“I think you exaggerate,” Henrietta said. She moved the slide clumsily, smearing the wax: spoiled, now. How disturbing it was to hear this! She thought of her mother, back home in Hammonds-port, reading aloud to her from the professor’s books. “Perhaps not everyone agrees with him, but still …” Her teachers, two of whom had been his students, admired him enormously. Were they so behind the times?
Daphne fell silent but later, when they were out in the marsh, plucking periwinkles from the eelgrass, she started up again. “He’s a wonderful speaker,” she said. As persistent as a starfish prying at a clam. “He hypnotizes people. That doesn’t make him right.”
Henrietta held up a shell. “I was taught that science depends on facts, not speculations,” she said firmly. “Observations, not wild flights of fancy. It’s a fact these are specimens of Littorina rudis, also that gasteropods have a radula covered with rows of chitonous teeth. This has a radula, as I do not; it rasps algae from these leaves, as I cannot; these are also facts. The stability of species is a fact. The fossil record, which in no place shows evidence of transitional forms, is another fact. My teachers who read Mr. Darwin’s book said it was riddled with fallacies and wild speculations. And that Mr. Darwin departed so far from Baconian methods that his work was not worth reading.”
Daphne poked at the tiny turbans in Henrietta’s palm. “Why,” she said, “don’t you just read the book for yourself?”
She loaned to Henrietta her own, much marked-up copy, which she’d brought to the island. Henrietta read it over the next week in secret, hoping to avoid upsetting either the professor or his wife, but it was so absorbing that she began skipping meals and lectures, which made her conspicuous in another way. Soon the professor, who when they first met had seemed so pleased with her, was frowning with disappointment. Twice the professor’s wife asked if she was unwell — and still, she kept reading. One sentence locked into the next and the next, the book itself quite different from the ideas as they’d been summarized by her teachers and then dismissed. A gigantic crowd of examples alternately crushed her and then swept her wonderfully, relentlessly along. From variation under domestication — pigeons, who had ever written so much about pigeons? — to the variations found in nature; from the great struggles for existence to the complex modes of finding a place in the natural economy; from natural selection and sexual selection to divergence of character and extinction: she was overwhelmed. Yet she was also troubled by how well the pieces seemed to fit together.
The tide went out as she read about an entangled bank, covered with many kinds of plants. Her legs went numb and the wind stirred up tiny spirals of sand; she missed an entire lecture about clams. The bank was colonized by singing birds and buzzing insects and burrowing worms, each different but all interdependent, produced by the laws Mr. Darwin had earlier described. She looked up and saw the bay gleaming before her. At school, Mr. Robbins had argued this: If species arise by transmutation, then why can we find nowhere in the geological record traces of the intermediate varieties connecting specific forms? We ought to see finely graduated chains; we see no such thing. Indeed we see the opposite: whole groups of allied species suddenly arising in specific formations. The professor had addressed this himself in a lecture about the teleostean fish. Once there were no such things as ray-finned bony fishes. And then there they were, a beautiful array of variations on a single new plan.
Out in the bay, hidden from her eyes but indisputably there, mackerel and cod and bluefish and bass finned swiftly through the water and a question surfaced in her mind: if those fish had been created all at once, in the blink of an eye, what about the creatures they ate, or the creatures who ate them? The whole tangled web of relationships in which each part depended on the others — Mr. Darwin’s book, not the professor’s lectures, explained this.
The wind blew, the water rippled, an osprey dove and came up with an eel. She worked back once more through certain paragraphs, absorbing what Mr. Darwin called his three great facts. First, neither the similarity nor the dissimilarity of the plants and animals inhabiting various regions could be accounted for by climate or physical conditions: although certain parts of South Africa and of Australia were much alike, the inhabitants were utterly different. Second, wherever significant physical barriers to migration existed — oceans, great deserts, mountain ranges — very different inhabitants existed on either side. Third, and this one struck her most deeply, was what he called the affinity of species inhabiting the same continent or sea: a deep organic bond that was, he claimed, simply inheritance. Affinity, if she understood his argument rightly, had nothing to do with Divine plan but rather indicated simply common descent — which was what her teachers had evaded, and also what the professor denied most vigorously. The mackerel and cod and bluefish and bass were related to each other, sharing ancestors as she and Hester shared ancestors with their second cousins, with whom they had little in common except for … well, their general shape and size, and their white skins that freckled in summer, their close-set eyes and curled upper ears and a certain curiosity about the world. So obvious, once he’d made her see it. So shocking.
Out on the dock on a moonlit evening, bringing up nets coated with luminescent plankton, she and Daphne went through all the arguments again. How tame, Henrietta thought, her schooling had been! The attitudes passed to her by her mother and teachers, a kind of worship, she thought now, which had made her tremble before the professor when she first got off the train, fell away. “You’re right,” she said. Her mother knew none of this. “Mr. Darwin’s right. It changes everything, doesn’t it?”
“Everything,” Daphne agreed.
THE DAYS ASSUMED a rhythm, and then the weeks. Tuesday and Thursday evenings they sang in the barn; Friday evenings, if the weather was fine, they ate on the beach. Sunday mornings they gathered for services and then students and teachers alike had an early dinner and a few free hours afterward. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons they botanized, mapping the distribution of land plants and seaweeds from the land through the littoral zone and into the shallows of the bay. The professor was especially interested in Charles’s excavation of the trench, in the rise of grassy land above the salt marsh.
One Wednesday afternoon he climbed down into the trench, aided by the six students who’d done most of the digging and hammered the ladder together. They’d dug cleanly and welclass="underline" the surface of the meadow was above the top of his head and in the sharp, almost vertical wall, he could clearly see the roots of the grasses penetrating the shallow layer of humus and the lighter brown layer just below that where more sand mingled with the rotted organic material. Farther down, dotted with embedded stumps and bones, were layers of gravel and glacial till.
“Very nice,” he said to Charles, who was still loyal, still a fine assistant, but no longer young. What would happen to Charles when he was gone? For months now he’d felt his energy diminishing, and the pains in his eyes, which sometimes brought with them confusion, increased each week. The cerebral hemorrhage he’d had a few years back made him dread the future. To the students he said, “Think about using teaching demonstrations like this with your own classes. There’s no substitute for digging through the layers with your own hands and seeing with your own eyes.”
One of the young men — Edward? — nodded. “In my part of Ohio,” he said, “they’d learn more than geology. You can’t dig down more than a couple of feet without finding Indian remains.”