by James Morrow
As Sancho shackled Miss Kirsop, she told Stopsack, “You are correct to hold Mr. Chadwick blameless—and mistaken to imagine God ever wanted you to enter the contest.”
“Your frustration is understandable, Governor,” said Malcolm. “But in binding two stalwart British subjects over to Hengstenberg you’ll be simultaneously committing a cardinal sin and making a grave political miscalculation.”
“You can’t detain us without bringing formal charges,” noted Dartworthy.
“Then I formally charge you with gross sacrilege, radical impiety, and arrant blasphemy,” replied Stopsack.
“Let’s be honest, Governor,” said Miss Kirsop. “Your sensitivity to sacrilege is such that you wouldn’t care if we made a chicken coop of the True Cross or a spitoon of the Holy Grail. The problem is that you think we cheated you out of ten thousand pounds.”
“Five thousand,” said Stopsack. “I was prepared to split the prize with Madam Prophet.”
“Here’s a detail for you to ponder—the Covenant is a fraud,” said Malcolm. “It was built by a Huancabamba religious sect a mere hundred years ago.”
“Mr. Hallowborn has judged the ark authentic,” Stopsack replied. “Eggwort believes in it, too, for that matter. Those endorsements are good enough for me.”
Silence descended on the cove, the various factions having turned their attention to the dying Covenant. As seawater flooded the gutted hull, the ark begin its vertical voyage, plank by plank, yardarm by yardarm. Soon only the mainmast was visible, piercing the waves like a sword—and then even that flaming Excalibur was gone.
“Miss Quinn and I eagerly await our day in court,” Dartworthy insisted.
“We are keen to advertise our low opinion of piety,” added Miss Kirsop.
“Allow me to remind you that Eggwort will be conducting the trial,” said Stopsack. “If I were you, I’d be dreading my day in court with every fiber of my being.”
* * *
Only through the application of hindsight did Granville Heathway understand that any painting titled No Transmutation Without Plenary Copulation, much less one featuring a man and woman engaged in the marital act, would distress his custodians. At the time, however, Dr. Earwicker’s anger surprised him, as did Dr. Quelp’s conclusion that poor old Heathway must be madder than previously supposed, for who but a victim of satyriasis would create so scandalous a tableau? Happily for Granville, nobody had made an initial accounting of his art supplies, and so when Tobias the orderly sought to repossess them, barging into his cell and bearing away four camel’s-hair brushes and seven tubes of paint (plus every one of his pictures), two brushes and four pigment capsules went unclaimed, Granville having secluded them in the dovecote, where the fastidious Tobias had not cared to search.
There remained the challenge of finding an object upon which to apply the paint, a problem whose solution, he now realized, was staring him in the face. He would produce his next work on the north wall of his cell: a barren whitewashed plane, surely as suitable for his visions as was the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Michelangelo’s. Pondering potential subjects, he decided to adorn the wall with a representation of itself. Through this clever choice of theme, he would avoid consuming any actual pigment, for he could achieve a convincing effect simply by running his brush, its bristles moistened with drinking water, along the naked surface.
Before Granville could begin creating Wall on Wall, Achilles wafted into the cell and landed on the dovecote. Granville set his brush aside, for every message from Constantinople deserved the same immediate attention he would accord an angelic annunciation or a mene mene tekel upharsin.
Dearest Father,
Is it possible that, concerning Noah and the Flood, the Mussulmans’ Koran is more accurate than the Hebrews’ Bible? In any event, two days ago the Grand Vizier received a semaphore message from Mr. Dalrymple. NO ARK ON ARARAT. DISMAYED BUT UNDAUNTED. ON TO AL-JUDI.
Naturally this news put me in a melancholy frame of mind. Were it not for yesterday’s encounter in the hookah-den, I would now be awash in self-pity. The longer I talked with Dr. Rosalind Franklin, however, the more trifling my own troubles seemed, and in time I forgot Mr. Dalrymple’s communiqué.
No sooner had I entered the grotto than Yusuf Effendi urged me to present myself to the disconsolate woman sitting beside the samovar. Dr. Franklin, he explained, had traveled here from London, seeking an educated person with whom she might discuss her illness whilst inhaling the hookah-den’s famously potent hashish—for Cannabis reportedly mitigates the collateral effects of “cobalt radiotherapy,” a treatment that the physicians at the Royal Marsden Hospital had recently inflicted upon her.
A petite woman with pleasant features and lustrous black hair, Dr. Franklin at first seemed wary of me, she being a Jew, a scientist, and a resident of the year 1958, I being a Gentile, a schoolmaster, and a denizen of 1850. Undaunted, I told her I had recently conversed with two great natural philosophers. Although a Francophile, Dr. Franklin could recall no Teilhard de Chardin, even after I cited his discovery of Peking Man. My acquaintanceship with Abbot Mendel, by contrast, impressed her, his triple-cross pea plant experiments being (as she phrased it) “amongst the most elegant in the history of science.” Before I knew it, she was sharing her hashish, her confidences, and that je ne sais quoi a charming woman exudes wherever she goes.
“I was always such an athletic girl, scrambling up and down the Alps like a goat, and now, suddenly—” She passed her splayed hands up and down her slender torso. “Right now I can’t tell if it’s the cancer itself or the treatment that has me feeling so bloody wretched. Intravenous radiotherapy entails many unintended consequences. Nausea, fatigue, dry mouth. At least I’ve kept my hair.”
Yes, Father, she did say “cancer.” I’d never heard anyone speak that word before.
“You indeed have splendid hair,” I told her.
“The rest of me’s all chopped apart.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Left ovary gone, right ovary, uterus.”
“My poor Dr. Franklin.”
She filled her lungs with smoke and held her breath, sending the hashish on an errand of mercy. “A double paradox presents itself. X-ray crystallography is the love of my life, and yet all those high-frequency emissions probably caused my tumors, and to top it off I’m now pumping myself full of radioactive elements, hoping to arrest a disease attributable to radioactive elements.”
“Tonight I shall pray that your illness remains in abeyance until a cure is found.”
“Don’t be a schmuck.”
“You mustn’t talk that way, Miss Franklin.”
“Call me Rosalind.”
“Is that truly acceptable to you?”
“Anything but Rosy.”
“Call me Bertram.”
My companion consumed another billow of hashish. “I hope I’m not remembered as a martyr. I detest martyrdom. Jews have enough problems. I can just imagine my obituary in the Times. ‘Heedless of the hazards posed by her X-ray diffraction machine, Dr. Franklin sacrificed herself to the cause of English scientific supremacy. For it happens that without her unprecedented images the Cambridge team of Watson and Crick would probably not have been the first to reveal the secret of life, as the American Linus Pauling was also bent on divining the structure of DNA.’”
“DNA?”
“Deoxyribonucleic acid,” Dr. Franklin explained.
“The secret of life?”
“A tedious molecule, to be sure, only four nucleotides, but it contains all the information needed to make a carrot or a cricket or the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“So this DNA is the stuff through which God brought forth living things?”
“Frankly, Bertram, I don’t think God had much to do with it. Back at my Birkbeck College laboratory, we sometimes joke that DNA stands for Deities Needn’t Apply.” Again she inhaled a quantity of Cannabis. “Tell me about Mendel.”
“A frustrated man,” I said. “He knew
he would never gain proper recognition in his lifetime.”
Dr. Franklin flinched. “At least he had a lifetime. No, forgive me—I’m feeling sorry for myself. I’ve had a career. Not only my DNA pictures and my virus work but also my early days in Paris. I discovered precisely how heated carbons that turn to graphite differ chemically from those that don’t. I’m curious, Bertram, what did Mendel call his hereditary units?”
“Hereditary units. What do you call them?”
“Genes. G-e-n-e-s.” The hash began to work its magic, eliciting a melodious “Hmmaaahhh” from Dr. Franklin. “Every human cell is crammed with genes, clustered in forty-six paired packets—chromosomes—except for our reproductive cells, of course, which contain twenty-three per egg and twenty-three per sperm. Hmmaaahhh. For many years smart money said genes were composed of protein, but then somebody figured out that DNA carries the code in toto. I’ll give credit to Crick, and even Jim Watson, schnorrer though he could be. They believed that if you built an accurate DNA model, you’d expose the molecule’s method of self-replication, which means you’d understand exactly how encoded characteristics and blueprinted traits are passed from cell to cell and ultimately generation to generation.”
“Schnorrer?”
“It’s what it sounds like. Hmmaaahhh. Francis and Jim chased after that structure like beagles on a bunny, and by God they caught it, whereas I was always more interested in how nucleic acids fit into the general scheme of things.”
“‘Characteristics’ and ‘traits’—the very terms Mendel used!”
“You actually got to blow hash with the man. I must say I’m jealous. Imagine how you’d feel if I’d gone pub crawling with Jesus.”
“I can’t tell if you’re being reverent or facetious.”
“Me neither. Hmmaaahhh. My sickness is a double paradox, and DNA is a double helix: two sugar-phosphate chains, intertwined like bootlaces, forming the backbone of the base pairs, adenine always joined to thymine, guanine to cytosine, the bonded chemicals spanning the spirals to create the most momentous ladder since Jacob dreamed of climbing to Heaven. How’s that for a bit of Torah from a secular Jew? During cell division, the thing unzips along its length, each helix becoming the template for a new one. Francis and Jim published right away. ‘It has not escaped our notice,’ they concluded, ‘that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.’ I love that. ‘Not escaped our notice.’ Reverse chutzpah. Someday those boys will get a bloody Nobel Prize, though I doubt they could’ve done it without those nice crisp DNA photographs I was snapping down at King’s College. My best shots revealed that the molecule has a dry crystalline A-form and a wet paracrystalline B-form. I’m convinced that my boss appropriated my sharpest wet-form image, number fifty-one, and gave it to Jim.”
“Then your boss is a schnorrer, too.”
“Hmmaaahhh. Look at number fifty-one with a scientist’s squint, and you’ll see that DNA is a bloody double helix. I’m pretty sure my data also fell into Jim’s hands, notably my deduction that the chains are anti-parallel, like escalators moving in opposite directions.”
“I think you should get a Nobel Prize, too, Rosalind, not just Watson and Crick.”
“Think again,” she said. “You see, they don’t give that award to—”
“To Jews?”
She shook her head.
“To women?” I asked.
“To the dead,” she replied with a brittle laugh. “Guess what, Bertram? I’m feeling better. The queasiness is gone. I can bear the abdominal pains. Cannabis is the best idea Nature ever had. Cannabis and companionship.” My crystallographer looked me in the eye, and I realized she possessed not only the sensual beauty that will emanate from a female face but the ineffable beauty that will arise from a female brain. “I wish we could get to know each other,” she continued. “Given sufficient time, I’m sure I would find you fascinating.”
“The mystery of it all,” I said.
“The mystery of it all,” she echoed, then set down her hookah hose and, gaining her feet, smoothed her skirt with her palms. “Here’s my pledge, Bertram—to you and to biophysics and to the God of my fathers. This won’t be the last time you see me. Tu comprends, mon cher? I’ll go home to London, and I’ll keep picking viruses apart—polio, tobacco mosaic, turnip mosaic—and I’ll take my bloody radiotherapy at Marsden, and then I’ll come here for more Cannabis.”
“Père Teilhard also spoke of viruses.”
“Cause of la grippe, amongst other things.” Dr. Franklin sidled away from the table. “First they shot me full of radioactive cobalt, then came radioactive gold. There are lots of elements left. Iodine, zinc, lead, lithium, titanium.”
“I’ll be waiting for you, Rosalind. I’ll keep the pipe loaded.”
“Yes. Do that.”
“Once you’re back in 1958, please perform a boon for me. I would know Père Teilhard’s present situation. Is he alive? Did Rome permit him to publish?”
“Your Rosalind is on the case.” She sidled into the hookah-den’s impacted gloom. “Au revoir, Bertram.” The darkness consumed her. “Je crois que je t’aime.”
My French is feeble, Father, but I know what she said. My emotions are a dizzying mixture of exhilaration over her affection for me and bitterness concerning her plight. Will you pray for her?
Your devoted son,
Bertram
After securing Achilles’s message in the nightstand, Granville pondered his son’s attitude to Miss Franklin. At one time the thought of Bertram developing a passionate friendship with a woman of the Abrahamic religion would have troubled him, but as a madhouse resident he saw no reason to favor the Gentile persuasion over the Hebrew. Of course, there was little point in imagining Bertram and Miss Franklin spending their lives together. They might marry outside their respective faiths but not their respective centuries. And beyond the metaphysical difficulties loomed the tragedy of Miss Franklin’s ruined health. If Granville was correctly interpreting her words, such future cancer-fighting miracles as cobalt infusions and titanium injections suffered from the drawback of not working very well.
Solemnly he returned Achilles to the dovecote, then bowed his head, clasped his hands, and entered into negotiations with Heaven. He prayed that a Dr. Rosalind Franklin not yet born might be cured of tumors not yet grown, for her destiny was to apprehend crystals and la grippe as had no person before her. Surely that wasn’t asking too much.
* * *
When Chloe learned that Ralph and Solange had burned the Covenant and that Stopsack had in consequence imprisoned them in Mephistropolis, she underwent a kind of sea change. For three tumultuous days she ceased to be an apostle of the Presence and became instead a force of Nature. Sparks streaked through her veins. Bitter winds churned the marrow of her bones. Even Françoise Gauvin, excoriating her fellow Raft of the Medusa castaways for descending into barbarism, had never attained such an apex of rage.
Although Chloe focused her anger primarily on the Governor, whose vindictive behavior merited its own chapter in the annals of spite, she was no less furious with Ralph and Solange, who’d so recklessly shut the portal through which thousands of wretches might have glimpsed the light of eternity. “They had no right to destroy the thing!” she fumed at Mr. Chadwick. “Why did you let them do it?”
“I protested their escapade in the strongest possible language.”
“Come clean, Reverend. You protested, but you were just as happy to see the Covenant sink, lest I bring the Presence to Christendom.”
“I shall attribute that false accusation to your agitated state of mind.”
It went without saying that she would not remain a guest at the Governor’s hacienda, but she said so anyway, to his face, using the occasion to call him “the prince of piranhas.” Mr. Chadwick was also eager to leave Indefatigable, likewise Léourier, whose high opinion of Stopsack (based on nothing beyond the Governor’s clever plan for winning the c
ontest) had dissolved the instant he learned of Ralph and Solange’s incarceration. The Huancabambas were equally impatient to depart, having spent the past two weeks coping with rain and hunger in the mangrove glades.
After studying Léourier’s chart, Chloe decided to transplant everyone to Hood’s Isle, a flat and featureless zone renowned for its colonies of sea lions. As the southernmost Galápagos formation, Hood presented few navigational difficulties, and it lay sufficiently close to the penal colony to facilitate visitations with her friends.
Whilst Mr. Chadwick and Léourier made the crossing in the Lamarck, Chloe and her disciples traveled to their new home aboard the Hippolyta, crewed by the furloughed Ecuadorians on orders from the Governor (who now wanted this dubious English mystic out of his life as soon as possible). Hood proved eminently habitable, having once been a destination of religious ascetics, runaway slaves, and social outcasts. In the previous century these fugitives had built a row of hovels and shacks along the central ridge, and it took Chloe and her company but five days to refurbish the deserted town.
Throughout their subsequent sojourn, an interval that the settlers measured first in weeks and then in months, Chloe moped about the island observing the sea lions and dreaming up unlikely schemes for rescuing Ralph and Solange, the most untenable of which had her abducting Orrin Eggwort with the aid of her disciples. As for the Indians, they found considerable amusement in constructing three outrigger canoes using timber harvested from verdant Indefatigable. At first Cuniche, Nitopari, Pirohua, Ascumiche, Yitogua, and Rapra were content to employ these craft as a fishing fleet (so that the community’s larders were always bursting with seafood), but then they became more adventurous. Upon organizing their fellowship into three two-man teams, they staged an arduous month-long regatta that required them to thrice circumnavigate the entire archipelago, including distant Wenman and remote Culpepper.
