by James Morrow
“And they survived the ordeal of postal delivery?” asked Chloe.
“The clam is doing splendidly. The beetle, alas, arrived suffering from terminal dehydration.” Mr. Darwin clutched his stomach, doubtless to palliate his nausea, then indicated a jar on his desk. “I sealed the creature therein, then added a dram of hydrogen cyanide, that he might know a quick death. Aren’t you supposed to be in the vivarium, Miss Bathurst?”
“Please, sir, if you could spare me a moment of your time.”
“Heaven forbid I should accord greater consideration to a beetle than to my assistant zookeeper.”
She began by reporting on a misadventure recently endured by Perseus of Indefatigable (her Trojan tortoise, she decided, the ploy by which she would redirect Mr. Darwin’s attention from invertebrates to herself), explaining that on the previous evening the creature had slipped off a boulder and injured his leg—though with Master Willy’s assistance she’d successfully bandaged the limb. When Mr. Darwin issued an approving hmmmm, she asked him whether, “transmutationally speaking,” Perseus with his intermediate carapace was more closely related to Boswell the domeshell or Isolde the saddleback. The ruse worked. Her employer forgot his clam, stepped away from his microscope, and proffered a warm smile. “Marvelous question, Miss Bathurst. Alas, my theory is not yet so refined as to provide a definite answer.”
“Even in its present state, your idea is quite the most exciting I’ve ever encountered. If it were a novel, it would be The Mysteries of Udolpho.”
“Really now?” Mr. Darwin lifted an eyebrow, evidently uncertain whether her aim was praise or flattery.
“It’s so excellent a conjecture, in fact, that with your permission I shall submit it to the Shelley Society.”
He scowled and said, “I think not.”
“Naturally I intend to credit you in full and turn over the greater part of the prize, seven thousand pounds, keeping but three thousand for my troubles.”
“And what troubles might those be?”
“Mastering your species theory, rehearsing my presentation, transporting the illustrative birds and beasts to Oxford.”
“Am I to infer you’re an atheist, Miss Bathurst?”
She leaned towards the microscope and surveyed its amorphous occupant, which the device had enlarged to the size of a tuppence. “You should infer merely that I’m prepared to portray an atheist, if I might thereby keep my father out of debtors’ prison. The Jehovah hypothesis holds no interest for me one way or the other.”
Grasping his tweezers, Mr. Darwin transferred the clam from the microscope stage to a dish of water. “What you’re suggesting is out of the question.”
“I take your point, sir. Permit me to offer you eight thousand pounds, retaining for myself a mere two, the sum I need to save Papa from his creditors.”
“No, Miss Bathurst, my point has eluded you. The theory of natural selection is not for sale.” Mr. Darwin pulled a handkerchief from his waistcoat, wiping his fevered brow like a barman mopping up a splash of ale. “Let me add that I’m sympathetic to your father’s plight. Is he really two thousand pounds in arrears? That’s only twenty more than I paid for this estate. How does a man squander so much money?”
“Phineas Bathurst is forever accomplishing feats that would daunt the average mortal. You may be sure the bulk of his debt traces to philanthropy, not prodigality.”
“I shall contribute two hundred pounds to whatever fund you’ve dedicated to his salvation,” Mr. Darwin promised.
Chloe sucked filaments of air through her clenched teeth. Two hundred pounds—the precise figure that, after pondering the tender abolitionist soul who’d written The Voyage of the Beagle, she’d imagined him donating. “May I make a suggestion? Allow me to become fluent in transmutationism. I shall carry the argument to Alastor Hall, ascribing it to an English naturalist who wishes to remain anonymous. Mr. Popplewell will duly report on my performance. If your theory proves palatable to a majority of Evening Standard subscribers and furthermore elicits the admiration of those readers who consider themselves scientists—”
“And also wins the prize.”
“And also wins the prize, you’ll be free to step forward and claim authorship of the most important idea in the history of biology. As for myself, I would expect no more than twenty percent compensation.”
“Miss Bathurst, I am out of patience with you.”
“I had no wish to give offense, sir.”
Taking hold of the beetle jar, Mr. Darwin held it up to the bay window and contemplated the doomed inhabitant. “Let there be no ambiguity in this matter. My mockingbirds, finches, reptiles, and brain are not now, nor will they ever be, at your disposal. Export them beyond Down House, and you’ll have made an enemy of a person who would be your benefactor.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Might I offer some advice, Miss Bathurst?” Pivoting towards his desk, Mr. Darwin set down the jar, apparently satisfied that the beetle had passed away. “Forget this blasted competition, embrace the Jehovah hypothesis, and pray that your father lives to see his creditors dead and buried. And now you will return to your duties.”
* * *
What other choice did she have? None, by her own reckoning. How many better paths lay before her? Zero, she ruefully concluded. Just as Pirate Anne was forced to abandon her baby on the steps of a monastery, so was Chloe now obliged to appropriate the transmutation sketch under cover of night and spirit it back to her room, there to transcribe all thirty-five pages ere they were missed.
She laid the groundwork of her scheme with excruciating care, clearing the clutter from her writing-desk and equipping it with certain essentials she’d acquired by milking her purse dry at Creigar & Sons, Stationers—a stack of blank paper, a fountain pen, two nibs, three pots of ink—plus four candles obtained from Parslow on the pretext that she intended to stay up late reading The Count of Monte Cristo. She wriggled into her burgundy-velvet Raft of the Medusa gown, the better to blend with the darkness, then put on slippers, the better to mute her tread, and irrigated her throat with barley water, lest she betray herself with a cough.
By midnight the household was deathly still, Mr. Darwin and his wife having retired to their bed-chambers, the children sleeping soundly, the servants snoring noisily, the dogs whimpering in their dreams. Step by silent step Chloe crept down the hall and, at one with the night, slithered into the study. A batten of moonlight streamed through the bay window, bright enough to illuminate her deed without betraying it. The lower-left desk drawer protested her knavery, squeaking more loudly than when she’d obtained the full-blown treatise for Mr. Hooker, but at last “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification” glided into view. Holding her breath, she removed the pages with the dexterity of a pickpocket. She exhaled, swallowed hard, and eased the drawer back into place.
Above the throbbing of her heart and the chugging of her lungs a second noise arose, the creak of human footfalls. She dropped to her knees and, crawling like an iguana, hid behind the couch. Cautiously she peered into the gloom. A flame floated across the study, followed by the extended arm of Mr. Darwin, dressed in a silk robe and holding a candle, its radiance enhanced by a globe. With the aid of his walking-stick he shuffled towards his bookcase and, setting his lamp on the reading table, slid a thick novel from the shelf. Only after he was ensconced in his overstuffed chair, poring over Mr. Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon, did Chloe play the lizard again and, manuscript in hand, exit softly on all fours.
Once back in the servants’ quarters, she lit the candles, then enacted her plan with the ticking efficiency of a trainman’s watch. The pen nib skittered across the page, neatly replicating Mr. Darwin’s sentences, each character crisply formed. No bleary-eyed medieval monk transcribing Scripture had ever accorded a text greater fealty. She never wrote “maladoptive” when the word was “maladaptive,” never “evaluation” instead of “evolution.”
To Chloe’s immense satisfaction, the ess
ay addressed the thorny questions raised by the luncheon guests. Why were random but felicitous advantages—and random but pathological disadvantages—not diluted through blending? Because if inheritance worked that way, then familial diseases such as hemophilia would have long since disappeared. Why should we think our planet old enough for natural selection to have worked such wonders? Because the more closely geologists pondered mountains, valleys, deserts, and seabeds, the more testaments they saw to a vast antiquity. Was the theory of transmutation so all-inclusive as to embrace Man himself? On this point, the author was adamant. Consider our vestigial anatomical features. Consider our resemblance to apes. There was never an Eden, a talking serpent, a fall from grace. Eve was a fiction. Adam be damned.
At long last, her second ink-pot almost drained and her energies all but depleted, she copied out the final paragraph.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its powers of growth, assimilation, and reproduction having been originally breathed into one or a few kinds, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling according to fixed laws, and whilst land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through processes of gradual selection and infinitesimal modifications, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved.
She had merely won a battle, of course. There remained the matter of the war. Victory would be hers only after she’d gathered up palpable proofs of transmutation—secure in their adaptive shells, proud of their strong tails, pleased with their useful beaks—and displayed them before the judges. Whence would come this evidence? A momentous question, but not one her weary brain was required to answer this night.
She blew out the candles, then huddled protectively over the essay’s moist, newborn twin. For reasons not readily apparent, her favorite speech from Mr. Jerrold’s Wicked Ichor popped into her mind. “We live in the shadows, cast out of Christendom, fleeing the cross,” said Carmine the vampire, as interpreted by Chloe, to her fellow undead brides. “And yet we ask no man’s pity, for ’tis not mere blood we seek but the thrill of mocking the cosmos. Will you look yourselves in the eye, dear sisters, and deny that this be true?”
When at last the pages were dry, she wrapped them in her woolen scarf and hid the bundle beneath her pillow. Let us be honest, she told herself. Not mere blood but the thrill. Not just the purse but the praise. Will you look yourself in the eye, dear Chloe, and deny that this be true?
* * *
Moving stealthily towards the study, sketch in hand, Chloe apprehended a pleasing sound, the cadence of Mr. Darwin’s snores. She approached the desk on tiptoe, grasping the handle of the lower-left drawer. The sleeper stirred but did not awaken. His lamp, nearly spent, emitted the aura of a sickly glow-worm. She gave the drawer a tug, then immediately wished she hadn’t, for the compartment squealed like a frightened pig.
“Who’s there?” demanded Mr. Darwin.
She froze—a futile gesture, immobility being a poor approximation of invisibility. The essay rattled in her fingers. Blood thundered in her ears. Involuntarily she relaxed her grasp. The thirty-five pages cascaded to the desktop and lay still, shimmering silently in the moonlight, exhibit number one in her forthcoming trial for intellectual larceny.
“Remain silent,” said Mr. Darwin firmly. “You’re a clever girl with your tongue, and I want no commerce with that organ right now. Nod if you understand.”
She nodded.
“Mere words could never mitigate this act.”
Again she nodded.
Suddenly he was by her side, leaning on his walking-stick as he gathered up the scattered sheets. “Your offense could not be clearer. Against my explicit instructions you slipped in here and appropriated my essay. Your intention, no doubt, was to take these pages back to your room and copy them ere they were missed.”
Chloe nodded a third time—not a mendacious reply, she decided: prior to copying the pages, she had indeed intended to do so.
“My responsibility to this household is self-evident,” Mr. Darwin continued. “I cannot abide so reckless a schemer beneath my roof. Tomorrow you must delegate your zookeeping duties to Mr. Kurland, as you will be leaving Down House the following day.” He secured the essay beneath the beetle jar. “Until the hour of your departure, I shall hide my sketch in a place you would never dream of looking—and the same goes for the scrivener’s copy of the longer treatise. Do you understand why I’m compelled to banish you? You may talk now.”
“I understand,” she rasped, a tear trickling down her cheek.
“I am sorry, Miss Bathurst. Truly.”
She swallowed audibly. “I shall miss Master Willy and Miss Annie.”
“I know. They speak highly of you.”
“Now that I think on it, I shall also miss our lizards and tortoises.”
Mr. Darwin caressed the beetle jar. “I realize this was not a common burglary, nor are you a common burglar. Should you find another situation involving either reptiles or children, I shall say nothing of this incident to your new employer. Moreover, I intend to place two months’ pay in your pocket ere you depart.”
“I don’t deserve your generosity, but I shall accept it.”
From his robe Mr. Darwin produced a packet of cigarettes, then removed one stick and inserted it between his lips. “Attend my every syllable,” he said, his voice grown cold again. “Beginning on Sunday, this estate and its grounds are forbidden to you.” The unlit cigarette bobbed up and down like a semaphore. “I shall instruct Mr. Kurland to keep an eye peeled for enterprising actresses seeking to abduct my animals.”
“Were our situations reversed, I would take the same precautions,” said Chloe, wiping her tears with the sleeve of her gown. “Upon returning to my room I shall pray to God that my former employer might one day forgive me.”
“No need to entreat Heaven, Miss Bathurst—your former employer stands before you, and he grants his forgiveness.” He extended his arm and splayed his fingers. “I hope we might part as friends.”
“I am humbled by your graciousness,” she said, shaking Mr. Darwin’s hand. And by the way, she declared silently, I mean to win the Great God Contest. I have your essay, and I shall win. Though I must take Bluebeard as my husband, hire Satan as my solicitor, and dance a fandango with the Angel of Death, the prize will be mine.
* * *
As he strode through the leathern splendor of the Alastor Hall library, that arena in which he’d spent so many hours defending both the honor and the actuality of his Creator, the Reverend Malcolm Chadwick, Vicar of Wroxton, brooded on the paradoxical fact that he actually admired the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society. Their banquets partook of a primordial gluttony, their clothing of a quintessential vanity, their comportment of transcendent sloth. The Devil himself might profit from a visit to Alastor Hall, where he would likely learn a thing or two about genuine aristocratic dissolution, as opposed to the predictable drunkenness and tiresome fornication pursued in less professional dens of iniquity.
Tonight, as always, the rites had begun in the drawing-room, Lord Woolfenden officiating alongside his present mistress, the buxom Lady Isadora, the rakehells smoking their opiates, declaiming their execrable sonnets, and listening to a recitation honoring their late, lamented idol. Although the revelers normally preferred to hear a scene from Prometheus Bound or a passage from “On the Necessity of Atheism” or “A Refutation of Deism,” this evening they’d experienced Lord Clatterbaugh reading from Shelley’s favorite philosophical work, De Rerum Natura by the Roman poet Lucretius, its six chapters celebrating the irreligious teachings of the ancient Greek sage Epicurus. Clatterbaugh had selected Lucretius’s account of the fate of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her own father, Agamemnon, so that the gods might grant the Achaean war fleet fair winds during their voyage to Troy.
Dumb with dread, her knees giving way, she fell sinking to the earth.
In that dark hour it availed the hapless daughter nothing
That
it was she who’d first bestowed the name of father on the King.
Uplifted by royal attendants, she was straightaway borne to the altar
Though not to play her part in joyful marriage rites
Or hear the happy sound of nuptial songs.
Instead the stainless maiden, at the very age of wedlock, was taken
To the holy stone to die beneath her father’s knife,
Lest his ships endure a perilous crossing to Ilium.
Such are the monstrous deeds inspired by faith’s fell promptings!
Next everyone had repaired to the banquet hall, there to consume suckling pig, roast pheasant, and gallons of champagne, whilst Lord Woolfenden’s brace of peacocks strutted freely about, their gaudy plumage spreading behind them like the flags of a fabulous Oriental empire. At eight o’clock, goblets in hand and lovers in train, the Byssheans had adjourned to the library, sprawling across the velvet divans surrounding the arena in which would be waged this evening’s war of wits.
“I am stuffed with pork and famished for gossip,” said Malcolm as he mounted the steps to the dais, seating himself on the Anglican side of the judges’ bench between the Reverend William Symonds and Professor Richard Owen. “What argument will our Christian petitioner submit tonight?”
“At dinner Lady Isadora told me we are to witness the most rational of all God proofs,” replied Mr. Symonds, the geologist whose magisterial Old Stones contended that volcanoes attested to a loving Creator, for without a divine hand modifying their eruptions would not human civilization have been long ago smothered in lava?
“The most rational?” said Professor Owen, the scowling anatomist who’d put a name, Dinosauria, to the immense lizards who, if the fossil evidence spoke truly, had once inhabited Sussex. “Ah, then it’s to be the Cosmological Proof, splendid! Of course, my loyalties will always lie with the Teleological Proof. What a piece of work is a man—and a marigold as well.” During the past year the judges had heard dozens of contestants argue that, given its innumerable instances of meaningless and even absurd design, from flightless birds to soft-shelled crabs, the world hardly bespoke the purposeful aims of an omnicompetent Deity. Owen had in every instance flummoxed the petitioner with teleology, adducing hundreds of creatures so perfectly fitted to their habitats that one could almost see the Almighty’s fingerprints on their feathers, pelts, hides, and scales.