Galapagos Regained (13 page)

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.