The Darwin Affair

by Tim Mason

  The bishop beamed, but Owen snorted. “How dare Huxley question my work!” he said. “Ridicule, from the likes of him!”

  “Never mind Huxley, old man,” said Sir Jasper. “He’s nothing and no one.”

  “I’ll make him pay. Before I’m done, Huxley will pay.”

  Captain FitzRoy watched them all, silent and abstemious, glowering from a deep chair, his large Bible on his lap.

  “After today, gentlemen,” said Sir Jasper, “Darwin’s bulldog can bloody well scamper off with his tail between his legs! What does the common man care for lobes, front or back? Not a blessed thing!”

  “But the science behind our argument is vitally important, Sir Jasper,” said Owen heatedly. “Why, the posterior horn represents . . .”

  “No, it don’t. Don’t represent a damned thing to the common man, old boy, and he’s the chappie I care about—he’s the one who will nip Darwinism in the bud. There’s only one posterior horn that matters to the average fellow, I guarantee it!” Sir Jasper’s bawdy laugh quickly became a smoky cough.

  Owen moved away, muttering in disgust, but Sir Jasper struggled to his feet and followed him. “Owen, old man,” he said confidentially. “I’ve had a revelation. Change of plan.”

  Owen glanced nervously at the others in the study, but Sir Jasper shook his head and put a finger to his lips.

  “Different scheme altogether,” he said in a low voice. “I’m going to engage a German to do the job, on his own turf.”

  “What?” whispered Owen.

  “You can tell your man to stand down, with our thanks, of course.”

  “You’re joking. You tell him!”

  Suddenly FitzRoy stood. “Cowards,” he said.

  “Oh, dear God,” said the bishop.

  “Appeasers!” cried FitzRoy. “Blasphemers!” The captain was red in the face. “You are not defenders of the faith, but deniers!”

  “Get him out of here, someone,” said Owen.

  “Huxley made mincemeat of you, Bishop!” cried FitzRoy. “Mincemeat, do you not understand? And Darwin, whatever his errors, is worth ten of any of you!”

  “I cannot abide this,” muttered Wilberforce, massaging his temples.

  “Listen to this,” said the captain, taking a creased, stained envelope from his Bible and carefully extracting a yellowed sheet. “He wrote this to me, oh so many years ago now: ‘My dear FitzRoy, I hope you will not forget to send me a note telling me how you get on. If you do not receive much satisfaction for all the mental and bodily energy you have expended in His Majesty’s service, you will be most hardly used.’” He looked up. “He was my friend, you see? Not my enemy.”

  “Get him out!”

  “‘God bless you! I hope you are as happy as, but much wiser than, your most sincere but unworthy philosopher, Charles Darwin.’”

  Tears streamed down FitzRoy’s face. He tucked the letter into his Bible and hoisted it. “We had such times together. Now look what’s become of us.”

  “Captain, a word.” FitzRoy glared as Sir Jasper approached him. “You might just set that Bible down, old man. Do yourself a favor.” Sir Jasper’s eyes twinkled as he draped an arm around FitzRoy’s neck. “Don’t worry, we’ll have it sent on.”

  “What?”

  Sir Jasper was leading him gently toward the door. “You’re leaving us, sir. As soon as ever you can. Now, in fact.”

  FitzRoy’s glare moved to Owen and Wilberforce. “I shake the dust from my feet. I don’t know why you asked me here, and I don’t know why I came.”

  “No more do we, Captain FitzRoy, no more do we,” said Sir Jasper. “Off you go now, you queer old thing. You’re not wanted here. Nor anywhere else, as far as I can tell.”

  FitzRoy threw off Sir Jasper’s arm and left. A collective sigh of relief went round the room.

  Sam Llewellyn sat next to the bed in the Radcliffe Infirmary, staring at the unconscious form of Josiah Kilvert. The two sisters on duty bustled quietly up and down the ward, glancing often at the policeman keeping vigil. One of them—Sister Claire, it was—actually laid her hand gently on his shoulder at one point. Llewellyn looked up, gave her a wan smile and resumed his watch.

  The doctor had been fascinated by the wound. Llewellyn had told him that Kilvert, before he lost consciousness, whispered something about a hand on his back.

  “‘Nothing sharp,’ I think he said, Doctor, when I asked him.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. The region of the back hasn’t many nerve endings, relatively speaking. Far fewer, say, than the hand or the foot. If I were to stick you square in the back with an ice pick, you’d feel a blunt sensation rather than a pointed one. What interests me about the wound is its precision. It’s so clean and economical; it looks like the work of a professional mortician.”

  “Will he live?”

  The doctor hesitated. “His pulse is not encouraging; his heart may have been weak to begin with. Nevertheless, he just might make it. I can’t really say, son.”

  That was nearly two hours earlier. Llewellyn felt utterly at sea. He realized how much he depended upon the vinegary soul who lay there with paper-white skin.

  I love the man, that’s all, isn’t it. He’s a brother to me.

  As the minutes dragged on, Llewellyn stared at Kilvert’s still form and gradually began to doze. He was awakened when Sister Claire touched his shoulder again. Llewellyn leaned back in his chair and covered his face while she closed Josiah Kilvert’s eyes and drew the sheet up over his head.

  “What did you tell him?” said Master yet again. “I saw you talking, what did you say?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Liar. How else did he know your name?”

  They were in the guest house; Mrs. Andrews was packing their things.

  “It was a policeman, wasn’t it?” said Master.

  A blush suffused Tom’s freckled face and Decimus laughed bitterly. “I can always tell. What did he say to you? Answer me, or I’ll have your tongue out!”

  “He said my mother came to him; she sent him to find me and he did.”

  Master looked to the heavens, breathing heavily and shaking his head. Then he spoke to Mrs. Andrews in an urgent undertone. She took Tom out to the pump in the yard, stripped him, and washed the black dye from his hair, the black running in streams down his naked body while he shivered with fear. When she’d dried him off, she took him inside and gave him clothes that were made, he realized, for some kind of servant. She pulled a rough cap down over his wet hair, which was now an indeterminate, dirty color.

  At the train station there was a bustle of people coming and going as the light failed. An Oxford fog was drifting in, and the lamplighter was summoning an indistinct glow from one lamp to the next along the platform. Decimus propelled Tom furiously before him: a prosperous gentleman with a recalcitrant servant. The London-bound train slowly entered the station, its headlamp lighting up the pendant fog. Expelling gusts of steam, the locomotive came to a halt. Decimus pushed Tom up the steps and onto the train, propelling him down the corridor and into an empty compartment. He thrust the boy onto a seat and sat close to him.

  “Do you still not comprehend the opportunities I’m giving you? To be my protégé, my inheritor?”

  The voices of other passengers rose just outside the compartment door. Decimus suddenly produced one of the knitting needles Tom had taken from the old woman’s bag and pressed it to the boy’s throat. “Say one word to anyone and I’ll push it right through.” The needle vanished; Master unfolded a newspaper and pretended to read as a middle-aged couple entered the compartment. A whistle blew and the train groaned into motion. As the train slowly accelerated, the fog pressed against the window, swirling, and Tom thought he might be drowning.

  London

  It was raining. The household in Half Moon Street was waiting for them, it seemed. John Getalong opened the door wordlessly, and Belinda stood just inside, silent and watchful, her hair every which way, as though she had been pulled recent
ly out of bed and sleep. Hamlet and Mrs. Hamlet stood at the top of the kitchen stairs, staring. There was a warm aroma of cooking from below, roasted fowl, perhaps.

  “Children,” said Decimus, letting Getalong help him off with his wet coat, “did you miss me?”

  Each of them nodded solemnly.

  “It feels as though I’ve been gone a month or more.”

  “Water’s hot, sir,” croaked Hamlet.

  “And supper on the hob!” cried Decimus. “Mrs. H., it smells delicious.”

  “Who heated the bath, then?” grumbled Hamlet. “But do I get any thanks?” His wife jabbed him savagely in the ribs, but Decimus appeared delighted.

  “You melancholy Dane, I’ve missed even you!” His face abruptly assumed a sorrowful expression. “Tom here will not be joining me for my homecoming meal, alas. He is, I’m sorry to say, a liar and a thief. Nevertheless, we don’t turn on our former friends; we strive to improve them, do we not, children?”

  The assembly nodded their heads, all eyes on Tom. Getalong chuckled aloud and then coughed to cover it.

  “Tom will be staying on the top floor with Mary Do-Not, in hopes that she can correct his ungrateful ways.”

  Blinky gasped.

  “If he is able to rejoin us at some point, so much the better. If he is not, well, let that be a lesson to you.”

  Tom, the wet dripping off him and chilled through, was determined not to show his considerable terror.

  “Off you go, Tom! Three flights up, then the little steps beyond. I can trust you this far, can I not? You won’t compel me to lead you by the hand?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “Knock thrice and then once again. Mary loves a surprise, and tonight you’re it.” Tom set his face toward the darkness above and began to climb. The image in Tom’s mind of Mary Do-Not had assumed grotesque proportions. She was a monster. A witch, a hag, a cannibal.

  It’s me or her i’n’it. Right, no holds barred, then.

  He knocked three times and then a fourth. After a silence he heard a rustle from within, a chair scraping, and footsteps. He clenched his fists and the door opened.

  She was tiny. No more than five feet tall. A year or two older than Tom, perhaps. She wore a frilly pink-and-white dressing gown, which she clutched modestly about her throat, and pale pink satin slippers on her feet. Flaxen hair peeked from under a pink-and-white nightcap. She was exquisite, a china doll. There was a quick tentative smile and then a ducking of her head.

  “You’re new, aren’t you.” The voice was high and soft. “You’re to stay, then? Like the other one?” She looked over Tom’s shoulder and down the dark staircase. “I don’t have much to offer. They below haven’t sent much up today or yesterday. Has he been away? The bread is dry, I’m afraid, but I have a cheese on the shelf there, still in its paper, and you’re welcome to it. Goodness, you’re wet through. Well, come along!”

  Tom took a deep breath and walked in. The garret was long and narrow and lit dimly by candles. At one end was a divan beneath the eaves. At the other was a small bed, done up in lace and frill. There were two windows. Before one of them was a table with an ink pot and quills and a prodigiously tall stack of paper. It was all neat as a pin.

  “What is the o’clock, do you know?” she said, closing the door. Tom’s fists clenched again. “I promise myself that I will keep faithful track of the hours, and then, like that, they’ve got away from me once more. I’m working, you see. He below keeps me well supplied with ink and quill and paper—I have no complaints in that regard. I should have put numbers to the pages, but then, if I’m honest, when I began I didn’t know I was beginning anything, I didn’t know I would be here such a long time or that I would be writing quite so much. So it is, the pages, like the hours of the days and nights, come and go unremarked by me, unnumbered, unnamed. If I should ever upset the pile, God forbid, I should have a difficult time putting them together again in the way they should go!”

  Mary Do-Not laughed a little tinkling laugh, but then her smile vanished.

  “Poor boy, do you mean to fight me?”

  Tom didn’t know what to say. He glanced down and saw that his fists were still fiercely balled and his feet braced.

  “You’re frightened. They have told you things about me.” She sighed and moved to the window before the desk. She laid her palm against the rain-spattered, night-blackened pane. “For years now people have said the unkindest things.” She turned back to Tom, tears in her eyes. “Does it seem fair to you?”

  She began to pace. “You would never know it today, but I come of respectable folk. Do-Not! My name is not Do-Not, certainly. It is Withers. My mother died of the fever when I was a child, but she and Father were in service in a fine household and much appreciated, everyone said so. Father saw to it his girls were able to read and write and do their sums, and I learned so much from Cook, who taught me all I know of the kitchen. Life was good. But things can go so badly, so quickly. Remember this, young man: life can and does change in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”

  Tom looked at the tiny, pacing figure intently. She had just put into words the bitter lesson Tom had learned only recently; it was as fresh and sharp as a knife. He nodded fervently, but she didn’t notice. As she moved, the candles made her shadow long and short by turns.

  “After Cook died, I became kitchen maid to the new cook and worked as hard and well as ever I could. In just a matter of months, though, many of the family sickened and several perished, one after another. Father died. To my horror, our household broke up. I feared I would starve. Then young Mr. Thomas of our first household got me placed in another, thank God. This family was not a happy one, but I am a hard worker and gave satisfaction, I like to think, before they fell ill. I took a position with another family after that, but it was no good. The typhoid galloped over the land and took so many.”

  Mary paused again before the window, brushing the tears as fast as they came.

  “All I want is to go back into service. To be placed with a good master and a kind mistress and a household of children—oh, it would be heaven. But no—people decided that I was a pariah, that I was the bringer of misfortune! Absurd! Then he below heard of me and took me in and I was thrilled for a time because I thought I was to cook for the house and make myself useful.” She shook her head, drying her eyes with a square of linen. Her voiced hardened. “Instead, I am closeted here, almost always alone. My food comes up on a tray from below and my slops go down in a pot.”

  Confused as Tom was, he was struck through the heart by the young woman’s pain, and her beauty. While Tom stood dumbly, Mary took a towel and a white bedcover from a wardrobe and laid them on the divan. She retraced her steps, this time carrying a porcelain chamber pot from the wardrobe and sliding it beneath the long couch, blushing, with her eyes demurely averted. She said she regretted she had no dry clothes suitable for a young man but laid a red silk robe with the other things on the long couch and then seated herself at the desk, leaving Tom to himself. He was shivering.

  “Is the door not locked, then?” he said.

  “No door is locked save his. But no one moves in this household without him below knowing of it. Everyone here is a spy. Everyone.”

  She picked up the quill and dipped it in the ink pot. “Dry yourself or you’ll be ill. Sleep. I’m going to work for a bit.” She looked up at him. “What is your name?”

  “Tom. What do you write, Miss Withers?”

  The quill already was moving across the paper. “It is a history of the world.”

  Tom pulled off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in the sheer scarlet robe. He sat on the divan, watching Mary write. He found himself nodding with exhaustion. He swung his legs up, pulled the thin white blanket to his chin, and slept.

  Part III

  22

  Oxford

  The fog thickened in the night and settled in to stay. By morning the bells of the university town, ringing their changes, were muffled by the dense wet ai
r. Charles Field awoke in a cell with an aching head and possibly a broken rib or two. There was a man standing on the other side of the barred door, looking at him.

  “Good morning, Inspector Field. It’s me, Sergeant Willette.”

  Field nodded and lights flashed painfully through his skull.

  “You have caused quite a stir, I must say. Are you in much pain?”

  Field shook his head no and wished he hadn’t.

  “You’re being released into my care. There’s some paperwork to be got through first. Your constable Llewellyn is making a statement, he’ll be along.”

  “Constable Kilvert?” His lips were swollen; his speech was thick.

  “Llewellyn is here, sir.”

  “Kilvert?”

  Willette hesitated. “Your superior, Commissioner Mayne, has sent word. I’m to send you packing, sir. You’re to desist in your activities and return to town. It seems the commissioner had a strongly worded note from the Earl of Derby, Mr. Field. That’s the chancellor of the bloody university, in case you were unaware.”

  “Where is Kilvert?”

  Again there was a moment’s pause. “It’s because of that situation, sir, that I’m inclined to defer Commissioner Mayne’s directive, at least temporarily. This is, in fact, my patch, not his. I’ll give you a day, Field, if you want it.”

  “Kilvert?”

  “I am very, very sorry, sir.”

  Field dropped his head into his hands. There was a jangle of keys and the squeal of the barred door swinging open. The inspector looked up and saw an elderly jailer and, beside him, Sam Llewellyn, looking ashen.

  “Josiah is on his way to Kidwelly, sir. His people will be waiting for him at the station.”

  “Did he speak . . . ?”

  “Sang or whispered a song or two. I don’t think he knew he’d been stabbed.”

  Field nodded. He started to stand, then sat again, grasping his side. As he gingerly explored the painful area, his fingers discovered something in a waistcoat pocket.