Galapagos Regained (14 page)

“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.