by James Morrow
Malcolm nodded and said, “A sanctum for young minds, right here on the banks of the Holywell Mill Stream.”
“That’s an ace of an idea,” said Bertram.
“Smashing,” said Phineas.
“Every forward-thinking Oxonian will want to entrust his children to our Rousseauian expertise,” said Chloe.
“Count me out,” said Algernon.
“I already have, dear brother-in-law,” said Malcolm. “We’re not about to corrupt our charges with games of chance.”
“You’ll be too busy corrupting them with transmutationism,” said Wilberforce.
“It’s time we resumed our tournament,” announced Lady Isadora, rising. “You may play, too, Mr. Chadwick—and you as well, Mrs. Chadwick.”
“I’ll trounce the lot of you!” proclaimed Algernon.
“To the wickets!” declared Wilberforce.
“Please recall, Mr. Bathurst, that you’ve just been roqueted by me,” said Woolfenden to Chloe’s father.
“I shall accept my fate stoically,” said Phineas. “I cannot answer for the ball.”
“I insist that the game be free of banter,” declared Lady Isadora. “The instant anybody says something clever, I’ll lay into him with my mallet.”
* * *
At the risk of inconveniencing her brother and father, Chloe accepted Algernon’s offer of temporary accommodations at Three Manor Place, an arrangement whereby the second-floor suite would be reserved to Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Chadwick to do with as they pleased for as long as they pleased. Being newly wedded, Chloe and Malcolm in fact had much doing and pleasing to accomplish. Though not as poetic a paramour as Ralph, the ex-vicar acquitted himself well in the conjugal domain, and thanks to a supply of Colonel Quondam’s devices from the Shelley Society’s stores, they had little fear of inadvertent procreation.
When Mr. Popplewell responded affirmatively to Lord Woolfenden’s invitation to visit Oxford and learn about the final days of the Great God Contest, Chloe changed her mind and consented to an interview. After all, she knew more about the Tree of Life than any other member of the Albion Transmutationist Club. Neither Ralph, Algernon, Solange, nor even Malcolm could explain as well as she the implications of iguanas for theology.
In a departure from Fleet Street protocol, Popplewell questioned Chloe and Bertram Heathway in tandem, believing that the juxtaposition of their respective stories—the Tree of Life quest versus the Ark of Noah hunt—would make for “a verbal concerto of comparisons and contrasts.” As it turned out, Bertram’s insipid experiences (moping around in a Constantinople hookah den, receiving depressing messages from Mr. Dalrymple in Anatolia, sending equally depressing messages to his father in the sanitarium) provided no compellingly counterpoint whatsoever to Chloe’s sweeping chronicle of the equatorial Atlantic hurricane, the perils of the Amazon basin, Léourier’s flying-machine, the fall of Castillo Bracamoros, Eggwort’s kangaroo court, the artificial volcano, and Hengstenberg’s Socialist utopia. In relating the convicts’ intention to lay waste to Galápagos, she assented to Malcolm’s wishes and declined to mention that the scheme’s architects were Wilberforce and Hallowborn, though she noted that the massacre was thwarted largely in consequence of her own initiatives.
On the thirteenth day in October, Popplewell’s final article about the Shelley Prize appeared in the Evening Standard, headed NO WINNERS IN GREAT GOD CONTEST and subheaded AN ENTHRALLING ACCOUNT OF A TREE OF LIFE, QUESTED BUT NOT ACQUIRED, AND A SACRED VESSEL, SOUGHT YET STILL SECLUDED. Chloe readily admitted that the journalist had accurately summarized her adventures (though he spelled “Schopenhauer” four different ways, all incorrect). Two days later she received an envelope addressed to MRS. MALCOLM CHADWICK, C/O MR. ALGERNON BATHURST, THREE MANOR PLACE, OXFORD (Popplewell’s article had en passant revealed her location and marital status), the return label indicating that the letter was from Down House.
So brief it might have been a telegram, Mr. Darwin’s message omitted any mention of Annie’s fate, information he presumably preferred to convey in person.
14 October 1851
Dear Mrs. Chadwick,
Just finished reading Popplewell’s Evening Standard piece. Imperative we talk. Come at earliest convenience. Bring overnight valise.
Yrs., C. Darwin
The following day Chloe rode the train from Oxford to London, took a second train to Bromley, then hired a fly to Down Village. She alighted within view of St. Mary’s Church. How remarkable, she mused, that the adjacent parsonage was once inhabited by Bertram Heathway’s father. Quite likely she and Granville Heathway had passed each other on the street ere the priest lost his reason and required incarceration in Wormleighton.
She resolved to visit the churchyard. Fearfully scanning the jumble of moss-cloaked stones, she was gratified to find only one reading Darwin—the resting place of Mary Eleanor, Charles and Emma’s third child, who’d died within weeks of her birth. Was it possible that Miss Annie had grown stronger than her disease?
After a ten-minute hike Chloe reached the estate, then started towards the zoological dome, where she hoped to discover children at play. Annie would be ten now, still young enough to enjoy a tortoise ride. The walk across the meadow proved bracing, a membrane of October frost crunching beneath her boots. Cautiously she pulled back the bronze door. No children met her gaze, yet the place was as fecund as ever, land lizards sunning themselves on the rocks, birds soaring beneath the crystalline roof. The tortoises regarded her with their usual reserved demeanors and sage faces, even as the aquatic iguanas slithered off their sandstone pylons and crashed into the pond. But the creature that most attracted Chloe’s notice was of the species Homo sapiens: her former rooming-companion, dressed in twill breeches and mucking boots, busily distributing bird food.
“Do my eyes deceive me? Can this be Fanny Mendrick?”
“Chloe!” cried Fanny, throwing down a handful of sunflower seeds.
“Do you no longer tread the boards at the Adelphi?”
“Alas, the company fell on hard times, and I was let go.” Fanny rubbed her oily palms on her trousers. “But, happily, it is a truth universally acknowledged—to paraphrase your paraphrase—that a naturalist who has lost his zookeeper must be in want of a replacement. So I wrote Mr. Darwin, reminding him that he’d enjoyed my performance in Via Dolorosa, and he summoned me.”
“Today I am likewise summoned, though I know not why.”
“I read of your adventures in the Evening Standard. Up to a point, I’m glad you found your Tree of Life.”
“Had I not found it, my friends might have died on the gallows,” said Chloe. “Their salvation was abetted by six newly minted transmutationists.”
“I sometimes imagine Mr. Darwin hired me so his wife would have an ally in her efforts to bring him to Christ, which I’d say speaks well of the man.” Fanny pointed east, then scratched her brow with the same muddy finger. “When last I saw him, he was in our new potting shed, adjacent to the vegetable patch. Oh, Chloe Bathurst, ’tis so marvelous to clap eyes on you again. I should like nothing better than to reforge our former bond.”
“It would be petty of us to allow the origin and purpose of the universe to stand in the way of our friendship. But before we part, I must ask—”
“About Annie?”
“Yes.”
“Her soul is now in Heaven.”
“Her soul, yes.” Chloe’s throat congealed as if invaded by a tumor. “And where is the rest of her?”
“Mr. Darwin buried his child in Malvern. He’d taken her there last spring for Dr. Gully’s cold-water treatment. Mrs. Darwin had to stay home—she was carrying Horace, and the other children needed her as well. It was all entirely awful.”
“Cold-water treatment—faugh,” said Chloe as a different sort of water, warm and briny, trickled down her cheeks. “Poor Mr. Darwin,” she sobbed. “Poor Mrs. Darwin.”
“Poor Annie.”
Drawing forth her handkerchief, Chloe daubed her te
ars and blew her nose, then kissed Fanny good-bye and made her way back across the meadow.
The new botanic facility was no mere potting shed but an elaborate greenhouse, complete with a sloping glass roof and a network of boiler pipes that, being patterned after the vivarium’s heating system, endowed the air with an agreeable tropical warmth. She found Mr. Darwin, outfitted with canvas gloves and a straw hat, in a compartment devoted to orchids. He was securing a large species labeled ANGRAECUM SESQUIPEDALE in a terra-cotta pot, its long white petals radiating outward like the propeller vanes on Léourier’s airship. Glancing up from his labors, he offered a wistful smile, thanked her for coming, then asked, doubtless in response to her reddened eyes, “Who told you?”
“Miss Mendrick.”
“Did she mention that I had to bury her—”
“In Malvern, yes.”
“Shortly after Easter.” Mr. Darwin clenched his jaw and winced. “I lowered the coffin into the ground myself. She still had that Petit Chaperon Rouge doll you gave her. The stone in the churchyard reads, rather blandly, ‘A dear and good child.’”
“‘Dear and good’—that she was, sir.”
“I didn’t know what else to say,” he rasped, weeping.
“Simple is always best.”
“‘Dear and good—’” Mr. Darwin blotted his tears with his sleeve. “Up to a point my work sustains me. My pigeons and my barnacles and—”
“And these orchids, too, I’ll wager.”
“My orchids, yes.” He swallowed audibly. “I believe I’ve demonstrated that, for most plant species, attracting a unique pollinator is an evolutionary priority. The nectar of this comet orchid resides within so deep a cavity that only an insect endowed with a thirty-centimeter tongue might hope to feast upon it. And yet so highly does Nature prize cross-fertilization over self-fertilization, I’m confident that such a moth or butterfly will be found.”
“We should sponsor a competition. Two hundred pounds to whoever nets the pollinator in question. With an entry fee of sixpence, we’re certain to turn a profit.”
Mr. Darwin laughed gaily and said, “Dear Mrs. Chadwick, how delightful to have you about the place again. Did you truly experience all the adventures Popplewell described?”
“Plus several I never told him about.”
“I was surprised to learn you married a man who’d spent a year dismantling atheist arguments at Alastor Hall.”
“It was one of those Newtonian romances,” said Chloe breezily. “Mr. Chadwick and I found ourselves on the same swirling planet, and one day we said to each other, ‘As long as we’re here, let’s make the best of it.’”
Having finished potting the Angraecum, Mr. Darwin inhaled with Epicurean appreciation, savoring the ambrosial aroma of the greenhouse. “I was particularly intrigued by your friends’ trial. Of the twelve jurymen in Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn, half proved sympathetic to the evolutionary view—did Popplewell get that right?”
“Upon my soul, I believe I gave the performance of a lifetime,” said Chloe, nodding. “Of course, only three of my six converts decided that evolution calls God into question. The others found no enmity whatsoever between monotheism and mockingbirds.”
“Mrs. Chadwick, by now you should know I simply don’t care whether my idea calls God into question.” Absorbing her chiding smile, Mr. Darwin added, “Very well, I do care, but my point is that, back in Galápagos, an entire courtroom—”
“A tabernacle, actually.”
“So much the better. An entire tabernacle sat still whilst you mounted a defense of transmutation. People listened. They learned. Mrs. Chadwick, you have demonstrated that, despite my promise to Mrs. Darwin, I mustn’t wait till I’m dead before publishing my species theory. Tomorrow I’ll hunt up the scrivener’s copy of my old manuscript, dust it off, and start turning it into a book.”
“How pleased I am to have made my small contribution to God’s demise.”
“Stop it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I picture a mammoth tome, bursting with evidence drawn from every sphere of science.” Mr. Darwin took Chloe’s arm and guided her towards a door marked CLIMBING PLANTS. “The title, of course, will be Natural Selection.” As they entered this second compartment, he directed her attention to a row of unassuming potted specimens, each snaking up its own trellis. “I’ll devote a whole chapter to my wild cucumbers. Echinocystis lobata exhibits an adaptation I call circumnutation, gyrating about an axis as its tendrils ascend. Even stronger than that urge is heliotropism, whereby a sunbeam will halt a plant’s upward aspirations and cause horizontal motion instead. My research has persuaded me that virtually all members of the vegetable kingdom key their lives to the sun. When night comes, some of them even sleep.”
“If orchids and creepers sleep, does that mean they dream?”
“I have no opinion, but you’ve asked a splendid question.” With his dirt-smudged fingertips Mr. Darwin caressed the nearest Echinocystis. “By the by, it was Wilberforce, wasn’t it? The schemer behind the planned massacre was Soapy Sam—am I right?”
“Per my husband’s wishes, I must decline to reveal his identity,” said Chloe, nodding.
“I pray you, madam, continue that policy. I make my request in deference to Sam’s father, a tireless crusader for the abolitionist cause. A mile from here stands the oak where the Reverend William Wilberforce was called from on high to fight the slave trade.”
She promised Mr. Darwin that her lips were sealed. Satisfied, he began to hum, then led her into a third compartment, labeled INSECTIVOROUS PLANTS. A dozen exemplars of the sundew, Drosera rotundifolia, a bulbous creature spouting dozens of sticky tentacles, rested on the benches in terra-cotta pots.
“Now that I think on it, sir, there’s a second reason you may wish to publish sooner rather than later,” said Chloe. “Whilst in Manáos I had lunch with a naturalist, one Alfred Wallace of Hertfordshire, who makes his living feeding the English appetite for stuffed specimens. He was keen to find a law explaining why different marmoset types inhabit opposite banks of the Rio Negro.”
An expression of alarm flashed across Mr. Darwin’s face. “I assume you told him nothing of my own species theory?”
“Not a peep—though I confess I was less interested in protecting your future reputation than in learning whether Mr. Wallace planned to enter the Great God Contest. In retrospect I realize that, being en route to the East Indies, he posed no threat.”
“Having friends in both the Geological Society and the Linnean Society, I am well situated to become the paterfamilias of natural selection—certainly better positioned than an itinerant taxidermist from Hertfordshire. I’ll tell my colleagues to be on the lookout for a packet from the Spice Islands bearing a scientific paper by an arriviste called Wallace.”
“So that they might suppress it? Isn’t that rather predatory of you?”
“Competition is the way of the world, Mrs. Chadwick, a point you doubtless made during the blasphemy trial. That said, please understand I have no wish to disrupt the man’s career. But I cannot allow him to gain preeminence over me.” Mr. Darwin gestured towards the tentacled plant. “Now here’s a real predator. My sundew can wrap her arms about unsuspecting flies and gnats—an essential adaptation, her aboriginal soil being poor in nitrogen. I’ve taken to feeding her egg white, bits of raw beef, even fingernail clippings. Mrs. Darwin says I won’t be satisfied till I’ve proved that rotundifolia is not a plant but an animal.”
“A hideous creature, by my lights,” said Chloe, adding, with a wry grin, “and yet there is grandeur in this view of life—is there not, Mr. Darwin?—with its powers of growth, assimilation, and reproduction having been originally breathed into one or a few kinds—”
“Good heavens, Mrs. Chadwick, you stole and transcribed my essay after all, didn’t you?”
“That I did, sir.”
He smiled softly and said, “And that whilst this our planet has gone circling according to fixed laws…”
“That from so simple an origin…”
“Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being—”
She said, “‘Are being’?”
“I added that flourish recently. Also, I now prefer ‘beginning’ to ‘origin.’”
“So do I,” said Chloe, and together they recited, “That from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
“I miss her so much,” said Mr. Darwin.
“Of course.”
“She defied the world with her joyousness.”
“Truly.”
“To bring her back I would give up my work, my sanity, my breath. But the universe doesn’t work that way.”
“No, sir, it doesn’t. Allow me to suggest that you defy the universe with your book.”
* * *
Of all the rejoinders to Genesis that Chloe had encountered in her career as a Shelley Prize contestant, the one that had most captured her fancy was the Chelmsford apothecary’s inversion of Saint Anselm’s Ontological Proof. The only thing more awe-inspiring than a universe created by a bona fide supernatural being would be one created by a nonexistent supernatural being. The longer she thought about this absurd argument, this Nontological Proof, the more it enchanted her. By the time she’d settled into her new life in Oxford, she imagined that her fortunes were being supervised by the Nontological God, the Nog, of the apothecary’s whim.
During the eight years that elapsed between her reunion with Mr. Darwin and the publication of his book, Chloe and her colleagues created and sustained Holywell Academy. What had begun as a modest school housed at Three Manor Place, catering to boys ages nine through eleven, evolved into a plenary institution embracing ages seven through fifteen, both genders accepted, so that its founders became obliged to employ more instructors (including the irreproachable Fanny Mendrick, hired to teach penmanship and ethics) and take over the premises of the recently failed St. Philomena’s Ladies College in Cowley Place. Whilst Chloe and her family moved into a town house across the street, Bertram made his home on the top floor of the school, where he passed his evenings devising lessons, caring for his aged mother, and—during most of the year 1858—grieving for his late father, the Reverend Granville Heathway, who’d died of an apoplectic seizure at Wormleighton Sanitarium on St. Valentine’s Day.
