This Thing Of Darkness (110 page)

Thick black smoke pumping from its engine, its brake-men clinging to their posts on the carriage-tops, the locomotive thundered into the cut at Norwood and came hissing to a stop at Crystal Palace station. Crowds of clamorous drunks emptied out of the third-class carriages, one pausing to be sick on the platform. FitzRoy waited for the throng to clear, before hauling himself wearily up the interminable staircase that zigzagged its way to street level. There were no hansoms remaining beneath the station’s wrought-iron portico, so he trudged back up Anerley Road, the mud piling up against his boots, and into the gloom of Church Road, until at last he reached the stolid, semi-detached house that had become his home. Maria was waiting up for him, a lantern in one hand - the gaslight from the chandelier was so feeble, it could barely penetrate the darkness - and her face revealed both relief and concern as she came to meet him in the hallway. ‘Is everything all right, Mr FitzRoy? Did you have an eventful day at work?’

‘Yes, thank you, Mrs FitzRoy. Everything is fine. I had a really quite uneventful day at work. There is little I can tell you about my day at all.’

He put the little travelling clock down on the hall table, and they went upstairs to bed.

FitzRoy was woken the following morning by the sound of the grandfather clock downstairs striking six. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom and his mind struggled to order its surroundings, Maria too stirred.

‘Is the maid not late in calling us?’ he murmured.

‘It is Sunday, dearest,’ she replied, without opening her eyes. ‘There is no hurry for breakfast today.’

She rolled over, and he shut his eyes once more. As he lay motionless in the funereal dark, the events of the previous day reminded him coldly of their existence. He should, perhaps, have felt agitation or even despair, but he did not; instead, he felt only calm. He may even have drifted in and out of consciousness, for it barely seemed a whole hour before the clock struck seven. Hetty called them about twenty minutes after that, and he propped himself up on one elbow.

‘My dearest?’

‘Mmm?’ purred his wife drowsily, from somewhere beneath the covers.

‘Since the day we married, you have been the most loyal, devoted and thoughtful companion that any man could have wished for. I am eternally grateful to you for all the kindness that you have shown me. I am only sorry that I have not been as good a husband as you have deserved.’

‘Mmm,’ demurred Maria, her fingers stretching out to intertwine with his.

‘Thank you, my dear, for everything.’

Gently extricating his hand, he rose and went into the little bedroom where Laura slept, undisturbed by chiming clocks and the calls of servants. He kissed his daughter’s forehead once, then passed into his dressing room and locked the door. A basinful of water had been poured out; all was ready for his morning shave. A clean ewer had been placed atop the washing stand, and his razor lay neatly parallel to the marble splashboard. He removed it from its leather case, unfolded it and inspected the blade, as he did every morning, for sharpness. Then he plunged his hands into the ice-cold water, pausing only momentarily to observe how pallid his skin became, how deathly white viewed through the prism of clear liquid. He thought then of Edward Hellyer, his moonstone face so peaceful amid the drifting kelp. Did God, he wondered, punish those poor souls who had seen fit to disobey a higher authority, even if theirs was a sincere and considered deed? Was it an act of bravery to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or an act of weakness? He brought up two freezing handfuls and splashed his face, trying to clear his mind. He wanted his thoughts to be as lucid as possible, his equilibrium utterly undisturbed.

He attempted to examine himself inwardly, scanning the cognitive landscape for signs of irregularity. Everything was fine, of course. He had learned long ago that the mere process of worrying about mental instability was in itself a sure guarantee that none was present. Only when he allowed himself to become complacent did his condition steal up unawares, and complacency turn to fatal, misdirected certainty. This morning, he realized, he was barely certain of anything any more.

He inspected himself in the looking-glass, embedded so solidly in its scrolled and crested mahogany frame above the splashboard. At the centre of the bevelled rectangle he could see a drawn, grey-haired man staring back at him, a few weeks short of his sixtieth birthday, a lifetime of punishing, vigorous, self-imposed toil written into his features. He had lived his life long enough, he realized, to begin feeling the disappointment wrought by change.
A common illusion, that softens the prick of death.
Old men, wearied at the end of their lives, often took comfort from this: how much easier to quit the world if you feel that you no longer quite belong to it? But was he in need of comfort? No. He was braver than that.

He had been born into another century, almost; a world of coaching inns and sailpower, in which it had taken days, not hours, to travel from London to the coast. Now man had become stupendously powerful, not individually but collectively, and had concertedly begun to assault the bastions of nature. The journey to the coast took just two hours by steam train. News from America reached London in a matter of minutes. Everything had been mechanized, from death itself to the production of undergarments. Man had begun to dismantle the wilderness, recording and cataloguing its constituent parts, eradicating his fear of the unknown, and in doing so had set himself against God. He, Robert FitzRoy, had connived in this process as much as anyone; but even though he had helped to create it, this was no longer his world.

Some things, at least, had not changed. The endless struggle of good against evil still raged. God’s love was still pitted against greed, hatred and selfishness. A lifetime on, and Trafalgar Square was still not completed. For all the changes that advancing knowledge had wrought, man was still, at heart, the same creature he always had been, lazy, venal, cunning, thoughtless and self-seeking. Perhaps, then, it was not man that had changed, not society even, but FitzRoy himself. Yes, that was it. It was he, and not the world, that had changed. He no longer believed. Oh, he still believed in God, but he was no longer sure that there was any point in trying to hold back humanity’s blind march towards the inextricably linked goals of self-advancement and self-destruction. He no longer believed that one man could make a difference. Was that what Captain Stokes had realized, all those years ago, on a freezing, pebbly beach at Port Famine? Or had the race been to the strong, and Stokes merely a weakling?

When I was young,
thought FitzRoy,
I was a voyager, traversing unknown seas, the master of my own destiny. The wind and the waves may have dashed themselves, against me, but I fought through to discover new shores and unknown worlds. Then I became part of a machine, a mere cog in a wheel. They took away my liberty, my independence. But at least my toil served to smooth the way for other travellers, who followed in my footsteps. Now, they have removed even that small comfort from me. The solution is clear. I must travel to where they cannot reach me. I must voyage once more, to the furthest shore. I must undertake the ultimate journey. A journey without maps.

He had not been given permission to undertake such a journey, of course. Technically speaking, it would be a sin to go. Once he had taken his leave, there could be no turning back. Once he had arrived, his only chance of redemption would be to throw himself upon the retrospective mercy of a higher authority. Would Mary be waiting for him there, he wondered, wreathed in a golden light on that distant shore? Would Jemmy be there too, and Musters and Hellyer, and his father, and old Skyring, and dear Johnny Wickham? Or was Darwin right? Was he just another monkey, too highly developed for his own good? There was only one way to find out.

The razor felt cold against his throat.

 

 

 

 

Robert FitzRoy was buried at All Saints Church, Upper Norwood, on 6 May 1865. His suicide was reported in the newspapers, but was largely eclipsed as a news event by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The funeral was a quiet family affair. All the surviving officers of the Beagle, with whom (Sulivan excepted) he had long ago lost touch, had written to the Statical Department of the Board of Trade asking to attend but, sadly, as the office had been closed down, their letters remained unanswered. By coincidence, however, Sulivan and Babington went into the office on the day before the funeral to clear away their papers, just as Maria FitzRoy’s brothers arrived to collect her husband’s belongings. As a consequence, the pair received a last-minute invitation and travelled down to Norwood to attend the ceremony. Sulivan later sent Darwin a letter, relating how a grief-stricken Maria FitzRoy had collapsed at the graveside. All FitzRoy’s former crew members were united in their sorrow; the regret expressed by Darwin, although undoubtedly sincere, was noticeably more muted.

Robert FitzRoy, it transpired, was utterly bankrupt. He had expended his entire fortune, over £6000 (equivalent to more than £400,000 in today’s money), in subsidizing the public purse for the benefit of others. When this came to light, Sulivan inaugurated the Admiral FitzRoy Testimonial Fund, to save Maria and Laura from destitution, and succeeded in persuading the government to pay back £3000 of the money FitzRoy had laid out. Darwin contributed a further
£
100. Queen Victoria, perhaps in gratitude for all those private weather forecasts, gave Mrs FitzRoy the use of a grace and favour apartment at Hampton Court Palace. She died there, peacefully, in December 1889.

After FitzRoy’s death, his storm warning and weather forecasting apparatus was broken up. His drums and cones were taken into storage, his electric telegraph lines ripped apart. Despite an anguished letter of protest from his wife, Augustus Smith MP more or less gloated over FitzRoy’s death in the House of Commons. Just as other European countries and the United States took up weather forecasting in earnest, political pressure exerted by those who stood to benefit financially saw the science of meteorology damned in Britain, the country of its birth, as a nonsense. The fishing-fleet owners, however, had reckoned without the ordinary sailors and fishermen to whom FitzRoy had been a hero. Such was the outcry at the scrapping of his storm warnings that two years later, in 1867, his network was reinstated. Within ten years, daily weather forecasts had made a belated reappearance.

In meteorological terms, FitzRoy had been a man quite astonishingly ahead of his time. Even today, the connection he made between sunspots and weather patterns continues, by and large, to be poohpoohed by the British Meteorological Office. Now, with all the satellite technology available to them, our official forecasters have achieved a 71 per cent accuracy rating for their twenty-four-hour rain forecast: but the private company Weather Action, owned by Piers Corbyn, which uses sunspot activity as a basis for its forecasts, achieves a long-range accuracy rating of 85 per cent.

Besides inventing the weather forecast, Robert FitzRoy’s contribution to nautical history was considerable. His navigational charts of Patagonia, Chile, the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego were so exhaustively precise that they continued to be used until recently: only aerial photography has managed to improve upon his extraordinary accuracy. Undoubtedly he saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives. He introduced the system of masters’ certificates for ship’s officers. He pioneered the use of the lightning conductor and the Beaufort Scale. He introduced the terms ‘port’ (as opposed to ‘larboard’) and ‘dinghy’ (as opposed to ‘jolly-boat’) into the Royal Navy. But perhaps FitzRoy’s greatest accomplishment lay in the individual achievements of those who sailed with him in the
Beagle
. Never can such a concentration of talent have been collected in one place before or since; never can it have been brought to fruition so lovingly. David Stanbury has listed some of the notable positions later held by the officers of the
Beagle
, including FitzRoy and Darwin:

It is an extraordinary list, all the more so because it was entirely achieved by the crew of one tiny surveying-brig.

The work of Charles Darwin aside, one is immediately struck by the career of Bartholomew Sulivan, who not only distinguished himself in the field, invented iron cladding for ships, minesweeping, concentrated mortar fire (thereby anticipating aerial bombardment from aeroplanes) and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, but who also - on a more peaceable note - brought back the common nasturtium (
Tropaeolum majus
) from South America. After FitzRoy’s death he resigned his position, and retired to the south coast with his wife Sophia, where he spent most of his time sailing model ships with his grand-children. He was knighted in 1869, and lived until 1890; although his retirement was marred by the death of his son Tom, who fatally contracted malaria at Monte Video in 1873. FitzRoy’s son Robert was luckier. He enjoyed a glittering naval career, reaching the rank of rear-admiral in 1894, in which year he became commander of the Channel Squadron. He, too, was knighted.