This Thing Of Darkness (68 page)

FitzRoy broke the seal and unfolded the paper. After six years as a commander - an acting captain - he had finally been made post. He was a full captain at last. He should have been pleased as punch. Instead he felt strangely empty. He perused the rest of the letter. There remained only an order to report to Mason in Valparayso at his earliest convenience.

‘Were there any news of further promotions - for Wickham or Stokes?’

‘I do not believe so.’

‘I had made representations ... I had hoped that their exertions might have obtained satisfactory notice at headquarters ...’

‘But are you not pleased?’ asked Darwin, concerned. ‘I apprehend that all goes by seniority from this point on — that this will like as not make you an admiral in due course.’

‘That is so. Forgive me for seeming so ungrateful. I just wish that I could get one or two of my hard-working shipmates promoted. That would have gratified me much more than my own advance, which has been too tardy to be much valued. Six years - some stay a commander for only a year. Plenty have gone over my head. I deserve it, of course, for having burned my fingers with politics.’

His star, he realized, which had once burned so brightly, had dimmed with time. To be given his own vessel at twenty-three - that had been special. Captain of a little brig at thirty, or nearly thirty — that was no great accolade. The promotion was no more than a poultice applied by Beaufort, or some other interested friend in high places, to cover the gaping sore of his recent run-in with their lordships. The true test would come when he returned to England, and received his next commission. Then he would discover whether or not he was still considered a high-flier. Perhaps a change of administration, from Liberal back to Tory once more, would make life easier for him and his crew.

‘Are there any news yet of who holds sway in Parliament? Is there a successor to Grey?’

‘My dear fellow, have you not heard?’ blurted out Corfield. ‘Parliament is no more. It has burned down!’

‘Burned down! When?’

‘Last October. The whole Palace of Westminster is gone — St Stephen’s Chapel, the cloisters, the Painted Chamber, all of it. Only Westminster Hall has survived. Concepción is not the only place to have suffered a conflagration. Everything is in chaos.’

‘¿
Quien sabe,
my friend?’ said Darwin, clapping FitzRoy encouragingly on the back. ‘Perhaps it is a bonfire that will instigate much-needed change.’

Let us hope so
, thought FitzRoy.

The trio strolled uphill, to give Corfield and Darwin their first sight of the ruins of Concepción. All conversation ceased as the newcomers took in the scale of the devastation, the serried lines of silent debris where once people had lived, shopped and prayed.

‘It is a bitter and humiliating thing to see,’ said Darwin at last. ‘Works that cost man so much time and labour, overthrown in one minute. Such is the insignificance of man’s boasted power. It is most wonderful to witness.’

‘I say, steady on, old man,’ said Corfield under his breath.

‘Forgive me - I do not mean to forget my compassion — but from a scientific aspect this is absolutely fascinating.’

‘Have you noticed how all the walls running north-west to south-east have been flattened,’ said FitzRoy, ‘but those running the other way have by and large survived?’

‘By God, you are absolutely right.’

‘It is like a ship in a heavy sea. Lined up with the waves, she will ride the shocks, but bring her broadside-on, and she will be put over on her beam-ends. Proof that the shocks of an earthquake arrive by a kind of wave motion, flowing in a single direction.’

Both men were charged with excitement now. They were passing the ruins of a spacious merchant’s house, when Darwin dived in suddenly, reappearing with a torn rug and a scattering of books extricated from the rubble. Swiftly, he laid the rug in the street and stood the books upon it spine uppermost, half of them aligned with the rug, the others at right-angles.

‘Observe,’ he commanded.

Kneeling at one end of the rug, he proceeded to tug it gently back and forth. At once, those books standing at right-angles to the direction of movement toppled over, but those aligned with it stayed upright.

‘As I said, Darwin old man,’ exclaimed Corfield, balling his hands deep into his pockets, ‘you’re a confounded marvel!’

 

Dusk found FitzRoy and Darwin many miles along the Pacific shore, kicking their heels on what remained of the outer wall of Penco Castle, a seventeenth-century Spanish sea-fort. The building had been devastated even before the recent earthquake; it now wore a battered, defeated aspect entirely in keeping with the imperial ambitions of its mother country. The tide was in, and dark magenta waves lapped at the old Spanish battlements, gradually teasing the ancient stones from their crumbling bed of mortar. As the sun had sunk towards the blue wall of the horizon, Darwin had breathlessly expounded his discoveries in the mountains, and the startling conclusions he had reached — all except one. He had withheld his disturbing ideas about the divergence of the wildlife on either side of the Andean
cordillera:
those deductions were of such devastating import that he would - he knew - have to choose his moment carefully. But his evidence for the intermittent and continuing uplift of the mountains seemed overwhelming.

‘So you see,’ he concluded, ‘the uplift is not caused by the earthquakes.
The uplift is the cause of the earthquakes.’

‘From what you say I must do you justice,’ conceded FitzRoy graciously. ‘I shall write to Lyell confirming that it is so.’

‘You oblige me by your understanding. But ... does this new evidence not bring the story of the Biblical flood into question?’

‘Not in the least. The one does not preclude the other. Earthquake and flood may exist side by side - indeed, the two may have occurred in tandem.’

‘But surely all the evidence of land having been under water is caused by the earth’s crust being in a continual state of change. Places now far above the sea were once beneath it. Districts may have been inundated in one quarter — but a universal deluge could never have happened!’

‘My friend,’ said FitzRoy gently, ‘everything might not be as clear-cut as you think. You say the land has been rising regularly for thousands of years, and continues to do so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why is this two-hundred-year-old Spanish fort, built by the water’s edge,
still
by the water’s edge?’

Darwin looked about him. FitzRoy was right.

Why
had
Penco Castle not been uplifted from the water, preferring to crumble where it stood? He had no answer. It had all seemed so simple, up in the mountains, in his delight at finding what appeared to be a universal solution. It would take a lifetime of study, he realized, merely to chip away at a few of the lesser complexities of God’s universe. He laughed out loud at the sheer size of the task, and how easily he had underestimated it.

‘I am sure you are correct in your observations,’ said a placatory FitzRoy, as the pair wound their way home, ‘but I am afraid I cannot bring myself to question the written word of God. I am sure there is room in the scheme of things for both eventualities.’

As he spoke, a deep roar echoed from the unseen caverns of the underworld, and the earth shook as if a huge subterranean beast were rattling its cage. It was the biggest aftershock so far. FitzRoy and Darwin found themselves hurled to the ground, like two statues in the cathedrals of old Byzantium thrown down by the armies of the Saracens. Thus forcibly prostrated, both men spread their arms and legs wide to avoid being rolled over and over in the grass. A few seconds later, when the assault had finished, they raised their heads warily. There was something odd, something different about their surroundings. Darwin was first to his feet and first to realize what had happened, scrambling eagerly down the slope towards the shore.

‘Look!’ he said, literally hopping from one foot to the other with excitement. ‘FitzRoy, look! Look at this!’

There, behind the frantic naturalist, a glistening mussel bed adhered to the rock. But the shellfish did not lie beneath the lapping water, as they had a few moments previously: they lay with rivulets of clear salt water streaming between them, several feet clear of the high-water mark.

‘Captain FitzRoy! Captain FitzRoy, sir!’

FitzRoy wheeled round. He had just stepped out of a dockside masthoop merchant’s on to the cobbled main street of Valparayso. Perhaps fifty yards distant, on their way up from the wharf and standing out like a sore thumb among the respectable Chilean gentlefolk, were three filthy, emaciated Englishmen. Their hair was matted, their clothing ripped, and two of them wore what looked suspiciously like the remains of British naval officers’ uniforms. Really, FitzRoy was not in the best of moods. He had brought the
Beagle
back to Valparayso to replenish her hold for the journey home, and to report to Commodore Mason as requested; but when he had rowed out to HMS
Blonde
, the commodore’s flagship, her crew had been surly and diffident. The commodore was no longer in residence aboard, the lieutenant in charge had wearily explained. No, he did not know when, or indeed if, the commodore would be back. No, he could not be of any further help. The
Blonde
, FitzRoy knew, had once been the proud frigate of Admiral Byron himself. What on earth would the admiral have made of the state of the modern-day
Blonde
? Her unkempt decks and mildewed sails indicated a ship in decline, ill-disciplined and rudderless. Such neglect of a fine old vessel invariably roused his ire.

‘It’s Captain FitzRoy, isn’t it, sir? Of the
Beagle?’
The three scare-crows had run all the way up the main street. Their leader introduced himself.

‘Lieutenant Collins, sir, of the
Challenger.
This is Assistant Surgeon Lane, and this is Jagoe, ship’s clerk.’

‘The
Challenger?
Seymour’s brig?’

‘That’s right, sir. You came aboard off Port Louis in the Falklands, sir. But the
Challenger
is lost, sir!’

‘Lost? Lost where?’ The blood ran cold through FitzRoy’s veins.

‘South of the river Leubu, sir. We were making eight knots an hour under treble-reefed topsails, courses and jib. By all fair calculations we should have been well out to sea - but something had happened to play merry hell with the tides and currents. Next thing we knew, sir, the officer of the watch noticed lines of foam in the water in the darkness. He ordered helm down and about ship, and Captain Seymour was fetched. The captain gave the order to haul the mainsail. The after-yards swung round, sir, but while we were bracing them up she struck. The rudder was destroyed, and the stern-post, the gunroom beams, the cabin-deck - all her timbers and planking were shivered to atomies, sir.’

‘My God. Did she go down at once?’

‘Not for a couple of hours, sir. The mate managed to get a line ashore in the jolly-boat. We cut the mizzen-mast down and made a raft, and got most of the supplies off. Just two men were lost in all, but the jolly-boat was the only one of the ship’s boats to survive the impact. Captain Seymour ordered the three of us to sail her to Valparayso, to fetch assistance from the commodore, sir.’

‘Thank God you have arrived safely. When did you get here?’

‘Three weeks ago, sir.’

‘Three
weeks
? What the deuce — ’

‘Commodore Mason, sir — he refused to send the
Blonde
south. He said it was too late in the season to land on a lee shore. And the Leubu river is Araucanian Indian territory, sir. He said it was too risky, sir. He didn’t want to peril another ship. But we heard that the
Beagle
was due in port soon, so we waited — ’

FitzRoy’s jaw set hard. ‘Then there is not another moment to lose.’

‘Captain Seymour set up camp on high ground overlooking the river, sir. He had a ditch dug, and erected a defensive barricade from barrels and timbers that were thrown ashore. But there is only so much ammunition available, sir. Of course we couldn’t get any of the cannon off the ship. We were hoping you might be able to use your influence to persuade the commodore to change his mind sir.’

‘Oh, I shall make him change his mind, Lieutenant, I promise you of that,’ said FitzRoy grimly. ‘Where may I find this Commodore Mason?’

The three men from the Challenger led FitzRoy to a pretty ginger-breaded cottage in the suburbs. They held back at the end of the lane, while FitzRoy walked up and knocked smartly at the door. It swung open to the touch. Marching past a startled Chilean maid with no word of introduction, he found Mason slumbering in a cane chair on raised decking at the back of the house, under the shade of a canvas awning. The commodore looked as if he might once have been handsome: certainly, he sported the breeches and hairstyle of another era. But he was running to fat now, pink jowls inflating with each breath. His sandy hair had turned all but grey. The tracery of broken veins on his cheeks and nose, and the half-empty geneva bottle on the table, suggested even at this early hour that the commodore had been drinking.

‘Captain FitzRoy, sir, of HMS
Beagle
, reporting as commanded,’ said FitzRoy, doing his best to disguise his impatience. He was, at least, going to give the man a chance to explain himself.

‘Is it your normal practice to enter the houses of superior officers without introduction, Captain?’

‘The door was on the jar and unattended, sir.’

A harrumph from Mason. ‘Well, I have been expecting you for some weeks. You have new orders. A pearl-oyster-fishing vessel, the
Truro
, has been plundered in one of the islands of Tahiti. The Admiralty is demanding compensation of two thousand eight hundred dollars on behalf of the owner. You are to make yourself known to Queen Pomare of those islands and extract the required sum of the Tahitians, using force if necessary. You are heading home via Tahiti, I take it?’