralph Dartworthy, master of H.M.S.
Inalienable
(survey ship
extraordinaire
) to Solange Kirsop, mistress of Cornucopia House (brothel
non pareil
), and the third being the birth of a rambunctious but winsome primate named Sophie Anne Chadwick. Malcolm proved a loving father, Phineas an indulgent grandfather, Algernon a solicitous uncle, and Chloe an attentive mother. Owing to her hours spent in Sophie's exuberant presence, she soon came to understand what Mr. Darwin meant by Annie defying the world with her joyousness, though each time she considered the sentiment her eyes welled up with tears.