Darwinia

Chapter Four

Spending time at the Sanders-Moss estate was much like having his testicles removed. Among the women he was a pet; among the men, a eunuch.

Hardly flattering, Elias Vale thought, but not unexpected. He entered the house as a eunuch because no other entrance was open to him. Given time, he would own the doors. He would topple the palace, if it pleased him. The harem would be his and the princes would vie for his favor.

Tonight was a soirée celebrating some occasion he had already forgotten: a birthday, an a

At di

The hard part, at least at first, had been maintaining his poise in the presence of so much luxury. Not that he was entirely a stranger to luxury. He had been raised in a good enough New England home — had fallen from it like a rebel angel. He knew a di

Waiting table was Olivia, a pretty and timid Negress whose cap sat perpetually askew on her head. Vale had pressed Mrs. Sanders-Moss not to punish her after the christening dress was rescued, which accomplished two purposes at once, to spotlight his kindheartedness and to ingratiate himself with the help, never a bad thing. But Olivia still avoided him assiduously; she seemed to think he was an evil spirit. Which was not far from the truth, though Vale would quibble with the adjective. The universe was aligned along axes more complex than poor simple Olivia would ever know.

Olivia brought the dessert course. Table talk turned to the Finch expedition, which had reached England and was preparing to cross the Cha

The congressman’s daughter disagreed. “It’s Europe proper they should be afraid of.” She frowned becomingly. “You know what they say. Everything that lives there is ugly, and most of it is deadly.”

“Not as deadly as human beings.” The young functionary, on the other hand, wanted to appear cynical. Probably he imagined it made him seem older.

“Don’t be scandalous, Richard.”

“And seldom as ugly.”

“They’re brave.”

“Brave enough, but in their place I’d worry more about the Partisans. Or even the English.”

“It hasn’t come to that.”

“Not yet. But the English are no friends of ours. Kitchener is provisioning the Partisans, you know.”

“That’s a rumor, and you shouldn’t repeat it.”

“They’re endangering our European policy.”

“We were talking about the Finch expedition, not the English.”

“Preston Finch can run a river, certainly, but I predict they’ll take more casualties from bullets than from rapids. Or monsters.”

“Don’t say monsters, Richard.”

“Chastisements of God.”

“Just the thought of it makes me shiver. Partisans are only people, after all.”

“Dear girl. But I suppose Dr. Vale would be out of business if women weren’t inclined to the romantic point of view. Isn’t that so?”

Vale performed his best and most unctuous smile. “Women are better able to see the infinite. Or less afraid of it.”

“There!” The congressman’s daughter blushed happily. “The infinite, Richard.”

Vale wished he could show her the infinite. It would burn her pretty eyes to cinders, he thought. It would peel the flesh from her skull.

After di

Pressed for wisdom, Vale confined himself to drawing-room prophecies. Lost cats and errant children; the terrors of yellow fever, polio, influenza. His visions were benign and hardly supernatural. Private questions could be handled at his business address, and, in fact, his clientele had increased considerably in the two months since his first encounter with Eleanor. He was well on his way to becoming Father Confessor to a generation of aging heiresses. He kept careful notes.

The evening dragged on and showed no signs of becoming especially productive: not much to feed his diary tonight, Vale thought. Still, this was where he needed to be. Not just to bolster his income, though that was certainly a welcome side effect. He was following a deeper instinct, perhaps not quite his own. His god wanted him here.

And one does what a god wants, because that is the nature of a god, Vale thought: to be obeyed. That above all.

As he was leaving, Eleanor steered a clearly quite drunken man toward him. “Dr. Vale? This is Professor Randall, you were introduced, weren’t you?”

Vale shook hands with the white-haired venerable. Among Eleanor’s collection of academics and civil-service nonentities, which one was this? Randall, ah, something at the Natural History Museum, a curator of… could it be paleontology? That orphaned science.

“See him to his automobile,” Eleanor said, “won’t you? Eugene, go with Dr. Vale. A walk around the grounds might clear your head.”

The night air smelled of blossoms and dew, at least when the professor was downwind. Vale looked at his companion more carefully, imagined he saw pale structures under the surface of Randall’s body. Coral growths of age (parchment skin, arthritic knuckles) obscured the buried soul. If paleontologists possessed souls.

“Finch is mad,” Randall muttered, continuing some abandoned conversation, “if he thinks… if he thinks he can prove…”

“There’s nothing to prove tonight, sir.”

Randall shook his head and squinted at Vale, seeing him perhaps for the first time. “You. Ah. You’re the fortune-teller, yes?”

“In a way.”

“See the future, do you?”

“Through a glass,” Vale said. “Darkly.”

“The future of the world?”

“More or less.”

“We talk about Europe,” Randall said. “Europe, the Sodom so corrupt it was cast into the refiner’s fire. And so we pluck out the seeds of Europeanism wherever we find them, whatever that means. Gross hypocrisy, of course. A political fad. Do you want to see Europe?” He swept his hand at the white-columned Sanders-Moss estate. “Here it is! The court at Versailles. It might as well be.”

The stars were vivid in the spring sky. Lately Vale had begun to perceive a kind of depth in starry skies, a layering or recession that made him think of forests and meadows, of tangled thickets in which predatory animals lurked. As above, so below.