The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton

  “the house’s central place”—wherever the hell that might be. Someplace in plain sight. Thanks a lot.

  “What do you make of that bit about Wallace demanding a pension?” he asked. “She calls it out-and-out extortion. She says if he doesn’t get it, he threatens to expose everything.”

  “And you know what?” replied Beth. “They did arrange for a pension, that X Club. I checked. They pressured the government. Gladstone himself awarded it—two hundred pounds a year. Not enough to make him rich but enough to live on. And when Darwin died, he left money to Hooker and Huxley and a bunch of people, but not to Wallace. Wallace got nothing. It’s almost as if Darwin gave him a kick in the teeth.”

  The pension was something concrete, thought Hugh, a nugget that appeared to bolster Lizzie’s credibility. On the other hand, perhaps she had simply heard about it and misinterpreted its meaning—or intentionally misconstrued the motive behind it.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Beth continued. “You’re wondering if she went off the deep end. I don’t think so. Her words strike me as genuine. Her anger’s authentic. She found out something about her father, and whatever it was, it was enough to disillusion her for the rest of her life.”

  Hugh wished he could be so certain. It had all suddenly struck him as incredible. Darwin was a great man, one of the greatest in history, and here they were, trying to accuse him of . . . of what exactly? Amateur sleuths, that’s all they were—looking for evidence of some misdeed they couldn’t even fathom, and, worse, being disappointed when they didn’t find it.

  The swaying of the train was reassuring. Beth’s head, nestled into his shoulder, rocked ever so slightly and her far hand rested on the seat, palm up like a small child.

  He thought of another train ride—that long one from Andover to New Haven. Cal boarded the train in Boston so that they would confront the old man together—“a united front,” he had said on the phone.

  And on the way there, for the first time, Cal told Hugh some of the family secrets, fights he had witnessed between their mother and father.

  You were too young to know what was going on. I used to sit on the back stairs, where I could hear them in the kitchen—they always had their fights in the kitchen, long, knock-down, drag-out affairs. I’d hear Mom cleaning up, the sound of the pots and pans, then Dad’s voice, deep and so sure of itself, smug. And she would be needling him and he’d get back at her—you’d hear the pots banging around—and then she’d come in with a zinger, like, “I saw those charges on your AmEx card,” or, “You don’t even clean out your pockets. I found her earring.” You know, Hugh, don’t you, that he had affairs?

  Hugh hadn’t known. He was shocked—he had never figured that into the calculation of what had gone wrong between them. Before, he had blamed his mother, not his father, for the divorce. It was hard to go back and recalculate things. He admired his brother for keeping it a secret all those years, and he was grateful that he revealed it at that particular moment.

  Once, he and Cal and a few teenage friends were hanging around the river and began tossing rocks at a red and white metal buoy out in the water. They cheered every time a rock hit it, sending forth a resounding twang. Out of nowhere a man leapt from the bushes behind them, his face flushed red, sliding down the embankment on one side and pivoting on the other, like a second baseman touching the ground, tossing a rock as large as a baseball. It struck Hugh in the thigh, hard, but no one saw, and he held his peace while the man stood over them, berating them for causing damage to his buoy. Then Cal saw his tears. He turned to the man and shouted: “You hit my brother, you son-of-a-bitch,” and the man wilted before their eyes, apologized, and slunk away.

  Hugh had never felt so secure and loved in his whole life.

  An hour after arriving, Hugh and Beth stood on the stoop of a semi-detached house on a narrow street in the center of Preston. He glanced up at the knocker, a brass claw holding a ball that was tilted slightly off center.

  “Lizzie called it ugly,” he said. “I’d say she’s not far off.”

  “Right on the money—as usual.”

  The building itself was run-down; the roof sagged, the stone facade was grimy, and the windowsills were peeling strips of bright blue paint.

  The street curved and no cross streets were visible; the identical houses lined it like slats in a barrel, giving it the artificial feel of a stage set.

  Hugh tried to imagine what it looked like when McCormick lived there. He had read up on the man, what little about him there was to be found, and knew that he must have been proud to be a house owner.

  McCormick had grown up poor in Scotland and dragged himself up by his bootstraps, turning to medicine as a profession for advancement. He had taken on various commissions at sea as an assistant surgeon; in 1827—before the Beagle—he accompanied Edward Parry on the Hecla’s fruitless quest for the North Pole.

  It seemed almost certain that he had never returned from the adventure that began with the Beagle, though what happened to him after he left the ship at Rio was not clear. Perhaps his peregrinations took him to the Far East. Or perhaps the curator at the Darwin Centre was right and he died in some sort of subsequent shipwreck. His widow, Hugh imagined, would have husbanded whatever money he left her. She seemed, at least judging from Lizzie’s account of the letters tied by a blue ribbon, to have treasured his memory before she, too, passed away.

  Hugh hadn’t found McCormick an engaging personality—he seemed petty, ambitious, and self-important—but standing before his dwelling, which must have been a dreary petit bourgeois house even in its heyday 150 years ago, Hugh regarded him with sympathy.

  It had not been that difficult to locate the place. From notes kept by Syms Covington, Darwin’s assistant, Hugh learned that McCormick lived in Preston, southeast of the Lake District and indeed, as Lizzie had written, about two hours by train from Kendal. He had pinpointed the address using other historical accounts—including one by Bartholomew Sulivan, the Beagle’s second lieutenant. Then, cross-referencing the street address with various family records on the Internet, he was able to track down a living descendant. The trail, however, was not all that clear-cut; he had not been able to identify “the cousins” Lizzie had described.

  A phone call early in the morning had secured them an invitation to visit, though it had been grudgingly given. The young man who answered the phone was none too friendly and had hinted that, if whatever Hugh was after was all that important, a little money might help grease the wheels.

  Lifting the knocker, Hugh said: “Well, here goes nothing.” He was curious to see what the young man looked like.

  They didn’t have to wait long to find out. A man in his mid-thirties opened the door and squinted suspiciously. Hugh and Beth introduced themselves and he opened the door and let them in without a word. He was dressed in black leather pants and a T-shirt; there was a tattoo of the Union Jack on his right arm and his hair ended in a rat’s tail. His skin was pallid and he was short in stature—like McCormick, thought Hugh.

  “Name’s Harry,” he said, with a deep smoker’s cough, leading the way to a front room darkened with thick draperies and heavy furniture.

  Hugh and Beth sat on hard wooden chairs while Harry sank into a dilapidated purple easy chair. A TV against the wall blared out a soccer game.

  Hugh explained that they were looking for McCormick’s letters. He tried to ward off the notion of payment by making their quest sound unimportant. They were researchers, interested in history, and looking at a project that might enhance Mr. McCormick’s reputation. All the while their host—if that was the word—looked over Hugh’s shoulder at the game.

  Then Beth spoke. “So do you have other distinguished relatives in your family?”

  “Uncle’s a foreman in the pits. But he’s been made redundant.”

  The fans on the television cheered. A chant rose up. Harry pulled himself higher and sat on the edge of his chair.

  Beth turned to Hugh. “Man
chester United,” she explained.

  They watched the tail end of the game—a penalty kick with seconds remaining. The ball flew to the upper left-hand corner of the goal and sunk into the net. The stadium exploded in a frenzy of cheers and flag waving: three to two, Manchester.

  “I had five quid on the game,” said Beth.

  Harry brightened. “Had you pegged for Chelsea.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Good,” said Harry. “Let’s go get a fookin’ pint.”

  They went to a pub around the corner.

  After two Guinnesses, Harry warmed up and became downright friendly. He recounted his life, which was remarkably uneventful. He had never been to London. A welder in an auto shop that had gone bust, he was currently on the dole. His father had retired and was spending the summer with his mother in Malaga, Spain. He had one sister who was off in the States—hadn’t seen her for years.

  He took a long swallow of Guinness and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Yes, he acknowledged, he had been told he was related to McCormick, the adventurer who shipped out with Darwin on the Beagle.

  “ ’E was my great-great somethin’ or tother,” he said.

  And he knew nothing at all about any papers left by McCormick.

  Nor, he was sure, did anyone else in his family. He offered to let them search his attic for ten quid but then, after a third Guinness, succumbed to a rush of generosity, took them back home, and showed them the attic for nothing.

  Nothing was what the attic contained. One old box of Venetian blinds, a dusty fan, and not a thing else.

  Hugh thanked him and said they had to be getting back.

  On the doorstep, Beth shook his hand and Harry gave her a reluctant smile. She said she’d like to ask a question that had been troubling her.

  “I thought that Mr. McCormick was childless,” she said, smiling. “So I take it you’re distantly related, through cousins or something. Is that right?”

  But he did have children, came the answer, or at least Harry thought so. “Can’t say for sure. I seem to remember two sons. Father’d ’em before that last trip with Darwin. But I could be wrong. Don’t know anything about cousins.”

  On the train ride back, rereading the photocopy of Lizzie’s journal, Hugh despaired of ever finding the letter.

  “C’mon,” said Beth. “We haven’t reached a dead end yet.”

  “I’m just wondering what to do next.”

  “Well, there’s one possibility. When I was looking through Lizzie’s letters, I checked out some that she received. And among them I found one from Mary Ann Evans.”

  Hugh perked up. “Did it say anything?”

  “Not in and of itself. But it referred to a letter Lizzie had written her.

  So it’s clear they had a correspondence.”

  “That’s good. We can go to George Eliot’s archives—wherever they are.”

  “They’re in Warwickshire. Nuneaton. And guess where Lizzie sent her the letter from. Zurich. Which is where she had the baby.”

  Hugh reached over and gallantly kissed the back of her hand. “Brilliant. You know,” he added, “I never pegged you for a Man-U fan.”

  “Only in the Midlands.”

  “By the way, did you notice the name of the pub we went to?”

  “No.”

  “It was called The Wild Goose.”

  He finally reached Neville on the phone. He had tried twice before, leaving a message each time, but Neville hadn’t called back. When Hugh identified himself, the voice on the other end of the line didn’t exactly ring with enthusiasm.

  “Bridget’s friend. We met the other night at dinner at her place.”

  “Of course. How could I forget?”

  “Good,” Hugh said, not knowing how else to respond. “I hope we can meet and—you know—carry on the conversation we, ah, started.”

  A lengthy pause, but when Neville finally spoke, Hugh got the impression he had reached a decision even before the call.

  “I don’t see why not,” he said, adding a slight exhale of resignation.

  “I hope I can trust you.”

  “You can,” said Hugh, adding, “I want you to know, I’m deeply grateful.”

  They set the rendezvous: the following afternoon at the entrance to the Royal National Theatre. Good spot, thought Hugh—they could walk along the Thames, maybe cross Waterloo Bridge, a proper setting for an intimate talk. He was surprised at what Neville said next.

  “I hope you realize that anything I might tell you—and mind you, I’m not saying that I will tell you much—I hope you realize it must be treated as strictly confidential.”

  “Of course.” Hugh’s fears rose along with his hopes.

  “In point of fact, I must insist upon it. We sign non-disclosure forms here and they are taken very seriously. Infractions are punishable.”

  “I understand.”

  Hanging up, Hugh was mystified. He had checked out the lab on the Internet and found a number of references to its various research projects and contracts, including some from the government, but nothing that seemed controversial. And Cal was not someone who would have worked on weapons systems or the like; he was far too idealistic.

  Neville was probably just indulging in the British penchant for secrecy. Still, Hugh could not shake a feeling of foreboding.

  It was hard to think about Cal, let alone talk about him—and the prospect of doing so with a stranger, and someone who had troubling information to impart, was upsetting. Hugh had achieved a kind of truce with the past; he hadn’t put it to rest but he had knocked it back so that it no longer haunted him every day. But things were happening, changing, perhaps because of those intimate conversations with Beth.

  He walked over to the desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out the photo that always traveled with him, a black-and-white picture of Cal and him together. He had studied it hundreds of times, the two of them on the Andover campus, him a freshman, Cal a senior about to go off to Harvard. It had been snapped at midday, or perhaps at night, with some phantasmagoric flash that threw their shadows clear across a lawn.

  Cal, as darkly handsome as a movie star and a full head taller than Hugh, grasped the neck of a tennis racket and a pair of sneakers by the laces. Hugh’s mouth was open, as if he were about to speak.

  Hugh had carried this photo with him for years and looked at it from time to time. More often than not it called up an anxiety, a vague distress. Only this time, he saw fresh details: how ill-fitting his own jacket was, how he was looking up at his brother while Cal stared straight ahead, his jaw set, ready to take on the world. What he saw now, he realized with a shock—and what caused his distress—was the tension between them. He could see Cal’s distance and ambition and his own pitiful need for acceptance and love. The photo seemed to capture the very moment when as brothers they were leaving childhood behind and abandoning each other.

  On the way to Down House, Hugh stopped off at the church of St.

  Mary’s in the village and wandered through the shaded churchyard.

  Some of the ancient tombstones were sunk deep in the earth, the epitaphs readable only by worms. Others lunged up at precarious angles, the writing mostly obliterated, spotted with lichens and moss or worn wafer-thin and white as seashells.

  The sixteen-mile trip from London had been quick. The station at Orpington was still in service but he decided instead to take the train to Bromley South and then the number 146 bus—half an hour, forty minutes at most. It was hard to imagine the rigors of a train ride and a phaeton in Darwin’s day that had made the voyage so insupportable to him.

  The village of Downe was much as he had expected—quaint and quiet, constructed of stone, with an apothecary, a grocer’s, a petrol station, and various other small shops. When Darwin was alive, the elders had decided to add an e to the spelling—even back then the lure of Ye Olde England was irresistible, Hugh thought—and he admired his man for standing firm: Down House it was when
he had bought it and Down House it would remain.

  In a corner of the churchyard, he found what he was looking for.

  There, under a yew tree, was the tombstone of Erasmus, Darwin’s brother. Two tiny stones nearby marked the graves of two of Charles’s children, Mary and Charles Waring. He recalled reading Lizzie’s diary—how she and Etty and Emma and the others would pass them every Sunday on their way to church.

  He left through an iron gate and walked up Luxted Road. Following it, he thought of Beth. He had smelled the scent of her when he awoke and he carried it with him through the day. Out of nowhere, a line from Paradise Lost, which he had lately been reading, popped into his head: So hand in hand they passd, the loveliest pair

  That ever since in loves imbraces met . . .

  And another line, this one from the Bible: At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down.

  After a long curve in the road, he came to Down House, a square Georgian building painted white, with a slate roof and ivy clinging to 2 1 3

  the walls. When Darwin first laid eyes on it, he pronounced it “oldish and ugly,” but he soon fell in love with the place, and Hugh could see why. It was comfortable and expandable—rooms could be added on like slides in a trombone. It was a world away from London, full of country smells and sounds—the wet hay in the meadow, the rattle of the fly-wheel in the well, the lime trees buzzing with bees. Phloxes, lilies, and larkspur grew in the flowerbeds. The grounds must have carried Charles back to his childhood at The Mount.

  Hugh entered through the obligatory gift shop and paid admission.

  It was a Tuesday, so there were not many visitors. He followed a herd of schoolchildren touring the ground floor; their teacher, warning them to touch nothing, patrolled like a nervous collie. A curator from English Heritage, a gray-haired woman in a tweed suit, provided the commentary.