The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (91 page)

“French, from their American colonies. The French do know how to make good coffee. Speaking of the French - have you visited Britain before? As it happens this rail line follows the track of the advance of Napoleon’s Grande Armee in 1807, through Maidstone to London. You may see the monuments in the towns we pass through . . . Are you all right, Lector? You don’t seem quite comfortable.”

“I’m not used to having so many clerics around me. Terra Australis is a Christian country, even if it followed the Marxist Reformation. But I feel like the only sinner on the train.”

He smiled and spoke confidentially. “If you think this is a high density of dog-collars you should try visiting Rome.”

She found herself liking him for his humour and candour. But, she had learned from previous experience, Jesuits were always charming and manipulative. “I don’t need to go to Rome to see the Inquisition at work, however, do I?”

“We prefer not to use that word,” he said evenly. “The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, newly empowered under Cardinal Ratzinger since the 29 May attacks, has done sterling work in the battle against Ottoman extremists.”

“Who just want the freedom of faith they enjoyed up until the 1870s Crusade.”

He smiled. “You know your history. But of course that’s why you’re here. The presence of unbiased observers is important; the Congregation wants to be seen to give Darwin a fair hearing. I have to admit we had refusals to participate from philosophers with specialities in natural selection—”

“So you had to settle for a historian of natural philosophy?”

“We are grateful for your help. The Church as a whole is keen to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings. The purpose of the Congregation’s hearings is to clarify the relationship between theology and natural philosophy, not to condemn. You’ll see. And frankly,” he said, “I hope you’ll think better of us after you’ve seen us at work.”

She shrugged. “I guess I’m here for my own purposes too.” As a historian she’d hope to gather some good material on the centuries-long tension between Church and natural philosophy, and maybe she could achieve more at the trial itself than contribute to some kind of Inquisition propaganda stunt. But now she was here, in the heart of the theocracy, she wasn’t so sure.

She’d fallen silent. Xavier studied her with polite concern. “Are you comfortable? Would you like more coffee?”

“I think I’m a little over-tired,” she said. “Sorry if I snapped.” She dug her book out of her bag. “Maybe I’ll read a bit and leave you in peace.”

He glanced at the spine. “H. G. Wells.
The War of the Celestial Spheres.”

“I’m trying to immerse myself in all things English.”

“It’s a fine read, and only marginally heretical.” He actually winked at her.

She had to laugh, but she felt a frisson of unease.

So she read, and dozed a little, as the train clattered through the towns of Kent, Ashford and Charing and others. The towns and villages were cramped, the buildings uniformly stained black with soot. The rolling country was cluttered with small farms where people in mud-coloured clothes laboured over winter crops. The churches were squat buildings like stone studs pinning down the ancient green of the countryside. She’d heard there was a monument to Wellington at Maidstone, where he’d fallen as he failed to stop Napoleon crossing the Medway river. But if it existed at all it wasn’t visible from the train.

By the time the train approached London, the light of the short English day was already fading.

* * * *

As a guest of the Church she was lodged in one of London’s best hotels. But her room was lit by smoky oil lamps. There seemed to be electricity only in the lobby and dining room - why, even the front porch of her own home outside Cooktown had an electric bulb. And she noticed that the telegraph they used to send a message home to her husband and son was an Australian Maxwell design.

Still, in the morning she found she had a terrific view of the Place de Louis XVI, and of Whitehall and the Mall beyond. The day was bright, and pigeons fluttered around the statue of Bonaparte set atop the huge Christian cross that dominated the square. For a historian this was a reminder of the Church’s slow but crushing reconquest of Protestant England. In the eighteenth century a Catholic league had cooperated with the French to defeat Britain’s imperial ambitions in America and India, and then in 1807 the French King’s Corsican attack-dog had been unleashed on the homeland. By the time Napoleon withdrew, England was once more a Catholic country under a new Bourbon king. Looking up at Napoleon’s brooding face, she was suddenly glad her own home was 12,000 miles away from all this history.

Father Xavier called for her at nine. They travelled by horse-drawn carriage to St Paul’s Cathedral, where the trial of Charles Darwin was to be staged.

St Paul’s was magnificent. Xavier had sweetened her trip around the world by promising her she would be allowed to give a guest sermon to senior figures in London’s theological and philosophical community from the cathedral’s pulpit. Now she was here she started to feel intimidated at the prospect.

But she had no time to look around. Xavier, accompanied by an armed Inquisition guard, led her straight through to the stairs down to the crypt, which had been extended to a warren of dark corridors with rows of hefty locked doors. In utter contrast to the glorious building above, this was like a prison, or a dungeon.

Xavier seemed to sense her mood. “You’re doing fine, Lector.”

“Yeah. I’m just memorizing the way out.”

They arrived at a room that was surprisingly small and bare, for such a high-profile event, with plain plastered walls illuminated by dangling electrical bulbs. The centrepiece was a wooden table behind which sat a row of Inquisition examiners, Mary presumed, stern men all of late middle age wearing funereal black and clerical collars. Their chairman sat in an elaborate throne-like seat, elevated above the rest.

A woman stood before them - stood because she had no seat to sit on, Mary saw. The girl, presumably Alicia, Darwin’s grand-niece several times removed, wore a sober charcoal-grey dress. She was very pale, with blue eyes and strawberry hair; she could have been no older than twenty, twenty-one.

On one side of her sat a young man, soberly dressed, good-looking, his features alive with interest. And on the other side, Mary was astounded to see, a coffin rested on trestles.

Xavier led Mary to a bench set along one wall. Here various other clerics sat, most of them men. On the far side were men and women in civilian clothes. Some were writing in notebooks, others sketching the faces of the principals.

“Just in time,” Xavier murmured as they sat. “I do apologise. Did you see the look Father Boniface gave me?”

“Not
the
Boniface!”

“The Reverend Father Boniface Jones, Commissary General. Learned his trade at the feet of Commissary Hitler himself, in the old man’s retirement years after all his good work during the Missionary Wars in Orthodox Russia ...”

“Who’s that lot on the far side?”

“From the chronicles. Interest in this case is world-wide.”

“Don’t tell me who’s in that box.”

“Respectfully disinterred from his tomb in Edinburgh and removed here. He could hardly not show up for his own trial, could he? Today we’ll hear the deposition. The verdict is due to be given in a couple of days - on the twelfth, Darwin’s 200th anniversary.”

Xavier said that the young man sitting beside Alicia was called Anselm Fairweather; a friend of Alicia, he was the theological lawyer she had chosen to assist her in presenting her case.

“But he’s not a defence lawyer,” Xavier murmured. “You must remember this isn’t a civil courtroom. In this case the defendant happens to have a general idea of the charges she’s to face, as a living representative of Darwin’s family - the only one who would come forward, incidentally; I think her presence was an initiative of young Fairweather. But she’s not entitled to know those charges or the evidence, nor to know who brought them.”

“That doesn’t seem just.”

“But this is not justice in that sense. This is the working-out of God’s will, as focused through the infallibility of the Holy Father and the wisdom of his officers.”

The proceedings opened with a rap of Jones’s gavel. A clerk on the examiners’ bench began to scribble a verbatim record. Jones instructed the principals present to identify themselves. Alongside him on the bench were other Commissaries, and a Prosecutor of the Holy Office.

When it was her turn, Mary stood to introduce herself as a Lector of Cooktown University, here to observe and advise in her expert capacity. Boniface actually smiled at her. He had a face as long and grey as the Reverend Darwin’s coffin, and the skin under his eyes was velvet black.

A Bible was brought to Alicia, and she read Latin phrases from a card.

“I have no Latin,” Mary whispered to Xavier. “She’s swearing an oath to tell the truth, right?”

“Yes. I’ll translate . . .”

Boniface picked up a paper, and began to work his way through his questions, in Latin that sounded like gravel falling into a bucket. Xavier whispered his translation:
“By what means and how long ago she came to London.”

Mercifully the girl answered in English, with a crisp Scottish accent. “By train and carriage from my mother’s home in Edinburgh. Which has been the family home since the Reverend Charles Darwin’s time.”

“Whether she knows or can guess the reason she was ordered to present herself to the Holy Office.”

“Well, I think I know.” She glanced at the coffin. “To stand behind the remains of my uncle, while a book he published 150 years ago is considered for its heresy.”

“That she name this book.”

“It was called
A Dialogue on the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.”

“That she explain the character of this book.”

“Well, I’ve never read it. I don’t know anybody who has. It was put on the Index even before it was published. I’ve only read second-hand accounts of its contents ... It concerns an hypothesis concerning the variety of animal and vegetable forms we see around us. Why are some so alike, such as varieties of cat or bird? My uncle drew analogies with the well-known modification of forms of dogs, pigeons, peas and beans and other domesticated creatures under the pressure of selection for various desirable properties by mankind. He proposed - no, he proposed an
hypothesis -
that natural variations in living things could be caused by another kind of selection, unconsciously applied by nature as species competed for limited resources, for water and food. This selection, given time, would shape living things as surely as the conscious manipulation of human trainers.”

“Whether she believes this hypothesis to hold truth.”

“I’m no natural philosopher. I want to be an artist. A painter, actually—”

“Whether she believes this hypothesis to hold truth.”

The girl bowed her head. “It is contrary to the teachings of Scripture.”

“Whether the Reverend Charles Darwin believed the hypothesis to hold truth.”

She seemed rattled. “Maybe you should open the box and ask him yersel’ ...” Her lawyer, Anselm Fairweather, touched her arm. “I apologise, Father. He stated it as an hypothesis, an organizing principle, much as Galileo Galilei set out the motion of the Earth around the sun as an hypothesis only. Natural selection would explain certain observed patterns in nature. No doubt the truth of God’s holy design lies beneath these observed patterns, but is not yet apprehended by our poor minds. Charles set this out clearly in his book, which he presented as a dialogue between a proponent of the hypothesis and a sceptic.”

“Whether she feels the heresy is properly denied in the course of this dialogue.”

“That’s for you to judge. I mean, his intention was balance, and if that was not achieved, it is only through the poor artistry of my uncle, who was a philosopher before he was a writer, and—”