This Thing Of Darkness (24 page)

‘You care for nothing, do you hear me? You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family! You dare to suggest that I pay for you to alter your profession for the third time in six years! And not, indeed, for the sake of any respectable position but for the sake of a wild scheme - a thoroughly useless undertaking - that would be entirely disreputable to your character as a clergyman hereafter! How should you ever settle down to a steady, respectable existence after such a - a jaunt? Clearly, nobody else can be found who will take on this utterly discreditable enterprise; many others have obviously turned down this - this escapade before you. From its not being previously accepted, one can only surmise that there is some serious objection to this vessel or expedition. Sailing ships are like gaols - brutal discipline, filthy conditions, with the additional disadvantage of being drowned!’

Even in the midst of a rage, Dr Darwin was not averse to quoting Johnson.

‘What was the name of the vessel that went down with all hands not a few months back? The
Thetis,
was it? I cannot permit you, Charles, to involve yourself in such a foolish and costly undertaking. Whatever would your mother have said?’

Charles’s train of thought diverted automatically to the inadequate framework of memories he had constructed to represent his mother. The edge of her work-table, seen from below. The rustle of her black velvet gown. Her white face on her deathbed, on a July afternoon. The smell in the room. Not once since that bewildering and frightening day had his father even mentioned his mother, still less invoked her name.
He’s frightened of me dying too
, Charles realized.
Bebind all that tbunderous rage at unpaid accounts lies genuine fear at the prospect of losing another member of his family.

‘I understand, sir. Thank you, sir.’

‘If you find any man of common sense -
any
man - who advises you to go, I shall give my consent. Otherwise, I suggest in the strongest terms that you write to Professor Henslow, declining his offer.’

‘Yes sir.’

And with that, Charles left the study and emerged blinking into the hallway, heading for the front door and escape. Hearing his footsteps, Catherine came out of the sitting room, the obvious question framed upon her lips, but as soon as she saw her brother’s burning cheeks and corrugated brow she had her answer.

Charles strode around to the back of the house, tactfully left to himself by his sisters, and halted at the edge of the terrace. In the distance, the river Severn curled through a lush, inviting panorama of soft green meadows. Below him the ramshackle dwellings of Frankwell, Shrewsbury’s poorest suburb, lapped against the foot of the hill like a dull grey sea. Resentfully, he turned on his heel and headed inside to compose his letter of refusal to John Henslow.

 

The first day of the partridge season saw Darwin rise early and take the curricle over to Maer to go shooting with his uncle Jos. He had opted for that particular vehicle as it was light and fast, but even in the early morning the road to Stoke-on-Trent seemed unusually littered with obstacles. A sleeping tollman. A gang of navvies macadamizing the road. A flock of sheep on their uncomplaining way to Market Drayton. A ridiculously slow cartload of pulverized stone pulled by a single donkey that looked fit only for cartwheel grease. Waggonloads of bleak-faced agricultural labourers, who had in all probability lost their homes, roaming the countryside in search of late harvest-work threshing oats or barley.

Darwin sat up on the box with the coachman, as if stealing an extra foot or two would get him to Maer sooner. His mood had not improved: the past couple of days at the Mount had been made awkward by the business of Henslow’s letter, and he was glad to get away. A labourer seated outside his cottage waved a respectful good morning, his breakfast of bread, onions and donkey milk spread out before him in the sunshine, but Darwin was in no mood to return the greeting. There were endless such cottages bordering the road, the crude, single-roomed lath-and-plaster constructions of the rural poor. Was he expected to salute every single occupant? They passed a crowd of women lining a stream, beating their threadbare laundry with wooden paddles. It seemed incredible that the countryside could support so many people in such squalor. Surely, in this age of mechanization and modernization, somebody could do something for them?

After Market Drayton the traffic thinned out somewhat, but his father’s coachman kept a careful course between the whitethorn hedgerows, anxious not to scratch Dr Darwin’s paintwork. Six miles south-west of Stoke they turned off on the rough track towards Maer, whereupon Charles’s new stock, which he had put on for the benefit of his female cousins, chafed at his neck with every bounce of the curricle. It was with an enormous sense of relief that he finally spied the gates of Maer thrown welcomingly open, and beyond them the warm, ancient stone of Maer Hall itself amid the trees. The thirty-mile journey had taken more than four hours.

As he expected, he found the Wedgwood family on the garden side, out on their picturesque porch, gathered adoringly around Uncle Jos and Aunt Bessie. A great shout of excitement rose up as he marched round the corner. How friendly, how informal, he thought, how different from the rigid courtesies of life at the Mount. Uncle Jos strode forward and extended all five fingers, rather than the polite double digit, for his favourite nephew to shake. ‘Charles. I had a feeling we might see you today.’

Darwin laughed. ‘You could not keep me away, sir. Good morning, Aunt Bessie. Good morning, everybody!’

Uncle Jos’s eyes shone with pleasure as greetings and embraces were exchanged. An obsessive hunter and shooter, he had suffered the misfortune of siring four sons, not one of whom had ever shown the slightest sporting interest. His nephew, on the other hand, lived for the hunt as he did.

‘Oh Charles,’ teased Fanny Wedgwood, ‘would you not like to come boating with us on the pool? We should
so
love you to come.’

‘Oh
yes please
,’ echoed Emma, who sat with her arm round her elder sister’s waist.

Beyond the flower garden, a steep wooded slope ran down to the sparkling mere that had given the hall its name in the seventeenth century. Fed by clear springs, its marshy end, adjoining the house, had been cleared by Capability Brown and transformed at great expense into a fishtail-shaped landscape feature. Water-birds now paddled in the shallows, or flapped lazily across the surface, scanning the reeds for insects.

‘Ladies, that would be a high treat indeed,’ affirmed Darwin, his bad mood swiftly evaporating. ‘But I fear your father and I have business at hand.’

‘Oh Charles,’ protested Emma with mock reproach. ‘I am sure that you would prefer to go boating if Fanny Owen were present.’

‘Ladies, you are making a game of me,’ mumbled Darwin, but he knew that he was blushing. It was not merely the mention of the infuriatingly flirtatious and delightful Fanny Owen that had embarrassed him so, but that he appreciated the quietly competing charms of Emma herself just as keenly.

 

‘Come on, my lad. Out with it. Something disturbs you, I can tell.’

Unlike Etruria, the family’s former home, which sat grandly on a ridge above Stoke-on-Trent, overlooking the pottery factories that had yielded the vast wealth of the Wedgwoods, Maer Hall nestled amid woods and wild heathland. Walking its sandy paths in search of partridge, one might never imagine that the hustle and bustle of the nineteenth century lay so close by.

‘It is nothing, sir. I have been offered a place as a naturalist on a naval expedition around the world - I was recommended by Henslow, the professor of botany at Cambridge - but my father, I suppose understandably, is reluctant to allow it. He says it is a wild scheme, which will be disreputable to my future character as a clergyman. And it will be costly, too. I think he fears I will end up in the sponging-house.’

Uncle Jos smiled. ‘You have felt the rough edge of his tongue, I do not doubt.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Your father cares for your safety, Charles. I saw this with Susannah when she was alive. Although a casual observer might have thought him unduly formal, I could see that he loved your mother very much. But as to this being a wild scheme, and disreputable to a clergyman’s character, well, with all due respect to your father, I am bound to disagree. I should think the offer is extremely honourable to you. The pursuit of natural history, though certainly not professional, is very suitable to a clergyman.’

‘My father also thought the vessel must be uncomfortable - that there must be some objection to it, as I am not the first to be offered the post.’

‘Well, I am no naval expert, but I cannot conceive that the Admiralty would send out a bad vessel on such a service. And if you were appointed by the Admiralty, you would have a claim to be as well accommodated as the vessel would allow. Did your father entertain any other objections?’

‘He considered that I was once again changing my profession.’

Uncle Jos laughed. ‘Well, you have not been the most steadfast apprentice to the professions that have been selected for you. If you were presently absorbed in professional studies, then I should probably agree that it would be inadvisable to interrupt them, but this is not the case. Admittedly, this journey would be of no use as regards a curacy, but looking upon you as a man of enlarged curiosity, it would afford you such an opportunity of seeing the world as happens to very few.’

‘Those are my very own thoughts on the subject - my own thoughts exactly, sir.’

A tiny spark of hope ignited somewhere deep in the young man’s heart.

 

As the last rays of the summer sun flared through the trees, Fanny Wedgwood sat on the porch, working on a rolled-paperwork decoration for a tea canister, while her sister Emma read out passages from the
Ladies’ Pocket Magazine.

‘There is a delightful walking-dress pictured, of striped sarcenet, sea-green on a white ground. The border has a double flounce, the sleeves have mancherons of three points bound round with green satin, the hat has a white veil, and it is ornamented in front with three yellow garden poppies. It says here that all the most distinguished ladies in Kensington Gardens are wearing coloured skirts and dresses this year, trimmed with fine lace. “Silk pelisses are generally seen on our matrons”, apparently.’

‘You have a silk pelisse or two, Fan,’ cut in Hensleigh Wedgwood. ‘Does that make you a matron? After all, you are twenty-five.’

Fanny threw a handful of rolled-paperwork trimmings at her brother. ‘The canister will be next if you utter another word.’

‘Really, Hen. You must learn to be more courteous with your sister,’ chided Bessie Wedgwood maternally.

Just then Charles and Jos appeared through the trees bordering the mere, and trudged up between lines of geraniums towards the house. Charles held forth a solitary partridge by its neck, looking curiously pleased with himself for a man with such a paltry bag. ‘Just the one,’ he called in confirmation.

‘A good job we were not expecting partridge pie for supper,’ laughed Fanny.

‘All the more left over for the poachers,’ scoffed Hen.

‘And there are certainly enough of those, if the last quarter-sessions are anything to go by,’ grumbled Jos.

‘Still, even a solitary partridge is one in the eye for the Duke of Wellington!’ Charles’s comment was deliberately intended to flatter his uncle who, as Whig MP for Shropshire, had helped win the battle to make game licences available outside the squirearchy for the first time.

‘Very true,’ beamed Jos. ‘Mind you, with only one partridge in the bag that’s a devilish dear game licence I’ve shelled out for.’

‘Never mind, dear,’ said his wife. ‘I’m sure you will have better luck on the morrow.’

‘On the morrow? Ah, but we shall not be shooting on the morrow.’

‘On the second day of the partridge season? Why ever not, dear?’

Jos grinned at Charles conspiratorially. ‘Because Charles and I shall go off tomorrow to return Robert Darwin’s curricle to its owner.’

 

The door to Dr Darwin’s study was pushed warily open. The silent dust motes, unexpectedly disturbed, whirled about in panic-stricken eddies. Charles moved forward cautiously into the darkened room.

‘Charles?’

‘Father.’

‘I thought you were at Maer, for the partridge.’

‘I have just returned from there, sir. Father ... would you consider Uncle Jos to be a “man of common sense”?’

Dr Darwin could just make out a stiff-backed figure silhouetted in the doorway behind his son, a pair of neatly trimmed grey sideburns illuminated by the daylight from the hallway. ‘Your uncle Josiah? ... But of course. That goes without saying. What an absurd question. Why ever do you ask?’

Josiah Wedgwood stepped forward into the study.

‘Good morning, Robert,’ he said.

 

‘I am the devil of a fellow at hunting - the best shot in my family, sir. One day I intend to be an admiral. The best way for me to arrive at that position, it seems, will be for me to serve on the
Beagle
. The arrangement will benefit you and it will also benefit me.’

Charles Musters looked FitzRoy squarely in the eye. Coolly, FitzRoy returned his gaze. They were sitting facing each other across a desk in a borrowed Admiralty office, where FitzRoy was recruiting the few remaining officers required for the second surveying voyage of the
Beagle
. At the back of the room, Musters’s mother raised her eyes despairingly to heaven. Charles Musters was eleven years old.

‘I could have gone to the Royal Naval College in Portsmouth, but my father says it is better to learn seamanship on a ship than in a classroom. My father says that college volunteers are all soft-handed whelps, sir.’