Read Darwinia for Free Online Page A

up his arm and invading his skull.
    He wasn’t a religious man. He had never believed in spirits, table-rapping, astrology, or the Resurrected Christ. He wasn’t sure he believed in any of those things now; the sum of his belief resided in this single god, the one that had touched him with such awful, irresistible intimacy.
    He had the skills of a confidence man and he was certainly not averse to a profitable larceny, but there had been no collusion in the case of, for instance, Mrs. Sanders-Moss; she was a mystery to him, and so was the servant girl Olivia and the memento mori in the shoe box. His own prophecies took him by surprise. The words, not his own, had fallen from his lips like ripe fruit from a tree.
    The words served him well enough, mind you. But they served another purpose, too.
    Larceny, by comparison, would have been infinitely more simple.
    But he took another glass of brandy and consoled himself: You don’t come to immortality by the low road.
     
    A week passed. Nothing. He began to worry.
    Then a note in the afternoon mail:
    Dr. Vale,
    The treasures have been recovered. You have my most boundless gratitude.
    I am entertaining guests this coming Thursday at six o’clock for dinner and conversation. If you happen to be free to attend, you would be most welcome.
    RSVP
    Mrs. Edward Sanders-Moss
    She had signed it, Eleanor .

Chapter Three
    Odense docked at the makeshift harbor in the marshy estuary of the Thames, a maze of colliers, oilers, heighters and sailing ships gathered in from the outposts of the Empire. Guilford Law, plus family, plus the body of the Finch expedition and all its compasses, alidades, dried food, and paraphernalia, transferred to a ferry bound up the Thames to London. Guilford personally supervised the loading of his photographic equipment — the carefully crated 8''x10'' glass plates, the camera, lenses, and tripod.
    The ferry was a cold and noisy steamer but blessed with generous windows. Caroline comforted Lily, who disliked the hard wooden benches, while Guilford gave himself up to the scrolling shoreline.
    It was his first real view of the new world. The Thames mouth and London were the single most populous territory of the continent: most known, most seen, often photographed, but still wild — smug, Guilford thought, with wildness. The distant shore was dense with alien growth, hollow flute trees and reed grasses obscure in the gathering shadows of a chill afternoon. The strangeness of it burned in Guilford like a coal. After all he had read and dreamed, here was the tangible and impossible fact itself, not an illustration in a book but a living mosaic of light and shade and wind. The river ran green with false lotus, colonies of domed pads drifting in the water: a hazard to navigation, he’d been told, especially in summer, when the blooms came down from the Cotswolds in dense congregations and choked the screws of the steamships. He caught a glimpse of John Sullivan on the glass-walled promenade deck. Sullivan had been to Europe in 1918, had made collections at the mouth of the Rhine, but that experience obviously hadn’t jaded him; there was an intensity of observation in the botanist’s eyes that made conversation unthinkable.
    Soon enough there was human litter along the shore, rough cabins, an abandoned farm, a smoldering garbage pit; and then the outskirts of the Port of London itself, and even Caroline took an interest.
    The city was a random collation on the north bank of the river. It had been carved into the wilderness by soldiers and loyalist volunteers recalled by Lord Kitchener from the colonies, and it was hardly the London of Christopher Wren: it looked to Guilford like any smoky frontier town, a congregation of sawmills, hotels, docks, and warehouses. He identified the silhouette of the city’s single famous monument, a column of South African marble cut to commemorate the losses of 1912. The Miracle had not been kind to human beings. It had replaced