“Aye,” said Pole. “And we’ll have to stop calling them fiends. Though they aren’t human, and look a bit on the fiendish side—if appearances bother you. Anyway, they did right by me.”
Richard Thaxton dropped another log on the fire, and pushed a second tray of meat pasties and mince pies closer to Darwin. “But at least there are fiends on Cross Fell,” he remarked. “Anna was right and I was wrong. It was a hard way to prove it, though, with the three of you all sick. What I find hardest to believe is that they’ve been there in the mines for fifteen hundred years or more, and we’ve not known it. Think, our history means nothing to them. The Norman Conquest, the Spanish Armada—they mean no more to them than last year’s rebellion in the American Colonies. It all passed them by.”
Darwin swallowed a mouthful of pie and shook his head. “You’re both wrong.”
“Wrong? About what?” asked Thaxton.
“Jacob is wrong when he says they are not human, and you are wrong when you say they’ve been up in the mines for fifteen hundred years.”
There was an immediate outcry from the other three. “Of course they’re not human,” said Pole.
Darwin sighed, and regretfully put down the rest of his pie, back on the dish. “All right, if you want evidence, I suppose I’ll have to give it to you. First, and in my opinion the weakest proof, consider their anatomy. It’s different from ours, but only in detail—in small ways. There are many fewer differences between us and the fiends than there are between us and, say, a monkey or a great ape. More like the difference between us and a Moor, or a Chinee.
“That’s the first point. The second one is more subtle. The flea.”
“You’d better have some proof more substantial than that, Erasmus,” said Pole. “You can’t build a very big case around a flea.”
“You can, if you are a doctor. I found a flea on one of the young females—you saw her yourself, Jacob.”
“If she’s the one you were hoping to roger, Erasmus, I certainly did. But I didn’t see any flea. Of course, I didn’t have the privilege of getting as close as you apparently did.”
“All the same, although you didn’t see it, I found a flea on her—our old friend, Pulex irritans, if I’m a reliable judge. Now, you scholars of diabolism and the world of demons. When did you ever hear of any demon that had fleas—and the same sort of fleas that plague us?”
The other three looked at each other, while Darwin took advantage of the brief silence to poke around one of his back teeth for a piece of gristle that had lodged there.
“All right,” said Anna at last. “A fiend had a flea. It’s still poor evidence that fiends are human. Dogs have fleas, too. Are you suggesting they should be called human? There’s more to humanity than fleas.”
“There is,” agreed Darwin. “In fact, there’s one final test for humanity, the only one I know that never fails.”
The room was silent for a moment. “You mean, possession of an immortal soul?” asked Richard Thaxton at last, in a hushed voice.
Jacob Pole winced, and looked at Darwin in alarm.
“I won’t get off on the issue of religious beliefs,” said Darwin calmly. “The proof that I have in mind is much more tangible, and much more easily tested. It is this: a being is human if and only if it can mate with a known human, and produce offspring. Now, having seen the fiends, isn’t it obvious to you, Jacob, and to you, Anna, that Jimmy was sired by one of them? One of them impregnated daft Molly Metcalf, up on the fell.”
Anna Thaxton and Jacob Pole looked at each other. Jacob nodded, and Anna bit her lip. “He’s quite right, Richard,” she said. “Now I think about it, Jimmy looks just like a cross of a human with a fiend. Not only that, he knows his way perfectly through all the tunnels, and seems quite comfortable there.”
“So, my first point is made,” said Darwin. “The fiends are basically human, though they are a variation on our usual human form—more different, perhaps, than a Chinaman, but not much more so.”
“But how could they exist?” asked Thaxton. “Unless they were created as one of the original races of man?”
“I don’t know if there really were any ‘original races of man.’ To my mind, all animal forms develop and change, as their needs change. There is a continuous succession of small changes, produced I know not how—perhaps by the changes to their surroundings. The beasts we finally see are the result of this long succession—and that includes Man.”
Darwin sat back and picked up his pie for a second attack. Pole, who had heard much the same thing several times before, seemed unmoved, but Anna and Richard were clearly uncomfortable with Darwin’s statements.
“You realize,” said Thaxton cautiously, “that your statements are at variance with all the teachings of the Church—and with the words of the Bible?”
“I do,” said Darwin indistinctly, through a mouth crammed full of pie. He held out his mug for a refill of the spiced wine.
“But what of your other assertion, Erasmus?” said Pole. “If the fiends were not on Cross Fell for the past fifteen hundred years, then where the devil were they? And what were they doing?”
Darwin sighed. He was torn between his love of food and his fondness for exposition. “You didn’t listen to me properly, Jacob. I never said they weren’t about Cross Fell. I said they weren’t living in the mine tunnels for fifteen hundred years.”
“Then where were they?” asked Anna.
“Why, living on the surface—mainly, I suspect, in the woods. Their murals showed many forest scenes. Perhaps they were in Milburn Forest, southeast of Cross Fell. Think, now, there have been legends of wood-folk in England as long as history has records. Puck, Robin Goodfellow, the dryads—the stories have many forms, and they are very widespread.”
“But if they lived in the woods,” said Anna, “why would they move to the mine tunnels? And when did they do it?”
“When? I don’t know exactly,” said Darwin. “But I would imagine that it was when we began to clear the forests of England, just a few hundred years ago. We began to destroy their homes.”
“Wouldn’t they have resisted, if that were true?” asked Pole.
“If they were really fiends, they might—or if they were like us. But I believe that they are a very peaceful people. You saw how gentle they were with us, how they cared for us when we were sick—even though we must have frightened them at least as much as they disturbed us. We were the aggressors. We drove them to live in the disused mines.”
“Surely they do not propose to live there forever?” asked Anna. “Should they not be helped, and brought forth to live normally?”
Darwin shook his head. “Beware the missionary spirit, my dear. They want to be allowed to live their own lives. In any case, I do not believe they would survive if they tried to mingle with us. They are already a losing race, dwindling in numbers.”
“How do you know?” asked Pole.
Darwin shrugged. “Partly guesswork, I must admit. But if they could not compete with us before, they will inevitably lose again in the battle for living space. I told you on the fell, Jacob, in all of Nature the weaker dwindle in number, and the strong flourish. There is some kind of selection of the strongest, that goes on all the time.”
“But that cannot be so,” said Thaxton. “There has not been enough time since the world began, for the process you describe to significantly alter the balance of the natural proportions of animals. According to Bishop Ussher, this world began only four thousand and four years before the birth of Our Lord.”
Darwin sighed. “Aye, I’m familiar with the bishop’s theory. But if he’d ever lifted his head for a moment, and looked at Nature, he’d have realized that he was talking through his episcopal hat. Why, man, you have only to go and look at the waterfall at High Force, not thirty miles from here, and you will realize that it must have taken tens of thousands of years, at the very least, to carve its course through the rock. The earth we live on is old—despite the good bishop’s pronouncement.”