Galapagos Regained (69 page)

“To employ a locution I first heard from your lips, it sounds like ‘a ripping good yarn,'” said Mr. Darwin, stroking the manuscript. “Now allow me to convey some news I hope won't distress you. Our zoo no longer exists. Five years ago I decided that the Galápagos specimens and their progeny had played their parts in my life. I gave the newest generation of birds to the Marquis of Sudbury for his aviary. You'll find the descendants of our original lizards in Her Majesty's Zoo.”

“And the tortoises?” asked Chloe.

“Perseus of Indefatigable, Boswell of James, Isolde of Charles—all the rest: they're in the Jardin des Animaux.”

“I shall make a point of visiting them.”

“Mr. Darwin must rest now,” said Mrs. Darwin, inserting herself into the tableau that had formed around the wheelchair. “If you wish to see him again, come back tomorrow morning.”

“The quinine is an excellent idea,” Chloe told Mrs. Darwin. “I would also recommend the occasional sip of whisky.”

“Mr. Darwin has already thought of that,” said Mrs. Darwin with an evanescent smile.

Partly to pass the time but mostly because she wanted him to see whence came the seeds of their South American adventure, Chloe took Malcolm on a tour. She showed him the vivarium, now as barren of reptiles and birds as Wilberforce and Hallowborn had intended to make Galápagos. She guided him to the greenhouse, where he took a naïve delight in feeding his fingernail clipping to a carnivorous sundew. The solitary comet orchid (perhaps the original specimen, perhaps a descendant) also fascinated Malcolm, and he decided that Mr. Darwin was well within his rights to predict the eventual discovery of the necessary pollinator, complete with thirty-centimeter tongue.

As dusk drew nigh, they perambulated along the famous sandwalk, four full revolutions, talking of many things. Chloe took note of the irony. On this saddest of days she and her husband were discussing unequivocally pleasant subjects—the unexpected ascent of Algernon Bathurst to the post of Oxford Gaming Commissioner; the bizarre puppet shows that the late Phineas Bathurst had staged for his three granddaughters; the generally successful theatrical career of their firstborn (though the Drury Lane Company's revival of
The Last Days of Pompeii,
with Sophie as Nydia the blind flower seller, had closed after only fourteen performances); the new telescope that daughter Celia had acquired for her celestial explorations; the English translation of Novalis that Tess had recently completed for John Murray, publisher of Mr. Darwin's
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals;
the letter from Philippe Léourier revealing that he'd found, deep in the Peruvian jungle, “the ruins of a city that was surely El Dorado”; the admirable efforts of Ralph and Solange Dartworthy to transform Cornucopia House from an elegant brothel into a haven not only for harlots seeking to escape the trade but also for sailors in need of a final port.

As darkness fell, Chloe and Malcolm ambled to the Queens Head Inn, where they enjoyed a good meal and a quiet night's rest. The following morning found them back at Down House, climbing the staircase to Mr. Darwin's chamber. He lay on a canopy bed surrounded by fat pillows, the bay window giving him a panoramic view of the pasture and the woods beyond. Whilst William applied cold compresses to his father's brow, the other sons took up posts in the corners. Hugging their sobbing mother, the two surviving daughters stood beside a full-length mirror, the glass so pristine it seemed as if three additional women were in the room.

The instant he caught sight of Chloe, Mr. Darwin roused himself and pointed towards the dresser, on which lay the jumbled pages of
Decrypting the Descent of Man.

“Oh, my dear Mrs. Chadwick, you have brought me such a marvelous gift. That friar Mendel is an authentic genius—how brilliantly he demonstrates that germ cells pursue their lives independently of somatic cells. Why didn't I think of that?”

“You've had many a felicitous thought in your day,” said Chloe.

“To blazes with my gemmules,” said Mr. Darwin. “To blazes with pangenesis and bloodlines. It's all about our monk's discrete hereditary units. Now we can say with confidence why traits don't disappear through blending.”

“So it seems,” said Chloe.

“And then we have Teilhard de Chardin and his lovely skulls from Asia, Europe, Africa—Africa, Mrs. Chadwick, the cradle of our species! How
dare
Owen assert that the fossil record tells against human evolution?!”

“He's an even more shameless bluffer than my brother-in-law,” noted Malcolm.

“Evidently Teilhard has been sucking on hookahs all his life,” said Mr. Darwin. “What a silly mystic goose, and his orthogenesis is a dead end—the universe isn't going anywhere. If we must have an Omega Point, let's not seek it in some fanciful dominion beyond the stars. It's right here. It's in my greenhouse. It's under my wormograph.”

“The kingdom of sod is within you,” said Malcolm.

“Then we come to Dr. Rosalind Franklin and her deoxyribonucleic acid.” Like Madeira leaking from an antique wineskin, tears spilled from Mr. Darwin's eyes. “Every organism contains in each cell the same self-replicating substance. You and I, Chloe, and your husband here, and Mrs. Darwin, and my sons and daughters, and the rest of us, all the plants and animals, we're now and forever bound to one another in the most materialist way imaginable—and hence the most transcendent!”

“Metaphysics without end,” said Malcolm.

“And yet it was Miss Franklin's observations about
Trypanosoma cruzi
and Chagas disease that brought me the greatest satisfaction.”

“I would not have predicted that,” said Chloe.

“
Mirabile dictu,
I didn't curse little Annie after all. I didn't damn her with a weak constitution. My sickness came from the outside, from those ghastly black bugs of the Pampas.” Slowly Mr. Darwin's eyelids enshrouded his gaze. “God bless the benchuca.” With each successive syllable, his voice grew more feeble. “Devil take the benchuca. Hooray for Mendel. Praised be Teilhard. A toast to Rosalind Franklin.”

He slept. Chloe kissed the old man's brow. “Good night, sweet prince,” she said, then gathered up the pages of
Decrypting the Descent of Man,
nodded to the assembled family, and—her husband at her side—made a circumspect exit.

*   *   *

“I daresay, he won't make it past sunset,” Malcolm remarked as they started across the meadow.

Chloe sighed in assent, then paused before the wormograph, which her imagination now framed, for better or worse, as Mr. Darwin's headstone. “I think I see how this thing works.” She indicated the plinth with the tip of her shoe. “It's very clever.”

“Before we leave, I should like to visit the greenhouse again.”

“Hundreds of worms, thousands of worms, working the soil according to their instincts—and moving a mountain in the bargain, two millimeters each year. Yes, my darling, we shall visit the greenhouse.”

“Those climbing plants are beguiling,” said Malcolm.

“When I called on Mr. Darwin following our return from Galápagos, I asked him a question he thought rather astute. Do orchids and creepers dream?”

“And his answer?”

“He did not venture one.”

“I wish to feed a fingernail clipping to a sundew again,” said Malcolm.

“Easily arranged, my love.”

Dropping to her knees, Chloe pressed her lips against the sunbaked stone. It was warm as fresh bread. Did orchids dream? Did moths grieve? Did bees have regrets? Were worms easily amused? She had no information on these matters, but just then she fancied she could hear the laughter of the subterranean creatures. And this was no soft vermian titter, either, but a roar of elation, as if the worms understood what magnificent chips they were in the mosaic of Creation, as if from their grubby vantage they'd apprehended the whole transmutational scheme of things—as if they knew their own wonder.

She rose and, taking her husband's hand, led him across the meadow toward the greenhouse. Toward resolute cucumbers, hungry sundews, and drowsing orchids. Toward forms most ravishing and rapturous, toward varieties ever evolving—toward life.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Although the fine print on my poetic license permits me, for the sake of producing a viable work of fiction, to reheat certain established facts to the point of plasticity, I resorted to this privilege only occasionally during the composition of
Galápagos Regained.
With a few obvious exceptions—notably the Great God Contest itself—most of the institutions depicted in this novel map onto the historical record.

Seventeenth years before publishing
On the Origin of Species,
Charles Darwin indeed set down his theory in the form of a thirty-five-page manuscript. I have titled this piece “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification.” As in
Galápagos Regained,
Darwin's 1842 sketch concludes with a longer version of the paragraph later made famous by his book, the soaring thought that begins, “There is grandeur in this view of life…” I must note, however, that some of the quotations and concepts Chloe Bathurst culls from the sketch are not in the actual document.

Owing to the transformation of Darwin's estate into an English Heritage site, I was able to walk in my heroine's footsteps as she negotiated Down House and its environs in the early chapters. The zoological dome is, of course, my own invention.

While
Galápagos Regained
may seem to suggest that South American rubber barons had brought their enterprise to a fever pitch by 1850, the industry did not reach its apex for several more years. Sad to day, the sorts of outrages perpetrated against the
seringueiros
in these pages match historians' accounts. My Great Rubber War roughly corresponds to violent events that ultimately occurred in Colombia on the Rio Putumayo and the Rio Cara Paraná.

Throughout the evolution of this novel I consulted many books, Web sites, and scholarly articles, a bibliography too extensive to reprint here. I must make special mention, however, of
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
by David Quammen,
Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life
by Niles Eldredge,
Galápagos: Discovery on Darwin's Islands
by David W. Steadman and Steven Zousmer,
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes,
The Encantadas
by Herman Melville,
Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon
by John Hemming,
A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro
by Alfred Russel Wallace,
The Jesuit and the Skull
by Amir D. Aczel,
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
by Brenda Maddox, the Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith,
On the Nature of Things
by Lucretius, and, of course, four books by Charles Darwin:
The Voyage of the Beagle, On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man
, and
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Just as our planet is blessed with a biosphere unlike any other in the solar system, and perhaps the Milky Way, so I am blessed with friends, colleagues, and family members who take satisfaction in commenting on my books in utero. My immense gratitude goes to the witty Joe Adamson, the wise Shira Daemon, the munificent Margaret Duda, the perspicacious Justin Fielding, the insightful Frank Kirkpatrick, the multifarious Elisabeth Lanser-Rose, the erudite Christopher Morrow, the polymathic Glenn Morrow, the thoughtful Tony Palermo, the sagacious Sam Scheiner, the astute James Stevens-Arce, the meticulous Don Thompson, and the passionate Michael Vicario. Let me also thank Michael Homler for his editorial acuity, Arthur Motta for his English-to-Portuguese translations, and two wonderful literary agents, Emma Patterson and the late Wendy Weil, for uplifting assessments of this project when I most needed them.

Finally, I must acknowledge the contributions of my dear wife, Kathryn Morrow, whose felicitous remark—“Isn't about time you wrote your novel about Charles Darwin?”—got the project started, whose editorial comments proved invaluable, and whose love for the natural world inspired me throughout nearly six years of composition.

 

A
LSO BY
J
AMES
M
ORROW

NOVELS

The Wine of Violence

The Continent of Lies

This Is the Way the World Ends

Only Begotten Daughter

The Last Witchfinder

The Philosopher's Apprentice

THE GODHEAD TRILOGY

Towing Jehovah

Blameless in Abaddon

The Eternal Footman

NOVELLAS

City of Truth

Shambling Towards Hiroshima

The Madonna and the Starship

COLLECTIONS

Bible Stories for Adults

The Cat's Pajamas and Other Stories

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR