Beneath Ceaseless Skies #164

by James Morrow

  “The creatures to whom I allude know nothing of farms.”

  He guided her off the sandwalk, past a copse of birch and alder, and from there to a meadow dominated by a fantastical building suggesting an immense hoop-skirt frame. The thing was easily as large as the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, its circular windows arrayed like portholes on a ship, while an exoskeleton of iron girders arced heavenward to support a gleaming glass vault.

  “My zoological garden,” Mr. Darwin explained, directing Chloe towards a riveted bronze door, evidently the only entrance.

  Stepping into the strange edifice, she heard a chorus of tweets and chirps, even as she beheld a tableau of golden sunflowers and blossoming vines. Her nose, meanwhile, admitted fragrances so numerous and heady—cloying, piquant, tart, lemony, rank—she seemed to be inhaling the olfactory essence of Creation itself. “An aviary, is that what you call it?” she asked, noting the little birds perching on the vines, pecking at the sunflowers, and swooping across the crystalline ceiling.

  “A more accurate term would be ‘vivarium.’ This dome is an aviary, herpetorium, and arboretum, all in one.”

  “Herpetorium?”

  “Here be dragons.” Mr. Darwin drew her attention to a sector jammed with granite boulders. A troop of large hideous lizards—some bright yellow, others a sallow gray, all sporting spines, scales, and surly faces—lay on a far rock, absorbing the sun. “Land iguanas from Las Encantadas, an archipelago six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador.” He rapped his knuckles on a firebox surmounted by a cylindrical boiler. Affixed to the curving walls, the attendant iron pipes pursued a loop apparently meant to supply the vivarium with steam heat. “Thanks to our furnace, these lizards suffer our English winters without complaint.”

  “Las Encantadas.” Chloe hummed the musical syllables. “So it’s an enchanted place?”

  Mr. Darwin nodded and said, “Sailors of long ago thought the islands went drifting magically about the Pacific Ocean when no one was looking.”

  He next led Chloe past a palisade of bamboo towards six colossal tortoises: primeval beasts with serpentine necks and plated shells, shambling amidst cactus plants so tall they bid fair to be called trees. The tortoises, too, traced to the Encantadas, he explained. In fact, these animals had given the islands their Spanish name, Galápagos.

  “I didn’t know a tortoise could grow so large,” said Chloe.

  “Until Man appeared in the Encantadas, these creatures had no natural enemies, and so they were free to become as big and blatant as they wished.”

  “How did you acquire such a menagerie?”

  “In my youth I joined the company of H.M.S. Beagle on its mission to chart the South American coastline. My duty was to provide the skipper with intellectual companionship, though I was nominally the brig’s naturalist—a position that, as you see, I took rather seriously. Our mockingbirds descend from bonded pairs I brought back from Galápagos, likewise our finches and vermillion flycatchers. The tortoises and iguanas are the very beasts I persuaded Captain Fitzroy to take on board. His officers were forever insisting we cook a specimen or two, but to the man’s credit he wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “How did you snare so many birds?”

  “Most Galápagos creatures, including those with wings, are tame as lapdogs.” Mr. Darwin guided Chloe to a pond the size of the Adelphi stage. Several varieties of lizard, equal in ugliness to their terrestrial brethren, occupied the limpid depths and surrounding sandstone pylons. “Behold our marine iguanas. Initially I assumed their pond should be topped up with brine, but it happens they also thrive in fresh water. The job will find you helping my gardener, Mr. Kurland, in feeding the reptiles, cultivating the vegetation, providing nesting material for the birds, mucking out the place, and, come winter, supplying the firebox with coal—though your duties will extend to an intangible domain as well. I shall call it ‘affection.’ Mr. Kurland finds little to admire about my zoo. Mrs. Darwin is similarly unmoved. She thinks the tortoises stupid, the lizards grotesque.”

  “I shall treat your menagerie most tenderly,” said Chloe.

  “It’s the only point on which Mrs. Darwin and I disagree—well, that, and the immortality of the soul.”

  “Your wife is a freethinker?”

  “Quite the contrary.”

  “I see.”

  “She keeps exhorting me to join her and Master Willy and Miss Annie for Sunday services at St. Mary’s in the village,” said Mr. Darwin. “Alas, I cannot attend in good conscience. At one point my wife even convinced the Reverend Mr. Heathway to send me personal invitations via rock dove—the parson and I are both pigeon fanciers—but he gave up after my fifth expression of regret.” He rapped his walking-stick against a pylon, prompting its scaled occupant to dive into the pond with a great splash. “It’s settled, then—you shall be my assistant zookeeper!”

  “May I assume the position comes with a salary?”

  “Forgive my forgetfulness,” said Mr. Darwin, chiding himself with a smile. “Don’t tell Mrs. Darwin, but I mean to pay you what Miss Thorley will receive for tutoring the children, forty pounds every year.”

  Forty pounds, mused Chloe. Not enough to redeem Papa, and well below the sixty per annum she’d netted during the Adelphi Company’s halcyon days, but sufficient for staying alive whilst she devised a strategy for growing rich. “At a yearly rate of forty pounds, I shall give your birds and beasts the best Rousseauian education within my competence.”

  Mr. Darwin laughed melodically. “Rousseauian, you say? Splendid. We mustn’t corrupt these noble animals with civilization.”

  “Rest assured, I shall never equip an iguana with a pocket watch or send him off to work in a textile mill.”

  “As for my tortoises—promise me you’ll give them no cigars to smoke, spirits to drink, or waistcoats to wear.”

  “You have my solemn word.”

  “Miss Bathurst, you are obviously the right woman for the job.”

  #

  Later that afternoon she took the steam train back to London and retrieved from 15 Tavistock Street her most precious belongings, including her mother-of-pearl combs, her grandfather’s bayonet, and the gown of burgundy velvet she’d worn as the dauntless Françoise Gauvin in The Raft of the Medusa (she fully intended to return it one day), plus two items that would make splendid gifts for the eldest Darwin children—an Italian snow globe for Master Willy and a French doll representing Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Little Red Riding Hood, for Miss Annie (both tokens from suitors whose names she’d forgotten). The rooms were deserted, Fanny being at the theatre playing Pirate Mary, so Chloe left a note telling of her new situation as an assistant zookeeper and promising to send ten shillings each month. The irony did not escape her. For the past fourteen weeks Fanny had been meeting the landlord’s bill in toto, and only now, having moved elsewhere, would Chloe be paying her fair share of the rent.

  Even after a fortnight of caring for the Down House menagerie, she couldn’t say whether she was indeed the right woman for the job, but one fact was clear—Mr. Kurland, a gnarly wight of acerbic disposition, was ill suited to zookeeping. In his opinion maintaining the vivarium was demeaning work, the brute iguanas and loutish tortoises being ignoble substitutes for the cows and swine he thought he’d been hired to tend, while the birds were but “fiendish little devices through which the Devil contrives to squirt shite upon our heads,” and so he was happy to let Chloe make the vivarium her exclusive domain.

  Naturally Kurland never bothered learning the names Mr. Darwin had given his tortoises—but Chloe soon did: Boswell and Johnson from James Isle, Tristan and Isolde from Charles Isle, Perseus and Andromeda from Indefatigable. As for the lizards, they had yet to be christened, and so she set about bestowing biblical names on the aquatic iguanas and literary appellations on their terrestrial brethren, a task she performed with all the joy of Adam bringing taxonomy to Paradise.

  The economy of the zoological dome, Chloe soon realized, turned on its elabo
rate network of passion-flower vines, as well as its soaring stands of prickly-pear cacti. To nurture the vines, she routinely irrigated the soil with well water, thereby underwriting the survival of the tree-dwelling finches and arboreal mockingbirds, who feasted on the fruits and seeds. The cactus plants required little moisture, but she was obliged to spend many hours protecting the roots from moles—an essential task, for the low-hanging fruits were a favorite food of the tortoises, mockingbirds, and ground-dwelling finches. The land iguanas, meanwhile, preferred a menu of sunflowers, bluebells, and daisies, which she dutifully cultivated throughout the southwest sector.

  Although the marine iguanas eagerly consumed the kelp that thrived in the vivarium’s pond, under Chloe’s administration they learned to appreciate whatever produce the Down House cook, Mrs. Davis, whom everyone called Daydy, had deemed unfit owing to spoilage. To augment the tortoises’ diet, Chloe again turned to the detritus of Daydy’s kitchen. The carapaced reptiles would eat almost anything, from rotting apples to fish eyes, sausage casings to poultry viscera, though they utterly lacked a predatory instinct, cheerfully ignoring the vermillion flycatchers who perched so trustingly on their heads and shells.

  Beyond the Sisyphean task of keeping the zoo free of animal waste, the most unsavory of Chloe’s duties required her to scour the meadows for the remains of whatever hare, hedgehog, or badger the dogs had run to earth that week. Upon locating a carcass, she would put on canvas gloves, then use a tin pail to bear the foul thing and its attendant load of fly eggs to the vivarium. About half of the emergent maggots were consumed by the ground-dwelling birds, while the other half survived to become adult insects, which the flycatchers, true to their name, would snatch on the wing.

  And what of Chloe’s promise to form emotional bonds with the zoo’s denizens? In the case of the birds, affection came easily, for she never tired of watching them hopping amongst the passion-flower vines and cactus pads like bejeweled machines wrought by a meticulous wizard. The tortoises likewise charmed her, for they’d become in her imagination a kind of deputation advocating on behalf of all the world’s ungainly and misbegotten creatures. For a full two months she regarded the iguanas with distaste, but then they, too, won her over. Unapologetic in their homeliness, unrepentant in their self-absorption, these dragons seemed to be saying, “Love us for what we are, for we shall never be anything else”—and so she did.

  While Chloe looked to the welfare of Mr. Darwin’s reptiles and birds, Miss Thorley did the same for his offspring. Each morning beginning after breakfast, nine-year-old Willy and seven-year-old Annie learned about the world from their industrious governess. At one o’clock Miss Thorley would deliver Willy and Annie to the kitchen employees for a midday meal, after which the youngsters were free to play with their four siblings in the nursery or (if they so chose) assist Miss Bathurst in the vivarium. For Chloe the advantages of having a private staff were many. The arrangement not only reduced her work load, it also provided the reptiles and birds with a surfeit of nurturance—to say nothing of the fact that Willy and Annie were learning valuable lessons in animal husbandry and waste management.

  “I’ve always been partial to the name ‘Annie’,” Chloe told Mr. Darwin’s eldest daughter. “In my days as an Adelphi player, I received favorable notices for my interpretation of a pirate called Anne Bonney.”

  “You were an actress, Miss Bathurst?” gushed Annie, a child of sunny disposition and luminous intelligence. (She would never be so foolish as to wish for a wicked stepmother.) “How exciting!”

  “I trod the boards for nearly nine years, beginning when I was sixteen.” Chloe and Annie were crouched beside the vivarium’s furnace, watching Willy use a garden trowel to remove the ashes from the firebox preparatory to supplying it with fresh coal.

  “You played a pirate?” said the boy with uncharacteristic fervor. (He was normally as gloomy as his sister was effervescent.) “I like pirates. Did you ever disembowel anyone?”

  “Willy, that’s a horrid question,” said Annie.

  “On the stage I’ve skewered many a blackguard, but rarely in real life,” said Chloe, opening the knapsack containing the children’s gifts. “We shall now address a happier topic.” From the sack she produced the snow globe and passed it to Willy. Inside the sphere a comical scarlet Satan lounged on a golden throne. “This is for you, Master William.”

  “Is that the Devil himself?” asked Willy, cleaning his sooty hands by rubbing them on a passion-flower leaf. “I love it!” He shook the globe, causing porcelain chips to swirl through the trapped water—the proverbial snowstorm in Hell. “Begone, Lucifer! Willy Darwin has brought you a blizzard!”

  “And this is for you, Miss Annie,” said Chloe, retrieving the Red Riding Hood doll and pressing it into the child’s grasp. The doll’s ceramic face—a confluence of ruby lips, apple cheeks, and merry eyes—uncannily mirrored the features of the person in whose possession it now lay.

  “How lovely!”

  “She comes all the way from France,” said Chloe. “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.”

  Annie threw her spindly arms about Chloe and kissed her fleetingly on the lips. “Oh, Miss Bathurst, I shall treasure it always. Now if I only had a wolf.”

  “Tell Father to whittle you one,” grumbled Willy. “He does whatever you ask of him.”

  At this juncture Chloe was tempted to spellbind the children with the lurid and sardonic tale Willy’s snow globe inevitably called to mind, Mr. Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” But then she thought better of the idea, sensing that Mrs. Darwin would not approve, likewise the ghost of Monsieur Rousseau, so instead she simply asked her charges to assist her in dismantling the furnace pipes and purging them of soot.

  * * *

  In time Chloe noted that an irony flourished within the noisy estate she now called home. The Charles Darwin who took such an inordinate interest in earthworms was condemned by certain infirmities to assume the posture of his beloved annelids. Although this horizontality doubtless served well for producing children, it surely frustrated his scientific endeavors (the botany projects he pursued in the potting sheds, the pigeon-breeding experiments he conducted in the backyard cotes, the barnacle dissections he performed in his study). On his worst days he was up and about for only two or three hours, after which, beset by a wracking headache and a high fever, he took to his couch, not far from the basin that, owing to his spells of vomiting, he was obliged to keep at hand, occluded by a Chinese screen.

  Not surprisingly, he rarely left the villa. Only once that autumn did he go to London, where he bought a cameo brooch for Mrs. Darwin and attended a meeting of the Geological Society. He much preferred that his colleagues come to him—and come they did. Amongst the illustrious visitors to Down House were the virile young botanist Mr. Joseph Hooker, recently returned from an expedition to the Antarctic, the affable Mr. John Gould, England’s greatest ornithologist, and the crusty Professor Charles Lyell, celebrated throughout Her Majesty’s realm for his Principles of Geology (a book that, as Mr. Darwin remarked to Chloe, “will be favorably impressing its readers even after the mountains for which it so eloquently accounts have turned to dust”). Occasionally the scientific triumvirate of Hooker, Gould, and Lyell spent the night, but usually they made a day trip of it, staying only long enough to partake of an afternoon meal. Because these luncheons normally occurred in the vivarium, Chloe oft-times found herself eavesdropping on the sages’ conversation (understanding but a fraction of what she heard), meanwhile pursuing her zookeeping tasks and supervising the children as they rode about the dome astride the tortoises like sheiks on camels.

  Gradually it dawned on her that the master of Down House was no less renowned than Professor Lyell, thanks largely to his book chronicling his journey around the world. When Chloe asked Mr. Darwin if she might peruse The Voyage of the Beagle, he lent her a copy of the third edition. Every night, upon retiring to her little room, she read another chapter. Having scant interest in coral reefs, ba
rrier beaches, silicified trees, sea-slugs, cuttle-fish, or fossil quadrupeds, she skipped the sections treating of these subjects, savoring instead the scenes in which Mr. Darwin held center stage. In his youth he’d been quite the adventurer, galloping with gauchos across the Pampas, hacking his way through a Patagonian jungle seething with hostile Indians, and traversing the Andes on a mule. He’d survived a volcano in Chile, an earthquake in Concepción, and the mountainous seas off Cape Horn, which had nearly capsized his ship.

  But the most striking passages in The Voyage of the Beagle were the author’s fiery denunciations of chattel slavery, an institution Chloe herself had come to detest while appearing as the Southern belle Pansy Winslow in Lanterns on the Levee. “On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil,” Mr. Darwin wrote in the final chapter. “I thank God I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings when, passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured.” And then, a paragraph later, “These deeds are done by men who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that His will be done on Earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”

  The sacred imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount versus the sordid institution of the Christian slave-trade: so it appeared that Chloe’s employer, like she herself, was attuned to irony—a coincidence she planned to exploit to her father’s advantage. Here we are, sir, the most civilized nation on Earth, sending innocent folk to abominable workhouses, as if they’d deliberately arranged to be poor. One might as well imprison a malaria victim for having the audacity to run a fever. Do you not agree?