The Darwin Conspiracy (6 page)

“Ha!” yelled FitzRoy, clapping the table with an open palm. “As I suspected, you do not subscribe to the belief in Mr. Paley’s Watch-maker.”

“To the contrary, my good sir. I’ve read
Natural Theology
on three occasions. I do believe in the Watch-maker. It’s merely the newness of the watch that I find open to question. You see, I do have a fondness for the longitudinal effects of age.”

FitzRoy leapt up and paced around the office.

“Old the world is, indeed,” he said. “Seeing that it was created on twenty-fourth October 4004 B.C. And we shall find ample evidence of the Great Deluge.”

“No doubt.”

“Well,” FitzRoy blurted, “you’re a man after my own heart. Stand up for what you believe but remain true to the Holy Word—heh. We’ll have lots to talk about in our tiny cabin, Whig and Tory, locked in intellectual combat on the high seas. Ha!”

And that’s how the offer was made.

On the way to the door, FitzRoy asked Charles if it was true, as he had heard from Henslow, that he had once put a beetle in his mouth. It was. Charles recounted the story of how, as a student, he’d lifted a rock and found two exotic beetles and scooped them up, one in each hand.

Then a third appeared, and he put one in his mouth so that he could grab that one also, only to have his mouth seize up from pain—the poor insect had secreted an acrid fluid.

“By Jove, I could not eat for days,” he said, as FitzRoy’s laughter echoed from the walls.

“Ha!” said the Captain. “You can’t try that with bugs in the tropics.

They’ll put you in
their
mouths.”

The joviality prompted Charles to ask a question in turn.

“Tell me, good sir. I had the impression—or perhaps it was my imagination—that you were inordinately taken by my nose. Was that the case?”

“It certainly was,” came the reply. “I’m a phrenologist, you know, and I abide by physiognomy, which explains my interest in your proboscis. And I must say, it does not speak well for you. It took me a while to realize that it was misleading me—you are indeed trustworthy.”

The next day they met again, for lunch at FitzRoy’s club on Pall Mall, and again the Captain made a powerful impression on Charles. At times, it seemed, their roles had switched—now it was FitzRoy who was fearful he would back out. At one point, sipping brandy before the fire, he leaned over to touch Charles on the arm and said: “Now your friends will tell you a sea captain is the greatest brute on the face of creation. I do not know how to help you in this case, except by hoping you will give me a trial.”

“A trial! By Jove, a thousand trials,” said Charles enthusiastically.

“Let us hope that necessity does not materialize.”

FitzRoy drifted for a moment on some dark thought and then added:

“Shall you bear being told during some dinner or other that I want the cabin for myself, when I want to be alone?”

Charles hastened to reassure him.

“Most certainly,” he said.

“If we treat each other this way, I hope we shall suit. If not, probably we should wish each other at the Devil.”

FitzRoy did not hold back in describing the rigors of the voyage—the cramped quarters, the tasteless food, the rough seas, the perilous storms around Cape Horn, and the dangers of overland exploration in South America. But with each new peril, as FitzRoy seemed to intuit, Charles felt more and more convinced that the
Beagle
was his destiny.

At one point, the Captain dropped his voice and confided that he had
a personal stake in the expedition. He had acquired three savages during his previous trip to Tierra del Fuego—he had taken them as hostages for a stolen whaleboat—and now he was going to bring them back to establish a Christian outpost on the storm-wracked coast of their origin.

“Have you not heard of this venture?”

“In truth, sir, I have,” replied Charles—and indeed, he could scarcely have been unaware; for months the Indians had been the talk of London and had even been introduced at court. The Queen took a fancy to them.

“And I heartily approve. A Christian settlement is bound to save the lives of shipwrecked seamen.”

“And so it shall!” put in FitzRoy with a slap on the thigh.

They settled on Charles’s expenses—£30 a year for mess—and drew up the list of items he would need, including twelve cotton shirts, six tough breech trousers, three coats, boots, walking shoes, Spanish books, a guide to taxidermy, two microscopes, a geological compass, nets, jars, alcohol, and all manner of tools for capturing and handling specimens.

Then they went for a stroll to purchase a pair of firearms. London was filling up with crowds for the coronation of William IV and Queen Adelaide on the morrow. Flags hung from the windows, gas illuminations were blazing, and everywhere were plastered decorations of crowns and anchors and “WRs” for the new king. But Charles was more excited by his purchase of a brand-new pair of flintlock pistols and a rifle. He had them sent to his hotel and could not resist informing the clerk that they were to be used in the wilds of South America. Later he wrote to his sister Susan, asking her to send to the Shrewsbury gun-smith for spare hammers, main springs, and plugs.

After FitzRoy left, Charles, on impulse, bought a seat along the coronation route. The following day he took up his position along the Mall across from St. James’s Park and was awestruck at the royal procession, an unending ribbon of liveried attendants dressed in crimson red and glittering gold. As the royal coach went by, he saw the King and fancied that the monarch gave him a slight nod. His heart swelled with imperial pride. How fine it was to be an Englishman. But then the crowd across the street became unruly, pushing and shoving one another off the curb for a better view, and tall equestrian Guardsmen rode up to keep order, 
the horses rearing up and kicking their back hooves violently. One man was injured and lay flat in the gutter until a carriage came to pick him up. Two officers tossed him inside like a sack of potatoes.

That night, Charles strolled among the crowd on the Westminster Embankment. He watched fireworks explode over the Thames, bursts of reds and blues and whites that lit up the Houses of Parliament and streamed down over the majestic bridges and into the cold black water.

Fog suddenly appeared, muffling the syncopated clacking of the horses’ 
hooves and engulfing the knots of people who disappeared and reappeared an instant later. Charles had the uncanny sensation that it was all for him, a stage arranged magically on his behalf that would be struck tomorrow when he departed. His step was light. He embraced the exhilarating and wonderfully lonely feeling that he was unlike anyone around him—a feeling derived, he realized with a quickening pulse, from the extraordinary knowledge that very soon his whole life, and maybe he himself, would be forever changed.

The date was 8 September 1831.

The supervisor of the Manuscripts Room of Cambridge University Library kept Hugh waiting while he sorted through papers on his desk.

When he finally looked up, Hugh asked, “Do you have a good biography of Darwin?”

The supervisor paused, as if considering whether or not to answer, and then said, his eyelids fluttering, “
All
of our Darwin biographies are what one might call
good.
”

“Fine,” said Hugh. “Then I’ll have them
all.
”

A young man standing behind the supervisor raised his hand to his mouth and snickered.

“I see. And how would you like to receive them?”

“Alphabetically.”

“By title?”

“By
author.
”

Five minutes later a stack four feet high appeared on the retrieval shelf. Hugh filled out the slips and carried the books to a corner table, where he piled them around him like a pilot in a cockpit.

Still jet-lagged, he had slept late that morning but awoke with a start, dressed, and ran downstairs to the parlor of the rooming house he had found on Tenison Road. Before taking his money the landlady had warned him twice about having guests in his room. He found strong tea and a scone on the sideboard, gulped them down, and hurried out to a dank drizzle. It was only his third day in Cambridge but already he had learned to carry a fold-up umbrella in his back pocket.

At the library, a huge brown-brick repository built around a massive central tower, the note from Simons under the Cornell letterhead had done the trick; he had obtained a reader’s card, a photo ID, and access to the vast third-floor room.

He picked his way through the books, reading sections here and there, not at all methodical in his search since he had no clear idea what he was looking for. After two hours he asked for more material; he handed in the request slips, and thin brown envelopes or small blue boxes were delivered without ceremony: manuscripts, notes, and sketches in Darwin’s scrawl, books and periodicals with jottings and exclamations in the margins. Then he looked through some of Darwin’s letters. There were thousands upon thousands of them. Some, written from the
Beagle,
were wrinkled and stained from long sailing voyages; he held them under his nose and imagined the scent of sea breezes and brine. Others, written in later years from his study, humbly begged for specimens, demanded data from pigeon breeders and barnacle fanciers, or spread flattery while seeming to fish for a review of one of his books.

Hugh scoured them for some clue to a larger mystery, some nugget that might shed light on how Darwin worked or the definitive moment when he formulated his theory. But they had yielded no such secrets, only bits and pieces of trivia about natural history, a throwaway line about the facial expressions of a monkey, a snippet of gossip about a rival—the mundane stuff of a naturalist’s daily life.

Hugh realized it was hopeless; he was flying blind.

Shortly after one o’clock he was eating in the library lunchroom and looked up to find a young man standing before him with a tray.

“Mind if I join you?”

Hugh recognized him—the assistant who had been snickering.

Although he didn’t feel like talking to anyone, he closed the book he was reading and nodded. The young man was thin, his features delicate and his head tending to cock to one side, like an attentive hound. He had a disconcerting smudge of a beard in the center of his chin.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to Hugh’s book.

“Voyage of the Beagle.”

“Oh, I thought you must have read that by now.”

“Yeah, I did. I’m rereading it.”

The young man cut into a slab of meat drenched in gravy.

“Mind if I ask you what line of research you’re pursuing?”

Hugh decided to keep his cards close to his chest but couldn’t come up with anything that sounded sufficiently esoteric.

“That’s kind of a sore subject. Something about Darwin. I’m looking around but I’m afraid I haven’t really come up with anything exciting, at least not yet. Actually, I’m a little worried about my thesis.”

He smiled lamely. There was more truth than he had expected in his words.

“My name’s Roland Damon, by the way,” the young man said, stretching his hand across the airspace of their two trays, a gesture that was touchingly awkward. Hugh shook it.

“Mine’s Hugh. Hugh Kellem.”

“American?”

“Yes.”

“From . . . ?”

“New York. Around New York. A place called Connecticut, actually.”

“Oh, I know it well. I spent a year there as an exchange student. New Canaan. Loved it. Life in an American high school is adolescent paradise. I joined all the clubs and got five pictures in the yearbook. I mention that only because there was a competition to see who got the most—very American, that sort of thing.”

Hugh smiled. There was nothing to be said by way of response.

“So,” continued Roland, “you’ve done what . . . looked through some of his letters?”

“Something like that.” Not many secrets around here, thought Hugh.

“They’re pretty well combed over,” said Roland. “Darwin’s known to have written fourteen thousand letters and nine thousand of them are here. I’ll bet each one has been read a hundred times.”

“Now it’s a hundred and one.”

“Perhaps you should look for something new. There are only thirty pages extant from the original manuscript of the
Origin.
Incidentally, we have nineteen of them. You could see if you could unearth some of the missing ones.”

Hugh perked up. “You seem to know this stuff pretty well,” he said.

“I should. I’ve been working here eight years. A man’s got to do something to pass the time.” He paused, looking at Hugh, then continued. “You could look for the 1858 Darwin and Wallace manuscripts

from the Linnean Society. They’ve never been found. They’re not in any of the collections.”

“So where would you go?”

“Some other archive. Maybe his publishers. Anywhere but here.

This ground has been ploughed over so many times there’s nothing left.” Roland raised his voice a notch. “There’re so many mysteries about the man. Why don’t you tackle some of them?”

“Like what?”

“Here’s this wanker who goes around the world, has all sorts of adventures, rides with the
gauchos
of South America, for Christ’s sake, and then sails home and never stirs again. What do you make of that?

And all his illnesses—he came down with everything in the book. He was a walking infirmary. You mean to tell me that’s normal? And he has this theory that’ll turn the world on its head and make him famous but he can’t bring himself to publish for twenty-two years. You don’t find that strange?”

Hugh did find it strange, of course, as did most scholars who took Darwin on, but that was part of the man’s attraction—he was nothing if not human.

“Everyone’s always making excuses for his procrastination. His wife was religious. He knew his work would bring down the walls of Jericho.

He needed time to marshal all his data. His own body was in a state of rebellion at what he was doing— Bullshit! I think people let him get away with murder.”

Hugh noticed that the more Roland talked, the more flirtatious he became. So he wasn’t really surprised when his luncheon companion posed one or two leading questions about his social life and asked what he did for fun. Hugh pushed aside the advance, gently. He had begun to like him.