This Thing Of Darkness (23 page)

The letter was signed by Dr Dickson, of the Royal Naval Hospital.

FitzRoy looked up from the letter, and realized that the expression on Murray’s face had not been a vacant one; it was the look of a man whose heart has been scoured out from the inside.

The mail coach from Oswestry disgorged Charles Darwin and three other passengers into the crowded inn-yard of the Lion, where he stretched his cramped legs and waited for his pack to be unloaded from the roof. Post-boys in smart red jackets and pedlars in smock frocks swarmed around to see to the horses and passengers respectively, most persistent of all being an urchin claiming to possess a trained bullfinch that would whistle ‘The White Cockade’ for a penny. Although the afternoon was grey and faintly sticky, Darwin decided to make his way to the Mount on foot. The trip from North Wales on macadamized roads had hardly taxed his muscles; the milestones had ticked rapidly by, although the relentless quickset hedges that arrowed into the distance had quickly become monotonous. Both his limbs and his senses were in need of exercise. Piqued as his curiosity was by the prospect of a singing bullfinch, he was keen to be home and marched off up Wyle Cop at a good pace. His long legs covered the ground with rapid strides, leaving the disappointed little boy-who thought he had sensed a business deal - to give up the chase some thirty yards beyond the inn gates.

Before long the streets and houses had given way to stands of acacia and copper beech, which in turn receded to reveal the great red-brick mansion that his father had built. It was an impassive rectangle boasting of solid provincial prosperity, its clean lines broken only by the classical portico at its base, put there to remind the visitor of the culture and learning that had literally elevated the Darwin family to this comfortable spot. Charles could see the servants going about their business on the lawn, and a tall, willowy shape - his sister Caroline, to judge from the brown mass of curls escaping from under the bonnet - compiling a bouquet of flowers. Before long, one of the housemaids spotted the dusty figure striding vigorously through the gates and sounded the alert. Maids scurried to check that Master Charles’s room was properly prepared, while the waterman rushed to fill a bucket with hot water. By the time he had reached the sitting room, the whole house was aware that its youngest son had returned.

‘Charley!’

His sister Susan put down her embroidery, pitter-pattered across the room and threw her arms round him. ‘You look uncommon well.’

‘Hello, Susan. Hello, Catty.’

His younger sister Catherine also rose to embrace him, but not before she had finished her paragraph in the
Weekly Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
.

‘Charley dear. We thought you were never coming back.’

‘If you thought I would forgo the start of the partridge season, then you do not know your beloved brother.’

‘Have you had any sport in Wales?’

‘After a fashion — I have been hunting old red sandstone, which is the next best thing. Professor Sedgwick and I walked all the way from Llangollen to Great Orme’s Head, looking for a band of sandstone that is on Greenough’s map. Well, it is there on the map right enough, but by the Lord Harry there is none in the ground. Old Greenough’s map is pure fiction!’ His face flushed with exhilaration at the memory of his and Sedgwick’s discovery.

‘How exciting,’ said Susan brightly.

‘How I should love to go geologizing,’ said Catherine, quietly.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t like it, Catty, really you wouldn’t. It’s the most fearful slog, all that tramping and hiking through rocks and mud and gorse - it’s really no hobby for a gentlewoman. It’s all frightfully boring - just measuring and collecting samples. Although I was able to make use of the clinometer that Professor Henslow gave me.’

‘What’s a clinometer?’

‘It measures the inclination of rock beds. It really is the most splendid instrument, in brass and wood. I must write to thank Henslow once more. Oh, but this is all I, I, I! I see your sister has begun another embroidery.’

‘It is to be “Fame Scattering Flowers on Shakespeare’s Tomb”,’ explained Susan. ‘Why, you may have it when it is finished, if you approve.’ She gave him another kiss.

Caroline, the eldest of the three sisters, now made an entrance from the garden, having demurely exchanged her bonnet for an indoor cap.

‘The wanderer returns,’ she beamed, hugging her brother and joining in the fuss. ‘Have you told him about the letter yet?’

‘The letter, of course,’ cried Susan with excitement, and went to fetch it from the hallway, too flustered to call for a servant.

‘A most urgent letter,’ Caroline explained conspiratorially. ‘Express delivery, at treble the cost. There were two shillings and fourpence to pay. We had to send Edward to the inn twice, as he had insufficient coin with him the first time.’

‘Papa had to tip up for it, so of course he grumbled for a good half-hour,’ confided Catherine. ‘He said you could hire a man to ride to Cambridge and back for less.’

‘It’s from Cambridge? Where is Papa?’ A hint of trepidation crept into Darwin’s voice.

‘In his study, with window-curtains drawn as usual. Papa has not been able to get about much these last few weeks - even less so than usual.’

‘I am sorry to hear it.’

Susan returned bearing the letter, and the three women formed a tall white palisade about their brother. Each was eager for news, hungry for anything out of the ordinary.

‘Talk of the very devil - it’s from Professor Henslow himself,’ said Darwin, glancing at the superscription. He broke open the wafer and unwrapped the brown paper.

‘Well?’

‘What does it say?’

‘It is about a certain Captain FitzRoy.’

‘Read it out.’

Darwin broke off. ‘A voyage around the world,’ he breathed. ‘What would I forfeit to go on such a journey? Imagine it!’

‘Oh, Charles,’ squeaked Susan. ‘I can’t.’

‘I can,’ said Catherine.

‘He admits I am not the first candidate - the Reverend Mr Jenyns has turned it down, and Henslow has too - “Mrs Henslow looked so miserable that I at once settled the point.” And he writes a word or two as to the cost ... it will be thirty guineas per annum to mess, plus some six hundred guineas in the way of equipment. Well, there, I think, will be the stumbling block. It is a pretty sum.’ His mind turned once more to the forbidding prospect of his father, awaiting him in the darkened study.

‘If he grumbled about two shillings and fourpence, think what he will say to six hundred guineas,’ murmured Caroline, whose thoughts had strayed in the same direction.

‘Do go on,’ said Catherine, impatiently.

Susan exhaled, and Caroline looked faintly anxious.

‘Well,’ breathed Catherine finally, ‘it sounds to me like a pretty desperate way of avoiding having to pay your tailor.’

 

The first thing Charles saw upon entering the study was the shape of an inverted crescent moon, where the daylight, split into shafts by the heavy drapes, illuminated the bald rim of his father’s head. As his eyes struggled against the twilight his father’s colossal silhouette took form, all six foot two and twenty-three stone of it. Dr Darwin was wedged into his favourite stiff-backed armchair or, rather, he seemed to grow from it, as if man and chair were hewn from the same enormous slab of rock. Charles could barely make out his father’s features, but memory filled the void: the heavy black brows angled severely in to the bridge of the nose, contrasting with the neatly trimmed white tufts over each ear; the defiant bulldog jowls; the pursed, unsmiling mouth, the lower lip curled contemptuously against the world as a matter of routine. Any resolve he had felt upon entering his father’s study evaporated in an instant.

‘You have returned, Charles.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Your trip was satisfactory?’

‘Most satisfactory, sir.’

‘I have received an account, Charles, from Christ’s College, Cambridge. An account for two hundred and three guineas, seven shillings and sixpence in unpaid battels. An account which I have settled.’

Charles’s heart sank. He had quietly prayed for that particular chicken to refrain from coming home to roost just yet.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Do you have anything to say for yourself, Charles?’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘You have an allowance, Charles. A most generous allowance. And yet you have exceeded it importunately. Have I not been generous, Charles?’

‘You have been most generous, sir.’

‘I have also had to part with the sum of two shillings and fourpence for an express letter from Cambridge. Does it contain another account in need of settlement?’

‘No sir. It contains an offer from Professor Henslow, the professor of botany at the university. He has recommended me for the post of supernumerary naturalist, sir, on a Royal Naval expedition travelling around the world.’

Charles awaited the expected explosion, but it did not come. Yet. Instead, the doctor’s eyes remained hooded in the darkness; his head lifted from his shoulders like a cobra’s, his already broad neck seeming to thicken as it did so.

‘And is it your intention to accept this offer, Charles?’

Charles took a deep breath, and stuck out his own neck. ‘I do consider it to be an invaluable opportunity, sir, for one of my lowly standing in the scientific community.’

‘Indeed. I was not aware that you were a member of the
scientific community
. I was under the impression that you were taking instruction in theology as a preliminary to entering the curacy. Is it now the business of a priest to encircle the globe? Does the route to heaven go via Cape Horn?’

‘Professor Henslow is a priest, sir. As is Professor Sedgwick, with whom I have been studying geology in North Wales.’

‘Then why does not
the Reverend
Professor Henslow apply for this exalted position himself?’

‘He is ... indisposed, sir, on account of his family. And the Reverend Mr Jenyns, sir, who was offered the position before me, would have travelled but for his duty to his parishioners at Bottisham.’

‘It is to be wondered, then, that the parishes of England are not wholly vacant. And how, pray, do you intend to maintain yourself on this voyage of - forgive me, for I omitted to enquire of its duration.’

‘Two years, sir. Possibly three.’

‘Two years, possibly three. How, then, do you intend to maintain yourself during this considerable length of time?’

‘I had very much hoped, sir, to lay claim to your generosity in this matter.’

‘You had hoped to lay claim to my generosity in this matter.’

‘You have been generous enough, sir, to defray the cost of my brother Erasmus’s year in Switzerland and Germany.’

‘Your brother Erasmus has completed his medical studies at Edinburgh University, and now furthers them on the continent. Your brother Erasmus did not leave off his studies after spending two years riding to hounds and collecting rocks when he should have been studying medicine. Your brother Erasmus did not exceed
his
most generous allowance.’

‘I should be deuced clever to spend more than my allowance while cooped on board a naval vessel, sir,’ chuckled Charles, in an unwise attempt at levity.

‘But they all tell me you are very clever, Charles, not, I must confess, that I can discern any trace of it in this instant. So, to the crux. What, pray, is the expected cost of this adventure?’

The young man swallowed. ‘Approximately... approximately seven hundred guineas all told, sir.’

There was silence. Charles had hoped that his eyesight would have better accustomed itself to the gloom, but his father’s study seemed darker than ever. He could barely make out Dr Darwin’s face, but instinct, coupled with a gradual change in the doctor’s breathing, told him that it had turned a shade of purple he knew all too well. And then the explosion came.