The Darwin Conspiracy (39 page)

I would like to recount the circumstances of your grandfather’s passing,
and I beg your indulgence in so doing. It may help you to understand him by
creating a fuller portrait. Your grandfather—my papa—had been in decline
for some years. Indeed, it is fair to say that his health has been poor for all of
his life, ever since he returned from the
Beagle,
a truth attested to by the
voluminous, almost daily records that he kept. His final years passed in the
comfort of a daily routine that hardly varied in any detail, though they were
not, as you shall learn, free from inner turmoil.

He was dealt a blow eight months ago when his beloved elder brother,
Erasmus, passed away. Your grandfather fell into the slough of despond, convinced that he himself was terminally ill. Last month, on 7th March to be
exact, he had an attack while walking alone on a favourite path on the outskirts of our property. He barely managed to return to the house and for days
he lay upon a sofa. However, a young doctor persuaded him that his heart
had not given out and eventually he rallied and even took the air in the spring
garden. Your aunt, Henrietta, came and left after a visit of several weeks,
and various doctors—four in all—traipsed in and out at various times, each
recommending different remedies and providing conflicting prognostications.

On Tuesday last, 18th April, Papa began failing. Just before midnight he
was gripped by a pain that seized his heart. He awoke Mamma, who came 
running from her bedroom to his. She quickly went to fetch the amyl but in a
panic became confused and called me for assistance. By the time we found the
medicine in his study and returned to his room, he was slumped across the
bed, looking close to death. Mamma screamed, which brought the servants.

We managed to give him the capsules and then tried to make him swallow
some brandy. Much of it spilled through his beard and trickled down his
night-dress but it revived him. His eyes suddenly opened, he retched into a
basin, and though trembling violently was finally able to speak. Then he did
something I never would have expected from such a confirmed atheist—he
pulled Mamma close to him and whispered urgently in her ear, begging her to
send for a priest. She leapt up with a willingness that almost rent my heart.

For it turned out that Papa’s plea was in the nature of a ruse, though not a
vicious one; he simply wanted to be alone with me for a few moments. He had
some important information that he could give to me only.

I should now move my narrative backward and tell you that Papa and I
have had a stormy relationship for a long time—indeed, ever since I was a
child. This may have come about from differences in our personalities (which
there is little point in exploring here) but also from various facts that I was
able to establish with regard to Papa’s work. I uncovered clues that something untoward had happened in the course of the
Beagle
’s five-year voyage.

I will not go into them all here; suffice it to say that not long before you were
born I came upon proof that he was not, in fact, an estimable thinker of scope
and depth, but rather someone of a different moral order. I confronted my
father with the evidence in a letter from the very clinic in Zurich where I was
forced to abandon you.

My father and I never discussed the matter in all the intervening years,
not until the night of his death. Then, once Mamma had been dispatched on
her errand and once the servants were sent from the room, he pulled me to
him, much as he had her, and in a raspy voice said that although he was not
at all a religious man, and not a believer in God, he did have an overbearing
need to confess a wrong. There was no-one other than myself to whom he
could unburden himself, for I was the only one who knew his secret. But—and
at this my blood froze—there was more to be said. He reached up and clutched
the edge of my night-dress with a strength that I could scarcely believe.

‘You are aware that for some years now I have been engaged in writing a
biography of myself.’ To this I nodded assent, and seeing that he still looked
up at me questioningly, I replied loudly, so that he would be sure to hear.

‘Yes, Papa. I know.’

At that, he released me, fell back upon the pillow and said, now in an
exhausted voice, ‘But you do not know that I have omitted one chapter—

rather, I have written it but have hidden it away so that no-one may see it. I
thought the writing of it would ease my conscience, but this was not to be.’ I
stared at him, not knowing what to say. He lay silent for several minutes,
looking up at the ceiling, as if he were still undetermined as to what to do.

Then, with a sigh, he directed me to fetch something from his study. To my
surprise, he asked me to find his cosh.

I did so, and when I returned and held it out to him, he grabbed it from
me and clasped it tightly in one hand. Then, with almost a sob, he said that
after he died, not before, I should open the chest that he kept locked beneath
his desk. He told me that I would find the key to it in the top drawer of his
bureau and he watched while I walked across the room, opened the drawer
and took out a strong-box key. Confused, I returned to him. He was still
clutching the cosh, which I would fain have taken away. Then he said something that I shall always remember. He said: ‘Of them all, only you know me
for what I am.’ At that, he closed his eyes and fell into a weakness that again
drained his system and turned him pale.

In some time, Mamma returned with a priest, of whom I said Papa had
little need. She ignored me and was surprised to find the cosh there, still in
Papa’s hand, but I did not feel the need to explain and left the room without
a backward glance. The doctor came at two in the morning and applied
mustard-plasters to Papa’s chest, which made him vomit. He was heard to
remark ‘If I could but die,’ and began spitting blood. His skin turned grey.

He was fed spoonfuls of whiskey and alternated between drowsiness and pain
throughout the night and the next morning. Then, in the afternoon, he lost
consciousness and fell into raspy breathing, finally dying at four o’clock in the
afternoon of Wednesday, 19 April 1882.

I honoured my promise to Papa—I did not open the chest until after his
death, not until today, upon returning from the Abbey. Inside, I found a
sealed parcel filled with paper. On the outer wrapping in Papa’s hand was a
quotation from a book that he used to read many years ago, Milton’s
Paradise Lost.
I decided not to open the package—for I have for some time known
my father’s secret—and instead am passing the missing chapter of his life on to
you with this communication. Do with it what you will; I am confident that
you will know how best to dispose of it in years hence.

You should know, Emma, that not a day passes but that I punish myself
for losing you and think of how, had I been wiser or more righteous, my life

and yours would have turned out differently. Then I would have been able to
gather you in my arms, not just for that one passing moment but whenever the
wish overtook me. Scarcely a day passes that I do not try to summon up in my
imagination an image of what you must be like, in your habits and your looks
and your spirit. You are ten now—only this month having passed that mile-stone birthday. In my mind’s eye I see you as robust and healthy, as I was,
but infinitely more beautiful.

I know nothing of your situation—only that you are being raised by a ‘fine
family’ somewhere in the American Midwest, a land that I have seen in
picture-books and that calls to mind, for me at least, wild Indians on the
rampage. This naturally makes me concerned for your safety, but I believe my
worry on this score is misplaced. I have developed an insatiable appetite for
all manner of information about America. I have even imagined visiting that
land someday, but for the idea that I would be consumed with the thought of
you and preoccupied in looking for you everywhere, even knowing that such a
search was destined to fail.

You will be mine always in my mind.

Your loving mother,

Lizzie

When Beth finished the letter she put it carefully back inside the plastic envelope, which she sealed for safekeeping, and looked over at Hugh.

“Well,” she said, raising her eyebrows, “that’s proof—if ever any was needed—of just how cruel the Victorians could be. They wielded that old sanctimonious Puritan sword with a vengeance, didn’t they?”

“Yes. These are the people who brought you skirts around piano legs. But tell me—the letter, it stayed in some lawyer’s file all these years?

Emma never got it?”

“No, she never got it. And of course her name wasn’t Emma. Her new family named her Filipa. I’ve got the lineage straight now. She was my great-grandmother—a pretty strong woman by all accounts.”

“Any men along the line?”

“One. Her son. He was named Benjamin. His daughter was my mother. As you know, she was the first to be told of the Darwin connection.”

“Which is why she named you Elizabeth?”

“No, that was pure coincidence. I was born before she got the notification from the lawyers. You want to see something heartbreaking?

Look at this.”

She handed the folder to Hugh.

“Look how she signed it,” she said.

“Lizzie. But she had been calling herself Bessie for—how long?—
almost two decades. What’s that all about?”

“I don’t know. I’d say she was definitely carrying some heavy psychological baggage. Which is not surprising given her family—a famous father who’s a sham, a mother who dotes only on him, a goody-two-shoes sister who’s the apple of everybody’s eye.”

“A brother-in-law who seduces her and leaves her in the lurch.”

“Exactly.”

Hugh’s eyes fell upon the package. He picked it up and read the quotation, in Darwin’s script, written so long ago that the black ink was flaking. It read:

Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part; 
Do thou but thine.

He weighed it in one palm, his hand moving up and down like a scale. It wasn’t heavy.

“What do you say?” he asked. “Shall we open it?”

Down House

I have been much affected by the death this month of my elder brother,
Erasmus. When I was a youth I looked up to him and made him the model of
my behaviour, a course I dearly wish I had continued to pursue, for he was a
good man and remained so until the end of his days. He neither married nor
raised a family nor achieved recognition from the world commensurate with
his abilities and native talents, but he could look back at his life at its close
and say that he had lived it honourably. I cannot do the same, alas. For over
fifty years I have not been able to travel, to sleep through the night, to spend
one week in full health. For the truth of the matter is that the greater part of
my life has rested on the twin pillars of cowardice and deceit. They are the
Scylla and Charybdis through which I have sailed these many years on a
voyage of fame and fortune. I have gained all this and more—I am consulted
by wise men the world over who take my word as gospel—but I have not
achieved peace of mind. For despite the world’s opinion, and despite the honours that have accrued to me, all has been undeserved. I am a rogue and
blackguard and worse. My life has turned to dross. Were I a believer in
Heaven and Hell, I know that, like Lucifer, I would spend my eternity in the
darker place.

I do not wish to dwell on the particulars of my shame and so I will make
my narrative short. Among my shipmates on the
Beagle
was a certain Robert
McCormick, the ship’s surgeon, who from the commencement of the voyage
had been vying with me over the collection of specimens. At one point we
struck upon the theory of natural selection and transmutation of species. In
one magnificent stroke, the theory made sense of the natural world in all its
 
splendid variety and explained the existence of disparate species without
recourse to a belief in a Supreme Being. I realised that Mr McCormick had
grasped the essentials of the theory and I knew that whoever first presented
that theory to the civilised world would achieve lasting scientific renown.

I suppressed my feelings about Mr McCormick, however, and did not
intend to harm him, this despite several indications that he was not above
placing my life in jeopardy. To cite but one episode, in the Galápagos he
enticed me into swimming with sharks. Luckily, the beasts on those isolated
islands are so unacquainted with men that they have not developed an
instinct to kill us. I soon came to the realisation that if I did not take care to
defend myself, Mr McCormick might well succeed in disposing of me.

Fate played us both for fools. I found myself on an outing with the man,
along with Captain FitzRoy. Our goal was to investigate a volcano which
even then was showing signs of activity. After a laborious climb we stopped to
dine and consumed two bottles of wine, which made us fall asleep. A short
while later I awoke, as did Mr McCormick, though Captain FitzRoy continued deep in slumber. The two of us then resolved to carry on. When we
achieved the summit, I proposed entering the volcano’s cone. This we did
without too much difficulty, lowering ourselves down with a rope that we
attached to a rock above. The heat was suffocating, the smell of sulfurous
gases overpowering and the sound of bubbling lava unnerving, but we were
both exhilarated at the prospect of exploring a natural phenomenon unknown
to anyone else. We went down to a depth of about ten feet below the volcano’s
lip. There was a ledge that served as a convenient work-space. After some
minutes I was bending over to chip away at some rock with my back turned to
Mr McCormick when I heard him cry out. I turned around and saw him
motioning towards the centre of the basin. It was belching smoke, and searing
hot magma was bubbling up like an angry red and yellow sea. The whole
was beginning to shake so violently that we realised it was about to erupt.