The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton

  “Again, guilt. A good man takes his sins harder than a bad man. And maybe if he was honest, he knew that he really had wanted McCormick to die. Don’t forget—the guy was trying to kill him.”

  “A minute ago you were saying Darwin was trying his hardest to save him.”

  “Maybe it’s not so clear-cut. At least in Darwin’s mind. Maybe he fears on some level he allowed the death to happen—a sin of omission rather than commission.”

  Hugh refilled their glasses. He remembered someone observing that Darwin had shied away from investigating the human mind.

  Why did he have the feeling that they hadn’t fully plumbed Darwin’s secrets?

  “And he never actually says when the theory comes to him,” he continued. “He makes it sound as if he and McCormick just stumbled on it somewhere.”

  “That’s nothing new. He struck that tone in everything he wrote. He was never precise about it. This just shows he formulated the theory a bit earlier than anybody knew.”

  “But covering up exactly when it struck him? Messing up his finch specimens? Making up that whole episode about an insect bite? What was the point?”

  “I grant you, that’s a bit strange.”

  “I’ll say. And another thing—all these people trying to blackmail him.

  Don’t forget that. And why would Huxley and all the others need to protect him?”

  “They’re not really protecting him. They’re protecting the theory.

  They know it’s too important to let one man’s reputation drag it down.”

  “But how did they know what Darwin did? Where did they hear of McCormick’s death?”

  “From FitzRoy.”

  “But FitzRoy didn’t actually see what happened on the volcano. All he came away with was suspicions.”

  “Maybe Darwin confessed it to them.”

  “But he says Lizzie was the only one who knew his secret.”

  “The only one who discovered it,” answered Beth, but without conviction. She was beginning to feel stymied.

  “And Wallace—he was on the other side of the earth,” said Hugh.

  “Don’t tell me Darwin confessed to him. ”

  “He eventually returned to London. Maybe he heard about it from someone in the inner circle then.”

  “But Wallace had already come up with the theory on his own.

  Wouldn’t he want to assert his ownership if he thought Darwin was possibly a murderer?”

  “Could be he needed the money.”

  “It could be. But if he exposed Darwin, he would have been credited with the theory and gotten fame and money into the bargain. Besides, if you include Wallace as one of the conspirators—if that’s the word for it—the circle gets wider and wider.”

  She withdrew her arm.

  “Face it, Beth. It just doesn’t add up. Too many loose ends.”

  “I admit you’re raising questions that are hard to answer.”

  He suddenly stood up. “I just thought of something,” he said. “How could we have missed it?” He put his glass down on a table. “There’s one question that’s even harder.”

  “What?”

  “Assume for a moment that you’re correct: Lizzie turned against her father because of what happened on the volcano.”

  “Right.”

  “And she learned about it from reading the letter McCormick wrote to his relatives.”

  “Right.”

  “How could he have written it? He was dead.”

  “Shit.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Hugh said to Roland, after the three of them left the library for the evening, the doors locking behind them, and strolled along Burrell’s Walk toward Garret Hostel Lane. “You’re a fount of knowledge.”

  “Thank you,” replied Roland. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  “Does the expression nuit de feu mean anything to you?”

  “It brings to mind several things. But I’m not sure I should discuss them in mixed company.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “May I ask what lies behind this rather odd query?”

  “It concerns our Darwin research,” put in Beth. “We’re at something of a dead end.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what you’re up to. I’m distinctly out of the loop, as you Americans say.”

  “We’d tell you but we don’t know what we’ve got,” said Hugh. “So far we’ve just exchanged one mystery for another one. And the second is even more mysterious than the first.”

  “It’s like what Churchill said about Russia,” added Beth. “A mystery inside an enigma wrapped in a riddle.”

  Roland grimaced. “You mean, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

  “Whatever. It means the same thing.”

  “No, it doesn’t. You can’t wrap something inside a riddle.”

  “And I suppose you can wrap it inside an enigma?”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, but the wrapping was done to the riddle by the mystery. Then the whole thing went into the enigma.”

  “Will you two stop it!” cried Hugh. They crossed the bridge over the Cam. The swans had turned in for the night behind the willow boughs.

  He explained: “Darwin used the expression ‘nuit de feu’ and we’re trying to figure out what it means.”

  Roland stopped short. “I don’t remember that,” he said.

  “It’s in Lizzie’s journal.”

  “I see. The book you found when I smuggled you into the stacks.”

  “Right,” said Beth. “And we thought we knew what he meant by nuit de feu, but it doesn’t exactly fit.”

  “For one thing,” said Hugh, “the event we’re thinking of didn’t happen at night.”

  “Though it did involve an awful lot of fire,” added Beth.

  They came to the narrow lane behind Trinity College.

  “There is one person who comes to mind when I hear that expression,” Roland said. “He used the same words—and in French. But it was two centuries earlier.”

  “Go on,” urged Hugh.

  “Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher. He used it to describe an incredible night in which he had a deep religious conversion. He believed he actually saw God. And afterward he entered a Jansenist convent and never again published under his own name.”

  “And Darwin would have heard of this?” asked Hugh.

  “Of course.”

  Now Beth was skeptical. “But that doesn’t really fit. You’re not going to tell me Darwin became a believer?”

  “No,” replied Roland. “And without the context, I obviously have no idea what he was talking about. But it’s possible he was using it generically. The expression suggests some kind of conversion, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus or Archimedes in the bath. Some flash of revelation like a lightning bolt—a moment when everything becomes clear.”

  “I see,” said Hugh.

  They came to Market Hill. The shops were full and the sidewalks crowded for the evening rush hour. They threaded their way around dons on bicycles, red-faced tourists piling back into their buses, and groups of students heading for the pubs.

  Roland stopped and entered a bookstore. “I’ll be back straightaway.”

  Hugh turned to Beth. “Revelation is one thing. Murder’s another. If you killed someone—or thought you’d killed someone—you’d hardly describe it as a nuit de feu. ”

  They waited by the entrance. A teenager came out carrying a pile of books under one arm. With his fresh face and long silky blond hair, he seemed young to be a student. Hugh, deep in thought, watched him walk away.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Beth.

  “Nothing’s wrong. He reminds me of someone—someone I saw in a sketch.” He stopped suddenly, becoming motionless. “Beth, my God.

  That’s it!”

  “What?”

  “We had the wrong R.M. It wasn’t Robert McCormick. It was the teenage missionary: Richard Matthews.”

&n
bsp; CHAPTER 27

  The call came to Hugh’s rooming house two hours later. When he hung up the phone and returned to his room, where Beth was lying on the bed, he told her he had to answer the summons. He would go to Oxford the next day and she would go to the library and try to track down the Matthews relatives on her own.

  The following morning he rose early, went to London, and caught the train to the place he had dreaded. London was one thing—it held only a scattering of memories. Cambridge was another—it was safe ground. But Oxford . . . here the ghosts were on their home turf. And sure enough, as he walked through the old university town and past the Gothic colleges with their spires and crenulated walls, they did not disappoint.

  He passed the bend on the Isis where he and Cal had gone punting together. There was the boathouse, still painted white, and the floating dock. (Hugh’s pole had stuck in the muck and he had clung to it, stranded above the water, until his strength ebbed and he plunged in.

  Cal had laughed his head off.) On the High Street, he passed the pub where Cal had confessed to making a pass at one of Hugh’s girlfriends—successful, it turned out—and for days afterward Hugh had pretended to sulk. And there, down the street, was the movie theater where they had seen La Dolce Vita on a rainy Sunday afternoon. That was the trouble with England: the boathouse, the pub, the theater—landmarks didn’t change.

  He passed All Souls, the college where he and Cal sometimes dined at the invitation of a friend, a historian who bragged that the wine cellar was second only to the Queen’s. He remembered the dinners, in which the fellows moved from dining hall to common room to consume various courses, donning and doffing academic gowns according to some ancient prescript that Hugh never could grasp. In an alcoholic blur Hugh had thought the conversations profound and enlightening but could never recall them the next morning.

  Hugh was on his way to see Simon, who, like Neville, had agreed to the meeting with a reluctance that he took no pains to conceal.

  “I’m not really sure what point would be served in getting together,”

  Simon had said over the phone in a thin, high voice.

  But Hugh insisted. “You were Cal’s roommate. I think it might be useful to me to talk to you. So does Bridget—in fact, she suggested it.”

  “And the purpose?”

  “I’m trying to sort some things out.” Hugh worried that his response sounded like psychobabble, anathema to the British.

  But the reply was positive: “Well—perhaps. Yes.”

  They agreed to meet in the cloisters of New College at one o’clock.

  Simon was leaving for France early the following morning.

  Before hanging up, Simon had said: “Incidentally, I hope you don’t mind my saying this but your voice sounds much the same as your brother’s, almost identical, in fact.”

  New College was at the epicenter of the town and a stone’s throw from the bustling High Street, but it was a world away. Hugh turned at Queens Lane, a narrow cobblestone street no wider than an oxcart. It zigzagged, following the ancient stone walls until it passed the college gate. Beyond the porter’s lodge, he came to a medieval courtyard, and to his left he saw the cloisters. At each turn the sounds from the town had grown fainter. Now, as he stepped inside, it was utterly still. The shadows that fell across the central quadrangle of grass remained unchanged from the fourteenth century.

  Hugh passed by the entrance to the chapel. The arcade was roofed with boards fitted together in a pattern like a ship’s hull. Memorial plaques lined the walkways and the pillared windows facing the garth were decorated in Gothic tracery.

  Simon was the only other person there, pacing nervously, carrying a briefcase. Seeing Hugh, he gave an awkward wave and marched toward him, his hand extended. He was thin and bony, with an angular face and wire-rimmed glasses. Despite the warm weather, he was wearing a heavy tweed jacket; his tie was tightly knotted and askew.

  “Glad you could come,” said Hugh, adopting a British speech pattern to put the man at ease. “A bit short notice, I realize.”

  “No, it’s fine. The least I could do.”

  He made it sound as if he had acquiesced readily.

  “Shall we walk?” said Hugh. In fact, they were already following the walkway. Simon moved like a bird, taking tiny steps, his head bobbing slightly.

  “I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you,” Hugh continued. “I’m over here doing research, and . . . I wanted to meet you.”

  “Yes, you’re investigating something about Darwin—isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “Bridget. She phoned me shortly after you did—that is, after the first time you called.”

  Hugh was tempted to ask why, in that case, he hadn’t returned his calls sooner, or, for that matter, why he had pretended ignorance of his motive, but he let it ride.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “Ah, the American question.”

  Hugh was annoyed. “You don’t have to answer it. I’m simply making small talk.”

  “I appreciate that. No, quite all right.” He was an agronomist, specializing in crops and the transfer of land to poor farmers in the Third World, specifically in South Africa. That made sense, thought Hugh; a profession with a social conscience was the kind of thing Cal would look for in a friend.

  They came to a corner in the cloisters and turned left, into the shadows.

  “How did you meet Cal?”

  Simon looked at him before answering.

  “At a party, when Cal was finishing up his degree. It was here at New College. Something of a bash, actually—we got drunk as lords. We liked each other from the start. It happened that we had a vacancy in my rooms, so I offered it to him and he took me up on it straightaway. And he moved in.”

  He paused, uncertain about what to say next.

  “Look,” he said abruptly. “This is difficult. I don’t know where to begin. But Bridget—by God, she’s a force of nature, isn’t she? She thought it would be a good idea if I told you some things about Cal.”

  It bothered Hugh, the idea that they were talking behind his back, measuring out what to tell him.

  “Exactly what is it that she thinks you should tell me?”

  “Hard to say, in so many words. I don’t want to be presumptuous.

  There are some things even she does not know.”

  “I want to know everything. That’s why I asked you to meet me.”

  “Well, let’s see. We were very close, the two of us. Intimate discussions. He talked a lot about you, incidentally.”

  “We were close too.” Hugh thought: a lot closer than the two of you.

  “I’m sure you were. In any case, seeing so much of each other, we got to know one another well. We took our meals together. Went for a pint from time to time. In some ways he was closer to me than anyone else—excluding family, of course. And early childhood friends; one never quite replicates those.”

  He paused again, uncertain.

  “Why don’t you just say what you want to say?”

  “Hmm, yes. I expect I needn’t fill you in on everything; it was some time ago, after all. And I suppose you don’t need to hear about our life here, except that we got along fine. That’s important. We became—I think we would have been—lifelong friends. I’m telling you all this because I want you to realize that we loved Cal and we, um, tried to help him.”

  “Help him? How?”

  “Um, I gather Neville has talked to you about that business in the lab.”

  Hugh nodded. So they all had been in touch with one another. It felt like a God-damned conspiracy.

  “That was serious, extremely so. At first I didn’t realize just how serious, but these are scientists, you know, working on government projects. They simply do not tolerate deviations from accepted practice.”

  “I can imagine,” said Hugh. His irritation was growing.

  “Even Bridget doesn’t know he was fired. To this day I believe she thinks he wa
s on some kind of leave.”

  “I see.”

  “So, as you might expect, Cal fell into a depression. A deep depression.” Simon looked over at Hugh, judging his reaction, then pressed ahead. “In fact, for days he didn’t want to get out of bed. He didn’t want to eat, he didn’t want to do anything. Finally—there’s no other way to say this—he simply didn’t want to go on.”

  “To go on?”

  “Go on living.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That, uh, I believe he tried to take his life—twice, in fact. Once with pills and once in a car crash. The first time I walked in and found him unconscious on the floor and rushed him to hospital. They pumped his stomach. The second time—that’s not so clear. He was found near the Ring Road, the car smashed to smithereens. No other vehicles involved.

  The police couldn’t say for certain but they hypothesized that he rammed a tree, intentionally. Given the first time, we thought perhaps they were right.”

  “Why did they think it was intentional?”

  “Well, there were some indications—he wasn’t wearing his seat belt, which he usually did. He had been drinking. There were no skid marks. Things like that.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Did we do enough, you mean. I hope so. I think so. We supported him in every way as best we could. We got him professional help. He went three, four times a week. The diagnosis was clinical depression and he was given pills. By the way, he said this had happened to him before, when he was young.”

  Hugh did not know what to say. Perhaps those times long, long ago when Cal stayed alone in his room all the time. His father had never mentioned it and of course they never discussed it.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Anyway,” Simon continued, “he seemed to be getting a bit better, with some ups and downs along the way, of course. And then he decided to go back to Connecticut, and we all thought that was a good idea, given that Oxford held such painful memories. Best to just start over and all that. So he left.”

  They had taken several complete circuits of the walkway.

  “Did you ever talk to him?” asked Hugh. “Ask him what was wrong, if you were so close to him?”