Darwinia

The flat-bottom riverboats arrived from New York and were transferred to a cross-channel steamer, the Argus. Guilford, Finch, Sullivan, and the surveyor, Chuck Hemphill, supervised the loading and annoyed the vessel’s cargo master until they were banished to the tarry dock. Spring sunlight washed the wharfs and softened the tarry planks; clots of false lotus rotted against the pilings; gulls wheeled overhead. The gulls had been among the first terrestrial immigrants to Darwinia, followed in turn by human beings, wheat, barley, potatoes; wildflowers (loosestrife, bindweed); rats, cattle, sheep, lice, fleas, cockroaches — all the biological stew of the coastal settlements.

Preston Finch stood on the wharf with his huge hands clamped behind his back, face shadowed by his solar topee. Finch was a paradox, Guilford thought: a hardy man, powerful despite his age, a weathered river-runner whose judgment and courage were unquestionable. But his Noachian geology, fashionable though it might have become in the nervous aftermath of the Miracle, seemed to Guilford a stew of half-truths, dubious reasoning, and wistful Protestantism. Implausible no matter how he dressed up the matter with theories of sedimentation and quotations from Berkeley. Moreover, Finch refused to discuss these ideas and didn’t brook criticism from his colleagues, much less from a mere photographer. What must it be like, Guilford wondered, to have such a baroque architecture crammed inside one’s skull? Such a strange cathedral, so well buttressed, so well defended?

John Sullivan, the expedition’s other gray eminence, leaned against a wharfhouse wall, arms crossed, smiling faintly under a broad straw hat. Two aging men, Finch and Sullivan, but Sullivan smiled — that was the difference.

The last of the crates descended into the Argus’s hold. Finch signed a manifest for the sweating cargo master. There was an air of finality about the act. The Argus would sail in the morning.

Sullivan touched Guilford’s shoulder. “Do you have a few free minutes, Mr. Law? There’s something you might like to see.”

Museum of Monstrosities, announced the shingle above the door.

The building was hardly more than a shack, but it was an old building, as buildings went in London, perhaps one of the first permanent structures erected along the marshy banks of the Thames. It looked to Guilford as if it had been used and abandoned many times over.

“Here?” Guilford asked. They had come a short walk from the wharfs, behind the brick barrelhouses, where the air was gloomy and stagnant.

“Tuppence to see the monsters,” Sullivan said. His drawl was unreconstructed Arkansas, but on his lips it sounded like Oxford. Or at least what Guilford imagined an Oxford accent might have been like. “The proprietor’s a drunk. But he does have one interesting item.”

The “proprietor,” a sullen man who reeked of gin, opened the door at Sullivan’s knock, took Sullivan’s money into his grimy hand, and vanished wordlessly behind a canvas curtain, leaving his guests to peer at the taxidermical trophies arrayed on crude shelves around the narrow front room. The smaller exhibits were legitimate, in the sense that they were recognizable Darwinian animals badly stuffed and mounted: a buttonhook bird, a miscellany of six-legged scavengers, a leopard snake with its hinged jaws open. Sullivan raised a window blind, but the extra light was no boon, in Guilford’s opinion. Glass eyes glittered and peered in odd directions.

“This,” Sullivan said.

He meant the upright skeleton languishing in a corner. Guilford approached it skeptically. At first glance it looked like the skeleton of a bear — crudely bipedal, a cage of ribs attached to a ventral spine, the fearsome skull long and multiply jointed, teeth like flint knives. Frightening. “But it’s a fake,” Guilford said.

“How do you arrive at that conclusion, Mr. Law?”

Surely Sullivan could see for himself? “It’s all string and baling wire. Some of the bones are fresher than others. That looks like a cow’s femur, there — the joints don’t begin to match.”

“Very good. The photographer’s eye.”

“It doesn’t take a photographer.”

“You’re right, of course. The anatomy is a joke. But what interests me is the rib cage, which is correctly articulated, and in particular the skull.”

Guilford looked again. The ribs and ventral spine were clearly Darwinian; it was the standard back-to-front arrangement, the spine U-shaped, with a deep chordal notch. The skull itself was long, faintly bovine, the dome high and capacious: a cunning carnivore. “You think those are authentic?”

“Authentic in the sense that they’re genuine bones, not papier-mâché, and obviously not mammalian. Our host claims he bought them from a settler who dug them out of a bog somewhere up the Lea, looking for something cheaper than coal to burn.”

“Then they’re relatively recent.”