by James Morrow
* * *
Sad to say, Chloe’s encounter with Lady Routledge was typical of the pièces mal faites in which she appeared that spring: an auspicious beginning, a wobbly second act, and a calamitous climax. Perhaps Fanny was right. Perhaps she should become a milliner or a seamstress.
When Chloe first clamped eyes on an advertisement indicating that on Sunday afternoon (between the hours of noon and four) a Mrs. Charles Darwin would be interviewing prospective governesses at her husband’s estate in Down, County Kent, she decided to ignore it, having no reason to imagine the meeting should go better than its predecessors. But then she noticed the final line, SYMPATHY WITH EDUCATIONAL THEORIES OF M. ROUSSEAU DESIRABLE, and her hopes soared, for she’d once seen Ellen Tree portray Sophie in an adaptation of the philosopher’s most acclaimed novel.
On the evidence of Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that amongst every child’s instincts were compassion, curiosity, and a love of adventure. The tutor’s job was to nurture these virtues, forswearing all forms of coercion and restraint. Very well, thought Chloe, if it’s amity Mrs. Darwin wants, I’ll become the most genial governess ever to draw breath in Britain. If freedom is the order of the day, I’ll let her offspring run wild as South Seas savages.
Although her liquidity was at low tide—shake her purse, and you would hear naught but a single farthing clink against a bereaved ha’penny—Chloe straightaway secured the steam-train fare in the form of yet another loan from Fanny. Upon arriving at Bromley Station (so ran her scheme) she would spare herself the hackney-coach fee by donning her calfskin boots, hoisting her parasol against the afternoon sun, and walking all five miles to Down Village, where she would change into her best clogs prior to the interview. A well-laid plan, to be sure, which proceeded to go spectacularly awry. Detraining, Chloe was thrown off balance by her portmanteau, accidentally wedging her foot between the last step and the station platform, thereby wrenching her ankle. The pain was implacable—knife-sharp when she moved at a normal pace, spasmodic when she shuffled—and, worse yet, a storm now arose, so she was obliged to trek through a downpour against which her little parapluie proved useless. At five o’clock she presented herself at the estate in the sorriest of conditions: cold, wet, muddy, exhausted—and one hour late.
Mrs. Darwin behaved with exemplary graciousness. Ignoring the raindrops cascading from Chloe’s bonnet and sleeves, she ushered her into the drawing-room, a commodious space boasting a bay window offering a panorama of sodden pastureland punctuated by mulberry trees and a Spanish chestnut. Mrs. Darwin proposed to serve her visitor a cup of chamomile. Given her half-frozen state, this offer delighted Chloe, though she accepted it with a studied restraint that she imagined bespoke refinement.
“I apologize for my tardiness,” she said. “Alas, at some point during my railway journey, my purse fell prey to a pickpocket,” she added (knowing that the truth might suggest an inveterate clumsiness), “and so I couldn’t hire a fly. If you and Mr. Darwin are about to have supper, I shall gladly wait here.”
“A pickpocket, Miss Bathurst?” said Mrs. Darwin. “Oh, dear.” She was a sweet-faced woman whose notable aspects included extravagant brown curls, pink cheeks, a pouty lower lip, and a pregnancy of perhaps six months’ duration. “Mr. Darwin and I should be pleased to put you up and provide for your return to London.”
“Am I to infer the other candidates have come and gone?”
“One stayed behind, a Miss Catherine Thorley, to whom I awarded the situation ninety minutes ere you arrived.”
So often had Chloe’s profession required her to sob on cue, she’d forgotten how it felt to weep spontaneously, but now such an episode was upon her, muffled cries breaking from her throat, fat tears welling in her eyes. Mrs. Darwin relieved Chloe of her cup and saucer, then placed a tender hand on her shoulder.
“I shall write to you the instant I learn that one of my relations requires a governess,” said Mrs. Darwin.
As if summoned by the din of Chloe’s despair, a tall gentleman strode into the room bearing a terra-cotta flowerpot covered with a pie plate, his confident carriage marking him as master of the house. Beetle-browed and side-whiskered, with a nose suggesting a small but assertive potato, he was far from handsome, though Chloe found him attractive nonetheless—physically magnetic and also, by the evidence of his kind eyes and warm smile, a person of abiding benevolence.
“There, there, my dear,” he said, observing her tears, “it can’t be as bad as all that,” a banality last spoken to Chloe by her gladiator lover in The Last Days of Pompeii. As articulated by Mr. Darwin, the platitude acquired a certain profundity—and he was right, she decided: it wasn’t as bad as all that. “If you like,” he continued, setting the flowerpot on the piano stool, “I shall lend you a pound or two till you find employment elsewhere.”
“I fear I’ve run short of elsewheres, sir,” said Chloe. “My peers in the theatre have spurned me, and yours is the twenty-first household where I shan’t become governess.”
“Miss Bathurst, meet Mr. Darwin, the county’s most celebrated naturalist and geologist,” said the mistress of Down House. “Charles, this is Miss Bathurst.”
“Charmed,” said Mr. Darwin, then snapped his fingers so emphatically that Chloe half expected to see a spark. “I have an idea. Tonight, Miss Bathurst, you will sleep in the guest room.”
“The servants’ quarters,” Mrs. Darwin corrected him.
“The servants’ quarters,” he agreed. “After you awaken, exit by way of the veranda, then proceed to the vegetable garden and thence to the rear gate. You will find me up and about, rambling through the thicket and pondering some scientific problem or other. Before our stroll is done I shall have made my proposal, and you will have given me your answer.”
“Good heavens, Charles,” said Mrs. Darwin, pursing her lips in mock exasperation, “it sounds as if you mean to ask for our visitor’s hand in marriage.”
“When a man has so marvelous a creature as you for a wife,” said Mr. Darwin, “he requires no additional brides. You are a harem unto yourself.”
Mrs. Darwin blushed and lowered her head. Her husband issued an affectionate laugh. These people, Chloe surmised, took every imaginable pleasure in each other. Happiness was a hobby that she, too, hoped to pursue one day, but for now she must attend to more practical matters.
Mr. Darwin removed the pie plate from the flowerpot and pointed into the cavity. “Annelids,” he announced.
“Earthworms, Mr. Darwin?” muttered his wife in a world-weary tone, as if crawlers on the piano stool were but one amongst many oddities that accrued to her husband’s profession.
Saying nothing, he flipped back the piano lid. Gaze fixed intently on his worms, he struck the keys with both fists, filling the room with a distressing discordance. “Once again, they make no response.” He assaulted the keys a second time. “Not a wriggle, not a tremor, not a twitch. Yesterday they ignored Master Willy’s flute, the day before that Miss Annie’s tin whistle.”
“Our firstborn son and elder daughter,” Mrs. Darwin explained.
“I daresay, I’ve all but proved that earthworms are deaf.”
“My goodness, that finding must be as significant as Mr. Newton’s universal gravitation—am I right, dear?” said Mrs. Darwin, her lips assuming a wry curve.
“How blithely we underestimate the humble earthworm,” Mr. Darwin persisted. “Were it not for this species’s contributions to soil formation, agriculture would be at a standstill throughout the Empire and the rest of the world.”
Mrs. Darwin now summoned a willowy domestic named Mary, instructing her to find accommodation for Miss Bathurst. The servant bobbed her head deferentially, then guided her charge along a candlelit hall hung with pastoral landscapes, Chloe limping as inconspicuously as her ankle permitted. Suddenly a rambunctious band of children came spilling down the stairs. They brushed past Chloe and marched towards the drawing-room with its earthworms and its doting parents. The tall, serious boy w
as surely Master William (studiously ignoring his little brother), whilst the taller, giggling girl was certainly Miss Annie (casting a protective eye on a toddling sister). Near the end of the parade marched a young woman cradling a babe to her bosom, a nursemaid, no doubt, followed by a second lass holding a chalkboard on which she’d written, “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” the capital letter A in “Adam” rendered in boldface, the lowercase a in “all” likewise enhanced.
For a fleeting instant Chloe endeavored to despise Miss Catherine Thorley, this person to whom she’d lost the coveted post. Her nemesis had at best eighteen years, exuded an air of rusticity, and evinced no obvious competence to cultivate Rousseauian curiosity in young minds. But then a sudden generosity took hold of Chloe, and she bestowed a smile on Miss Thorley, who smiled back. Blighted by workhouses, crippled by Parliamentary inertia, torn by Chartist unrest, the British nation in 1848 was not exactly Heaven on Earth—and yet by Chloe’s lights Mother Albion always had certain perennial virtues on display, not the least of which was governesses for whom even Adam’s lapse from grace could be turned to pedagogical advantage.
* * *
Hopes aloft, senses alive to the melodious larks and sun-soaked sky, Chloe stepped off the veranda and entered the grassy, clover-dotted back lawn of Down House, hobbling past an oval flower bed bursting with lilies and larkspur. Her ankle felt better, and she moved at a sprightly pace to the brick-walled vegetable garden. Gimping quickly through the arched entrance, she sauntered amidst patches of turnips, rhubarb, and runner beans, then lifted the rear-gate latch and crossed into the wild environs beyond.
True to his prediction, Mr. Darwin had reached the thicket ahead of her. “Welcome to my sandwalk,” he said, indicating a path of pulverized flint mottled along its entire course with medallions of sunlight, flanked on one side by a tangled woodland and on the other by a vacant field. “I laid it out myself, an ellipse fit for every sort of rumination.”
She drew abreast of the scientist, and they proceeded towards a cottage located at the far swerve of the path, Mr. Darwin smoking a cigarette whilst propelling himself forward with his walking-stick. “Down to business,” he said. “Beyond the invertebrates whose deafness I demonstrated yesterday, other species occupy these premises, and they all require care and feeding.”
Chloe cringed. A sour curd congealed in her stomach. She could imagine cultivating Mr. Darwin’s roses or whitewashing the walls of his villa, but she had no desire to become his goose girl, milkmaid, or resident shepherdess. “I grew up in the streets of Wapping. I am ignorant of farm animals.”
“The creatures to whom I allude know nothing of farms.”
He guided her off the sandwalk, past a copse of birch and alder, and from there to a meadow dominated by a fantastical building suggesting an immense hoop-skirt frame. The thing was easily as large as the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, its circular windows arrayed like portholes on a ship, whilst an exoskeleton of iron girders arced heavenward to support a gleaming glass vault.
“My zoological garden,” Mr. Darwin explained, directing Chloe towards a riveted bronze door, evidently the only entrance.
Stepping into the strange edifice, she heard a chorus of tweets and chirps, even as she beheld a tableau of golden sunflowers and blossoming vines. Her nose, meanwhile, admitted fragrances so numerous and heady—cloying, piquant, tart, lemony, rank—she seemed to be inhaling the olfactory essence of Creation itself. “An aviary, is that what you call it?” she asked, noting the little birds perching on the vines, pecking at the sunflowers, and swooping across the crystalline ceiling.
“A more accurate term would be ‘vivarium.’ This dome is an aviary, herpetorium, and arboretum, all in one.”
“Herpetorium?”
“Here be dragons.” Mr. Darwin drew her attention to a sector jammed with granite boulders. A troop of large hideous lizards—some bright yellow, others a sallow gray, all sporting spines, scales, and surly faces—lay on a far rock, absorbing the sun. “Land iguanas from Las Encantadas, an archipelago six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador.” He rapped his knuckles on a firebox surmounted by a cylindrical boiler. Affixed to the curving walls, the attendant iron pipes pursued a loop apparently meant to supply the vivarium with steam heat. “Thanks to our furnace, these lizards suffer our English winters without complaint.”
“Las Encantadas.” Chloe hummed the musical syllables. “So it’s an enchanted place?”
Mr. Darwin nodded and said, “Sailors of long ago thought the islands went drifting magically about the Pacific Ocean when no one was looking.”
He next led Chloe past a palisade of bamboo towards six colossal tortoises: primeval beasts with serpentine necks and plated shells, shambling amidst cactus plants so tall they bid fair to be called trees. The tortoises, too, traced to the Encantadas, he explained. In fact, these animals had given the islands their Spanish name, Galápagos.
“I didn’t know a tortoise could grow so large,” said Chloe.
“Until human beings appeared in the Encantadas, these creatures had no natural enemies, and so they were free to become as big and blatant as they wished.”
“How did you acquire such a menagerie?”
“In my youth I joined the company of H.M.S. Beagle on its mission to chart the South American coastline. My duty was to provide the skipper with intellectual companionship, though I was nominally the brig’s naturalist—a position that, as you see, I took rather seriously. Our mockingbirds descend from bonded pairs I brought back from Galápagos, likewise our finches and vermillion flycatchers. The tortoises and iguanas are the very beasts I persuaded Captain Fitzroy to take on board. His officers were forever insisting we cook a specimen or two, but to the man’s credit he wouldn’t hear of it.”
“How did you snare so many birds?”
“Most Galápagos creatures, including those with wings, are tame as lapdogs.” Mr. Darwin guided Chloe to a pond the size of the Adelphi stage. Several varieties of lizard, equal in ugliness to their terrestrial brethren, occupied the limpid depths and surrounding sandstone pylons. “Behold our marine iguanas. Initially I assumed their pond should be topped up with brine, but it happens they also thrive in fresh water. The job will find you helping my gardener, Mr. Kurland, in feeding the reptiles, cultivating the vegetation, providing nesting material for the birds, mucking out the place, and, come winter, supplying the firebox with coal—though your duties will extend to an intangible domain as well. I shall call it ‘affection.’ Mr. Kurland finds little to admire about my zoo. Mrs. Darwin is similarly unmoved. She thinks the tortoises stupid, the lizards grotesque.”
“I shall treat your menagerie most tenderly,” said Chloe.
“It’s the only point on which Mrs. Darwin and I disagree—well, that, and the immortality of the soul.”
“Your wife is a freethinker?”
“Quite the contrary.”
“I see.”
“She keeps exhorting me to join her and Master Willy and Miss Annie for Sunday services at St. Mary’s in the village,” said Mr. Darwin. “Alas, I cannot attend in good conscience. At one point my wife convinced the Reverend Mr. Heathway to send me personal invitations via rock dove—the parson and I are both pigeon fanciers—but he gave up after my fifth expression of regret.” He rapped his walking-stick against a pylon, prompting its scaled occupant to dive into the pond with a great splash. “It’s settled, then—you shall be my assistant zookeeper!”
“May I assume the position comes with a salary?”
“Forgive my forgetfulness,” said Mr. Darwin, chiding himself with a smile. “Don’t tell Mrs. Darwin, but I mean to pay you what Miss Thorley will receive for tutoring the children, forty pounds every year.”
Forty pounds, mused Chloe. Not enough to redeem Papa, and well below the sixty per annum she’d netted during the Adelphi Company’s halcyon days, but sufficient for staying alive whilst she devised a strategy for growing rich. “At a yearly rate of forty pounds, I shall give your
birds and beasts the best Rousseauian education within my competence.”
Mr. Darwin laughed melodically. “Rousseauian, you say? Splendid. We mustn’t corrupt these noble animals with civilization.”
“Rest assured, I shall never equip an iguana with a pocket watch or send him off to work in a textile mill.”
“As for my tortoises—promise me you’ll give them no cigars to smoke, spirits to drink, or waistcoats to wear.”
“You have my solemn word.”
“Miss Bathurst, you are obviously the right woman for the job.”
* * *
Later that afternoon she took the steam train back to London and retrieved from 15 Tavistock Street her most precious belongings, including her mother-of-pearl combs, her grandfather’s bayonet, and the gown of burgundy velvet she’d worn as the dauntless Françoise Gauvin in The Raft of the Medusa (she fully intended to return it one day), plus two items that would make splendid gifts for the eldest Darwin children—an Italian snow globe for Master Willy and a French doll representing Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Little Red Riding Hood, for Miss Annie (both tokens from suitors whose names she’d forgotten). The rooms were deserted, Fanny being at the theatre playing Pirate Mary, so Chloe left a note telling of her new situation as an assistant zookeeper and promising to send ten shillings each month. The irony did not escape her. For the past fourteen weeks Fanny had been meeting the landlord’s bill in toto, and only now, having moved elsewhere, would Chloe be paying her fair share of the rent.
Even after a fortnight of caring for the Down House menagerie, she couldn’t say whether she was indeed the right woman for the job, but one fact was clear—Mr. Kurland, a gnarly wight of acerbic disposition, was ill-suited to zookeeping. In his opinion maintaining the vivarium was demeaning work, the brute iguanas and loutish tortoises being ignoble substitutes for the cows and swine he thought he’d been hired to tend, whilst the birds were but “fiendish little devices through which the Devil contrives to squirt shite upon our heads,” and so he was happy to let Chloe make the vivarium her exclusive domain.
