The Darwin Conspiracy (32 page)

On the train ride back, rereading the photocopy of Lizzie’s journal, Hugh despaired of ever finding the letter.

“C’mon,” said Beth. “We haven’t reached a dead end yet.”

“I’m just wondering what to do next.”

“Well, there’s one possibility. When I was looking through Lizzie’s letters, I checked out some that she received. And among them I found one from Mary Ann Evans.”

Hugh perked up. “Did it say anything?”

“Not in and of itself. But it referred to a letter Lizzie had written her.

So it’s clear they had a correspondence.”

“That’s good. We can go to George Eliot’s archives—wherever they are.”

“They’re in Warwickshire. Nuneaton. And guess where Lizzie sent her the letter from. Zurich. Which is where she had the baby.”

Hugh reached over and gallantly kissed the back of her hand. “Brilliant. You know,” he added, “I never pegged you for a Man-U fan.”

“Only in the Midlands.”

“By the way, did you notice the name of the pub we went to?”

“No.”

“It was called The Wild Goose.”

He finally reached Neville on the phone. He had tried twice before, leaving a message each time, but Neville hadn’t called back. When Hugh identified himself, the voice on the other end of the line didn’t exactly ring with enthusiasm.

“Bridget’s friend. We met the other night at dinner at her place.”

“Of course. How could I forget?”

“Good,” Hugh said, not knowing how else to respond. “I hope we can meet and—you know—carry on the conversation we, ah, started.”

A lengthy pause, but when Neville finally spoke, Hugh got the impression he had reached a decision even before the call.

“I don’t see why not,” he said, adding a slight exhale of resignation.

“I hope I can trust you.”

“You can,” said Hugh, adding, “I want you to know, I’m deeply grateful.”

They set the rendezvous: the following afternoon at the entrance to the Royal National Theatre. Good spot, thought Hugh—they could walk along the Thames, maybe cross Waterloo Bridge, a proper setting for an intimate talk. He was surprised at what Neville said next.

“I hope you realize that anything I might tell you—and mind you, I’m not saying that I
will
tell you much—I hope you realize it must be treated as strictly confidential.”

“Of course.” Hugh’s fears rose along with his hopes.

“In point of fact, I must insist upon it. We sign non-disclosure forms here and they are taken very seriously. Infractions are punishable.”

“I understand.”

Hanging up, Hugh was mystified. He had checked out the lab on the Internet and found a number of references to its various research projects and contracts, including some from the government, but nothing that seemed controversial. And Cal was not someone who would have worked on weapons systems or the like; he was far too idealistic.

Neville was probably just indulging in the British penchant for secrecy. Still, Hugh could not shake a feeling of foreboding.

It was hard to think about Cal, let alone talk about him—and the prospect of doing so with a stranger, and someone who had troubling information to impart, was upsetting. Hugh had achieved a kind of truce with the past; he hadn’t put it to rest but he had knocked it back so that it no longer haunted him every day. But things were happening, changing, perhaps because of those intimate conversations with Beth.

He walked over to the desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out the photo that always traveled with him, a black-and-white picture of Cal and him together. He had studied it hundreds of times, the two of them on the Andover campus, him a freshman, Cal a senior about to go off to Harvard. It had been snapped at midday, or perhaps at night, with some phantasmagoric flash that threw their shadows clear across a lawn.

Cal, as darkly handsome as a movie star and a full head taller than Hugh, grasped the neck of a tennis racket and a pair of sneakers by the laces. Hugh’s mouth was open, as if he were about to speak.

Hugh had carried this photo with him for years and looked at it from time to time. More often than not it called up an anxiety, a vague distress. Only this time, he saw fresh details: how ill-fitting his own jacket was, how he was looking up at his brother while Cal stared straight ahead, his jaw set, ready to take on the world. What he saw now, he realized with a shock—and what caused his distress—was the tension between them. He could see Cal’s distance and ambition and his own pitiful need for acceptance and love. The photo seemed to capture the very moment when as brothers they were leaving childhood behind and abandoning each other.

On the way to Down House, Hugh stopped off at the church of St.

Mary’s in the village and wandered through the shaded churchyard.

Some of the ancient tombstones were sunk deep in the earth, the epitaphs readable only by worms. Others lunged up at precarious angles, the writing mostly obliterated, spotted with lichens and moss or worn wafer-thin and white as seashells.

The sixteen-mile trip from London had been quick. The station at Orpington was still in service but he decided instead to take the train to Bromley South and then the number 146 bus—half an hour, forty minutes at most. It was hard to imagine the rigors of a train ride and a phaeton in Darwin’s day that had made the voyage so insupportable to him.

The village of Downe was much as he had expected—quaint and quiet, constructed of stone, with an apothecary, a grocer’s, a petrol station, and various other small shops. When Darwin was alive, the elders had decided to add an
e
to the spelling—even back then the lure of
Ye
Olde England
was irresistible, Hugh thought—and he admired his man for standing firm: Down House it was when he had bought it and Down House it would remain.

In a corner of the churchyard, he found what he was looking for.

There, under a yew tree, was the tombstone of Erasmus, Darwin’s brother. Two tiny stones nearby marked the graves of two of Charles’s children, Mary and Charles Waring. He recalled reading Lizzie’s diary—
how she and Etty and Emma and the others would pass them every Sunday on their way to church.

He left through an iron gate and walked up Luxted Road. Following it, he thought of Beth. He had smelled the scent of her when he awoke and he carried it with him through the day. Out of nowhere, a line from
Paradise Lost,
which he had lately been reading, popped into his head:
So hand in hand they passd, the loveliest pair

That ever since in loves imbraces met . . .

And another line, this one from the Bible:
At her feet he bowed, he fell,
he lay down.

After a long curve in the road, he came to Down House, a square Georgian building painted white, with a slate roof and ivy clinging to
2 1 3

the walls. When Darwin first laid eyes on it, he pronounced it “oldish and ugly,” but he soon fell in love with the place, and Hugh could see why. It was comfortable and expandable—rooms could be added on like slides in a trombone. It was a world away from London, full of country smells and sounds—the wet hay in the meadow, the rattle of the fly-wheel in the well, the lime trees buzzing with bees. Phloxes, lilies, and larkspur grew in the flowerbeds. The grounds must have carried Charles back to his childhood at The Mount.

Hugh entered through the obligatory gift shop and paid admission.

It was a Tuesday, so there were not many visitors. He followed a herd of schoolchildren touring the ground floor; their teacher, warning them to touch nothing, patrolled like a nervous collie. A curator from English Heritage, a gray-haired woman in a tweed suit, provided the commentary.

The tour started in the drawing room. He glanced at Emma’s grand piano, the marble mantelpiece, the breakfront bookcase, the special case for the backgammon set that was designed to look like the spine of a book and titled
History of North America.
They passed into the central hall and Hugh noted the long base-clock, a wall table with the jar for Darwin’s snuff, and Christian-themed lithographs hung by Emma.

They entered the billiard room with its pale brown felt table and three balls ready for a shot. A butler’s tray set for two drinks of port (he wondered: was one of them for the butler Parslow himself?) stood in the corner.

They stopped off in the dining room, which was lit by three bay windows facing the garden. The Regency mahogany table was set for twelve, close by the sideboard with Wedgwood “waterlily” tureens ordered by Darwin’s mother. Grim portraits stared down from the walls. The schoolchildren were bored and anxious to move on.

At last they came to the famous study. Hugh’s eye was drawn immediately to the large dark armchair set on casters. Here Darwin composed the books that changed the world, supporting his paper on a fabric-covered slab of wood that rested upon the arms. With a cane propped against one side, the chair looked as if it were waiting for its owner. Behind it, tucked into a recess as snug as a ship’s cubicle, was a small wooden desk filled with cubbyholes and slender sliding drawers, each one carefully labeled. A bookcase mounted to the ceiling. Over the 
fireplace was a gold-framed mirror, turning dark as a New England lake, and above that were portraits of Joseph Hooker, Charles Lyell, and Josiah Wedgwood.

In the center was a Pembroke table. Various items were placed on it to suggest that Darwin himself might have recently left them there: a bell jar, a pair of scissors, a primitive microscope, three upturned glasses, a wooden box, a monkey’s skull, a feather, various papers, a wooden spool of string, and half a dozen books. One was a second edition of
Das Kapital,
inscribed by Marx himself (“To Mr Charles Darwin on the part of his sincere admirer . . .”) A young boy reached out to touch it. The teacher quickly smacked his wrist, hard.

“What’s this?” asked a dark-skinned girl, pointing to the far left corner. There, behind the half wall, was a thick porcelain basin mounted inside a platform. A dressing gown hung from a wall peg and a wooden stand next to it held white china pitchers and towels.

“That, children, was built especially for Mr. Darwin because he worked so hard he sometimes fell ill. Don’t forget, he had traveled around the world and he picked up many diseases.”

“But what’s it for?” persisted the girl.

“That’s enough, Beatrice,” said the teacher. “You heard what Mrs.

Bingham said. It was used when he was ill.”

“But used for what?”

“He was sick in it,” said a boy. The others giggled.

Hugh wandered over to the chair and peered out the window. The mirror that Darwin had ordered Parslow to attach was no longer there.

The tour moved back to the central hallway.

“Now let me show you something you’ll find captivating,” said the curator. “The Darwins were a close, loving family and they played many family games.” She stood below the grand wooden staircase, which turned twice as it mounted upward to the floor above. “Here’s one the children invented themselves—they used wooden boards as sleds and rode them down the staircase. As you can imagine, it was dangerous sport. But they quite enjoyed it.”

The schoolchildren stared at the staircase.

She moved to a cupboard under the stairs. “This is where they kept many of the games they played outside—croquet mallets and tennis rackets and skates. At one point Darwin even kept an outline for his famous book here.”

She opened it with a quick pull on the knob.

“One of the children called this cupboard ‘the place of all others where the essence of the whole house was concentrated.’ ”

Hugh caught her eye. “Excuse me, but would you know which child said that? Would it have been Elizabeth?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m not sure which one it was, but we know that Lizzie, as she was called, was considered slow. It is unlikely she would have kept a record of the family’s activities for posterity.”

Hugh broke off from the group, which moved outside to see the garden and the Sandwalk, the boys tearing across the grass. Another group took its place in the central hall. He mounted the staircase to the exhibition on Darwin’s life.

The floor was deserted. He peered into glass cases and stared at the pictures. There was a painting of Charles’s father, Robert, leaning forward in a chair, huge and stern. Nearby, a quotation was framed and mounted; it was Robert’s famous chastisement of his son, which had always struck Hugh as unspeakably cruel: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

Hugh suddenly thought of his own father and felt a stab of guilt for not answering his letters.

He turned to a portrait of the young FitzRoy, handsome and sensitive-looking, with his dark hair, sideburns, upturned nose, and delicately lined mouth. Various artifacts were on display: a cutaway drawing of the
Beagle,
mahogany fittings, glass collecting bottles, a clinometer, dissecting instruments, a pocket pistol, a sketch of round-faced Jemmy Button, a compass in a wooden box, a sketch of Darwin being “shaved” 
while crossing the Equator, a Bancks microscope with a swiveling brass eyepiece.

Alone, in a special case, were
bolas
with their leather straps attached to stones. And next to them—Hugh drew his breath—was the cosh, the very one that Darwin had chided Lizzie for removing from the mantelpiece. It was a foot-long metal cable with heavy metal fittings at both ends, dangerous if used as a weapon but hardly lethal to the touch. He stared at it for some time before moving on.

A number of Darwin’s quotes were displayed in the cases. Next to a box of bones sent back to Henslow from Tierra del Fuego, Hugh read:

“I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage 
and civilised man.” In a framed letter to Hooker was a note of despair:

“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature!”

Across from this was a depiction of the “tree of life”—branches that ended in drawings of animals inside balloons, hanging like Christmas bulbs, the simpler ones like hydra and fish at the bottom, the complex ones like tigers and monkeys at the top. On the very summit was man.