For If It Prosper

© 1997 Stephen Hunt (UK)

Sample Chapters: Part 3

Print this one out? Approx 3 pages of A4 text

Kent's green hills and hedgerows had not escaped been covered by a dusting of snow during the night, a pristine landscape where sunlight sparkled off a plain of silver pinheads.

 The village of Downe rested among Kent's orchards, bare branches rustling shiftlessly for the first fingers of spring. As D'Corsair's hired chaise approached Downe House with Terrillion's daughter beside him, he saw the manor house was of a style that befitted Darwin's ascendant position among the new scientific community. Not that money would have posed a problem. Darwin's wife had been a Wedgewood before her betrothal. The prosperous family of pottery magnates could have afforded a dowry of a dozen manors of Downe House's quality without missing a single shilling from their coffers.

 With an underplayed beauty typical to English roses, Mrs Darwin came out to greet the chaise as it clattered up the house's grounds, her hair tied German style in twin buns.

 "Delphine," Mrs Darwin cried, lifting her petticoats to graze past the horses. "My dear little darling. How have you been coping since the funeral? Such a terrible turn of fortune, it's done Charles sickness no end of distress after hearing what happened to your father."

 There were tears in Delphine's eyes. "I know, every day's been ghastly since it happened. I can hardly bear to stay in the house sometimes."

 Mrs Darwin seemed to see D'Corsair for the first time. "And this must be the police officer you telegraphed us about. Anything that we may do to assist you, Inspector."

 D'Corsair passed down the boxes containing the dead Belgian's scientific legacy to a footman. "I trust it won't be inconveniencing your husband if I speak to him about Professor Terrillion's work. The Yard have to be as thorough as possible in such matters."

 "Completeness of approach is a discipline you will find Mr Darwin values equally, being a scientist, Inspector."

 "Then we will have much in common, I am sure."

 "Are you with Scotland Yard's Department of Detectives, Inspector? Sir Richard was dining with us at the beginning of the New Year, he said there was pressure to increase your department to deal with those rascals in the Fenian movement."

 "I work in something of a specialist area, Mrs Darwin. But you can rest assured that the whole resources of the force will be mobilised, if that is what it takes to bring the Professor's murderers to book."

 "I was certain it would be no other way. I know Professor Terrillion may not have had the fortune to be born on our fair shores, but he had many well-placed friends in England, and his loss is a loss which strikes straight at the very heart of our own nation's scientific endeavours. I shall miss his grace and wit greatly."

 "I look forward to the opportunity to discuss the Professors friends later, Mrs Darwin."

 The woman led them up the manor house's sweeping steps, two retainers following behind with the cases. "Henry will show you to Mr Dawin's rooms, Inspector. Your train timetable permitting, I would be offended If you do not stay for lunch."

 "How could I offend such a gracious host? I am sure the Yard will not begrudge me an hour or two to sample Downe House's hospitality."

 Mrs Darwin watched as her steward led D'Corsair around the side of the house. "I venture that many of the Hampstead ladies might pay for their own houses to be broken into for the chance to be interviewed by the Inspector."

 Delphine nodded. "It's foolish, Emma, but I feel I have known him far longer than a few days. It's almost like "

 "Delphine?"

 "Oh, I was going to say it was like when I was on expedition with papa, and he would sit guard outside the tent with his rifle. You knew there was nothing in the world capable of reaching out to hurt you."

 Mrs Darwin pulled out a handkerchief for her young friend. "My poor darling Delphine. Come inside, Mrs Trafford has the kettle on and nothing affords to affliction like a good cup of her brew."

On the hillsides above Down House, the watcher laid his brass telescope onto the grass, picking up a canteen of beer from his side for a sly swig

 "Did you get a look at the driver's face, Sheenan?"

 "No," the observer said to the female at his side. "The bugger had his back to me. But it was the professor's girl alright."

 "They're going to want her taken care of, you can be sure of that." The woman spoke with a soft French-American accent, her sensual tone at odds with the murder in the words.

 The man called Sheenan grimaced. "Whatever the professor's daughter knows, Madeleine, the police knows as well. And there's nothing in those trunks that'll be of use to our ailing friend down there. I searched Terrillion's study from top to bottom, took everything that was ours."

 "All the same, they're going to want her silenced," said the woman.

 A third man emerged out of the trees, a double-barrelled pistol in his hand. "I can kill them both on the train. Easy as anything, sitting down in a carriage. Like shooting parrots in a cage."

 "It's a bad business, so it is, killing girls."

 "Liberty, equality, fraternity," said the woman. "Particularly the equality. If your catholicism is making you squeamish, Sheenan, I'll do the bitch for you. How many girls die are worked to death in mills for people like that? She deserves to die."

 The man with the pistol tucked the gun in his belt. "I got two boys waiting for orders down there. I say we do them on the train."

 "Ah, you'd kill your own grandmother for a half-penny," said Sheenan. "You're with me, Madeleine. We'll go back and get orders on this."

 "You do that," spat the man with the gun. "But if I don't hear from you by the time the girl leaves, she's going to be joining her dada, you hear me? You're not in the Ribbonmen now, paddy. We don't do People's Courts for the landowners in England. Just a length of rope or sharp steel is good enough for the toffs here."

 "Good enough, is it? You sit tight here, boy. We'll be back before you know it."

Darwin's bedroom had been combined with his study as a result of his intermittent convalescence, the windows opening up to the wide bright vista of the house's gardens. A roaring blaze had been stoked in the room's fireplace and Charles Darwin lay under the blankets in a brown dressing gown, two hounds at his feet as if he were a viking warlord waiting on a flight of valkyries.

 Darwin glanced up from the tome he was reading. "So, Emma's policeman. Come in, young chap."

 D'Corsair closed the door. "Mr Darwin, my apologies on having to intrude on your bed."

 "My fever is fading; I expect it will be gone by the end of the month. An occupational hazard, I fear. But I am lucky, two of the Royal Society chaps that were with me at Valdivia are dead now, poor Mackenzie and Captain Laurie. There are more diseases in the South Americas than people to carry them."

 "Two deceased?" D'Corsair sat on a chair by the scientist's bed. "You must have hardy bones, sir."

 "That I do, sir. And my work keeps me alive. No damn exotic animalcule is going to lay me low before my time, not while I can still grip a pen and keep those fossils back in London from letting science become the sole preserve of the Prussian Academy and Britain's legions of canting churchmen."

 "Your work, and that of Professor Terrillion."

 "Alphonse's work, yes. It's a dashed strange business, his murder."

 "What strikes you as unusual about it?"

 "Unusual, Inspector? That it should have happened at all! Our profession is often more heated than an outsider like yourself might appreciate, the smallest, most trivial difference in published opinion can lead life-long friends to ostracise each other for years, but we are not known for resorting to murder. Godfathers, if we were I would no doubt have been assassinated a thousand times over by now."

 "You are aware of the claims the Professor made before his death? About anarchist plots, your colleagues ostracism of him over his wild claims of lost lands."

 "Your latter point, refers, I trust, to his search for the remains of Atlantis. That was a long-standing obsession with Alphonse. As to his anarchist cabal, that was a more recent whimsy, he only confided to me about it when we last dined ­ that would have been Boxing Day."

 "You didn't take his claims seriously?"

 "The line between genius and madness is sometimes thin enough to be stretched into abstraction, Inspector. I knew Alphonse had fallen in with some rough sorts on his last expedition, sailors who had only accepted service as an alternative to less pleasant tenure in a House of Correction. My speculation was that long nights of supper-table conversation with those rapscallions led on to the normal prattle about burning judges' homes and police stations and the fun to be had in stealing the queen's plate and silver. It's easily enough done on board a ship, and Alphonse's famous imagination would have been quick to leap in, ascribing treason to every word, gesture and newspaper article he saw afterwards. But I was disturbed to see an unpleasant taint of paranoia creeping into Alphonse's fantasies, he was terrified. It was always his way, bringing passion to every fad passing through the nation: assembling bones from the monstrous reptiles, locating the grave of King Arthur or finding the lost treasure of El Dorado. But now from the Times, I see his imagination seems to have sporned a terrible legacy; it's as if Alphonse's troubled spectre has returned to seek revenge on his sceptics."

 D'Corsair drew the chair closer. "Whatever else existed in the Professor's imagination, the Fraternity of Redressors is sadly not among them. What was his last project, Mr Darwin?"

 Darwin smiled. "His last and only project. He was determined to discover Atlantis."

 "And Terrillion was a zoologist?"

 "It was zoology that first drew his attention to the myth of Atlantis. We were in Peru together. He had gone into retirement after his wife died and it had taken many years of coaxing for me to convince him to come on expedition with me. Yes, as I recall, we were travelling over the Nazca desert when we came across huge lines that looked to be of near prehistoric origin. Imagine our astonishment; this dry, windless, rocky place, and here were these strange tracks thousands of feet long. The lines seemed totally purposeless at first as we attempted to follow them on foot, but that conclusion made no sense. No race of ancients would labour so long on something without design ­ you might recall our own henges, and the theories that they were raised as a calender of astral movements. Everything has a purpose, albeit out of the scope of significance of our modern experience.

 "It was then an American army officer in our party suggested inflating a scout balloon he was transporting for his government. He recalled his own visit to England, the famous chalk man of the Kent downs which had so impressed him at the time with our predecessors' ingenuity. Might not these lines be something similar? His intuition proved to be first-rate."

 "The lines were intentional markings?" D'Corsair asked.

 "Oh yes. Once we were raised in the air the intention of their design became very clear, the volcanic dirt of the region had been scratched away into monkeys, sea creatures, birds, patterns of the constellations, all manner of marvels. It was only when Alphonse took his turn in the balloon that he pointed out the spider that had been cut out is to be found exclusively in the Amazon ­ far on the other side of the Andes! Scouring the area, we began to discover more about the lines; local tribes had references to them that predated the Inca people by many hundreds of years, and their Sun Kings had no talent for such clever work."

 "Is there not a fault in your reasoning?" D'Corsair asked. "If the drawings could only be viewed from the air by your party, then surely they could only be constructed and viewed by their creators in the same manner?"

 Darwin smiled. "Now that's the mystery of it, isn't it, Inspector. If we discount the possibility that distant ancestors of the Montpellier brothers lived in Peru, who did such work, and in what manner? This was the question which struck to the heart of what was fast becoming a mania for Alphonse."

 "Atlantis."

 "Yes, Atlantis. We diverted our travels to visit dozens of Indian villages, and everywhere we went we heard the same myth; a blue-eyed white man much resembling the prophet Moses in description had sailed across from a land across the sea bringing strange learnings and techniques of engineering, accompanied by a crew of white-robed giants. The savages called him Viracocha. Bolivia, Peru, the man travelled everywhere working miracles, preaching peace and tolerance in the manner of the first Christians."

 "A Greek explorer perhaps, a sailor blown far off course in the manner of Jason and the Argonauts?"

 "A possibility," said Darwin, scratching at his own white beard. "But I think not. This legend dates back earlier than Christ, earlier than Sparta, Athens and Alexander. It is their continent's Old Testament, the stuff of gods and demi-gods. Then there are the other things Alphonse found in South America. After visiting Nazca, we decided to split the party. I took the majority of the company onto Valdivia as planned, where the cursed fever you can see me with laid us low. The Professor and the American, however, led the Washington contingent across the Andes looking for more signs of the prophet Viracocha."

 "They found them?"

 "That they did, Inspector. They followed the tales of one of the original Spanish explorers, Garcilaso de la Vega, right up to the gates of the ancient city of Sacsayhuaman. Sacsayhuaman is a mountain city built for titans, stone blocks that weigh up to 300 Imperial tons, each perfectly cut and placed. I once consulted Isambard Kingdom Brunel about how he might go about constructing such a place. His answer was that he couldn't, not with all the cranes and steam lifts in England."

 "Would Brunel say the same about the Great Pyramid?"

 "Oh, I don't underestimate the wit of any native people, Mr D'Corsair. I've seen New Zealand medicine-men cure fatal infections of the kidneys with herbs and turtle juice, Fiji islanders dive for an hour breathing only out of a sack of shells. But this is beyond the wit of the natives of the South Americas. The conquistadors discovered the ruins of a road over 14,000 miles long, tunnels bored through mountains. It was the work of a lost civilisation, of that I have no doubt."

 "The Professor believed it to be Atlantis?"

 "Alphonse found a copy of an ancient Inca map that indicated the prophet Viracocha's home was a landmass in the middle of the Atlantic, along the tropic of Capricorn. Unfortunately for the force of his case, the map was lost when his steamer sunk along the Amazon, with much else his party had collected on their journey. The position of the landmass does correspond to the legend of Atlantis as passed down to us by the Greeks. And if the island was destroyed though volcanic activity, Atlantean survivors could have struck out for the Americas, perhaps Egypt too, the people of the Nile have myths incredibly similar to that of Viracocha."

 D'Corsair shook his head, perplexed. "But how could archeological investigations lead to Terrillion's death at the hands of British radicals? Where is the link?"

 "The link? There is none, Inspector. I can only think that the whimsy which led Alphonse to believe he could discover a lost civilisation on the floor of the Atlantic somehow attracted the flighty minds of the revolutionaries to him. Anyone who thinks our people will put up with the arbitrary rule of the Parisian Terror does not know this nation's true heart."

 "When I interviewed the civil servant who put us on to the Professor, he mentioned something about Terrillion travelling to the South Pole."

"He did. That was Alphonse's last expedition and an ill-starred journey it developed into too. I understand he was cut off on the plains after getting separated in a snow storm. The rest of the expedition found him nearly dead of cold and his sanity had started to drift with the terrible loneliness of the place. His instincts were no longer reliable, he should have never been selected to go on the team by those fools! But he was determined. Do you recall the story of the mammoth preserved in Siberian ice? Alphonse thought he might find a ship full of frozen Atlantean refugees in Antarctica ­ he became a laughing stock among the British Society. The expedition was a serious endeavour to bring back Arctic fauna and flora, and he was lowering its tone to low farce."

 "The trip's sponsorship?"

 "Private, I believe. It was led by the Ackland brothers, Charles and Edward. Specialists in the field, they own the ice-breaker Eurydice. They may be able to tell you more of how the Professor spent his final year."

 "I trust so. A friend of mine recently suggested to me there is more to this affair than meets the eye, and his qualifications in such matters are impeccable."

 "Yes, it's singularly bizarre. But then you're not a run-of-the-mill policeman, are you?"

 "Mr Darwin?"

 The scientist slipped his book onto the cabinet beside him. "If asked you to show me your badge, would I be off the mark in wagering it would have a trident stamped on it?"

 "A trident ­ the Thames Marine Division perhaps?"

 Darwin smiled. "And no doubt the unicorn stands for the Bow Street Horse Patrol. I heard rumours people like you existed, lad. Never expected to see one in Downe, though."

 "If it's a threat to the state, justice can even find its way to Kent, Mr Darwin."

 "Justice, is it now? Are you familiar with the poetry of John Harington, Inspector?"

 "I fear I studied Greek history, not Elizabethan."

 "For if it prosper, none dare call it treason. You might want to give some thought to just who it is that decides which man is a threat to the state and which man is not. Otherwise our green and pleasant land might yet wake up one fine moring and find it is living under the heel of a Tsar, or worse, a Pope."

 The door opened behind them, a loud rumbling Scottish voice filling the room. "Lunch is ready for you, sir."

 "I will take it here, my boy. Inspector, allow me to introduce you to George Edward Challenger, recently come down from Edinburgh University. A very able graduate whom I have promised to take on my next trip to South America ­ after my fever passes, of course. He has kindly been acting as my assistant until such time as I am returned to full health."

 Turning, D'Corsair found himself facing a great bull of man, and although in his youth already sporting a massive spade-shaped beard as dark as burning pitch, hands hairy enough to pass for a gorilla's. It was as if having been riduled by Christianity for his heretical theories, Darwin had had gone out of his way to aquire an assistant posessing a bestial combination of simian features and strength. He by far was the largest figure D'Corsair had ever encountered, a mountain of sinew born out of time, a barbarian who would have been better matched to life in the gladiator's sand, or shaking some huge claymore at red-coated English border barons.

 "Master George will see you to the table, Inspector. The very best of luck in bagging Alphonse's damn killers. He deserved better than they gave him."

 D'Corsair nodded to the old scientist and shut the door.

 "This way, Inspector."

 "Challenger? Would you be aquainted with a Colonel Challenger?" D'Corsair asked. "Once of the Coldstreams second foot."

 "Indeed, I am, Inspector," the youth almost bellowed, his natural voice set at a level suggesting an upbringing among a troop of parade sergeants. "He is my uncle, and I his nephew. Have you seen service, sir?"

 "Briefly, sir," said D'Corsair. "Very briefly."

 "The regiments are filled with vile, crawling rascals, sir! They had the temerity to cashier my uncle for cowardice ­ he, the most courageous soul to pick up a sabre for crown and country. Why, they should have made him a Field Marshal, instead the thundering fools gave him the order of the boot after Alma! Those devils will get no more Challenger blood from us in the ranks. If we ever get called upon to serve, it'll be to the damned navy we go, the sons of Nelson and Drake."

 D'Corsair nodded. "Yes, I heard of the court martial. The Crimea broke the reputation of many a good soldier when the press demanded the criticisms of the campaign be found a home."

 "The press," Challenger growled, "if there's any scoundrels more ill-fitted to the estate of modern civillisation than the war office, it's that ugly pack of howling two-faced hyenas. It beggars belief that no crowd of citizens wronged by scurrilous barbs have yet taken it to heart to fire their dens with a mind to pursuing the ink-stained blackards down Fleet Street, rope in hand."

 "From your response, I understand you would be at the head of the mob?"

 "Without a second thought," said Challenger. "I would stretch them from the Palace to St Pauls as a signal to good people about what happens to a nation when it lets its heart be swayed by impertinent, intrusive scribblers with no thought on their mind but to fill their pockets through the trade of lies."

 Light filled Downe House's breakfast room, flooding in through wide tall windows built in the French manner, Mrs Darwin and Delphine already seated as the staff bustled around her, obviously fond of the Professor's daughter.

 "Inspector," Mrs Darwin said. "Was my husband as helpful as you hoped?"

 "More than helpful," D'Corsair said, Challenger taking the seat next to him. "Finding the truth in such circumstances is like following the weave of a coat ­ you must trace as many threads as possible before the design of the pattern may be descried."

 "A dark design indeed," said Challenger, "with such a wicked business as the taking of a human life. And doubly pernicious when the life in question is of Professor Terillion's calibre."

That's if for the sample, folks!

These two novels are still unpublished. Interested publishers can contact my agent, Maggie Noagh, to bid for these (same agent who represents Stephen Baxter etc).

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