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.
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?”
“I pray you, grant me an hour of your time.”
“I’ve never trusted the knave of clubs”—he retrieved the knave of hearts—“nor his lovelorn cousin, either. I shall exile ’em both from this afternoon’s tournament. Let me guess. You’re here concerning our ne’er-do-well father’s plight, which you imagine his ne’er-do-well son might remedy.”
“Listen, dear brother, and you’ll learn the solution to all our problems—yours, mine, and Papa’s. It involves a game so bold as to put your precious faro in the shadows.”
She took a long swallow of ginger beer, then told Algernon of the great prize and how she’d become privy to a scientific theory that bid fair to claim it. Any persuasive presentation of this argument required live, exotic creatures that she intended to procure by traveling to the Galápagos archipelago. The rakehells had already underwritten one such expedition, a hunt for Noah’s ark, so it seemed reasonable to suppose they would sponsor another.
With each successive revelation Algernon’s eyes increased in diameter. She couldn’t tell which aspect of her tale had most beguiled him—the size of the purse, her plan to sail around Cape Horn to the equator and then back to England, or her intention to pass off Mr. Darwin’s idea as her own—but in any event she felt emboldened to set forth the hypothesis itself, and so she offered up her narrative of bat wings and baby tails, horse hooves and porpoise paddles, whale teeth and Welshmen’s nipples.
“Being possessed of a hazy belief in a nebulous God, I’m not eager to cast my lot with atheism,” Algernon admitted. “That said, I shan’t reject your theory out of hand. The problem is simply this—I cannot make any sense of it.”
“We shall begin anew,” said Chloe, at once exasperated and galvanized. Leaning over the array of faceup cards, she extracted the knave, queen, king, and ace of diamonds, plus the deuce of spades. “Imagine that everyone in this den has become enamored of that great American bluffing game, poker. Let us further assume that, according to the house rules, a sequential run of royalty can turn the corner to embrace a deuce. Ergo, I’m holding a desirable hand—”
“A straight.”
“A straight, exactly: knave, queen, king, ace, deuce, likely to prosper once the final bet is called. Now suppose my environment changes, and I find myself in a different gaming establishment, such as—”
“The Tinker’s Damn!” cried Algernon.
“The Tinker’s Damn, where the rules forbid a leap to the deuce. Owing to its altered habitat, my hand has been enfeebled, a mere ace high. Destined for a quick death, it will leave no progeny behind.”
“Nothing would please me more than to say I follow your reasoning.”
“Now consider a different set of circumstances. I’m back in the Hook, pondering my round-the-corner straight, when I’m suddenly whisked away to—”
“The Drunken Lord!”
“The Drunken Lord, an establishment where aces aren’t allowed to leap but—voilà!—deuces are always wild, so that my two of spades has become—”
“A ten of diamonds, for a—”
“A royal flush, brimming with adaptive traits and thus certain to propagate those advantages through subsequent generations. Now do you follow my reasoning?”
“I know that royal flushes generally reign supreme, but does that mean I understand Mr. Darwin’s idea? If I had to make a wager, I’d say no.”
“You disappoint me, Algernon.”
“Chloe, ma chère, listen to your one and only twin brother. Whoever God might be, His divine self surely does not play at cards. I, on the other hand, do little else, and so I must take leave of you and attempt to turn my fifty quid into a hundred.”
“First you must agree to help me reach Galápagos.”
“I think not,” said Algernon, quaffing the dregs of his stout.
“Would you rather Papa dropped dead from breaking stones in a workhouse?”
Algernon rolled his eyes, pursed his lips, and, gathering up his playing cards, marched towards a corner of the room shrouded in a fug of cigar smoke and oil-lamp vapor. Chloe remained in the booth and sipped her ginger beer, her mind abuzz with her favorite passage from Mr. Darwin’s essay. “Amongst wild creatures,” he’d written, “the choice of a mate oft-times resides with the female.” In other words, a savannah was arguably more civilized than a city, for how could one improve upon an arrangement whereby a female bird or beast pondered a pool of suitors, weighed their respective merits, and selected the one who most struck her transmutational fancy?
Algernon returned sooner than Chloe expected, grim, stooped, and crestfallen. “Might I finish your drink?” he mumbled in the voice of a man noticing he’d forgotten to put on his trousers that morning. “My brain’s now so befuddled it can’t tell ginger beer from ale.”
She seized her glass and plunked it down before Algernon. “Having just lost fifty quid, the thought of winning ten thousand now appeals to you—am I correct?”
“I have a friend and fellow gambler,” he said, nodding, “one Merridew Runciter, a criminal of considerable accomplishment.” He drained the ginger beer in a single gulp. “Upon inheriting the brigantine Equinox from his late uncle, old Merry abandoned his scandalous vocation as a highwayman to pursue a respectable career in smuggling. I’m confident I can inveigle him into lending us his ship and assuming command.”
“That’s the spirit, brother,” said Chloe, assembling a fragile house from his playing cards. “You’ve caught the fever.”
“I suggest we offer the old rascal a five percent interest in the Shelley Prize, plus a second five percent to divide amongst his crew, which leaves us with a sum sufficient to free our father and feather our nests.” Algernon licked a lacy veil of foam from his mustache. “This is a bad business, sister—I hope you know that. As our Savior once remarked, there’s no profit in gaining the world only to lose one’s soul.”
“We’re not talking about the world, Algernon, merely ten thousand pounds.” She poked the house of cards, causing it to wobble and then collapse. “Let us gather our tortoises whilst we may, and let the Devil take the difference.”
* * *
True to Algernon’s prediction, Merridew Runciter proved eager to donate both his ship and his avarice to the lucrative cause of God’s demise. He drafted a statement explaining “to the Right Honorable Lord Woolfenden” that, as master of the brigantine Equinox, he would “lease said vessel to the Albion Transmutationist Club for the purpose of bearing biological specimens from the Galápagos archipelago to England.” Although attracting a crew would not be difficult—he need merely promise them pieces of the Shelley Prize—he hoped the Society would grant the expedition £300, so he might “provision the ship, repair the hull, and retain competent officers.”
On the ides of August, Chloe and Algernon visited the administrator of the Great God Contest, Mr. Gillivray, in whose Kensington offices all petitioners were required to audition. When he’d met with the Diluvian League, she speculated, Mr. Gillivray must have been particularly struck by their daguerreotypes of Noah’s ark, and so she’d resolved to impress him with an equally vivid prop. After introducing herself as a zookeeper and her brother as an importer of gaming supplies, she flourished a two-foot-high piece of shrubbery she’d pilfered from the Adelphi, all wire twigs and silk leaves, explaining that the world’s every bird and beast had come into being without divine assistance, as branches on a majestic but entirely natural Tree of Life. Mr. Gillivray listened carefully, frowned thoughtfully, and proclaimed that her presentation was certain to amuse his employers. Come Saturday the 22nd of September, she and her brother should betake themselves to 4 Mansfield Road, Oxford, arriving punctually at eight o’clock in the evening.
When the fateful day arrived, Chloe and Algernon boarded a crowded steam train out of Paddington Station, passing the two-hour journey to Oxford wedged into a compartment with four rowdy students, the wire tree sitting on her knees like a lap dog. Upon reaching their destination, she and her brother purchased meat pies from a street vendor and gobbled them down, forgoing the final bite to keep their fingers clean. They proceeded on foot along High Street, pausing to admire the spired splendor of University College, the institution from which Percy Shelley had been expelled for his essay celebrating atheism. Although darkness was coming on fast, Chloe could still make out the entablature above the door—a priest blessing a student, the surmounting caption reading Domimina Nustio Illumea, “The Lord Is My Light.”
They bid the stone scholar farewell, then followed the crenellated town wall to Alastor Hall, a three-storied, Corinthian-capitaled monstrosity dwarfing the adjacent structures, bowing only to honey-colored Mansfield College across the way. Chloe checked her brooch-watch: 7:30 p.m. A liveried footman answered Algernon’s knock, then admitted the contestants to the vestibule, a rotunda ringed by portrait heads of wrinkled Romans, each set on a pedestal. Outfitted in a white peruke and a peach cutaway coat, an ancient gentleman tottered into view, identifying himself as Lippert, the majordomo. After determining that the woman and her brother were the expected atheists, Lippert led them into an antechamber and bade them wait until Lord Woolfenden introduced the evening’s disproof of God. Whilst Algernon lounged on the méridienne, Chloe opened the library doors a crack and stared through the chink like Pyramus seeking a glimpse of Thisbe.
Her first impression of the Byssheans was that they cultivated so towering a caliber of fakery as to make Bulwer-Lytton’s ridiculous historical melodramas seem like eyewitness chronicles. Whereas Algernon had acquired his reputation as a lotus-eating sybarite by following his natural inclinations, these overdressed toffs (with their chalked faces, perfumed neckcloths, pomaded hair, and mistresses in dishabille) were merely playing roles, like actors strutting across the boards. Only one audience member aspired to respectability, being modestly attired and neatly coiffed—most likely the Evening Standard journalist, Mr. Popplewell.
A person of Falstaffian figure and Mephistophelean smile, Lord Woolfenden introduced the night’s first contestant as “Mr. Venables, instructor in entomology at Eton College.”
The petitioner, a squat dumpling of a man with a surfeit of chins, strode confidently towards the judges’ bench. From his valise he extracted three objects and set them on the dais: a big glass jar, a ceramic Star of David, and a globe the size of a Galápagos tortoise egg, mounted on a stand and painted to represent Earth’s moon.
Shifting her constricted gaze, Chloe surveyed the Anglican judges. Thanks to her familiarity with Mr. Darwin’s book collection, she quickly identified Professor Owen (whose choleric countenance decorated the title page of Report on British Fossil Reptiles) and also the Reverend Mr. Symonds (whose engraved portrait served as the frontispiece of Old Stones). It followed that the remaining Anglican, a somber and gangly young man, must be the Reverend Mr. Chadwick.
“The Argument from Cosmic Correlations turns on the improbably large number of symmetries in the universe,” Mr. Venables began, “all of them best understood as evidence planted by our Creator, that we might feel confident of His existence.” The contestant picked up the lunar globe, showing it to the judges. “Consider how, viewed from Earth, the diameter of the moon appears the same as that of the sun. Owing to this congruence, the human race is periodically awed by solar eclipses, those grand displays of indomitable sunbeams fringing our planet’s satellite. ‘God is real,’ the corona tells us. ‘God is love and light, eternally shining behind whatever lumps of woe might briefly block a person’s way in life.’”
Next Venables presented the bench with his Star of David. “Now consider this familiar image, sacred to God’s Chosen People. Not only does the Mogen David decorate many a synagogue, it also adorns the heavens. For as every schoolboy knows, our planet revolves about the sun accompanied by six other such bodies: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus—that’s right, six, the number of vertices that define a Star of David. ‘God is near,’ the configuration tells us. ‘Even before the Creator revealed Himself to the Hebrews, He had announced Himself to all Mankind.’”
The petitioner removed a brass bell from his vest pocket and rang it vigorously. An instant later Lippert and the footman appeared, straightaway making a circuit of the library, snuffing candles and stanching gas lamps. The resulting darkness drew everyone’s attention to the glass jar, which—mirabile dictu—was filled with tiny twinkling lights.
“Behold those creatures called fireflies,” said Venables, displaying the luminous receptacle to the judges. “After my uncle in Pennsylvania shipped me the necessary chrysalises, I raised seven generations at Eton. Of a summer night nothing delights me more than to release a colony of fireflies in my orchard and watch them flashing against the vault of Heaven until they become indistinguishable from the stars. The message could scarcely be clearer. Just as God made every fire that burns in the sky, so did He fashion every beast that crawls upon the Earth.”
Whilst Lippert and the footman reignited the candles and turned on the gas lamps, a plump woman—the notorious Lady Isadora, no doubt—invited the judges to evaluate Mr. Venables’s efforts.
“This is perhaps the most persuasive demonstration we’ve encountered thus far,” insisted Professor Owen. “I’m quite prepared to reward our visiting entomologist.”
“Aquinas argued that a doubter might find his way to God through reason alone,” said Mr. Symonds. “Our contestant’s fiery insects illuminate that very path.”
“Though I appreciate the cleverness of Mr. Venables’s correlations,” said Mr. Chadwick, “I cannot give this presentation my assent, for his examples seem to me arbitrary in the extreme.”
The first freethinker to speak was Mr. Holyoake, whose bulbous nose and profuse side-whiskers Chloe recalled from an engraving accompanying a newspaper account of his trial. “The Correlative Proof has always suffered from a fatal statistical naiveté,” the convicted blasphemer began. “A one-in-a-million event cannot be thought supernatural if there are a million opportunities for it to occur. Because our planet is home to a vast insect population comprising hundreds of thousands of species, it would be surprising not to find one or more kinds endowed with the trait of phosphorescence.”
Next to speak was a hatchet-faced woman—this had to be Miss Martineau—holding an ear trumpet and dressed in black crêpe, as if in mourning for the Deity in whom she did not believe. “Here’s another fact Mr. Venables won’t find soothing: the Earth’s celestial brethren no longer number six, the planet Neptune having been observed and named three years ago. Let me suggest that, if our guest wishes to corroborate God through astronomy, he should keep abreast of the field.”
Last to hold forth was a nondescript gentleman whom, by process of elimination, Chloe identified as Mr. Atkinson. “The philosopher David Hume put it well. The human ego is predisposed to, quote, ‘spread itself on the world,’ projecting private prejudices onto public domains. Mr. Venables’s globe, star, and fireflies are no more theologically significant than those other phenomena in which we see meanings that aren’t there, such as clouds, crystals, tea leaves, and ink stains.”
For a prolonged and poignant moment Mr. Venables stared blankly into space, fuming silently. Lord Woolfenden thanked the contestant for diverting the Byssheans with his “lambent though fallacious God proof,” then abruptly dismissed him.
An intermission ensued, during which the rakehells indulged in a majority of the sins on view in Seven Dials.
“Tonight’s atheist presentation will come from Miss Chloe Bathurst, formerly of the Adelphi Theatre Company,” said Lord Woolfenden upon reconvening the contest. “Since leaving the stage, she has pursued a career as a naturalist and currently presides over the Albion Transmutationist Club. Assisted by her brother, Mr. Algernon Bathurst, a dealer in gaming implements, she will enlighten us with a theory drawn from her zoological ruminations.”
Affecting a confident air, and doing so with such skill as to feel appreciably imperturbable, Chloe swooped into the library, leafy prop in hand, Algernon at her side. “Behold the Tree of Life!” she exclaimed, setting the little bush on the dais. “No, I do not show you a sacred shrub from Eden, for this specimen is of a quite different order. Gourmands agree that, although its fruits may at first burn the tongue like gall, in time they come to taste sweet as honey!”
Having delivered her carefully rehearsed prologue, she proceeded to improvise a tissue of lies, declaring that, as the keeper of a large private menagerie, she had oft-times found herself in conversation with “scientists who roam the world collecting biological specimens.” Over the years her curiosity had been aroused by travelers’ accounts of “creatures that belong to different species yet retain membership in one grand family or another—the finches, thrushes, turtles, vipers, toads, and so forth.” Inevitably she’d found herself wondering “why God would make so many kinds to so little purpose.” The more she thought about the problem, the more convinced she’d become that, by appealing to natural processes of selection and transmutation, “we can trace each particular type of plant and animal back through countless generations and innumerable varieties to one primordial creature, just as each leaf on this shrub leads to a branch that then takes us to the trunk, which in turn brings us to the taproot, from which we may infer an original seed.”
Every eye in the library, she sensed, was fixed on her face and form. Each ear was attuned to her voice. Even the surrounding ramparts of books seemed alive to her words.
“I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, where and when in this grand spectacle of unsupervised speciation must God appear? Where and when do we need the flashy theatrics of Genesis chapter one? I answer as follows: nowhere and never.”
Miss Martineau said, “So it’s your contention that all living things owe their existence to a single germ cell?”
“Correct.”
“Not excluding Man himself?”
“That’s right.”
“What an exhilarating idea!” exclaimed Miss Martineau.
“‘Not excluding Man himself,’” echoed Mr. Holyoake. “I’m glad you warned me, Miss Bathurst, lest I betray an unseemly surprise when a baboon shows up at the next Holyoake family reunion.”
“My theory does not count baboons, chimpanzees, gorillas, or orang-utangs amongst your progenitors,” Chloe explained. “It suggests, rather, that today’s humans and modern apes boast an extinct common ancestor.”
“Fiddlesticks,” said Professor Owen. “For my money, your shrub is no more a disproof of God than an elf is an elephant.”
“I shall make one point in the petitioner’s favor,” said Mr. Chadwick. “To wit, I do not understand her argument and therefore scruple to call it worthless.”
“I confess to sharing the vicar’s perplexity,” said Woolfenden, whereupon the other rakehells murmured in agreement.
“Might I lay a proposition before this august body?” asked Chloe. “Sponsor an expedition to the faraway Galápagos archipelago, for it happens that those volcanic islands harbor vivid illustrations of my theory. I speak now of certain rare giant tortoises, bizarre marine iguanas, and strange terrestrial lizards—plus uncommon finches, flycatchers, and mockingbirds. To see such specimens in the flesh is to know that transmutation has occurred on our planet time and again.”
“We have already secured a ship and a captain,” noted Algernon, handing Runciter’s letter to Lord Woolfenden. “Were you to grant us three hundred pounds with which to engage officers, lay in supplies, and caulk the Equinox’s hull, we could set sail within a month, returning to Oxford in less than a year.”
“In summary, just as the Diluvian League asked the Shelley Society to finance a hunt for Noah’s ark,” said Chloe, “so do we now beseech you to patronize our quest for the Tree of Life. Give us the funds, plus a written commission whereby we might attract a crew, and we shall settle this pesky God question once and for all.”
“We’re prepared to endorse your project and seed it with cash, Miss Bathurst, provided that a majority of our judges is sympathetic,” said Woolfenden. “I assume that our freethinkers are keen to have you fetch these wondrous reptiles and birds.”
“Bring ’em on,” said Atkinson.
“I yearn to ride about town astride a giant tortoise,” said Miss Martineau.
“By its fruits ye shall know the Tree of Life,” declared Holyoake.
“Whereas our Anglicans are probably less eager to see you sail away on the Equinox,” said Woolfenden.
“The proposed expedition would be a waste of everyone’s time,” said Symonds.
A nay vote—and yet Chloe heard in his voice a whiff of equivocation.
“The object of Miss Bathurst’s quest is not a tree but a weed of corrupt pedigree,” said Owen.
Another nay vote—but again she detected a note of doubt.
Before delivering his verdict, Mr. Chadwick rose from the bench and stood at full height. Despite a certain gawkiness, the man cut an impressive figure. Chloe suspected that half the ewes in his flock accepted the Jehovah hypothesis largely in consequence of their infatuation with this bony Quixote of a cleric.
“I’ve already noted that Miss Bathurst’s argument eludes me in the main, and what I do comprehend of it strikes me as dubious at best.”
Chloe’s palms grew moist. Her bowels contracted into a knot of dread.
“Now permit me to fence with myself,” Mr. Chadwick continued. “I cannot but recall Mr. Holyoake’s response when asked to sanction the Diluvian League’s mission. An atheist, he insisted, has naught to fear from the facts. Surely the same holds true for a Christian. And so I say, ‘Send Miss Bathurst to Galápagos!’”
A mellifluous warmth rushed through Chloe’s veins. With a single sentence the Reverend Mr. Chadwick had crystallized the conditions whereby she might rescue Papa from the jaws of privation, pluck Algernon from the clutches of dissolution, and be awarded the plummiest part an actress could ever hope to play. Strutting towards the judges’ bench, she ascended the dais and pointed to the illustrative shrub.
“Until I come back from Galápagos, bearing the Tree of Life, you will have to make do with this facsimile,” she said. “I know you will supply it with the best imitation water and the finest artificial sunlight.” She turned and, humming the bawdy ballad through which Jack Rackham had wooed Anne Bonney, followed her little brother out of the library.
* * *
Although the Reverend Granville Heathway did not particularly mind his incarceration in Wormleighton Sanitarium, the food being palatable, his keepers agreeable, the appointments generous—he even had an escritoire—and the view from his barred window a pastoral panorama complete with shepherd, flock, and meadow, he worried that his residency in a lunatic asylum might prompt some people to suppose he’d gone mad. In Granville’s opinion his recent change of address, from his Down Village parsonage to this Warwickshire barmy bin, did not bespeak a permanent loss of reason. He’d simply mislaid that faculty for the moment, the better to travel unimpeded through his mind’s many terrae incognitae.
True, prior to his internment, Granville had exhibited behaviors that arguably indicated lunacy. His project of eating the Book of Revelation, for example. Just as the medieval Rabbi Löew had nourished his clay golem by feeding it written prayers, so had Granville sustained his soul by attempting to devour the Apocalypse. He’d gotten as far as the Whore of Babylon, whereupon his beloved Evelyn, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, declared that she would walk out the parsonage door and never return if he consumed even one more vision of Saint John the Divine.
But it was not until Granville had begun scouring the countryside for scarecrows and setting them on fire that Evelyn arranged for his residency at Wormleighton. The failure of his fellow Englishmen to appreciate the scarecrow menace was for Granville a continual source of frustration. By day these effigies were benign, keeping the nation’s crops from harm, but at night they transmogrified into agents of Satan, suffocating innocent citizens in their beds by cramming straw down their throats.
His promise to enter Wormleighton quietly had turned on two conditions. First, he must be allowed to bring along a dovecote, some unhatched pigeon eggs, and a hot-water bottle to serve as an incubator. Second, if the Mayfair Diluvian League, of which he was a charter member, ever mounted its search for Noah’s ark, the explorers must send him regular reports via the first generation of pigeons he raised in the asylum. Initially the leader of the hunt, the Reverend Mr. Dalrymple, dismissed this request as “the quintessence of impracticality.” But then Granville’s son, Bertram, having absented himself from his teaching duties at St. Giles Grammar School and joined the company of H.M.S. Paragon, agreed to collect all eight pigeons from his father’s cell, secure them aboard the ship, and dispatch them sequentially as the expedition progressed.
Right before they’d bid each other good-bye, Granville had received Bertram’s promise that the first pigeon he released would be Cassandra (the most intelligent of the birds and the one most likely to find her way back to the asylum). Day after day, Granville sat in his white-walled room, his gaze alternating between the window and the empty dovecote. Where was Cassandra? Had she fallen prey to a hawk? Gotten waylaid by a storm? Blasted from the sky by a scarecrow wielding a fowling piece?
And then one morning, shortly after Granville had consumed his breakfast of kippers and buttered oatmeal (not as nourishing as the Apocalypse but still savory), Cassandra came winging through the window bars, warbling triumphantly. O glorious dove! O blessed bird! O angel with a tawny beak! For a full minute she circled the cell, at last settling atop the cote. Deftly Granville unstrapped the capsule from her leg, then extracted and unfurled the scrip, only to be astonished by the minuscule hand in which Bertram had written his message.
Fortunately, amongst the personal effects permitted to Granville was a brass-framed quizzing-glass for reading Holy Writ (his keepers having allowed him a Bible after he’d sworn not to eat it). The device proved equal to the infinitesimal, recovering Bertram’s words from the microscopic realm and displaying them before Granville’s incredulous gaze.
Dearest Father,
Greetings from the Orient! I hope that this, the first of my dispatches, finds you in better spirits than when we sat in the asylum garden discussing my imminent adventure and your recent internment. How infuriating that your keepers have failed to understand that your present mental state is in fact an extravagant form of sanity.
The month of August found us navigating the Mediterranean Sea, dropping anchor off the fabled isle of Crete. After reprovisioning in Ierápetra, we negotiated the Dardanelles, then crossed the Marmara and set our course for the Bosporus, until at last we reached the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
Constantinople! Has ever a city been blessed with a more euphonic name? Speak the word slowly. Con-stan-ti-no-ple. Do you hear the enchantment in those syllables, Father? I’m sure you do, for this is the most mysterious, beautiful, and—if one believes the stories about a local hookah-den—magical metropolis on Earth.
Thirteen of Sultan Abdülmecid’s courtiers awaited us on the docks, a delegation headed by the Grand Vizier, Mustafa Reshid Pasha, an urbane person with a remarkable beard, long and curved like a scimitar. I soon inferred that, prior to our departure, the Reverend Mr. Dalrymple had corresponded in French with Mustafa Reshid, who’d mastered that tongue during his diplomatic missions to Paris. And now these two worldly gentlemen were finally meeting face-to-face.
Mustafa Reshid and the courtiers directed our party into a coach drawn by four Arabian horses. Our first stop was the Hippodrome, built by the Romans as a chariot-racing arena and presently employed by the Turks for their own equestrian spectacles. Then came Hagia Sophia, formerly a Byzantine church, now a mosque ringed by soaring minarets. Next we saw the forum of Constantine, featuring an immense Roman column believed to contain, in the Grand Vizier’s words, “evidence that we are indeed in the land of Noah, including the adz with which he built the ark and the skull of the first African lion to come on board.”
The most curious item on our itinerary was the Hookah-Den of Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin. Given the lateness of the hour, Mustafa Reshid declined to take us inside, but he assured us we weren’t missing much. He called it “a rank and shoddy establishment” that stayed in business only in consequence of “a legend more fabulous than anything Scheherazade ever told the Persian King.”
“Let me guess,” said Captain Deardon. “The ghost of Sinbad the Sailor is in there right now, puffing on a water-pipe and recounting his escape from a cyclops.”
“You are close to the mark,” said the Grand Vizier. “Our more credulous citizens will tell you that the den is frozen in the Christian year A.D. 1000, at the height of the Byzantine Empire, drawing its customers not only from distant towns and faraway lands but also from epochs yet to come.”
“That makes no sense,” I observed.
“You are correct, Effendi. The claim strains credulity. My bodyguards patronize Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin, and they have yet to meet a pilgrim from the future. Still, there is a certain logic to the legend. Constantinople has always been an intellectual crossroads, a place where a mad philosopher, visionary poet, or wandering soothsayer might find a sympathetic audience—and so in His beneficence Allah exempted one tiny patch of Byzantium from the laws of time and chance.”
As dusk shrouded the city, the Grand Vizier escorted our party to the Topkapi Palace with its spectacular view of the harbor. After assigning each of us a private suite, Reshid Pasha’s majordomo explained that we would next descend to the southwest courtyard, shed our clothing, and avail ourselves of “that most civilized of amenities, a haman,” by which he meant a Turkish steam bath. Striving mightily to avoid giving insult, Mr. Dalrymple explained that we English do not have nakedness in our culture, then hastened to add that he had no objection to public bathing per se, especially not the sort practiced in Constantinople.
The following morning, as we all sat in an elegant salon eating bread, cheese, honey, and fruit whilst drinking preternaturally strong coffee, I came to understand that the bond between Reshid Pasha and Mr. Dalrymple is more in the nature of a treaty than a friendship. It seems that several months ago they struck an accord whereby the Grand Vizier would assist the Diluvian League in excavating Noah’s ark, reprovisioning the Paragon, and granting both vessels safe passage through the Bosporus. For his part, Dalrymple will intercede with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who will in turn urge Her Majesty to form an alliance with the Ottoman Empire prior to Turkey’s coming clash with Russia (an inevitable conflict, Reshid Pasha believes, given the Tsar’s desire to drive the Moslem infidel out of Europe).
For the remainder of our repast, we discussed what lay ahead for the Diluvian League—a 700-mile voyage to Trebizond, followed by a 180-mile overland passage. Reshid Pasha proposed not only to equip the expedition with victuals, sweet water, sailcloth, rope, and sledges but also to lend it the talents of Ahmed Silahdar, commander of his bodyguards, who has considerable experience negotiating the harsh terrain of Anatolia. Most auspiciously, Captain Silahdar will bring along his twenty best men.
Ere the conversation ended, I learned to my astonishment that Reshid Pasha endorses the Diluvian League’s mission (which he sees as “a quest to glorify Almighty Allah and by extension the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him”). Nevertheless, he has misgivings, which he did not forbear to share with Mr. Dalrymple—to wit, he is reluctant to commit soldiers and supplies to an Ararat adventure when, according to the Holy Koran, the ark resides on Mount Al-Judi. By our third bowl of coffee a compromise was reached. Initially the party will search the location suggested by Genesis 8:4, but should that venture fail, everyone will proceed to the place specified in Sura 11:44. I hope Mr. Dalrymple performs a meticulous survey of Ararat. How scandalous it would be if the League left the true Judaic ark sitting where Noah abandoned it and instead brought back a false Moslem ark from Al-Judi.
When the Paragon sails again, I shan’t be amongst her passengers. True, I could accompany the expedition as far as Trebizond—but then I would have to stay on board, tending the birds, for Captain Deardon has told me he cannot allow his crew or Silahdar’s men to “waste their energy bearing the dovecote south to Ararat.” So it appears that the next three months will find me in residence at the palace. One day soon I may revisit Hagia Sophia, the better to appreciate its splendor. I may even slip into Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin’s establishment, though I doubt that I’ll encounter any travelers from the future.
Your loving son,
Bertram
Upon reading his son’s message, Granville knitted his brow and furled the scrip, as momentous in its own way as the paper prayers that had nourished Rabbi Löew’s golem. He deposited the pigeon missive in the drawer of his nightstand. Although the news from Constantinople was heartening—how marvelous that the Grand Vizier had decided to help facilitate the ark hunt—Granville was troubled by Bertram’s dismissal of the Hookah-Den of Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin. Once again the dear boy was being unreasonably chary of the irrational. To paraphrase Saint Anselm’s Ontological Proof, the only thing more perfect than an imaginary way station for time travelers would be an actual way station for time travelers, and because a person can conceive of such a place it must ipso facto exist.
Certainly Granville, if given the opportunity, would gladly enter Yusuf Effendi’s establishment and sit down amongst the water-pipe users. The chances were excellent that the hookah-den would one day be honored with a visit from Jesus himself—not the Galilean carpenter of the Gospels, of course, but rather the Lord of the Parousia, eager for some peace and quiet amidst the hurly-burly of the Second Coming. Granville would happily buy Christ a bag of hashish and listen to his troubles. It was the least he owed the Word made flesh.
* * *
Although Chloe Bathurst’s acting career officially began with The Haunted Priory, her stage debut had in fact occurred in a school pageant written and directed by her parish priest. Chloe had portrayed Little Aggie Teal, whose parents had neglected to baptize her, a lapse that assumed cosmic proportions when, after being run down by a horse, she arrived unshriven at the gates of Perdition. Before Satan could take the child under his membranous wing, the Redeemer himself materialized in the Bottomless Pit bearing a christening font (a development that, even at age ten, Chloe thought inane). Aggie begged to be sprinkled, Jesus complied, and she was whisked heavenward like smoke up a flue.
Fifteen years later, as Chloe and Algernon approached their father’s place of imprisonment, her irony bone began to sing. Whereas the fake Hell that had nearly claimed Aggie Teal announced itself as Lucifer’s domain, all leaping flames and prancing imps, the real Hell of Holborn Workhouse presented to the world a soothing and fastidious aspect. Its stone façade was whitewashed, the path neatly raked, the hedges meticulously trimmed.
The inner reaches told, or rather exuded, a different story—a narrative of fumigants locked in a losing battle with proliferating vermin and unemptied chamber pots. After wandering the facility for several minutes, Chloe and Algernon found their way to a courtyard where the cottage of the superintendent, Mr. Wadhams, stood in isolation from the stench. Upon learning that the intruders were Phineas Bathurst’s offspring, Wadhams, a pompous autocrat who seemed to be concealing turnips beneath his waistcoat, insisted that, contrary to whatever rumors their father might have circulated during his furlough, he was neither underfed nor overworked. As for the proposed visit, Wadhams would allow it provided Mr. Bathurst continued picking oakum throughout and received from his children no gift of food or spirits.
The superintendent now summoned a cudgel-carrying overseer, one Squibble, who led Chloe and her brother down a spiral staircase to a subterranean chamber lit only by ensconced candles. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, a grid of refectory tables materialized, each piled high with rigging and towlines. Dressed in paupers’ uniforms and supervised by two sentinels armed with truncheons, the inmates took no notice of the newly arrived party but instead pursued their bloody-fingered toil, tearing apart the ropes and shoving the wads of fiber into bushel baskets. Squibble cleared his throat, then thrice banged his cudgel on the stone floor, the harsh reports echoing off the moist walls. Seated at the nearest table, flanked by a pockmarked man and a snaggle-toothed woman, Phineas Bathurst looked up, squinted through the murk, and, recognizing his daughter, smiled like a child eating Christmas pudding.
“Chloe!” he cried, rising to receive her embrace.
“Papa!”
“Keep plucking, Bathurst!” snarled Squibble. “This is a workhouse, not a mineral spring!”
“I see you’ve brought my prodigal son,” said Phineas.
“Good morning, Father,” said Algernon.
“He might be prodigal, but at least he visits,” said the pockmarked man.
“Perhaps my children will show up someday,” said the snaggle-toothed woman, “though the odds are better that Wadhams will install an oakum-picking machine down ’ere and pay us two quid a day to drink gin and watch it run.”
“When last we talked, you were supporting yourself primarily through vicissitudes,” said Phineas, fixing his son with a reproving stare.
“That is still the case,” said Algernon. “Vicissitudes have always done right by me, and they continue to claim my allegiance.”
“If you’re determined to waste your life at basset and faro, you should at least waste it in style,” said Phineas. “I pray you, become the Robin Hood of cardsharpers, cheating wealthy gamesters and giving half your profits to the poor.”
“Time is short,” said Chloe, “but our message is simple.” Bending low, she whispered in her father’s ear. “Your children are soon to undertake a long—and profitable—sea voyage.”
“It’s all true, sir,” rasped Algernon. “Our scheme enjoys the endorsement of twenty Oxford dandies, three renowned blasphemers, and the Vicar of Wroxton. Your deliverance is at hand.”
The news of his children’s proximity to wealth had an immediate effect on Phineas. Whistling a sprightly air, he rooted through the jumble of rope and selected two equal segments, one of hemp, the other of jute. With his torn but nimble fingers he sculpted the cords into hangman’s nooses, then brought both creations to life.
“Ere my retirement to this establishment,” the hemp noose declared, “I cleansed the world of nearly three hundred murderers, includin’ nine Bombay thuggees, two regicides, and a Lambeth maniac specializin’ in streetwalkers.”
“An impressive record,” the jute noose conceded, “but mine’s more remarkable yet, for in my day I strangled sixty men sent to the gallows on false testimony.”
“How can you boast of such a thing?” asked the hemp noose.
“When a government executes its citizens willy-nilly,” replied the jute noose, “the people grow fearful, accordin’ their rulers the blindest sort of obedience. I’m proud to have made my small contribution to England’s social stability.”
The pockmarked man bobbed his head approvingly. “’Tis common knowledge that half the hangings at Newgate send blameless souls to oblivion.”
“This visit has ended,” declared Squibble. “Phineas Bathurst, you will speak no more treasonous bilge within these walls, lest you yourself become a candidate for the scaffold.”
“Executin’ treason-mongers a speciality,” bragged the jute noose.
“Upon my return to England, I shall systematically employ this country’s gambling dens in redistributing the Empire’s wealth,” Algernon promised his father.
“We love you, Papa,” said Chloe as Squibble ushered her towards the stairs. “Even as we seek our fortune in the New World, you will never be far from our thoughts.”
“Be thee well,” said Phineas.
“Good luck,” said the hemp noose.
“Godspeed,” said the jute noose.
* * *
Whereas Miss Bathurst’s dubious baboon theory of human origins was, as far as Malcolm Chadwick could determine, a monolithic hypothesis, not yet fractured into competing varieties, Samuel Wilberforce’s nickname—“Soapy Sam”—enjoyed no such scholarly unanimity. One theory traced the epithet to the bubble-light quality of the bishop’s sermons. Another explanation referenced his habit of punctuating his speeches with a florid hand-washing gesture. The least sympathetic conjecture turned on Wilberforce’s slick and slippery practice of passing off a parody of an opponent’s position as an accurate paraphrase, a skill through which he routinely won philosophical arguments without resorting to reasoned discourse.
Summoned to the bishop’s elegant Oxford abode four days after Miss Bathurst’s presentation, Malcolm knew he was about to encounter neither Sam of the frothy homilies nor Sam of the spotless hands but the third Wilberforce, the crafty polemicist. The bishop intended to scold him, as he often did in the wake of a Shelley Society meeting. Malcolm was still smarting from Wilberforce’s reproach following the most recent appearance at Alastor Hall of the Argument from Evil. “According to the Evening Standard, you unhorsed the contestant through Leibniz’s observation that ours is the best of all possible worlds,” said the bishop. “I especially appreciated your coda, ‘emphasis on the possible.’ Splendid. Of course, you might have given an example of God deferring to necessity. I myself would have adduced the case of bone. The Creator had no choice but to make our skeletons vulnerable to breakage, for otherwise we’d be unable to move.”
Upon answering Malcolm’s knock, Wilberforce’s grouchy and officious butler guided him into the oak-paneled privacy of the library, where the reading table held a splayed copy of the Evening Standard. ATHEIST JUDGES UNIMPRESSED BY COSMIC CORRELATIONS, shouted the page three headline, but it was the subheading that had probably caught Wilberforce’s attention: FREETHINKING FEMALE NATURALIST TO SEEK PROFANE “TREE OF LIFE.” The paragraphs concerning Miss Bathurst featured quotations from prominent Oxonians, including barrister Andrew Peach, don Wilfred Glenister, physician Amos Crichlow, and rector Simon Hallowborn, who’d called her, respectively, “a deluded fool,” “an obstreperous wench,” “a conceited troublemaker,” and “the Covent Garden Antichrist.”
Though hardly an antichrist, Miss Bathurst was surely amongst the most unappetizing persons Malcolm had ever met. Unlike other contestants of scientific bent, this flighty zookeeper seemed not to care particularly whether God existed, just so long as she pocketed the £10,000. Should he ever become inspired to write an ode to womanly intellect, he would select as his subject not the unprincipled Chloe Bathurst but the formidable Harriet Martineau. Despite her ungainly ear trumpet and intractable atheism, Miss Martineau remained for Malcolm the paragon of her sex.
“By rights I should be furious with you,” boomed Wilberforce, rushing into the library like a diminutive but implacable tornado. “You could have nipped Miss Bathurst’s preposterous argument in the bud, but instead you handed her a ticket to Ecuador.”
“If her argument is preposterous, we have naught to fear from it,” said Malcolm.
“Don’t waggle your Aristotle at me, sir,” said Wilberforce. “On the face of it you’ve bungled this whole affair—yet I believe you may have dealt the Devil a deuce.”
“How so?”
Wilberforce sidled towards the shelves devoted to printed sermons, including his own collection, Sabbath Orations for All Occasions, a volume thick with (in Malcolm’s view) feeble theodicies and anemic exegesis. “By ratifying Miss Bathurst’s quest, you have guaranteed that the judges will hear no more of transmutation for at least a year.”
“Which gives us time to detect the flaws in her idea,” noted Malcolm.
“Better yet, it gives us time to learn where she got it in the first place,” said Wilberforce.
“You don’t believe the hypothesis is original with her?” asked Malcolm, entering an alcove reserved to Martin Luther and John Calvin, twenty tattered volumes, their bindings now gutters for dust. Evidently Wilberforce hadn’t visited the Reformation in years.
“Recall that Miss Bathurst is by training an actress, once employed by such sordid emporia as the Adelphi Theatre,” said the bishop. “Are we really to believe that a scatterbrained thespian devised this Tree of Life persiflage on her own? Mark my words, she stole the theory from some real scientist. We must locate the man and alert him to the theft.”
“And once he realizes what mischief is afoot, he’ll come to Alastor Hall and explain why his conjectures don’t constitute a disproof of God—is that what you have in mind?”
“Precisely,” said Wilberforce, lathering his hands, “which is why I’m giving you a new assignment. Miss Bathurst surely appreciates your recent patronage, so you should have no trouble gaining her trust and learning the origin of her species theory. Indeed, I suspect you’ll have coaxed the cat from the bag long before the Equinox rounds the Horn.”
“Good Lord, Sam, are you suggesting I accompany her on the voyage?”
“No, Malcolm, I’m insisting you accompany her.”
“An order from my bishop?”
Wilberforce nodded emphatically. “It’s all been arranged. For the humbling sum of two hundred pounds, Captain Runciter will engage you as ship’s chaplain.”
“Two hundred pounds is not humbling. It’s twice what I make in a year of sermonizing on dry land.”
“Runciter is not paying you,” Wilberforce explained. “The Diocese is paying him to take you on. An unsavory arrangement, but the best we could manage on short notice.”
“I’m entirely the wrong man for the job,” protested Malcolm. “From the moment I clamped eyes on her, I found in Miss Bathurst a person of unbridled arrogance and unmitigated egotism.”
“Quite possibly she has a different opinion of herself. The two of you will have much to talk about. If you’re wondering who might replace you on the judges’ bench, fear not. Owen and Symonds have welcomed me into their fellowship.”
Taking Malcolm’s arm, Wilberforce propelled him through a set of French doors into the sun-dappled conservatory beyond. The room contained three trilling nightingales in a wicker cage plus two somber men in recumbent postures, one lounging on a divan, the other sprawled across a couch, the first dressed in the blue uniform of a naval commander, the second wearing the immaculate cassock and clean white bib of a cleric who could afford either a laundress or a wife. The bishop made the introductions, presenting Captain Adrian Garrity, “master of the Antares, leaving Bristol three weeks hence for the Galápagos archipelago,” and Mr. Simon Hallowborn, “servant of the Lord and passenger on that same brig,” to Malcolm Chadwick, “the canniest advocate God ever had,” then poured everyone sherry from a crystal decanter.
“The Encantadas have become a popular destination,” Malcolm observed.
The pallid and sinewy Simon Hallowborn rose and took a swallow of wine, setting his glass atop the piano lid. “Every fortnight I read the Standard, eager to learn of your latest adventure amongst the rakehells.”
“And I’ve seen your name in that same paper,” said Malcolm. “I suspect the epithet you contrived for Miss Bathurst, ‘Covent Garden Antichrist,’ is going to stick.”
“Allow me to state the obvious,” said the rector. “The Church owes you a debt of gratitude for defeating every supposed disproof to cross your path, thus exposing this contest as the ludicrous national distraction it has become.”
“A distraction, exactly,” said Wilberforce. “And yet I worry that even if Miss Bathurst’s Tree of Life dies a dog’s death at Alastor Hall, it may eventually flourish elsewhere in Britain. I’m pleased to report that at last month’s General Synod we took steps to preclude that possibility.”
“It’s a devilishly dexterous scheme,” said Captain Garrity, a lantern-jawed giant who looked capable of severing a towline with his teeth.
“Dexterous, to be sure,” said Wilberforce, “but the Devil had naught to do with it.”
Fearing that he was about to hear something ignoble, Malcolm drifted into the vicinity of the caged nightingales and attempted to calm himself with their song. Bequeath to transmutationism the world’s finest lathe, he mused, give it a flawless loom, a perfect kiln, and still it could never fashion such creatures without divine assistance.
“When the rector and I set sail for Galápagos, our passengers will include scores of criminals from Dartmoor Prison, all slated to reinvigorate an Ecuadorian penal colony on Charles Isle,” said Garrity. “The overseers in Quito call the place Ciudad del Diablo, the Devil’s City—‘Mephistropolis’ on all the Royal Navy’s maps.”
“To understand Her Majesty’s unusual interest in Mephistropolis,” said Hallowborn, “we must go back nineteen years to the moment when a young American frontiersman, one Orrin Eggwort, took title to Charles Isle. Evidently Eggwort had fought with great valor during Ecuador’s war of independence, and so President Flores awarded him his own private island. Eggwort lost no time turning his portion of Galápagos into some sort of Christian utopia and appointing himself emperor—that’s right, emperor—as well as de facto administrator of the penal colony.”
“With the coming of the Antares,” said Wilberforce, “the population of Mephistropolis will increase by ninety-two English-born convicts—four times the number of Ecuadorian inmates—a figure sufficient to make Charles Isle of a piece with Her Majesty’s global penal system. The present Galápagos governor, one Jonathan Stopsack, should then have no difficulty breaking Eggwort to the rank of figurehead and assuming jurisdiction over the whole archipelago, per the 1832 agreement between London and Quito making the Encantadas at once a British protectorate and an Ecuadorian possession.”
A disconcerting grin claimed Hallowborn’s face. “Beyond their political utility, our ninety-two prisoners will have a spiritual mission as well. Upon disembarking, they will perform a boon on God’s behalf.”
Malcolm winced and took a long sip of sherry.
“The General Synod, as it happens, was gifted with a twofold revelation concerning the reptiles and birds with which Miss Bathurst intends to demonstrate her theory,” said Wilberforce. “First revelation: these creatures are so unloved by Providence that we should regard them as the very spawn of Satan.”
“When the Bishop of Panama stumbled upon Galápagos in 1535,” added Hallowborn in a tone of corroboration, “he thought he’d found the Devil’s pied-à-terre.”
“Second revelation: nothing would please God more than the elimination of these demonic beasts,” said Wilberforce.
“Elimination?” said Malcolm, dumbfounded.
Garrity replied, “My sailors will get rid of the birds: you may be sure we’re not about to give fowling pieces to criminals—they’ll receive only machetes for the lizards and wire garrotes for the tortoises. If the convicts do their jobs properly, Governor Stopsack will reduce their sentences accordingly.”
“We call it the Great Winnowing,” added Hallowborn.
The sherry suddenly turned against Malcolm, causing his brain to reel and waves of nausea to roll through his stomach. “What an appalling idea.”
“A deadly poison demands a strong emetic,” said Wilberforce, clasping Malcolm’s shoulder. “Do you remember how John the Baptist called for every unwholesome tree to be cut down and thrown into the fire? For John alone knew that Christ had come, ‘whose winnowing-fan is in his hand, and he will purge his threshing-floor.’ So shall we scrape Galápagos clean of its wicked finches, depraved mockingbirds, fallen tortoises, and sinful lizards.”
“If there’s a biblical precedent for your scheme,” asserted Malcolm, cringing internally, “it would be the massacre by which Herod sought to murder our Savior in his crib.”
“Do not confuse a slaughter of the innocents with a cleansing of the corrupt,” said Hallowborn.
“I want no part of this horrid plot,” said Malcolm.
“Nor do we ask you to take one,” said Wilberforce. “We merely request that throughout your passage to Galápagos you refrain from speaking of the Great Winnowing. And, of course, once it becomes known aboard the Equinox that the Encantadas have been harrowed, you must not reveal that the Anglican Communion lent Heaven a hand.”
Seeking to settle his stomach, Malcolm entered into what he imagined was a Saint Francis of Assisi sort of rapport with the nightingales. The birds bestowed their healing gifts upon him, even as he took refuge in a comforting thought. At the moment Stopsack and Eggwort might be acquiescing to the proposed mischief, but surely when it came down to it the Governor would never allow his archipelago to become an abattoir, nor would this so-called emperor stand by whilst intruders butchered the reptiles whose meat sustained his community.
“Very well, Sam—I shall remain silent,” Malcolm said. For the nonce, he thought.
“Do we have your solemn word?” asked Wilberforce.
“Another order from my bishop?” Malcolm replied, straightaway receiving a nod.
“Remember, sir, to swear before the mortal likes of Sam and myself is perforce to swear before God,” said Hallowborn. “Our Creator occupies all places at all times.”
“A theological point in which I require no instruction from you,” Malcolm told the rector, offering the nightingales a sweet Franciscan smile. “I daresay that, even as He sheds His grace on Oxford, God has betaken Himself to Galápagos, that He might minister to its fallen tortoises and sinful lizards. Yes, Sam. Yes, Simon. You have my word.”
* * *
Throughout the week preceding the Equinox’s scheduled departure, Chloe’s energies were consumed largely in evading Mr. Popplewell, who insisted that she submit to an Evening Standard interview, “so that thousands of Englishmen might satisfy their curiosity concerning the woman who would put God in His grave.” Ever since he’d published his article about the “freethinking female naturalist,” with its scurrilous quotation from the Reverend Mr. Hallowborn—“I am moved to call Miss Bathurst the Covent Garden Antichrist”—she’d wanted no truck with Popplewell, his wretched newspaper, or his salivating readership. She could only hope that when she finally gave her prize-winning performance at Alastor Hall, amongst the journalists present would be a sober and appreciative Times reporter, perhaps even the one who’d written with such verve about her final gallows speech at the Adelphi.
Beyond the unease Chloe felt at being branded an antichrist (a discomfort leavened somewhat by the satisfaction she took in the epithet), the most troublesome consequence of Popplewell’s piece was Fanny Mendrick’s discovery that her rooming-companion harbored atheist sympathies. So bitter was the subsequent altercation between Chloe and Fanny that the wreckage of their friendship was surely but one more such quarrel away.
“I don’t know which fact gives me greater pain,” said Fanny. “That you would murder your Creator or that, having done so, you would collect ten thousand pounds in blood money.”
“It’s my Christian duty to help my father pay his debts,” said Chloe.
“And is it your Christian duty to spit on Christianity?”
“Oh, Fanny, how it grieves me to cause you unhappiness.”
“Then burn your ticket to Galápagos.”
A particularly exasperating aspect of his “freethinking female naturalist” article was Popplewell’s penchant for making a philosophical debate sound like a penny dreadful. In his estimation the interconnected voyages of the Paragon and the Equinox constituted a “cosmic regatta” between irreconcilable worldviews.
On the one hand, allied with the Church of England and the dictates of tradition, we have Captain Deardon and his company of Anglicans, coursing towards Ararat. On the other, braving the wrath of the faithful and the ire of the angels, we have Captain Runciter’s band of unbelievers, heading for Galápagos. Make no mistake, O my readers—the real prize in this race is not £10,000. Whichever company brings back the better evidence will be giving us to know whether we descend from the loving hands of Providence or the hairy loins of primates. Is it any wonder Miss Chloe Bathurst is amongst our nation’s most talked-about figures, her praises sung in every hellfire club from Lowestoft to Liverpool, even as her damnation is recommended from thousands of pulpits throughout Great Britain?
On Monday morning Popplewell tracked Chloe to a Bond Street milliner’s shop, hovering in the shadows as she opened her purse (newly fattened with Shelley Society funds) to procure an extravagant white Panama hat, perfect for keeping the equatorial sun from ravaging her skin. Upon completing the transaction, she informed the journalist that if he did not absent himself she would seek out a constable and complain that she’d been “subjected to the advances of the lecherous scribbler Popplewell.” Her nemesis departed straightaway.
The following afternoon she sat down with Mr. Abernathy of Maritime Enterprises, the corporation charged with equipping the voyage, receiving his assurances that the Equinox would put to sea with an abundance of animal pens and birdcages. Returning to the street, she again encountered Popplewell. Before he could speak, she told him that unless he disappeared instantly she would visit the nearest magistrate and “swear out a complaint against the unscrupulous penny-a-liner Popplewell.” Again the scoundrel fled.
Wednesday morning found Chloe and Algernon at the British Museum, where they spent three damp and frigid hours poring over hand-colored maps of the Encantadas, an experience redeemed for her by the delight she took in seeing the positions and shapes of the islands whence came Mr. Darwin’s reptiles and birds. (Charles Isle resembled a walnut shell, Indefatigable a fried egg, Narborough a mushroom cap, Albemarle a gouty foot.) Exiting the map room, she and her brother were importuned by Popplewell. This time around, she deferred to Algernon, who brandished his furled umbrella and waved it about whilst feigning derangement. The journalist vanished.
Chloe would admit that the “freethinking female naturalist” article had brought one blessing into her life. Thanks to Popplewell’s pen, the management of the Adelphi Theatre now perceived her not as a nuisance with anarchist sensibilities but as a resourceful bluestocking capable of wheedling £300 from the Shelley Society, which meant that her dealings with the playhouse need no longer take the form of theft. Instead she could walk through the front door of a Wednesday afternoon, seek out Mr. Kean, and propose to buy, for two pounds sterling, the female pirate regalia that had figured so prominently in The Beauteous Buccaneer. Like most aspiring transmutationists, Chloe was not superstitious, and yet she could not but impute certain arcane powers to these costumes: by outfitting herself as Pirate Anne or Pirate Mary she would become Pirate Anne or Pirate Mary—women who, owing to their many years of sinking ships and accumulating doubloons, were far better suited to the imminent voyage than was Chloe Bathurst, who’d never even seen the Atlantic Ocean, much less sailed upon it.
Mr. Kean cheerily accepted her offer, dispatching his wife to the wardrobe racks. Ellen Tree returned promptly, costumes in hand. Chloe left the manager’s office in good spirits, clutching a muslin sack stuffed with the talismanic garments.
No sooner had she stepped into the foyer, now overrun with playgoers leaving the matinee performance of Via Dolorosa, than a tall figure with a walking-stick planted himself in her path.
“Good afternoon, Miss Bathurst.”
She could scarcely credit her senses, which disclosed not only the haggard features of Mr. Darwin’s face but also the rasp of his cough and the acrid aroma of his tobacco. “Hello, sir,” she replied, her throat constricting as if she’d fallen prey to one of her father’s talkative nooses.
“How felicitous to find you here.” Mr. Darwin puffed on his cigarette, exhaling a pungent zephyr. “I’ve been searching for my erstwhile zookeeper all day.” Elaborating, he revealed that after arriving on the morning train he’d made inquiries at the Adelphi. Eventually Fanny Mendrick had stepped forward to explain that she and Miss Bathurst were “friends and fellow lodgers whose affection has been compromised by the Shelley Prize.” On apprehending that she was speaking with Chloe’s former employer, Miss Mendrick had offered him directions to their rooms, noting that Miss Bathurst was usually “out and about until sundown, making preparations for her awful sea voyage,” and so he’d resolved to spend the afternoon on the premises, watching Miss Mendrick portray the saintly Veronica.
“Have you been well, Miss Bathurst?” asked Mr. Darwin, flourishing the “freethinking female naturalist” edition of the Evening Standard.
“I must confess to considerable fatigue. Pondering the arguments I overheard in our vivarium”—it would be best, she decided, not to mention her stolen copy of the essay—“is a wearying vocation. May I assume you are furious with me?”
“I have my usual complaints,” said Mr. Darwin, vaulting past her question whilst massaging his temples. “Headaches. Nausea. Insomnia. Each month I go to Malvern for Dr. Gully’s cold-water treatments. They seem to help. Yes, Miss Bathurst, I am furious with you, though my feelings are tempered by a certain begrudging wonder that you have come so far so fast.”
Sensing that he needed to get off his feet, she guided Mr. Darwin into an alcove decorated with posters for Adelphi productions gone by: The Beauteous Buccaneer, Wicked Ichor, The Raft of the Medusa, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He eased himself onto a velvet-upholstered bench, so that a lithographic hodgepodge of pirates, vampires, castaways, wraiths, and orang-utangs swirled above his head like the dramatis personae of a nightmare.
“If you’re planning to expose me as a fraud, I can hardly blame you,” she said.
“Tomorrow, Miss Bathurst, yes, tomorrow I might inform the Standard that you’ve contrived to pass my species theory off as your own.” He secured his walking-stick upright between his knees in a tableau suggesting a Hindoo cobra emerging from a basket. “But today I wish only to praise my zookeeper. One might even say I’ve come to offer her a benediction.”
“A benediction?” she said, astonished.
“Don’t overestimate my sympathy. Had I two thousand surplus pounds, I would cover your father’s debts, then arrange for you to tell the world you no longer believe in transmutationism. That said, I must allow as how a part of me wants you to claim the prize, for it happens that my relationship with God—”
“Assuming He exists.”
“Assuming He exists, our relationship is in such disarray that I should be glad to see Him thrown down.”
“‘For ’tis not mere blood we seek but the thrill of mocking the cosmos.’”
“How’s that?”
“A line from this confection by Mr. Jerrold,” said Chloe, pointing to the Wicked Ichor poster. “If you want me to win the contest, why not give me that scrivener’s copy of the full treatise? Whilst you’re about it, why not lend me your menagerie, thus sparing me a journey to the New World?”
“Why not, Miss Bathurst?” said Mr. Darwin indignantly. “Why not? Because a greater part of me is horrified that my idea has been dragooned into so tawdry an enterprise.”
“In your shoes, I would feel the same way.”
“Furthermore, though personally prepared to forsake theism, I question whether anyone has the right to deprive his fellow humans of its comforts.”
“Were I to give the issue more thought, I would surely agree with you,” she said. “Tell me of your difficulties with the Almighty.”
Mr. Darwin rose and strode up to the Raft of the Medusa poster, an image that, though intended to evoke the famous painting, took as many liberties with Géricault’s masterpiece as had Bulwer-Lytton’s play with the historical facts. “Before finding my true calling, I intended to become a physician. Oft-times my training required me to visit private homes, attending to patients whose illnesses were so contagious that no hospital would admit them. I saw many an innocent child suffer and die.”
“And you wondered why a loving God would permit such a state of affairs?”
“No, back then I never doubted His goodness.”
Mr. Darwin fell silent. A tear coursed down his cheek, followed by another. At last he spoke two syllables.
“Annie.”
“Annie?”
“The signs are unmistakable. Night and day she lies a-bed, clutching that doll you gave her, vomiting, spitting blood, burning with fever, her little heart racing. She has consumption—I know it.” Mr. Darwin jabbed the floor with his walking-stick, as if to wound the world that had sickened his child. “Consumption. There—you see? I found the courage to speak the word. My dear sweet Annie has pulmonary consumption.”
Now Chloe, too, began to weep, soon sobbing with all the ferocious hopelessness of Cleopatra cradling her dying Antony. “That child is a gift from the angels.”
“There are no angels, Miss Bathurst. As His earthly avatars God appoints only vengeful demons.”
From her reticule Chloe withdrew a handkerchief, using it to daub first Mr. Darwin’s tears and then her own. “Vengeful demons,” she echoed, blowing her nose. “C’est vrai.”
In an apparent bid to change an intolerable subject, Mr. Darwin gestured towards the central figure in the Raft of the Medusa poster, Françoise Gauvin, standing in the prow of the improvised vessel and frantically signaling the Argus—though ultimately the frigate had sailed into the sunset, heedless of the surviving Medusa passengers (fifteen out of an original hundred and fifty, the others having succumbed to thirst, duels, murder plots, and suicide). “Is that supposed to be you?”
“I portrayed a fictitious female survivor,” Chloe replied, absorbing the last of her tears. “Throughout the play she struggles to forestall her shipmates’ descent into cannibalism. Her best speech finds her scrambling atop a pile of corpses and screaming, ‘He who would eat his fellow man must answer to his God!’ One night, just to be clever, I added, ‘And he who would eat his God must answer to his fellow man!’”
“Should I assume the piece is allegorical? Is the raft a metaphor for the world?”
“The playwright, Mr. Bulwer-Lytton, has proven himself a stranger to symbolism and other literary felicities. I believe he was drawn primarily to the luridness of the tale. When next you see Miss Annie, give her a kiss from me.”
Mr. Darwin pivoted on his heel and fixed Chloe with a marine iguana’s implacable stare. “Get thee to South America, Miss Bathurst. Find your inverse Eden. Who am I to judge your overweening ambition? We’re a damned and desperate species, the lot of us, adrift on a wretched raft, scanning the horizon with bloodshot eyes and hollow expectations. Go to the Encantadas. Go with my blessing.”
Having made his parting remark, Mr. Darwin firmed his grip on his walking-stick and, wreathed in cigarette smoke, shambled into the Strand, doubtless seeking to distract himself with the sights, sounds, and fragrances of London, a desire that the indifferent city would surely fulfill straightaway, with myriad sensations to spare—and yet it seemed he was also looking for a ship, the frigate of his most fervent desire, the Argus that would never come.