Mr Darwin's Shooter Read online

  ‘“Safe for those for whom it is to be safe, but transgressors shall fall therein.”’

  The catechism echoed a way of speech that no longer chimed with the rhythm of Covington’s heart. It was the speech of his household and chapel left far behind. It was planted in his ear by the whispers of his mother. It was the speech of Mrs H with a delectable tickle affecting the pit of his stomach. It was the speech of the young man with gold buttons who pulled Covington up in the wall, leapt the stile, and spoke in his dreams. It was the speech spouted by Able Seaman John Phipps, a man whose meeting house was the open air and boundless horizons, whose congregation consisted of frogs in the wet grass, moles in the banks, spiders, snails, and the very birds tumbling through the air; and also the fish in the sea if his reputation was anything to be reckoned with. And Covington had given it away for sixty pounds a year and a catechism in which was recited the families of creatures and the ladders by which small fitted to large, strange to familiar, until everything was sealed in a book that dared say it knew better than earnest old Bunyan’s.

  But still Phipps was present, and beckoned Joey Middleton up alongside him. One strode, the other trotted, the boy’s breath going fast as a dragonfly’s wings.

  ‘Run, Joey, shall I catechise you?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘“Was there anything antecedent or before there was God?”’

  ‘“No, for God is eternal. In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them.”’

  ‘“What do you think of the Bible?”’

  ‘“It is the holy word of God.”’

  ‘Do you understand it?’

  ‘Not a great deal.’

  ‘What do you do with the places in it you don’t understand?’

  ‘I think God is wiser than I.’

  ‘What about resurrection of the dead?’

  ‘I believe they shall rise, the same that was buried. God has promised it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘God is able to perform it.’

  John Phipps turned back to the other boys—names forgotten, faces forgotten, all but spirits forgotten in time—and said to them in a loud voice, ‘Joey has proved himself first.’

  ‘But the last shall be first,’ quipped the boy, who came last in the line.

  ‘That,’ said John Phipps stopping in his tracks, bringing the boy up to him quick smart, grabbing him by the collar, ‘is because the best things are for the last, and do you know why?’

  The boy spluttered he didn’t. He expected it was humility.

  ‘Because last must have his time to come. In eternity. “Therefore it is said of Dives. In thy lifetime thou receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.”’

  Mr Covington was comforted. His paralysis creeping over him was a shadow covering the earth, while a star in the window burned white as diamonds.

  When they reached their night’s destination, miles beyond anywhere Covington had been in his life, past any last possible glimpse of Bedford’s steeples, the boy Joey Middleton proved he was better than first. He ran ahead quick as a wisp to wait in the shelter of a lonely barn, with a fire of twigs going ready. He was more heart than sinew with his face gone blue from effort. Covington told him to stay by the fire, and gave him an apple and a sugar lump from his satchel. Joey gave Covington some portions of tobacco he had been saving. This was their friendship based in rivalry of attention that lasted past death.

  A soft wind blew, sending hoops of rain across sodden green pastureland. Dark clumps of trees emerged and faded in the light. Rooks went down into their wood. A man with a gun could be seen in the distance walking in their direction. He was on the other side of a high stone wall that snaked across the valley, making a grim divider. After a time he stopped. Covington knew him; he was Darwin.

  He called a black dog, and the dog went away with him. But after a time the dog was seen coming back. It was the sort of dog that was taught never to bark, only to slither forward on its belly like a puddle of tar, and then to spring out, yellow teeth and raking claws, and take a poacher by the arm.

  It made John Phipps smile.

  ‘I have no gun,’ he said, reaching into his bag, ‘but I have nets, lime, twigs, a small light—see?—and a bell.’ He set out each of these things carefully.

  ‘What about that dog?’ wondered Covington.

  ‘The dog stays close to his master,’ said Phipps. ‘It is what dogs are for. Otherwise they are all over the countryside. A dog will work itself to death if its master decrees. But later, when the master sleeps, the dog sleeps, and soundly too.’

  Covington knew this for truth. A great sleep was his due portion.

  ‘You thought you had a sailorman,’ said one of the boys, ‘but you have got yourself a fowler.’

  ‘He is a poacher,’ grinned Joey, squatting in friendly closeness in the circle. If John Phipps declared himself the Son of God at this moment they would hail the blasphemy as truth, because they worshipped him.

  ‘A poacher in God’s creation, I’ll own to that,’ said Phipps, tying a thread by holding one end in his teeth, and attaching the other to a pair of wires, then biting the thread clean off. ‘This park was common pasture when I was a boy. What we had that was good then, was taken from us through acts of parliament. Whenever I pass I think it is in my power through the grace of God to take it back again.’

  ‘Who is the man over there?’ asked the boys.

  ‘He is my brother.’

  The night was mild and misty and still. Covington heard tassels of corn whispering on the river flats down from ‘Forest Oak’, and the cry of a plover and the distant sound of surf coming in from the Tasman Sea. The half moon rode above the haze of Pambula and Bedfordshire. Covington loved such nights, having experienced them in his independence, wandering the countryside and stemming his fear of hobgoblins and dark fiends just by the nature of who he was—a reasonable boy with no great harm in his breast. And for this reason no great harm came to him from any such encounters, and moonlit nights were the cradle of his being. He never imagined that to be reconciled would be to meet with himself this way, all times present in one. But it was why Mr Darwin was there, who had written in his book:

  If both are equally well fitted for their own places in nature, both probably will hold their own places and keep separate for almost any length of time.

  So the ancient species of believer still had a chance, it seemed.

  Slowly the mist cleared and the valley was flooded with silvery light. Trees with their bare limbs and stately shapes shifted closer to the barn. They were sombre and deep. John Phipps yawned a prayer and said that just before moon-set, when shadows were long and clean, he would cross the valley and make his catch. It would be close to morning before he went. Now for sleep.

  Covington lay back with his hands behind his head. The fire faded down. His lids grew heavy. Joey beside him shivered:

  ‘It is cold ’tween the decks of a ship. Colder’n you could imagine, Cobby.’

  ‘Then why are you mad to be going there?’ whispered Covington back to him.

  ‘It is hot in the Indies, that is why,’ whispered Joey, and tucked himself into Covington’s back, neat as a kitten. Then said, as if the thought was everything to him: ‘I might see my Pa.’

  Covington knew nothing more of that night except half-awake contentment each time he stirred and settled deeper in the bedding. It was the great night of his life. Others around him snored. He snored a good bit himself, giving Mrs Covington satisfaction and granting her respite from worry. When John Phipps crept away none of them knew he went. In the early morning Covington woke looking out from the broken doorway of the barn. The sun was not yet up. There was only an easing of the dark, the moon hanging like a tiny mirror back in a cleft of hills. Joey was up and had a fire going. In the first burst of cold sunlight John Phipps came strolling back, carrying a brace of plump birds that would keep them fed fo
r the next sixty miles to Devonport and the ships of the Royal Navy.

  The man he called his brother was over yonder. They ate hard cheese for breakfast and awaited his call. Soon Darwin came with his jacket buttoned to his neck and his eyes bright and excited. He gave scant attention to the birds with their feet tied. The two men embraced. There was a mood of withheld love between everyone present. A breeze stirred the cold, and John Phipps led them out to the shelter of a broad, bare-branched chestnut tree. Its trunk was like a wall, with roots making seats and footrests and arms for the weary. It was the old meeting place from a time when Congregationalists were driven from lawful worship. Many had gone to America where they had built a new Bedford. In the chilly sunlight overlooking the winter-green valley John Phipps spoke his words.

  ‘Methinks here—under this tree—one may without much molestation be thinking what he is, whence he came, what he has done, and to what the King has called him.’

  Covington trembled the words into his bones.

  He saw Darwin on his knees, and there was no difference between prayer and pulling a worm from the grass. As for Mr Covington, he prayed in the old-fashioned way. It was the last of anything he knew.

  ‘My servant [Covington] is an odd sort of person; I do not very much like him; but he is, perhaps from his very oddity, very well adapted to all my purposes.’

  Charles Darwin in a letter to his sister,

  from aboard HMS Beagle, 1834.

  In basing Mr Darwin’s Shooter on real people and actual events I have relied on many historical sources. Charles Darwin’s archive is immense: he remains the most thoroughly documented scientific genius of the nineteenth century. Syms Covington’s archive by comparison is tiny. It consists of a contested birth-date, a scrappy diary, a few watercolours, and scattered mentions in Darwin’s letters and diaries. Yet Covington was at Darwin’s side almost constantly from 1832 to 1839, during the voyage of the Beagle and for the two and a half crucial years following, when they lived in the same house and Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection in private notes. After Covington’s emigration to Australia in 1839 they maintained a collecting relationship and a correspondence that ended with the arrival of The Origin of Speciesin Australia and, shortly afterwards, Covington’s death (‘of a paralysis’) on 19 February 1861.

  My principal Darwin sources have been: The Origin of Species (London, 1859); The Red Notebook of Charles Darwin, ed. Sandra Herbert (London, 1980); The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume I, 1821–1836 and Volume II, 1837-1843, eds Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith (Cambridge, 1985 and 1986); and Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, ed. Richard Darwin Keynes (Cambridge, 1988).

  For Covington I used all of the above except the first. Also the following works: Syms Covington of Pambula by B. J. Ferguson (Merimbula, 1971, 1981); Charles Darwin in Australia by F. W. and J. M. Nicholas (Cambridge, 1989); and the unpublished diary of Syms Covington, held by the Mitchell Library, Sydney. I learned of Covington while reading Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (London, 1991). The most recent biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging by Janet Browne (London, 1995), refers to Covington as ‘the unacknowledged shadow behind [Darwin’s] every triumph’. This is more my Covington than the diarist of somewhat undistinguished record he made himself in life.

  Covington’s belief, in this novel, speaks from Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (London, 1678). His collecting would not have been possible, for me, without The Naturalist’s Guide for Collecting and Preserving Subjects of Natural History and Botany, by William Swainson (London, 1822). Darwin almost certainly owned a copy of Swainson, and it is likely that it formed part of the library of the Beagle. For other aspects of bird collection I am indebted to the Key to North American Birds by Elliott Coules (Boston, 1903) and to Walter Bowles of the Australian Museum for directing me to it. My understanding of the importance of Covington’s private collection of birds to Darwin’s theory of natural selection is owed to two articles by Frank J. Sulloway. They can be found in the Spring and Fall 1982 issues of the Journal of the History of Biology: ‘Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend’, and ‘Darwin’s Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and its Aftermath’.

  I wish to thank Angela Marshall for the timely gift of a book; Rob Fenwick for the loan of one; Alan Gould for the same; Tony Milner for several; Trevor Shearston for Galapagos mementos; Lyndsay Brown for seafaring lore; Sue Fisher for invaluable manuscript readings and many clarifying conversations; Gerry Cassis for impromptu seminars in zoological lore, and for books, encouragement, and the wisdom of a naturalist; Linda Funnell for close editorial scrutiny; and last, but never least, Rose Creswell, my literary agent, for constant encouragement and enthusiastic guidance.