The Darwin Conspiracy (3 page)

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes.”

“I see. Well, you’ll be hard up for places to go to here.”

They fell quiet and in the silence, Hugh felt the scotch thickening his tongue. He excused himself and rose.

“Don’t worry about the fire,” he said. “You can let it go—there’s nothing to burn.” As he walked toward his tent, he found that he enjoyed the sensation of moving with difficulty. Liquor had a lot to recommend it.

He turned back and looked at Nigel, a thick, dark shape sitting on the stump.

“By the way, you might want to hang your boots on the tent pole.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’ll find a lot of scorpions here—
in
paradise.
”

The moment he crawled into his sleeping bag, he felt the letter in his pocket. What the hell. He turned on a flashlight and opened the envelope. The familiar script looked back at him, but he felt sufficiently numbed to read it through, to deal with the knowledge that he had, once again, let his father down. His father wouldn’t write that in so many words. But Hugh had become adept at reading between the lines.

Charles Darwin saddled his favorite horse and rode him hard to Josiah Wedgwood’s estate in Staffordshire. He skirted the villages of cobbled streets and black-and-white Tudor houses and instead took the back lanes, trotting beside hedgerows and through fields pink with sorrel and white with dog-daisies. When he reached the forest and entered the path through the tall ash and beech, he urged the animal into a full gallop, feeling the wind, full in his face, blur his eyes with tears.

Never in his twenty-two years had he felt more wretched. And to think that only a week ago he had been serenely contented, basking in compliments from Adam Sedgwick, the renowned geologist of Trinity College Cambridge. They were exploring the ravines and riverbeds of North Wales, just the two of them, and it had been a glorious expedition. And then he had returned home to find the offer waiting for him, a bolt from the blue that could change his life forever, provide it with meaning. And to be denied it! To have his hopes elevated so high and then dashed the very next moment! How could he endure it? He looked down at the ground’s blur, the black earth spewing onto the weeds—how simple it would be to slide down Herodotus’ flank and slip headlong under those pounding hooves.

From a distance, young Darwin did not cut a bad figure. He was a bit plump but he was an accomplished and graceful rider, moving in rhythm with the horse’s long strides. His upbringing at The Mount, the family estate in Shrewsbury, had been assiduously arranged around the holy trinity of the country gentry: riding, hunting, and fishing. Up 
close, dressed in soft provincial browns and knee-high boots, he was more compact and disarming than classically handsome. He had a noble forehead, auburn hair giving way to trimmed muttonchops, gentle brown eyes, a slightly prissy mouth, and a nose that he felt was too large. His wit was not as sharp or irreverent as that of his older brother, Erasmus. His speech was marred by a slight stammer, inherited from the patriarchal side; it had so far resisted the lure of a sixpenny reward on the day he could successfully pronounce “white wine.” Yet all in all, he was considered a presentable fellow, open and amiable, if not remarkable, and someday he would make someone a fine husband.

But appearances could be deceiving. No one knew the depth of the ambitions lodged within him. And few, aside from his friends at college and university, knew of his passion for natural history. It had been with him as long as he could remember, from the time his father, Robert Waring Darwin, had given him two dog-eared books that had once belonged to his father’s older brother, Charles, his namesake, who had died tragically young in medical school; one was on insects, the other on “the natural history of waters, earth, stones, fossils and minerals, with their virtues, properties and medical uses.” The passion was rooted in the heart, growing into the very ventricles. It led him to skip anatomy lessons at Edinburgh so that he might go hunting for shells along the Firth of Forth and to spend long afternoons outside the walls of Christ’s College Cambridge, patrolling the countryside, ripping the bark off trees and hammering fenceposts, looking for insects.

A parade of mentors filled his eager brain with lore and theory about nature and something more—with
feeling.
That was what was so inspiring about Sedgwick. He was a Romantic—in point of fact, he told tales of traipsing across the hills of the Lake District with his friend William Wordsworth—and he made the prospect of unlocking nature’s secrets impassioning. In Wales, hot on the pursuit of geological beds, he had collected rocks of unusual interest, pouring them into the bulging pockets of his long black coat, and then, raising his arms toward the canopy of trees far above, he joked that he required the weight “to keep me grounded in the face of such boundless beauty.” Charles remembered another moment: the night the two were dining at the Colwyn Inn and there, seated before a plate of mutton and a mug of ale, the great man had told Charles that their journey was going to lead to critical amend
ments to the national geological map and that he, Charles, had performed brilliantly. The acolyte felt a flush of pride and confidence so strong that it made him realize how rare the feeling was, one that he’d never experienced in the presence of his father.

And now, racing to Maer Hall for a day of partridge-shooting that he hoped would blunt his burning disappointment, he carried a sealed letter from his father to Uncle Jos. It contained a prescription for “turpen-tine pills” for a digestive complaint and a note that rebuked his son for his latest folly, a proposed “voyage of discovery” on a ship called the
Beagle
that the Admiralty was sending on a two-year surveying trip around the world. The captain, a temperamental aristocrat by the name of Robert FitzRoy, required a gentleman companion to lift his spirits at sea with convivial conversation, and the old boy network at Cambridge had put forth young Darwin as the perfect candidate. John Henslow, the eminent botany professor who had adopted him during long walks along the Cam and had brought him into his celebrated Friday evening salon, had recommended him to George Peacock, a Cambridge mathematician with connections to Francis Beaufort, the powerful Hydrogra-pher of the Admiralty.

That was how the invitation came to be waiting for him in the letter rack of the grand foyer at The Mount. As he read it, his hands shook, his breath quickened, and instantly he vowed to go. But he hadn’t reckoned on his father, who raised objection after objection. What kind of useless and wild scheme was this? Surely others had turned it down before him. Wouldn’t it hurt his career if he decided to become a man of the cloth? After changing professions so often, wasn’t it finally time to settle down?

Charles could not bring himself to oppose his father. To him the doctor was a giant of a man in more ways than one and yet that one alone, physical stature, was sufficiently imposing. He weighed twenty stone and stood at six feet two inches, so immense that when young Charles had accompanied him on his rounds in the carriage he’d found himself crushed so tightly against the seat’s iron railing that he could barely breathe. Charles had no memory of his mother, Susanna, who died when he was eight, other than the dark room where she lay as an invalid for so many weeks and the black velvet gown she was dressed in upon her death. His father raised him—or rather, his two older sisters 
raised him while Dr. Darwin presided over the household, a distant figure who harangued them with two-hour-long monologues at dinner.

Charles was packed off to boarding school at the age of nine. Still, he loved his father and knew he was loved in return, and that was part of the never-ending conundrum: he was continually disappointing his father, yet he craved nothing so much as the old man’s approval. Two years before, when he had abandoned medical school in Edinburgh, horrified by operations conducted without anesthetic, sick at the sight of blood, and disgusted by the scandal of grave-robbers supplying corpses for dismemberment, the look of disappointment in his father’s eyes had pierced his soul. And he would never forget his father’s words:

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

With a heavy heart, Charles had written to Henslow that he could not accept the post on the
Beagle.
Still, he thought, as he urged on his horse, whose neck and flanks were now dank with sweat, perhaps all was not lost. His father had not totally closed the door. After listing his objections, he had left it open a crack by saying: “If you can find any man of common sense who advises you to go, I will give my consent.”

And what man of common sense was better than Uncle Jos, the doctor’s brother-in-law and first cousin? A man of easygoing grace and quiet humor, he presided over the Wedgwood china-making empire founded by his father. His advice carried the authority of the modern entrepreneurial world of the ironworks and steam-driven engines of the Midlands. Charles adored his companionship. And he loved Maer Hall, filled with books, resounding with the laughter of his cousins, and warmed by its benign patriarch, so unlike his own home that he dubbed it “bliss castle.”

He left Herodotus in the hands of the stable boy and entered the grand hall, the hounds baying at his heels. The girls, Fanny and Emma, squealed with delight, and his cousin, Hensleigh, six years his junior, clapped him on the back. Uncle Jos was delighted to see him but at once read the distress in his face. Charles told them about the proposed voyage and handed his father’s letter to his uncle, who repaired to his study to read it in private. He emerged shortly to propose a hunt. The two of
them meandered on the heath largely in silence, their guns resting comfortably in the crooks of their arms. Charles missed seven out of nine partridges. Even his shooting was off, he thought, as he knotted the cord on his jacket only two times, once for each downed bird. By late afternoon when they returned, the whole of Maer Hall was buzzing about his offer and even the houseguests were unanimous in the conviction that he must not let it pass.

“Come with me and list your father’s objections,” suggested Uncle Jos, leading him to the study. Charles duly wrote down eight items and passed them over to his uncle, who frowned in feigned seriousness and then dealt with them one by one, knocking each down as skillfully as a barrister at the Old Bailey.

“What do you say—shall we write your father?” he said. Seated at a huge desk of New World mahogany, he composed a skillful rebuttal, turning every objection on its head so that it was somehow transformed into a positive consideration. From time to time he winked at Charles, who was stymied in his own composition. Finally, the young man dipped his pen in the inkwell and began in a hesitant scrawl: 

The letters were posted. They discussed the matter late into the evening and over snuff after dinner. That night, in the second-floor bedroom, Charles could not sleep; his mind wandered as he gazed out the window onto the garden of irises, lobelias, and dahlias and a lake illuminated by moonlight. Was there still a chance for the trip? It would be such an opportunity to further his knowledge of geology and zoology, to view uncharted rock formations and collect specimens in parts of the world never before visited by specialists. He was seized by wanderlust—
hadn’t he and Henslow been indulging in fantasies about a trip to the Canary Islands? How tame that would be compared to this! It would be 
a last adventure before settling down somewhere to a life of comfort and family, undoubtedly as a provincial vicar.

But there was more to it, he knew. The world of natural science was expanding rapidly, new discoveries were pouring in to the museums all the time, and a voyage like this could make a young man’s name. He had seen how the explorers were welcomed back as heroes, fêted in the marble and wood-paneled clubs, and how at dinner parties in the best homes in Kensington and Knightsbridge the bankers and industrialists hung on their every word, their own lives seeming suddenly humdrum, while the women cast admiring glances over the cut-crystal goblets. His heart longed for fame the way a plant in drought longs for rain.

Some words that night from Uncle Jos popped into his brain. “Do you remember,” his uncle had asked abruptly, standing in the glow of the Gothic fireplace, “when you were young, about ten or eleven, you told all those fibs? You told the most elaborate lies—you talked of seeing rare birds during your perambulations in the countryside. You would come running home to claim you had just spotted the most exotic starling imaginable. We were all quite perplexed. Something very curious—

I noticed they began at the same time you perceived that your father was interested in ornithology. I told him to cease paying any attention and gradually, by Jove, if you did not drop the habit. I think the reason behind your little fictions was that you were trying to please him.”

The remark had struck home. He had changed since then, surely, and his burgeoning love of science had filled him to the brim with admiration for fact. But he viewed truth in much the way a home county par-son views God—as a higher abstract that on occasion can be reshaped to bring a wayward parishioner back to the bosom of the Church. His mind drifted to his father—how stern and unyielding he was. If Charles could take this trip and send back specimens and return to lecture the Royal Society of London, how vindicated he would be—all those years of shooting birds and hunting insects would have come to something.