The Darwin Affair

by Tim Mason

  You’re to be a choir scholar now, Tom, isn’t that grand? I was a choirboy once.

  They would attend a great meeting. Some of the finest minds of the kingdom would be there.

  The whole world’s buzzing about it, isn’t it exciting? Here’s history, and here you are, a little butcher’s boy, part of it all!

  After his hair was dry, Tom had been allowed to collapse on a pallet at the foot of the bed. Master had taken the bed for himself, fully clothed, but in the night Tom had awakened to see a figure, tall and naked, standing before the mirror above the basin. There was something strange, something wrong, and then Tom had seen. The boy had shut his eyes tight, hoping, praying he had not gasped aloud. He heard the man turn and then nothing. No sound, for one hour? Two? Tom slept.

  In the morning the bed was empty, but Master was present below in the little parlor, drinking tea, dark circles beneath his deep-set eyes. Mrs. Andrews, with her pinched, starved look and her warts, set a plate in front of Tom. He hungrily devoured the roll and morsel of cheese. Before he’d finished eating, Master was off again without a word.

  Tom quickly climbed the stairs to their rooms, knowing how foolish he was being. His heart pounding in his ears, he took the little pencil he’d found in a drawer and used it to write on the five-pound note Master had given him. It was perilous, it was wrong. Like the watch chain he’d taken from the nice young man on the coach and hid in his clothes, and the knitting needles he’d found in the old woman’s handbag, thinking he might somehow put them to use. Just last night, when Master cut his hair, Tom had watched to see where he would put the scissors, and Master had seen him watching, he was quite sure. Foolish and dangerous, like the tightly folded five-pound note, hiding now in his waistcoat pocket. For whom was the note? For what reason had Tom put himself (and his mother, as Master often reminded him) at such risk? Looking into the chipped mirror above the bowl, Tom saw again the young man from the coach, saw the fear and confusion in the young man’s eyes. And then he gasped, he couldn’t help it: Master was there, in the mirror, standing in the door, wearing a black gown and staring.

  “Come along, then, Tom,” said Decimus, pulling a wry smile. “We’ve a busy day ahead.” Master’s features suddenly darkened. “What’s that?” he said, pointing.

  Heart racing, Tom looked down at himself, assuming the Master had detected the note in his pocket. Then he saw the ring on his left hand and felt a rush of relief.

  “It’s just Blinky’s ring, sir. She gave it me.”

  “Did you copulate with her?”

  “No!” shouted Tom, appalled. “No, sir, she gave it me, the ring, it was too big.”

  Master shook his head and said, “She’s old enough, I suppose, but I don’t like it when they move.”

  It took a moment for Tom to realize what Master was saying, and then he felt a rising wave of nausea.

  “Never mind, I am setting you an examination, of sorts. Are you attentive? Do you listen and recall everything? Not everyone who answers history’s call is fit for the task, don’t you see?”

  Tom didn’t see and his face showed it, so Master crossed the room in two steps and slapped him, hard.

  20

  Oxford

  In the morning, Inspector Field stood in the porter’s lodge at Christ Church College, enduring the disdainful scrutiny of the porter through his window. Black-robed undergraduates and dons were coming and going beneath the arch of the college’s main gate, and a carriage was pulling up before it.

  “Was the bishop expecting you, sir?” said the porter.

  “No indeed,” said Field. “This is a police matter that has just arisen.”

  The porter’s frown deepened. He turned and spoke to someone behind him. “Mr. Smuts? Would you be so kind? This person wishes to speak with the bishop, says it’s police business.”

  After a moment a door opened in the wall, and Smuts, the human fence post, emerged, clapping a bowler hat on his head. “I am the police here,” he said, looking Field up and down.

  “Delighted to hear it,” said Field. “I am Chief Detective Inspector Field of the Metropolitan, and I am a policeman also.”

  “The bishop is fully engaged.”

  “My business is urgent, sir.”

  “Nothing I can do about that, is there.”

  “I can think of one or two things you could do right about now, Mr. Smuts, but never mind that.” He raised his voice a notch. “Kindly let the bishop know that the London police request an audience!”

  “Bishop’s just coming, sir,” said a passing undergraduate, nodding toward the quadrangle.

  With a triumphant glance at the Bulldog, Field turned to see a stocky, gowned man in a priest’s collar entering the lodge with a black-robed, beak-nosed man at his side. “Bishop Wilberforce?” said Field, and the two men paused.

  “Yes?” said the bishop.

  “We mustn’t be late, my friend,” said the other man, gesturing to the carriage waiting on the street.

  “My lord, I am Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Police, and I regret to tell you that one of your scholars has suffered a grievous accident.”

  “Who is it? What sort of accident?”

  “His name was David Gates, and I am sorry to say he was murdered, my lord.”

  The bishop stared. “Murdered.”

  The other gentleman murmured, “Dreadful, dreadful.”

  “Where?” asked Wilberforce. “When?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, on a coach approaching Oxford.”

  “By whom?”

  “We do not yet know, sir.”

  “Has Mr. Gates’ family been told?”

  “Yes, my lord. They are arriving this morning.”

  Wilberforce seemed genuinely upset. “Fond of the boy.” He took a deep breath. “Sorry, Inspector Field, this is Sir Richard Owen.”

  Owen nodded and then laid a comforting hand on Wilberforce’s shoulder. “My friend, this is a terrible shock. Nevertheless, we need to be going.”

  “One moment, gentlemen, please,” said the inspector. “It seems young Mr. Gates was concerned about a guest of yours, my lord, a man named FitzRoy.”

  “Concerned?” said Owen. “In what way?”

  “We understand Mr. Gates heard FitzRoy threaten the life of Mr. Charles Darwin.”

  Look at this, the bishop is going all white.

  “FitzRoy is not well,” said Owen. “The man’s confused. Addled.”

  “You don’t suspect him of this crime, surely?” said the bishop. “He was here with us all day yesterday.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Field, “I wondered if I might have a word with the captain.”

  “But he is at the University Museum for the great meeting.”

  “Which is, my lord,” said Owen, “where you and I need to be going without delay. If you will excuse us, Inspector Field?”

  “Of course, gentlemen. I’ll see you at the museum, then. My men are there already.”

  Owen’s smile was acidic. He led Wilberforce through the lodge and into the waiting carriage. Field turned back to the porter. “Where is this museum?” The porter glanced uncertainly at Smuts, who stared, his arms folded across his chest. Field thrust his head to the porter’s window. “Quickly!” he barked.

  “In Parks Road, sir, at the end of the Broad.”

  Field strode out, shouting over his shoulder, “Thank you kindly, I’m sure!”

  The inspector, as he walked, was all eyes and ears. It was the end of Trinity term and, as always at that time of year, there was a kind of frenetic madness in the air. Freedom was at hand. Undergraduates were giddy with it and, in many instances, drunk with it as well. The river teemed with punts. The romantic comedies of Shakespeare were performed by torchlight in the college gardens, and unscripted love affairs were consummated in the neighboring woods. The Bulldogs patrolled the streets with fierce countenances, dragging miscreants to justice, but the antic mayhem was rampant even so. Field walked to the end of Broad Street, p
ast the soot-blackened busts of Roman emperors perched before the Sheldonian Theatre, their faces glaring fiercely above the heads of the current youthful populace into their own contentious histories.

  As he turned off into Parks Road, a back gate at St. John’s College opened on his left, and a stream of choirboys emerged, followed by their masters, all of them wearing long black robes. The sight left the inspector momentarily stunned: the masters all seemed to move on wheels instead of feet. The boys moved their legs like normal human beings, but the adults glided.

  They dress alike, do they have to walk alike as well? This is religious somehow?

  A large man fell into step on his right. “Oh, Mr. Smuts,” said Field, “can you explain why these chaps walk like they’re bleeding ballerinas?” Another solid, bowler-hatted man appeared at Field’s other side. “Hullo!” said the inspector, and then turning to Smuts, “Are you not going to introduce us?”

  “You do not belong here,” said Smuts.

  “Why would you say such a thing, Smuts? You are a warm and welcoming person, that’s what you are!”

  “University police are in charge here. You and your lot can hop it.”

  “Not going to do that, certainly, I’ve a sea captain to interview.”

  The Bulldog on his left laid a police baton across Field’s chest, and all three men came to a stop.

  “Mr. Smuts, tell your man to take away his stick.”

  “I think we’ll lock you up, London. Just for the night, and then we’ll put you on the first train out come morning.”

  The Bulldog holding the baton doubled over with Field’s fist in his belly, gasping for breath. Smuts, drawing a truncheon from beneath his coat, was stunned to find his opposite hand cuffed to the wrist of his falling comrade, the two big men going down together in a grunting tangle. Field left the men thrashing on the ground and moved quickly across a broad expanse of grass toward the imposing University Museum.

  Llewellyn and Kilvert were already inside. The crowd was such that they had to edge up the staircase one step at a time toward the museum’s upper gallery and the library where the meeting was to be held. The stone walls of the soaring neo-Gothic structure reverberated with hundreds of voices, all talking at once.

  “Will you look at those great creatures, Mr. Kilvert!” said Llewellyn, staring down over the rail at the enormous fossil dinosaurs mounted below. “To think monsters such as these once roamed this very land!”

  “I’ll wager they were manufactured locally, Mr. Llewellyn. It’s all a fraud.” Normally the annual meeting of the staid British Association for the Advancement of Science caused barely a ripple among the public; today, it captured the attention of the world. The gathering was not a debate per se but a platform for the presentation of scientific papers. Everyone, however, knew that whatever papers were presented, there was only one topic this year: Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theory.

  Professor Perkins, secretary to the British Association, watched dumbfounded as the crowds poured in, filling the library to overflowing. The day was humid and warm, the temperature in the library was already rising, and Perkins, a slender, querulous bachelor, was inwardly fuming. If anything went wrong it was Perkins who would catch it.

  Beside him, the graying, mild-mannered scholar from New York, scheduled to read an essay inspired by Darwin’s theory, was quite giddy, thinking mistakenly that this multitude was gathering to hear him. Professor Draper glanced down at the pages he clutched in his hands and realized with horror that the ink was running here and there from his own perspiration. “Oh, dear me, my remarks!” cried Professor Draper. Perkins offered the American a baleful glance and turned back to the incoming throng.

  “Orderly now, gentlemen and ladies!” he shouted. “Orderly! There will not be room to sit, most of you will have to stand! You young men there, drunkenness will not be tolerated! Hallo, may we have some quiet please! May we have some order!”

  Master had told Tom to watch and listen and learn. Every word, do you understand? What he must not do, however, is speak; no one must hear rough London accents coming from an Oxford choirboy, after all! Master himself kept shifting through the crowded room, edging this way and that, until he seemed to find someone he’d been looking for, and there he stopped. This was a square-jawed man toward the front, with mutton-chop whiskers (Thomas Huxley, had Tom known it). He was one of the few who had a chair in which to sit. Master placed himself just behind the man. A white-haired gentleman finally stood and held up one hand.

  It took some time, but John Stevens Henslow, Darwin’s old mentor from Cambridge, finally was able to hush the room. He made a brief introduction and then Professor Draper from New York University began reading his remarks.

  Field made his way up through the crowd, which spilled halfway down the staircase. Finally he reached the threshold, elbowed his way in, and surveyed the room. It was packed from wall to wall. The audience was mostly male, with a few scattered females, whose crinolines took up even more of the limited space.

  “ . . . seen in this light, as suggested by Mr. Darwin,” Professor Draper was saying, “the progression of organisms is determined by natural law and not . . . Oh, dear me, what is that next word? I seem to have blotted it . . . Skipping down a bit . . .”

  Get him off! cried a young male voice from somewhere in the crowd.

  “ . . . the question thus arises, are we merely a fortuitous congregation of atoms?”

  The inspector caught sight of Kilvert, who was quite near to the speaker’s podium. On the other side of the room he spotted Llewellyn, who clearly had located the sea captain: a florid man in an old-fashioned naval uniform, clutching a huge book.

  Field pushed into the crowd, making his way incrementally.

  Professor Draper finally stumbled to a halt and was given perfunctory applause. The crowd was impatient for the main event to begin, and the botanist Daubney, who spoke next about the implications of Darwin’s theory on the sexual reproduction of plants, was not it. The rowdier elements among them grew more vocal, and then a Reverend Dingle was called to the podium. Dingle gave the crowd a big-toothed grin and turned to a blackboard, carefully writing the letter A on one side and B on the other. He circled each letter and drew an arrow connecting the two.

  “Now, then,” he said in a thick Yorkshire accent, “let ‘A’ stand for the man and ‘B’ stand for the mawnkey . . .”

  It was simply too much for the crowd. A group of undergraduate rogues began to chant, Mawnkey, Mawnkey, Mawnkey, Mawnkey!

  They would not be stilled and poor Reverend Dingle had to stand down, still bravely showing his large front teeth and still clutching a lump of chalk. There was a moment wherein the entire crowd seemed to take a breath, and then a door opened at the end of the room.

  Bishop Samuel Wilberforce entered and strode the short distance to the podium. He grasped it with both hands, looking out over the vast assembly, waiting for silence. He inclined his head respectfully toward the single row of natural historians and dignitaries seated before him, beginning with the venerable Henslow. He bestowed smiles upon Sir Richard Owen and Sir Jasper Arpington-Dix. He had wry grins for Thomas Huxley and, seated next to Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker, the botanist, Darwin’s closest friend. Wilberforce evidently failed to notice Professor Draper from New York, the botanist Daubney, and the Reverend Dingle sitting before him, since he acknowledged none of them. When there was a complete hush, the bishop’s eyes twinkled.

  “Odd,” he said, finally, his strong voice reaching without effort from the front of the packed room to the back. “I was expecting a crowd.”

  The assembly exploded in laughter.

  The bishop clasped his hands before him and worked them as if washing them. “Is this what you came to see?” he cried, and laughter again surged through the crowd. A daring young man cried, Good old Soapy Sam! Wilberforce held up one hand, calling for silence and quickly getting it.

  “I wonder,” he said, suddenly solemn, “if you know whose
passion and dream it was to see this great building erected? This museum, newly completed, which is and will be forever a monument to the pursuit of natural history and all things scientific?” He looked over the crowd, as if waiting for an answer. “Well, my friends,” he said finally, “the University Museum had many dedicated patrons, thank the Lord, and with their permission and your forgiveness, I proudly confess to being prominent amongst them!”

  Applause from the assembly.

  The bishop looked down at Huxley and Hooker, shaking his head sadly, and then up at the crowd, his eyes blazing. “I am the friend of natural philosophy! I am the servant of science, not her enemy!”

  Renewed applause and scattered shouts of Hear, hear!

  Again Wilberforce raised a plump palm to quiet the crowd. “Why, then, as a friend and ally of science, am I here?”

  “Why?” shouted a tipsy undergraduate, provoking a ripple of laughter.

  “As a friend of science I am compelled to speak out against bad science! On this occasion I am here, not as a man of the cloth and a defender of the faith, but as a defender of fact over fiction—a fiction that has been inflicted, regrettably, on the public and the world of natural history by the amateur Charles Darwin!”

  Tumult from the crowd: cries and shouts, applause and catcalls. Hear, hear! Shame! Hear, hear! For shame, sir! For shame!

  Sir Richard Owen was beaming. His pupil was doing him proud. Owen turned to Sir Jasper, seated next to him, but found that gentleman staring at his hands. Somber? Strangely remote, in any case. He scarcely seemed to be listening.