Galapagos Regained (2 page)

“True, we've lost this initial skirmish, but I'm not prepared to quit the campaign,” Granville told Mrs. Darwin at the start of Sunday's services. “For today's homily, I had indeed contrived a sequel to my thoughts on
Natural Theology
. Instead I shall preach on Joseph and his brethren, saving ‘The Revelation of the Rocks' for your husband's eventual appearance.”

“Alas, Reverend, the situation is worse than we imagined,” said Mrs. Darwin. “Charles tells me he intends to write a treatise directly refuting Mr. Paley. He will assert that the Earth's primal life-forms underwent a kind of self-development, changing mechanistically into the species we see around us today. At least he has promised to delay its publication until after his death.”

“Take heart, Mrs. Darwin,” said Granville, making a cylinder of his intended sermon and slipping it into his pocket. “My pen is not yet dry. Next week you and the children must arrive here toting a Down House pigeon—Cherub or one of her kin—and the following Sunday as well, and the Sunday after that.” He offered the good woman the warmest smile in his repertoire. “We shall bring your geologist to Jesus yet.”

 

BOOK ONE

A DOME OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS

 

1

Treating of Our Heroine's Stage Career, Including Accounts of Her Momentary Madness and Ignominious Dismissal

When Chloe Bathurst was seven years old, living in Wapping with her widowed father and tiresome twin brother, she decided that her future prosperity would be best secured by the arrival, sooner rather than later, of a wicked stepmother. The evidence was beyond dispute. Cinderella the ash-maiden, Snow White the dwarf-keeper, Gretel the hag-killer—in each such case a young woman had found happiness only after her father had wooed and wed a malign second wife.

By her ninth birthday Chloe had come to recognize the naiveté of her wish, and she felt just as glad Papa had neglected to marry a bad person. (Indeed, she felt just as glad he'd not remarried at all.) As it happened, this oversight was not the only accidental boon Phineas Bathurst bestowed upon his daughter, for he also inadvertently guided her towards a glamorous profession. Whereas some men are congenital blacksmiths and others constitutionally sailors, Phineas was a natural-born puppeteer, given to seizing upon whatever inert object might lie to hand—clock, kettle, mallet, lantern, fish head—and blessing it with the gift of mobility and the power of speech. Illusion mongering, Chloe concluded, was in her blood. She must become an actress.

Amongst Papa's many
pièces bien faites,
she had particularly fond memories of a dialogue between a wine bottle and a flagon of ale, each arguing that its ancestors had done the better job of making human beings the oafish and dullard race they were. She likewise cherished an encounter between a hammer and an apple, the former blaming the latter for the Fall of Man, the latter vilifying the former for its collaboration in the Crucifixion—a dispute neatly resolved when the hammer turned the apple to mash, declaiming, “And so Popish power once again has its way with Jewish lore.”

Several years into Chloe's quest for theatrical fame, an irony presented itself. Whatever role she was playing at the moment, her personal circumstances would soon come to reflect the fate of the character in question: not in faithful facsimile—and here was where the irony emerged—but in mirror opposite. If Mr. Charles Kean, manager of the Adelphi Theatre and director of its shamelessly melodramatic offerings, had entrusted to Chloe the blind flower-seller Nydia in
The Last Days of Pompeii,
the tragic Queen Cleopatra in
Siren of the Nile,
or any other doomed and desperate heroine, she knew that ere long her life beyond the boards would be filled with suitors and champagne. But if she'd been tapped to portray a woman for whom all came right in the end—the brave French castaway Françoise Gauvin in
The Raft of the Medusa,
the Southern belle Pansy Winslow in
Lanterns on the Levee
—she could safely assume Dame Fortune was preparing some unpleasant surprises. So compelling did Chloe find this phenomenon that in time she became a connoisseur of irony per se, to a point where no instance of vivid incongruity, from gaunt glutton to tippling vicar, blushing trollop to fastidious tramp, escaped her notice or failed to amuse her.

It was therefore with joyous anticipation that, two days after her twenty-fifth birthday, Chloe contracted to essay the lead in
The Beauteous Buccaneer,
Mr. Jerrold's violent narrative of the historical female pirate Anne Bonney, who'd fought and plundered side by side with her friend, Mary Read, and her lover, Captain Jack Rackham, prince of freebooters. As staged by Mr. Kean,
The Beauteous Buccaneer
was a dark divertissement, replete with long shadows, choruses of wailing nereids, and
misterioso
trills boiling up from the orchestra pit. In one particularly poignant episode Pirate Anne deposited her newborn infant (whom Jack had refused to acknowledge as his own) at the gates of an orphanage, bidding the baby a tearful farewell, then melting into the fog. The final scene found Anne being hauled onto a gallows, outfitted with a noose, and hanged.

Chloe's future, in short, looked rosy. She could practically taste the oysters and the sparkling wine. And yet, strangely enough, in the case of
The Beauteous Buccaneer
the usual disjuncture between her life and her art did not obtain. No sooner had she finished cleaning her face following her fifteenth Saturday matinee performance (so that her painted brow changed from white to rose, and her cherry lips turned pink) than a visitor entered her dressing-room—her very own wayward father, who at last report had been working as a dustman in St. Albans. His arrival occasioned in Chloe sharp and sudden pangs of remorse, for he wore a pauper's uniform, complete with brown hempen tunic and matching skullcap, and his hands displayed the scars and scabs of one who'd been condemned to relentless toil.

“Yes, child, your eyes do not deceive you,” said Phineas. “I'm living at Her Majesty's expense in Holborn Workhouse—a place no sane person would enter of his own free will. Thus does our nation hold down the high cost of poverty.”

“Papa, you should have
told
me,” Chloe moaned.

“I should have told
myself,”
said Phineas with a shiver of chagrin. “Instead I kept pretending the world was about to provide me with a living.”

She slipped behind her fan-folded Chinese screen and began shedding her pirate costume—leather corset, crimson-striped pantaloons, gleaming black boots—in favor of street clothes. “When last we dined together, you had hopes of becoming a hackney coachman,” she remarked from her makeshift boudoir.

“A vocation at which I would have succeeded had my passengers not expected me to possess a promiscuous familiarity with London geography,” said Phineas. “Shortly thereafter I became a carpenter's assistant, a calling I abandoned upon realizing that my maul bore a grudge against my thumb. Next I apprenticed myself to a locksmith, leaving his service after he told me that burglars would one day drink my health.”

Chloe stepped free of the screen, brushing her taffeta skirt into place, her chestnut hair now secured with mother-of-pearl combs, a gift from a former swain. Briefly she contemplated herself in the looking-glass. Her features were inarguably attractive: large eyes, straight nose, high cheekbones—a face for launching, if not a thousand ships, then certainly a fleet of robust fishing smacks.

“You must be famished, Papa.”

“Not so much for food, dear child, as for your charming presence. Offer me a bite of cheese, though, and I shan't refuse.”

Sensing that her father's hunger was rather greater than he allowed, she suggested they repair to the Cloven Hoof for some supper and a pint of ale. At first he demurred, saying, “Surely my daughter would be ashamed to appear in public with a man dressed in a pauper's uniform.”

“No more than her father would be ashamed to appear in public with the most notorious lady buccaneer ever to stain the pages of English history,” said Chloe, tying on her green velvet bonnet. “Take my arm, Papa, and I'll procure for you the fattest pie in Covent Garden.”

*   *   *

It was for Chloe a measure of her father's despondency that, as they sat in the noisy and smoke-filled tavern awaiting their respective orders of mutton stew and kidney pie, he declined to bestow life on any inanimate object. In the past he would have introduced the candles to one another, exhorting them to seize the day ere their paraffin flesh melted away. Or he would have transformed the napkins into shrouds worn by spectral rats, encouraging the phantom rodents to haunt the dog who'd murdered them.

The food arrived promptly. Fervently devouring his pie, washing it down with tidal gulps of ale, Phineas explained that he was obliged to eat quickly, for his furlough ended at sundown.

“They've got you doing hard labor like some Hebrew slave in Egypt,” said Chloe, indicating her father's ravaged hands.

“Breaking stones, grinding bones, picking oakum.”

“Oakum? Is that a crop?”

“Now that I think about it, aye, 'tis a kind of crop, sown with malice and harvested in misery. From dawn to dusk we stoop over masses of discarded rope, untwisting the fibers for shipbuilder's caulk. The overseer's not satisfied unless our fingers bleed.”

“We must liberate you from that abhorrent place.” A tear exited Chloe's left eye, tickling her cheek as it fell.

“I came not to unload my troubles but to offer my accolades.” Phineas removed his pauper's cap and kneaded his brow with the ball of his thumb.

“You saw my performance?”

“From a secret vantage on the catwalk. You make a splendid blackguard, darling. I loved how you stabbed the bosun in the gizzard when he discovered your true sex. The audience got its money's worth in blood.”

“In beetroot juice, actually.”

Chloe leaned back in her seat, her roving gaze confirming her worst fears. Half the customers were staring at the moist-eyed actress. Her irony bone began to sing. Normally when dining at the Hoof, she hoped that the patrons, having just seen her onstage, would accord her admiring glances—but now that she had their attention she wished them all gone.

“Watching you drink Jack Rackham under the table was equally enthralling,” said Papa, daubing her tears with his napkin. “I assume that wasn't rum in your glass.”

“Weak tea.”

If Phineas Bathurst had ever entertained a sensible idea in his life, Chloe was unaware of it. Even his decision to marry the beautiful Florence Willingham had been fundamentally barmy, for she had evidently possessed the disposition of a gorgon conjoined to the ethics of a snake. In the opinion of the neighborhood gossips, Phineas's wife was determined to put him in an early grave, and it was only her own death (minutes after the respective births of Chloe and her brother) that thwarted this ambition.

“Listen, Father, I am lodged in Tavistock Street with the woman who played Pirate Mary.” Chloe slurped down a spoonful of broth. “You are welcome to sleep on the floor each night till you find employment. We'll steal a mattress for you from the properties department.”

“Your generosity touches me, but my situation's more complicated than you imagine,” said Phineas. “For all my fifty years, I still own a stout arm and a strong back, and so the workhouse authorities count me a great asset. Give old Bathurst an extra helping of gruel, and he'll pick oakum with a frenzy to shame Hercules sweeping the stables. But should I ever leave the place, those same authorities will hunt me down and toss me into debtors' prison.”

“You're in arrears, Papa?”

“For the past two years, I've availed myself of England's peerless network of moneylenders. I'm proud to say that, thanks to my continuous expectations of solvency, I donated most of this income to people even needier than I. In time my creditors' patience ran short, and I saw no choice but to don a pauper's uniform and flee to a workhouse.”

“What is the total of your debts?”

“Let me tell you about my favorite scene, Pirate Anne leaving her baby at the orphanage. It brought a lump to my throat.”

“Father, please, I must know the sum.”

“If you insist on dragging arithmetic into our conversation, the figure may be obtained by adding four hundred pounds to five hundred pounds.”

“That's nine hundred pounds!”

“Such a mathematical prodigy you are, Chloe, a regular Isaac Newton. And now, to calculate the absolute and final total, we must reckon with six hundred additional pounds.”

“Good Lord! You owe fifteen hundred?”

“Yes. Correct. Plus interest.”

“How
much
interest?”

“Five hundred, more or less.”

“Sweet Jesus! Two thousand pounds?”

“I know it sounds like a king's ransom, but I've researched the matter, and for two thousand pounds you could barely redeem the bastard son of a pretender to the Scottish throne.”

Chloe stared at the remainder of her stew, for which she presently enjoyed no appetite. “I have but four pounds to my name.”

Not surprisingly, Phineas now inquired after the third member of the family, doubtless hopeful that Algernon had found some profitable occupation, and it became Chloe's duty to report that, to the best of her knowledge, her twin brother was still the incorrigible gamester and jack-of-no-trades he'd always been.

“The dear boy, so utterly his father's son,” said Phineas. “The rotten apple never falls far from the crooked tree.” He rose and attempted without success to assume a military bearing. “Thankee for the pie and ale, child, which for several glorious minutes made me forget the frightful workhouse porridge.”