The girl bowed her head. ‘It is contrary to the teachings of Scripture.’
‘Whether the Reverend Charles Darwin believed the hypothesis to hold truth.’
She seemed rattled. ‘Maybe you should open the box and ask him yersel—’ Her lawyer, Anselm Fairweather, touched her arm. ‘I apologise, Father. He stated it as a hypothesis, an organising principle, much as Galileo Galilei set out the motion of the Earth around the sun as a hypothesis only. Natural selection would explain certain observed patterns in nature. No doubt the truth of God’s holy design lies beneath these observed patterns, but is not yet apprehended by our poor minds. Charles set this out clearly in his book, which he presented as a dialogue between a proponent of the hypothesis and a sceptic.’
‘Whether she feels the heresy is properly denied in the course of this dialogue.’
‘That’s for you to judge. As I said, I have not read it. I mean, his intention was balance, and if that was not achieved, it is only through the poor artistry of my uncle, who was a philosopher before he was a writer, and—’
‘Whether she is aware of the injunction placed on Charles Darwin on first publication of this book.’
‘That he destroy the published edition, and replace it with a revision more clearly emphasising the hypothetical nature of his argument.’
‘Whether she is aware of his compliance with this injunction.’
‘I’m not aware of any second edition. He fled to Edinburgh, whose Royal Society heard him state his hypothesis, and received his further work in the form of transactions in its journal.’
Xavier murmured to Mary, ‘Those Scottish Presbyterians. Nothing but trouble.’
‘Whether she approves of his departure from England, as assisted by the heretical criminals known as the Lyncean Academy.’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Whether she approves of his refusal to appear before a properly appointed court of the Holy Office.’
‘I don’t know about that either.’
‘Whether she approves of his non-compliance with the holy injunction.’
‘As I understand it he felt his book was balanced, therefore it wasn’t heretical as it stood, and therefore the injunction was not applicable …’
So the hearing went on. The questioning seemed to have nothing to do with Darwin’s philosophical case, which after all was the reason for Mary’s presence here, but was more a relentless badgering of Alicia Darwin over the intentions and beliefs of her remote great-uncle – questions she couldn’t possibly answer save in terms of her own interpretation, a line Alicia bravely stuck to.
To Mary, the trial began to seem a shabby epilogue to Darwin’s own story. He had been a bright young cleric with vague plans to become a Jesuit, who had signed on to a ship of discovery, the Beagle, in the year 1831: the English had never assembled an empire, but they had been explorers. On board he had come under the influence of the work of some of the bright, radical thinkers from Presbyterian Edinburgh – the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, as the historians called it. And in the course of his travels Darwin saw for himself islands being created and destroyed, and island-bound species of cormorants and iguanas that seemed obviously in flux between one form and another … Far from the anchoring certainties of the Church, it was no wonder he had come home with a head full of a vision that had obsessed him for the rest of his life – but it was a vision fraught with danger.
All that was a long time ago, the voyage of the Beagle nearly two hundred years past. But the Church thought in centuries, and was now exacting its revenge.
Alicia had volunteered to participate in this trial as an honour to her uncle, just as Mary had. Mary had imagined it would all be something of a formality. Yet the girl seemed slim, frail, defenceless standing there before the threatening row of theocrats before her – men who, Mary reminded herself uneasily, literally had the power of life and death over Alicia. Once, during the course of the questioning, Alicia glanced over at Mary, one of the few women in the room. Mary deliberately smiled back. No, I don’t know what the hell we’ve got ourselves into here either, kid.
At last it ended for the day. Alicia had to look over and sign the clerk’s handwritten transcript of the session. She was ordered not to leave without special permission, and sworn to silence. She seemed shocked when she was led away to a cell, somewhere in the crypt warren.
Mary stood. ‘She wasn’t expecting that.’
Xavier murmured, ‘Don’t worry. It’s just routine. She’s not a prisoner.’
‘It looked like it to me.’
‘Darwin will be found guilty of defying that long-ago injunction, of course. But Alicia will be asked only to abjure her uncle’s actions, and to condemn the book. A slap on the wrist—’
‘I don’t care right now. I just want to get out of this place. Can we go?’
‘Once the Reverend Fathers have progressed …’ He bowed as Boniface Jones and the others walked past, stately as sailing ships in their black robes.
Mary got a good turn-out for her sermon in the cathedral the next day.
She’d titled it ‘Galileo and the Holy Mystery of Relativity’ – a provocative choice that had seemed a good idea from the other side of the world. Now, standing at the pulpit of St Paul’s itself, dwarfed by the stonework around her and facing rows of calm, black-robed, supremely powerful men, she wasn’t so sure.
But there in the front row, however, was Anselm Fairweather, Alicia Darwin’s lawyer. He looked at her brightly, with an engaging, youthful sort of curiosity that she felt she’d seen too little of in England. Xavier Brazel sat beside him, faintly sinister as usual, but relatively sane, and relatively reassuring.
For better or worse, she was stuck with her prepared text. ‘I’m well aware that to most churchmen and perhaps the lay public the philosophical career of Galileo, in astronomy, dynamics and other subjects, is of most interest for the period leading up to his summons to Rome in 1633 to face charges of heresy concerning his work regarding the hypothetical motion of the Earth – charges which, of course, were never in the end brought. But to a historian of natural philosophy, such as myself, it is the legacy of the man’s work after Rome that is the most compelling …’
Nobody was quite sure what had been said to Galileo, by Pope Urban himself among others, in the theocratic snakepit that was seventeenth-century Rome. Some said the Tuscan ambassador, who was hosting Galileo in Rome, had somehow intervened to soothe ruffled papal feathers. Galileo had not faced the humiliation of an Inquisition trial over his Copernican views, or, worse, sanctions afterwards. Instead the increasingly frail, increasingly lonely old man had returned home to Tuscany. In his final years he turned away from the astronomical studies that had caused him so much trouble, and concentrated instead on ‘hypotheses’ about dynamics, the physics of moving objects. This had been an obsession for him since, as a young man, he had noticed patterns in the pendulum-like swinging of church chandeliers.
‘And in doing so, even so late in life, Galileo came to some remarkable and far-reaching conclusions.’
Galileo’s later work had run ahead of the mathematical techniques of the time, and to be fully appreciated had had to be reinterpreted by later generations of mathematicians, notably Leibniz. Essentially Galileo had built on common-sense observations of everyday motion to build a theory that was now known as ‘relativity’, in which objects moved so that their combined velocities never exceeded a certain ‘speed of finality’. All this properly required framing in a four-dimensional spacetime. And buried in Galileo’s work was the remarkable implication – or, as Mary carefully said now, a ‘hypothesis’ – that the whole of the universe was expanding into four-dimensional space.
These ‘hypotheses’ had received confirmation in later centuries. James Clerk Maxwell, developing his ideas about electromagnetism in the comparatively intellectually free environment of
Presbyterian Edinburgh, had proved that Galileo’s ‘speed of finality’ was in fact the speed of light.
‘And later in the nineteenth century, astronomers in our Terra Australis observatories, measuring the spectral shift of light from distant nebulae, were able to show that the universe does indeed appear to be expanding all around us, just as predicted from Galileo’s work.’ She didn’t add that the southern observatories, mostly manned by Aboriginal astronomers, had also long before proved from the parallax of the stars that the motion of the Earth around the sun was real, just as Galileo had clearly believed.
She had often wondered, she concluded, if Galileo’s attention had not been diverted to his dynamics work by his brush with the authorities – or, worse, if he had been left exhausted or had his life curtailed by their trial and sentencing – perhaps the discovery of relativity might have been delayed by centuries. She was rewarded with nods and smiles from churchmen accepting as if it were their own achievement this marvellous revelation by a man they had come close to persecuting, four hundred years before.
At the end of the Mass, Xavier and Anselm Fairweather approached her. ‘We could hardly clap,’ Xavier said. ‘Not in church. But your sermon was much appreciated, Lector Mason.’
‘Well, thank you.’
Anselm said, ‘Points in your talk sparked my interest, Lector. What do you know of the Lyncean Academy? Named for the lynx, the sharpest-eyed big cat. It was a group of free-thinking scholars, founded in Galileo’s time to combat the Church’s authority in philosophy. It published Galileo’s later books. After Galileo it went underground, but supported later thinkers. It defended Newton at his excommunication trial, and protected Fontenelle, and, as was mentioned in court, helped Darwin flee to Scotland …’
She glanced at the churchmen filing out ahead of her – and at Xavier, whose impassive face carried an unstated warning. She asked, ‘Is there something you want to tell me, Mr Fairweather?’
‘Look, could we speak privately?’
Once out of the cathedral, she let Anselm lead her away. Xavier clearly did not want to hear whatever conversation Anselm proposed to have.
They walked down Blackfriars to the river, and then west along the Embankment. Under grimy iron bridges the Thames was crowded with small steam-driven vessels. The London skyline, where she could see it, was low and flat, a lumpy blanket of poor housing spread over the city’s low hills, pierced here and there by the slim spire of a Wren church. The city far dwarfed Cooktown, but it lay as if rotting under a shroud of smoky fog. In the streets there seemed to be children everywhere, swarming in this Catholic country, bare-footed, soot-streaked and ragged. She wondered how many of them got any schooling – and how many of them had access to the medicines shipped over from the Pasteur clinics in Terra Australis to the disease-ridden cities of Europe.
As they walked along the Embankment she addressed the issue directly. ‘So, Anselm, are you a member of this Lyncean Academy?’
He laughed. ‘You saw through me.’
‘You’re not exactly subtle.’
‘No. Well, I apologise. But there’s no time left for subtlety.’
‘What’s so urgent?’
‘The Darwin trial must have the right outcome. I want to make sure I have you on my side. For we intend to use the trial to reverse a mistake the Church never made.’
She shook her head. ‘A mistake never made … You’ve lost me. And I’m not on anybody’s side. I’m an outsider, outside your faith wars.’
He didn’t seem to listen to that. ‘Look – the Lynceans don’t question the Church about morality and ethics, the domain of God. It’s the Church’s meddling in free thinking that we object to. For two millennia human minds have been locked in systems of thought imposed by the Church. First, Christianity was imposed across the Roman empire. Then Aquinas imposed the philosophy of Aristotle, his four elements, his cosmologies of crystal spheres – which is still the official doctrine, no matter how much the observations of our own eyes, of the instruments you’ve developed in Terra Australis, disprove every word he wrote! We take our motto from a saying of Galileo himself. “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect –”’
‘“– has intended us to forgo their use.” I don’t see what this has to do with Darwin’s trial.’
‘But it is an echo of the trial of Galileo – which the Church abandoned! Galileo was taken to a prison, given a good fright about torture and the stake, he agreed to say whatever they wanted him to say – but he was not put on trial.’
She started to see. ‘But what if he had been?’
He nodded eagerly. ‘You get the point. A few decades earlier the Church persecuted Giordano Bruno, another philosopher, for his supposed heresies. They burned him. But nobody knew who Bruno was. Galileo was famous across Europe! If they had burned him – even if they had merely put him through the public humiliation of a trial – it would have caused outrage, especially in the Protestant countries as they were then – England, the Netherlands, the German states. The Church’s moral authority would have been rejected there, and weakened even in the Catholic countries.
‘And the Church would not have been able to cow those thinkers who followed Galileo. You’re a historian of natural philosophy; you must see the pattern. Before Galileo you had thinkers like Bacon, Leonardo, Copernicus, Kepler … It was a grand explosion of ideas. Galileo’s work drew together and clarified all these threads – he wrote on atomism, you know. His work could have been the foundation of a revolution in thinking. But after him, comparatively speaking – nothing! Do you know that Isaac Newton the alchemist was, covertly, working on a new mechanics, building on Galileo? If the Church had not been able to impeach Newton, who knows what he might have achieved?’
‘And all this because the Church spared Galileo.’
‘Yes! I know it’s a paradox. We suspect the Church made the wise choice by accident. It would have been better if Galileo had been martyred! Then all honest souls would have seen the Church for what it is.’
Saying this, he seemed very young to Mary. ‘And now,’ she said carefully, ‘you want to use this Darwin trial to create a new martyr. Hmm. How old is Alicia Darwin?’
‘Just twenty.’
‘Does she know she’s to become some kind of token sacrifice for your cause?’ When he hesitated, she pressed, ‘You produced her as the family representative for this trial, didn’t you? What’s your relationship with her?’
‘We are lovers,’ he said defiantly. ‘Oh, it is chaste, Lector, don’t worry about that. But she would do anything for me – and I for her.’
‘Would she be your lover if she weren’t Darwin’s grand-niece? And I ask you again: does she know what she’s letting herself in for?’
He held her gaze, defiant. ‘The Lyncean Academy is ancient and determined. If the Church has a long memory, so do we. And I hope, I pray, that you, Lector, if the need arises, will use your considerable authority in that courtroom tomorrow to ensure that the right verdict is reached.’ He glanced around. ‘It’s nearly noon. Care for some lunch?’
‘No thanks,’ she said, and walked sharply away.
On Thursday 12 February, Darwin’s two-hundredth anniversary, the final session of the hearing was held in another subterranean room, burrowed out of the London clay beneath St Paul’s.
At least this was a grander chamber, Mary thought, its walls panelled with wood, its floor carpeted, and a decent light cast by a bank of electric bulbs. But this comparative luxury was evidently for the benefit of the eight cardinals who had come here to witness the final act of the trial. Sitting in their bright vestments on a curved bench at the head of the room, they looked oddly like gaudy Australasian birds, Mary thought irreverently.
Before them sat the court officials, led by Boniface Jones and completed by the earnest clerk with the rapidly scratching
pen. The scribes from the chronicles scribbled and sketched. Anselm Fairweather, sitting away from his client-lover, looked excited, like a spectator at some sports event. Mary could see no guards, but she was sure they were present, ready to act if Alicia dared defy the will of the court.
That ghastly coffin stood on its trestles.
And before them all, dressed in a penitent’s white robe and with her wrists and ankles bound in chains, stood Alicia Darwin.
‘I can’t believe I volunteered for this farce,’ Mary muttered to Xavier Brazel. ‘I haven’t contributed a damn word. And look at that wretched child.’
‘It is merely a formality,’ Xavier said. ‘The robe is part of an ancient tradition, which—’
‘Does the authority of a two-thousand-year-old Church really rely on humiliating a poor bewildered kid?’
He seemed faintly alarmed. ‘You must not be seen to be disrespecting the court, Mary.’ He leaned closer and whispered, ‘And whatever Anselm said to you, I’d advise you to disregard it.’
She tried to read his handsome, impassive face. ‘You choose what to hear, don’t you? You have a striking ability to compartmentalise. Maybe that’s what it takes to survive in your world.’
‘I only want what is best for the Church – and for my friends, among whom I would hope to count you.’
‘We’ll see about that at the end of this charade, shall we?’
As before, Boniface Jones began proceedings with a rap of a gavel; the murmuring in the room died down. Jones faced Alicia. ‘Alicia Rosemary Darwin, daughter of James Paul Darwin of Edinburgh. Kneel to hear the clerical condemnation, and the sentence of the Holy See.’
Alicia knelt submissively.
Jones picked up a sheet of paper and began to read in his sonorous Latin. Xavier murmured a translation for Mary.
‘Whereas he, the deceased Charles Robert, son of Robert Waring Darwin of London, was in the year 1859 denounced by the Holy Office for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the species of living things that populate the Earth are mutable one into the other, in accordance with a law of chance and selection, and in defiance of the teaching of the divine and Holy Scripture that all species were created by the Lord God for His purpose, and having published a book entitled A Dialogue on the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Whereas he the said Darwin did fail to respect an injunction issued by the Holy Congregation held before his eminence the Lord Cardinal Joseph McInnery on 14 December 1859 to amend the said work to ensure an appropriate balance be given to argument and counter-argument concerning the false doctrine …’
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