by James Morrow
The religionists made ready to launch a second assault, retrieving more missiles from a pony cart jammed with the slimy arsenal, but before they could strike again an elegant and well-favored man in a brass-buttoned frock coat appeared on the quarter-deck, wielding a pistol and commanding a dozen sailors armed with muskets.
“Trim their beards!” shouted the first officer, for surely that was the man’s rank. “Rattle their wigs! Fire!”
The sailors raised their muskets and unleashed a fusillade over the heads of the throng.
“Stand down!” the first officer ordered the protestors. “Drop your weapons!”
The religionists scanned one another’s faces, quickly reaching an unspoken consensus, then spilled their missiles onto the wharf in a mad circus of tumbling bulbs and rolling tubers.
Algernon guided Chloe up the ramp and into the vicinity of their benefactor, who at close range proved more handsome still, a maritime Adonis with cobalt eyes and a cleft chin. “Mr. Bathurst, I presume?” he said, prompting a nod from Algernon. “Ralph Dartworthy, captain’s mate, at your service.”
“Allow me to present my sister,” said Algernon.
“Enchantée, Mademoiselle Bathurst.” Mr. Dartworthy lifted Chloe’s hand to his lips and kissed the back of her pirate glove.
“I must thank you for delivering us from the rabble,” she said.
“And I must thank you for chasing after this great prize,” said Mr. Dartworthy. “My piece of it, I’m told, comes to two hundred pounds. Captain Runciter hopes that you and your brother might join him for supper at eight o’clock.”
“Tell the old rogue we accept his invitation,” said Algernon.
“And will you be at the captain’s table, Mr. Dartworthy?” asked Chloe.
“’Tis not every day a man gets to dine with an antichrist,” he replied with a sly smile. “I’ve never before seen a person change wine into venom or bread into stones. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
* * *
Amongst the useful bits of information Chloe had acquired during her theatrical career was a formula for removing stains from cloth. The secret lay in a confluence of soap, water, lemon juice, and doggedness. Although citrus fruits were understandably at a premium aboard the Equinox (their efficacy against the scurvy being a proven scientific fact), she nevertheless persuaded the sea-cook to peel two lemons, keep the pulp for his tea, and present her with the rinds. Laboring strenuously in her cramped poop-deck cabin, she successfully scrubbed the foul-smelling smears and blotches from her buccaneer ensemble.
Upon removing the last spot, she changed into her burgundy-velvet gown and returned to the open air, just in time to observe the crew unbinding the brig from the wharf. The arrival of a woman on the weather deck did not go unnoticed by the sailors, who variously inspected her with slack-jawed amazement, wide-eyed salaciousness, and a cringing discomfort that she interpreted (given her reputation as the enemy of all things holy) as the fear of God. Mr. Dartworthy was everywhere at once, consigning some men to the sheets and braces, sending others up the shrouds, so that the foresail, headsails, topgallants, and royals were soon loosed into the press of the wind, each great block of canvas falling into place like a curtain demarking the end of an Adelphi Company melodrama.
As the westering sun inflamed her wake, the Equinox sailed free of the harbor and scudded into the channel, so that Chloe in time found herself surrounded by vast tracts of water. Her skin prickled, alive to the salt air and the impending quest, even as her mind reeled with the humbling geometry of the sea. Here on the mighty North Atlantic, the normally wide gap between the intimate and the infinite did not obtain. Her cabin was absurdly small, and yet just beyond its confines lay the unbounded main, endless in all directions.
Although Chloe’s accommodations suggested a sarcophagus, the captain’s quarters were as capacious as a bishop’s tomb. As she approached the linen-draped table, her velvet gown glowing in the candlelight, four gentlemen set down their goblets, rose from their chairs, and bowed. Clamping eyes on Captain Runciter, a bulky man with a silver beard, she pictured him perched on the Tree of Life, the branch cracking beneath his weight and returning him to his apish ancestors. He introduced himself in a booming voice, averring that, although he disapproved of deicide on first principles, he intended to get everyone to Galápagos and back without misadventure.
“I’m pleased to see you looking so well, Miss Bathurst, after your encounter with the mob,” said Mr. Dartworthy, pulling out a chair and guiding her onto the plush cushion.
“But for your gallantry, sir, my buccaneer ensemble would have been irretrievably tarnished,” she said.
“By the by, your animal pens and birdcages are all safely on board.” Algernon took hold of a green bottle and filled her glass with a honey-colored fluid. “Have some wine, sweetest sister.”
“A commendable Tokay,” noted a third personage, a gangly man in a parson’s collar.
“What would we ever do without our pirate costumes?” Algernon replenished his own glass. “Oft-times I’ve said to myself, ‘I can’t imagine what I’ll wear to Her Majesty’s next ball.’ And suddenly the answer dawns on me.”
“Speaking of the theatre, I was recently privileged to observe one of your performances,” said the unidentified cleric to Chloe.
“As the Beauteous Buccaneer?” she asked.
“As a Shelley Prize contestant,” replied the stranger with a furtive smile—and suddenly she recalled him: the vicar who’d cast the deciding vote in favor of the quest. “We’ve not been formally introduced.” He extended his arm, nearly knocking over his Tokay glass. “Malcolm Chadwick, your brother’s cabinmate.”
“Forgive me for not recognizing you,” she said, shaking the vicar’s hand. “The low light deceived me, as did my assumption you were still in Oxford.”
“Needless to say, Mr. Chadwick has no interest in whatever financial rewards this expedition might yield,” Captain Runciter explained. “The Oxford Diocese has appointed him ship’s chaplain. Mark my words, ere this voyage is done our crew will have need of spiritual solace. Thanks to that scribbler Popplewell, word has been flying up and down the Channel that anyone who signs aboard the Equinox is risking his immortal soul.”
“Which doubtless made finding men difficult,” said Algernon.
“In fact, we had to turn applicants away,” said Mr. Dartworthy. “For a British sailor, evidently, killing God does not feel as bad as owning a piece of the Shelley Prize feels good.”
Now the food arrived, a cornucopia of roast beef, baked ham, and fresh mackerel, served on china plates by the captain’s steward. The vicar offered a laconic grace, and then everyone set upon the feast.
“Miss Bathurst, I want you to know that, for all my loyalty to the Church of England, I am intrigued by your species theory,” said Mr. Chadwick, indicating her with his fork, its tines holding a nugget of beef. “I look forward to discussing its sources and implications with you in the weeks to come.”
“We may talk about my idea whenever you wish,” she said, feigning nonchalance. “It’s the least I owe the man who persuaded Woolfenden to patronize us. But please satisfy my curiosity. Who’s taking your place on the judges’ bench?”
“None other than Bishop Wilberforce. Let me add that I’ve permanently recused myself from the contest, as my association with this expedition cannot but compromise my objectivity concerning your alleged disproof.”
“Well, sister, there’s a piece of luck,” said Algernon. “With the impossibly pious Soapy Sam on the bench, no upstart atheist will bag the prize in our absence.”
Chloe chewed a morsel of ham and nodded in assent. Algernon was right—at the moment both Bishop Wilberforce and Mr. Chadwick were precisely where she wanted them. And yet the vicar’s presence seemed as contrived as anything in a Bulwer-Lytton melodrama. Ship’s chaplain indeed. Something exceedingly odd was afoot.
“Forgive my suspicions, Reverend, but would we not be within our rights to
consider you a Jonah?” asked Mr. Dartworthy, as if he’d read her mind. “After all, you want our mission to fail. You hope we’ll return to England with nary an illustrative specimen.”
“On my view, the Galápagos creatures pose no threat to God’s credibility,” said Mr. Chadwick. “As I asserted back at Alastor Hall, a Christian has nothing to fear from the facts.”
“Though when I consider the fate of the great library of Antioch,” said Mr. Dartworthy, “I would say the facts may have much to fear from a Christian.”
“Good heavens, Ralph, you sound like one of those blasted freethinkers yourself,” said Runciter. “I don’t care if you’re a secret Chartist, a closet Jacobin, or a procurer for a Persian seraglio—but I won’t have you gainsaying Her Majesty’s Church at my table!”
“Sir, you’ve smoked me out,” said Mr. Dartworthy. “Your first officer is one of those blasted freethinkers, answering on occasion to the name of atheist.”
Chloe reddened with pleasurable dismay. It was one thing to pose as an atheist (by way of acquiring a small fortune and overdue adulation) and quite another actually to be an atheist. To what depths did Mr. Dartworthy’s disaffection run? Would he feel at home amongst the Byssheans of Alastor Hall, writing lewd poetry with one hand whilst groping a paramour with the other?
“So we have two unbelievers amongst us,” said Mr. Chadwick, “and two men of faith—am I correct in labeling you a Christian, Captain?”
“A very bad Christian,” said Runciter, “a Christian who has violated all ten commandments and several bylaws as well, but a Christian nevertheless.”
“We shall leave it to Mr. Bathurst to break the tie,” said Mr. Chadwick to Algernon. “Given your efforts in support of Miss Bathurst’s cause, should I take my cabinmate for a religious skeptic?”
“Although the Almighty and I aren’t on speaking terms, I would never presume to doubt His existence,” said Algernon. “How, then, to explain my membership in the Transmutationist Club? Let’s just say I am my sister’s keeper.”
“The sea is a dangerous place for a woman,” said Mr. Chadwick, nodding.
“So is dry land,” said Chloe.
“Tell me, Reverend,” said Mr. Dartworthy. “Do you and your fellow vicars ever get together for wine-tasting parties, using the residue of Eucharists gone by? ‘Here, Father Lambert, try Father Frickert’s Château Absolution from Easter Sunday of 1832, an excellent vintage with a lingering bouquet.’ ‘I quite agree, Friar Alcott, but have you appraised Father Marbury’s Vin d’Infini from Ascension Sunday of 1798? It has a je ne sais quoi not attained since Thomas à Becket himself was performing the magic at the altar.’”
“That will be all, Ralph,” said Runciter. “Mr. Chadwick is not amused.”
“But neither am I offended,” said the vicar. “Irreverence is always an embarrassment to itself, especially when mouthed by village atheists like Mr. Dartworthy. God is not so easily mocked.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Runciter, raising his glass.
“To what?” asked Algernon.
“To the unmockability of God.”
“Hear, hear,” said Algernon.
“God is not mocked,” said Mr. Chadwick, elevating his wine.
“But village atheists are always fair game,” said Mr. Dartworthy.
“To the unmockability of God,” said Chloe. As opposed to the cosmos, she thought. “And to the necessity of village atheists,” she added, assuming her most provocative Carmine the vampire smile—the trick was to keep the lower lip immobile—and bestowing it on Mr. Dartworthy.
Like compass needles in thrall to a lodestone, each goblet sought out its companions, all five connecting with crystalline clinks.
“It’s going to be a long voyage,” said Mr. Dartworthy, offering Chloe an admiring glance. “And owing to the presence of the lovely Miss Bathurst, it promises to be an enchanting voyage as well.”
* * *
A long voyage: quite so. In fact, the most monotonous odyssey imaginable, Chloe soon realized, a one-way ticket to tedium and beyond. Day after day, week upon week, the Equinox cleaved to her course, south by southwest, ever onward, bound for the great port city of Fortaleza on the Brazilian coast, where Captain Runciter intended to reprovision ere beginning the protracted journey to Cape Horn. Having laden the brig with plenty of victuals, sailcloth, and potable water, he was loath to stop anywhere between the fiftieth parallel and the equator. The Equinox pursued a negative itinerary, a succession of ports not called, from La Coruña to Lisbon to Tenerife to St. Jago. An aura of disgruntlement hung over the decks, the inevitable mood of a crew that needed, as Mr. Dartworthy told Chloe with a hasty grin, “wine, women, and song of the sort found in harbor towns, as opposed to the grog, onanism, and chanteys available on the Equinox.”
Although Chloe could appreciate the crew’s desire to stretch their legs and engage in other acts of elongation, the need to outdistance the ark hunters trumped all other considerations, and she thanked Dame Fortune that the crossing to Brazil would occur without any hiatuses beyond those occasioned by doldrums, storms, and what Mr. Dartworthy called “Captain Runciter’s peculiar notions of how to plot a course.” Nevertheless, there were times when she yearned for the marvels of the terrestrial world (dogs romping through Hampstead Heath, children sailing toy boats on the Serpentine, street musicians playing their squeeze-boxes in Piccadilly). Deep and awesome as the Atlantic might be, it lacked for variety and drama. The sea was impressive, but it did not have a plot.
True, the present adventure featured intriguing fauna—flocks of greedy gulls, schools of rambunctious porpoises, herds of playful right whales, not to mention Second Officer Hugh Pritchard’s noisy monkey, a capuchin named Bartholomew, forever clapping his paws and shrieking chee-chee-chee—but she took little joy in these creatures and their antics. With their opaque pedigrees and obscure lineages, each such bird and beast reminded her that she was not so much impersonating a naturalist as living a lie. How close together on the Tree of Life would Mr. Darwin place a storm petrel and a goshawk? What common progenitor did a Cape Verde dolphin share with a Thames River water vole? At what point did Bartholomew’s ancestry become synonymous with that of his human owner? Here and now, on the sunbaked decks of the Equinox, her ignorance seemed as vast as the omnipresent ocean.
Beginning each evening at eight o’clock Chloe was obliged, as a regular guest at the captain’s table, to witness Mr. Dartworthy and Mr. Chadwick debating the mystery of First Causes. Spirited and erudite though they were, these exchanges did nothing to relieve her languors, for in fact she’d grown sick of the whole God question, even when it touched directly on the Shelley Prize. Were it not for her fascination with the brig’s first officer, she would have declined Merridew Runciter’s dinner invitations—an option embraced by her brother, who preferred to play at dice and cards with the able-bodied seamen amidst their dank, odiferous hammocks.
Although Mr. Dartworthy’s understanding of transmutationism seemed patchy at best, he clearly reveled in the prospect of having his atheism corroborated by the Galápagos fauna, even as Mr. Chadwick accused that same atheism of being little more than its own variety of faith. “And a poorly reasoned faith withal,” said the vicar shortly after the Equinox crossed the Tropic of Cancer, “lacking the sort of robust evidence on which my own convictions are founded. I speak of Holy Writ and the testament of visible Creation.”
“May I assume you do not believe in trolls, Reverend?” Mr. Dartworthy inquired by way of retort.
Mr. Chadwick answered with a glower.
“Would you assert that such skepticism constitutes an act of faith?” Mr. Dartworthy continued. “Must you have a religious revelation ere entertaining doubts about trolls? Do you need a heavenly choir to appear before you, singing, ‘Hear us now, Vicar of Wroxton, and know cave monsters for a delusion’?”
“If I thought as you do, I should never get out of bed in the morning, for fear of finding the world had lost all coherence
,” said Mr. Chadwick. “Face it, sir, even you don’t think as you do. An atheist cannot begin to tell us why the trees bud every spring, or why a drover might lose his heart to a goose girl, yet when did you last spurn a piece of fruit or a maiden’s smile because apples and desire must be taken on faith?” From his coat pocket he produced a small Bible, slapping it onto the table like a gamester playing the ace of trumps. “Read the Book of Job, and you’ll see that we can account for the ways of birds, beasts, and heavenly bodies only by evoking a supernatural agency. ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’”
“The next time you compare God to a troll,” Captain Runciter told Mr. Dartworthy, “our friendship will emerge the worse for it.”
“Freethinkers have their books, too,” Mr. Dartworthy replied, then revealed that his favorite such text was The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which he’d first learned about from a fellow mariner, a dervish who’d stopped whirling long enough to translate the poems into English. “I keep the manuscript in my bunk. When we get to Fortaleza, I shall betake myself to the nearest cantina, there to sip Madeira”—he leaned towards Chloe and brushed her hand—“whilst our resident player whispers irreverent verses in my ear: ‘Allah, perchance, the secret word might spell. If Allah be, he keeps his secret well.’”
“I should be happy to amuse you in such a manner,” she said, blushing.
Occasionally Mr. Chadwick tried to lure Chloe into these symposia, particularly when the talk touched on biological matters. Having promised to answer the vicar’s questions about her species theory, she normally acquiesced to his invitations, though they seemed motivated less by curiosity than by rancor.
“I don’t doubt that the Almighty built a certain flexibility into the natural world,” said Mr. Chadwick as the brig blew across the tenth parallel, “but a mutable Creation hardly negates Genesis.”
“Once we reach Galápagos and I begin collecting specimens,” said Chloe, hoping the subject would change sooner rather than later, “you may find yourself possessed of a different opinion.”
