The Darwin Conspiracy (23 page)

Those were the last coherent words I heard from him. I asked him about
the
nuit de feu
and he gave me a most singular look, started to talk several
times, then broke off in mid-sentence. It was a jumble of nonsense. He kept
shaking his head, to show disagreement, and saying ‘No . . . no . . . not
Tierra del Fuego, the Galápagos . . . the enchanted isles—heh! That’s where
it all happened . . .’ and then he fixed me with a frightening look and said, in
that singular singsong, those horrible words, ‘So that’s how it is, eh, Mr
Darwin?’ After which, he laughed; a low-pitched, hollow, evil sound.

I was on the point of leaving when he placed his hand upon my arm, holding me down, and said with urgency: ‘Seven wounds, that’s what they found.

Seven wounds . . . like our Saviour Christ’s wounds . . . that’s what it is to
be Captain . . . the loneliness, salt in your lungs . . . all my money gone,
spent on the
Adventurer . . .
enemies and ingrates in the Admiralty. I was
warned . . . beware, they said . . . Sulivan, my very own second lieutenant,
knighted,
knighted . . .
And me—what am I?’

He said this last fragment with such vehemence that I bolted up. But
he did not release my arm and leapt up next to me, leaning close to my face,
still babbling. I felt a spray of his saliva on my forehead and my heart was
pounding.

‘Darwin’s a heretic, an infidel . . . the Devil’s hand-maiden . . . The
stones on the beach do not lie, they’re rounded, from the Flood . . . The Flood

happened just as the Bible relates, I tell you . . . the door of the Ark was too
small to admit the Mastodon . . . Heresy’s a sin and so are violations of the
Commandments, eh, Mr Darwin? So that’s how it is, eh?’

I resolved to leave at once and tore my arm from his grasp.

‘Jemmy Button,’ he cried. ‘Jemmy Button did not do it! They attempted to
crucify him . . . as they are crucifying me!’

‘Kindly let me leave,’ I cried.

‘You English—no lifeless,’ he screamed in an accent, as if he himself were
the Indian boy.

At that, I grabbed up my skirts in both hands and rushed towards the
door without a backward look. I heard a flood of invective follow me and
more incomprehensible words and that horrible hoarse laugh.

I rushed out the front door and down the steps. I managed to wave down
a phaeton—they almost never stop but I suspect the driver took pity, seeing my
dishevelled state—and I went directly to Uncle Ras’. I did not recover easily,
even after several cups of hot tea.

That night, as I was trying fruitlessly to sleep, his grotesque words echoed
through my head, especially that meaningless final phrase, ‘You English—no
lifeless.’

30 April 1865

Horror upon horrors! I have just heard that Captain FitzRoy took his own
life. I can scarcely believe it! And here I saw him not more than two days ago.

Uncle Ras informed me of it, and he did not spare my feelings but in his
excitement described it in gruesome detail. The account had been told by
FitzRoy’s poor wife and was the talk of the Athenaeum. The day before his
death, FitzRoy could not sit still; he would spring up, pace around, start to
speak, then stop and sit down again. He insisted he needed to go to his office,
but having set out turned back, then left for London in the afternoon, returning in the evening extremely upset and rambling incoherently. He insisted he
must see Maury again, even though the next day was a Sunday and they had
already said good-bye.

He did not sleep well that night. In the morning, when his wife stirred,
 
his eyes were already open. He asked why the maid had not awakened them
and she told him it was Sunday. He remained in bed by her side for half an
hour, rose quietly, went into an adjoining room and kissed his daughter,
Laura. Then he went into the dressing-room and bolted the lock. A minute
later, she heard his body strike the floor. She screamed for the servants, who
smashed through the door and there he was lying in a pool of blood. He had
taken a straight razor from his shaving-kit and, with a single stroke, perhaps
even looking into the mirror, ended his misery by pulling it swiftly across his
throat.

The horror of it! The poor wretched man. I cannot help but wonder if I
contributed in some small way—or even a large way—to his fevered state of
mind. If this were true, I could not easily live with myself—and yet I will
never know for certain one way or the other. I tremble to think upon it!

Enough of this spying and snooping, this childish play at investigating! I will
have no more of it. I shall stop it at once and force myself to change. I shall
become a new and better person, no longer the suspicious, arrogant Lizzie
I’ve been these many years.

Poor Captain FitzRoy. How can God allow such misery in this world?

How can we poor human beings endure it?

Hugh finished his Scottish breakfast—a bowl of steaming oatmeal, bubbling under a half-inch pool of thick cream, eaten with a wooden spoon.

He sipped his coffee, looking at a vista of pointed green pines and the deep blue of Loch Laggan. A road hugged the shore and in the morning sun it looked tranquil and pristine, a necklace beside a mirror. But last night, when he had driven from Inverness across the mountains, following the road’s embedded cat’s-eyes through the drifting fog, it had been treacherous.

A long trip for what could turn out to be a wild goose chase, he thought.

He returned to his room, packed his bag, and carried it to the front parlor of the old inn, bowing his head to pass through the low-slung wooden doorways. He paid the bill and asked for directions to walk to the owner’s house. The woman seemed surprised that FitzRoy Macleod had agreed to receive him.

“Now don’t you be aggravating him,” she chided in a brogue. “He’s a grand man, he is, but old enough to be your grandfather. And what might you be wanting with him, anyway?”

“Just a wee chat,” replied Hugh, smiling.

The woman leaned over and wagged her elbow at him, as if to poke him in the ribs.

“Aw, you Yanks.”

Outside, the air was crystal clear and cool enough to bite his lungs.

He stashed his bag in the trunk of the rental car, buttoned his coat, and 
walked up the dirt path beside the inn. A massive, moss-covered stone wall listed away from the house. The path entered a wood, then mounted steeply to the top of a hill and came to a crossroads. He took the path to the right, which after fifteen minutes led him to a bright green meadow dotted with sheep, their coats gray and tangled. They lifted their heads from grazing to stare at him blankly.

He looked forward to seeing Macleod. It had not been difficult to trace him. Nora Barlow, Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, wrote of a meeting in London in 1934 with Laura FitzRoy, the very same daughter upon whose cheek the deranged Captain pressed a kiss moments before taking his life. From this, Hugh found Laura’s obituary and traced other FitzRoy family members. Macleod, now in his nineties, was one of them. He was famous in the inner circles of Whitehall as a Tory strategist and a war hero who took a German bunker single-handedly.

Hugh arrived at a grove of tall evergreens. They rose up so abruptly they appeared to form a gigantic wall and through it, like a door, was the dark opening of the path. Hugh followed it and emerged at the other end of the grove to find a breathtaking vista—an old manor-house set in rolling hills beside a small lake. He saw that it had once been grand, but now its slate roof was sagging and its windows crooked. The path narrowed and dew on the knee-high grass soaked his trouser legs.

As soon as he walked up the front steps the door opened so quickly, he surmised his approach had been scrutinized. Clutching the knob was a woman in her eighties, thin, small, and birdlike in her quick movements. Hugh introduced himself and she did likewise: Mrs. Macleod.

“He’s expecting you,” she said, gesturing behind her to a wooden staircase that rose in tiers along the squared-off walls, its dark banister as thick as a ship’s mast. Hugh thanked her and mounted the faded red runner, held in place by brass stays. At the turn halfway up he stopped in astonishment. He was face to face with a large marble bust that was instantly familiar: the almond eyes, the sensitive mouth and aquiline nose, the broad forehead with hair brushed forward like Napoleon’s. It was FitzRoy himself.

Macleod received him upstairs in a huge room, with tall ceilings of ancient plaster and rough-hewn beams. He sat before a window with the sun streaming in behind him so that he was hard to see at first, a 
man shrunken with age but still sitting erect, a wool blanket across his legs. He motioned to Hugh to join him and Hugh chose a seat to one side so that he could better examine the man. Macleod had long white hair that curled around his ears, red veins tracing tributaries on his nose, and moist pink eyes.

He offered Hugh a Scotch. Hugh declined and saw a glass half full on a small table next to his host. He sneaked a look at his watch: ten o’clock.

After a bit of small talk, Macleod knocked back a healthy swallow, banged the glass down, and asked him to state his business. Hugh explained, as he had over the phone, that he was interested in learning about Captain FitzRoy, that he was thinking of researching a book, that he wondered if perhaps there just might be some letters or other mementos lying about.

“Ah, poor man. He was brilliant, you know. First to try weather forecasting—invented the damn thing. First to use barometers. His survey maps are used to this day.”

He spoke with such passion, he might have been talking about his own son.

“They hounded him to death—the bankers, the businessmen, the Whigs. He had enemies everywhere and they brought him down. No loyalty, no appreciation . . . Years he spent, charting the toughest coast of them all, Strait of Magellan, Cape Horn, Tierra del Fuego . . . Spent his own money to hire the
Adventure.
Had to pay for it all but he got the job done. And was the Admiralty grateful? Not a bit of it—not so much as a thank you.”

Hugh nodded sympathetically.

“He took to the sea at fourteen. Given his own ship at twenty-three.

Aye, what a lonely thing it is, a captain aboard Her Majesty’s vessel . . .

What’s the name of that captain who shot his brains out on the
Beagle
?”

“Pringle Stokes.”

“That’s it. Holed up in his cabin off the God-forsaken coast, weeks on end, storms lashing the ship, never so much as see the sun. FitzRoy used to go on and on about him . . . talking about ‘seven wounds, seven wounds’ . . . whatever the blazes that meant. The loneliness of it all. No one to help, no one to turn to.”

Hugh changed his mind and said he’d like a drink after all. Macleod, delighted, shouted to his wife, who brought him one instantly.

“And that Darwin didn’t help poor FitzRoy much—he and that Huxley fellow . . . Got him into the Royal Society, a small job as a weather-man, no pension, no future. No wonder he was pressed to take his own life. Here was his shipmate, world-famous because of the journey he had made possible—a heretic to boot—and they give the Captain a pittance.”

The mention of Darwin brought the conversation around to the fickleness of history and this gave Hugh an opportunity to renew his request for documents.

Macleod drained his glass.

“They’re gone, nothing left, picked clean. You should have been here years ago.”

Hugh enjoyed Macleod’s reminiscences and ended up staying the day. At Mrs. Macleod’s urging, he accompanied the old man on a tour of the grounds, pushing him in a wheelchair over rocky walkways.

After that came lunch, partridge served with an excellent Merlot, and then cigars in the parlor. Shortly after lighting up, Macleod fixed him with a steady eye and remarked casually: “There is one bit of paper I’ve saved that you might be interested in.”

Hugh raised his eyebrows.

“It wasn’t the Captain’s. It belonged to Bessie—that was Darwin’s daughter, the one who never married. Some called her Lizzie. She said she got it from her father but she always thought it should have been the Captain’s, so she gave it to his daughter Laura long after both their fathers had died. It’s been in our family ever since.”

Macleod instructed his wife, who disappeared for quite some time and reemerged with dust on the underarms of her sleeves, bearing a frayed leather briefcase. She placed it on the blanket across his lap.

“I was thinking of selling this over eBay,” Macleod said. “But, what the blazes—I can’t bear to part with it. I’ll let you look at it but be warned: handle it with care.”

So saying, he passed over a single sheet of ancient paper. It was creased from being folded and shredding from multiple readings. Hugh stared at the childish printing in black ink:

I seen your ships. I seen your cities. I seen your churches. I meet your Queen. Yet you Inglish know life less as we poor Yamana.

“I’m betting you don’t know who wrote that,” said Macleod proudly.

But Hugh knew at once. “Bet I do. Jemmy Button.”

Macleod was impressed. “That’s right. Seems he wrote it for Darwin.

He sent it to FitzRoy from the Falklands round about the time of that inquiry over the massacre, and FitzRoy gave it over to Darwin.”

Hugh handed it back.

“I’d say it’s worth keeping,” he said.

“Aye. It’s a relic, all right. The last words of a poor Indian, tormented by a voyage between two worlds.”

Shortly afterward, with the sun already sinking in the afternoon sky, Hugh said his goodbyes and left.