by James Morrow
“Your forthcoming performance in Oxford will rank with the achievements of Catherine Clive and Sarah Siddons,” said Solange, kissing Chloe’s cheek. “My she-devil navigates by the brightest light in the heavens, a star called aesthetics.”
“Exactly,” said Chloe, squeezing the courtesan’s hand.
“The aesthetics of theatre and the aesthetics of deicide,” said Solange. “I needn’t tell you, of course, I needn’t tell the Covent Garden Antichrist, but a world without God will prove more pleasing to our eyes and more nourishing to our minds. We must love the butterfly for its own sake, not as a testament to some nonexistent deity’s tedious omnipotence.”
“And the dung beetle, too, and my ugly iguanas back in County Kent,” said Chloe. “Oh, Solange, do I really have fortitude enough to win the day? My Cleopatra could win it, and my French castaway, and Pirate Anne, and perhaps even Carmine the vampire, but I am none of those people.”
“Darling, I think you are all four,” said Solange. “But should you feel your courage falter, remember the boon you’re bringing to humankind. If there exists a species of ignorance certain to keep increasing the premiums on the bliss it buys, then a belief in God is surely that creature.”
“My dear Solange, let me invite you to stand by my side when I address the Alastor Hall judges.”
“You do me a great honor.”
Chloe decided that she’d never been in so gratifying a tête-à-tête—an exchange made all the more marvelous for taking place on the 24th of December. It was as if Solange were making a Christmas gift to Chloe of her sea-witch’s wit. If this conversation could somehow continue forever, she would count herself the happiest of women.
But the idyll did not endure. Indeed, it ended abruptly. For the very next morning a hurricane descended on the Equinox, a celestial maelstrom that in turn whipped the equatorial Atlantic to an unimaginable fury, as if the ocean were a soup set a-boil in Lucifer’s own kitchen.
Hour by hour, the tempest increased in violence, its thunderclaps rattling the air like Judgment Day trumps. Believing that by imagining herself as Pirate Anne she would get the better of her fear, Chloe traded her chemise for her buccaneer ensemble, then ventured into the gale. Although she’d endured numerous stage-bound aquatic catastrophes, most memorably the tidal wave that had drowned blind Nydia in The Last Days of Pompeii, nothing had prepared her for the present spectacle. Towering fountains of rain blew across the Equinox from gunwale to gunwale. The torrents saturated her clothes and drenched her skin, then penetrated more deeply still, diluting her blood, turning her marrow to paste.
Peering through the cataract, she saw that the weather deck was deserted, as if the crew had been swept overboard. She looked heavenward. Like monkeys clambering about in treetops, dozens of sailors labored amidst the yardarms, reefing the canvas. She steeled herself, vowing to remain steadfast before Nature’s wrath. Defiantly she opened her mouth, admitting the squalls, for she-devils must traffic in audacity—they grew strong by kissing volcanoes, eating fire, taking suck from storms.
Algernon and Mr. Chadwick stood near the mainmast, gripping a ratline to keep from toppling over, evidently awaiting orders, though to Chloe it seemed obvious that they could best serve the ship by staying out of the way. “We’ve already been dragged north of Fortaleza!” her brother informed her, yelling above the screaming wind. “Runciter’s hoping to make landfall at Parnaíba or São Luís!”
In a spasm of anger Chloe pulled her grandfather’s bayonet from its scabbard and plunged it into the mainmast. Damn this hurricane! Damn each lightning bolt and thunderclap! Owing to this unthinkable cataclysm, the Mayfair Diluvian League would beguile the judges with their confounded ark long before the Equinox returned from Galápagos.
“We’ve learned our lesson, haven’t we?” she shouted, her words borne by a bitter laugh. “Never offend Poseidon with a pageant!”
“It’s God we’ve offended!” cried the vicar.
She returned to her cabin, shed her sodden costume, and climbed into her bunk. Soon her disciple joined her, so that they became proximate as newborn twins. The sea continued to roll and pitch, as if to rid itself of the Equinox as would a bull determined to throw its rider. Stuck fast by terror, Chloe and Solange embraced more tightly yet, but then a half-dozen raps on the cabin door disturbed their wretched privacy.
“Miss Bathurst!”
“Yes?” replied Chloe, recognizing Mr. Dartworthy’s voice.
“We’re sinking!”
“Impossible!”
“I agree! We’re sinking anyway! There’s a place for you and Miss Kirsop in the launch! Hurry!”
Hurry, bien sûr—no other course made sense. Chloe quit the bunk, secured her Panama hat with a piece of twine, and once again costumed herself as Pirate Anne, the wet fabric raising goose bumps on her arms and legs. From her trunk she retrieved the boxed transmutation sketch and the Pirate Mary costume, passing the garments to Solange.
“Meet me on the weather deck!”
Fleeing her cabin, Chloe entered a scene of utter pandemonium, dozens of frightened sailors scurrying every which way, combers of foaming white water spilling across the planks. Atop the forecastle, several midshipmen attempted to lower the quartet of jolly boats. Was the Equinox truly sinking? The dreadful fact could not be doubted, for the weather deck now listed so radically that a chaotic mass of ropes, buckets, barrels, and sea chests lay jammed against the starboard gunwale.
Suddenly Solange appeared, and together the women climbed to the poop deck, great waves rising on both sides like Red Sea ramparts in thrall to Moses’s magic. Mr. Dartworthy emerged from behind a swirling spout of rain and, taking Chloe’s hand, guided her aft. She looked over the rail, beholding the longboat that had conveyed them to St. Paul’s Rocks, now crammed with mariners and nearly swamped. Descending the rope ladder, Solange and Mr. Dartworthy in train, Chloe bemoaned her situation, as bereft of aesthetics and devoid of justice as any she’d ever known. She was supposed to be moving horizontally just then, off to the Encantadas, not vertically towards some pathetic launch.
The women clambered over the keelson and assumed their seats, whereupon Mr. Dartworthy presented them with tin buckets and told them to start bailing. Chloe surveyed her fellow evacuees, the cream of the ship’s company. Captain Runciter sat in the bow, arm curled about the tiller. Mr. Dartworthy held the mooring tethering the longboat to the Equinox. Whilst Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Flaherty deftly nocked the forward oars and slipped them into the sea, Algernon and Mr. Chadwick struggled to likewise position the aft oars.
“Cast off!” shouted the captain over the din of the gale.
Mr. Dartworthy untied the rope. The doomed Equinox lurched drastically to larboard, as if the longboat had been supporting the brig and not the other way around. Chloe and Solange bailed furiously, laboring to rid the launch of rain from the heavens and brine from the swells.
“Pull!” cried Runciter. “Put your backs into it! Pull, or we’re all dead!”
Gasping and grunting, the four rowers worked their oars, stroke upon stroke, and within twenty minutes the longboat was a hundred yards clear of the wreck.
“My fair philosopher, I fear you’ve lost the contest!” exclaimed Mr. Dartworthy.
“Not until somebody else has won it!” screamed Chloe.
Frantically she removed another bucket of water—and another, and still another. Pausing, she endured a fit of coughing, then fixed on the foundering brig. Like some fissured and forsaken Atlantis, abandoned by her every patron deity, the Equinox made a clockwise revolution, then spun a second time, a third, a fourth, until finally she shuddered stem to stern, shivered plank to plank, admitted the sea to her bowels, and vanished.
But the Shelley Prize did not go down with the ship, or so Chloe now required herself to believe. The animal pens and birdcages were headed for the bottom of the ocean, but the treasure still lay in Oxford, waiting to be borne away on the backs of ancient tortoises and venerable iguanas. T
he Transmutationist Club would triumph yet. She would win the world’s applause. It was a simple matter of being shrewder than King Cecrops, more resourceful than Lord Poseidon, and as wise as Lady Athena.
BOOK TWO
THE WHITE RADIANCE OF ETERNITY
6
Recounting a Journey up the Amazon River, Featuring Lush Panoramas, Voracious Piranhas, and a Sun That Rises Even As It Sets
Throughout that interminable first night in the storm-tossed longboat, the Equinox castaways suffered largely in silence, mutely enduring their multiple tribulations, from soggy biscuits to salt-caked clothing, aching muscles to sickening waves, squalls of rain to spasms of dread. Whenever a castaway spoke, it was only to speculate about the fate of the men they’d left behind on the foundering brig. Presumably all forty-two sailors had escaped in the jolly boats, but when the rain finally subsided and the sun rose, disclosing a smooth and benevolent sea, the expected flotilla was nowhere to be seen.
Exchanging not a word, Mr. Dartworthy and Mr. Pritchard erected the mast and hoisted the sail, thus setting the launch on a rapid westerly course and making the oarsmen’s task less burdensome. In time the collective mood shifted, and everyone began to chatter. Reminiscing promiscuously, the castaways talked of cozy taverns, convivial brothels, sainted mothers, favorite uncles, lost loves, found dogs, and Christmases past (excluding the 25th of December, 1849, the date on which the hurricane struck), even as they pointedly avoided the subject of death by thirst and exposure. Fearful that this wanton nostalgia would ultimately prove destructive of morale, Chloe introduced a new subject, remarking on how at the last minute everyone had salvaged an item of personal significance. Mr. Pritchard, not surprisingly, had rescued his pet monkey. Mr. Flaherty had secured three bottles of rum in his breeches. Captain Runciter had seized his sextant, Mr. Chadwick his Bible, Algernon his playing cards, Solange her glass pendant. But the choice that most impressed Chloe was Mr. Dartworthy’s decision to retain his translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
“I’ve not forgotten our appointment with your poet,” she said to the first officer, setting her palm atop the manuscript. “You’re going to sit in a Brazilian cantina drinking Madeira whilst I declaim his verses.”
“It was our planned afternoon in Fortaleza that inspired me to select these quatrains over my cigars,” Mr. Dartworthy replied.
“Might I ask what you salvaged, Miss Bathurst?” inquired Mr. Chadwick. “Besides your Panama hat, I mean.”
Chloe flourished the sandalwood box. “I grabbed my latest effort to put my species theory into words”—she fingered the twine that bound the hat to her head, determining that the knot held firm—“including nuances that occurred to me during the voyage. Thirty-five pages worth ten thousand pounds.”
The conversation now veered towards a more urgent topic: how to keep the longboat from becoming their collective coffin. Algernon proposed turning around and sailing to St. Paul’s Rocks, where they could survive on gannets and crabs till a rescue ship appeared. (Were not the known virtues of that archipelago preferable to the hostile Indians and horrendous insects of the Brazilian coast? Had not Miss Kirsop survived on St. Paul’s Rocks for over a month, and had she not been saved?) Although Chloe found merit in Algernon’s argument, Mr. Dartworthy was quick to reject it, insisting that they would “do far better running from heathen cannibals than fighting over the last edible crab on Miss Kirsop’s little islands.”
Mr. Pritchard suggested that whatever their destination they should dismantle the mast, bisect it with Miss Bathurst’s bayonet, and convert each half into an oar, “thereby increasing our rowing power by one-third.” Mr. Dartworthy called the idea “ingenious in its own way” but declared that the launch would reach its goal more efficiently if they left the rigging in place.
Mr. Flaherty spoke up next, recommending that they exploit the happy fact of a priest in their midst. If the Reverend Mr. Chadwick were now to hear an honest confession from everyone, God might elect to blow them to Fortaleza. The vicar replied that the Almighty was not to be petitioned in so crude a fashion, “though it is appropriate for us to turn our hearts towards Heaven,” then led the castaways in the Lord’s Prayer, a recitation to which Chloe willingly lent her voice, whilst Mr. Dartworthy and Solange maintained a conspicuous silence, as befitted a village atheist and a she-devil’s disciple.
“Having talked to God, ye will now listen to me,” said Runciter. “Just as I was master of the Equinox, so am I now lord of this launch. What manner of man is your captain? Well, he’s evidently incompetent, having steered his ship directly into a hurricane. He’s likewise something of a coward, having abandoned that same ship when honor demanded he go down with it. He must furthermore answer to the charge of greed, as he has not forsaken our original mission. For all this, know ye that in the weeks to come my every word will be taken for a law and my every caprice for a canon, and any man who mutinies will wish he’d drowned in the gale.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” said Mr. Flaherty, “but am I to understand we’re still chasing after the prize?”
“That is my meaning,” said Runciter.
“Spoken like the competent, brave, and philanthropic leader you are,” said Chloe.
“Whoever opposes this plan risks the wrath of the Covent Garden Antichrist,” Solange added.
“You speak out of turn, strumpet,” said Flaherty.
“I’m a courtesan.”
“I don’t mean to dampen our hopes,” said Pritchard, “but according to the Admiralty’s maps, the fattest part of the South American continent lies between here and Galápagos.”
“Then we shall cross the fattest part of the South American continent,” Chloe insisted.
“The Amazon River will get us most of the way there,” added Runciter.
“It flows in the wrong direction,” noted Mr. Dartworthy.
“Then we shall paddle against the current,” said Chloe.
“And after the Amazon come the Andes,” said Pritchard.
“If a man can climb a mast, he can climb a mountain, and so can a woman,” said Chloe.
“And after we reach the Encantadas, how do we get the menagerie back to England?” asked Mr. Dartworthy.
“We’ll think of something,” said Chloe.
“My she-devil always thinks of something,” said Solange.
“With all due respect, Captain, do you not grasp the meaning of our misfortunes?” asked an exasperated Mr. Chadwick, tapping his foot against a bailing bucket. “Will you not allow that God sent the storm to warn us off this impertinent quest?”
“We appreciate your knowledge of the Almighty’s motives, but today we shall confine the conversation to matters of naked avarice,” Runciter replied. “By my reckoning our company has been reduced by three-quarters, which means everyone’s share in the treasure has increased. Mr. Pritchard, for example, now stands to gain five hundred pounds.”
“My captain practices an amiable arithmetic,” said the second officer. “Do you hear that, Bartholomew?” he told his monkey. “We’re rich!”
“Whereas Mr. Flaherty will walk away with four hundred,” said Runciter.
“Let us toast our wise leader,” said the third officer, brandishing one of his rum bottles. With the sole and unsurprising exception of the vicar, the company retrieved their various water receptacles. A half-dozen arms reached towards Flaherty, who awarded each Equinox survivor a splash of spirits. “To Captain Runciter!”
“Captain Runciter!” echoed Chloe.
“Captain Runciter!” chorused Solange, Algernon, Pritchard, and Mr. Dartworthy.
“To myself!” cackled the former master of the lost Equinox.
Seven tin cups connected beneath the equatorial sun, a cadence so spirited it suggested a telegrapher clicking out jubilant news, though by Chloe’s lights the toast’s true recipient was she herself. On numerous occasions throughout history, men had sworn fealty to unruly women—to Boadicea and Jeanne d’Arc and even Pir
ate Anne Bonney. Whether they knew it or not, the longboat’s company was now pledged to escort her up the Amazon, over the mountains, and across the sea to Galápagos. They had vowed to help her uproot the Tree of Life and bear it back to Oxford. They had even promised to follow her as she marched through the gates of Perdition, strode into the Devil’s palace, and inquired of His Satanic Majesty whether Hell had need of a queen.
* * *
When at long last their ordeal ended, five days after the Equinox went down, the hungry, thirsty, and exhausted castaways having blown into the Baía de Marajó and received succor from a passing band of priests en route to their mission outside Curuçá, Chloe was quick to appreciate the incongruity of her situation. Her irony bone sang like a glass chalice. A half-dozen black-robed Jesuits had bestowed the finest quality of Catholic charity on a bedraggled bunch of English adventurers—and yet those same castaways sought to humble the whole of Christianity, including its famous Papist form. Over the course of her career Chloe had enacted many roles, some sympathetic, others villainous, but this was the first time she’d played a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“I eat their bread, I drink their wine, and I feel like a hypocrite,” she said, sipping red crianza.
She was sitting between her devoted disciple and prodigal brother in a mosquito-netted cloister adjacent to a crumbling sandstone church with twin bell towers, the three explorers having retreated to the sheltered arcade to escape the burning eye of the tropical sun and the avid mouths of sand-flies and fire-ants. It was the tenth day of their sojourn amongst the Jesuits. Compared with the blind malice of the sea, the Missão do Sagrado Coração seemed to Chloe a paradise on Earth, and with each tolling of the bells she thanked Solange’s sibyls of coincidence for bringing her to so serene a sanctuary. True, the wine was sour, the heat stifling, and the insects voracious, but these hardships were as milk and honey compared to the grueling labor and intolerable privations of life in a longboat.
