A Discovery of Witches(106)
There was a letter folded inside.
“Dear Sir,” it began. “Your letter of 15 October has reached me at last. I am mortified at my slow reply. I have for many years been collecting all the facts which I could in regard to the variation and origin of species, and your approval of my reasonings comes as welcome news as my book will soon pass into the publisher’s hands.” It was signed “C. Darwin,” and the date was 1859.
The two men had been exchanging letters just weeks prior to Origin’s publication in November.
The book’s pages were covered with the vampire’s notes in pencil and ink, leaving hardly an inch of blank paper. Three Chapters were annotated even more heavily than the rest. They were the chapters on instinct, hybridism, and the affinities between the species.
Like Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of blood, Darwin’s seventh chapter, on natural instincts, must have been page-turning reading for vampires. Matthew had underlined specific passages and written above and below the lines as well as in the margins as he grew more excited by Darwin’s ideas. “Hence, we may conclude, that domestic instincts have been acquired and natural instincts have been lost partly by habit, and partly by man selecting and accumulating during successive generations, peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident.” Matthew’s scribbled remarks included questions about which instincts might have been acquired and whether accidents were possible in nature. “Can it be that we have maintained as instincts what humans have given up through accident and habit?” he asked across the bottom margin. There was no need for me to ask who was included in “we.” He meant creatures—not just vampires, but witches and daemons, too.
In the chapter on hybridism, Matthew’s interest had been caught by the problems of crossbreeding and sterility. “First crosses between forms sufficiently distinct to be ranked as species, and their hybrids,” Darwin wrote, “are very generally, but not universally, sterile.” A sketch of a family tree crowded the margins next to the underlined passage. There was a question mark where the roots belonged and four branches. “Why has inbreeding not led to sterility or madness?” Matthew wondered in the tree’s trunk. At the top of the page, he had written, “1 species or 4?” and “comment sont faites les dāēōs?”
I traced the writing with my finger. This was my specialty—turning the scribbles of scientists into something sensible to everyone else. In his last note, Matthew had used a familiar technique to hide his thoughts. He’d written in a combination of French and Latin—and used an archaic abbreviation for daemons for good measure in which the consonants save the first and last had been replaced with lines over the vowels. That way no one paging through his book would see the word “daemons” and stop for a closer look.
“How are daemons made?” Matthew had wondered in 1859. He was still looking for the answer a century and a half later.
When Darwin began discussing the affinities between species, Matthew’s pen had been unable to stop racing across the page, making it nearly impossible to read the printed text. Against a passage explaining, “From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups,” Matthew had written “ORIGINS” in large black letters. A few lines down, another passage had been underlined twice: “The existence of groups would have been of simple signification, if one group had been exclusively fitted to inhabit the land, and another the water; one to feed on flesh, another on vegetable matter, and so on; but the case is widely different in nature; for it is notorious how commonly members of even the same subgroup have different habits.”
Did Matthew believe that the vampire diet was a habit rather than a defining characteristic of the species? Reading on, I found the next clue. “Finally, the several classes of facts which have been considered in this chapter, seem to me to proclaim so plainly, that the innumerable species, genera, and families of organic beings, with which this world is peopled, have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent.” In the margins Matthew had written “COMMON PARENTS” and “ce qui explique tout.”
The vampire believed that monogenesis explained everything—or at least he had in 1859. Matthew thought it was possible that daemons, humans, vampires, and witches shared common ancestors. Our considerable differences were matters of descent, habit, and selection. He had evaded me in his laboratory when I asked whether we were one species or four, but he couldn’t do so in his library.
Matthew remained fixated on his computer. Closing the covers of Aurora Consurgens to protect its pages and abandoning my search for a more ordinary Bible, I carried his copy of Darwin to the fire and curled up on the sofa. I opened it, intending to try to make sense of the vampire based on the notes he’d made in his book.
He was still a mystery to me—perhaps even more so here at Sept-Tours. Matthew in France was different from Matthew in England. He’d never lost himself in his work this way. Here his shoulders weren’t fiercely squared but relaxed, and he’d caught his lower lip in his slightly elongated, sharp cuspid as he typed. It was a sign of concentration, as was the crease between his eyes. Matthew was oblivious to my attention, his fingers flying over the keys, clattering on the computer with a considerable amount of force. He must go through laptops at quite a rate, given their delicate plastic parts. He reached the end of a sentence, leaned back in his chair, and stretched Then he yawned.