A woman stood before them — stood because she had no seat to sit on, Mary saw. The girl, presumably Alicia, Darwin’s grand-niece several times removed, wore a sober charcoal-grey dress. She was very pale, with blue eyes and strawberry hair; she could have been no older than twenty, twenty-one.
On one side of her sat a young man, soberly dressed, good-looking, his features alive with interest. And on the other side, Mary was astounded to see, a coffin rested on trestles.
Xavier led Mary to a bench set along one wall. Here various other clerics sat, most of them men. On the far side were men and women in civilian clothes. Some were writing in notebooks, others sketching the faces of the principals.
“Just in time,” Xavier murmured as they sat. “I do apologise. Did you see the look Father Boniface gave me?”
“Not the Boniface!”
“The Reverend Father Boniface Jones, Commissary General. Learned his trade at the feet of Commissary Hitler himself, in the old man’s retirement years after all his good work during the Missionary Wars in Orthodox Russia…”
“Who’s that lot on the far side?”
“From the chronicles. Interest in this case is world-wide.”
“Don’t tell me who’s in that box.”
“Respectfully disinterred from his tomb in Edinburgh and removed here. He could hardly not show up for his own trial, could he? Today we’ll hear the deposition. The verdict is due to be given in a couple of days — on the twelfth, Darwin’s 200th anniversary.”
Xavier said that the young man sitting beside Alicia was called Anselm Fairweather; a friend of Alicia, he was the theological lawyer she had chosen to assist her in presenting her case.
“But he’s not a defence lawyer,” Xavier murmured. “You must remember this isn’t a civil courtroom. In this case the defendant happens to have a general idea of the charges she’s to face, as a living representative of Darwin’s family — the only one who would come forward, incidentally; I think her presence was an initiative of young Fairweather. But she’s not entitled to know those charges or the evidence, nor to know who brought them.”
“That doesn’t seem just.”
“But this is not justice in that sense. This is the working-out of God’s will, as focused through the infallibility of the Holy Father and the wisdom of his officers.”
The proceedings opened with a rap of Jones’s gavel. A clerk on the examiners’ bench began to scribble a verbatim record. Jones instructed the principals present to identify themselves. Alongside him on the bench were other Commissaries, and a Prosecutor of the Holy Office.
When it was her turn, Mary stood to introduce herself as a Lector of Cooktown University, here to observe and advise in her expert capacity. Boniface actually smiled at her. He had a face as long and grey as the Reverend Darwin’s coffin, and the skin under his eyes was velvet black.
A Bible was brought to Alicia, and she read Latin phrases from a card.
“I have no Latin,” Mary whispered to Xavier. “She’s swearing an oath to tell the truth, right?”
“Yes. I’ll translate. ”
Boniface picked up a paper, and began to work his way through his questions, in Latin that sounded like gravel falling into a bucket. Xavier whispered his translation: “By what means and how long ago she came to London.”
Mercifully the girl answered in English, with a crisp Scottish accent. “By train and carriage from my mother’s home in Edinburgh. Which has been the family home since the Reverend Charles Darwin’s time.”
“Whether she knows or can guess the reason she was ordered to present herself to the Holy Office.”
“Well, I think I know.” She glanced at the coffin. “To stand behind the remains of my uncle, while a book he published 150 years ago is considered for its heresy.”
“That she name this book.”
“It was called A Dialogue on the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.”
“That she explain the character of this book.”
“Well, I’ve never read it. I don’t know anybody who has. It was put on the Index even before it was published. I’ve only read second-hand accounts of its contents… It concerns an hypothesis concerning the variety of animal and vegetable forms we see around us. Why are some so alike, such as varieties of cat or bird? My uncle drew analogies with the well-known modification of forms of dogs, pigeons, peas and beans and other domesticated creatures under the pressure of selection for various desirable properties by mankind. He proposed — no, he proposed an hypothesis — that natural variations in living things could be caused by another kind of selection, unconsciously applied by nature as species competed for limited resources, for water and food. This selection, given time, would shape living things as surely as the conscious manipulation of human trainers.”
“Whether she believes this hypothesis to hold truth.”
“I’m no natural philosopher. I want to be an artist. A painter, actually—”
“Whether she believes this hypothesis to hold truth.”
The girl bowed her head. “It is contrary to the teachings of Scripture.”
“Whether the Reverend Charles Darwin believed the hypothesis to hold truth.”
She seemed rattled. “Maybe you should open the box and ask him yersel’…” Her lawyer, Anselm Fairweather, touched her arm. “I apologise, Father. He stated it as an hypothesis, an organizing principle, much as Galileo Galilei set out the motion of the Earth around the sun as an hypothesis only. Natural selection would explain certain observed patterns in nature. No doubt the truth of God’s holy design lies beneath these observed patterns, but is not yet apprehended by our poor minds. Charles set this out clearly in his book, which he presented as a dialogue between a proponent of the hypothesis and a sceptic.”
“Whether she feels the heresy is properly denied in the course of this dialogue.”
“That’s for you to judge. I mean, his intention was balance, and if that was not achieved, it is only through the poor artistry of my uncle, who was a philosopher before he was a writer, and—”
“Whether she is aware of the injunction placed on Charles Darwin on first publication of this book.”
“That he destroy the published edition, and replace it with a revision more clearly emphasizing the hypothetical nature of his argument.”
“Whether she is aware of his compliance with this injunction.”
“I’m not aware of any second edition. He fled to Edinburgh, whose Royal Society heard him state his hypothesis, and received his further work in the form of transactions in its journal.”
Xavier murmured to Mary, “Those Scottish Presbyterians. Nothing but trouble.”
“Whether she approves of his departure from England, as assisted by the heretical criminals known as the Lyncean Academy.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Whether she approves of his refusal to appear before a properly appointed court of the Holy Office.”
“I don’t know about that either.”
“Whether she approves of his non-compliance with the holy injunction. “
“As I understand it he felt his book was balanced, therefore it wasn’t heretical as it stood, and therefore the injunction was not applicable…”
So the hearing went on. The questioning seemed to have nothing to do with Darwin’s philosophical case, which after all was the reason for Mary’s presence here, but was more a relentless badgering of Alicia Darwin over the intentions and beliefs of her remote uncle — questions she couldn’t possibly answer save in terms of her own interpretation, a line Alicia bravely stuck to.