The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

STEPHEN BAXTER Darwin Anathema

Trailed by a porter with her luggage, Mary Mason climbed down the steamer’s ramp to the dock at Folkestone, and waited in line with the rest of the passengers to clear security.

Folkestone, her first glimpse of England, was unprepossessing, a small harbour in the lee of cliffs fronting a dismal, smoke-stained townscape from which the slender spires of churches protruded. People crowded around the harbour, the passengers disembarking, stevedores labouring to unload the hold. There was a line of horse-drawn vehicles waiting, and one smoky-looking steam carriage. The ocean-going steamship, its rusting flank a wall, looked too big and vigorous for the port.

Mary, forty-five years old, felt weary, stiff, faintly disoriented to be standing on a surface that wasn’t rolling back and forth. She had come to England all the way from Terra Australis to participate in the Inquisition’s trial of Charles Darwin, a man more than a century dead. Back home in Cooktown it had seemed a good idea. Now she was here it seemed utterly insane.

At last the port inspectors stared at her passepartout, cross-examined her about her reasons for coming to England — they didn’t seem to know what a “natural philosopher” was — and then opened every case. One of the officials finally handed back her passepartout. She checked it was stamped with the correct date: 9 February 2009. “Welcome to England,” he grunted.

She walked forward, trailed by the porter.

“Lector Mason? Not quite the harbour at Cooktown, is it? Nevertheless I hope you’ve had a satisfactory voyage.”

She turned. “Father Brazel?”

Xavier Brazel was the Jesuit who had coordinated her invitation and passage. He was tall, slim, elegant; he wore a modest black suit with a white clerical collar. He was a good bit younger than she was, maybe thirty. He smiled, blessed her with two fingers making a cross sign in the air, and shook her hand. “Call me Xavier. I’m delighted to meet you, truly. We’re privileged you’ve agreed to participate in the trial, and I’m particularly looking forward to hearing you speak at St Paul’s. Come, I have a carriage to the rail station…” Nodding at the porter, he led her away. “The trial of Alicia Darwin and her many-times-great-uncle starts tomorrow.”

“Yes. The ship was delayed a couple of days.”

“I’m sorry there’s so little time to prepare, or recover.”

“I’ll be fine.”

The carriage was small but sturdy, pulled by a pair of patient horses. It clattered away through crowded, cobbled streets.

“And I apologise for the security measures,” Xavier said. “A tiresome welcome to the country. It’s been like this since the 29 May attacks.”

“That was six years ago. They caught the Vatican bombers, didn’t they?” Pinprick attacks by Muslim zealots who had struck to commemorate the 550th anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople — and more than 120 years after a Christian coalition had taken the city back from the Ottomans.

He just smiled. “Once you have surrounded yourself with a ring of steel, it’s hard to tear it down.”

They reached the station where the daily train to London was, fortuitously, waiting. Xavier already had tickets. Xavier helped load Mary’s luggage, and led her to an upper-class carriage. Aside from Mary everybody in here seemed to be a cleric of some kind, the men in black suits, the few women in nuns’ wimples.

The train pulled away. Clouds of sooty steam billowed past the window.

A waiter brought coffees. Xavier sipped his with relish. “Please, enjoy.”

Mary tasted her coffee. “That’s good.”

“French, from their American colonies. The French do know how to make good coffee. Speaking of the French — have you visited Britain before? As it happens this rail line follows the track of the advance of Napoleon’s Grande Armee in 1807, through Maidstone to London. You may see the monuments in the towns we pass through. Are you all right, Lector? You don’t seem quite comfortable.”

“I’m not used to having so many clerics around me. Terra Australis is a Christian country, even if it followed the Marxist Reformation. But I feel like the only sinner on the train.”

He smiled and spoke confidentially. “If you think this is a high density of dog-collars you should try visiting Rome.”

She found herself liking him for his humour and candour. But, she had learned from previous experience, Jesuits were always charming and manipulative. “I don’t need to go to Rome to see the Inquisition at work, however, do I?”

“We prefer not to use that word,” he said evenly. “The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, newly empowered under Cardinal Ratzinger since the 29 May attacks, has done sterling work in the battle against Ottoman extremists.”

“Who just want the freedom of faith they enjoyed up until the 1870s Crusade.”

He smiled. “You know your history. But of course that’s why you’re here. The presence of unbiased observers is important; the Congregation wants to be seen to give Darwin a fair hearing. I have to admit we had refusals to participate from philosophers with specialities in natural selection—”

“So you had to settle for a historian of natural philosophy?”

“We are grateful for your help. The Church as a whole is keen to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings. The purpose of the Congregation’s hearings is to clarify the relationship between theology and natural philosophy, not to condemn. You’ll see. And frankly,” he said, “I hope you’ll think better of us after you’ve seen us at work.”

She shrugged. “I guess I’m here for my own purposes too.” As a historian she’d hope to gather some good material on the centuries-long tension between Church and natural philosophy, and maybe she could achieve more at the trial itself than contribute to some kind of Inquisition propaganda stunt. But now she was here, in the heart of the theocracy, she wasn’t so sure.

She’d fallen silent. Xavier studied her with polite concern. “Are you comfortable? Would you like more coffee?”

“I think I’m a little over-tired,” she said. “Sorry if I snapped.” She dug her book out of her bag. “Maybe I’ll read a bit and leave you in peace.”

He glanced at the spine. “H. G. Wells. The War of the Celestial Spheres.”

“I’m trying to immerse myself in all things English.”

“It’s a fine read, and only marginally heretical.” He actually winked at her.

She had to laugh, but she felt a frisson of unease.

So she read, and dozed a little, as the train clattered through the towns of Kent, Ashford and Charing and others. The towns and villages were cramped, the buildings uniformly stained black with soot. The rolling country was cluttered with small farms where people in mud-coloured clothes laboured over winter crops. The churches were squat buildings like stone studs pinning down the ancient green of the countryside. She’d heard there was a monument to Wellington at Maidstone, where he’d fallen as he failed to stop Napoleon crossing the Medway river. But if it existed at all it wasn’t visible from the train.

By the time the train approached London, the light of the short English day was already fading.

As a guest of the Church she was lodged in one of London’s best hotels. But her room was lit by smoky oil lamps. There seemed to be electricity only in the lobby and dining room — why, even the front porch of her own home outside Cooktown had an electric bulb. And she noticed that the telegraph they used to send a message home to her husband and son was an Australian Maxwell design.

Still, in the morning she found she had a terrific view of the Place de Louis XVI, and of Whitehall and the Mall beyond. The day was bright, and pigeons fluttered around the statue of Bonaparte set atop the huge Christian cross that dominated the square. For a historian this was a reminder of the Church’s slow but crushing reconquest of Protestant England. In the eighteenth century a Catholic league had cooperated with the French to defeat Britain’s imperial ambitions in America and India, and then in 1807 the French King’s Corsican attack-dog had been unleashed on the homeland. By the time Napoleon withdrew, England was once more a Catholic country under a new Bourbon king. Looking up at Napoleon’s brooding face, she was suddenly glad her own home was 12,000 miles away from all this history.

Father Xavier called for her at nine. They travelled by horse-drawn carriage to St Paul’s Cathedral, where the trial of Charles Darwin was to be staged.

St Paul’s was magnificent. Xavier had sweetened her trip around the world by promising her she would be allowed to give a guest sermon to senior figures in London’s theological and philosophical community from the cathedral’s pulpit. Now she was here she started to feel intimidated at the prospect.

But she had no time to look around. Xavier, accompanied by an armed Inquisition guard, led her straight through to the stairs down to the crypt, which had been extended to a warren of dark corridors with rows of hefty locked doors. In utter contrast to the glorious building above, this was like a prison, or a dungeon.

Xavier seemed to sense her mood. “You’re doing fine, Lector.”

“Yeah. I’m just memorizing the way out.”

They arrived at a room that was surprisingly small and bare, for such a high-profile event, with plain plastered walls illuminated by dangling electrical bulbs. The centrepiece was a wooden table behind which sat a row of Inquisition examiners, Mary presumed, stern men all of late middle age wearing funereal black and clerical collars. Their chairman sat in an elaborate throne-like seat, elevated above the rest.

A woman stood before them — stood because she had no seat to sit on, Mary saw. The girl, presumably Alicia, Darwin’s grand-niece several times removed, wore a sober charcoal-grey dress. She was very pale, with blue eyes and strawberry hair; she could have been no older than twenty, twenty-one.

On one side of her sat a young man, soberly dressed, good-looking, his features alive with interest. And on the other side, Mary was astounded to see, a coffin rested on trestles.

Xavier led Mary to a bench set along one wall. Here various other clerics sat, most of them men. On the far side were men and women in civilian clothes. Some were writing in notebooks, others sketching the faces of the principals.

“Just in time,” Xavier murmured as they sat. “I do apologise. Did you see the look Father Boniface gave me?”

“Not the Boniface!”

“The Reverend Father Boniface Jones, Commissary General. Learned his trade at the feet of Commissary Hitler himself, in the old man’s retirement years after all his good work during the Missionary Wars in Orthodox Russia…”

“Who’s that lot on the far side?”

“From the chronicles. Interest in this case is world-wide.”

“Don’t tell me who’s in that box.”

“Respectfully disinterred from his tomb in Edinburgh and removed here. He could hardly not show up for his own trial, could he? Today we’ll hear the deposition. The verdict is due to be given in a couple of days — on the twelfth, Darwin’s 200th anniversary.”

Xavier said that the young man sitting beside Alicia was called Anselm Fairweather; a friend of Alicia, he was the theological lawyer she had chosen to assist her in presenting her case.

“But he’s not a defence lawyer,” Xavier murmured. “You must remember this isn’t a civil courtroom. In this case the defendant happens to have a general idea of the charges she’s to face, as a living representative of Darwin’s family — the only one who would come forward, incidentally; I think her presence was an initiative of young Fairweather. But she’s not entitled to know those charges or the evidence, nor to know who brought them.”

“That doesn’t seem just.”

“But this is not justice in that sense. This is the working-out of God’s will, as focused through the infallibility of the Holy Father and the wisdom of his officers.”

The proceedings opened with a rap of Jones’s gavel. A clerk on the examiners’ bench began to scribble a verbatim record. Jones instructed the principals present to identify themselves. Alongside him on the bench were other Commissaries, and a Prosecutor of the Holy Office.

When it was her turn, Mary stood to introduce herself as a Lector of Cooktown University, here to observe and advise in her expert capacity. Boniface actually smiled at her. He had a face as long and grey as the Reverend Darwin’s coffin, and the skin under his eyes was velvet black.

A Bible was brought to Alicia, and she read Latin phrases from a card.

“I have no Latin,” Mary whispered to Xavier. “She’s swearing an oath to tell the truth, right?”

“Yes. I’ll translate. ”

Boniface picked up a paper, and began to work his way through his questions, in Latin that sounded like gravel falling into a bucket. Xavier whispered his translation: “By what means and how long ago she came to London.”

Mercifully the girl answered in English, with a crisp Scottish accent. “By train and carriage from my mother’s home in Edinburgh. Which has been the family home since the Reverend Charles Darwin’s time.”

“Whether she knows or can guess the reason she was ordered to present herself to the Holy Office.”

“Well, I think I know.” She glanced at the coffin. “To stand behind the remains of my uncle, while a book he published 150 years ago is considered for its heresy.”

“That she name this book.”

“It was called A Dialogue on the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.”

“That she explain the character of this book.”

“Well, I’ve never read it. I don’t know anybody who has. It was put on the Index even before it was published. I’ve only read second-hand accounts of its contents… It concerns an hypothesis concerning the variety of animal and vegetable forms we see around us. Why are some so alike, such as varieties of cat or bird? My uncle drew analogies with the well-known modification of forms of dogs, pigeons, peas and beans and other domesticated creatures under the pressure of selection for various desirable properties by mankind. He proposed — no, he proposed an hypothesis — that natural variations in living things could be caused by another kind of selection, unconsciously applied by nature as species competed for limited resources, for water and food. This selection, given time, would shape living things as surely as the conscious manipulation of human trainers.”

“Whether she believes this hypothesis to hold truth.”

“I’m no natural philosopher. I want to be an artist. A painter, actually—”

“Whether she believes this hypothesis to hold truth.”

The girl bowed her head. “It is contrary to the teachings of Scripture.”

“Whether the Reverend Charles Darwin believed the hypothesis to hold truth.”

She seemed rattled. “Maybe you should open the box and ask him yersel’…” Her lawyer, Anselm Fairweather, touched her arm. “I apologise, Father. He stated it as an hypothesis, an organizing principle, much as Galileo Galilei set out the motion of the Earth around the sun as an hypothesis only. Natural selection would explain certain observed patterns in nature. No doubt the truth of God’s holy design lies beneath these observed patterns, but is not yet apprehended by our poor minds. Charles set this out clearly in his book, which he presented as a dialogue between a proponent of the hypothesis and a sceptic.”

“Whether she feels the heresy is properly denied in the course of this dialogue.”

“That’s for you to judge. I mean, his intention was balance, and if that was not achieved, it is only through the poor artistry of my uncle, who was a philosopher before he was a writer, and—”

“Whether she is aware of the injunction placed on Charles Darwin on first publication of this book.”

“That he destroy the published edition, and replace it with a revision more clearly emphasizing the hypothetical nature of his argument.”

“Whether she is aware of his compliance with this injunction.”

“I’m not aware of any second edition. He fled to Edinburgh, whose Royal Society heard him state his hypothesis, and received his further work in the form of transactions in its journal.”

Xavier murmured to Mary, “Those Scottish Presbyterians. Nothing but trouble.”

“Whether she approves of his departure from England, as assisted by the heretical criminals known as the Lyncean Academy.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Whether she approves of his refusal to appear before a properly appointed court of the Holy Office.”

“I don’t know about that either.”

“Whether she approves of his non-compliance with the holy injunction. “

“As I understand it he felt his book was balanced, therefore it wasn’t heretical as it stood, and therefore the injunction was not applicable…”

So the hearing went on. The questioning seemed to have nothing to do with Darwin’s philosophical case, which after all was the reason for Mary’s presence here, but was more a relentless badgering of Alicia Darwin over the intentions and beliefs of her remote uncle — questions she couldn’t possibly answer save in terms of her own interpretation, a line Alicia bravely stuck to.

To Mary, the trial began to seem a shabby epilogue to Darwin’s own story. He had been a bright young cleric, with vague plans to become a Jesuit, who had signed on to a ship of discovery, the Beagle, in the year 1831: the English never assembled an empire, but they remained explorers. On board he had come under the influence of the work of some of the bright, radical thinkers from Presbyterian Edinburgh — the “Scottish Enlightenment”, as the historians called it. And in the course of his travels Darwin saw for himself islands being created and destroyed, and island-bound species of cormorants and iguanas that seemed obviously in flux between one form and another. Far from the anchoring certainties of the Church, it was no wonder he had come home with a head full of a vision that had obsessed him for the rest of his life — but it was a vision fraught with danger.

All this was a long time ago, the voyage of the Beagle nearly 200 years past. But the Church thought in centuries, and was now exacting its revenge.

Alicia had volunteered to participate in this trial as an honour to her uncle, just as Mary had. Mary had imagined it would all be something of a formality. Yet the girl seemed slim, frail, defenceless standing there before the threatening row of theocrats before her — men who, Mary reminded herself uneasily, literally had the power of life and death over Alicia. Once, during the course of the questioning, Alicia glanced over at Mary, one of the few women in the room. Mary deliberately smiled back. No, I don’t know what the hell we’ve got ourselves into here either, kid.

At last it ended for the day. Alicia had to glance over and sign the clerk’s handwritten transcript of the session. She was ordered not to leave without special permission, and sworn to silence. She looked shocked when she was led away to a cell, somewhere in the crypt warren.

Mary stood. “She wasn’t expecting that.”

Xavier murmured, “Don’t worry. It’s just routine. She’s not a prisoner.”

“It looked like it to me.”

“Darwin will be found guilty of defying that long-ago injunction, of course. But Alicia will be asked only to abjure her uncle’s actions, and to condemn the book. A slap on the wrist—”

“I don’t care right now. I just want to get out of this place. Can we go?”

“Once the Reverend Fathers have progressed. ” He bowed as Boniface Jones and the others walked past, stately as sailing ships in their black robes.

Mary got a good turn-out for her sermon in the cathedral the next day.

She’d titled it “Galileo, Einstein and the Mystery of Transubstantiation” — a provocative theme that had seemed a good idea from the other side of the world. Now, standing at the pulpit of St Paul’s itself, dwarfed by the stonework around her and facing rows of calm, black-robed, supremely powerful men, she wasn’t so sure.

There in the front row, however, was Anselm Fairweather, Alicia Darwin’s lawyer. He looked bright, with an engaging, youthful sort of curiosity that she felt she’d seen too little of in England. Xavier Brazel sat beside him, faintly sinister as usual, but relatively sane, and relatively reassuring.

For better or worse, she was stuck with her prepared text. “I’m well aware that to most churchmen and perhaps the lay public the philosophical career of Galileo, in astronomy, dynamics and other subjects, is of most interest for the period leading up to his summons to Rome in 1633 to face charges of heresy concerning his work regarding the hypothetical motion of the Earth — charges which, of course, were never in the end brought. But to a historian of natural philosophy such as myself it is the legacy of the man’s work after Rome that is the most compelling…”

Nobody was quite sure what had been said to Galileo, by Pope Urban himself among others, in the theocratic snake-pit that was seventeenth-century Rome. Some said the Tuscan ambassador, who was hosting Galileo in Rome, had somehow intervened to soothe ruffled papal feathers. Galileo had not faced the humiliation of an Inquisition trial over his Copernican views, or, worse, sanctions afterwards. Instead, the increasingly frail, increasingly lonely old man had returned home to Tuscany. In his final years he turned away from the astronomical studies that had caused him so much trouble, and concentrated instead on “hypotheses” about dynamics, the physics of moving objects. This had been an obsession since, as a young man, he had noticed patterns in the pendulum-like swinging of church chandeliers.

“And in doing so, even so late in life, Galileo came to some remarkable and far-reaching conclusions.”

Galileo’s later work had run ahead of the mathematical techniques of the time, and to be fully appreciated had had to be reinterpreted by later generations of mathematicians, notably Leibniz. Essentially Galileo had built on common-sense observations of everyday motion to build a theory that was now known as “relativity”, in which objects moved so that their combined velocities never exceeded a certain “speed of finality”. All this properly required framing in a four-dimensional spacetime. And buried in Galileo’s work was the remarkable implication — or, as she carefully said, an “hypothesis” — that the whole of the universe was expanding into four-dimensional space.

These “hypotheses” had received confirmation in later centuries. James Clerk Maxwell, developing his ideas about electromagnetism in the comparatively intellectually free environment of Presbyterian Edinburgh, had proved that Galileo’s “speed of finality” was in fact the speed of light.

“And later in the nineteenth century, astronomers in our Terra Australis observatories, measuring the Doppler shift of light from distant nebulae, were able to show that the universe does indeed appear to be expanding all around us, just as predicted from Galileo’s work.” She didn’t add that the southern observatories, mostly manned by Aboriginal astronomers, had also long before proved from the parallax of the stars that the motion of the Earth around the sun was real, just as Galileo had clearly believed.

Finally she came to transubstantiation. “In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas justified the mystery of the Eucharist — how a communion host can simultaneously be a piece of bread and the flesh of Christ — using Aristotle’s physics. The host has the outer form of bread but the inner substance of Christ. It’s now more than a century since the Blessed Albert Einstein, then a mere clerk, showed that the transformation of bread to flesh could be described by means of a four-dimensional Galilean rotation, invisible to our senses. And I believe that a Vatican committee is considering accepting this interpretation as orthodoxy, a second Scholasticism. But all this stems from Galileo’s insights…”

She had often wondered, she concluded, if Galileo’s attention had not been focused on his dynamics work by his brush with the authorities — or, worse, if he had been left exhausted or had his life curtailed by their trial and sentencing — perhaps the discovery of relativity might have been delayed centuries.

She was greeted by nods and smiles, from churchmen accepting as justification for their central mystery the wisdom of a man they had come close to persecuting, four centuries dead.

At the end of the Mass Xavier and Anselm Fairweather approached her. “We could hardly clap,” Xavier said. “Not in church. But your sermon was much appreciated, Lector Mason.”

“Well, thank you.”

Anselm said, “Points in your talk sparked my interest, Lector. Have you ever heard of the Lyncean Academy? Named for the lynx, the sharpest-eyed big cat. It was a group of free-thinking scholars, founded in Galileo’s time to combat the Church’s authority in philosophy. It published Galileo’s later books. After Galileo it went underground, but supported later thinkers. It defended Newton at his excommunication trial, and protected Fontenelle, and later helped Darwin flee to Scotland…”

She glanced at the churchmen filing out ahead of her. Xavier’s impassive face carried an unstated warning. “Is there something you want to tell me, Mr Fairweather?”

“Look, could we speak privately?”

Once out of the cathedral, she let Anselm lead her away. Xavier clearly did not want to hear whatever conversation Anselm proposed to have.

They walked down Blackfriars to the river, and then west along the Embankment. Under grimy iron bridges the Thames was crowded with small steam-driven vessels. The London skyline, where she could see it, was low and flat, a lumpy blanket of poor housing spread like a blanket over the city’s low hills, pierced here and there by the slim spire of a Wren church. The city far dwarfed Cooktown, but it lay as if rotting under a blanket of smoky fog. In the streets there seemed to be children everywhere, swarming in this Catholic country, bare-footed, soot-streaked and ragged. She wondered how many of them got any schooling — and how many of them had access to the medicines shipped over from the Pasteur clinics in Terra Australis to the disease-ridden cities of Europe.

As they walked along the Embankment she addressed the issue directly. “So, Anselm, are you a member of this Lyncean Academy?”

He laughed. “You saw through me.”

“You’re not exactly subtle.”

“No. Well, I apologise. But there’s no time left for subtlety.”

“What’s so urgent?”

“The Darwin trial must have the right outcome. I want to make sure I have you on my side. For we intend to use the trial to reverse a mistake the Church never made.”

She shook her head. “A mistake never made. You’ve lost me. And I’m not on anybody’s side.”

“Look — the Academy doesn’t question the Church about morality and ethics, the domain of God. It’s the Church’s meddling in free thought that we object to. Human minds have been locked in systems of thought imposed by the Church for two millennia. Christianity was imposed across the Roman empire. Then Aquinas imposed the philosophy of Aristotle, his four elements, his cosmologies of crystal spheres — which is still the official doctrine, no matter how much the observations of our own eyes, of the instruments you’ve developed in Terra Australis, disprove every word he wrote! We take our motto from a saying of Galileo himself. ‘I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect — ’ “

“‘ — has intended us to forgo their use.’ I don’t see what this has to do with the trial.”

“It is an echo of the trial of Galileo — which the Church abandoned! Galileo was taken to a prison, given a good fright about torture and the stake, he agreed to say whatever they wanted him to say — but he was not put on trial.”

She started to see. “But what if he had been?”

He nodded eagerly. “You get the point. A few decades earlier the Church persecuted Giordano Bruno, another philosopher, for his supposed heresies. They burned him. But nobody knew who Bruno was. Galileo was famous across Europe! If they had burned him — even if they had put him through the public humiliation of a trial — it would have caused outrage, especially in the Protestant countries, England, the Netherlands, the German states. The Church’s moral authority would have been rejected there, and weakened even in the Catholic countries.

“And the Church would not have been able to cow those thinkers who followed Galileo. You’re a historian of natural philosophy; you must see the pattern. Before Galileo you had thinkers like Bacon, Leonardo, Copernicus, Kepler… It was a grand explosion of ideas. Galileo’s work drew together and clarified all these threads — he wrote on atomism, you know. His work could have been the foundation of a revolution in thinking. But after him, comparatively speaking — nothing! Do you know that Isaac Newton the alchemist was working on a new mechanics, building on Galileo? If the Church had had not been able to impeach Newton, who knows what he might have achieved?”

“And all this because the Church spared Galileo.”

“Yes! I know it’s a paradox. We suspect the Church made the wise choice by accident…”

Mary had a basic sympathy for his position. But she had a gut feeling that history was more complex than this young man imagined. If Galileo’s trial had gone ahead, would the work the old man completed later in life have been curtailed? It might have taken centuries more to discover relativity.

Anselm clearly had no room in his head for such subtleties. “It would have been better if Galileo had been a martyr! Then all men would have seen the Church for what it is.”

Saying this, he seemed very young to Mary. “And now,” she said carefully, “you want to use this Darwin trial to create a new martyr. Hmm. How old is Alicia Darwin?”

“Just twenty.”

“Does she know she’s to become some kind of token martyr for your cause?” When he hesitated, she pressed, “You produced her as the family representative for this trial, didn’t you? What’s your relationship with her?”

“We are lovers,” he said defiantly. “Oh, it is chaste, Lector, don’t worry about that. But she would do anything for me — and I for her.”

“Would she be your lover if she weren’t Darwin’s grand-niece? And I ask you again: does she know what she’s letting herself in for?”

He held her gaze, defiant. “The Lyncean Academy is ancient and determined. If the Church has a long memory, so do we. And I hope, I pray, that you, Lector, if the need arises, will use your considerable authority in that courtroom tomorrow to ensure that the right verdict is reached.” He glanced around. “It’s nearly noon. Care for some lunch?”

“No thanks,” she said, and she walked sharply away.

On Thursday 12 February, Darwin’s 200th anniversary, the final session of the hearing was held in another subterranean room, burrowed out of the London clay beneath St Paul’s.

At least this was a grander chamber, Mary thought, its walls panelled with wood, its floor carpeted, and a decent light cast by a bank of electric bulbs. But this was evidently for the benefit of the eight cardinals who had come here to witness the final act of the trial. Sitting in their bright vestments on a curved bench at the head of the room, they looked oddly like gaudy Australasian birds, Mary thought irreverently.

Before them sat the court officials, led by Boniface Jones and completed by the earnest clerk with the rapidly scratching pen. The scribes from the chronicles scribbled and sketched. Anselm Fairweather, sitting away from his client-lover, looked excited, like a spectator at some sports event. Mary could see no guards, but she was sure they were present, ready to act if Alicia dared defy the will of this court. That ghastly coffin stood on its trestles.

And before them all, dressed in a penitent’s white robe and with her wrists and ankles bound in chains, stood Alicia Darwin.

“I can’t believe I volunteered for this farce,” Mary muttered to Xavier Brazel. “I haven’t contributed a damn word. And look at that wretched child.”

“It is merely a formality,” Xavier said. “The robe is part of an ancient tradition which—”

“Does the authority of a 2,000-year-old Church really rely on humiliating a poor bewildered kid?”

He seemed faintly alarmed. “You must not be seen to be disrespecting the court, Mary.” He leaned closer and whispered, “And whatever Anselm said to you I’d advise you to disregard it.”

She tried to read his handsome, impassive face. “You choose what to hear, don’t you? You have a striking ability to compartmentalize. Maybe that’s what it takes to survive in your world.”

“I only want what is best for the Church — and for my friends, among whom I would hope to count you.”

“We’ll see about that at the end of this charade, shall we?”

As before Jones began proceedings with a rap of a gavel; the murmuring in the room died down. Jones faced Alicia. “Alicia Darwin, daughter of James Paul Darwin of Edinburgh. Kneel to hear the clerical condemnation, and the sentence of the Holy See.”

Alicia knelt submissively.

Jones picked up a sheet of paper and began to read in his sonorous Latin. Xavier murmured a translation for Mary.

“Whereas he, the deceased Charles Robert, son of Robert Waring Darwin of London, was in the year 1859 denounced by the Holy Office for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the species of living things that populate the Earth are mutable one into the other, in accordance with a law of chance and selection, and in defiance of the teaching of the divine and Holy Scripture that all species were created by the Lord God for His purpose, and having published a book entitled A Dialogue on the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Whereas he the said Darwin did fail to respect an injunction issued by the Holy Congregation held before his eminence the Lord Cardinal Joseph McInnery on 14 December 1859 to amend the said work to ensure an appropriate balance be given to argument and counter-argument concerning the false doctrine…”

The Commissary’s pronouncements went on and on, seeming to Mary to meld into a kind of repetition of the details of the previous session. It struck her how little thought had been applied to the material presented to this court, how little analysis had actually been done on the charges and the evidence, such as they were. The sheer anti-intellectual nature of the whole proceedings offended her.

And Alicia, kneeling, was rocking slightly, her face blanched, as if she might faint. The reality of the situation seemed to be dawning on her, Mary thought. But with a sinking heart she thought she saw a kind of stubborn determination on Alicia’s face.

At last Boniface seemed to be reaching the end of his peroration. “ Therefore, involving the most Holy name of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His most glorious Mother, ever Virgin Mary, and sitting as a tribunal with the advice and counsel of the Reverend Masters of Sacred Theology and Doctors of both laws, we say, pronounce, sentence and declare that he, Charles Darwin, had rendered himself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspect of heresy, having held and believed a doctrine that is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture, namely the doctrine known as “natural selection “. Consequently, he has incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated by the sacred Canons and all particular and general laws against such delinquents.

“For adhering to the doctrine of the Origin of Species, let Darwin be anathema.”

The chroniclers scribbled, excited; Mary imagined the telegraph wires buzzing the next day to bring the world the news that Charles Darwin had been formally, if posthumously, excommunicated.

But Alicia still knelt before the panel. The clerk came forward, and handed her a document. “A prepared statement,” Xavier whispered to Mary. “She’s not on trial herself, not under any suspicion. She’s here to represent Darwin’s legacy. All she has to do is read that out and she’ll be free to go.”

Alicia, kneeling, her voice small in the room before the rows of churchmen, began to read: “I, Alicia Rosemary Darwin, daughter of James Paul Darwin of Edinburgh, arraigned personally at this tribunal and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors General against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Republic…” She fell silent and read on rapidly. “You want me to say the Origin of Species was heretical. And to say my uncle deliberately defied the order to modify it to remove the heresy. And to say I and all my family abjure his memory and all his words for all time.”

Boniface Jones’ gravel-like voice sounded almost kind. “Just read it out, child.”

She put the papers down on the floor. “I will not.”

And this was the moment, Mary saw. The moment of defiance Anselm had coached into her.

There was uproar.

The chroniclers leaned forward, trying to hear, to be sure what Alicia had said. Anselm Fairweather was standing, the triumph barely disguised on his face. Even the cardinals were agitated, muttering to one another.

Only Boniface Jones sat silent and still, a rock in the storm of noise. Alicia continued to kneel, facing him.

When the noise subsided Boniface gestured at the clerk. “Don’t record this. Child — Alicia. You must understand. You have not been on trial here. The heresy was your distant uncle’s. But if you defy the will of the tribunal, if you refuse to read what has been given to you, then the crime becomes yours. By defending your uncle’s work you would become heretical yourself.”

“I don’t care.” She poked at the paper on the floor, pushing it away. “I won’t read this. My family doesn’t “abjure” Charles Darwin. We honour him. We’re not alone. Why, the Reverend Dawkins said only recently that natural selection is the best hypothesis anybody ever framed…”

Mary whispered to Xavier, “And I wonder who put that in her mouth?”

“You mean Anselm Fairweather.”

“You know about him?”

“He’s hardly delicate in his operations.”

“This is exactly what Anselm and his spooky friends want, isn’t it? To have this beautiful kid throw herself to the flames. Smart move. I can just imagine how this will play back home.”

Xavier frowned. “I can hear how angry you are. But there’s nothing you can do.”

“Isn’t there?”

“Mary, this is the Inquisition. You can’t defy it. We can only see how this is going to play out.”

His words decided her. “Like hell.” She stood up.

“What are you doing?”

“Injecting a little common sense from Terra Australis, that’s what.” Before Xavier could stop her she strode forward. She tried to look fearless, but it was physically difficult to walk past the angry faces of the cardinals, as if she was the focus of God’s wrath.

She reached the bench. Boniface Jones towered over her, his face like thunder. Alicia knelt on the floor, the pages of the statement scattered before her.

Anselm was hovering, desperate to approach. Mary pointed at him. “You — stay away.” She reached out a hand to Alicia. “Stand up, child. Enough’s enough.”

Bewildered, Alicia complied.

Mary glared up at Boniface. “May I address the bench?”

“Do I have a choice?” Boniface asked dryly.

Mary felt a flicker of hope at that hint of humour. Maybe Boniface would prove to be a realist. “I hope we all still have choices, Father. Look, I know I’m from the outside here. But maybe we can find a way to get out of this ridiculous situation with the minimum harm done to anybody — to this girl, to the Church.”

Alicia said, “ I don’t want your help. I don’t care what’s done to me—”

Mary faced her. “I know you never spoke to me before in your life. But just listen, if you don’t want to die in prison, serving the dreams of your so-called lover.”

Alicia frowned, and glanced at Anselm.

Mary turned to Boniface. “This is a spectacle. A stunt, so the Church can show its muscles. Even death doesn’t put an enemy out of your reach, right? So you dug up poor Darwin here and excommunicated him posthumously. But in your wisdom, and I use the word loosely, you decided even that wasn’t enough. You wanted more. But it’s all unravelling. Can’t you see, Commissary, if you prosecute this innocent kid for being loyal to her family, how much harm you will do to the Church’s image — even in your home territories, and certainly outside? You should come visit Cooktown some time. Imagine how this would play out there. If you punish this girl, you’ll be doing precisely what your enemies want you to do.”

“What would you have me do, Lector?”

“Your problem is with Darwin, not his remote grand-niece. If excommunication’s not enough, punish him further. There are precedents in history. In the year 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his various heresies. But the punishment didn’t end there. His bones were ground to dust! That showed him. So take Darwin’s mouldering corpse out of that box and hang it from Tower Bridge. Grind his bones and scatter them on the wind. Whatever — I’m sure your imagination can do better than mine in coming up with ways to debase a dead man. Then you’ll have the public spectacle you want, without the cruelty.”

Boniface considered, his eyes hooded over those flaps of blackness. “But the holy court heard the girl defy me.”

Xavier approached now. “I for one heard nothing, Holy Father. A cough, perhaps. I’m sure there is no reliable transcript.”

Boniface nodded. “Hmm. You should consider a career in politics, Lector Mason. Or the Church.”

“I don’t think so,” she said vehemently.

“I must consult my colleagues. You may withdraw.” He turned away, dismissing her.

Mary grabbed Alicia by the arm and walked her away from the bench. “Let’s get you out of here, kid.”

Anselm followed, agitated. “What did you do? Alicia, you need to go back — Lector, let her go—” He reached for Alicia.

Xavier said, “I wouldn’t advise it, Mr Fairweather.”

Mary hissed, “Back off, kid. You’ll get your martyr. Darwin’s as much an intellectual hero as Galileo ever was. How do you think it’s going to reflect on the Church to have his very bones abused in this grotesque way? You’ll get the reaction you want, the anger, the disgust — with any luck, the mockery. And, look — you heard me speak about what the Aboriginal astronomers have discovered, back home. The expansion of the universe, building on Galileo’s own work. The truth has a way of working its way out into the open. The Church has clung on for centuries, but its hold is weakening. You don’t need to sacrifice Alicia to the Inquisition.”

The blood had drained from Alicia’s face. Perhaps she saw it all for the first time.

But Anselm still faced her. “Come with me, please, Alicia.”

Alicia looked from Mary to Anselm. “Lector Mason — if I could stay with you — just until I get my thoughts sorted out—”

“Of course.”

Xavier leaned forward. “Go, Lyncean. And I’d advise you, boy, never to come to the attention of the Inquisition again.”

Anselm stared at the three of them. Then he turned and ran.

Mary looked at Xavier. “So how long have you known he was with this Academy?”

“A while.”

“You’re lenient.”

“He’s harmless. You know me by now, I prefer to avoid a fuss. The Church survived the fall of Rome, and Galileo and Darwin. It will survive a pipsqueak like Anselm Fairweather.”

“So will you help us get out of here?”

He glanced back at Boniface. “I suspect the court will find a way to close this hearing gracefully. Nothing more will be asked of Miss Darwin. Umm, her clothes—”

“I don’t care about my clothes,” Alicia said quickly. “I just want to get out of this place.”

“You and me both,” Mary said. “You can borrow my coat.” She started walking Alicia towards the door.

“Anselm set me up, didn’t he?”

“I’m afraid so, dear.”

“He said no harm would come to me if I refused to say anything bad about Charles Darwin. I believed him. Of course I did. He was my lawyer, and my, my—”

“Don’t think about it now. Come see my hotel room. It’s got a great view of the Place de Louis XVI. You can see right up Napoleon’s nose. You know, I’m thinking of a trip up to Edinburgh. You have family there? I hear the air is cleaner. Why don’t you come? And I’m thinking of booking an early berth back home. Maybe you can come visit.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? After all, your uncle Charles was a traveller, wasn’t he? Maybe it’s in the blood. I think you’d like Terra Australis…”

Talking quietly, following Xavier through the warren under St Paul’s, Mary led Alicia steadily towards the light of day.