The Darwin Conspiracy Read Free Page B

Going out together?”
    “Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes.”
    “I see. Well, you’ll be hard up for places to go to here.”
    They fell quiet and in the silence, Hugh felt the scotch thickening his tongue. He excused himself and rose.
    “Don’t worry about the fire,” he said. “You can let it go—there’s nothing to burn.” As he walked toward his tent, he found that he enjoyed the sensation of moving with difficulty. Liquor had a lot to recommend it.
    He turned back and looked at Nigel, a thick, dark shape sitting on the stump.
    “By the way, you might want to hang your boots on the tent pole.
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’ll find a lot of scorpions here— in paradise. ”
    The moment he crawled into his sleeping bag, he felt the letter in his pocket. What the hell. He turned on a flashlight and opened the envelope. The familiar script looked back at him, but he felt sufficiently numbed to read it through, to deal with the knowledge that he had, once again, let his father down. His father wouldn’t write that in so many words. But Hugh had become adept at reading between the lines.

CHAPTER 2

    Charles Darwin saddled his favorite horse and rode him hard to Josiah Wedgwood’s estate in Staffordshire. He skirted the villages of cobbled streets and black-and-white Tudor houses and instead took the back lanes, trotting beside hedgerows and through fields pink with sorrel and white with dog-daisies. When he reached the forest and entered the path through the tall ash and beech, he urged the animal into a full gallop, feeling the wind, full in his face, blur his eyes with tears.
    Never in his twenty-two years had he felt more wretched. And to think that only a week ago he had been serenely contented, basking in compliments from Adam Sedgwick, the renowned geologist of Trinity College Cambridge. They were exploring the ravines and riverbeds of North Wales, just the two of them, and it had been a glorious expedition. And then he had returned home to find the offer waiting for him, a bolt from the blue that could change his life forever, provide it with meaning. And to be denied it! To have his hopes elevated so high and then dashed the very next moment! How could he endure it? He looked down at the ground’s blur, the black earth spewing onto the weeds—how simple it would be to slide down Herodotus’ flank and slip headlong under those pounding hooves.
    From a distance, young Darwin did not cut a bad figure. He was a bit plump but he was an accomplished and graceful rider, moving in rhythm with the horse’s long strides. His upbringing at The Mount, the family estate in Shrewsbury, had been assiduously arranged around the holy trinity of the country gentry: riding, hunting, and fishing. Up  close, dressed in soft provincial browns and knee-high boots, he was more compact and disarming than classically handsome. He had a noble forehead, auburn hair giving way to trimmed muttonchops, gentle brown eyes, a slightly prissy mouth, and a nose that he felt was too large. His wit was not as sharp or irreverent as that of his older brother, Erasmus. His speech was marred by a slight stammer, inherited from the patriarchal side; it had so far resisted the lure of a sixpenny reward on the day he could successfully pronounce “white wine.” Yet all in all, he was considered a presentable fellow, open and amiable, if not remarkable, and someday he would make someone a fine husband.
    But appearances could be deceiving. No one knew the depth of the ambitions lodged within him. And few, aside from his friends at college and university, knew of his passion for natural history. It had been with him as long as he could remember, from the time his father, Robert Waring Darwin, had given him two dog-eared books that had once belonged to his father’s older brother, Charles, his namesake, who had died tragically young in medical school; one was on insects, the other on “the natural history of waters,