The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  Who was this Lady Janet, guest ad perpetuam? A rich relation? With a fortune to dispose of? No; only a connection of Mr Chambers’s brother’s wife—which is no relation at all. Nor had she any evident fortune, to live on, or dispose of. She had been staying in Edinburgh with the William Chamberses until they had set off upon an extended Italian tour; then, needing a place to live until their return, she had removed temporarily to the Robert Chambers branch of the family at Spring Gardens. There she had been received out of pure kindness and generous principles, soon regretted. As the William Chamberses were due back from Leghorn very soon—within a matter of weeks, now—the family at Spring Gardens stuck to their principles, and did their best with a stubborn virtuous forbearance to tolerate Lady Janet for just a little longer. “Were she rich,” Mrs Chambers had said to Mr Chambers, “we might turn her off without compunction; but as she is poor, there is nothing to be done but suffer her company in patience.”

  “GOSSIP AND idle tittle-tattle are not at all to my liking,” said Mrs MacDonald to Mrs Chambers one afternoon in the garden, “but it were better that you knew something of Mrs MacAdam’s personal history, so as to avoid any awkward situations or remarks which might otherwise arise by chance; and so that you can judge what measure of sympathy and kindness are due her—for none of it is her own fault.” The two of them settled side by side onto a bench which stood in sunshine at the end of the yew walk. Though the day was not warm, they had come out because they did not wish to be overheard by Lady Janet, who was toiling over her cabinet in the drawing room. “Where shall I begin? She was born Miss Constantia Babcock, in India, just when her father—or so everyone thought him—a lieutenant in the service of the East India Company, had been carried off by one of those tropical fevers. Then she was left entirely an orphan at only nine or ten years of age when her mother died, too. All this was in the deepest jungles, the wilds of Assam or Burma, or some such remote place—where there are scarcely any white people; but she was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of a black queen there, called the Rani of Nungklow, a friend of her mother’s. In any case, when the Rani and her grown-up family came here, via America, some four or five years ago, Miss Babcock sailed with them, in hopes of finding her father’s people—or her mother’s people—or someone, at least, still belonging to her. It was then that I first became acquainted with them all, though my husband and his sister had known her mother, and the Rani too, many years previously, under very different circumstances. Oh! But there is Lady Janet, coming this way.”

  “Do not interrupt your agreeable tête-à-tête, pray,” called Lady Janet as she approached. “I am in search of nothing but these last warm rays of sunshine.”

  Taking Mrs MacDonald’s arm, Mrs Chambers rose, saying, “Allow me to recommend this excellent seat to your ladyship. No, you do not incommode us in the least; indeed, it is so excessively warm here that Mrs MacDonald and I were just on the point of seeking the shade of the allée.” And so the two of them walked off arm in arm to the linden allée, leaving Lady Janet in possession of the sun-warmed seat.

  “Where was I?” said Mrs MacDonald, when privacy had been secured once more. “Aye; four years ago. From her mother’s papers, Miss Babcock had learnt that this Lieutenant Babcock hailed from Wivenhoe, in Essex; and there, she and the Rani at length made their way. Their inquiries presently turned up his people; indeed, they found his elder brother, still living in the family house. A farming family, of a middling sort. But she got a dreadfully cold welcome, because . . . just imagine her distress, upon learning—well!—upon learning that this man Babcock had never been legally married to her mother at all! For there, still living at Wivenhoe, was his widow—whom he’d married quite correctly at the parish church, before ever he went out to India! And a grown-up daughter!”

  “A previous wife, still living!” breathed Mrs Chambers.

  “But listen, my dear, there is worse to come: Only then did Miss Babcock learn from the Rani that this bigamous lieutenant was not her father after all; and that her mother was already some months gone with child when he had married her—or rather, when he had pretended to marry her—and that her mother had previously been known as Mrs Todd! Indeed, when the Rani—and my husband, too—first knew her, she was a young bride accompanying her husband Mr Todd on their honeymoon voyage out to India.”

  “No!”

  “But this Mr Todd was shot dead in Cape Town, in some sort of affair of honour—”

  “Oh, no! Too bad! You are making up romances, now!”

  “Indeed I am not,” protested Mrs MacDonald. “I have not so lurid a fancy. My husband was there at the time, and most dreadful it was, by his account. Oh! Shall we turn this way?” she proposed—for Lady Janet had left her seat and adopted a course which might intersect theirs.

  “Quite excessively warm there, just as you observed!” cried out Lady Janet, as she entered the linden allée—just as they turned out of it toward the doocot at the bottom of the garden.

  “But you will already have perceived,” continued Mrs MacDonald in a lower voice, “that the misconduct of her parents is no fault of Miss Babcock’s—Mrs MacAdam’s—whatever we are to call her—who was then only an unborn babe, innocent as a lamb. But she, having once discovered all this, was entirely at a loss, poor child; at a standstill. She was left with no family at all—knowing only her father’s surname and her mother’s Christian name. She resolved then—this was some three years ago—to go to France, upon the invitation of some American ladies who had befriended her during their voyage here. These ladies had by that time established themselves in Paris, and were pursuing there, I believe, chemical studies of some kind at the museum of natural history. As I say, she accepted their invitation—was helped to some work of her own there, through their connections—and there, soon afterward, quite soon afterward, she met and married her husband—”

  “Or so she claims,” called Lady Janet’s voice from behind them.

  “But what is the great mystery in connection with him?” said Mrs Chambers quietly, ignoring the interruption. “Why must his name remain a secret?”

  “A Frenchman—if he exists at all!” interjected Lady Janet, who was gaining rapidly on them.

  “No indeed, my lady,” said Mrs MacDonald, turning to Lady Janet. “He is a Scot, I am given to understand; no Frenchman. I am not certain whether it may be a matter of—perhaps a debt—or something else . . .”

  “You will allow me to observe that something dark and discreditable—if not actually criminal—must lie at the bottom of it,” said Lady Janet a little breathlessly, having now caught up to them. “French wickedness, and French dresses; horrid colours! If that is the fashion in Paris, I want none of it.”

  “But how vastly romantic a situation is hers!” said Mrs Chambers. “She is utterly nameless; her mother’s name, her father’s name, and her husband’s name, all unknown—to us, at least. She is Mrs Anonymous.”

  “If she has a husband in France, why is she here? Why is she not there, with him?” demanded Lady Janet. “That is her proper place.”

  But Mrs Chambers, resolutely unruffled, said, “She has made it plain that she will stop with us here only until Hogmanay; that I shall have to find another wet nurse before the New Year, when she is pledged to be away, and rejoining her husband.”

  “Mark my words,” said Lady Janet. “When the time comes, she will not go. Husband there is none; nor ever was.”

  Constantia’s dresses, so alarming to Lady Janet, were indeed French; and she had two of them. They were made of fine light roller-printed cottons, ideal for a Parisian summer, but somewhat too thin for a Scottish September. Upon close inspection, the bright busy designs printed on the cloth were astonishing: teeming squiggles, or dizzy speckles, or floating enigmas—rods, blobs, pointed ovals—sprouting spikes or hairs. What were they, these exotic shapes, in strange clashing colours, superimposed upon tangled backgrounds of seaweeds, or corals, or crystalline crenellations? Their appearance was v
ery odd; to Scottish eyes, ugly.

  Odd they most certainly were; but in Paris they were new, and wonderful; not ugly in the least. They were all the rage. The French manufacturers called such designs “bizarres,” and nothing could have been more of the moment, and more knowing—not only for frocks, but for furnishings, too. These bizarres derived not from the fevered imaginations of artists, but from such unremarkable objects as a droplet of pondwater (rather, the infinitesimal denizens thereof); or a translucent slip of onion skin; or a horse’s worn molar—these, as seen through that marvelous device the microscope. Through powerful new lenses, astonishing structures, minuscule flora and fauna, preposterous animalcules—all unsuspected hitherto—were to be seen, and drawn. In France, science was fashionable—and the fashion, just now, was scientific.

  Constantia owned a microscope; had earned money by it. She had left it packed away in the Paris attic (sixième arrondissement) where she and her husband had been living before coming to Britain. Through that microscope’s eyepiece, she had seen and drawn the very designs she now wore as cloth: the animalcules squiggling in a teeming droplet of water brought in from the gutter outside the front doorstep. She sold her drawings—sheaves of them, each carefully tinted in gouache—to the cloth manufacturer who often bought her designs.

  Her forms and compositions were based upon what she saw under the lens of her microscope, but her palette was quite another matter. Recent advances in chemistry had made for new dyes, producing colours never until now fast on cloth: mustard! green! purple! in bold juxtaposition. This was by no means the palette of the old masters; it was new, new, new. Even the famous old Oberkampf toile factory at Jouy, failing to adopt or adapt to this new fashion, had dwindled and, three years since, died.

  Constantia had made up her dresses herself, taking the precaution of leaving extra depth in the seams, to be let out for such contingencies as maternity, and nursing.

  “Is it true, Mr Chambers,” Miss Toulmin asked, one drowsy Sunday afternoon when everyone (except Lady Janet, at kirk again for the afternoon service) had come out for tea on the grass under the beech tree, “that no one has ever found the ancient fossil remains of any human being?” Besides Mr and Mrs Chambers and Miss Toulmin, there were Mrs Crowe, Dr and Mrs Moir, and Constantia, with Livia at her breast. Constantia had just fed Charlie who, in his mother’s arms, was attempting to focus upon the enchanting silver spoon which she dandled before him. Nina sat before her easel nearby, engrossed in copying a botanical engraving: a Musa.

  “Aye, it is quite true,” said Mr Chambers. “There have been claims of such finds, from time to time; but all of them have proven baseless. Dr Buckland found a human skeleton some years ago in a cave in Wales, in just the same sediment layer which gave up the bones of a mammoth, but soon concluded that the remains had been buried there much more recently, in Roman times; perhaps by a murderer disposing of his victim. And the famous skeletons found in Guadeloupe, embedded in hard limestone apparently of great age, were eventually pronounced—by no less an authority than Dr Cuvier—to be of recent origin, and the stone only calcareous sand quite recently cemented by natural processes common on tropical beaches. No authentic human fossil has ever been found—not convincingly embedded in rock, you know, not in rock of any antiquity—nor with the remains properly petrified—turned to stone, as is the case in what we generally speak of as fossils; as is true of any ammonite, for example.”

  “‘Fossil’ . . .” said Mrs Crowe thoughtfully. “What is the origin, Dr Moir, of the word?”

  “From Latin fossa: a trench in the ground,” replied he, without hesitation. “Originally, ‘fossil’ referred to any article which has been dug from the earth. But nowadays it is generally taken to mean the petrified remains of a creature which was formerly alive—usually preserved by petrifaction—”

  “Rather than lost to putrefaction, the usual fate of most earthly remains,” said Mr Chambers.

  “But just how does this petrifaction of remains occur?” demanded Mrs Crowe. “If not in consequence of a Gorgon’s stony glance?”

  “Oh; well; Dr Moir?” said Mr Chambers. But Dr Moir was happy to let Mr Chambers explain, if he could; and he did, saying, “It is a natural chemical process which may sometimes occur in buried remains, if the liquids which bathe the surrounding soils or rock are suffused with particular dissolved minerals, which may, under certain conditions, precipitate and fill the space formerly occupied by the buried remains—indeed, perfectly replacing those remains, as they decay—”

  “Rather like cire perdue, then; the lost-wax method, for casting bronze mounts and that sort of thing,” suggested Mrs Chambers, who had often seen her father, a clockmaker, use that technique in his work.

  “Just so,” said her husband. “I have sometimes fancied us—the animated tribes, with our soft mortal bodies, our brief life spans—as mere wax models, if you will; only a preliminary, a preparatory form to be melted away in the casting of those far more durable stone figures, which are the Divine Sculptor’s ultimate design for this, His Creation.”

  “A pretty conceit,” said Miss Toulmin, “though not entirely flattering to those qualities we most admire in ourselves.”

  Mrs Crowe said, “Yet among all His durable stone figures, no ancient humans. Remarkable. What are we to make of that?’

  “Now that we are bound, in these enlightened times, to scoff at Bishop Ussher’s calculations,” said Mrs Moir, “is it permitted to consider whether humankind may be of very recent origin, after all?”

  “Perhaps we have not yet searched long enough, or hard enough, or in the right places.”

  “Either the incompleteness of our researches, then—or, the incompleteness of the record.”

  “Perhaps both.”

  “It has been suggested that we are taken bodily into heaven,” offered Nina, having set aside her drawing.

  “Somehow vacating our earthly graves, well before the Day of Judgment?” said Miss Toulmin. “How might so macabre a notion be investigated? Are we to go in search of some unimaginably ancient necropolis—to be opened, and found empty?”

  “It has been proposed,” said Mrs Crowe, “that our remains are composed of some lofty material which does not petrify—in which case we ought perhaps to call ourselves Homo ephemeris, rather than Homo sapiens: the ‘wise brotherhood.’”

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am; Homo sapiens means nothing of the sort!” cried Dr Moir, roused to contradiction. “For homo, Mrs Crowe, we must look to the Greek, not the Latin. Homo is from humus: dust, earth; so, earthling. Sapiens is respectable enough Latin: ‘tasting’—from sapere, to taste. So: the earthling which tastes. We are the ‘tasting earthlings.’”

  “ ‘Tasting’! No, no!” declared Mrs Crowe. “Here is some mistake—for was I not taught that sapiens meant ‘wise’? Though I have often thought, privately, that it smacked of hubris to claim wisdom for our kind in particular.”

  “Tasters . . . of the fruit . . . of the Tree of Knowledge, I suppose,” said Mrs Chambers slowly.

  “How Mr Linnaeus rises, in my estimation!” said Miss Toulmin, as appreciation dawned. “I had thought him merely an assiduous naturalist—no mean thing—but he was more than that. He was a poet.”

  “Knowledge—there is the crux of it,” said Dr Moir. “So, the Knowing Ones: the connoisseurs, if you like, of all Creation.”

  “Let us say, rather, ‘savants’!” cried Miss Toulmin. “It is not only the natural philosophers naming specimens in museums who deserve to be called savants; we are, all of us, all humankind, savants—are we not?”

  “No; but hold up, for a moment. Say that again,” demanded Mrs Crowe. “Might it—mightn’t it be the naming itself—the lordly naming of all the creatures—indeed, the very act of distinguishing among kinds—which distinguishes our kind? As, we are told, Adam named them all—and certainly before his fateful encounter with that forbidden fruit?”

  “As Mr Linnaeus did, too, so very thoroughly,” said Dr Moir.
r />   “What would you have named humankind?” said Mr Chambers.

  “Oh! Well!”

  “No, but this is immensely interesting; not to be taken lightly,” said Mr Chambers. “We might devote some serious deliberation—an hour, or even two?—to so momentous a task as this.”

  “Let us each propose a name after dinner, then—instead of music,” said Mrs Chambers. “Tonight you need not sing for your supper—for your tea afterward, I should say—but only propose a suitable name for our kind.”

  And that was the origin of Adam’s Game—as it came to be called in the Chambers household. All of the family’s friends and regular guests were soon introduced to it, and any new acquaintances quickly learned that they, too, were expected to propose a name. The name ought to be original, not previously proposed by someone else. And true, in distinguishing humankind from all other kinds. And it ought to be clever.

  Lady Janet, when she heard of Adam’s Game, would have nothing to do with it. She considered it gross materialism, a grievous error; and said so. Every human being, she told Mrs Chambers, was created in the Divine Image; and was elevated to a rank distinct from and incomparably superior to the beasts by possessing an immortal soul. Mrs Chambers on this occasion courteously refrained from pointing out to Lady Janet that she had just played the game; and made this observation only to her husband, in private.