Darwin laughed aloud. “Ah, you’re missing the point, Jacob. Look out there.” He waved a brawny arm at the Tees valley, ascending with the river before them. “There’s a whole treasure right here, for the taking. If I knew how to use them, there are plants for a whole new medical pharmacopeia, waiting for our use. I’m a botanist, and I can’t even name half of them. Hey, Mr. Thaxton.” He leaned farther out of the coach, looking up to the driver’s seat above and in front of him.
Richard Thaxton leaned perilously over the edge of the coach. “Yes, Dr. Darwin?”
“I’m seeing a hundred plants here that don’t grow in the lowlands. If I describe them to you, can you arrange to get me samples of each?”
“Easily. But I should warn you, there are many others that you will not even see from the coach. Look.” He stopped the carriage, swung easily down, and went off to a mossy patch a few yards to one side. When he came back, bareheaded, dark hair blowing in the breeze, he carried a small plant with broad leaves and a number of pale green tendrils with blunt, sticky ends. “There’s one for your collection. Did you ever see or hear of anything like this?”
Darwin looked at it closely, smelled it, broke off a small piece of a leaf and chewed it thoughtfully. “Aye. I’ve not seen it for years, but I think I know what it is. Butterwort, isn’t it? It rings a change on the usual order of things—animals eat plants, but this plant eats animals, or at least insects.”
“That’s right.” Thaxton smiled. “Good thing it’s only a few inches high. Imagine it ten feet tall, and you’d really have a ‘Treasure of Odirex’ that could have scared away the Romans.”
“Good God.” Jacob Pole was aghast. “You don’t really think that there could be such a thing, do you—up on Cross Fell?”
“Of course not. It would have been found long ago—there are shepherds up there every day, you know. They’d have found it.”
“Unless it found them,” said Pole gloomily. He retreated even farther into his greatcoat, Thaxton climbed back into the driver’s seat and they went on their way. The great expanse of the winter fells was spreading about them, a rolling sea of copper, sooty black and silver-grey. The land lay bleak, already in the grip of winter. At last, after three more hours of steady climbing, they came to Milburn. Thaxton leaned far over again, to shout into the interior of the coach. “Two more miles, and we’ll be home.”
The village of Milburn was small and windswept, a cluster of stone houses around the church and central common. Thaxton’s coach seemed too big, out of scale with the mean buildings of the community. At the cross-roads that led away to the neighboring village of Newbiggin, Thaxton halted the carriage and pointed to the great mass of Cross Fell, lying to the northeast. Darwin looked at it with interest, and even Jacob Pole, drawn by the sight of his potential treasure-ground, ventured out of his huddle of coats and shawls.
After a couple of minutes of silent inspection of the bleak prospect, rising crest upon crest to the distant, hidden summit, Thaxton shook the reins to drive on.
“Wait—don’t go yet!” Darwin’s sudden cry halted Thaxton just as he was about to start the coach forward.
“What is it, Dr. Darwin? Is something the matter?”
Darwin did not reply. Instead, he opened the carriage door, and despite his bulk swung easily to the ground. He walked rapidly across the common, to where a boy about ten years old was sitting by a stone milestone. The lad was deformed of feature, with a broad, flattened skull and deep-set eyes. He was lightly dressed in the cast-off rags of an adult, and he did not seem to feel the cold despite the biting breeze.
The child started up at Darwin’s approach, but did not run away. He was less than four feet tall, heavy chested and bowlegged. Darwin stood before him and looked at him with a professional eye.
“What is it, Erasmus?” Jacob Pole had dismounted also and come hurrying after. “What’s his disease?”
Darwin had placed a gentle hand on the boy’s head and was slowly turning it from side to side. The child, puzzled but reassured by Darwin’s calm manner and soft touch, permitted the examination without speaking.
“It is not disease, Jacob.” Darwin shook his head thoughtfully. “At first I thought it must be, but the lad is quite healthy. Never in my medical experience have I seen such a peculiar physiognomy. Look at the strange bone structure of the skull, and the curious regression of the jaw. And see that odd curve, in the relation of the thoracic and cervical vertebrae.” Darwin puffed out his full lips, and ran a gentle finger over the child’s lumpy forehead. “Tell me, my boy, how old are you?”
The child did not reply. He looked at Darwin with soft, intelligent eyes, and made a strange, strangled noise high in his throat.
“You’ll get no reply from Jimmy,” said Thaxton, who had followed behind the other two men. “He’s mute—bright enough, and he’ll follow any instructions. But he can’t speak.”
Darwin nodded, and ran his hand lightly over the boy’s throat and larynx. “Yes, there’s something odd about the structure here, too. The hyoid bone is malformed, and the thyroid prominence is absent. Tell me, Mr. Thaxton, are the boy’s parents from these parts of Cumbria?” Darwin smiled encouragingly at the lad, though his own lack of front teeth made that more frightening than reassuring. A piece of silver, pressed into the small hand, was more successful. The boy smiled back tentatively, and pointed upwards toward the fell.
“See, he understands you very well,” said Thaxton. “His mother is up on Dufton Fell, he says.” He turned away, drawing the other two men after him, before he continued in a low voice. “Jimmy’s a sad case. His mother’s a shepherdess, daft Molly Metcalf. She’s a poor lass who doesn’t have much in the way of wits. Just bright enough to tend the sheep, up on Dufton Fell and Cross Fell.”
“And the father?” asked Darwin.
“God only knows. Some vagrant. Anyway, Jimmy’s not much to look at, but his brain is all right. He’ll never be much more than a dwarf, I fear, but there will always be work for him here in the village. He’s trustworthy and obedient, and we’ve all grown used to the way he looks.”
“He’s certainly no beauty though,” said Jacob Pole. “That’s a strange deformity. You know what he reminds me of? When I was in the Spice Islands, there was a creature that the Dutch called the Orange-Lord, or Orang-Laut, or some such name. It lived in the deep forest, and it was very shy; but I once saw a body that the natives brought in. The skull and bone structure reminded me of your Jimmy.”
“It’s a long way from the Spice Islands to Cross Fell, Colonel,” said Thaxton. “And you can guess what Anna has been saying—that daft Molly was impregnated by a fiend of the fell, some diabolical incubus, and Jimmy is the devilish result. What do you think of that, Dr. Darwin?”
Erasmus Darwin had been listening absentmindedly, from time to time turning back for another look at the boy. “I don’t know what to think yet, Mr. Thaxton,” he finally replied. “But I can assure you of one thing. The only way that a human woman bears children is from impregnation by a human male. Your wife’s chatter about an incubus is unscientific piffle.”
“Impregnation is not always necessary, Doctor. Are you not forgetting the virgin birth of Our Lord, Jesus Christ?”
“Don’t get him started on that,” said Jacob Pole hastily, “or we’ll be here all day. You may not know it, Mr. Thaxton, but this is Erasmus Darwin, the doctor, the inventor, the philosopher, the poet, the everything—except the Christian.”