The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi (21 page)

Burton waited for her to clarify her thoughts.

“Francis has some very strange notions,” she finally continued, “which my husband humours but does not approve of. I think—I think, under the circumstances—” She stopped again, then said, more assertively, “I shall fetch Charles. This news is the last thing he needs, but it would be wrong of me to keep it from him. Will you wait here? I'll send him out. A little fresh air will do him good, at least.”

She left them and ran across the lawn and into the house.

“What do you make of that?” Trounce asked.

“She appears very tense,” Burton replied. “More so, perhaps, than can be attributed to the mothering of so many children. Lord knows, that must place her under enough pressure, but I suspect there's some other issue at play. Did you notice how she repeatedly touched her crucifix?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. What of it?”

“My fiancée also wears the cross. I've noted her touching it to draw on her faith for comfort. Mrs. Darwin's action was quite different. There was a sort of desperation about it, as if the solace she was seeking was no longer there.”

Trounce gave a non-committal grunt and nodded toward the house. Burton looked and saw a casually dressed man emerging from it, walking stick in hand. He was about fifty years old, an inch or so under six feet tall—but a little stooped—stockily built, and bald-headed. His brows, which jutted craggily, buried his eyes in deep shadow, and his jaw, bordered by curly sideburns, might have been carved from rock, so solid was it. However, as he drew closer and the sunlight illuminated his eyes, Burton noted an intense torment in them, and realised that the man's back was bent not from physical causes but from an emotional burden.

“I am Charles Darwin,” the scientist said. “Sir Richard, I regret that we've never run into one another. I have followed your exploits with much interest. My profoundest congratulations. Your solving of the Nile question is as impressive a feat as I have ever heard of.”

“Thank you, sir,” Burton responded. “It is indeed unfortunate that our paths haven't crossed until now—though not an uncommon circumstance within the RGS. An organisation of travellers inevitably finds its headquarters more than half-empty for most of the time. This is my colleague, Detective Inspector Trounce.”

“Good day to you, sir. Colleague?”

Burton smiled. “A geographer and a policeman—a strange combination, but it so happens that I've been commissioned to investigate a certain matter, and it has thrown Detective Inspector Trounce and I together.”

Darwin used his stick to indicate a path that led from his garden into the fields beyond. When he spoke again, he stuttered a little. “Sh-shall we walk? You can tell me all about it. Th-this matter concerns Francis, does it not? My wife said he's escaped.”

“That's correct,” Burton responded as they set off down the path. “And he was assisted by Burke and Hare.”

“The—the—the traitors? B-but what has he to do with them?”

Trounce said, “That's what we were hoping you could tell us, Mr. Darwin.”

They skirted a hedgerow, thick with the billowy flowers of white snakeroot, and entered a meadow that had been neatly cropped by sheep. Rabbits raced away from them and vanished into their burrows.

Darwin waved his stick from side to side in an extravagant gesture of negation. “No, no, no!” he cried out. “Francis has never once mentioned the rogues. I cannot believe he has any connection with them. W-w-when they fled the country back in 'forty-one, he was still at Trinity College and so deeply involved in his research that he barely saw a soul. By mid 'forty-five, his Irish experiment had failed, he'd suffered a severe breakdown, and had been incarcerated. As far as anyone knows, Burke and Hare were somewhere on the continent during those years.”

“Who funded his research?” Burton asked.

“His club.”

“It being?”

“The—the—the League of Enochians.”

“I've not heard of it.”

“I have,” Trounce put in. “It occupies a building on the corner of Mildew Street where it joins Saint Martin's Lane.”

“So this club has an interest in Eugenics?”

Darwin stopped and thumped his stick into the ground. “Damn Eugenics!” Burton and Trounce looked at him in surprise, taken aback at the show of anger from a man who had thus far appeared mild in temperament.

“Francis is family,” Darwin continued, “but the manner in which that bloody club encouraged him to appropriate and pervert my research is—is—is absolutely foul. I cannot forgive that he allowed himself to be so swayed.”

Burton put out a hand and touched the scientist's arm. “Mr. Darwin, perhaps this would make rather more sense to me if I understood the nature of your work.”

They resumed their walk. Darwin snorted. “Sir Richard, I've been attempting to articulate my theory since 1837—”

Without thinking, the explorer blurted, “The beginning of the Great Amnesia!”

Darwin peered at him curiously. “W-w-what of it?”

“I—” Burton stopped, considered, and went on, “I wonder how it affected you, that is all.”

“The same way it affected everyone else. In 1840, I had to extensively review three years' worth of research and notes, and it all seemed oddly unfamiliar to me. However, it made sense, and as a matter of fact, in going through it, my enthusiasm was renewed, my ideas clarified, and I was set upon a course that led me to my current position.”

“Which is?”

They reached the corner of the field and followed the path as it curved sharply to the right.

“W-w-which is that, having fully developed my hypothesis, I have, since 'fifty-seven, been writing a detailed account of it. However, a year ago, to my dismay, I received a paper from a fellow scientist—Alfred Wallace—that dealt with the very same matter. I thought I had been f-f-forestalled, but my publisher insisted that if I produced an abstract of my dissertation, it could be published before Wallace pipped me to the post. I have thus been struggling for thirteen months to condense my w-w-work. And now you ask me to explain it in a few sentences!”

Burton glanced up at the blue, cloud-spotted sky. He thought he could hear the distant clatter of approaching engines.

“I'm trying to understand why Burke and Hare took Mr. Galton from the asylum,” he said, “and can only surmise that it has something to do with Eugenics. If he developed that science by subverting your own research, then I must have some grasp of your theory in order to comprehend his version of it.”

Darwin stopped, poked the tip of his cane into a blackberry bush, and used it to lift a clump of overripened berries. He bent and scrutinised them closely.

“Very well,” he muttered. “Let us put it this way. Our world has limited resources, thus every individual of every species is engaged in intense competition for them. Do you follow?”

“I do, sir.”

“Within any given species, individuals vary in their t-t-traits. One might have better eyesight than another, or sharper teeth, or a brighter-coloured skin, or a better ability to endure cold, and so on and so forth. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Depending on local conditions, some of these traits will aid survival, while others will not. The individuals that possess the advantageous ones will generally eat better, live longer, and thus breed more successfully, passing their attributes on to their offspring. Over t-t-time, therefore, the species as a whole will retain beneficial characteristics while breeding out the weaknesses.”

Darwin suddenly turned away from the bush, straightened, and faced Burton and Trounce. He raised a finger. “But, but, but! Environmental conditions are far from stable. There are ongoing geological and climactic upheavals and alterations. So it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change—the one that will most quickly develop and adopt new strengths and abilities even to the point where, eventually, and if necessary, it will transmute into a new species entirely. Gentlemen, I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of
natural selection
.”

He lowered his hand and regarded them, blinking, and panting slightly after what had become an increasingly impassioned speech.

Burton heard the engines he'd noticed before draw much closer. They idled, and he looked toward Down House, convinced they'd halted at the Darwin residence.

Trounce quietly cleared his throat and said, “Um. Where does God fit into your theory, Mr. Darwin?”

The scientist winced. He set off again along the path. They walked with him.

“My poor Emma,” he said. “My w-w-wife has laboured assiduously to assist me in preparing my thesis for publication, but in contemplating it, she has found, as did I, that her faith is eroded. She c-c-clings to it, Detective Inspector, whereas I—well, I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created, for example, parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. There is no other conclusion to draw than that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we would expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

Burton, who'd so often drawn this same conclusion but been unable to accurately express it or identify incontrovertible evidence to support it, looked at Darwin with admiration. “Sir, if, as you said, my solving of the Nile question was as impressive a feat as you have ever heard of, then I suggest you hold your own theory to a mirror, for the elegant explanation you have just given, though you might consider it curtailed in the extreme, is enough to convince me that you are on the brink of transforming the world of man. That a human brain can produce so profound an insight is—” He stopped, lost for words.

Darwin supplied them. “Bloody dangerous.”

“Dangerous?”

“You wanted to know what my half-cousin has done with my theory, Sir Richard. I will tell you. He has proposed a human intercession in the processes of natural selection. Rather than allow the successes and failures of survival to dictate the shape of species, he wants to decide for himself which strengths to breed and which weaknesses to eliminate.”

“But how is that different from the actions of, say, a pigeon breeder or a cattle farmer?” Burton asked.

“It is different because he intends that it be applied to the human species. Furthermore, rather than allowing physical characteristics to develop over long periods of time and in response to the environment, he advocates surgical intervention to hasten the process of evolution.”

“The warden at the hospital suggested that Mr. Galton believed that men can be made gods.”

“If, by gods, you mean beings with physical and mental powers that far exceed what is currently natural to us, then yes, that is what Francis seeks.”

Darwin, Burton, and Trounce all jerked their heads around toward the house.

“Was that a scream?” Trounce said.

“Emma!” Darwin gasped.

They left the path and started running across the grass. Burton rapidly drew ahead while Trounce helped the scientist along. The explorer heard children shouting and crying. Angling to the right, he rejoined the path where it entered the garden, raced past the white snakeroot flowers, and burst out of the bushes onto the lawn of Down House.

There were two steam spheres at the side of the residence, both empty but with their engines still ticking over and vapour curling from their funnels. Two of the Darwin children were lying dead or unconscious on the ground. The others were screaming in panic and running back and forth. A short, ape-like man had his arms around Mrs. Darwin, pinning her arms to her sides. She was facing away from him, and as Burton came into her line of sight, she saw him and yelled, “Get them away! Save my children! Save my children!”

Standing a little to the left of her, a second man, taller and thinner than the other, raised his right arm and pointed a green and very odd-looking pistol at the little boy named Leo. Burton, still running toward them, heard a sharp gasp—
phut!
The youngster hit the grass, rolled, and became still.

“Again,” the short man snarled at Emma Darwin. “Where is your husband?”

“We have company, Mr. Hare,” the taller man declared upon seeing Burton.

“Ah, so we do, Mr. Burke!”

Hare threw Mrs. Darwin aside and he and his companion turned to face the explorer. They were dressed identically in long black surtouts, black waistcoats, and knee-length breeches that gave way to pale yellow tights. Their white shirts had high cheek-scraping collars. Yellow cravats encased their necks. Their shoes were buckled and blocky-heeled.

Burton skidded to a halt in front of the taller man, Damien Burke, who said, “Good day to you, Mr. Darwin. I'm afraid I've frightened your children.”

He was slightly hunchbacked and extremely bald but with a short fringe of hair around his ears that curled into enormous “Piccadilly weeper” sideburns. His face hung in a naturally maudlin expression.

Burton said, “Sorry, wrong man,” and launched the heel of his hand up into Burke's chin. The cracking blow sent Palmerston's man sprawling backward and the weapon fell from his fingers. Burton had just enough time to register that, though pistol-shaped, it more resembled some sort of spineless cactus, before Hare crashed into him. The thug was immensely broad, with massive shoulders and long, thick arms. His head was crowned with an upstanding mop of pure white hair that angled around his square jawline to a tuft beneath the heavy chin. His pale grey eyes were deeply embedded in gristly sockets; he had a splayed, many-times-broken nose and an extraordinarily wide mouth filled with large flat teeth. The latter were displayed in full as Hare caught Burton around the neck, crushed his windpipe in the crook of his arm, grinned broadly, and bent him double.