The Darwin Conspiracy (31 page)

Lizzie’s second notebook was a godsend. He and Beth had discussed it late into the night, lying next to each other in bed—how the new pieces fit into the puzzle.

At least they now knew why Lizzie had become an atheist and why she had changed her name to Bessie.

“It was the whole trauma of FitzRoy’s suicide,” Beth said. “She felt guilty for it and so she wanted to reinvent herself. She swore off spying and abandoned her journal.”

“So why did she resume it six years later?”

“She fell in love. As she says, a woman in love has to confess it to somebody, even if that somebody is only a blank piece of paper. And love can have a curative effect, even if it’s directed at a scoundrel.”

The shock was discovering the identity of
X,
which became obvious once they added up the clues: he was a progressive, a friend of Ruskin’s, and affiliated with the Working Men’s College. In addition, he was some 
one known to the Darwin family, who visited them at home and accompanied them on outings. Beth was the first to say
X
’s name aloud—she pronounced it under her breath and later she would claim that somehow
Goblin Market
had figured in her deduction. “Litchfield!” she said.

“My God, it’s Litchfield. Etty’s fiancé.”

Hugh knew instantly that she was correct. And it filled him with foreboding. In analyzing her correspondence, Beth had noticed that there were two long gaps when Lizzie had written no letters to anyone. She mentioned them to Hugh. One gap came shortly after April 1865, when FitzRoy died and Lizzie fled to Germany and her first journal ended.

The second came in mid 1871—and here the second journal also ended.

Hugh knew what had occurred then: Etty had married Richard Litchfield and Lizzie had gone abroad again, this time to Switzerland.

“Beth,” he said. “You better face something: if Lizzie is your great-great-grandmother, then Litchfield is your great-great-grandfather.”

“That bastard!” was all she said.

But now, with some of the missing pieces filled in, the puzzle was even more frustrating.

“She discovered what the
nuit de feu
was,” Hugh complained. “Why the hell couldn’t she just write it down?”

“I know. It’s exasperating.”

“She makes it out to be some sort of singular event that affected the whole outcome of the voyage.”

“Well, at least we’re getting somewhere. We know who R.M. is. And the key to unlocking the mystery is that letter that Robert McCormick sent home. Lizzie tracked down his family, found the letter, and everything fell into place.”

“It apparently laid out the whole story of what happened on the
Beagle
—and the story was disturbing enough to turn her against her papa.” Hugh got out of bed, retrieved the photocopy of the journal, and searched for the passage. “Here it is: she calls him an
impostor
and says he fills her with
disgust.
Strong words.”

“The blackguard is Litchfield, who ‘deflowered’ her, as they put it so eloquently back then. That last entry—it’s heartbreaking. She’s about to run off for a rendezvous with him and she has no idea where her passion is taking her.”

Again, Hugh thought of the historian as God, the speeding car. The accident was about to happen. He didn’t want to dwell on it.

He pondered the sketch by Martens—significantly, it was of Darwin and McCormick together. It was important enough for her to steal it from her father. But what did it show? She called it evidence that could lead to a verdict of guilty. Evidence of what? Guilty of what? And then she had hidden it in a “central place”—no, that wasn’t the exact wording. He opened the journal again and found the passage. She hid it in

“the house’s central place”—wherever the hell that might be. Someplace
in plain sight.
Thanks a lot.

“What do you make of that bit about Wallace demanding a pension?” he asked. “She calls it out-and-out extortion. She says if he doesn’t get it, he threatens to expose everything.”

“And you know what?” replied Beth. “They
did
arrange for a pension, that X Club. I checked. They pressured the government. Gladstone himself awarded it—two hundred pounds a year. Not enough to make him rich but enough to live on. And when Darwin died, he left money to Hooker and Huxley and a bunch of people, but not to Wallace. Wallace got nothing. It’s almost as if Darwin gave him a kick in the teeth.”

The pension was something concrete, thought Hugh, a nugget that appeared to bolster Lizzie’s credibility. On the other hand, perhaps she had simply heard about it and misinterpreted its meaning—or intentionally misconstrued the motive behind it.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Beth continued. “You’re wondering if she went off the deep end. I don’t think so. Her words strike me as genuine. Her anger’s authentic. She found out something about her father, and whatever it was, it was enough to disillusion her for the rest of her life.”

Hugh wished he could be so certain. It had all suddenly struck him as incredible. Darwin was a great man, one of the greatest in history, and here they were, trying to accuse him of . . . of what exactly? Amateur sleuths, that’s all they were—looking for evidence of some misdeed they couldn’t even fathom, and, worse, being disappointed when they didn’t find it.

The swaying of the train was reassuring. Beth’s head, nestled into his shoulder, rocked ever so slightly and her far hand rested on the seat, palm up like a small child.

He thought of another train ride—that long one from Andover to New Haven. Cal boarded the train in Boston so that they would con
front the old man together—“a united front,” he had said on the phone.

And on the way there, for the first time, Cal told Hugh some of the family secrets, fights he had witnessed between their mother and father.

You were too young to know what was going on. I used to sit on the back
stairs, where I could hear them in the kitchen—they always had their fights in
the kitchen, long, knock-down, drag-out affairs. I’d hear Mom cleaning up,
the sound of the pots and pans, then Dad’s voice, deep and so sure of itself,
smug. And she would be needling him and he’d get back at her—you’d hear
the pots banging around—and then she’d come in with a zinger, like, “I saw
those charges on your AmEx card,” or, “You don’t even clean out your pockets. I found her earring.” You know, Hugh, don’t you, that he had affairs?

Hugh hadn’t known. He was shocked—he had never figured that into the calculation of what had gone wrong between them. Before, he had blamed his mother, not his father, for the divorce. It was hard to go back and recalculate things. He admired his brother for keeping it a secret all those years, and he was grateful that he revealed it at that particular moment.

Once, he and Cal and a few teenage friends were hanging around the river and began tossing rocks at a red and white metal buoy out in the water. They cheered every time a rock hit it, sending forth a resounding
twang.
Out of nowhere a man leapt from the bushes behind them, his face flushed red, sliding down the embankment on one side and pivoting on the other, like a second baseman touching the ground, tossing a rock as large as a baseball. It struck Hugh in the thigh, hard, but no one saw, and he held his peace while the man stood over them, berating them for causing damage to his buoy. Then Cal saw his tears. He turned to the man and shouted:
“You hit my brother, you son-of-a-bitch,” 
and the man wilted before their eyes, apologized, and slunk away.

Hugh had never felt so secure and loved in his whole life.

An hour after arriving, Hugh and Beth stood on the stoop of a semi-detached house on a narrow street in the center of Preston. He glanced up at the knocker, a brass claw holding a ball that was tilted slightly off center.

“Lizzie called it ugly,” he said. “I’d say she’s not far off.”

“Right on the money—as usual.”

The building itself was run-down; the roof sagged, the stone facade was grimy, and the windowsills were peeling strips of bright blue paint.

The street curved and no cross streets were visible; the identical houses lined it like slats in a barrel, giving it the artificial feel of a stage set.

Hugh tried to imagine what it looked like when McCormick lived there. He had read up on the man, what little about him there was to be found, and knew that he must have been proud to be a house owner.

McCormick had grown up poor in Scotland and dragged himself up by his bootstraps, turning to medicine as a profession for advancement. He had taken on various commissions at sea as an assistant surgeon; in 1827—before the
Beagle
—he accompanied Edward Parry on the
Hecla
’s fruitless quest for the North Pole.

It seemed almost certain that he had never returned from the adventure that began with the
Beagle,
though what happened to him after he left the ship at Rio was not clear. Perhaps his peregrinations took him to the Far East. Or perhaps the curator at the Darwin Centre was right and he died in some sort of subsequent shipwreck. His widow, Hugh imagined, would have husbanded whatever money he left her. She seemed, at least judging from Lizzie’s account of the letters tied by a blue ribbon, to have treasured his memory before she, too, passed away.

Hugh hadn’t found McCormick an engaging personality—he seemed petty, ambitious, and self-important—but standing before his dwelling, which must have been a dreary
petit bourgeois
house even in its heyday 150 years ago, Hugh regarded him with sympathy.

It had not been that difficult to locate the place. From notes kept by Syms Covington, Darwin’s assistant, Hugh learned that McCormick lived in Preston, southeast of the Lake District and indeed, as Lizzie had written, about two hours by train from Kendal. He had pinpointed the address using other historical accounts—including one by Bartholomew Sulivan, the
Beagle
’s second lieutenant. Then, cross-referencing the street address with various family records on the Internet, he was able to track down a living descendant. The trail, however, was not all that clear-cut; he had not been able to identify “the cousins” Lizzie had described.

A phone call early in the morning had secured them an invitation to visit, though it had been grudgingly given. The young man who 
answered the phone was none too friendly and had hinted that, if whatever Hugh was after was all that important, a little money might help grease the wheels.

Lifting the knocker, Hugh said: “Well, here goes nothing.” He was curious to see what the young man looked like.

They didn’t have to wait long to find out. A man in his mid-thirties opened the door and squinted suspiciously. Hugh and Beth introduced themselves and he opened the door and let them in without a word. He was dressed in black leather pants and a T-shirt; there was a tattoo of the Union Jack on his right arm and his hair ended in a rat’s tail. His skin was pallid and he was short in stature—like McCormick, thought Hugh.

“Name’s Harry,” he said, with a deep smoker’s cough, leading the way to a front room darkened with thick draperies and heavy furniture.

Hugh and Beth sat on hard wooden chairs while Harry sank into a dilapidated purple easy chair. A TV against the wall blared out a soccer game.

Hugh explained that they were looking for McCormick’s letters. He tried to ward off the notion of payment by making their quest sound unimportant. They were researchers, interested in history, and looking at a project that might enhance Mr. McCormick’s reputation. All the while their host—if that was the word—looked over Hugh’s shoulder at the game.

Then Beth spoke. “So do you have other distinguished relatives in your family?”

“Uncle’s a foreman in the pits. But he’s been made redundant.”

The fans on the television cheered. A chant rose up. Harry pulled himself higher and sat on the edge of his chair.

Beth turned to Hugh. “Manchester United,” she explained.

They watched the tail end of the game—a penalty kick with seconds remaining. The ball flew to the upper left-hand corner of the goal and sunk into the net. The stadium exploded in a frenzy of cheers and flag waving: three to two, Manchester.

“I had five quid on the game,” said Beth.

Harry brightened. “Had you pegged for Chelsea.”

“Not on your life.”

“Good,” said Harry. “Let’s go get a fookin’ pint.”

They went to a pub around the corner.

After two Guinnesses, Harry warmed up and became downright friendly. He recounted his life, which was remarkably uneventful. He had never been to London. A welder in an auto shop that had gone bust, he was currently on the dole. His father had retired and was spending the summer with his mother in Malaga, Spain. He had one sister who was off in the States—hadn’t seen her for years.

He took a long swallow of Guinness and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Yes, he acknowledged, he had been told he was related to McCormick, the adventurer who shipped out with Darwin on the
Beagle.

“ ’E was my great-great somethin’ or tother,” he said.

And he knew nothing at all about any papers left by McCormick.

Nor, he was sure, did anyone else in his family. He offered to let them search his attic for ten quid but then, after a third Guinness, succumbed to a rush of generosity, took them back home, and showed them the attic for nothing.

Nothing was what the attic contained. One old box of Venetian blinds, a dusty fan, and not a thing else.

Hugh thanked him and said they had to be getting back.

On the doorstep, Beth shook his hand and Harry gave her a reluctant smile. She said she’d like to ask a question that had been troubling her.

“I thought that Mr. McCormick was childless,” she said, smiling. “So I take it you’re distantly related, through cousins or something. Is that right?”

But he did have children, came the answer, or at least Harry thought so. “Can’t say for sure. I seem to remember two sons. Father’d ’em before that last trip with Darwin. But I could be wrong. Don’t know anything about cousins.”