by John Darnton
The tour started in the drawing room. He glanced at Emma’s grand piano, the marble mantelpiece, the breakfront bookcase, the special case for the backgammon set that was designed to look like the spine of a book and titled History of North America. They passed into the central hall and Hugh noted the long base-clock, a wall table with the jar for Darwin’s snuff, and Christian-themed lithographs hung by Emma.
They entered the billiard room with its pale brown felt table and three balls ready for a shot. A butler’s tray set for two drinks of port (he wondered: was one of them for the butler Parslow himself?) stood in the corner.
They stopped off in the dining room, which was lit by three bay windows facing the garden. The Regency mahogany table was set for twelve, close by the sideboard with Wedgwood “waterlily” tureens ordered by Darwin’s mother. Grim portraits stared down from the walls. The schoolchildren were bored and anxious to move on.
At last they came to the famous study. Hugh’s eye was drawn immediately to the large dark armchair set on casters. Here Darwin composed the books that changed the world, supporting his paper on a fabric-covered slab of wood that rested upon the arms. With a cane propped against one side, the chair looked as if it were waiting for its owner. Behind it, tucked into a recess as snug as a ship’s cubicle, was a small wooden desk filled with cubbyholes and slender sliding drawers, each one carefully labeled. A bookcase mounted to the ceiling. Over the fireplace was a gold-framed mirror, turning dark as a New England lake, and above that were portraits of Joseph Hooker, Charles Lyell, and Josiah Wedgwood.
In the center was a Pembroke table. Various items were placed on it to suggest that Darwin himself might have recently left them there: a bell jar, a pair of scissors, a primitive microscope, three upturned glasses, a wooden box, a monkey’s skull, a feather, various papers, a wooden spool of string, and half a dozen books. One was a second edition of Das Kapital, inscribed by Marx himself (“To Mr Charles Darwin on the part of his sincere admirer . . .”) A young boy reached out to touch it. The teacher quickly smacked his wrist, hard.
“What’s this?” asked a dark-skinned girl, pointing to the far left corner. There, behind the half wall, was a thick porcelain basin mounted inside a platform. A dressing gown hung from a wall peg and a wooden stand next to it held white china pitchers and towels.
“That, children, was built especially for Mr. Darwin because he worked so hard he sometimes fell ill. Don’t forget, he had traveled around the world and he picked up many diseases.”
“But what’s it for?” persisted the girl.
“That’s enough, Beatrice,” said the teacher. “You heard what Mrs.
Bingham said. It was used when he was ill.”
“But used for what?”
“He was sick in it,” said a boy. The others giggled.
Hugh wandered over to the chair and peered out the window. The mirror that Darwin had ordered Parslow to attach was no longer there.
The tour moved back to the central hallway.
“Now let me show you something you’ll find captivating,” said the curator. “The Darwins were a close, loving family and they played many family games.” She stood below the grand wooden staircase, which turned twice as it mounted upward to the floor above. “Here’s one the children invented themselves—they used wooden boards as sleds and rode them down the staircase. As you can imagine, it was dangerous sport. But they quite enjoyed it.”
The schoolchildren stared at the staircase.
She moved to a cupboard under the stairs. “This is where they kept many of the games they played outside—croquet mallets and tennis rackets and skates. At one point Darwin even kept an outline for his famous book here.”
She opened it with a quick pull on the knob.
“One of the children called this cupboard ‘the place of all others where the essence of the whole house was concentrated.’ ”
Hugh caught her eye. “Excuse me, but would you know which child said that? Would it have been Elizabeth?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m not sure which one it was, but we know that Lizzie, as she was called, was considered slow. It is unlikely she would have kept a record of the family’s activities for posterity.”
Hugh broke off from the group, which moved outside to see the garden and the Sandwalk, the boys tearing across the grass. Another group took its place in the central hall. He mounted the staircase to the exhibition on Darwin’s life.
The floor was deserted. He peered into glass cases and stared at the pictures. There was a painting of Charles’s father, Robert, leaning forward in a chair, huge and stern. Nearby, a quotation was framed and mounted; it was Robert’s famous chastisement of his son, which had always struck Hugh as unspeakably cruel: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”
Hugh suddenly thought of his own father and felt a stab of guilt for not answering his letters.
He turned to a portrait of the young FitzRoy, handsome and sensitive-looking, with his dark hair, sideburns, upturned nose, and delicately lined mouth. Various artifacts were on display: a cutaway drawing of the Beagle, mahogany fittings, glass collecting bottles, a clinometer, dissecting instruments, a pocket pistol, a sketch of round-faced Jemmy Button, a compass in a wooden box, a sketch of Darwin being “shaved” while crossing the Equator, a Bancks microscope with a swiveling brass eyepiece.
Alone, in a special case, were bolas with their leather straps attached to stones. And next to them—Hugh drew his breath—was the cosh, the very one that Darwin had chided Lizzie for removing from the mantelpiece. It was a foot-long metal cable with heavy metal fittings at both ends, dangerous if used as a weapon but hardly lethal to the touch. He stared at it for some time before moving on.
A number of Darwin’s quotes were displayed in the cases. Next to a box of bones sent back to Henslow from Tierra del Fuego, Hugh read:
“I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man.” In a framed letter to Hooker was a note of despair:
“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature!”
Across from this was a depiction of the “tree of life”—branches that ended in drawings of animals inside balloons, hanging like Christmas bulbs, the simpler ones like hydra and fish at the bottom, the complex ones like tigers and monkeys at the top. On the very summit was man.
Hugh went back downstairs. Now the central hall was deserted. He listened—footsteps upstairs, some chatter from the gift shop around the corner, a clattering of dishes in the teashop. He walked over to the cupboard and casually opened the door. He leaned down and poked his head inside; it was empty. In the dim light he examined the interior. It ran deep to the left and rose up about four feet, lined with unfinished planks about three inches wide. Wooden pegs protruded two thirds of the way up. A baseboard ran around the bottom.
He looked at the baseboard. At the far end a section looked as if it had been cut out and replaced, leaving a slight crack on either side. He reached in with his left hand and touched it. It moved. He grabbed it and pulled it toward him. It gave way easily and he saw a dark hole behind it. Inside, he could make out a small packet. He retrieved it, replaced the baseboard, closed the cupboard door, and, with the packet slipped under his coat, walked over to the gift shop. Smiling at the young woman behind the cash register, he passed the shelves of books, postcards, and bric-à-brac without stopping.
On the train ride back, his heart thumping, he untied a ribbon, opened the wrapping, and looked at his prize—the sketch Lizzie had described. It was a bit wrinkled, yellowed and rolling up at the edges, but clear enough. He examined the drawing closely. There were two figures, identified in a caption as Darwin and McCormick, standing on either side of a tree, and at the bottom the artist’s initials: C.M. He was puzzled. To Lizzie, its importance was immediately apparent, but he couldn’t for the life of hi
m figure it out. There was nothing to identify the place—it could have been anywhere. The tree was certainly not the baobab tree the two had discovered during their outing at St. Jago. It was an ordinary, nondescript tree. Behind it were a few rocks that offered no clue about the location. So where was it? And what was its significance? What had Lizzie seen? Hugh was stumped.
On the ride back, he pulled it out several times and looked at it but still he could not decipher its meaning.
Beth spent the night in the George Eliot Hotel. She had her morning coffee outdoors in the main square, a stone’s throw from a statue depicting the author in a flowing Victorian gown, glancing over her shoulder—as if, thought Beth, she couldn’t wait to get away. She was amused to find a George Eliot Art Gallery, a George Eliot Pub, even a George Eliot Hospital. How’s that for irony? Beth thought. As a woman Mary Ann Evans couldn’t even publish under her own name and now the whole damn town is living off the man’s name she chose as her pseudonym.
She made her way to the Nuneaton Library. The supervisor was a woman in her thirties with porcelain skin and light blond hair, the prototype of the English rose. She received Beth graciously and ushered her into the workroom, a fifty- by fifty-foot chamber with elegant windows and solid oak desks.
The library housed the largest public collection of George Eliot material in the country, the supervisor boasted, but virtually all the author’s letters had already been published in some eight or nine volumes, thanks in part to a Yale English professor who began collecting them in 1920.
Beth explained that she was interested in letters that Eliot had received, not sent, and particularly those whose writers had not yet been identified.
“Ah. That’s another matter.”
She disappeared and returned some ten minutes later. Behind her a shabbily dressed young man pushed a cart stacked with thick looseleaf binders.
“From the vault,” she said. “I’m afraid that William here will have to sit with you as you go through them. Can’t be too careful. You don’t look like a thief, but one never knows. The other day we caught a little old lady with an engraving rolled up in her umbrella.”
“Of course,” said Beth. “I understand.”
William sat beside her, seemingly glad to have nothing to do, and she began to sort through the binders.
After some two hours, she gave a little cry.
William looked up. Her finger was resting on a plastic cover sheet.
Underneath was a letter with crimson borders and printed across the top were the words Dieu Vous Garde.
“I’ll be damned,” she said out loud. “She’s using Annie’s stationery.”
The letter came from Switzerland.
CHAPTER 19
Oddly enough, it was after the Beagle reached the tranquil waters of the Pacific that Captain FitzRoy lost his mind.
I suppose, thought Charles, as he looked down at the poor disheveled man, it is when the worst is over that we lower our guard and fall prey to torments of the spirit.
The passage through the Strait of Magellan had been rough. For a month the ship had battled winter gales, her rigging frozen, her decks covered with snow. She maneuvered perilously through canyons of giant blue glaciers, which every so often split, toppling ice into the water with a thunderous crack and unleashing enormous waves.
During this time Charles and most of the crew not needed to man the rigging stayed belowdecks. Happily, he did not see much of McCormick, because the naturalist was still aboard the Adventure. When the two did find themselves together on land, each was understandably awkward in the other’s company.
Charles had begun viewing the whole world differently. He scribbled excitedly in his journal. Everything opened up to him. Everything now seemed palpable and manifest—the cloud of butterflies that engulfed the ship like snowfall, the phosphorus trailing behind in luminescent silver, the electrical field that crackled around the masts one moonlit night. These were not phantasmagoric phenomena; they were all too real, Nature exposed in all her glory. Charles felt that he could make sense of all the natural events around him, that he possessed insight to illuminate them at a single stroke, like a lightning bolt in a ghostly night-time landscape.
Before crossing through the strait, the Beagle was beached for repairs to the hull at the mouth of the Santa Cruz and the Adventure anchored nearby. For the first time since Woollya, Charles and McCormick were thrown together. For the most part they avoided one another. The distance between them had now turned into an unbridgeable gulf. To kill time, the two posed for a sketch by Conrad Martens, one on each side of a tree, barely looking at each other the whole time.
At last the ships reached the Pacific and put in at the quaint port of Valparaiso on the Chilean coast. Charles could not wait to be back on land and explore the Andes. He managed to find lodging in town with an old school chum and then struck out for the high Cordillera. He wandered for six weeks, stepping over ravines that would have sent him hurtling to his death and crossing suspension bridges that swayed in the howling wind. He caught mountain birds, found minerals, uncovered marine deposits. At night he slept huddled for warmth against his two peasant guides. He had returned in triumph, trailing mules loaded with specimens, including whole shell beds from the mountains, more evidence for his theory that the range, once seashore, had been thrust up by geological forces.
Seeing the ship from the dock, he quickly noticed something was wrong. The Beagle looked to be in a sorry state, the crew lounging about at loose ends. Lieutenant Wickham, pacing up and down, rushed over when he saw Charles.
“The Captain’s gone off his head,” he said. “He’s resigning his commission and wants to be invalided and returned to England. Go and talk to him, Philos. Maybe you can return him to himself.”
“What precipitated the crisis?” asked Charles.
“He received notice from the Admiralty rebuking him for the purchase of the Adventure and refusing to pay the cost. He’s had to sell it.
That’s what pushed him over the brink. I partly blame myself.”
“Why?”
“Sulivan had been hounding him for weeks to buy the Adventure, and once he got command, he told him she was essential to complete the work. I should have put a stop to it.”
Charles found FitzRoy in his cabin, lying on his bunk with the curtains drawn. His tunic was open and he rested with one arm thrown across his eyes, the other trailing to the floor. He scarcely looked up.
His face was pallid, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Charles helped him to a glass of water.
At first FitzRoy said very little, but then he turned verbose, the words rushing out in such a maniacal torrent that Charles became alarmed.
FitzRoy roundly condemned the Admiralty, the Navy, Whigs, the entire government. Wickham heard him ranting and came in. The two stayed with the Captain for hours, gently persuading him that there was no need to return to Tierra del Fuego, that the survey there was essentially finished, and that all that remained was to take the chronometrical readings for the remainder of the voyage.
They did the same the next day and the next. Charles was impressed by Wickham; the man stood to gain if he stepped in as Captain, as FitzRoy had done for Pringle Stokes on the previous voyage, but he seemed more concerned about the Captain’s health than his own advancement.
On the third day, their soothing words seemed finally to take effect.
FitzRoy was much improved. He got up, shaved, dressed, and decided to venture outside. Charles came to help him. Before leaving the cabin, FitzRoy stood at the door and looked all around, as if waking from a dream.
“Do you have the remotest idea why I spent a fortune refitting this ship in Plymouth?” he asked.
Charles said he did not.
“In order to change the Captain’s quarters. I moved the entire cabin.
I refused to live in the same one as my predecessor so that I would not be haunted by his ghost—Pringle Stokes, that poor wretch.”
“I see,
” said Charles. Without thinking, he added: “I suppose it was the loneliness of command that unhinged him.”
FitzRoy looked Charles directly in the eyes.
“You know,” he said, “after his death, they performed an autopsy.
They found the ball lodged in his brain, but they also found something else. They opened his shirt and what did they see there? Seven wounds, seven knife wounds, nearly healed. Nearly healed. The bloke had been trying to kill himself for weeks. . . . He had no one to help, no one to turn to. He was alone.”
With that, FitzRoy went on deck, took a deep breath, and said he would resume command. A good wind had come up.
As they hoisted anchor, Charles looked up and saw McCormick on the quarterdeck with his canvas bag, returning from his berth on the Adventure, heading toward his old cabin. He emerged five minutes later and approached Charles, standing resolutely before him.
“I see we’re shipmates again, Mr. Darwin,” he said.
“That we are,” replied Charles.
They would head up the coast and then due west, six hundred miles, toward the famed archipelago named after the shell of the tortoise.
Charles was standing next to FitzRoy when they drew alongside the first island. He could hardly believe his eyes. He had been looking forward to the Galápagos because legend called the place Eden.
But this! There was nothing paradisiacal about this place—a dismal heap of black lava rising up to the sky with scarcely a jot of vegetation and nothing to see but birds.
“And what island, pray tell, is that?” he asked.
“That,” replied the Captain, “is a Spaniard’s joke. It is so insignificant it has no name—and that’s exactly how it is noted on the chart: Sin Nombre.”
He sniffed the air and continued: “Do not be misled by Islas Encan-tadas. The Spanish does not mean ‘beautiful’ but rather ‘bewitched,’ an appellation derived from the treacherous currents that make landing difficult. It is true that the animals and birds, having no acquaintance with man, show no fear in proximity but rather a blithe indifference.