The Darwin Conspiracy Page 2

  It took a long time to bring their equipment up. They made three trips each and placed the supplies in three piles—one for him, one for her, and one for the kitchen. When they finished, they were sweating profusely and sat down around the campsite to catch their breath.

  “So, this is it,” Nigel finally said, surveying the campsite with obvious disappointment. “Somehow I expected more. All those generations of students, you know. You’d think they’d build the place up a bit. I suppose they had nothing on their minds but birds—birds and sex, of course. You can probably get a whiff of that.” He inhaled. “Crikey, it does smell, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s guano.”

  “No shit.” Nigel chuckled at his own joke.

  “You get used to it,” said Hugh. “I don’t even smell it anymore.”

  Nigel looked at him and then turned to gaze out to sea. “At least you’ve got a world-class view here,” he said. “Now, what island is that?”

  “Santiago. One of the biggest.” Hugh pointed out the other islands, giving a brief description of each. “You’ll get to know them in no time.”

  “I expect so.” Nigel paused a moment. “So, what exactly happened to that chap who was here with you—Victor? He came down ill?”

  “Yes. He was evacuated. Some kind of stomach ailment.”

  “I see. And you’ve been alone ever since?”

  “Yes. Six, eight months, something like that.”

  “Hmm. Well, not to worry. We’re here to rescue you. The cavalry.”

  He held a fist to his mouth, imitated the sound of a bugle, and clapped Hugh on the back, startling him. Then, moving uncertainly among the rocks, Nigel chose the best place to pitch his tent and put it up quickly.

  It had side vents and a canopy, much fancier than Hugh’s. Beth pitched her tent, a snug two-sleeper, off to one side.

  Nigel emerged carrying a knapsack. “By the by,” he said. “Almost forgot. I’ve got some post for you.”

  Hugh recognized the envelope—a corporate return address, his name printed in large confident letters. He felt his cheeks redden as if he had been slapped: it was from his father.

  “Thanks.”

  He folded the envelope and shoved it in his back pocket.

  After dinner they sat around the fire on the sawed-off tree stumps imported from San Isabel. Hugh was tired after a day of showing them around the island; it had felt odd pointing out the fixed points in his shrunken world—the crater’s bottom, the dry, cracked bushes, the mostly vacant nests, the traps baited with bits of banana. “How many finches are not yet banded?” Nigel had demanded. “Six,” Hugh had replied. “And they’re smart as thieves. I don’t think you’ll catch them.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Hugh’s stomach churned—he wasn’t accustomed to meat and Nigel had unpacked two thick steaks and fried them in oil, flipping them in the air like pancakes. Afterward Beth produced a quart of Johnnie Walker Black and poured each of them a strong one. Hugh felt it burn his throat as he leaned back to watch the smoke and embers shooting up into the darkness.

  “As I calculate it,” said Nigel, after knocking back half his scotch,

  “this drought is well on its way to becoming one for the record books.

  Isn’t that right? When was the other one again?”

  “Nineteen seventy-seven,” said Hugh.

  “And how long was that? Something like a year?”

  “Four hundred and fifty-two days,” said Beth. She was seated on the rock, leaning back upon the stump, her brown legs curled to one side.

  The fire lit up her high cheekbones and her eyes, framed by her black hair, gleamed.

  Nigel whistled. “And how long has this been?” He looked at Hugh.

  “Two hundred thirty-five days.”

  “That’s good for the study.”

  “Good for the study, bad for the birds.”

  “What’s been the effect so far?”

  “Seeds are in short supply. Not much mating. Some chicks have died in their nests. They’re listless. Some are desperate.”

  “Which ones? What are the variations? The beak sizes?”

  “God’s sake,” put in Beth. “He’s not your graduate student.”

  “That’s all right,” Hugh said. The truth was he liked having someone to talk about it with. “The fortis are hurting, especially the smallest ones. Their beaks are too tiny. They can’t handle Tribulus. You see them trying—they pick it up and turn it around and then drop it. Some of them get into this herb—it’s called Chamaesyce—and the leaves coat their feathers with this white sticky latex. It bothers them and they rub their crowns against the rocks until they go bald. Then they get sun-stroke. You see them lying around dead, these little bald finches.”

  “And the next generation?”

  “It’s too soon to tell, but it’ll be like the last drought. The ones who survive will be the ones with the deepest beaks. And they’ll go on until one year there’ll be heavy rainfall and then you’ll suddenly see a multitude with narrow beaks.”

  Nigel mimicked the tone of an announcer: “Darwin’s living laboratory. Step up and watch as natural selection works its daily miracles.

  How does it go? How did the great man put it?”—he tilted his head back slightly, as if trying to remember, but the words came so easily he clearly knew them by heart— “daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.”

  Hugh didn’t mind the showing off. The scotch was warming his system and rendered him charitable. He looked across the fire at Beth but couldn’t read her reaction.

  “But of course Darwin didn’t quite get it, not when he was here, did he?” Nigel continued. “I mean, he mixed up all his specimens, took finches from the various islands and put them all in the same bag. He had to go begging to FitzRoy to look at his finches.”

  “That’s right,” said Beth.

  “And there’s only one single sentence in The Voyage of the Beagle that even hints at the theory.”

  “So they say.”

  “Ah, well. You’ve got to hand it to him. He got there eventually, though he took his sweet time about it.” Nigel looked over at Hugh.

  “Tell me,” he asked, “exactly what is it about Darwin that engaged your interest?”

  The question had been thrown down like a gauntlet. Hugh was startled.

  How to answer? How could he even begin to put what he felt into words? He admired so many things about Darwin—his methodical exactitude, his boyish enthusiasm for experiments (imagine, playing the bassoon to see if earthworms could hear!), his demand for facts, nothing but facts, and his willingness to follow them wherever they led, wading knee-deep into lakes of hellfire if need be. But one thing he admired above all else was Darwin’s ability to think in eons—not centuries or millennia but entire epochs. He elongated time, stretched it out, examined cataclysmic events as if in slow motion. He could look at mountain ranges and imagine the earth’s crust rising up ever so slowly. Or come upon marine fossils high up in the Andes and envision the antediluvian seabed that buried them there. How extraordinary to possess sight that could stretch so far backward that the infinitesimal wheels of change and chance became apparent in their movement, like Galileo examining heavenly revolutions through the telescope. And how brave to measure yourself against the eons of all that time and recognize you live in a Godless universe and admit your nothingness. Hugh found that oddly comforting—the nothingness.

  “I like that he took the long view,” he finally replied.

  Nigel turned to Beth. “And you?”

  Hugh leaned forward to listen. Beth took a swig of scotch and spoke matter-of-factly.

  “I like that when he came to these islands and went inland, he took a single book with him.”

  “Which was . . . ?”

  “Paradise Lost. He r
ead it here and then he thought about what he saw here and somehow he put the two together.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” asked Nigel.

  “He found Eden, he ate from the tree of knowledge, and the world hasn’t been the same since.”

  “I see. ‘And they realized they were naked and they covered themselves.’ I see what you mean, though—it is like paradise here.”

  “I’m not so sure,” she said. A few minutes later she got up and stretched, reaching her arms above her like a dancer, and then walked off toward her tent, her body disappearing into the darkness.

  The two men were silent for a while, and Hugh felt the weight of the other man’s presence now that he had finally stopped talking. But Nigel wasn’t quiet for long.

  “You know,” he said, tilting his head toward the spot where Beth had been sitting, “it’s interesting to hear her talk about Darwin like that.

  There’re these rumors that she’s related to him somehow, somewhere way back there, a great-great something or other.”

  “But she’s American,” Hugh said.

  “Yes, it’s unlikely, I know. Just a rumor. Some people collect these kinds of legends around themselves. And she’s certainly a legend, all right.”

  “In what way?”

  “Part of a fast crowd, Cambridge, London, the States. Stunningly beautiful—well, that you can see for yourself. Read everything, done everything. She was married for a while to a brilliant chap, Martin Wilkinson. He had everything going for him—read history at St. John’s Oxford, took firsts in every subject under the sun, good family, world at his feet. But he has problems, a depressive actually, an incredible writer and conversationalist but mentally unstable. He went into a downward spiral. They’re divorced. It was quite the talk there for a while.”

  “And you’ve known each other for . . . how long?”

  “Oh, ages. But things have picked up since the divorce.”

  “Ah. So you’re . . . what? Going out together?”

  “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.

  CHAPTER 2

  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 amendments 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 Geor
ge 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.”