Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 27

  Covington stepped onto English soil a mauled, weather-battered survivor. Darwin was not so scratched about, but brown, healthy, excited and full of plans—a bachelor of twenty-eight notable in his particular circles, and most secretly anxious to mate with a female, as Covington happened to know; also quick to enlarge his advantages in the world of natural philosophy by spreading about what they had found. Over his years away friends had read his letters to learned gatherings and extracts from his notes had influenced the great. He was their pair of eyes and a brain that was attached to a mainmast and sent scudding around the world while others of his class did it rather more gently. He left the Beagle at Falmouth quivering with fame, while Covington packed the specimens securely, got drunk first chance he could, and returned to the vessel to see that nobody took or spoiled what they had until it could be properly unloaded in the Thames.

  It gave Covington a sight of the Celestial City when they sailed up the river a fortnight later. Bedford was only fifty miles away and he’d been round the world to get there, yet had never been to London, not once in his life. It showed the difference between being told about somewhere and seeing it with your own eyes. London was all covered in grime. Instead of shining, the city smoked. Soot floated down like black snowflakes. Iron-rimmed cartwheels clattered through the streets and Covington felt the vibrations of them all around him, there was no need of warning shouts. Instead of gorgeous raiment the people wore dull cloth. There were beggars in every doorway; bold thieves; outright pickpockets. Those on day wages were the lucky ones, while the poor milled through, glowered, starved and drank themselves insensible when they got the chance.

  Darwin asked Covington to continue in personal service and he agreed most gladly. He started the day fetching shaving water and ended it bearing a hot brick wrapped in flannel to his master’s bed. Was he to be merely a footman? His employment being of such a mixed nature you would think so. When asked his station he puffed a bit, saying he was a gentleman’s clerk or amanuensis. ‘I was with Mr Darwin on the Beagle, and he relied on me somewhat …’ Darwin’s friends, the experts of London nature study—Lyell, Owen, Gould—referred to him as the Trusted Cobby, the Right-Hand Man or Hefter. They treated him as simple and went on with joshing. It was well meant between each other, but didn’t fit if you weren’t their equal. Darwin’s brother Erasmus always greeted him as the Good Shooter Covingtonius, and asked him if he kept his powder dry, and then laughed and clapped him on the back. Before Christmas master and servant took leave of each other and went their separate ways to see their families.

  Covington went part of the way by coach, and then by foot. It was cold and damp as he came by the flatlands near Elstow, a sack over his shoulder, a stone in his shoe. Closer to home his heart sank. The hiss of footsteps across dewy-damp grass. Empty houses. Graveyards of names. His small nephews and nieces dead of fevers while he thrived in foreign climates, their only luck that they knew heaven first. A door-hinge creaked as he entered the old chapel, peering, his eyes lifting, discovering that the window he loved, high in a wall, was gone—and some greatness in his heart leaping the obstacles of the world was gone also. The gap was nailed with boards. Bedford and what Covington loved there were displaced. He came to the other end of Mill Lane, the door of the small house, the gathering of his closest. His brothers were short of work. His Pa was come on hard times. Mrs H was so sickly as to barely smile at his kiss. Yet she basked in his gaze as if he were sunshine. There was so much to tell, but where to start? He made boasts of the higher-ups whose serving class he had attained. His Darwin came over somewhat sharp, his FitzRoy as grand. He told them stories of Sydney Town where a man was as good as his purse, and heard his voice get excitement, and they were all at him at once to emigrate and send for them when he was settled. For the rest, the magnitude of their chase, he was dumb.

  There was a letter waiting for him from Mrs FitzGerald. His fingers trembled tearing it open. She told him her news. She had a daughter. Theodora, beloved of God. And so Covington held in his arms, when he prayed, the sense of a white, penetrating light, a cradle of light, a basket! He filled his arms with this light as though it were silk. It streamed into him redeeming him from water, from gunshot, from doubt, from the damage to the nerves of his face. I am very fortunate, Mrs FitzGerald had written. She is a lovely, clever child. Should it ever move to you to send a remembrance, do it through Mr Lumb of Buenos Ayres. She signed herself his cousin, which he took as his cue, sending a child’s bonnet and a money order for five pounds, which was a great fortune for him to spare, and signing himself ‘your cousin’ in reply. When I am able I will send for her, Covington resolved. He never once swayed from the resolution, either, and at long last Theodora was to come: and it was proved, she was his, and this light of the world he held in his arms proved eternal.

  It was always his plan to go to the old chestnut tree, where he and John Phipps had prayed, and meet there with his old shipmate. But Phipps took off in another ship, they missed their goodbye. Where Phipps went Covington only heard by rumour, until the last day came and they were met again in a strange fashion, and Phipps preached a brief sermon, restoring Covington’s soul and redeeming him to all of creation.

  After Bedford he joined Darwin in Cambridge, unpacking quantities of specimens and sending them around. In the New Year Darwin took a house in London. Covington worked in the basement and slept in the attic.

  There was a second accident:

  It was at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was a veritable mortuary of bones in there. A block and tackle with a broken link came loose and the crate they were winching crashed from an upper door. It made a wild ringing as it smashed against the walls, flying from side to side on coming down. Heads appeared at windows and there were shouts of warning, but do you think Covington heard them? Not he with his deaf man’s look of waiting to be surprised.

  The middle fingers of his right hand were crushed. They were stiff ever after, and when he raised his right arm to comb his hair or trim his whiskers the tendons in his right hand, somewhat damaged, caused his index finger to lift back, so that he seemed to make a beckoning gesture to himself. ‘Follow me.’

  Well, it was sad to think of it, that it might come around to a misery of doubt and anxiety regarding God; that a man might have only himself on this earth as a guide whatever his heart told him, and that such a loneliness might be proved, and that the man to prove it had a servant, an accomplice in the affair, and his name was Covington.

  There was much in this London time that Covington wasn’t meant to know. And much that passed him by. But how could he not know certain matters after his footman’s day—when he straightened a page at his elbow, spread a fresh sheet of parchment in front of him, and began reading Darwin’s scribbles and transferring them across in awkward copperplate? He was back to listing hides from South America as in his boyhood, only now it was bird-hides and mouse-hides. While the work elevated him in the world somewhat, it also put him down. Tucking his tongue in the corner of his mouth, twisting his ankles around the stem of a stool, he gave all his concentrativeness to the task. Darwin often checked over his shoulder. A sooty cat looked in from the other side of the window. Coal smouldered in the grate with sickly bloodshot insufficiency. Covington fell asleep over what he was doing and woke with a start, finding his pen still held in his damaged claw. Darwin sat in the corner with his head thrown back, his fists clenched, doing his thinking.

  The lists of what had been collected on their voyage were prodigious. It was taken by Covington, shot by him, smothered, clubbed, spiked, dug. It was skinned by him, boned, plucked, pickled, dried. Afterwards packed, wrapped, labelled, stacked. Then hefted, carried, carted, deposited and shipped. Finally unpacked, re-sorted, transferred, and brought to light. Men came around for the sorting, expressing interest. Strange that once he’d thought the collecting the whole meaning of what he did. And that was only his first vanity. The material had been sent back to England for th
e glory of Britain and the interest of science, and he had never decided what the interest of science meant, except that bones were measured and fitted to other bones until declared to be megatheriums or macrauchenias or whatever. In this reckoning of booty everything went Darwin’s way, and that is how it was between master and servant. Then it came trembling up against questions, touching the one inequality between them that tipped back in Covington’s direction—his four finches labelled by island whereas Darwin’s were not.

  It was March by then, five months after their return. Darwin snapped his eyes and asked Covington if he remembered something. Had he labelled his birds by island?

  Repeating the question and waving his arms.

  ‘Covington—your birds, if you will.’

  ‘What birds are those, sir?’

  ‘The finches you took on the islands. Are they sold yet?’

  ‘What islands?’

  ‘You know the islands I mean, Covington. The Galapagos chain. Out of the hundreds you took on your own account.’

  ‘You weren’t to know of it,’ Covington thought to himself.

  ‘There were no secrets on a bark of six guns,’ Darwin implied in his softest smile.

  ‘You never said not to turn a small profit,’ Covington purred to his inner conscience.

  ‘Gentlemen don’t always,’ he imagined Darwin thinking. ‘They have their restraint. They just mark their servants down.’

  ‘You were not so interested in the finches there,’ Covington said brazenly. ‘You just sent me around blasting, and I did your will. You wrote in your diary, which I have just made in fair copy, that it would be interesting to find from future comparison what district or centre of creation the organised beings of that archipelago must be attached. You never thought the different islands mattered because a godly man would only say the creatures were right and proper for where they lodged.’

  ‘Why the cavilling, man? Are you becoming a pedant, my schoolmaster? I never knew you to take such an interest! Now tell me—what say your labels?’

  ‘You doubt Creation.’

  ‘Still your thoughts.’

  ‘Is this on God?’

  ‘It is on the geography of finches.’

  ‘Charles Island,’ Covington said at last. ‘And Chatham.’

  ‘Ah. Very good. Very good. And Harry Fuller’s were shot on Chatham and James. Bring yours to me, then.’

  ‘But they are mine.’

  ‘Whose employ are you in?’

  He brought them down from his attic room: a prize four of finches neatly tagged, their island homes noted and dated on the tag as Beskey had advised, to give cachet to his find. Such lumpy little birds they were, about as interesting as starlings, the female speckled somewhat, the male rather dark.

  So to the dim drawing room on a day soon after, when Covington stood obediently, sullenly holding a scrap of paper in his hand, barely able to read Darwin’s lips in such light. Windows dark, wet with yellow fog, lamps lit throughout the day, coalfires helpless against the bronchial chill. The receipt was for Covington’s four finches delivered to John Gould at the Zoological Society, and yes, taken round to him loyally. Covington believed he was to have them back again, his Geospiza magnirostris as fine a demonstration of the taxidermist’s art as any collector would know. They were Covington’s own sworn property, portion of his small estate, dull in plumage but valued by Leadbeater’s at several guineas apiece. No matter, they were gone from him, taken to be used as proof—if you please— of the order of nature. A most crucial proof as he learned from Darwin’s wanting the specimens so badly, though whether it was to be a fully reliable proof he was afraid to know.

  There was anger in the dull house. The matter was to stay secret.

  Darwin said it wasn’t his doing, if it was shown the Bible wasn’t true. It was the nature of beings and their stations in life that would speak the blasphemies if there were any. Darwin wasn’t in the business of proving atheism, he said, or anything else for that matter that would undermine Creation, but was only setting his mind to the material, in much the same way Covington cupped a hand to his ear— to hear better, was it not, to hear exactly what was said?

  Then the whole of Covington’s life seemed merely a story he told himself. Why should his outdated existence be exempt from condemnation and saved for God?

  There was the light on the face of the waters. There were the seven days of creation. There was Bedford, the slow river and the lock gates dripping water. There was his captivating by Phipps, and their eager voyaging deep as a dream and lost to his waking mind. Then the Beagle, the full seeking of service with Darwin, and the never taking no for an answer until he was taken on.

  And the next part of his life, too. Also a story he told himself. Staying with Darwin another two years. Getting his golden guinea when Darwin, without warning, announced he was to marry and wouldn’t be needing a ‘wife’ any more to warm his head plasters and mend his slippers. Getting his recommendations as an emigrant at the age of twenty-three. It was something to have been found ‘perfectly satisfactory’ at the end, ‘generally useful’, ‘prudent’, ‘economical’, and ‘never once seen in the least degree affected by any spirituous liquor and trustworthy in the highest degree’.

  In short to have been Mr Darwin’s most obedient servant.

  It was almost morning of the next day. It seemed much longer since the boy drowned and MacCracken became their guest. Mrs Covington rolled from bed, wrapped herself in a blanket and went to the kitchen and kindled the fire. She stood warming her hands to the flames and considered the day ahead. It would not be an easy time of it, although what day ever was with Mr Covington as one’s chosen in life? It would be into Sydney Town with all of them this morning, securing horses and loading the spring cart and pony trap. Good riddance to Sydney, then, by afternoon, and so making their way over badly made roads they would go, to endure who knew what frights until they came late to an inn. That was if what Mr Covington had in mind came to pass, and it usually did, and so there would be little comfort in their wayside halts except for sacking beds and smoky kitchens and salt beef and sooty bread on the table. Days of it to follow as they wended their way south. Dust like talcum in the nose and ears. Flies to be swallowed and endured. And if it rained, a quagmire of bogs and rivers to be crossed. Mrs Covington was raised to such things, being colonial-born. She bore them stoically enough. But she would rather they travelled by schooner, and in a stateroom, too. Then there would be just the sailing, the disembarkation at the wharves, the short foray inland and the steep haul up ridges by bullock-cart, with bellbirds in gullies and the shade of tree-ferns at morning-tea stopping places. A return to the country was what Mrs Covington wanted—had argued for with her husband until she had no words left. But only the arriving—that was what she cherished—never the getting there. It was a relief that now even he could see it was time to bring his whims over ‘Coral Sands’ to a finish, because they had a home, and it was in the wilds, and she longed for it.

  They had not been back in almost a year. Mrs Covington thought about what it meant to her. When she arrived at the top of the ridge where the farm buildings clustered she would shake out her rugs and call up her pets, and introduce Theodora to her cockatoo, who called everyone by name. Her piglets would be thick-shouldered boars by now, her poddy calves milkers, her housemaids would all be run back to the wild bush and be about bearing children to bearded Irishmen. Her sons—what word of them ever came, except as relating to cattle and land?—they went chasing to the edge of the world and made her terrified with thoughts of the dangers they faced, leaping their horses over ravines and plunging down cliffs. When far from home they slept with backs to the fire and their carbines loaded in defence from creeping savages. Her daughters—what about them? Untameable freckled whipsticks competing with the boys, stubborn to be left with the older ones when she tried to get them to the city and the pretensions of comfortable life. She could hardly blame them.

  How she love
d the clear light on the ridges and the sound of the river below, and the rock where she sometimes took herself, perching over the drop allowing cool breezes to fan upwards through her dimpled knees. How she loved the simple joys of steering a cow back to pasture with a springy sapling, the churning of butter and the sour damp wood of the dairy, the finding of warm brown eggs and getting them in her basket before goannas found and broke them, licking them empty. But she was bound to her husband by her vows, and her love, and if their bush-bred brood were repelled by his clumsy hopes, his Covingtonisms, then stand by him she must.

  She hoped Theodora would come. She would introduce her, with a blush, as her daughter. If neighbours smirked over that she would redden even more, no doubt, and be uncomfortable with the truth, but hold their eyes until they thought better of their snickering. Theodora might teach her half-brothers a few manners, too, if they ever came in from their roaring lives. What Theodora might do for the daughters, advancing their manners, was too wishful to be imagined. As for Dr MacCracken, who Covington was hopeful to bring, he was the reason they were to take the overland route, so that he could eye the prospects for land. Although he considered Mrs Covington an old eccentricity, she believed, and barely worth two hellos of a morning, she desperately hoped he would come anyway, trussed up like a cornstalk or no, because, Thank God for him, she thought: I have a husband who’s as mad as May-butter. But I dearly love him and would have him rescued for his soul, if such a thing be possible in a man.