by James Morrow
Midway through her trek across the nocturnal city, Chloe came upon a ragamuffin selling Tuesday’s Evening Standard. Without asking permission, she seized the topmost copy and turned to page three, which indeed featured Popplewell’s account of Saturday night’s goings-on at Alastor Hall. Heart astir, she scanned the headline, COSMOLOGICAL PROOF FAILS TO AUTHENTICATE JEHOVAH, then the subhead, ANGLICAN JUDGES REJECT ARGUMENT FROM EVIL, and finally the illustration: a snake emerging from an African native’s chest, labeled Guinea-Worm Victim. Despite the disturbing image, she laughed out loud, unnerving the ragamuffin. The purse remained intact. The race went on.
Upon reaching the Strand, she surveyed the Adelphi Theatre billboards and saw that The Beauteous Buccaneer had ended its run: hardly a surprise—without Miss Chloe Bathurst in the principal role, who would patronize that overripe melon? The new offering was Via Dolorosa, Mr. Bulwer-Lytton’s iambic-pentameter dramatization of the further adventures of Veronica, the woman who’d swabbed Jesus’ brow as he’d limped towards Golgotha (thereby imprinting his face on her veil in a kind of first-century daguerreotype). Three years earlier, when the Southwark Company was poised to mount the world premiere of Via Dolorosa, Chloe had auditioned for the part of Veronica, having read the entire play by way of preparation. The venture came to naught. Not only did the director decline to cast her, but Chloe had nearly drowned in Bulwer-Lytton’s cataract of verse, in which treacherous tides of forced rhymes concealed perilous shoals of distressed metaphors. The present production featured Fanny as Veronica—the perfect role for an actress of such radiant faith.
By the testimony of her smile, Fanny was delighted to find her former rooming-companion waiting at the stage door, and she refrained from any show of skepticism when Chloe insisted that her departure from Mr. Darwin’s employ had been voluntary, “driven only by a longing for the cosmopolitan life I’d left behind.”
“How bold of you to follow your heart’s desire and walk away from a secure situation,” said Fanny.
“Somewhat bold, yes, but largely foolhardy. At the moment I lack for a roof over my head.”
Fanny kissed Chloe’s cheek and said, “Allow me to cast you once again in the unfolding drama that is my life.”
“There’s an even greater boon you can perform for me. Were you to drop by Mr. Kean’s office tomorrow and acquire a dozen sheets of stationery bearing an engraved image of this theatre, I should be evermore in your debt.”
“I love you, Chloe, but I shan’t commit a robbery on your behalf,” said Fanny.
“Think of it as undeclared borrowing. If my scheme comes to fruition, I’ll supply Mr. Kean with foolscap enough to paper over Hyde Park.”
“And what scheme might that be?” asked Fanny.
“As Pirate Anne says to Jack Rackham when he first visits her boudoir, ‘All in good time.’”
* * *
The following day, upon receiving from Fanny a goodly quantity of Adelphi stationery, Chloe inked her Tavistock Street address onto every sheet, forthwith drafting and posting the letters by which she hoped to acquire the illustrative specimens. Mindful of Fanny’s fondness for God, Chloe declined to tell her why she sought these creatures. Instead she beguiled her friend with the same falsehoods that, Dame Fortune willing, would bring the exhibits her way.
“Perhaps you recall how, in leaving the Adelphi, I told Mr. Kean of my desire to write plays,” said Chloe. “It happens that during my sojourn at Down House I fell upon a worthy subject, and I straightaway composed the first two acts. I call it The Ashes of Eden, spun from Mr. Darwin’s pulse-pounding adventures in the Galápagos archipelago.”
“What sorts of pulse-pounding adventures?” asked Fanny.
“The usual. A hair’s-breadth escape from headhunters, a battle with a gigantic iguana, a flight from an erupting volcano. But primarily my play concerns Mr. Darwin’s insights into the method by which God tenanted the islands with their distinctive varieties of bird and beast.”
“It sounds perfect for the Adelphi, thrilling and edifying all at once.”
“Here’s the rub, Fanny. My artistic vision can be realized only by bringing live animals on stage. Towards that end I’ve written to various zoological institutions. If they will lease us the necessary creatures, I shall be inspired to finish the third act posthaste.”
Within a fortnight Chloe received—from the associate director of the Royal Zoo—the first response to her campaign: an altogether maddening and abysmal missive.
7 June 1849
Dear Miss Bathurst,
We are in receipt of your letter concerning your theatre company’s forthcoming production. Alas, although we have in captivity several large lizards from Indonesia, we are deficient in the Galápagos types your spectacle requires.
As for the fabled giant tortoises, over the past decade we’ve made numerous attempts to procure live specimens. Unfortunately, every sea captain we commissioned swindled us, claiming that the creatures had become sickly en route back to England and needed to be cooked on the spot.
I regret that we cannot be of service. Her Majesty’s Zoo is ever eager to raise the cultural horizons of the London citizenry, and we were genuinely intrigued by the possibility of a cooperative venture with the Adelphi.
Yours, etc.,
Mordecai Bramble
Later that week two more such dispiriting letters arrived. Although the Pimlico Natural History Park owned a terrestrial iguana from Indefatigable Isle and another from Chatham Isle, their keeper insisted that he was “loath to put them on stage night after night, a trauma certain of shortening their lives.” The undersecretary of Her Majesty’s Tropical Arboretum in Regent’s Park wrote, “The Ashes of Eden sounds like a worthy endeavor, and yet we would never populate our cosmopolitan paradise with creatures hailing from a place so desolate as Galápagos. Relocate your play to the jungles of Malaysia, and we shall happily assist you.”
Undaunted, Chloe cast her net wider, contacting zoos in Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, but she failed to snare a single serviceable vertebrate. Refusing to admit defeat, she attempted to obtain preserved specimens. The strategy proved bootless. A Trinity College herpetologist replied that, although he curated several mummified reptiles from the South American continent, “Alas, our collection stops short of the Encantadas.” A King’s College ornithologist declared that the Adelphi Theatre was in his opinion “a bawdy-house by another name,” and he would not rent Chloe a stuffed Galápagos mockingbird even if he had one.
Her salvation took the unlikely form of the Evening Standard for Tuesday the 24th of July. Habitually she turned to page three. The headline proved gratifying. SUPREME BEING SURVIVES BIBLICAL CONTRADICTIONS. It was the subhead, however, that truly enthralled her. DILUVIAN LEAGUE TO RECOVER GENESIS ARK FROM ARARAT. The adjacent engraving depicted the prophet Noah urging pairs of zebras, elephants, and giraffes to board his famous vessel. What on earth? Could it be? Did some wily theist intend to win the prize with the ultimate version of the Argument from Relics?
ALASTOR HALL, OXFORD. On Saturday evening the judges of the Great God Contest heard the Argument from Biblical Errors. Mr. Enoch Brattlebone, an amateur philologist, exhibited a stack of pasteboard sheets onto which he’d transcribed dozens of alleged scriptural mistakes.
In the inaugural chapter of Genesis, God first creates every sort of animal, with Man serving as the climax of the process, whereas in chapter two the Almighty, having apparently started the whole business over again, brings Adam on stage in advance of the beasts. In Leviticus, bats are categorized as birds, rabbits as cud-chewers, and insects as four-legged. In Matthew, Judas casts down his silver pieces and then hangs himself, whereupon the chief priests use the money to purchase a field, but in Acts it’s Judas who purchases the field, a tract on which he dies when his abdomen bursts open.
With lucidity and passion the Anglican judges explained why such anomalies should not trouble believers. The Reverend Mr. Symonds speculated that at the time of Moses bats were
birds, rabbits chewed their cud, and insects had four legs. Professor Owen proposed a version of Judas’s death in which the priests unstrung his corpse with the intention of interring it, a plan they abandoned when the villain’s remains exploded on the burial ground, which they’d purchased in his name. The Reverend Mr. Chadwick simply stated, “Let us not discount God’s glorious forest for a few aberrant leaves on solitary twigs.”
Visiting Alastor Hall on Jehovah’s behalf was the Reverend Mr. Dalrymple, president of the Mayfair Diluvian League, who submitted various images of Noah’s ark ensconced in its final resting place, Mount Ararat in Anatolia. None of this evidence—neither the pen-and-ink sketches nor the watercolors nor the daguerreotypes—impressed the freethinking judges, who declared them fraudulent.
“My colleagues and I anticipated such a reaction,” said Mr. Dalrymple, “which is why we intend to undertake an unprecedented archeological expedition. After securing the necessary funds, we shall sail the good ship Paragon through the Bosporus to the Black Sea. Disembarking at Trebizond, our party will proceed overland to Ararat, scale the slopes, excavate the ark, and tow it to England.”
At this point Lord Woolfenden waxed enthusiastic, saying, “We salute your ambition, Reverend. What’s more, we’re prepared to invest three hundred pounds in your adventure.”
Although moved by the Shelley Society’s generosity, Mr. Dalrymple noted that the project would cost in excess of £2,000. With a trenchant smile Lord Woolfenden averred that an organization as Godly as the Diluvian League should have no problem raising the difference.
“But let us make your task even easier. We shall be pleased to grant you an official commission—provided that a majority of our judges concurs.”
An interval of high drama ensued. Polled by Lord Woolfenden, the Anglicans on the bench agreed that Mr. Dalrymple should be permitted to raise ark-hunting capital in the Society’s name. The atheists then cast their ballots. Mr. Atkinson voted nay, saying, “Your Lordship, I believe it behooves you to grant commissions neither to churchgoers nor to freethinkers.” Miss Martineau abstained, saying, “I can see both sides of the question, and I am fond of neither.” All eyes now turned to Mr. Holyoake. “An atheist, I would argue, is a person who has naught to fear from the facts,” he declared. “If the Genesis ark is real, I should like to know it, and so I vote aye.”
Chloe accorded the remainder of Popplewell’s piece (quotations from the Reverend Mr. Dalrymple praising the judges and the Byssheans) but a cursory glance, for her mind was aglow with an incandescent idea. If the Oxford rakehells were willing to endorse the Mayfair Diluvian League, then surely they would authorize her to collect biological evidence for a Godless universe. Fairness demanded that the Shelley Society patronize a journey to Galápagos by the—by the what? The Natural Selection League? The Tree of Life Society? The Transmutationist Club? Yes, that sounded right. The Byssheans must underwrite the Albion Transmutationist Club, England’s newest scientific organization.
So jubilant was Chloe at the prospect of outmaneuvering the Diluvians, she decided to celebrate, treating herself to grouse and beer at the Cloven Hoof, then attending a performance of Via Dolorosa. As mounted by the Adelphi Company the play proved strangely engaging, and Chloe realized she’d been wrong to scorn the text on the basis of a single reading.
She was especially touched by the climax of act one—Veronica wiping blood and sweat from Christ’s face. Act two came to a thrilling conclusion when a band of Zealots, having enchanted their swords by cleaning them with Veronica’s veil, defeated Caligula’s soldiers in a skirmish. Act three found the heroine assuming the mantle of evangelist, healing the sick and spreading the news that love had superseded the Law. Angered by this perceived critique of their religion, a Pharisee mob carted Veronica down to the Mediterranean Sea and set her adrift in a fishing boat, along with Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Mary the mother of John. The outcasts suffered hunger, pirates, sharks, and whirlpools, and yet they persisted, reaching France and inaugurating the Provençal legend of les Trois Maries.
As Chloe strode through the foyer of the Adelphi and entered the churning metropolis beyond, her buoyant mood evaporated, yielding to reflections concerning not only her imminent voyage (which promised to be as perilous as Veronica’s) but also the emergent rivalry between the Mayfair Diluvian League and the Albion Transmutationist Club. From the loftiest aristocrat to the lowliest commoner, all Christendom would want the Ararat mission to succeed and the Galápagos quest to fail. The King of the Universe was on surely the Diluvians’ side, and so was the Queen of England. And Miss Chloe Bathurst? All she had was her finch beaks and her mockingbird bills, her iguana tails and her tortoise shells: beautiful things, to be sure, beautiful and subtle and true—and yet so easily ground to dust by the colossal keel of Noah’s ark.
4
The Pigeon Priest Moves from His Parsonage to a Madhouse, Even as Our Heroine Arranges to Circumnavigate a Continent
A woman adept at creating illusions but in thrall to only a few, Chloe knew that she could not simply march into a Shelley Society meeting and charm the rakehells into sanctioning her expedition. Not, at least, until she’d digested Mr. Darwin’s theory in all its clawed and carapaced particulars. Thus did she take to haunting the Jubilee Market coffee-houses, inundating her intellect with chocolate and caffeine whilst perusing her illicit manuscript.
Each time she read “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification,” she grew even more appreciative of Mr. Darwin’s talent for shoring up his argument with anatomy and embryology. “The wing of a bat,” he’d written, “the paddle of a porpoise, the hoof of a horse, and the hand of a man all exhibit a unity of type,” hence the near impossibility of distinguishing these structures from each other “in the early stages through which the corresponding foetuses pass.” One might also infer transmutation from “abortive organs,” structures for which a plant or animal had no need, “the teeth of the narwhale being a famous instance, likewise the nipples of male mammals, also the tailbone—the coccyx—of the species called Homo sapiens.”
Varied and ingenious were the ways Mr. Darwin had found to push God farther and farther off the stage of natural history. These days no physicist was obliged to “spurn Newton’s laws and insist instead that the planets cleave to their orbits in direct obeisance to the Creator’s will”—so why shouldn’t biologists, mutatis mutandis, enjoy the same privilege? In the next paragraph Mr. Darwin bemoaned the scriptural literalism whereby the flat-spined species of Galápagos land iguana and the high-spined type “must have been separately created from the dust of Albemarle Isle and Barrington respectively.” Equally untenable was the biblical implication that “all four species of Encantadas mockingbird reflect four different divine initiatives.”
After a fortnight of industry fueled by enough coffee to refloat Noah’s ark, Chloe decided she’d achieved an almost connubial relationship with the Tree of Life. Unless she missed her guess, she would take Alastor Hall by storm, bearing away either Jehovah’s head on a silver salver or (the next best thing) an official commission to arrange His ruin somewhere east of Eden and west of Ecuador.
On Friday the 10th of August, in the shank of the wet afternoon, after fastening her hair beneath her green velvet bonnet, hiding her purse in her bodice, and prudently removing all jewelry from her person, Chloe belted her grandfather’s bayonet about her waist and set off for Seven Dials, the district where her little brother—having come into the world a half-hour ahead of Algernon, she’d always thought of herself as the elder sibling—had at last report established himself as a flamboyant faro player who could normally be counted upon to lose. Amongst his many unsavory acquaintances Algernon surely numbered a few disgraced sea captains, at least one of whom should be willing, for a cut of the profits, to assist the Albion Transmutationist Club. If she appeared in Oxford having already procured a ship, she reasoned, the Shelley Society would smile all the more broadly on her quest.
&
nbsp; Arriving in the wretched rookery, she decided that although Seven Dials had a logical enough name (the streets converged on a pillar encrusted with sundials), an equally appropriate appellation would be Seven Sins. At every turn yet another reprobate activity met her gaze, from opium smoking to gin swilling, cockfighting to whoremongering. Each time Satan invented a new vice, she mused, he tested it out in the Dials ere inflicting it on the world at large.
She pestered landladies, importuned beggars, and distributed pennies with the alacrity of a child tossing bread crumbs to ducks, until at last a busker with a violin told her that the wastrel Bathurst frequented a gaming establishment called the Butcher’s Hook in Earlham Street. The thoroughfare in question, she soon learned, was a gathering place for trollops. Moving amongst these pocked and syphilitic women (painted like harlots, not actresses, she decided), she pondered her present embargo on carnal pleasure, promising herself that, in the name of eluding the diseases of Venus, she would remain chaste until her wedding night.
Cautiously she entered the Butcher’s Hook. It was like stepping into an enormous hearth whose fire had died with the coming of dawn: stale, cold, murky, ashen. She spotted Algernon almost immediately, slumped in a nearby booth and contemplating an empty tumbler whilst shuffling a pack of cards. He did not look up but merely grinned and said, “Sweetest sister, how marvelous to see you.”
“How did you know ’twas I, little brother?”
“Through a gin glass darkly,” he replied, indicating the tumbler. His skin was sallow as candle wax, his hair tangled as a thrush’s nest. “Allow me to buy you a libation.”
“Ginger beer, if you please.”
Spreading his cards faceup across the knife-nicked table, Algernon rose and kissed Chloe’s cheek. Stubble covered his chin like gnats mired in flypaper. As she slid into the booth, her twin repaired to the bar, returning apace with a glass of faux beer and a tankard of stout, both crested with foam. “I hope you don’t mean to engage me in a tête-à-tête”—from the fanned deck he selected the knave of clubs—“for I’m needed at the faro table. Tell me, sister, is this the card I should play against the dealer?”