Darwinia

“This Creator men like Finch drone on about,” Randall said. “One wants to believe, of course. But there are no fingerprints on a fossil. Washed off, I suppose, in the Flood.”

Obviously Randall shouldn’t be saying any of this. The climate of opinion had shifted since the Miracle and men like Randall were themselves a kind of living fossil — wooly mammoths trapped in an ice age. Of course Randall, a collector of bones, could hardly know that Vale was a collector of indiscretions.

Who would pay to know what Randall thought of Preston Finch? And in what currency, and when?

“I’m sorry,” Randall said. “This could hardly interest you.”

“On the contrary,” Vale said, walking with his prey into the dewy night. “It interests me a great deal.”

Chapter Five

The flat-bottom riverboats arrived from New York and were transferred to a cross-cha

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-ru

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, a

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 cu

“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.”

“Relatively, though no one’s seen a living animal like it or anything remotely equivalent. Large predators are scarce on the Continent. Do

“I hope extinct. He looks formidable.”

“Formidable and, judging by the cranium, perhaps intelligent. As animals go. If there are any of his tribe still living, we may need those pistols Finch is so fond of. And if not—”

“If not?”

“Well, what does it mean to talk about an extinct species, when the continent is only eight years old?”

Guilford decided to tread carefully. “You’re assuming the continent has a history.”

“I’m not assuming it, I’m deducing it. Oh, it’s a familiar argument — I simply wondered where you stood.”

“The trouble is, we have two histories. One continent, two histories. I don’t know how to reconcile them.”

Sullivan smiled. “That’s a good first pass. Forced to guess, Mr. Law? Which is it? Elizabeth the First, or our bony friend here?”

“I’ve thought about it, obviously, but—”

“Don’t hedge. Take your pick.”

“Both,” Guilford said flatly. “Somehow… both.”

“But isn’t that impossible?”

“Apparently not.”

Sullivan’s smile became a grin. “Good for you.”

So Guilford had passed a test, though the older man’s motives remained obscure. That was all right. Guilford liked Sullivan, was pleased that the botanist had chosen to treat him as an equal. Mainly, however, he was glad to step out of the taxidermist’s hut and into the daylight. Though London’s docklands didn’t smell much better.

That night he shared his bed with Caroline for the last time.

Last time until autumn, Guilford corrected himself, but there was small comfort in the thought. Frustratingly, she was cool toward him tonight.

She was the only woman he had ever slept with. He had met her in the offices of Atticus and Pierce when he was touching up his plates for Rocky Mountain Fossil Shales. Guilford had felt an immediate, instinctive fondness for the aloof and frowning Pierce girl. He obtained a brief introduction from her uncle and in the following weeks began to calculate her appearances at the office: she took lunch with her uncle, a secretary told him, every Wednesday noon. Guilford intercepted her after one of these meetings and offered to walk her to the streetcar. She had accepted, looking at him from under her crown of hair like a wary princess.