Darwinia (7 page)

The congressman’s daughter disagreed. “It’s Europe proper they should be afraid of.” She frowned becomingly. “You know what they say. Everything that lives there is ugly, and most of it is deadly.”

“Not as deadly as human beings.” The young functionary, on the other hand, wanted to appear cynical. Probably he imagined it made him seem older.

“Don’t be scandalous, Richard.”

“And seldom as ugly.”

“They’re
brave
.”

“Brave enough, but in their place I’d worry more about the Partisans. Or even the English.”

“It hasn’t come to that.”

“Not yet. But the English are no friends of ours. Kitchener is provisioning the Partisans, you know.”

“That’s a rumor, and you shouldn’t repeat it.”

“They’re endangering our European policy.”

“We were talking about the Finch expedition, not the English.”

“Preston Finch can run a river, certainly, but I predict they’ll take more casualties from bullets than from rapids. Or monsters.”

“Don’t say
monsters
, Richard.”

“Chastisements of God.”

“Just the thought of it makes me shiver. Partisans are only people, after all.”

“Dear girl. But I suppose Dr. Vale would be out of business if women weren’t inclined to the romantic point of view. Isn’t that so?”

Vale performed his best and most unctuous smile. “Women are better able to see the infinite. Or less afraid of it.”

“There!” The congressman’s daughter blushed happily. “The
infinite
, Richard.”

Vale wished he could show her the infinite.
It would burn her pretty eyes to cinders
, he thought.
It would peel the flesh from her skull.

After dinner the men retired to the library with brandies and Vale was left with the women. There was considerable talk of nephews in the military and their lapses of communication, of husbands keeping late hours at the State Department. Vale felt a certain resonance in these omens but couldn’t fathom their final significance. War? War with England? War with Japan? Neither seemed plausible… but Washington since Wilson’s death was a mossbound well, dark and easily poisoned.

Pressed for wisdom, Vale confined himself to drawing-room prophecies. Lost cats and errant children; the terrors of yellow fever, polio, influenza. His visions were benign and hardly supernatural. Private questions could be handled at his business address, and, in fact, his clientele had increased considerably in the two months since his first encounter with Eleanor. He was well on his way to becoming Father Confessor to a generation of aging heiresses. He kept careful notes.

The evening dragged on and showed no signs of becoming especially productive: not much to feed his diary tonight, Vale thought. Still, this was where he needed to be. Not just to bolster his income, though that was certainly a welcome side effect. He was following a deeper instinct, perhaps not quite his own. His god wanted him here.

And one does what a god wants, because that is the nature of a god
, Vale thought:
to be obeyed. That above all.

As he was leaving, Eleanor steered a clearly quite drunken man toward him. “Dr. Vale? This is Professor Randall, you were introduced, weren’t you?”

Vale shook hands with the white-haired venerable. Among Eleanor’s collection of academics and civil-service nonentities, which one was this? Randall, ah, something at the Natural History Museum, a curator of… could it be paleontology? That orphaned science.

“See him to his automobile,” Eleanor said, “won’t you? Eugene, go with Dr. Vale. A walk around the grounds might clear your head.”

The night air smelled of blossoms and dew, at least when the professor was downwind. Vale looked at his companion more carefully, imagined he saw pale structures under the surface of Randall’s body. Coral growths of age (parchment skin, arthritic knuckles) obscured the buried soul. If paleontologists possessed souls.

“Finch is mad,” Randall muttered, continuing some abandoned conversation, “if he thinks… if he thinks he can prove…”

“There’s nothing to prove tonight, sir.”

Randall shook his head and squinted at Vale, seeing him perhaps for the first time. “You. Ah. You’re the fortune-teller, yes?”

“In a way.”

“See the future, do you?”

“Through a glass,” Vale said. “Darkly.”

“The future of the world?”

“More or less.”

“We talk about Europe,” Randall said. “Europe, the Sodom so corrupt it was cast into the refiner’s fire. And so we pluck out the seeds of Europeanism wherever we find them, whatever that means. Gross hypocrisy, of course. A political fad. Do you want to see Europe?” He swept his hand at the white-columned Sanders-Moss estate. “Here it is! The court at Versailles. It might as well be.”

The stars were vivid in the spring sky. Lately Vale had begun to perceive a kind of depth in starry skies, a layering or recession that made him think of forests and meadows, of tangled thickets in which predatory animals lurked. As above, so below.

“This Creator men like Finch drone on about,” Randall said. “One wants to believe, of course. But there are no fingerprints on a fossil. Washed off, I suppose, in the Flood.”

Obviously Randall shouldn’t be saying any of this. The climate of opinion had shifted since the Miracle and men like Randall were themselves a kind of living fossil — wooly mammoths trapped in an ice age. Of course Randall, a collector of bones, could hardly know that Vale was a collector of indiscretions.

Who would pay to know what Randall thought of Preston Finch? And in what currency, and when?

“I’m sorry,” Randall said. “This could hardly interest you.”

“On the contrary,” Vale said, walking with his prey into the dewy night. “It interests me a great deal.”

The flat-bottom riverboats arrived from New York and were transferred to a cross-channel steamer, the
Argus
. Guilford, Finch, Sullivan, and the surveyor, Chuck Hemphill, supervised the loading and annoyed the vessel’s cargo master until they were banished to the tarry dock. Spring sunlight washed the wharfs and softened the tarry planks; clots of false lotus rotted against the pilings; gulls wheeled overhead. The gulls had been among the first terrestrial immigrants to Darwinia, followed in turn by human beings, wheat, barley, potatoes; wildflowers (loosestrife, bindweed); rats, cattle, sheep, lice, fleas, cockroaches — all the biological stew of the coastal settlements.

Preston Finch stood on the wharf with his huge hands clamped behind his back, face shadowed by his solar topee. Finch was a paradox, Guilford thought: a hardy man, powerful despite his age, a weathered river-runner whose judgment and courage were unquestionable. But his Noachian geology, fashionable though it might have become in the nervous aftermath of the Miracle, seemed to Guilford a stew of half-truths, dubious reasoning, and wistful Protestantism. Implausible no matter how he dressed up the matter with theories of sedimentation and quotations from Berkeley. Moreover, Finch refused to discuss these ideas and didn’t brook criticism from his colleagues, much less from a mere photographer. What must it be like, Guilford wondered, to have such a baroque architecture crammed inside one’s skull? Such a strange cathedral, so well buttressed, so well defended?

John Sullivan, the expedition’s other gray eminence, leaned against a wharfhouse wall, arms crossed, smiling faintly under a broad straw hat. Two aging men, Finch and Sullivan, but Sullivan smiled — that was the difference.

The last of the crates descended into the
Argus
’s hold. Finch signed a manifest for the sweating cargo master. There was an air of finality about the act. The
Argus
would sail in the morning.

Sullivan touched Guilford’s shoulder. “Do you have a few free minutes, Mr. Law? There’s something you might like to see.”

Museum of Monstrosities
, announced the shingle above the door.

The building was hardly more than a shack, but it was an old building, as buildings went in London, perhaps one of the first permanent structures erected along the marshy banks of the Thames. It looked to Guilford as if it had been used and abandoned many times over.

“Here?” Guilford asked. They had come a short walk from the wharfs, behind the brick barrelhouses, where the air was gloomy and stagnant.

“Tuppence to see the monsters,” Sullivan said. His drawl was unreconstructed Arkansas, but on his lips it sounded like Oxford. Or at least what Guilford imagined an Oxford accent might have been like. “The proprietor’s a drunk. But he does have one interesting item.”

The “proprietor,” a sullen man who reeked of gin, opened the door at Sullivan’s knock, took Sullivan’s money into his grimy hand, and vanished wordlessly behind a canvas curtain, leaving his guests to peer at the taxidermical trophies arrayed on crude shelves around the narrow front room. The smaller exhibits were legitimate, in the sense that they were recognizable Darwinian animals badly stuffed and mounted: a buttonhook bird, a miscellany of six-legged scavengers, a leopard snake with its hinged jaws open. Sullivan raised a window blind, but the extra light was no boon, in Guilford’s opinion. Glass eyes glittered and peered in odd directions.

“This,” Sullivan said.

He meant the upright skeleton languishing in a corner. Guilford approached it skeptically. At first glance it looked like the skeleton of a bear — crudely bipedal, a cage of ribs attached to a ventral spine, the fearsome skull long and multiply jointed, teeth like flint knives. Frightening. “But it’s a fake,” Guilford said.

“How do you arrive at that conclusion, Mr. Law?”

Surely Sullivan could see for himself? “It’s all string and baling wire. Some of the bones are fresher than others. That looks like a cow’s femur, there — the joints don’t begin to match.”

“Very good. The photographer’s eye.”

“It doesn’t take a photographer.”

“You’re right, of course. The anatomy is a joke. But what interests me is the rib cage, which is correctly articulated, and in particular the skull.”

Guilford looked again. The ribs and ventral spine were clearly Darwinian; it was the standard back-to-front arrangement, the spine U-shaped, with a deep chordal notch. The skull itself was long, faintly bovine, the dome high and capacious: a cunning carnivore. “You think those are authentic?”

“Authentic in the sense that they’re genuine bones, not papier-mâché, and obviously not mammalian. Our host claims he bought them from a settler who dug them out of a bog somewhere up the Lea, looking for something cheaper than coal to burn.”

“Then they’re relatively recent.”

“Relatively, though no one’s seen a living animal like it or anything remotely equivalent. Large predators are scarce on the Continent. Donnegan reported a leopard-sized carnivore from the Massif Central, but nothing bigger. So what does this fellow represent, Mr. Law? That’s the interesting question. A large, recently-extinct hunter?”

“I hope extinct. He looks formidable.”

“Formidable and, judging by the cranium, perhaps intelligent. As animals go. If there are any of his tribe still living, we may need those pistols Finch is so fond of. And if not—”

“If not?”

“Well, what does it mean to talk about an
extinct
species, when the continent is only eight years old?”

Guilford decided to tread carefully. “You’re assuming the continent has a history.”

“I’m not assuming it, I’m deducing it. Oh, it’s a familiar argument — I simply wondered where you stood.”

“The trouble is, we have two histories. One continent, two histories. I don’t know how to reconcile them.”

Sullivan smiled. “That’s a good first pass. Forced to guess, Mr. Law? Which is it? Elizabeth the First, or our bony friend here?”

“I’ve thought about it, obviously, but—”

“Don’t hedge. Take your pick.”

“Both,” Guilford said flatly. “Somehow… both.”

“But isn’t that impossible?”

“Apparently not.”

Sullivan’s smile became a grin. “Good for you.”

So Guilford had passed a test, though the older man’s motives remained obscure. That was all right. Guilford liked Sullivan, was pleased that the botanist had chosen to treat him as an equal. Mainly, however, he was glad to step out of the taxidermist’s hut and into the daylight. Though London’s docklands didn’t smell much better.

That night he shared his bed with Caroline for the last time.

Last time until autumn
, Guilford corrected himself, but there was small comfort in the thought. Frustratingly, she was cool toward him tonight.

She was the only woman he had ever slept with. He had met her in the offices of Atticus and Pierce when he was touching up his plates for
Rocky Mountain Fossil Shales
. Guilford had felt an immediate, instinctive fondness for the aloof and frowning Pierce girl. He obtained a brief introduction from her uncle and in the following weeks began to calculate her appearances at the office: she took lunch with her uncle, a secretary told him, every Wednesday noon. Guilford intercepted her after one of these meetings and offered to walk her to the streetcar. She had accepted, looking at him from under her crown of hair like a wary princess.

Wary and wounded. Caroline hadn’t recovered from the loss of her parents in the Miracle, but that was a common enough grief. Guilford found he could provoke a smile from her, at least now and then. In those days her silences had been more ally than enemy; they fostered a subtler communication. In that invisible language she had said something like:
I’m hurt but too proud to admit it — can you help?
And he had answered,
I’ll make you a safe place. I’ll make you a home.

Now he lay awake with the sound of an occasional horsecart passing in the night and a valley of cotton bedsheet between himself and the woman he loved. Was it possible to break an unspoken promise? The truth was that he hadn’t delivered Caroline to a safe place after all. He had traveled too far and too often: out west, and now here. Given her a fine daughter but brought them to this foreign shore, where he was about to abandon them… in the name of history, or science, or his own reckless dreams.