Galapagos Regained (9 page)

Equally encouraging to Chloe was her discovery that, although the London-based administrator of the Shelley Prize refused to allow the common run of applicant to take his proof or disproof to Oxford (lest the Byssheans be subjected to the rants of fanatics and the ravings of cranks), that same worthy normally blessed any argument that turned on tangible artifacts—and what could be more tangible than a broad-tailed marine iguana or a slim-beaked warbler finch? In one especially arresting presentation, a version of the Argument from Miracles, a Northumberland bishop had paraded “a collection of discarded crutches and abandoned Bath chairs before the judges, graphic testaments to the Creator's healing hand.” The petitioner did not prosper, the freethinking judges noting that the vast majority of prayers on behalf of the halt and the lame went unanswered. But what most struck Chloe was the hopeful bishop's employment of physical props. A crutch was a truly vivid thing, though hardly more vivid than the egg-cracking bill of a Hood's Isle mockingbird.

In another notable albeit unsuccessful submission, an attempted “refutation of the Jehovah hypothesis,” a Chelmsford apothecary had taken Saint Anselm's Ontological Proof—because one can conceive of a Perfect Being, such an entity necessarily exists, actualities being
ipso facto
superior to ideas—and turned it on its head. The apothecary had prepared a diagram, dense with mathematical formulae, allegedly demonstrating that “the only thing more astonishing than a universe created by a
bona fide
supernatural being would be a universe created by a nonexistent supernatural being.” Surely this chart, reasoned Chloe, though rendered in the boldest strokes and brightest colors, had not been more compelling than the arched carapace of a Charles Isle saddleback tortoise.

Two days after Mr. Darwin acquired a new microscope for his barnacle studies, built especially for him from a French prototype, Chloe resolved to confront him with her plan, figuring that the instrument had put him in a good humor. She found him in his study, alternately smoking a cigarette and enlarging the latest object of his curiosity. “A fresh-water clam,” he explained, pointing to the microscope stage. “It arrived this morning from a Greenwich naturalist who shares my fascination with the means by which aquatic invertebrates are dispersed from their birth sites. He mailed me the clam along with a diving beetle to whose leg it was attached. Thanks to the offices of that insect, this clam may have traveled a full three miles from home, eventually reaching the bend in the creek from which my friend retrieved both vehicle and rider.”

“And they survived the ordeal of postal delivery?” asked Chloe.

“The clam is doing splendidly. The beetle, alas, arrived suffering from terminal dehydration.” Mr. Darwin clutched his stomach, doubtless to palliate his nausea, then indicated a jar on his desk. “I sealed the creature therein, then added a dram of hydrogen cyanide, that he might know a quick death. Aren't you supposed to be in the vivarium, Miss Bathurst?”

“Please, sir, if you could spare me a moment of your time.”

“Heaven forbid I should accord greater consideration to a beetle than to my assistant zookeeper.”

She began by reporting on a misadventure recently endured by Perseus of Indefatigable (her Trojan tortoise, she decided, the ploy by which she would redirect Mr. Darwin's attention from invertebrates to herself), explaining that on the previous evening the creature had slipped off a boulder and injured his leg—though with Master Willy's assistance she'd successfully bandaged the limb. When Mr. Darwin issued an approving
hmmmm,
she asked him whether, “transmutationally speaking,” Perseus with his intermediate carapace was more closely related to Boswell the domeshell or Isolde the saddleback. The ruse worked. Her employer forgot his clam, stepped away from his microscope, and proffered a warm smile. “Marvelous question, Miss Bathurst. Alas, my theory is not yet so refined as to provide a definite answer.”

“Even in its present state, your idea is quite the most exciting I've ever encountered. If it were a novel, it would be
The Mysteries of Udolpho
.”

“Really now?” Mr. Darwin lifted an eyebrow, evidently uncertain whether her aim was praise or flattery.

“It's so excellent a conjecture, in fact, that with your permission I shall submit it to the Shelley Society.”

He scowled and said, “I think not.”

“Naturally I intend to credit you in full and turn over the greater part of the prize, seven thousand pounds, keeping but three thousand for my troubles.”

“And what troubles might those be?”

“Mastering your species theory, rehearsing my presentation, transporting the illustrative birds and beasts to Oxford.”

“Am I to infer you're an atheist, Miss Bathurst?”

She leaned towards the microscope and surveyed its amorphous occupant, which the device had enlarged to the size of a tuppence. “You should infer merely that I'm prepared to
portray
an atheist, if I might thereby keep my father out of debtors' prison. The Jehovah hypothesis holds no interest for me one way or the other.”

Grasping his tweezers, Mr. Darwin transferred the clam from the microscope stage to a dish of water. “What you're suggesting is out of the question.”

“I take your point, sir. Permit me to offer you
eight
thousand pounds, retaining for myself a mere two, the sum I need to save Papa from his creditors.”

“No, Miss Bathurst, my
point
has eluded you. The theory of natural selection is not for sale.” Mr. Darwin pulled a handkerchief from his waistcoat, wiping his fevered brow like a barman mopping up a splash of ale. “Let me add that I'm sympathetic to your father's plight. Is he really two thousand pounds in arrears? That's only twenty more than I paid for this estate. How does a man squander so much money?”

“Phineas Bathurst is forever accomplishing feats that would daunt the average mortal. You may be sure the bulk of his debt traces to philanthropy, not prodigality.”

“I shall contribute two hundred pounds to whatever fund you've dedicated to his salvation,” Mr. Darwin promised.

Chloe sucked filaments of air through her clenched teeth. Two hundred pounds—the precise figure that, after pondering the tender abolitionist soul who'd written
The Voyage of the Beagle,
she'd imagined him donating. “May I make a suggestion? Allow me to become fluent in transmutationism. I shall carry the argument to Alastor Hall, ascribing it to an English naturalist who wishes to remain anonymous. Mr. Popplewell will duly report on my performance. If your theory proves palatable to a majority of
Evening Standard
subscribers and furthermore elicits the admiration of those readers who consider themselves scientists—”

“And also wins the prize.”

“And also wins the prize, you'll be free to step forward and claim authorship of the most important idea in the history of biology. As for myself, I would expect no more than twenty percent compensation.”

“Miss Bathurst, I am out of patience with you.”

“I had no wish to give offense, sir.”

Taking hold of the beetle jar, Mr. Darwin held it up to the bay window and contemplated the doomed inhabitant. “Let there be no ambiguity in this matter. My mockingbirds, finches, reptiles, and brain are not now, nor will they ever be, at your disposal. Export them beyond Down House, and you'll have made an enemy of a person who would be your benefactor.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Might I offer some advice, Miss Bathurst?” Pivoting towards his desk, Mr. Darwin set down the jar, apparently satisfied that the beetle had passed away. “Forget this blasted competition, embrace the Jehovah hypothesis, and pray that your father lives to see his creditors dead and buried. And now you will return to your duties.”

*   *   *

What other choice did she have? None, by her own reckoning. How many better paths lay before her? Zero, she ruefully concluded. Just as Pirate Anne was forced to abandon her baby on the steps of a monastery, so was Chloe now obliged to appropriate the transmutation sketch under cover of night and spirit it back to her room, there to transcribe all thirty-five pages ere they were missed.

She laid the groundwork of her scheme with excruciating care, clearing the clutter from her writing-desk and equipping it with certain essentials she'd acquired by milking her purse dry at Creigar & Sons, Stationers—a stack of blank paper, a fountain pen, two nibs, three pots of ink—plus four candles obtained from Parslow on the pretext that she intended to stay up late reading
The Count of Monte Cristo
. She wriggled into her burgundy-velvet
Raft of the Medusa
gown, the better to blend with the darkness, then put on slippers, the better to mute her tread, and irrigated her throat with barley water, lest she betray herself with a cough.

By midnight the household was deathly still, Mr. Darwin and his wife having retired to their bed-chambers, the children sleeping soundly, the servants snoring noisily, the dogs whimpering in their dreams. Step by silent step Chloe crept down the hall and, at one with the night, slithered into the study. A batten of moonlight streamed through the bay window, bright enough to illuminate her deed without betraying it. The lower-left desk drawer protested her knavery, squeaking more loudly than when she'd obtained the full-blown treatise for Mr. Hooker, but at last “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification” glided into view. Holding her breath, she removed the pages with the dexterity of a pickpocket. She exhaled, swallowed hard, and eased the drawer back into place.

Above the throbbing of her heart and the chugging of her lungs a second noise arose, the creak of human footfalls. She dropped to her knees and, crawling like an iguana, hid behind the couch. Cautiously she peered into the gloom. A flame floated across the study, followed by the extended arm of Mr. Darwin, dressed in a silk robe and holding a candle, its radiance enhanced by a globe. With the aid of his walking-stick he shuffled towards his bookcase and, setting his lamp on the reading table, slid a thick novel from the shelf. Only after he was ensconced in his overstuffed chair, poring over Mr. Thackeray's
The Luck of Barry Lyndon,
did Chloe play the lizard again and, manuscript in hand, exit softly on all fours.

Once back in the servants' quarters, she lit the candles, then enacted her plan with the ticking efficiency of a trainman's watch. The pen nib skittered across the page, neatly replicating Mr. Darwin's sentences, each character crisply formed. No bleary-eyed medieval monk transcribing Scripture had ever accorded a text greater fealty. She never wrote “maladoptive” when the word was “maladaptive,” never “evaluation” instead of “evolution.”

To Chloe's immense satisfaction, the essay addressed the thorny questions raised by the luncheon guests. Why were random but felicitous advantages—and random but pathological disadvantages—not diluted through blending? Because if inheritance worked that way, then familial diseases such as hemophilia would have long since disappeared. Why should we think our planet old enough for natural selection to have worked such wonders? Because the more closely geologists pondered mountains, valleys, deserts, and seabeds, the more testaments they saw to a vast antiquity. Was the theory of transmutation so all-inclusive as to embrace Man himself? On this point, the author was adamant. Consider our vestigial anatomical features. Consider our resemblance to apes. There was never an Eden, a talking serpent, a fall from grace. Eve was a fiction. Adam be damned.

At long last, her second ink-pot almost drained and her energies all but depleted, she copied out the final paragraph.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its powers of growth, assimilation, and reproduction having been originally breathed into one or a few kinds, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling according to fixed laws, and whilst land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through processes of gradual selection and infinitesimal modifications, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved.

She had merely won a battle, of course. There remained the matter of the war. Victory would be hers only after she'd gathered up palpable proofs of transmutation—secure in their adaptive shells, proud of their strong tails, pleased with their useful beaks—and displayed them before the judges. Whence would come this evidence? A momentous question, but not one her weary brain was required to answer this night.

She blew out the candles, then huddled protectively over the essay's moist, newborn twin. For reasons not readily apparent, her favorite speech from Mr. Jerrold's
Wicked Ichor
popped into her mind. “We live in the shadows, cast out of Christendom, fleeing the cross,” said Carmine the vampire, as interpreted by Chloe, to her fellow undead brides. “And yet we ask no man's pity, for 'tis not mere blood we seek but the thrill of mocking the cosmos. Will you look yourselves in the eye, dear sisters, and deny that this be true?”

When at last the pages were dry, she wrapped them in her woolen scarf and hid the bundle beneath her pillow. Let us be honest, she told herself. Not mere blood but the thrill. Not just the purse but the praise. Will you look yourself in the eye, dear Chloe, and deny that this be true?

*   *   *

Moving stealthily towards the study, sketch in hand, Chloe apprehended a pleasing sound, the cadence of Mr. Darwin's snores. She approached the desk on tiptoe, grasping the handle of the lower-left drawer. The sleeper stirred but did not awaken. His lamp, nearly spent, emitted the aura of a sickly glow-worm. She gave the drawer a tug, then immediately wished she hadn't, for the compartment squealed like a frightened pig.

“Who's there?” demanded Mr. Darwin.