by James Morrow
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FOR PETER G. HAYES,
who builds knowledge,
cultivates wisdom, and makes an art of friendship
If we accept the scholarly consensus, then the Percy Bysshe Shelley Prize, with its peculiar aim of proving, or disproving, the existence of a Supreme Being, was a fundamentally frivolous affair, barely worth a footnote in any but the most exhaustive history of Victorian Britain. The present author disagrees. For many years I have believed that the Great God Contest—and the consequent expedition that the intrepid Chloe Bathurst undertook to the Galápagos Islands—might be fruitfully reimagined as a novel, and here is the result.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prefatory Note
Map of the Galapagos Archipelago
Epigram
Prologue
THE PIGEON PRIEST OF COUNTY KENT
Book One
A DOME OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS
1. Treating of Our Heroine’s Stage Career, Including Accounts of Her Momentary Madness and Ignominious Dismissal
2. Chloe Finds Employment on the Estate of Charles Darwin, to the Benefit of Certain Giant Tortoises, Exotic Iguanas, and Rare Birds
3. We Meet the Reverend Malcolm Chadwick, a Man of Limber Frame and Nimble Mind, Before Whom Atheists Quake and Skeptics Grow Dyspeptic
4. The Pigeon Priest Moves from His Parsonage to a Madhouse, Even as Our Heroine Arranges to Circumnavigate a Continent
5. Chloe Explores St. Paul’s Rocks, Home to Brown Boobies, Black Noddies, Belligerent Crabs, and Her Greatest Admirer
Book Two
THE WHITE RADIANCE OF ETERNITY
6. Recounting a Journey up the Amazon River, Featuring Lush Panoramas, Voracious Piranhas, and a Sun that Rises Even As It Sets
7. Addressing a Vexing Question: Is Malaria Best Viewed as a Punishment for Improvidence or a Portal to Infinity?
8. Recruited into an Unlikely Army, Our Heroine Ponders the Doctrine of Just War and Savors the Virtues of Hallucinogenic Snuff
9. Venomous Snakes Fall from the Sky, Fortress Walls Come Tumbling Down, and a New Plan Hatches in Chloe’s Brain
10. Touching upon an Ancient Theological Riddle: After Resting on the Seventh Day, Did God Appropriate Adam’s Foreskin on the Eighth?
Book Three
A PREFERENCE FOR THE APE
11. Arriving in the Encantadas, Chloe Discovers the Empire of Duntopia, Where Maximum Mediocrity Yields Minimum Disappointment
12. Ralph and Solange Are Charged with the Capital Crime of Blasphemy, a Crisis that Rekindles Our Heroine’s Passion for the Tree of Life
13. The Tortoises of the Encantadas at Long Last Have Their Day in Court, as Do the Land Lizards, Marine Iguanas, Mockingbirds, and Finches
14. Although Untutored in Geology and Lacking in Divinity, Our Heroine Presumes to Practice Vulcanogenesis
15. A Book Is Born, a Bishop Is Bested, and a Scientist Receives Solace on His Deathbed
Author’s Note
Also by James Morrow
About the Author
Copyright
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
PROLOGUE
The Pigeon Priest of County Kent
That Sunday morning the Reverend Granville Heathway delivered “The Testament of the Trees,” the most ambitious sermon of his career. For nearly an hour he preached about the totality of Creation, from mushrooms to thrushes, lilies to alligators, wasps to lobsters, kangaroos to Christians, including the very parishioners who’d so graciously accorded him their attention. Granville’s sermons were normally more modest in scope—“homey little homilies” his wife, Evelyn, affectionately called them—but after reading William Paley’s remarkable tome, Natural Theology, he’d been moved to declaim its argument from the pulpit.
Of all the religious puzzles that periodically troubled Granville’s flock, none vexed them more than the Almighty’s seeming acquiescence to human and animal suffering, a paradox to which Mr. Paley had provided an astute solution. Superfluity was the way of the world. By producing an overabundance of progeny, every bonded pair of earthly creatures was making a payment in kind on the survival of its species. Inevitably this reproductive redundancy brought starvation, sickness, and misadventure to many an individual, but such pain was a logical necessity. God could not have designed the laws of Nature otherwise.
Whenever he allowed himself a respite from his clerical responsibilities, Granville pursued activities as unassuming as his average sermon. He cultivated his vegetable garden, reread Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels, and played cribbage with his son, Bertram, surely the brightest lad in County Kent. But Granville’s foremost passion was pigeon breeding. A decade earlier, upon his promotion to parson of St. Mary’s Church, Down Parish, Granville had purchased three female rock doves and their mates, and before long he and his dear Evelyn were presiding over a large family of birds, all gifted with an uncanny instinct to return to their native cote.
In time it became Granville’s custom, following Sunday services, to provide each departing churchgoer with a copy of the sermon and, if the parishioner so desired, a live pigeon in a wicker cage. The parishioner would go home, write out a brief question or remark keyed to the homily, affix the scrip to the bird’s leg, and send it winging back to the parsonage. On Sunday morning, before mounting the pulpit, Granville would distribute detailed and individualized letters of reply. Thus did he maintain a private correspondence with his congregation’s more inquisitive members, thoughtfully addressing their confusion about good and evil, salvation and sin, Heaven and Hell.
Upon finishing his Natural Theology sermon, Granville realized that, given the topic’s complexity, the demand for caged pigeons would be high. What he hadn’t anticipated was the behavior of his parishioner Emma Darwin, mistress of Down House and wife of a renowned naturalist and geologist. No sooner had Mrs. Darwin accepted from Bertram a pigeon called Ajax than she summoned her six-year-old son and his younger sister. The children carried their own wicker birdcage—Willy grasping one side, Annie the other—which they straightaway presented to Granville. The cooing, bobbing occupant was a rock dove with an elegant scarlet crest.
“Like yourself, my husband breeds homing pigeons,” Mrs. Darwin explained, resting a gloved hand against her most recent contribution to reproductive redundancy, a conspicuous pregnancy swathed in a flowered muslin gown.
“An activity he prefers to hearing my sermons,” noted Granville.
“As usual, Mr. Darwin went sauntering about the village instead of following me to church.”
Mrs. Darwin had made no secret of her preferred denomination: she would much rather belong to the Unitarian congregation in Bromley—but St. Mary’s was, as she put it, “ever so much more convenient for a woman in a delicate condition.” Whenever Granville’s parishioners turned towards the altar to recite the triune-inflected Nicene Creed, she and Willy and Annie faced the other way. And yet despite their theological differences a bond of friendship had formed between Granville and Mrs. Darwin. Many were the anguished conversations in which he and the distraught woman had engaged concerning her husband’s nonconformist (some might say nonexistent) religious beliefs. She feared that, come the Kingdom, she and her beloved Charles would be marked for eternal separation—though she
seemed to take solace in Granville’s insistence that Christ’s infinite love would triumph over Mr. Darwin’s transient folly.
“Last night I fell upon a clever idea,” Mrs. Darwin continued. “Were you to write my husband a personal message, and were your words to reach him via the pigeon medium, he might take it seriously.”
“What should my message say?” asked Granville.
“Merely invite him to attend next Sunday’s services.”
“Does this bird have a name?” asked Granville.
“Annie has christened her ‘Cherub.’”
“How appropriate that it was your Annie who named her, for tradition tells of a connection between birds and Saint Anne,” said Granville. “Whilst contemplating a lark feeding its young, Saint Anne suddenly desired children of her own. Eventually she bore a daughter, the very Mary destined to carry our Savior. I suspect there’s a homily in there somewhere.”
“I don’t believe my husband would be moved by that topic,” said Mrs. Darwin. “Were you to continue preaching on William Paley, however—”
“Then Paley it will be!”
Returning to the parsonage that afternoon, Granville lost no time finding a scrip and, aided by his quizzing-glass, filling it edge to edge with words calculated to pique Mr. Darwin’s interest: ACCOMPANY YOUR WIFE ON SUNDAY, AND I SHALL ADDRESS THE MYSTERY OF THIS BIRD’S CREATOR, WHO GAVE US THE WORLD AND ITS LAWS. YRS., REV’D. HEATHWAY. He coiled up the paper—the smallest of scrolls, he mused, like a Torah for mice—then deposited it in Cherub’s capsule and released her to find the Down House dovecote.
By Tuesday morning a majority of pigeons had made their way back to St. Mary’s, the sole exception being Ajax. Much to Granville’s satisfaction, many parishioners had profited from his Natural Theology sermon, their responses blending cris de coeur with shouts of affirmation. I SEE NOW THAT LIFE IS A VALE OF BOTH TEARS AND MIRACLES, noted Mrs. Rashbrook. NATURE’S HARSH IMPERATIVES ARE AT ONCE BEWILDERING AND SUBLIME, wrote Miss Hawkins. I HAVE RESOLVED TO JOIN WITH THE PHILOSOPHERS IN DECLARING, “WHATEVER IS, IS GOOD,” averred Professor Tandy. EVERMORE SHALL I GRIEVE FOR MY SON, BUT NOW THE SADNESS IS LESS, proclaimed Captain Maxwell.
Ajax arrived late on Thursday afternoon, gliding onto the parsonage grounds as the sun kissed the bracken. With quivering fingers Granville unstrapped the capsule and retrieved Mr. Darwin’s reply: THOUGH I ADMIRE THE AUTHOR OF ALL BIRDS AND BEASTS, I DO NOT BELIEVE HIM A CHURCHGOING SORT OF DEITY. YRS., CHAS. DARWIN.
“True, we’ve lost this initial skirmish, but I’m not prepared to quit the campaign,” Granville told Mrs. Darwin at the start of Sunday’s services. “For today’s homily, I had indeed contrived a sequel to my thoughts on Natural Theology. Instead I shall preach on Joseph and his brethren, saving ‘The Revelation of the Rocks’ for your husband’s eventual appearance.”
“Alas, Reverend, the situation is worse than we imagined,” said Mrs. Darwin. “Charles tells me he intends to write a treatise directly refuting Mr. Paley. He will assert that the Earth’s primal life-forms underwent a kind of self-development, changing mechanistically into the species we see around us today. At least he has promised to delay its publication until after his death.”
“Take heart, Mrs. Darwin,” said Granville, making a cylinder of his intended sermon and slipping it into his pocket. “My pen is not yet dry. Next week you and the children must arrive here toting a Down House pigeon—Cherub or one of her kin—and the following Sunday as well, and the Sunday after that.” He offered the good woman the warmest smile in his repertoire. “We shall bring your geologist to Jesus yet.”
BOOK ONE
A DOME OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS
1
Treating of Our Heroine’s Stage Career, Including Accounts of Her Momentary Madness and Ignominious Dismissal
When Chloe Bathurst was seven years old, living in Wapping with her widowed father and tiresome twin brother, she decided that her future prosperity would be best secured by the arrival, sooner rather than later, of a wicked stepmother. The evidence was beyond dispute. Cinderella the ash-maiden, Snow White the dwarf-keeper, Gretel the hag-killer—in each such case a young woman had found happiness only after her father had wooed and wed a malign second wife.
By her ninth birthday Chloe had come to recognize the naiveté of her wish, and she felt just as glad Papa had neglected to marry a bad person. (Indeed, she felt just as glad he’d not remarried at all.) As it happened, this oversight was not the only accidental boon Phineas Bathurst bestowed upon his daughter, for he also inadvertently guided her towards a glamorous profession. Whereas some men are congenital blacksmiths and others constitutionally sailors, Phineas was a natural-born puppeteer, given to seizing upon whatever inert object might lie to hand—clock, kettle, mallet, lantern, fish head—and blessing it with the gift of mobility and the power of speech. Illusion mongering, Chloe concluded, was in her blood. She must become an actress.
Amongst Papa’s many pièces bien faites, she had particularly fond memories of a dialogue between a wine bottle and a flagon of ale, each arguing that its ancestors had done the better job of making human beings the oafish and dullard race they were. She likewise cherished an encounter between a hammer and an apple, the former blaming the latter for the Fall of Man, the latter vilifying the former for its collaboration in the Crucifixion—a dispute neatly resolved when the hammer turned the apple to mash, declaiming, “And so Popish power once again has its way with Jewish lore.”
Several years into Chloe’s quest for theatrical fame, an irony presented itself. Whatever role she was playing at the moment, her personal circumstances would soon come to reflect the fate of the character in question: not in faithful facsimile—and here was where the irony emerged—but in mirror opposite. If Mr. Charles Kean, manager of the Adelphi Theatre and director of its shamelessly melodramatic offerings, had entrusted to Chloe the blind flower-seller Nydia in The Last Days of Pompeii, the tragic Queen Cleopatra in Siren of the Nile, or any other doomed and desperate heroine, she knew that ere long her life beyond the boards would be filled with suitors and champagne. But if she’d been tapped to portray a woman for whom all came right in the end—the brave French castaway Françoise Gauvin in The Raft of the Medusa, the Southern belle Pansy Winslow in Lanterns on the Levee—she could safely assume Dame Fortune was preparing some unpleasant surprises. So compelling did Chloe find this phenomenon that in time she became a connoisseur of irony per se, to a point where no instance of vivid incongruity, from gaunt glutton to tippling vicar, blushing trollop to fastidious tramp, escaped her notice or failed to amuse her.
It was therefore with joyous anticipation that, two days after her twenty-fifth birthday, Chloe contracted to essay the lead in The Beauteous Buccaneer, Mr. Jerrold’s violent narrative of the historical female pirate Anne Bonney, who’d fought and plundered side by side with her friend, Mary Read, and her lover, Captain Jack Rackham, prince of freebooters. As staged by Mr. Kean, The Beauteous Buccaneer was a dark divertissement, replete with long shadows, choruses of wailing nereids, and misterioso trills boiling up from the orchestra pit. In one particularly poignant episode Pirate Anne deposited her newborn infant (whom Jack had refused to acknowledge as his own) at the gates of an orphanage, bidding the baby a tearful farewell, then melting into the fog. The final scene found Anne being hauled onto a gallows, outfitted with a noose, and hanged.
Chloe’s future, in short, looked rosy. She could practically taste the oysters and the sparkling wine. And yet, strangely enough, in the case of The Beauteous Buccaneer the usual disjuncture between her life and her art did not obtain. No sooner had she finished cleaning her face following her fifteenth Saturday matinee performance (so that her painted brow changed from white to rose, and her cherry lips turned pink) than a visitor entered her dressing-room—her very own wayward father, who at last report had been working as a dustman in St. Albans. His arrival occasioned in Chloe sharp and sudden pangs of remorse, for he wore a pauper’s uniform, complet
e with brown hempen tunic and matching skullcap, and his hands displayed the scars and scabs of one who’d been condemned to relentless toil.
“Yes, child, your eyes do not deceive you,” said Phineas. “I’m living at Her Majesty’s expense in Holborn Workhouse—a place no sane person would enter of his own free will. Thus does our nation hold down the high cost of poverty.”
“Papa, you should have told me,” Chloe moaned.
“I should have told myself,” said Phineas with a shiver of chagrin. “Instead I kept pretending the world was about to provide me with a living.”
She slipped behind her fan-folded Chinese screen and began shedding her pirate costume—leather corset, crimson-striped pantaloons, gleaming black boots—in favor of street clothes. “When last we dined together, you had hopes of becoming a hackney coachman,” she remarked from her makeshift boudoir.
“A vocation at which I would have succeeded had my passengers not expected me to possess a promiscuous familiarity with London geography,” said Phineas. “Shortly thereafter I became a carpenter’s assistant, a calling I abandoned upon realizing that my maul bore a grudge against my thumb. Next I apprenticed myself to a locksmith, leaving his service after he told me that burglars would one day drink my health.”
Chloe stepped free of the screen, brushing her taffeta skirt into place, her chestnut hair now secured with mother-of-pearl combs, a gift from a former swain. Briefly she contemplated herself in the looking-glass. Her features were inarguably attractive: large eyes, straight nose, high cheekbones—a face for launching, if not a thousand ships, then certainly a fleet of robust fishing smacks.
“You must be famished, Papa.”
“Not so much for food, dear child, as for your charming presence. Offer me a bite of cheese, though, and I shan’t refuse.”
Sensing that her father’s hunger was rather greater than he allowed, she suggested they repair to the Cloven Hoof for some supper and a pint of ale. At first he demurred, saying, “Surely my daughter would be ashamed to appear in public with a man dressed in a pauper’s uniform.”