The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton

  With a heavy heart, Charles had written to Henslow that he could not accept the post on the Beagle. Still, he thought, as he urged on his horse, whose neck and flanks were now dank with sweat, perhaps all was not lost. His father had not totally closed the door. After listing his objections, he had left it open a crack by saying: “If you can find any man of common sense who advises you to go, I will give my consent.”

  And what man of common sense was better than Uncle Jos, the doctor’s brother-in-law and first cousin? A man of easygoing grace and quiet humor, he presided over the Wedgwood china-making empire founded by his father. His advice carried the authority of the modern entrepreneurial world of the ironworks and steam-driven engines of the Midlands. Charles adored his companionship. And he loved Maer Hall, filled with books, resounding with the laughter of his cousins, and warmed by its benign patriarch, so unlike his own home that he dubbed it “bliss castle.”

  He left Herodotus in the hands of the stable boy and entered the grand hall, the hounds baying at his heels. The girls, Fanny and Emma, squealed with delight, and his cousin, Hensleigh, six years his junior, clapped him on the back. Uncle Jos was delighted to see him but at once read the distress in his face. Charles told them about the proposed voyage and handed his father’s letter to his uncle, who repaired to his study to read it in private. He emerged shortly to propose a hunt. The two of them meandered on the heath largely in silence, their guns resting comfortably in the crooks of their arms. Charles missed seven out of nine partridges. Even his shooting was off, he thought, as he knotted the cord on his jacket only two times, once for each downed bird. By late afternoon when they returned, the whole of Maer Hall was buzzing about his offer and even the houseguests were unanimous in the conviction that he must not let it pass.

  “Come with me and list your father’s objections,” suggested Uncle Jos, leading him to the study. Charles duly wrote down eight items and passed them over to his uncle, who frowned in feigned seriousness and then dealt with them one by one, knocking each down as skillfully as a barrister at the Old Bailey.

  “What do you say—shall we write your father?” he said. Seated at a huge desk of New World mahogany, he composed a skillful rebuttal, turning every objection on its head so that it was somehow transformed into a positive consideration. From time to time he winked at Charles, who was stymied in his own composition. Finally, the young man dipped his pen in the inkwell and began in a hesitant scrawl:

  My dear Father—

  I am afraid I am going to make you again very uncomfortable. . . . The danger appears to me and all the Wedgwoods not great. The expense cannot be serious and the time I do not think, anyhow, would be more thrown away than if I stayed at home. But pray do not consider that I am so bent on going that I would for one single moment hesitate, if you thought that after a short period you should continue uncomfortable. . . .

  The letters were posted. They discussed the matter late into the evening and over snuff after dinner. That night, in the second-floor bedroom, Charles could not sleep; his mind wandered as he gazed out the window onto the garden of irises, lobelias, and dahlias and a lake illuminated by moonlight. Was there still a chance for the trip? It would be such an opportunity to further his knowledge of geology and zoology, to view uncharted rock formations and collect specimens in parts of the world never before visited by specialists. He was seized by wanderlust—hadn’t he and Henslow been indulging in fantasies about a trip to the Canary Islands? How tame that would be compared to this! It would be a last adventure before settling down somewhere to a life of comfort and family, undoubtedly as a provincial vicar.

  But there was more to it, he knew. The world of natural science was expanding rapidly, new discoveries were pouring in to the museums all the time, and a voyage like this could make a young man’s name. He had seen how the explorers were welcomed back as heroes, fêted in the marble and wood-paneled clubs, and how at dinner parties in the best homes in Kensington and Knightsbridge the bankers and industrialists hung on their every word, their own lives seeming suddenly humdrum, while the women cast admiring glances over the cut-crystal goblets. His heart longed for fame the way a plant in drought longs for rain.

  Some words that night from Uncle Jos popped into his brain. “Do you remember,” his uncle had asked abruptly, standing in the glow of the Gothic fireplace, “when you were young, about ten or eleven, you told all those fibs? You told the most elaborate lies—you talked of seeing rare birds during your perambulations in the countryside. You would come running home to claim you had just spotted the most exotic starling imaginable. We were all quite perplexed. Something very curious—

  I noticed they began at the same time you perceived that your father was interested in ornithology. I told him to cease paying any attention and gradually, by Jove, if you did not drop the habit. I think the reason behind your little fictions was that you were trying to please him.”

  The remark had struck home. He had changed since then, surely, and his burgeoning love of science had filled him to the brim with admiration for fact. But he viewed truth in much the way a home county par-son views God—as a higher abstract that on occasion can be reshaped to bring a wayward parishioner back to the bosom of the Church. His mind drifted to his father—how stern and unyielding he was. If Charles could take this trip and send back specimens and return to lecture the Royal Society of London, how vindicated he would be—all those years of shooting birds and hunting insects would have come to something.

  How proud his father would be.

  The next morning, Charles was up early and out on a hunt when a servant brought a message from his uncle. They should at once proceed together to The Mount for a discussion with his father. This whole business was too important and too urgent to let another moment pass without resolving it. They took a gig, bouncing over the bumps in record time, and shortly after noon they pulled up to the house on a hill overlooking a bend in the River Severn. They found Dr. Darwin alone in the drawing room, drinking tea and seemingly deep in reflection.

  “I’ve received your letters” was all he said, lowering his eyebrows.

  Uncle Jos signaled for Charles to leave them alone and the young man went to the garden and could do nothing but pace up and down the paths through the banks of flowers. Fifty minutes later he was called back in, and with a ceremonial air, as Uncle Jos chortled in the background, his father told him that he had changed his mind. Charles was now free to go on the voyage, “provided that is still your wish.”

  Charles could barely contain himself. He stammered his gratitude, less graciously than he would have liked, then bounded upstairs to his roll-top desk and dashed off a letter to Beaufort, saying he would be “very happy to have the honour of accepting” the proposal. Later, hugging his uncle goodbye in the courtyard, he asked him how he had “worked the miracle.”

  “Not at all difficult,” replied Jos, clearly pleased. “I merely mentioned that given your interests, this particular voyage was bound to enhance your career. Of all the means for a young man to pull ahead of the pack, it is by far the surest.”

  Charles dined that night with his father and Erasmus, who was on a rare trip home. In the foyer, his brother grabbed his hand and patted him on both shoulders, congratulating him on “milking the cow”—the favorite of his many expressions for extracting money from the parsi-monious master of the house. At dinner, conversation was strained and light, for all the world as if nothing momentous had occurred. Their father was unusually taciturn. Charles made only one reference to the impending voyage.

  “I shall be deuced clever to spend more than my allowance whilst on the Beagle, ” he ventured.

  His father relinquished a half smile.

  “But they tell me you are very clever,” he replied.

  Afterward, Charles threw some belongings in a bag, shook his father’s hand gravely, hugged Erasmus, and after several hours’ sleep set off at 3 a.m. on the express stage to Cambridge, where he took a room at the Red Lion Hote
l.

  The next morning Henslow was surprised to see him but also, he admitted, not a little envious. Staring at the carpet, his mentor confessed that he himself had considered taking up the offer, but was quickly dissuaded by the look of horror on his wife’s face. He could not subject her, as he put it, to “premature widowhood.”

  Mrs. Henslow served them crumpets and the two men chatted animatedly. Charles’s enthusiasm was contagious and Henslow went to the study to fetch a book of maps. Just then a messenger rang the porter’s bell and handed him a note.

  Henslow tore it open, read it, and blanched. He sat down, theatrically, with one hand across his forehead.

  “Come, come,” said Charles. “What is it?”

  “It’s from Captain FitzRoy. He says that he is most grateful for my efforts to assist him in his search for a companion on the Beagle and he hopes that I have not gone to great trouble, for he no longer requires one. It seems he has given away the position to a friend.”

  Charles could not bring himself to speak.

  CHAPTER 3

  Over the ensuing days on the island, they fell into a routine, dividing up the chores and the fieldwork. Hugh had to admit sharing the burden made things easier. They took turns cooking—Nigel, it turned out, was good at it, inventive with sauces—and doing the communal laundry.

  When it fell to Hugh on the second day, he carted the small bundle of clothes down to the mat, drenching them in salt water without deter-gent and rinsing them out in a plastic basin of fresh water. To his amusement he found himself washing two pairs of white panties, thin and small with a narrow cotton isthmus for a crotch, and when he spread the clothes out to dry, he put them on the highest rock. Their whiteness gleamed in the sun.

  The project went faster, too. They rotated in teams of two—one to capture and measure the birds, the other to record the entries. Beth was good at handling the finches; her calmness seemed to attract them.

  They stayed unruffled in her hand and some remained there even when she opened her fingers, standing on her palm and shifting their weight back and forth to keep their balance. Nigel began calling her “Saint Francesca.”

  On the fourth day they went swimming, diving off the welcome mat.

  Beth draped her halter over the rocks. Hugh tried not to stare at her breasts, but she seemed totally unselfconscious. She ignored Nigel’s ribald comments.

  Most of the time Hugh wore only shorts and hiking boots, and his body was lithe and golden. Nigel wore Bermuda shorts and a thin white

  T-shirt that rapidly soaked in his sweat and showed a paunch of pink flesh. He moved about the rocks with the graceless tread of a heavyset man. In the evening he liked nothing better than sitting around the fire after dinner, talking. Hugh, looking at Beth, wondered what she was thinking. At night, alone in his tent, he began masturbating again and took it as a sign of returning strength. Once, getting up in the dark to take a piss, he looked over and saw that she was in Nigel’s tent. A kerosene lantern threw their shadows onto the canvas; he saw an outline of their movements, an arm raising up, and heard a murmur of voices, and he quickly turned away.

  Nigel was getting on his nerves, but when it got to be too much Hugh would drift away and head for the north rim. There was refuge and solitude—the end of the earth, as he imagined it. He had discovered the spot four months before while trying to catch one of the elusive finches; it had led him on a chase between scraggy bushes and withered cacti that ended, between two large boulders, at the head of a natural trail down the cliff. By carefully negotiating footholds and handholds, he had found it possible to descend, and after some thirty feet, he had reached a rocky ledge about two yards wide. It overlooked a sheer drop; far below the ocean threw itself against the rocks, sending up fountains of sea spray.

  Beth had brought a stash of books and she chose one for him—a novel by W. G. Sebald. He took it with him to the ledge during the long afternoon hours when it was too hot to do any work. If there was a breeze, he could catch it there. At times he felt almost peaceful, reading and thinking, looking up every so often at the expanse of water and the way the clouds threw their shadows down on it, immense shifting pools of gray-green, deep blue, and black.

  On the morning of the first day of the third week, Beth asked Hugh if he would take her to his “hideaway.”

  Yes, he replied—a little too quickly, he thought a moment later. He was not sure he wanted to share it.

  “But—how did you find out about it?” he asked.

  “It’s a small island,” she responded. “No secrets here.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  For the remainder of the morning they worked side by side, taking a census of seeds. She had marked out a square yard of dirt with string stretched around pegs and was sifting through it with a strainer, identifying the seeds by holding them up to a manual and then laying them out on a white cloth. Hugh worked on a plot nearby. For the most part they were silent—like an old married couple, he mused, puttering around in the backyard garden. The sun was pressing down, a piston of heat that slicked his torso with sweat. When he scratched his side with his thumb, it left a smudge of wet dirt. Beth stood up and stretched, then crouched down again, squatting with her back to him. The top lip of her shorts hung away and he could see sweat running toward the cleavage of her backside. He heard the blood ticking in his head under the hot sun.

  After lunch, they set out. Nigel remained in his tent, cleaning it. He had rigged up a small fan that ran on batteries and had the radio tuned to the BBC, which blared out news—about terrorism, politics, AIDS in Africa—that seemed from another world.

  Gulls flew overhead, cruising the thermals, but otherwise nothing moved in the stillness of the afternoon. They passed the boulders and came to the cliff, and as he started down, hugging the rock face, she stood above with her hands on her hips and watched him closely to see where he was putting his feet and hands. Then she came down, five feet directly above him, using the same footholds and handholds. It took a good five minutes to reach the ledge—he hadn’t realized before how arduous the climb was.

  Once there, she sat beside him against the rock, brushed her hair off her forehead, and smiled.

  “I was beginning to have second thoughts up there,” she said. He knew she didn’t mean it.

  She leaned forward to peer down at the sheer drop to the water far below, then sat back with her eyebrows raised in fake alarm. It was high tide so the surf rode over the rocks and plunged out of sight into the hollow underside of the cliff, then a second later shot straight back, as if the island were pumping bilge. Off in the distance where the currents were rough the waves churned and exploded in tiny whitecaps.

  “So this is where you come to get away from it all,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I can understand that—the noise, the filth, the crowds.”

  “Nigel.”

  She threw him a quick look, a slight frown.

  They discussed the island and the study and then began, for the first time, to talk personally. He asked her about herself—and what brought her to the island. She sat cross-legged, resting her elbows on the insides of her thighs.

  “Me . . . ,” she said, making it sound like a riddle. “Let’s see. Where to start?” And she told him about growing up in the American Midwest and how at first she loved it but then began to feel out of place there, almost like a pariah as she went up through the ranks of public school.

  Finally she escaped to Harvard, the only kid from her high school class to go there. She graduated and went to Cambridge, got her graduate degree in evolutionary biology and worked for a bit in London, then got fed up with life there and signed up for the project. And now here she was, before she knew it, about to hit thirty.

  “I felt I was at a bit of a dead end,” she said. “That’s why I’m here, really, to get away for a while, think things over.”

  “And your parents?”

  “They’re still in Minneapolis. They’re both te
achers. We’re in touch often—or we were until I came here.”

  They were silent for a spell.

  “I heard you were married,” he said.

  She gave a start and looked him in the eye. “Nigel told you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was. In England. It was a mistake. I knew it pretty much from the beginning. I tried sticking it out, but it just didn’t work. We couldn’t make a go of it, as they say. There were some good times but always some bad mixed in, and then the bad got worse and more and more frequent.”

  “Nigel said your husband was a depressive.”

  “He certainly talks a lot, doesn’t he?” She shook her head. “My husband did suffer from depression but it wasn’t his fault that we split up.

  We were both at fault.”

  She gazed out toward the ocean. Hugh looked at her hand resting on the ledge, close to his own. Her presence was so strong—it seemed to make the air shimmer.

  “I shouldn’t be talking so much about myself,” she said finally. “I’m sorry Nigel told you.”

  “Well, as you say, he talks a lot.”

  “He does. But he’s a good man.”

  She asked Hugh about his childhood and what he had done in his twenty-eight years.

  “Not a lot, I’m afraid. I grew up in Connecticut, a little town in Fair-field County. I actually liked the suburbs when I was young—camping out in the woods, Little League, hitchhiking to the beach, the whole deal. Then I went away to prep school, to Andover. I did all right at first but then I fell off the rails. In my senior year, about a month before graduation, I was expelled. . . .”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing all that dramatic. They have what they call four major rules and one weekend, to celebrate getting into Harvard, I broke them all—went off campus, had a drink. I’d signed in to my dormitory so they got me on lying. The fourth rule—conduct unbecoming a gentleman—they threw that in too, which I objected to but without success.”