The Trouble with Tom (22 page)

Well, at least this time he'd find a hero of his who was alive and still in one place. The other great influence on his life had proven rather more elusive. Conway had heard the stories about Tom Paine's bones mysteriously showing up at Chennell's shop over twenty years earlier. It seems people had been pocketing bits ofTom Paine at each step of the old patriot's journey. Before sending the bones back up from London to Normandy in 1833, Ben Tilly had quietly lifted the hard black lump that was once a brain, and wrapped his prize in a labeled piece of oilcloth. The bones, sent back to Surrey in a corn merchant's wagon, appear to have been plundered yet again by Chennell, who may have taken a few bones to store in a jar. And even with the bones returned to him years later by George West, Tilly kept Paine's brain separate from the box: when he lost the box to a debtor's auction in the 1850s,Tilly cheated the auctioneer out of his one cloth-wrapped souvenir.

Well, that was fair enough: it might be that the auctioneer was cheating too. The box sold at Richards the Auctioneer was an incomplete set, because the skull and a hand were secretly pieced out for separate sale. So the box that James Watson won that day was rather lighter than the one William Cobbett carried from the Liverpool Customs Yard. Even if Watson had tried to bury Paine in Kensal Green, he couldn't have buried allof Paine. The body was becoming impossibly scattered.

It was enough to give Moncure a headache. But the air here, in the countryside outside Bromley, was a good cordial to raise his spirits. Rising from his bed, he looked out his window to see Darwin already up and inspecting the flowers out in this garden. Conway could hardly help remarking to himself on the man's very form, as he bent down with his gray beard as if to talk with his flowers.

"All that phrenologists had written," he mused, "was feeble compared with a look at that big head with its wonderful dome."

The dissenting minister's laudatory sermons on evolution had earned him an invitation to Darwin's house, but he'd arrived here after Darwin's early bedtime. Now, crossing the garden, the two men finally met for the first time. A hermit thrush was singing loudly in a tree, and Conway paused to gaze at it. "He is justifying his hermit profession," he ventured, "by a Vedic hymn to the rising sun."

No, Darwin countered good-naturedly—
he is singing a canticle to his beloved
.

Their talk turned more serious as they strolled about the garden. Inspired by reading
The Origin of Species
weeks after it first came out, Conway had plunged himself into years of scientific study in London, mingling easily in the company of Lyell, Galton, and Huxley. Darwin had heard of Conway's resulting sermons, which lofted evolution as the great hope and wonder of the world, as the very essence of progress itself—and still entirely divine as well. As one paleontologist mused to Conway, "If you tell me of a mechanic who made a remarkable steam engine I may admire his skill; but if you tell me of a man who has made an engine which can of itself produce another engine, and then another, an engine from which is evolved an endless series of steadily self-improving engines, I might say that inventor was a god." But Darwin wouldn't quite say whether he agreed with Conway's friendly theological interpretation of his work, though he appreciated its intent. While denying that his theory attacked religion, in private he was less sure of just how viable religion had been left in the wake of his work, and-unknown to Conway or nearly anyone else—his former piety had long drifted into a realm of agnostic doubts.

I stop in front of Darwin's laboratory. It's a formality, really: nature was his laboratory, and his laboratory was nature. You can step over the stone threshold from one to the other, but there was no real boundary at all.

Over breakfast they read the letters for the day. There were always letters, and his daughters had to sort the ones from friends from the great mass sent by strangers. It still amused Darwin's family that he never quite grasped just how famous he'd become. His sister confided to Moncure that, after the Prime Minister came by to visit one day, Darwin was left astounded. "To think of such a great man coming to see me!" he'd kept exclaiming afterward. But the letters he received were often of a humbler sort: rural gardeners writing about a new variety of bean they thought they'd developed. A man writing in with what he clearly believed to be important observations on pigeons. An unlettered farmer excited over his dog, who—evolving into a more intelligent being, clearly—seemed to know
exactly
when his master was about to take him outside for a walk. Darwin's family laughed over the well-meaning but crude letters, but the old scientist turned thoughtful as he dispatched the remains of his breakfast.

"Let them all be pleasantly answered," he said. "It is something to have people observing the things in their gardens and backyards."

As I walk out of Darwin's backyard, nobody seems to be observing
me
very much: the road back down to the village bus stop has almost no verge, so that Rovers and Renaults keep whistling past just inches away, sending me diving into the hedges. Overhead, every few minutes, a plane distantly rumbles up a steep angle of ascent as it leaves London. But then—improbably—one side of the road opens up into a glorious vision of old England. A manor, a blue sky, a line of trees. A woman on horseback clops by behind me, and suddenly there are no cars visible anywhere, no planes overhead: for a moment, the past is visible not in the mute sepia of antiquity, but in the color and living silence of actual being.

Trowmer Lodge is an ancient dwelling, so much so that it has acquired at least three different spellings—Troumer, Trowmer, and Tromer. It is set behind struck-off flint walls and a drained fishpond now filled in with lush green grass and the shade of a weeping willow. An actual Troumer family lived here from at least the 1300s, and held on to their home for centuries until the reign of Henry VIII. By 1868 Darwin's daughter Elizabeth owned the house, and as Moncure Conway walked past Trowmer Lodge, he didn't notice the tenant to whom Elizabeth had rented the house. Within was a fellow man of the cloth—one that he in fact already knew.

The Reverend Robert Ainslie was a respectable fellow, as orthodox in his belief as Conway was liberal; the two men had met years before, soon after Conway arrived in England. By then Ainslie had led a series of London lectures against "Infidel Socialism," and written pamphlets bearing titles like
Is There a God?
(In case you were wondering, apparently the answer is: yes.) But amid his old Hebrew and Latin books, his volumes of theology and history, something rather more curious sat in Ainslie's study—and had been sitting there for twenty years when Conway walked right past his house completely unaware.

I walk onward, my gaze following the stolid house in an arc as it moves out of sight. A chance comment by Elizabeth or Charles on the tenant, and Conway would have sat up and taken note: he always stopped off to visit other clergymen. Indeed, he generally found that even the most conservative ministers gave him the politest reception of all the people he met when traveling. Yes: he
could
have been invited inside, had a cup of tea in that very study where . . .

Ah, but chance did not work that way.

The road comes to a T in front of an old chapel. St. Mary's is the end of the line: the bus into Bromley terminates at this end, making its turnaround in front of a churchyard that forms the very final stop indeed for town residents. The church, like everything else around here, is built of handsome chunks of flint, and surrounding it are the wind-blasted and lichen-covered stubs of old tombstones. I lean down to read one. It is for James Fontaine, a minister who died at the age of twenty soon after preaching a sermon titled "In the Midst of Life We Are in Death." Very astute of him, if rather more astute than he might have hoped.
Thursday saw him cheerful and grateful for health,
the stone's inscription notes.
August 6th,
1825,
a pale corpse.

Charles Darwin's wife Emma is buried here, as is his brother Erasmus. So are Charles's faithful house servants of thirty-six years, Joseph and Eliza Parslow. But . . .
Charles
is not here. This is the churchyard where Darwin himself wished to be buried, and in as modest a casket and simple a ceremony as possible. It didn't happen. The government, pleading national pride with Darwin's family, buried him in Westminster Abbey in a blazingly sumptuous coffin. And so now instead of voyaging through eternity with his wife by his side, his closest company, within whispering distance of him below the ground, is Sir Isaac Newton. Somehow it seems unsurprising by now: for once dead, we no longer belong to ourselves. It is the final loss of control.

I'm the only person to board the bus, and it roars me back toward my London-bound train, its silence punctuated only by an occasional immense sneeze from the burly driver. We pass the vast fields of nature that Darwin loved so well: shady trees, grazing cows, and the ripe smell of manure in the air. As I settle in to peruse through some old maps and directories I picked up back in Guildford, back where I was searching for Chennell's house, a notation on one catches my eye: 'The High Street was renumbered in 1959," it says, and . . .
Dammit.
I pore over a 1739 merchant directory and map, and—for chrissake—the numbers
are
all different. I trace my thumb over the old numbering of the municipal lots to a notation of 132, the location of a fruiterer. So 130, where Chennell lived? That used to be on the
other
side of Tunsgate.

The perfume shop.

As the cows look up with bored eyes at our passing bus, with nobody but me to hear, I laugh incredulously. It's perfect. I'd done exactly what everyone else has ever done. I walked right through a resting place of Paine's bones without realizing it at all.

Since you already know the rules of Mornington Crescent game, I won't bore you with them here. But, needless to say, I have studied them deeply: I have examined the routes of Victorian hansom drivers, read the Welsh-language texts on the Double-Reverse Stratagem, and in the Public Records Office I found the first known description of Trumpington's Gambit scrawled into the margins of a torn-out page of
Beeton's Christmas Annual
for 1889. The curious thing about the latter text is that . . .

Sorry? You haven't heard the rules?

"Mind the gap," the tunnel scolds.

The elevator begins the long ascent to the surface. Mornington Crescent is one of the deeper tube stations in London; you wouldn't want to install escalators here. In fact, once the elevators broke down in the early 1990s, they closed the place for five years and almost shut it down for good. For decades beforehand, many trains wouldn't even stop here: nobody ever much uses this station. True, it's got a rather lovely glazed terra-cotta building atop it, the inspiration for the 1920s comic song "The Night I Appeared As Macbeth":

The audience yelled 'You're sublime!"

They made me a present of Mornington Crescent

They threw it one brick at a time.

The bricks are all back in place, the station very nicely restored—and still nobody much uses it. I emerge into daylight and almost immediately trip up: pavers are scattered everywhere, along with sawhorses and taped-off areas, all haphazardly arranged as if a local drunk stumbling out of the Mornington Arms had been put in charge of the sidewalk repairs.

And out here is where Conway stood, wondering—
where? Where is he?

Days after burying James Watson in 1874, Conway placed a notice in the
National Reformer
asking for any information from readers about Paine's remains. Watson
had
them, true, but the question of whether he'd buried Paine, and that jar ofbones sighted in Guildford in 1849 . . .well, it was all very confusing. The mystery only deepened when a minister in Manchesterwrote to Conway and not only claimed to have seen the revolutionary's skeleton, but also spoke ofburying it.

This was hardly an idle claim, for it came from Alexander Gordon, who along with Conway was one of the most prominent Unitarian ministers in the country. It's not hard to see how Paine held an interest for him. Gordon was a well-regarded historian of religious dissent, and not long before writing Conway, he'd already come to notice for his sensational discovery of the continuing existence of the Muggletonians. A religious sect as whimsical sounding in its theology as in its name, the Muggletonians were founded by two London tailors in the 1640s, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton. They believed they were living in end times, but of an exceedingly curious sort: namely that they, when not busy taking up people's trousers, were endowed with God-like powers—not least because God himself no longer cared about the Earth and wouldn't interfere. Their God lived six miles above the ground, in a realm of planets and stars that were actually exceedingly small: in fact, what we perceived in the sky was their
actual size.

One can only imagine Gordon's amazement when he stumbled upon a Muggletonian meeting in 1860. It was a veritable religious version of The Lost World: the sect was not even thought to exist anymore. And yet, sure enough, there they were: in fact, the members had been creating some very lovely Muggletonian celestial maps over the last few decades. Their utter obscurity makes sense when you realize that, almost alone among every religious sect ever known, the Muggletonians had no interest in proselytizing. They were the world's laziest cult, and assumed that anyone meant to join them would eventually find them somehow. Not that they'd have been easy to find. The Muggletonians did not believe in churches: they liked to hold their meetings in taverns.

After getting his head around a Muggletonian meeting, encountering a boxful of Tom Paine must have seemed downright normal to Gordon. And if it took him a few years to get around to burying them, well, he was certainly already busy with other projects as it was. Gordon was one of the most prolific contributors to that monument of Victorian historical reference, the
Dictionary of National Biography
, writing a staggering 699 entries for it. But the voluble minister turned very quiet when pressed for any further details about Paine, even when asked by a colleague like Conway. Perhaps, Conway theorized, Gordon had buried the remains near those of Paine's parents at Thetford. But perhaps not. It
sounded
like Gordon had buried Paine, but as Conway noted, "that gentleman gave no further particulars."