by James Morrow
Despite her knowledge that the vessel anchored in the Bahía de Cormoranes was not the Genesis ark, Chloe found herself in sympathy with Stopsack’s plan. For if the Covenant indeed enthralled a majority of Shelley Prize judges, with Popplewell reporting that momentous outcome in the Evening Standard, did it not follow that thousands of ambivalent Christians throughout England and the Continent might progress from a manifestly plausible belief in the prophet Noah to a shattering apprehension of the Presence? Might not a man who understood the rainbow covenant to be a real historical event soon come to hear the morning stars sing together?
“I pray you, Governor, restrain your excitement for the nonce,” she said, eating a morsel of shark. “First we must hear Mr. Hallowborn’s decision. Only then might we speak of winning the gold.”
“It’s not worth winning,” Mr. Chadwick insisted.
“Whenever there’s a ten-thousand-pound purse at stake,” said Stopsack to Chloe, “you will find me the paragon of patient men”—he took a sip of pisco—“and the very soul of forbearance.”
* * *
Awakening in the Governor’s guest suite shortly after sunrise, Chloe put on her white robe and, as she’d done every morning for the previous ten days, repaired stealthily to the kitchen. Finding Pablo about, she requested that he serve her coffee on the veranda. By nine o’clock she was relaxing in the open air, munching on cassava bread and using Pablo’s brew to dilute the previous evening’s indulgence in pisco and caxirí beer, her face shaded by a pink parasol planted on the deck like a conquistador’s flag.
A tolda canoe appeared, Eugenio working the paddle, the Reverend Mr. Hallowborn seated stiffly beneath the canopy like one of Charon’s fares crossing the Styx. He cried out to Chloe, saying, “I would have a moment of Lady Omega’s time!” She called back, proposing that they share her carafe of coffee (though warning him it was strong to the point of proximate sin), an invitation he accepted without hesitation.
As Chloe revisited the kitchen and procured an empty coffee cup for the rector, a question wrapped itself, serpent-like, about her mind. If Hallowborn joined with Eggwort in pronouncing Lady Omega a fraud, would she feel deserted by the God of her epiphany?
The question continued to haunt her after she returned to the veranda.
“You have transformed my dark night of the soul into a bright noon of the spirit,” said the rector, pulling up a chair and joining her beneath the parasol. “Had Lady Omega not come to Galápagos with her Indian disciples and their ark, I would have stained my hands with the blood of blameless beasts.”
For a glorious instant Chloe’s heart occupied every part of her body. Her veins all pulsed with joy. Hands trembling, she directed a stream of coffee into Hallowborn’s cup. “How pleased I am that the morning stars have sung to you.”
“One day you will be designated the Church of England’s first mystic.”
It would be unfitting, she decided, for a divine messenger to dance about the wharf like a gypsy. Instead she took a bite of cassava bread and said, “In Heaven you will be honored largely for sparing the animals, though your appreciation of Lady Omega will also draw praise.”
Hallowborn took his coffee in hand, fluted his lips, and sipped. Setting down the cup, he stretched out his arms in a benediction embracing the wharf’s habitués, twenty birds at least, the majority engaged in extracting invertebrates from the railing. “I hereby ask absolution of these finches and thrushes.”
“They are gracious creatures, certain to forgive you. What will you tell Bishop Wilberforce?”
“That Chloe Bathurst is dead. That a wayward Israelite tribe is flourishing in Peru. That God gave them a prophet. That the Devil authored not a single Encantadas species.”
For a wordless interval Chloe and the rector savored their coffee, until at last she squeezed his hand and said, “Reverend, might I solicit your counsel in a theological matter? No, not just theological—political as well. Before the month is out, Governor Stopsack and I hope to transport Noah’s ark to England and display it before the citizenry in corroboration of Hebrew Scripture. What do you think of our project?”
Hallowborn interlaced his long fingers. “Though my own faith has never required tangible testaments, I suspect such an exhibition might benefit the great mass of men. But I must advise you to stay clear of Oxford, where the local rakehells have turned the God question into a ridiculous sport played for a large cash prize.”
“You may be sure that Lady Omega eschews all such profane competitions,” said Chloe, thinking that an apostle of the Presence might take a more nuanced view of the matter.
The rector untangled his fingers and said, “I would never have imagined otherwise.”
* * *
Upon finishing his coffee, Mr. Hallowborn took leave of Chloe, citing an obligation to return to the Antares and offer the ninety convicts one last sermon before their incarceration. She spent the morning spreading the good news throughout the hacienda, so that breakfast became a carnaval de la victoria in which even the Governor participated. Throughout the meal, Ralph, Solange, and Mr. Chadwick heaped accolades on the English mystic, being careful not to accidentally call her “Chloe” or “Miss Bathurst.” Perhaps Stopsack had already deduced that the whole Lost Thirteenth Tribe business was a hoax, but in any event he kept his own counsel, speaking only to laud Madam Prophet’s compassion for the Encantadas fauna.
In the days that followed, Chloe realized that the ghost of Doubting Thomas had laid claim to her imagination. Peace of mind would elude her until she’d witnessed in person not only the relocation of the ninety prisoners to Mephistropolis but also Simon Hallowborn’s subsequent departure for England. She shared her forebodings with the Governor, who explained (to her immense relief) that he was about to take up the pen of his authority and write the final chapter in the short, shabby history of the Great Winnowing.
“Tomorrow is the Hebrew Sabbath,” he said, “and then comes the Christian Sabbath, and the very next day, Madam Prophet, we shall bring this distasteful matter to a conclusion, whereupon you and I can set about claiming the Byssheans’ treasure.”
The Monday in question dawned ominously, a thick and treacherous fog swaddling Indefatigable, but Stopsack decided to attempt the crossing anyway. Shortly after eight o’clock the Hippolyta sailed out of the cove, crewed by all four furloughed Ecuadorians and carrying the European adventurers (minus Léourier, who’d elected to spend the morning browsing through the Governor’s library). The mood aboard the schooner was at once festive and tense. Although the masquerade troupe still took satisfaction in their recent feat, they could not ignore the shadow cast by Stopsack’s intention to win the prize. Whereas Ralph, Solange, and Mr. Chadwick made no effort to disguise their distaste for the scheme, Chloe, braving a trio of sneers, speculated aloud that a finding in God’s favor at Alastor Hall might bring solace to countless Christians presently enduring crises of faith.
Soon after the Hippolyta rounded Pelican Point, the fog lifted, and the balance of the voyage occurred without mishap, the company reaching Post Office Bay in time to see the Antares’s crew pilot her along the wharf towards a berth adjacent to Eggwort’s shallop. The furloughed Ecuadorians guided the Hippolyta into the outermost slip. Disembarking, the Governor headed for the prison ship, whilst Chloe and her friends ascended to a natural balcony of frozen lava near the summit of Mount Pajas, so they might observe the maneuver from a safe distance (an eleventh-hour revolt by the convicts being all too easy to imagine). The balcony offered an unobstructed view of Mephistropolis with its grim watchtower and stout brick wall, a panorama that the adventurers enlarged by means of Léourier’s glass.
Although Stopsack had probably never before directed such an undertaking, he performed his duties with brio, skillfully heaping verbal abuse on the manacled inmates (“Step lively, you dunderheads!” “Keep moving, you walleyed toads!” “Stay in line, you hairy apes!”), whilst Captain Garrity’s sailors, fowling pieces in hand, poked and prodde
d the ninety down the Antares’s gangplank, along the wharf, across the tuff-strewn basin, and through the thorny perimeter fence. All during this fitful march, the elderly Kommandant Hengstenberg, whose Prussian affectations included a monocle, a waxed mustache, and a riding crop, likewise sought to intimidate the convicts. In a voice so loud it easily rode the torpid air to Chloe’s ears, he told the prisoners they must not imagine swimming to freedom, the waters off Duntopia being “inhabited by hammerhead sharks with an appetite for English flesh.” Mr. Hallowborn, meanwhile, assumed a consoling role, assuring the convicts that once they’d atoned for their crimes through hard bondage, God would look favorably on their petitions to enter Heaven.
After the ninety had passed through the main gate and assembled in the exercise yard, an ursine capitán strode out of the stone keep leading a dozen guards brandishing carbines. With so many men waving firearms in their faces, the convicts grew visibly alarmed, but then Stopsack made a momentous announcement (far more heartening than Hallowborn’s soggy promises of salvation). Every man who toed the line, causing no trouble whilst residing in Mephistropolis, would have his sentence reduced by one-quarter, just as if he’d butchered his share of reptiles.
Despite their shackles, the inmates crossed the yard with a buoyant gait, disappearing into the keep.
His mission accomplished, Stopsack took leave of Hengstenberg and, transcending his bulk, climbed Mount Pajas to converse with Chloe and her friends. Wheezing and sweating, he explained that for the next two hours he must ensconce himself in Hengstenberg’s office, signing papers legalizing the convicts’ deracination from Dartmoor Prison to Her Majesty’s Galápagos Penal Colony, the better to establish that Charles Isle was now of a piece with the British Empire.
The troupe and the Governor descended in tandem. As Stopsack returned to Mephistropolis, Chloe and her friends strode towards Post Office Bay, taking satisfaction in the lush fecundity they observed along the way. Here on the lava field: a bright yellow short-spined lizard they’d delivered from the wrath of Wilberforce. There, near a fresh-water spring: a clan of saddleback tortoises who would never suffer the garrote. Beyond, in a thicket: a scattering of ground finches, forever spared the fowling pieces of Garrity’s sailors. In time the adventurers reached the wharf, where Chloe basked in the imagined gratitude of the very iguana colony she’d observed upon landing in the Encantadas.
For several silent minutes she stood and watched topsails and headsails blossoming on the spars of the Antares. The crewmen raveled up the mooring lines, and the brig blew free of her berth, then headed south across the bay towards the open sea. There, it was finished: she’d beheld Simon Hallowborn exit her life and the prisoners enter a place where they could work no mischief. Having fulfilled her sacred obligation to the Galápagos fauna, she could now turn to the formidable—perhaps impossible—task of getting the ark to Oxford.
* * *
During the week that followed the Antares’s departure for England, Malcolm enlisted all his powers of persuasion in attempting to discourage Stopsack from becoming a Shelley Prize contestant, an endeavor in which he found ready allies in Dartworthy and Miss Kirsop but a stubborn antagonist in Miss Bathurst, who continued to argue (despite her knowledge of its origins) that the ark, astutely deployed, might bring spiritual blessings to the multitudes. Whilst Dartworthy tried to convince Stopsack that hauling the Covenant across the isthmus would prove an endeavor only slightly less insane than trying to sail her around the Horn, Miss Kirsop told the Governor that, in the event the ark failed to win the competition, the Roman Church might sponsor its own version of the Great Winnowing, thereby causing no end of headaches for his administration. But it was Malcolm who (in his own estimation at least) offered the most persuasive case. The Shelley Prize was a moral miasma. No genuine Christian would imagine acquiring so sordid a reward.
Despite Malcolm’s exhortations, or perhaps because of them, the seventh evening in September found the Governor leading Eugenio, Sancho, Pablo, and Virgilio in a raid on the Covenant. Armed with truncheons, Stopsack and the furloughed Ecuadorians sailed the Hippolyta out to the ark, dragged the sleeping Indians from their hammocks, and ferried them to shore, leaving all six to fend for themselves in the mangrove glades. In his subsequent gubernatorial proclamation, Stopsack explained that his devotion to the Anglican Communion had compelled him to appropriate “one of Christendom’s most sacred relics, lest it devolve to those who would use it for personal gain,” by which of course he meant that, bent on using one of Christendom’s most sacred relics for personal gain, he’d sought to prevent its devolving to anyone else.
From his most recent conversations with Dartworthy and Miss Kirsop, Malcolm had concluded that the Governor’s hunger for the prize no longer distressed them, for they seemed exclusively focused on their scheme to visit every whaling ship, sealing brig, and survey vessel stopping in the Encantadas until they finally found a captain who liked the idea of taking on four English explorers pledged to serving him faithfully in exchange for their eventual passage home. It thus came as a shock to Malcolm when Dartworthy and Miss Kirsop appeared at his bedside late one night, kerosene lanterns in hand, and announced that they’d discovered how to prevent Stopsack from entering the contest. Annoyed and confused, Malcolm nevertheless agreed to board the longboat and accompany them as they rowed through the inland waterways and beyond. And so it happened that, after a half-hour’s journey (during which his companions refused to specify whatever game was afoot), he found himself in the Bahía de Cormoranes, heading towards the ark.
“We hope you will sanction tonight’s escapade,” said Dartworthy, “though we mean to carry it out in any case.”
“We thought it would be wrong to burn the Covenant without telling you first,” added Miss Kirsop.
“Burn it?” gasped Malcolm, appalled.
“Given the success of the masquerade, Solange and I now deem Miss Chloe Bathurst capable of whatever ridiculous feat might catch her fancy,” Dartworthy explained. “With Stopsack cheering her on, she’ll drag the ark over the isthmus, sail it across the Atlantic, pilot it up the Thames, adopt the persona of a conventional Christian, and convince all six Oxford judges that a proof of God lies to hand.”
“This is madness,” said Malcolm.
“What choice do we have?” asked Miss Kirsop.
“The choice not to burn the ark,” said Malcolm.
“I thought you were now a freethinker, Reverend,” said Miss Kirsop. “Evidently I was mistaken.”
Throughout the remainder of the crossing, Malcolm simply sat and brooded, mutely formulating arguments against the intended crime and imagining the arsonists’ rebuttals. Miss Kirsop countered his silence by chattering about the imminent adventure, explaining how every night for the past week she and Ralph had collected kindling from the arid inland thickets, furtively borne the sticks to the vessel, and distributed them throughout the cargo hold. The Covenant was a floating tinderbox, awaiting a fateful spark.
No sooner had they all climbed the rope ladder to the weather deck than Dartworthy disappeared into the forecastle. He returned carrying a bundle of dried reeds, which he proceeded to ignite with the flame of his lantern. When Malcolm made a final plea for canceling the plan, asserting that no person had the right to obliterate an artifact so central to the Huancabamba religion, Dartworthy reminded him that for the past century the Indians had been happy to let the ark rot in a salt marsh.
As she dragged the door free of the hatch, Miss Kirsop quoted Macbeth. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”
Burning faggot in one hand, lantern in the other, Dartworthy descended into the hold, bound for the secret pyre.
“Do you remember my constellations?” Miss Kirsop asked Malcolm. Stretching an arm towards the Milky Way, she sifted the stars through her splayed fingers. “When we met on St. Paul’s Rocks, I told you I’d sown the sky with constellations made of my personal demons.”
“Mi
ss Kirsop, I am not now, nor shall I ever be, interested in your mental disease.”
Despite this protestation, she insisted on telling him of a starry succubus fond of poisoning village wells, and she was about to relate the story of “my most demonic alter ego, a streetwalker adept at castrating her clients with her father’s shaving razor,” when Dartworthy emerged from the hold, followed by a helix of thick gray smoke.
“It would be in our collective interest to abandon ship,” he said.
A half-hour later, Malcolm, seated on a lava rock, observed the burning Covenant—as did Dartworthy and Miss Kirsop, standing together on the beach. Already the flames had broken free of the hull and begun stabbing through the weather deck. The Bahía de Cormoranes mirrored the blaze, the glimmering orange tongues flashing across the waters like colonies of phosphorescent algae. Now the flames were climbing the masts, turning the spars into torches, the sails into billowing scarlet clouds. Like some hellish tree dropping overripe fruits, the ark shed great chunks of burning canvas, the embers hitting the bay and expiring in reptilian hisses.
“’Tis done—and quickly,” said Miss Kirsop.
“And well,” added Dartworthy.
“Nothing good will come of this,” said Malcolm.
“Stay where you are!” a male voice bellowed from out of the swamp.
Armed with a pistol, Governor Stopsack quit the shadows, accompanied by Eugenio and Sancho. Shackles jangled on the servants’ belts. When Stopsack, raising his kerosene lantern high, shouted the inevitable command—“Arms out! Wrists together!”—Malcolm was the first to comply, though the arsonists (having every reason to suppose the pistol loaded) also assented in a timely manner.
“Your crime played out more conspicuously than you would have wished,” the Governor explained whilst Eugenio manacled Dartworthy’s wrists and ankles. “I saw the flames from my veranda.” He turned to Malcolm, offering him a dispensational smile. “As a mere bystander to this incident—or so I assume—you may leave whenever you wish. Professor Cabot and Miss Quinn, however, are going to Mephistropolis, there to remain till Eggwort puts them on trial or the Devil sponsors a frost fair, whichever happens first.”