The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton

  The horror of it! The poor wretched man. I cannot help but wonder if I contributed in some small way—or even a large way—to his fevered state of mind. If this were true, I could not easily live with myself—and yet I will never know for certain one way or the other. I tremble to think upon it!

  Enough of this spying and snooping, this childish play at investigating! I will have no more of it. I shall stop it at once and force myself to change. I shall become a new and better person, no longer the suspicious, arrogant Lizzie I’ve been these many years.

  Poor Captain FitzRoy. How can God allow such misery in this world?

  How can we poor human beings endure it?

  CHAPTER 14

  Hugh finished his Scottish breakfast—a bowl of steaming oatmeal, bubbling under a half-inch pool of thick cream, eaten with a wooden spoon.

  He sipped his coffee, looking at a vista of pointed green pines and the deep blue of Loch Laggan. A road hugged the shore and in the morning sun it looked tranquil and pristine, a necklace beside a mirror. But last night, when he had driven from Inverness across the mountains, following the road’s embedded cat’s-eyes through the drifting fog, it had been treacherous.

  A long trip for what could turn out to be a wild goose chase, he thought.

  He returned to his room, packed his bag, and carried it to the front parlor of the old inn, bowing his head to pass through the low-slung wooden doorways. He paid the bill and asked for directions to walk to the owner’s house. The woman seemed surprised that FitzRoy Macleod had agreed to receive him.

  “Now don’t you be aggravating him,” she chided in a brogue. “He’s a grand man, he is, but old enough to be your grandfather. And what might you be wanting with him, anyway?”

  “Just a wee chat,” replied Hugh, smiling.

  The woman leaned over and wagged her elbow at him, as if to poke him in the ribs.

  “Aw, you Yanks.”

  Outside, the air was crystal clear and cool enough to bite his lungs.

  He stashed his bag in the trunk of the rental car, buttoned his coat, and walked up the dirt path beside the inn. A massive, moss-covered stone wall listed away from the house. The path entered a wood, then mounted steeply to the top of a hill and came to a crossroads. He took the path to the right, which after fifteen minutes led him to a bright green meadow dotted with sheep, their coats gray and tangled. They lifted their heads from grazing to stare at him blankly.

  He looked forward to seeing Macleod. It had not been difficult to trace him. Nora Barlow, Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, wrote of a meeting in London in 1934 with Laura FitzRoy, the very same daughter upon whose cheek the deranged Captain pressed a kiss moments before taking his life. From this, Hugh found Laura’s obituary and traced other FitzRoy family members. Macleod, now in his nineties, was one of them. He was famous in the inner circles of Whitehall as a Tory strategist and a war hero who took a German bunker single-handedly.

  Hugh arrived at a grove of tall evergreens. They rose up so abruptly they appeared to form a gigantic wall and through it, like a door, was the dark opening of the path. Hugh followed it and emerged at the other end of the grove to find a breathtaking vista—an old manor-house set in rolling hills beside a small lake. He saw that it had once been grand, but now its slate roof was sagging and its windows crooked. The path narrowed and dew on the knee-high grass soaked his trouser legs.

  As soon as he walked up the front steps the door opened so quickly, he surmised his approach had been scrutinized. Clutching the knob was a woman in her eighties, thin, small, and birdlike in her quick movements. Hugh introduced himself and she did likewise: Mrs. Macleod.

  “He’s expecting you,” she said, gesturing behind her to a wooden staircase that rose in tiers along the squared-off walls, its dark banister as thick as a ship’s mast. Hugh thanked her and mounted the faded red runner, held in place by brass stays. At the turn halfway up he stopped in astonishment. He was face to face with a large marble bust that was instantly familiar: the almond eyes, the sensitive mouth and aquiline nose, the broad forehead with hair brushed forward like Napoleon’s. It was FitzRoy himself.

  Macleod received him upstairs in a huge room, with tall ceilings of ancient plaster and rough-hewn beams. He sat before a window with the sun streaming in behind him so that he was hard to see at first, a man shrunken with age but still sitting erect, a wool blanket across his legs. He motioned to Hugh to join him and Hugh chose a seat to one side so that he could better examine the man. Macleod had long white hair that curled around his ears, red veins tracing tributaries on his nose, and moist pink eyes.

  He offered Hugh a Scotch. Hugh declined and saw a glass half full on a small table next to his host. He sneaked a look at his watch: ten o’clock.

  After a bit of small talk, Macleod knocked back a healthy swallow, banged the glass down, and asked him to state his business. Hugh explained, as he had over the phone, that he was interested in learning about Captain FitzRoy, that he was thinking of researching a book, that he wondered if perhaps there just might be some letters or other mementos lying about.

  “Ah, poor man. He was brilliant, you know. First to try weather forecasting—invented the damn thing. First to use barometers. His survey maps are used to this day.”

  He spoke with such passion, he might have been talking about his own son.

  “They hounded him to death—the bankers, the businessmen, the Whigs. He had enemies everywhere and they brought him down. No loyalty, no appreciation . . . Years he spent, charting the toughest coast of them all, Strait of Magellan, Cape Horn, Tierra del Fuego . . . Spent his own money to hire the Adventure. Had to pay for it all but he got the job done. And was the Admiralty grateful? Not a bit of it—not so much as a thank you.”

  Hugh nodded sympathetically.

  “He took to the sea at fourteen. Given his own ship at twenty-three.

  Aye, what a lonely thing it is, a captain aboard Her Majesty’s vessel . . .

  What’s the name of that captain who shot his brains out on the Beagle?”

  “Pringle Stokes.”

  “That’s it. Holed up in his cabin off the God-forsaken coast, weeks on end, storms lashing the ship, never so much as see the sun. FitzRoy used to go on and on about him . . . talking about ‘seven wounds, seven wounds’ . . . whatever the blazes that meant. The loneliness of it all. No one to help, no one to turn to.”

  Hugh changed his mind and said he’d like a drink after all. Macleod, delighted, shouted to his wife, who brought him one instantly.

  “And that Darwin didn’t help poor FitzRoy much—he and that Huxley fellow . . . Got him into the Royal Society, a small job as a weather-man, no pension, no future. No wonder he was pressed to take his own life. Here was his shipmate, world-famous because of the journey he had made possible—a heretic to boot—and they give the Captain a pittance.”

  The mention of Darwin brought the conversation around to the fickleness of history and this gave Hugh an opportunity to renew his request for documents.

  Macleod drained his glass.

  “They’re gone, nothing left, picked clean. You should have been here years ago.”

  Hugh enjoyed Macleod’s reminiscences and ended up staying the day. At Mrs. Macleod’s urging, he accompanied the old man on a tour of the grounds, pushing him in a wheelchair over rocky walkways.

  After that came lunch, partridge served with an excellent Merlot, and then cigars in the parlor. Shortly after lighting up, Macleod fixed him with a steady eye and remarked casually: “There is one bit of paper I’ve saved that you might be interested in.”

  Hugh raised his eyebrows.

  “It wasn’t the Captain’s. It belonged to Bessie—that was Darwin’s daughter, the one who never married. Some called her Lizzie. She said she got it from her father but she always thought it should have been the Captain’s, so she gave it to his daughter Laura long after both their fathers had died. It’s been in our family ever since.”

  Macleod instructed h
is wife, who disappeared for quite some time and reemerged with dust on the underarms of her sleeves, bearing a frayed leather briefcase. She placed it on the blanket across his lap.

  “I was thinking of selling this over eBay,” Macleod said. “But, what the blazes—I can’t bear to part with it. I’ll let you look at it but be warned: handle it with care.”

  So saying, he passed over a single sheet of ancient paper. It was creased from being folded and shredding from multiple readings. Hugh stared at the childish printing in black ink:

  I seen your ships. I seen your cities. I seen your churches. I meet your Queen. Yet you Inglish know life less as we poor Yamana.

  “I’m betting you don’t know who wrote that,” said Macleod proudly.

  But Hugh knew at once. “Bet I do. Jemmy Button.”

  Macleod was impressed. “That’s right. Seems he wrote it for Darwin.

  He sent it to FitzRoy from the Falklands round about the time of that inquiry over the massacre, and FitzRoy gave it over to Darwin.”

  Hugh handed it back.

  “I’d say it’s worth keeping,” he said.

  “Aye. It’s a relic, all right. The last words of a poor Indian, tormented by a voyage between two worlds.”

  Shortly afterward, with the sun already sinking in the afternoon sky, Hugh said his goodbyes and left.

  As he walked back through the woods toward the inn, he felt the satisfaction of a detective who’s nailed down a clue. The phrase in Lizzie’s diary, the words that FitzRoy had spoken to her in his madness, wasn’t: You Inglish—no lifeless. It was: You Inglish know life less . . .

  So that was it—a message representing Jemmy Button’s final disillusionment with the English and the civilization they personified. For all their knowledge, for all their accomplishments, the overlords knew less of real life than his own fellow Indians.

  Hugh had long been intrigued by the saga of Jemmy, plucked up from a canoe, paraded around London, then dropped back into his natural world. He had wondered about his role in the Allen Gardiner massacre, for history had been moot on that particular point: Jemmy had been charged with the heinous act but never positively cleared of it.

  That detail from the cook’s testimony, the description of the plundering savage bedding down in the Captain’s cabin while his tribesmen hacked and roasted the white men’s flesh on the beach, had a compelling ring of truth. Hugh had sometimes tried to imagine himself as the Indian, what it must have been like to contend with the dueling worlds, the confusion he must have felt, the rage and self-hatred.

  This little piece of paper was a cry from the grave. It didn’t solve the mystery of Jemmy’s schizophrenic existence, but it suggested that he had come to terms with it. Against the power and complexity of nineteenth-century industrialized Britain, he had chosen his own people and his own primitive but vital life in the hellish southernmost spur of South America.

  The following morning, bolstered by a feeling of success, Hugh decided to pay a visit to Cal’s laboratory to see what he could find out about his brother’s termination. He pulled into the driveway of the Oxford Institute, grateful at least that the facility was situated sixteen miles south of Oxford and not in the town itself. This way he wouldn’t have to run the gauntlet of ghosts that would surely be waiting for him in every courtyard and every doorway of the High Street.

  The appearance of the lab was disappointing. In his mind’s eye, from hearing Cal brag about it, Hugh had pictured a large campus, four or five buildings set among the shire’s hills and dells. He had envisioned scientists in white coats—some of them attractive females—bustling about the place, taking breaks on slate-paved terraces, drinking hot coffee from thick china mugs as they worried along their experiments. Instead, there was one ugly, low-slung brick building with an unprepossessing entrance, a thrusting slab above a single revolving door, surrounded by an asphalt parking lot.

  A security guard found his name on a list and raised the bar obstructing the entrance. He was to see an administrative assistant, one Henry Jencks, and he had been led to believe on the phone that he would not be able to obtain much information. He had gotten the appointment only through old-fashioned American badgering.

  A receptionist gave him a toothy smile and asked him to wait, tilting her heard toward a bank of modern metal and vinyl chairs next to some vending machines offering soft drinks and candy.

  He had trouble imagining Cal here, nodding hello to colleagues, walking down the bright laminated hallways. The place seemed lifeless and sterile, not a hothouse of cutting-edge research, but as deadening as an insurance company.

  “Hugh, it’s time to grow up, boy. Time to get serious. How many times have you driven cross-country now—seven, eight? How many different jobs have you had? Bartending, picking apples, construction, the post office, selling souvenirs at the Empire State Building, for Christ’s sake.”

  “They’re summer jobs. I was in college.”

  “But you’re not now and it’s time to decide what you’re going to do with your life. You want to end up a deadbeat lawyer like Dad? You want to run for the six-fifteen train every night and grab a drink at Grand Central and hardly wait until you’re home to grab another one and conk out? When I was your age, I already knew what I wanted to do.”

  “You sound like you’re fifty already. You’re only twenty-seven.”

  “It’s never too soon to smarten up.”

  “You’re lucky. You found something you love. I’m still looking.”

  “Well, hurry up. Sometimes I think you carry this bohemian shit too far.

  You act like you’re trying to accumulate a résumé of shit jobs for the back of a paperback novel.”

  He had been talking about Cal a lot to Beth. She was a good listener, asking few questions but always the right ones, quick to point out the false notes in his well-constructed, self-taught narrative. Yesterday, when he had recited the story of his expulsion from Andover, she had been surprised to learn that Cal was involved. “You mean he drove up from Cambridge to celebrate your getting in to Harvard and you ended up losing your admission there?” she had exclaimed. “Think about that for a minute.”

  Later that night he had remembered a visit to London when he and Cal attended a gut-wrenching performance of Long Day’s Journey into Night at the National Theatre. In the fourth act, the brothers have their climactic moment of truth. Jamie, the elder, his tongue loosened by drink, swears he loves Edmund and then abruptly lashes out and warns him to be wary of him: “Never wanted you to succeed and make me look bad by comparison. Wanted you to fail. . . . Mama’s baby, Papa’s pet!” At that moment, Hugh turned his head slightly in the darkened pit of the theater and saw Cal looking back at him. Their eyes met. Not a word was said. Nor did they ever talk about it afterward.

  “Mr. Kellem? May I help you?”

  The voice was thin and reedy, already sounding defensive. Hugh followed Henry Jencks down the hall to his office, settled in across the desk from him, and explained that he had come to learn as much as he could about his late brother’s work.

  “I’m afraid I cannot be of much help. That information is confidential, for reasons you can surely understand.”

  They fenced for a while.

  “Tell me this,” Hugh finally said. “Did he actually quit his job or was he on some kind of holiday leave?”

  A pause. “I have checked the record. He was in fact no longer working here as of June the tenth six years ago. I’m afraid I cannot say more than that.”

  “So he did quit?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “What kind of research was he doing?”

  The question caused some consternation. “I don’t believe I am at lib-erty to answer that either.”

  Hugh drove back to Cambridge breaking every speed limit.

  That afternoon, sitting at his customary place in the library—the corner table—Hugh felt stymied. He had come to the end of Lizzie’s journal and was still none the wiser. There were those
intriguing passages about Darwin vetting his own journals and changing his manuscript, but they were short on specifics. He’d not been able to track down the journals themselves; a number of them were indeed missing, but that was hardly proof of misconduct in and of itself. There was that enigmatic reference to a nuit de feu, whatever the hell that was. And some dramatic stuff about FitzRoy’s suicide, which—aside from Lizzie’s encounter with him—was already known (he checked).

  Even more, he was beginning to have doubts about Lizzie’s veracity.

  The thought occurred to him that perhaps she was just a young woman hung up on her father, who saw drama and conspiracy where none existed, filtering everything through an overwrought Victorian sensibility teeming with repressed emotion. Or worse, maybe she got her kicks out of laying little clues that would explode in the face of some future historian—such as himself.

  Roland came over.

  “Things that bad, huh?”

  “You know the expression ‘two steps forward and one back’? With me, it’s the reverse.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  Hugh shook his head. Roland walked away but Hugh called him back.

  “Maybe one thing. Have you ever heard of a poem called Goblin Market?”

  Roland shot him an odd look. “Now you’re far afield. Yes. But what of it?”

  “Just curious. I heard of it recently. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s by Christina Rossetti. A big hit in its day. It’s about two sisters—one pure, one who gives in to the temptations of the flesh. Very Victorian. Spirituality and concupiscence, arm-in-arm . . .”