The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(38)

Through his tiny empire of successful businesses, which Sydney managed with the easy elegance of an orchestra conductor, in less than two years William was able to dissociate his name forever from medicinal paper, canceling the final shipment and leaving the whole of London plunged into silent, mournful despair. In the spring of 1872, Annesley Hall invited him to his first hunt gathering on his Newstead estate, which was attended by all of London’s great and good who eagerly applauded William’s extraordinary achievements, and where the witty young man who had made a joke at his expense at that party long ago regrettably perished.

According to the newspaper account, the ill-fated youth accidentally shot himself in the foot with his own shotgun. It was around that time when William Harrington dusted off his old uniform and commissioned a portrait of himself bursting out of it, smiling as though his unadorned chest were plastered with medals, and greeting all who entered his mansion.

This, and no other, is the secret that their fathers so jealously guarded and whose air of light entertainment I considered appropriate for this rather wearisome journey. But I am afraid we have reached the end of our story too soon. Total silence still reigns in the cab and is likely to do so for some time, because, when he is in the mood, Andrew is capable of daydreaming for hours, unless prodded with a red-hot poker or doused in boiling oil, things Charles is not in the habit of carrying around with him. Therefore, I have no other choice but to take flight again so that we reach their destination, Mr. Wells’s house, more quickly than they do. Not only, as you will have gathered from some of my commentaries, am I not subject to the cab’s tortuous pace, but I can travel at the speed of light, so that— voilà!— in the blink of an eye, or faster still, we find ourselves in Woking, floating above the roof of a modest three-storey house with a garden overrun by brambles and silver birch, whose frail fa?ade trembles slightly as the trains to Lynton roar past.





11


Iimmediately realize I have picked an inopportune moment to intrude upon Herbert George Wells’s life. In order to inconvenience him as little as possible, I could quickly pass over the description of his physical appearance by saying no more than that the celebrated author was a pale, skinny young man who had seen better days. However, of all the characters swimming around like fish in this story, Wells is the one who appears most frequently, no doubt to his regret, and this compels me to be a little more precise in my depiction of him. Besides being painfully thin and having a deathly pallor, Wells sported a fashionable moustache, straight with downward-pointed ends that seemed too big and bushy for his childish face.

The moustache hung like a dark cloud over an exquisite, rather feminine mouth, which, together with his blue eyes, would have lent him an almost angelic air were it not for the roguish smile playing on his lips. In brief, Wells looked like a porcelain doll with twinkling eyes behind which roamed a lively, penetrating intellect. For lovers of detail, or those lacking in imagination, I shall go on to say that he weighed little more than eight stone, used a size eight and a half shoe, and wore his hair neatly parted on the left. His body odor, usually pleasant, smelled slightly of stale sweat that day, as some hours earlier he had been for a ride with his new wife through the surrounding Surrey roads astride their tandem bicycle, the latest invention that had instantly won the couple over because it needed no food or shelter and never strayed from the place where you left it. There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.

At that very moment, he was seated at the kitchen table, where he usually did his writing, a magazine in his hands. His stiff body, bolt upright in his chair, betrayed his inner turmoil.

For while it might have seemed as though Wells were simply letting himself be slowly enveloped by the pretty pattern of rippling shadows cast by the afternoon sun shining on the tree in the garden, he was in fact trying hard to contain his simmering rage. He took a deep breath, followed by another, then another, in a desperate effort to summon up a soothing calm. Evidently this did not work, for he ended up taking the journal he had been reading and hurling it against the kitchen door. The magazine fluttered gracelessly through the air like a wounded pigeon and landed a few yards from his feet. Wells gazed at it from his chair with slight regret, then sighed and shook his head, before finally standing up to retrieve it from the floor, scolding himself for this outburst of rage unworthy of a civilized person. He put the magazine back on the table and sat down in front of it again with the resigned expression of one who knows that accepting reversals of fortune with good grace is a sign of courage and intelligence.

The magazine in question was an edition of The Speaker, which had published a devastating review of his most recent novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, another popular work of science fiction beneath the surface of which lurked one of his pet themes: the visionary destroyed by his own dreams. The main protagonist of the novel is a man called Prendick who is shipwrecked and has the misfortune to be washed up on an uncharted island that turns out to be the domain of a mad scientist exiled from England because of his brutal experiments on animals. On that remote island, the eponymous doctor has become like a primitive god to a tribe made up of the freakish creations of his unhinged imagination, the monstrous spawn of his efforts to turn wild animals into men. The work was an attempt to go one step further than Darwin by having his deranged doctor attempt to modify life by speeding up the naturally slow process of evolution. It was also a tribute to Jonathan Swift, his favorite author.