Galapagos Regained (66 page)

“But with the
Apogee'
s company in so festive a mood,” said Malcolm, “and Captain Pritchard eager to perform the ceremony, I decided that the apple of opportunity was too ripe to leave unplucked.”

“Although I never imagined Chloe being plucked by a vicar, you seem a decent enough chap to me,” said Phineas. “Welcome to that consortium of dreamers and zounderkites called the Bathurst family.”

“Actually, I'm an ex-vicar,” said Malcolm. “The horrors of Amazonia took half my faith away, and the other half succumbed to a treatise concerning descent with modification.” He turned to the bishop and said, “I knew that my gamester brother-in-law had joined the Shelley Society, but I never imagined
you
becoming a rakehell, Sam.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Wilberforce. “But now that the contest is over, I see no reason we Oxonians can't all be friends.”

“It's over?” said an astonished Chloe.

“Hello there, Mrs. Chadwick,” said Wilberforce. “We meet at last. By Hallowborn's account, you went down with the
Equinox
. I'm pleased to infer he was misinformed.”

“It's over?” persisted Chloe, touching Wilberforce's sleeve.

“Hallowborn returned from the Encantadas bearing a startling theological insight,” the bishop continued, ignoring her question. “Contrary to the General Synod's original speculations, the archipelago boasts a peculiar harmony. It's not the Garden of Eden, but neither is it Satan's
pied-à-terre
.”

“Over?” wailed Chloe. “As of when? Who won?”

“During the past three months my friends and I could not but notice that the competition no longer enthralled us,” Lord Woolfenden explained. “Then Mr. Dalrymple told us he'd failed to find the ark, which further dampened our spirits. Finally, three days ago”—he indicated the young man—“this splendid fellow arrived bearing a message from the world's greatest philosopher. Thanks to Doktor Schopenhauer's arguments, we now understand that the God question cannot be resolved rationally, and so we ended the game.”

“What about the ten thousand pounds?” asked Chloe.

“We'll spend it on ourselves,” said Woolfenden. “With each passing year, depravity grows more costly to sustain. Later this month I'll summon that Popplewell fellow from the
Evening Standard
and tell him God's been reprieved. I'm sure he'll want to talk to you.”

“And I'm sure I
won't
want to talk to him,” said Chloe.

“Did you return with any animals in tow?” asked Lady Isadora. “I'm afraid they won't do you much good. Bobo and I apologize for whatever inconvenience we may have caused you.”

“The
Apogee
arrived in Plymouth
sans
reptiles and birds,” said Chloe, “but I did bring back a superb specimen of husband.”

“So you found no creatures illustrative of your theory?” asked Woolfenden.

“
Au contraire,
Your Lordship, Galápagos offers an embarrassment of such riches. But after deploying the Tree of Life by way of preventing a mad American expatriate from hanging two of my friends, I realized I'd grown sick of the whole wearisome business of killing God.”

“That is not a sentence one hears every day,” noted the mysterious young man, bestowing an elfin smile on Chloe. “Will someone accord me the pleasure of an introduction?”

“Bertram, meet Mrs. Chadwick, formerly of the Albion Transmutationist Club,” said Algernon. “Chloe, meet Mr. Heathway, late of the Mayfair Diluvian League.”

“Delighted to make your acquaintance,” said Chloe as she and Mr. Heathway shook hands. “Do I correctly surmise that last spring found you scrambling up Mount Ararat?”

“I was obliged to remain in Constantinople,” Mr. Heathway replied, “smoking hashish whilst dispatching homing pigeons to my poor lunatic father—formerly a Down Village parson, presently a resident of Wormleighton Sanitarium.”

“That, too, is not a sentence one hears every day,” noted Chloe. “Are you now an Oxonian?”

“At some point during my absence, my employers at St. Giles Grammar School began to despair of my return, so they gave the post to another,” said Mr. Heathway. “On the bright side, the Shelley Society was so grateful to have their disenchantment vindicated by Doktor Schopenhauer's essay, they have granted me rooms at Alastor Hall until I find employment.”

“My generosity has its limits,” said Woolfenden to Chloe. “Having abandoned your quest
in medias res
, you owe the Shelley Society three hundred pounds.”

“The very sum you owe
me
from last night's game,” said Algernon, pitching Woolfenden a grin.

“Then we shall consider your sister's debt settled,” said Woolfenden.

“Tell me, Mr. Heathway, do you expect your father will ever be released from the madhouse?” asked Chloe.

“Alas, I see no cure on the horizon,” said Bertram.

“A Down Village parson, was he?” said Chloe. “It happens that I once worked as zookeeper to a County Kent landholder. My employer's wife was in your father's congregation.”

“You speak of Mrs. Darwin,” said Mr. Heathway. “She was forever trying to get her husband to attend Sunday services at St. Mary's.”

“No, her name was Mrs. Caedmon,” said Chloe, offering the young man a furtive wink.

“Finished!” cried Phineas, indicating the spire he'd just constructed from a dozen lumps of sugar. “And lo, the ants of Albion built a great altar to their candied god, higher even than the Tower of Babel.”

“Most amusing,” said Wilberforce, unamused, before turning to Chloe. “There's a question I've always meant to ask a transmutationist. Do the apes generally appear on the
grandfather's
side of a person's family or on the
grandmother's
side?”

“I'm bored, Bobo,” said Lady Isadora to Woolfenden. “Everyone here is so tediously droll.”

“You're always bored.”

“To begin with, Your Grace,” said Chloe to Wilberforce, “as with every other creature on planet Earth, my descent involved
four
grandparents, not two. When I look back further, I find eight ancestors, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. It all gets very complicated very quickly, until we're knee-deep in that stew of relentless pressures, incessant couplings, and incalculable quantities of death that makes evolution by natural selection so plausible a hypothesis.”

“So you say,” grumbled Wilberforce.

“For what it's worth, Your Lordship,” said Malcolm to Woolfenden, “I disagree with Schopenhauer that the God question cannot be resolved rationally. Now and forever, Mrs. Chadwick's theory remains the
bête noire
of theism.”

“Oh, so it's still
Mrs. Chadwick's
theory, is it?” said Wilberforce. “As you may recall, Malcolm, I've always been a skeptic on that point.”

“I shan't pretend the Tree of Life sprang full-blown from my brow,” Chloe told the bishop, “but I'm not at liberty to divulge my collaborator's identity.”

“With the contest now defunct, the point is moot,” said Wilberforce, lathering his hands with phantom soap. “Malcolm, I assume that, given your present godless state, you have no desire to mount the pulpit again. Please know that, should your faith ever return, I shall help you find a new parish.”

“If that offer is your way of suborning me from telling all I know about the Great Winnowing, I shan't swallow the bait,” Malcolm informed the bishop. “That said, I'm willing to ascribe your plot against Galápagos to a momentary lapse in judgment.”

“Thank you,” said Wilberforce with appreciable chagrin. “You are a gracious atheist indeed.”

“I know little of graciousness, but I fear my atheism is a permanent condition.”

“Since you're evidently leaving the clergy for good,” said Phineas to Malcolm, “it behooves me to ask how you intend to support my daughter.”

“In fact, I have a scheme,” said Malcolm. “It involves not only myself but also my dear wife and, if he's amenable, Mr. Heathway here. My education equipped me with a grasp of Latin and Aristotelian logic. Mrs. Chadwick, meanwhile, speaks a passable French and knows a thing or two about zoology. As for young Bertram”—he fixed his gaze on the former ark hunter—“evidently he's no stranger to the classroom. You can all imagine what I'm about to propose.”

“That we start a school?” said Bertram.

Malcolm nodded and said, “A sanctum for young minds, right here on the banks of the Holywell Mill Stream.”

“That's an ace of an idea,” said Bertram.

“Smashing,” said Phineas.

“Every forward-thinking Oxonian will want to entrust his children to our Rousseauian expertise,” said Chloe.

“Count me out,” said Algernon.

“I already have, dear brother-in-law,” said Malcolm. “We're not about to corrupt our charges with games of chance.”

“You'll be too busy corrupting them with transmutationism,” said Wilberforce.

“It's time we resumed our tournament,” announced Lady Isadora, rising. “You may play, too, Mr. Chadwick—and you as well, Mrs. Chadwick.”

“I'll trounce the lot of you!” proclaimed Algernon.

“To the wickets!” declared Wilberforce.

“Please recall, Mr. Bathurst, that you've just been roqueted by me,” said Woolfenden to Chloe's father.

“I shall accept my fate stoically,” said Phineas. “I cannot answer for the ball.”

“I insist that the game be free of banter,” declared Lady Isadora. “The instant anybody says something clever, I'll lay into him with my mallet.”

*   *   *

At the risk of inconveniencing her brother and father, Chloe accepted Algernon's offer of temporary accommodations at Three Manor Place, an arrangement whereby the second-floor suite would be reserved to Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Chadwick to do with as they pleased for as long as they pleased. Being newly wedded, Chloe and Malcolm in fact had much doing and pleasing to accomplish. Though not as poetic a paramour as Ralph, the ex-vicar acquitted himself well in the conjugal domain, and thanks to a supply of Colonel Quondam's devices from the Shelley Society's stores, they had little fear of inadvertent procreation.

When Mr. Popplewell responded affirmatively to Lord Woolfenden's invitation to visit Oxford and learn about the final days of the Great God Contest, Chloe changed her mind and consented to an interview. After all, she knew more about the Tree of Life than any other member of the Albion Transmutationist Club. Neither Ralph, Algernon, Solange, nor even Malcolm could explain as well as she the implications of iguanas for theology.

In a departure from Fleet Street protocol, Popplewell questioned Chloe and Bertram Heathway in tandem, believing that the juxtaposition of their respective stories—the Tree of Life quest versus the Ark of Noah hunt—would make for “a verbal concerto of comparisons and contrasts.” As it turned out, Bertram's insipid experiences (moping around in a Constantinople hookah den, receiving depressing messages from Mr. Dalrymple in Anatolia, sending equally depressing messages to his father in the sanitarium) provided no compellingly counterpoint whatsoever to Chloe's sweeping chronicle of the equatorial Atlantic hurricane, the perils of the Amazon basin, Léourier's flying-machine, the fall of Castillo Bracamoros, Eggwort's kangaroo court, the artificial volcano, and Hengstenberg's Socialist utopia. In relating the convicts' intention to lay waste to Galápagos, she assented to Malcolm's wishes and declined to mention that the scheme's architects were Wilberforce and Hallowborn, though she noted that the massacre was thwarted largely in consequence of her own initiatives.

On the thirteenth day in October, Popplewell's final article about the Shelley Prize appeared in the
Evening Standard,
headed
NO WINNERS IN GREAT GOD CONTEST
and subheaded
AN ENTHRALLING ACCOUNT OF A TREE OF LIFE, QUESTED BUT NOT ACQUIRED, AND A SACRED VESSEL, SOUGHT YET STILL SECLUDED.
Chloe readily admitted that the journalist had accurately summarized her adventures (though he spelled “Schopenhauer” four different ways, all incorrect). Two days later she received an envelope addressed to
MRS. MALCOLM CHADWICK, C/O MR. ALGERNON BATHURST, THREE MANOR PLACE, OXFORD
(Popplewell's article had
en passant
revealed her location and marital status), the return label indicating that the letter was from Down House.

So brief it might have been a telegram, Mr. Darwin's message omitted any mention of Annie's fate, information he presumably preferred to convey in person.

14 October 1851

Dear Mrs. Chadwick,

Just finished reading Popplewell's
Evening Standard
piece. Imperative we talk. Come at earliest convenience. Bring overnight valise.

Yrs., C. Darwin

The following day Chloe rode the train from Oxford to London, took a second train to Bromley, then hired a fly to Down Village. She alighted within view of St. Mary's Church. How remarkable, she mused, that the adjacent parsonage was once inhabited by Bertram Heathway's father. Quite likely she and Granville Heathway had passed each other on the street ere the priest lost his reason and required incarceration in Wormleighton.

She resolved to visit the churchyard. Fearfully scanning the jumble of moss-cloaked stones, she was gratified to find only one reading
Darwin
—the resting place of Mary Eleanor, Charles and Emma's third child, who'd died within weeks of her birth. Was it possible that Miss Annie had grown stronger than her disease?

After a ten-minute hike Chloe reached the estate, then started towards the zoological dome, where she hoped to discover children at play. Annie would be ten now, still young enough to enjoy a tortoise ride. The walk across the meadow proved bracing, a membrane of October frost crunching beneath her boots. Cautiously she pulled back the bronze door. No children met her gaze, yet the place was as fecund as ever, land lizards sunning themselves on the rocks, birds soaring beneath the crystalline roof. The tortoises regarded her with their usual reserved demeanors and sage faces, even as the aquatic iguanas slithered off their sandstone pylons and crashed into the pond. But the creature that most attracted Chloe's notice was of the species
Homo sapiens
: her former rooming-companion, dressed in twill breeches and mucking boots, busily distributing bird food.