The Darwin Conspiracy (33 page)

Hugh went back downstairs. Now the central hall was deserted. He listened—footsteps upstairs, some chatter from the gift shop around the corner, a clattering of dishes in the teashop. He walked over to the cupboard and casually opened the door. He leaned down and poked his head inside; it was empty. In the dim light he examined the interior. It ran deep to the left and rose up about four feet, lined with unfinished planks about three inches wide. Wooden pegs protruded two thirds of the way up. A baseboard ran around the bottom.

He looked at the baseboard. At the far end a section looked as if it had been cut out and replaced, leaving a slight crack on either side. He reached in with his left hand and touched it. It moved. He grabbed it and pulled it toward him. It gave way easily and he saw a dark hole behind it. Inside, he could make out a small packet. He retrieved it, replaced the baseboard, closed the cupboard door, and, with the packet slipped under his coat, walked over to the gift shop. Smiling at the young woman behind the cash register, he passed the shelves of books, postcards, and bric-à-brac without stopping.

On the train ride back, his heart thumping, he untied a ribbon, opened the wrapping, and looked at his prize—the sketch Lizzie had described. It was a bit wrinkled, yellowed and rolling up at the edges, but clear enough. He examined the drawing closely. There were two figures, identified in a caption as Darwin and McCormick, standing on either side of a tree, and at the bottom the artist’s initials: C.M. He was puzzled. To Lizzie, its importance was immediately apparent, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure it out. There was nothing to identify the place—it could have been anywhere. The tree was certainly not the baobab tree the two had discovered during their outing at St. Jago. It was an ordinary, nondescript tree. Behind it were a few rocks that offered no clue about the location. So where was it? And what was its significance? What had Lizzie seen? Hugh was stumped.

On the ride back, he pulled it out several times and looked at it but still he could not decipher its meaning.

Beth spent the night in the George Eliot Hotel. She had her morning coffee outdoors in the main square, a stone’s throw from a statue depicting the author in a flowing Victorian gown, glancing over her shoulder—as if, thought Beth, she couldn’t wait to get away. She was amused to find a George Eliot Art Gallery, a George Eliot Pub, even a George Eliot Hospital. How’s that for irony? Beth thought. As a woman Mary Ann Evans couldn’t even publish under her own name and now the whole damn town is living off the man’s name she chose as her pseudonym.

She made her way to the Nuneaton Library. The supervisor was a woman in her thirties with porcelain skin and light blond hair, the prototype of the English rose. She received Beth graciously and ushered her into the workroom, a fifty- by fifty-foot chamber with elegant windows and solid oak desks.

The library housed the largest public collection of George Eliot material in the country, the supervisor boasted, but virtually all the author’s letters had already been published in some eight or nine volumes, thanks in part to a Yale English professor who began collecting them in 1920.

Beth explained that she was interested in letters that Eliot had received, not sent, and particularly those whose writers had not yet been identified.

“Ah. That’s another matter.”

She disappeared and returned some ten minutes later. Behind her a shabbily dressed young man pushed a cart stacked with thick looseleaf binders.

“From the vault,” she said. “I’m afraid that William here will have to sit with you as you go through them. Can’t be too careful. You don’t look like a thief, but one never knows. The other day we caught a little old lady with an engraving rolled up in her umbrella.”

“Of course,” said Beth. “I understand.”

William sat beside her, seemingly glad to have nothing to do, and she began to sort through the binders.

After some two hours, she gave a little cry.

William looked up. Her finger was resting on a plastic cover sheet.

Underneath was a letter with crimson borders and printed across the top were the words
Dieu Vous Garde.

“I’ll be damned,” she said out loud. “She’s using Annie’s stationery.”

The letter came from Switzerland.

Oddly enough, it was after the
Beagle
reached the tranquil waters of the Pacific that Captain FitzRoy lost his mind.

I suppose, thought Charles, as he looked down at the poor disheveled man, it is when the worst is over that we lower our guard and fall prey to torments of the spirit.

The passage through the Strait of Magellan had been rough. For a month the ship had battled winter gales, her rigging frozen, her decks covered with snow. She maneuvered perilously through canyons of giant blue glaciers, which every so often split, toppling ice into the water with a thunderous crack and unleashing enormous waves.

During this time Charles and most of the crew not needed to man the rigging stayed belowdecks. Happily, he did not see much of McCormick, because the naturalist was still aboard the
Adventure.
When the two did find themselves together on land, each was understandably awkward in the other’s company.

Charles had begun viewing the whole world differently. He scribbled excitedly in his journal. Everything opened up to him. Everything now seemed palpable and manifest—the cloud of butterflies that engulfed the ship like snowfall, the phosphorus trailing behind in luminescent silver, the electrical field that crackled around the masts one moonlit night. These were not phantasmagoric phenomena; they were all too real, Nature exposed in all her glory. Charles felt that he could make sense of all the natural events around him, that he possessed insight to illuminate them at a single stroke, like a lightning bolt in a ghostly night-time landscape.

Before crossing through the strait, the
Beagle
was beached for repairs to the hull at the mouth of the Santa Cruz and the
Adventure
anchored nearby. For the first time since Woollya, Charles and McCormick were thrown together. For the most part they avoided one another. The distance between them had now turned into an unbridgeable gulf. To kill time, the two posed for a sketch by Conrad Martens, one on each side of a tree, barely looking at each other the whole time.

At last the ships reached the Pacific and put in at the quaint port of Valparaiso on the Chilean coast. Charles could not wait to be back on land and explore the Andes. He managed to find lodging in town with an old school chum and then struck out for the high Cordillera. He wandered for six weeks, stepping over ravines that would have sent him hurtling to his death and crossing suspension bridges that swayed in the howling wind. He caught mountain birds, found minerals, uncovered marine deposits. At night he slept huddled for warmth against his two peasant guides. He had returned in triumph, trailing mules loaded with specimens, including whole shell beds from the mountains, more evidence for his theory that the range, once seashore, had been thrust up by geological forces.

Seeing the ship from the dock, he quickly noticed something was wrong. The
Beagle
looked to be in a sorry state, the crew lounging about at loose ends. Lieutenant Wickham, pacing up and down, rushed over when he saw Charles.

“The Captain’s gone off his head,” he said. “He’s resigning his commission and wants to be invalided and returned to England. Go and talk to him, Philos. Maybe you can return him to himself.”

“What precipitated the crisis?” asked Charles.

“He received notice from the Admiralty rebuking him for the purchase of the
Adventure
and refusing to pay the cost. He’s had to sell it.

That’s what pushed him over the brink. I partly blame myself.”

“Why?”

“Sulivan had been hounding him for weeks to buy the
Adventure,
and once he got command, he told him she was essential to complete the work. I should have put a stop to it.”

Charles found FitzRoy in his cabin, lying on his bunk with the curtains drawn. His tunic was open and he rested with one arm thrown across his eyes, the other trailing to the floor. He scarcely looked up.

His face was pallid, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Charles helped him to a glass of water.

At first FitzRoy said very little, but then he turned verbose, the words rushing out in such a maniacal torrent that Charles became alarmed.

FitzRoy roundly condemned the Admiralty, the Navy, Whigs, the entire government. Wickham heard him ranting and came in. The two stayed with the Captain for hours, gently persuading him that there was no need to return to Tierra del Fuego, that the survey there was essentially finished, and that all that remained was to take the chronometrical readings for the remainder of the voyage.

They did the same the next day and the next. Charles was impressed by Wickham; the man stood to gain if he stepped in as Captain, as FitzRoy had done for Pringle Stokes on the previous voyage, but he seemed more concerned about the Captain’s health than his own advancement.

On the third day, their soothing words seemed finally to take effect.

FitzRoy was much improved. He got up, shaved, dressed, and decided to venture outside. Charles came to help him. Before leaving the cabin, FitzRoy stood at the door and looked all around, as if waking from a dream.

“Do you have the remotest idea why I spent a fortune refitting this ship in Plymouth?” he asked.

Charles said he did not.

“In order to change the Captain’s quarters. I moved the entire cabin.

I refused to live in the same one as my predecessor so that I would not be haunted by his ghost—Pringle Stokes, that poor wretch.”

“I see,” said Charles. Without thinking, he added: “I suppose it was the loneliness of command that unhinged him.”

FitzRoy looked Charles directly in the eyes.

“You know,” he said, “after his death, they performed an autopsy.

They found the ball lodged in his brain, but they also found something else. They opened his shirt and what did they see there? Seven wounds, seven knife wounds, nearly healed.
Nearly healed.
The bloke had been trying to kill himself for weeks. . . . He had no one to help, no one to turn to. He was alone.”

With that, FitzRoy went on deck, took a deep breath, and said he would resume command. A good wind had come up.

As they hoisted anchor, Charles looked up and saw McCormick on the quarterdeck with his canvas bag, returning from his berth on the
Adventure,
heading toward his old cabin. He emerged five minutes later and approached Charles, standing resolutely before him.

“I see we’re shipmates again, Mr. Darwin,” he said.

“That we are,” replied Charles.

They would head up the coast and then due west, six hundred miles, toward the famed archipelago named after the shell of the tortoise.

Charles was standing next to FitzRoy when they drew alongside the first island. He could hardly believe his eyes. He had been looking forward to the Galápagos because legend called the place Eden.

But this! There was nothing paradisiacal about this place—a dismal heap of black lava rising up to the sky with scarcely a jot of vegetation and nothing to see but birds.

“And what island, pray tell, is that?” he asked.

“That,” replied the Captain, “is a Spaniard’s joke. It is so insignificant it has no name—and that’s exactly how it is noted on the chart: Sin Nombre.”

He sniffed the air and continued: “Do not be misled by Islas Encan-tadas. The Spanish does not mean ‘beautiful’ but rather ‘bewitched,’ an appellation derived from the treacherous currents that make landing difficult. It is true that the animals and birds, having no acquaintance with man, show no fear in proximity but rather a blithe indifference.

Still, mark my words, ’tis a shore fit for pandemonium.”

The ship dropped anchor at the second island. The men threw their lines in the water and the decks were soon alive with parrot fish and angelfish flapping about in a riot of bright tropical colors. Charles and eight sailors took the whaleboat to shore. They found the black beach so hot they could feel it through the soles of their boots.

They walked along the coast: the place was teeming with life. Marine iguanas littered the lava rocks, their spotted black hides invisible at a distance but hideously distinct close up. With combs of scales along their backs, cold eyes, sagging chin pouches, and long curved tails, they looked like malevolent dragons, but were in reality sluggish and harmless. Charles picked one up by the tail and heaved it into the water.

Rounding a point, they were surrounded by a profusion of birds.

Red-footed boobies perched in trees. Below them, on the ground, masked boobies tended their nests and blue-footed boobies covered every ridge, some ponderously raising their pale blue feet one at a time in an awkward two-step mating dance. The birds paid the men no attention whatsoever. Charles raised his gun to a nearby hawk, which didn’t move, so he pushed it off the branch with the barrel.

With Covington at his side, he followed a path inland and at last came upon the islands’ most famous denizens, giant tortoises—two of them munching prickly pears. The animals hissed and withdrew their heads, but soon poked them out again and resumed eating. Charles measured the circumference of one of their shells: a full seven feet around. They walked on and came to a sight that stopped them in their tracks: a wide path that was a veritable thoroughfare for tortoises, long processions of them mounting and descending.

The two followed the trail to the top of the hill where a spring-fed pool was filled with an entire congregation of the creatures. Some sank up to their eyes in the pure cold water, swallowing it in great, lugubrious gulps. Others wallowed deep in the mud. Charles was overwhelmed—he felt he had blundered upon some clandestine rite, an antediluvian spectacle in which beasts had dropped their savage masks and revealed their innocent natures.

The men turned and pursued the tortoises that were lumbering downhill. On the spur of the moment, Charles climbed up one and sat on it, then so did Covington. They rocked back and forth with the movement and held on to the edges of the shells to keep from falling.