This Thing Of Darkness (39 page)

‘You do not frighten me, Mr McCormick. Pack your bags and leave the ship immediately. You shall have ten minutes’ warning.’

His face a mask of suppressed fury, McCormick picked up the birdcage and headed for the door.

‘Go to the devil! Go to the devil!’ shouted the parrot merrily at FitzRoy, as its cage disappeared from view.

 

With a gentle downward pressure, Darwin sliced the head off the firefly. Its lifeless body continued to glow brightly against the gloom of the verandah steps.

‘Yeurch,’ said King.

‘Look! Look at this!’ said Darwin, eager with the excitement of discovery. Augustus Earle put down his fiddle - which in truth was a blessing, as his technique was rudimentary at best - and did as bidden.

‘The glow is continuous in death,’ explained Darwin, ‘which means it is involuntary. So when the firefly winks his light, he is turning it off, not turning it on.’

‘I see,’ said Earle, returning to his fiddle.

The three had taken a cottage four miles south of the city, between Corcovado and the lagoa, on the road out to the botanical gardens. It was, to Darwin’s mind, a veritable Elysium, free from seasickness and slavery. There were graceful coconut palms in front, with heavy clusters of fruit and long, plume-like drooping flowers. Passion vines climbed all over the house, dark crimson flowers concealed seductively between the leaves. He had spent a month making an exhaustive study of the insect life of the neighbourhood, with a pruriently thrilled Midshipman King as his sole audience. Together they had documented the gruesome habits of the hymenop wasp, which paralysed its victim before injecting eggs into the living tissue, there to hatch and feed and grow into fat, wriggling larvae. He found it hard to reconcile such suffering with the love of a merciful God, but then had not Job suffered horribly at the hands of the Lord? He did not, of course, share his theological confusions with his collecting partner.

King, in return, told him tales of the south, of icebergs and crimson seas and giant whales that leaped clean out of the water, tales that sounded too tall to be true. ‘Come, King,’ he would gibe informally, ‘do not come your traveller’s yarns on me,’ and the boy would aver, hotly, that every word was true. He had discovered that he preferred King’s company to that of Earle, whom he found rather intimidating. The artist was old now - he was nearly forty - and troubled by the rheumatism that comes with age, so he would sit barefoot on the verandah, painting or screeching away at his fiddle, while Darwin and King gleefully roamed the neighbourhood with their insect-nets. It felt as if they were on holiday from school.

Their supper guests arrived just before eight, brought by a covered cart with big solid chariot wheels, two spherical slabs of wood like Saxon war-shields. A pair of statuesque mulatto women alighted, attired in layer upon layer of brightly coloured shawls, their hair piled high and twisting into extravagant headdresses. Their lips and cheeks were rouged, their eyes rendered dark and mysterious by lashings of makeup. Darwin had no idea where Earle had procured them, but they resembled - he realized uncomfortably - two ladies of the Haymarket.

‘Mr Darwin, Mr King, may I introduce to your acquaintance Rita and Rosa?’

This is all wrong, thought Darwin. He has introduced us the wrong way round. The man has no sense of propriety.

The introductions over, they went through to the supper-table. The ladies had no English, but seemed content to giggle among themselves. The only communication between the two halves of the supper-party was via Earle’s pidgin Portuguese, a dialect in which the artist proved himself singularly adept at flirting.

The servant brought out bottles of red wine, and plates piled high with
feijão
beans,
carne secca,
bread and a strange, sausage-shaped, creamy-coloured fruit.

‘Pray what is this?’ asked Darwin.

‘Banana,’ replied Earle.

‘Oh! I have never eaten a banana before.’

‘Ele nunca havia visto bananas antes,’
remarked Earle to the two women, who giggled voluptuously.

‘May I know the source of the amusement?’ enquired Darwin, reddening.

‘I simply informed them of your virginity
vis-à-vis
the banana.’

The two women continued to giggle, one concealing her merriment behind a Chinese fan, and Darwin thought that perhaps there was something attractive about them after all. With a glass of wine under his belt, he was prepared to admit to himself that they did not share the normally disagreeable expression of the mulatto. They were not ladies, in the sense that Fanny Owen was a lady, but they definitely possessed a certain charm. He glanced across the table at King as if in search of endorsement, but the normally talkative lad had become utterly tongue-tied since their guests’ arrival. In fact, he had spent most of the evening trying to steal furtive glances at the women’s cleavage, between long periods spent staring fixedly at his plate.

‘Rita wishes to know how you like your banana.’

‘I find it rather mawkish and sweet, without too much flavour, I am afraid,’ replied Darwin stiffly; for some unaccountable reason he had begun to feel embarrassed.

‘That is beyond my meagre Portuguese, I fear,’ smiled Earle. ‘I shall tell her yes.’

‘How do you like the Brazils? Rosa wishes to know.’

‘Tell her that hers is a most gloriously attractive nation, but that I most heartily wish it were not disfigured by the curse of slavery.’

Earle attempted a translation, and it was clear from the women’s response that they were in agreement. They crossed themselves and spoke in low tones of something called a
matican.

‘The
matican,’
explained Earle, ‘is a slave-hunter. He is paid to hunt down slaves who escape and to kill them, be they man, woman or child. And when he has run down his quarry, he slices off the ear as proof of death.’

‘I used to do that with rats for my father, when I was a boy,’ offered King, pleased at last to be able to contribute something to the conversation.

‘Perhaps I will not translate that into Portuguese, Mr King.’

‘Will you excuse me for a moment?’ said Darwin suddenly, rising from his seat as he spoke, his gaze fixed unwaveringly on the window opposite.

‘Is everything all right, Mr Darwin?’ asked Earle.

Darwin did not answer, but shot through the doorway and out on to the verandah, reappearing a moment later on the outside of the window, his nose pressed to the glass. There, in front of his face, a tiny copper-coloured frog clung to the smooth surface, its eyes wide and unmoving, its throat palpitating silently to its own inner rhythm. Darwin reappeared in the doorway. ‘That frog. It has suckers on its feet, so that it may climb a vertical sheet of glass!’

‘Gosh!’ said King, excited.

‘Many of them do,’ said Earle, who had to explain to the confused women that the gentleman was
a filosofia da natureza.

Darwin resumed his seat, and the supper-party continued as before, Earle complimenting his guests extravagantly in Portuguese, Darwin offering the occasional politeness, and King unsure where to look. Eventually it grew late, but there was no sign of the two women preparing to leave or of their cart returning. As another burst of merriment erupted from their end of the table, Darwin was seized by an uncomfortable thought.

‘I say, Earle,’ he whispered awkwardly.

‘Yes, Darwin?’ Earle leaned back, his collar undone, his face flushed with drink.

‘I hope it is not your intention that I ... entertain one of these ladies after supper has finished.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Of course not, of course not,’ said Darwin hurriedly, his voice suffused with relief. ‘I just thought for one moment that . . .’ He tailed off.

Earle fixed him with a pointed look. ‘Both these two are for me. You want company, Darwin, you go fetch your own.’

 

The
Beagle
sailed into Rio harbour - now correctly located on the Admiralty chart - in mid-May, ahead of time but low on fresh food and water. They had tried fishing for groupers, but fearless sharks would invariably seize the fish from the lines before they could be reeled in, so seamen Morgan, Jones and Henderson were detailed to take the dinghy (as FitzRoy had decided to rename the jolly-boat) on a snipe-shooting expedition around the islets of the bay. The voyage had left FitzRoy disturbed: they had passed two frigates anchored off Cabo Frio, which had been identified by challenge-and-response as the
Lightning
and the
Algerine,
engaged in salvaging bullion from the wreck of the
Thetis.
How many of his old shipmates had been taken by the sharks, he wondered. Or was such an end preferable to death by drowning, and that terrifying, lung-bursting moment when the victim knows he can hold his breath no longer and must accept his agonizing fate?

A knock at the door interrupted his morbid reverie. It was Seaman Morgan, who had built the coracle, and Volunteer Musters.

‘Permission to speak, sir!’ Musters stood ramrod straight.

‘Yes, what is it, Mr Musters?’

‘Able Seaman Henderson has cut his leg, sir, and will be unable to take part in the snipe-shooting detail. As the best snipe-shooter in the ship, sir, I would like to take his place. Furthermore, sir, as the expedition has no officer in charge, I feel it is only right that I should command the expedition, sir.’ Musters had managed to cram his entire request into a single breath, and now exhaled with relief.

‘Is this true, Morgan?’

‘Henderson has cut his leg, sir, and the lad, I mean Mr Musters, well, he’s a fine shot for his age, sir.’

FitzRoy smiled. ‘Very well, Mr Musters, you may command the snipe-shooting expedition. As long as you remember that you are to do exactly what Seaman Morgan tells you at all times.’

‘Yes sir!’

A beaming Musters retreated, Morgan clutching his cap behind.

 

The cutter collected Darwin, King and Earle late the next morning, together with a score of boxes, crates and specimen jars.

‘My dear Philos! I see that you have been busy!’ was FitzRoy’s warm greeting to his friend.

‘Indeed I have, my dear FitzRoy. Professor Grant always stressed the importance of the analytic method, by which one derives one’s conclusions from as many observations as possible. I fear it will not please Mr Wickham, nor our Mr McCormick, who prefers to start with a hypothesis and illustrate it with observations; but then, he is a philosopher of rather an ancient type.’

‘Mr McCormick is gone. Bynoe has taken his place.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

‘He is “invalided home” once more, on HMS
Tyne.’

‘Well, my dear fellow, he is no loss. I must confess that he put me in mind of Mrs Campbell’s performance as Lady Macbeth.’

Both men laughed.

‘Mr McCormick was an empty-headed coxcomb, but I fear the consequences of his departure. I can ill afford the Admiralty’s displeasure on this matter.’

‘My dear FitzRoy, we shall not return to England these next two years, by which time I am sure that all will be forgotten. Now, let us to dinner, for I could eat a horse - or a plate of rice and peas, at any rate.’

‘Rice and peas be hanged. Today, in honour of the philosopher’s return, we shall have fresh snipe!’

The pair squeezed themselves into FitzRoy’s cabin and ate royally, while Darwin told of his discoveries, of Earle’s disgraceful licentious-ness and of the idyllic cottage by the
lagoa,
upon which he had laid out no less than twenty-two shillings a week.

‘I fear I shall have to write to my father for a further fifty pounds. In the meantime, you couldn’t make it convenient ... ?’

‘Of course. Seek out the purser Mr Rowlett after dinner, and tell him that I have authorized a loan. I fear that by the end of our voyage your poor father will have become a slave to his son’s
divertissements.’

‘My dear FitzRoy, slavery is a term I would prefer not to hear used in jest. If you had only seen what I have seen!’ And he proceeded to relate the story of his journey to the
fazenda,
the cruelties he had witnessed there, and his conclusions as to the social repercussions of the trade in human beings. ‘I fear that slavery has already entailed some of its lamentable consequences upon the Brazilian nation, in demoralizing them by extreme indolence, and its accompaniment, gross sensuality.’ As he fulminated, his thoughts strayed momentarily to Earle’s two supper companions, hurrying quickly past the ambivalent feelings he himself had entertained that night. ‘Slavery is an affront to every civilized nation!’ he concluded hotly.

‘Indeed it is. We must thank the Lord that ours is the only civilized nation. The only nation of any consequence to have abolished slavery, to have made it a capital offence, and to have taken action against the slavers.’

‘Abolished slavery? But it is still legal in British dominions overseas!’

‘It is only a matter of time before such vested interests are overcome. Already the free people of colour in South Africa have legal equality with the whites.’

‘You say that we have taken action against the slavers - but here we are, sitting in a naval gunboat, in a harbour belonging to one of the world’s biggest slaving nations. I am unconscious of you taking any “action”.’

‘I? My dear Darwin, I am the commander of a surveying-brig! Are you suggesting that I unilaterally declare war against a nation that our government considers to be its principal ally in South America?’

‘Of course not. But I fail to see the logic of a policy that would see the captain of a Brazilian slaveship hanged were we to intercept him in international waters - yet should we meet him here in Rio, we should doubtless take high tea with him! Surely at the very least we should be blockading the coast against this inhuman cargo?’