Newton’s Niece
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She said: ‘Well, is all agreeable to you, Ize? He has everything he needs in the basket, and I’ve done some baking for you. And Mr Anderson sent the wine. And Robert sends you his best wishes and blessing in Christ.’ She lowered her voice to a mutter. ‘There are his cords for the night-time under the package of his linen. Which reminds me I packed some of my own which I must take out directly. Linen, I mean. It’s the last day or so of my courses and you can imagine … ’ She drew breath and then whispered on. ‘Regarding what I wrote to you about his … ’ and here she only mouthed the word and I could not see her lips, but I knew she said devil, ‘you will see what you can do, won’t you?’ She continued in a normal voice: ‘But I believe I’ve seen to everything and he’ll be no trouble. Is there a screen or corner where I can …?’ She looked round and then back to him. I saw terror come into his eyes. But she was driven, tactless, itching to be changed and off. My dear mother: an unknown; a variable.
She left. I sat. He wrestled with his misery, ignored me, and at last was empowered to continue his Quest for the Philosopher’s Stone – the riddle of Matter. It was the only thing he could bear to do.
I knew from previous visits that every bit of his space and time was pressed into the service of this great activity. He either worked here or in the laboratory – a tiled shed the College had caused to be put up for him in what was known as Mr Newton’s Garden. There was a large iron furnace up here in the fireplace as well as the one down there, and scattered around both rooms were a number of secondary structures he had made himself, that bubbled and smoked at various times. Papers and books lay about inviting combustion.
I did not feel safe. But then I never did.
My mother would be with Mr Trueman for a week’s holiday, hoping, I surmise, to clinch some relief for the family’s financial crisis from this comfortable city businessman, in addition to that from my uncle’s sense of family duty. It was the week in which we made the Elixir. Yes, it was accomplished. Newton and Co. (and an odd company we were) succeeded in the ultimate goal of alchemy; but it was never made public. Of course not. It was never sent up to the Annals of the Royal Society, whose august fellows later conspired to deny for centuries that their sainted Mr Newton even so much as looked at an alembic, let alone suffered from a primary obsession with the warped and solitary art of the Puffers.
And he’d had practice enough – after the twenty years he made his chum, John Wickens, help him fire and pour and puff and skim and slake, coming and going with the great scuttle full of seacoals, the nets of ores, ingots and fossil turds; crucibles, pelicans, tongs; bags and boxes of God knows what; until they both had hands as black as print and not an eyebrow between them.
But he did not achieve it by any rational means, as he’d have liked. It occurred because of me – and by accident.
My uncle had his own ways of dealing with me which were different from my mother’s. He had no intention of attempting to exorcise my devil according to her wishes – I believe his new fame had suggested to her that he had some special power over the moon and thus could do something about my version of lunacy which my father could not. She had no more expectations from that religious quarter.
But Uncle did not hold with priests or ritual of any sort. When I made the noise and gestured to him that I needed to use the chamber – pot, he undid the concealed tapes that turned the sleeves of my green coat into a straitjacket and let me loose. He had a cane on the ledge over the chimney-breast should my sudden rage call for it. His only general precaution was to lock the main door to his rooms.
I went into my doorless sleeping space. This bedchamber was, like my uncle’s own, off the main room, and it was empty for the very good reason that no one now in the College dared to share his noisome, explosive centre of activity. John Wickens, his close and only friend from the time they were both undergraduates, had left him two years ago, to get married; and was replaced in due course by an H. Newton who was not related to us, and whom I was glad to see the back of when my uncle dispensed with his services earlier that same year, 1693.
When I had finished he came and saw me clean myself up. Then he held my wrist with one hand and brought the chamber-pot in the other so that he could empty it as we went down to the laboratory.
His garden was immaculately kept by a gardener whom we passed on the way. It was a maze of pretty paths between which were beds of a great variety of unusual flowers that I wished I could destroy
In the laboratory I was left to myself in a corner and immediately began to seek manual comfort.
‘Leave off that, you young dog!’ said my uncle, looking up from his work at a crucible he had in the tongs. ‘Or you’ll feel my cane across you! I’m about God’s work here and I want none of your impurities.’ In my family I lived among lies and contradictions. Although I knew different about him, my odd uncle was held up to be a creature of the most absolute temperance, virginity, and, dare I say it, gravity. He even believed this himself. My mother and the College certainly did. He’d once quarrelled with another alchemist -Vigani, I think his name was – just because he’d told a lewd story about a nun. And yet I had earlier evidence that he suspected himself possessed and was tormented by the suspicion. The lies of adults were one of the reasons I could not speak. Their aggression was proportional to their denial. He came over and tied my right hand to a ring in the wall.
It was in the Corner of Fermentation. This corner of the laboratory had as its heart and nominator a great hot-box full of horse shit – a device used in those days before thermostatic heating elements by many a chymical projector for incubating any processes which needed generous room temperature over a long period. Sunk into the steaming rancidity of the hot-box my uncle had left a large vessel – a sort of glass bath – and in this vessel there was nothing except a grey, scum – plagued liquid.
I made noises at him equivalent to: ‘Are you using this at the moment, Uncle?’
He looked up with a certain suggestion in his eyes that he was sorry for the way he’d corrected me and saw in me the image of his soul.
‘What? Eh? What do you want? You can’t do any harm over there.’ Then he turned back to his torture of the metals.
With my free hand I could reach various piles of objects that lay about the Corner of Fermentation. It was, as it were, the slag heap of the operation – a dumping ground for sweepings, or for remnants of the process, or for forgotten things from former parts of the obsession.
I decided on a vaguely rebellious whim to drop everything shiny or attractive from the slag heap of bits into the bath. I looked at the prettier amalgams and lumps of pure metal. I thought of Elizabeth, whom I loved and could not come near. I thought of the curious composition of her name, and the way the sounds might be made in the throat. These were the sounds that denoted her. Remote breathy compositions: El-iz-a-b-e-rh. I thought of jewellery and murder and beautiful women with soft breasts with whom I was not in love. I thought of these metals lying upon the flesh, their sharpnesses just grazing the tender nipples. Then I plummeted them. I had no idea of their rarity or chemical composition or the fact that my uncle must have had them supplied from strange sources and then worked them, in incalculable ways, according to his books and recipes. They were an assortment of metallic substances probably never before or afterwards assembled so closely in one small dump, not counting the other shards and offcuts, stone chips, curios, corals, crystals, dried offal and organs, pastes, bladders, potions and gums which he was too preoccupied to notice me adding in once I’d lost scruple for the seriousness of my project. Thus into that glass bath went some very far-fetched chemical company. Soon the faintest steam began to lift from its surface, and the tiniest bubbles to appear at its rim. This was my first and momentous attempt at experimental science.
Things Whereof a Man Cannot Speak
In the evening the mathematician Nicholas Fatio arrived, unannounced and knocking at the locked door. He regarded me with intense curiosity. I regarded him with suspicion, while my uncle was put into a complete fluster such as I had never seen in him before. ‘It’s the son of my half-sister Barton,’ explained Isaac. ‘He means nothing. His mother left him here for some days. She has some business to transact. It’s a regular arrangement.’
When he had sat the man down he bundled me into my sleeping space and tied the tapes that crossed my arms again. He would have made me stay there out of sight but that the other man appeared in the doorway and started asking questions and opening a conversation. My uncle explained that I was dumb. ‘He is … distempered. His mother gets exhausted with him. There is a need for … unusual measures.’ But he did bring me to sit near, if not with them, in the main chamber by the furnace.
I had been sometimes stared at and mocked if I went into the streets, but next to my Uncle Isaac my looks must have achieved a slight advantage. He never dressed up or received company – he rarely washed, combed his hair or lurched as far as his wig, so preoccupied was he with the race against matter and, currently I guessed, the impossible disorder Fatio had already caused to his carefully cauterised feelings. Fatio had striking, somewhat petite features, a fashionable get-up, and unusual manners which I took to be French. In my experience no other like this had ever appeared in his chamber – such a young man of mode. I had never seen one. Behind my mask of exclusion from everything I gawped; while Isaac hastily and apologetically cleaned his face at the bowl, changed his coat from the one which was all burnt and spangled from molten metal, and made an attempt with a periwig.
Acknowledging myself half-animal I was very responsive to atmosphere. I picked up the ghastly tension in the air between the two men, although they preserved a brittle politesse, seeing that I occupied the third comer of a triangle. I was not exactly a public to their privacy, but I was, as far as they knew, sentient. As a result they were more open than they might have been in front of another, but yet cautious, and embarrassed. And still Fatio seemed to want to include me in the meeting. I felt there was some final passage of feeling, some quod erat demonstrandum, that one man wanted to engage in, but could not because of me; and some teasing defence or private cruelty that the other could better engage in because of me. So everything in the room felt more mad and distraught than ever.
He had brought no servant. Since Uncle rarely troubled the company in Hall at that time, they made a meal of some sort with what my mother had left and other scraps of food they could find. Isaac wouldn’t untie my hands but fed me pieces and a little wine. The other man joined in, laughing, and pressing the food against my lips when I already had a mouthful, to provoke me and see me snap. Nicholas Fatio drank the most wine. He’d been away, he said, since their former break, which had left him so desolated, he claimed. He’d taken a second tour, and had also visited his mother in Switzerland. He was now recovered and had called in for good fellowship, and to show there were no hard feelings. And to learn of the progress of the Great Work, to which he reminded my uncle he had contributed so much in former months.
As he came to feel the effects of the wine, and because my uncle seemed to have become almost as incapable of speech as I was, he began to grow rhapsodic – to fill the painful vacuum in the room. The tour was a great cure for the distempered soul. He recommended it to us both in his curious English. He was casual about it all – a much travelled man. But although I might have flown at him and bitten him had I been untied, or have scratched at my own ears to drown out the sound, I could not but listen and be overcome by the descriptions he made with his words. They threatened and compelled me as much as the stories I’d heard as a little boy when the children were eaten in the forest. From the camera obscura of my mind I saw, through his words, and through his memory, the exotic, damned, Papist lands to the South; the vineyards of Provence standing in the baking Summer heat, the enchanted white-walled cities and palaces; the pitiless Alps where the air bit and purified the lungs, and where wild mountaineers used women as currency; and then Italy herself, where no surface went unpainted, and where fornication was an Art. Seeing me half-snarling but listening, Monsieur Fatio engaged his wit. I believe I was the earpiece of a powerful Amplification. For me the Duomi were pressed all over with gold leaf; for me the cloves of European garlic opened like culinary sunflowers, ravishing the imagination of my brutalised taste with new and magic meals; for me the floating wonder of Venice reflected itself and its smell in the clouds.
A College servant knocked. We were all silent as he lugged in a box of logs. It was well after dark. He cleared some utensils and left. My uncle pressed Nicholas to stay the night. He accepted. But where was he to sleep, seeing that Monsieur Newton already had company? Isaac offered immediately to turf me out of my room: ‘He can sleep on the floor.’ Fatio experienced an access of nicety concerning the prior rights of family over friends: ‘But no. It is not to be dreamed of, Maître.’
Uncle made a sort of gasp and offered his own room. Monsieur pursued him with a knowing eyebrow. Uncle became uncannily silent.
‘No, no. Pas du tout.’ Nicholas would couch himself on his cloak between the Desk of Opticks and the Athanor of Alkhimia.
Take my bed, man. For God’s sake.’
‘Pray, Maître, do not trouble yourself. I would not dream … Why, there is no man in all Europe whom …’ and into fragments of French or Latin, or whatever, as was his fashion of compliment. And so, heavy with implications, they played out their game of offer and refusal, until Nick Fatio won, as he was bound to do, being the more calculating of two mathematicians.
Therefore, after some geometrical discussion which I was not equipped to follow, we all retired at more or less the same time, with the newcomer promised to stretch out by the furnace in the main chamber on the horsehair-stuffed seat, after he’d taken some more wine. My uncle found the night cords my mother had left and bound my wrists to the two head-posts of the spare bed, which was the configuration in which I had slept on my back for as long as I could remember.
Some chiming clock of the city and a pressure against my mouth woke me at about two. I opened my eyes to the almost pitch-blackness of an abominable assault. A male smell under my nose. Faint pallor of linen suggesting the presence of a part-clothed torso. His voice above me whispering in a foreign language. Fear mapped me to the bed. Something automatic made me try to scream but I had no voice, only a poor rasping in the throat. And my mouth had opened, which was the worst thing it could have done. Invasion; the thing stuffed back and forth in my head; the taste; the revolting sensation of being gagged at the very back of the palate, while held down by superior force. But for some reason I couldn’t bite, and the violation continued, against my will but beyond my control. Why couldn’t I bite? I felt waves of panic. My breath was knotted into my grimace, my neck locked rigid. I was sure I should die. Until I found myself at last panting through my squashed nostrils, like the choked dog in the farmyard. But it wasn’t enough. The torso was all over my face. Not enough air to survive on. The fight for air. I would not survive. Could not. All my chest and throat contorted in the effort, the drag for air. A point of black pain expanded in a rush towards me, until it enveloped me totally.
Then I was out of myself and looking down from the ceiling in the small-hours murk which only a window’s faint moon-and-starlight illuminated, at a larger person over a smaller one’s head; whose hair was held down by a fist, and whose trunk thrashed between tied cords. I saw my knees rear up and catch him so that he grunted, withdrew and tried to wrestle me over on to my front. Great heaves of longed-for breath filled those lungs. In such dark, however, he clearly hadn’t grasped the fact about my strung wrists; my body wouldn’t turn. I watched myself twist and hurt. Then he gave that up and returned to the mouth, penetrating it and jerking on his violent weight. Why did I, that sufferer below me, comply? I watched the asphyxiation build up once more. I watched my renewed thrash.
Maybe a minute. He shuddered and came off. And again I saw the desperate lungs permitted at last to inflate themselves in relief.
I remember having a discarnate idea which seemed, incredibly, to exist everywhere around us both. I would sing. I would.
I did. And that was what now in fact filled the room with a powerful and almost tangible vibration:
Let us with a gladsome mind
I felt myself, as I returned to my body, swallow the stuff that was in my mouth. It was a reflex. And now I felt what I had only watched a moment ago – the great gulps of air rushing down my throat between each phrase of the hymn.
Praise the Lord for he is kind. For his mercies ay endure Ever faithful, ever sure.
I was squinting in the darkness into a startled face which itself had just made a sound: some little feminine squeak which mingled with my last two lines. It reminded me of a creature I’d once seen cornered – a hare which somebody had tried to make a pet of. He moved at once to escape but the noises had aroused my troubled uncle, because I heard him hurry round to my doorway. There was a crash of breaking glass followed by a cry of pain and a rational curse. Then his dark bulk appeared in the frame, and I could sense him peering in. Fatio turned and was clutching at his breeches, trying to tie or pull them up – I don’t know which. My uncle roared in a roaring whisper:
‘Villainy! Whoredom! Fornication! Caught in the net! By Christ Almighty!’ And then he burst into tears.
Fatio claimed first in French and then in English that he’d been in search of a chamber-pot, being blind drunk, and had tripped over my bed in the dark. Then he too burst into tears and fell to grovelling at my uncle’s feet, licking them and proclaiming his own mathematical limitations in an attempt to smother the memory of the incident in all of our minds.
‘Maître, you are the foremost mage of all Europe. An intellectual Volcanus. Before which I humble myself, like the savage who knows no salvation, in abject Abasement. You have anatomised Light and thus have delivered us from our Darkness and Error; you have interrogated Change itself and given it Number; Movement, the Divine, you have glimpsed the limit; Prophecy! Gravity! The Moon! And you are trying for the Stone, and shall see it, yes, yes, draw even the constellations from their spheres and peer into the immortal Mind itself. It is that Faculté Incroyable which has so drawn me to you, has enforced my presence here, to be with you and none other. You must know that as soon as ever I heard of you I suffered that force you alone have justified – impulsion from a distant Attractor: I was drawn; I was conjured. And still I am drawn back to you here after you have bid me depart and I meant to be absent for ever.’
At last I could close my mouth. Something vomited back from my stomach. I spat up and growled and spat up again over myself and bared my teeth in shock. Inside I was weeping but no tears would come out of my wolf-eyes. The dark bulk of Uncle Isaac knelt down to break his hindering clasp. He put his arms around the snivelling one, and then took his, Fatio’s, luxuriant, curling, blond hair and jerked it back in a tragic gesture.
‘Not Mars with Venus, neither. Not betrayed with Venus. Nor even the messenger boy of the Olympians. But, to my eternal shame, Cerberus.’ Visibly demonstrating a profound agitation, he picked him up like a child and returned him to the horsehair. I understood nothing that had passed.
No more was said. I doubt if any of us slept much more that night, but there was no more migration of place. In the morning I was freezing in my own sweat.
And no mention at all was made of the dark offences of the small hours. A servant brought food. We ate. Then I was tied to the desk, shivering and panting by turns. My neck and shoulders were filled with cramps. Newton kept sighing and staring at the furnace. Fatio began to shave, then he gave up. He proceeded to unpack his saddle-bag. He claimed to have a homunculus in a bottle. From Egypt, he said. Furious, my uncle went to cast it out of the window, hurling up the sash in preparation, and saying:
‘Nay, Sir. We do God’s work here. At least by daylight.’
That was the sash by which I gassed the moth in the curious jar when I was ten, four years before.
The homunculus sat also in its curious jar. It was a little septic foetus, cushioned on its placenta, and hermetically sealed, by some glassblower, in a vacuum. Nicholas prevented its fate:
‘Maître! Non! Non seulement est I’homoncule fort précieux, mais encore pourrait-il être le truc même qu’il nous faut.’
My uncle hesitated. And then:
‘pray, Sir, get thee behind me. For years I’ve sought the justification of God in the secret of these metals and in these,’ he indicated the walls full of leather-bound volumes, ‘testaments. And I have sought freedom from the Fiend – at least, as I said, by day. The homunculus is but an emblem – a figure of rhetoric. It is not a literal requirement and refers to a state of the metals. As such this is an obscenity and declares in its horrible shape the continued presence of the evil one. My only hope is to maintain the restricted path. I shall try to keep up my shattered honour, sir, and my reason, as I am a gentleman and a Protestant; otherwise it shall not be done. When you return,’ and I could see his disciple’s sweet foxy eyes receive the hint that the straight path was compromised even as it was declared, ‘take care that you not bring that abortion with you.’
It was enough. The Swiss collected his saddlebag and blanket, and affirmed that he would go out into the city to find a barber to attend to him. He did not return that day. My brain ran again and again on what had happened. I was wound up in a kind of shock, because there was no grounding of it. And most of all I wondered why it was that I’d submitted. It made it somehow my fault: I deserved all I got. I was already half-brute. What else could I perform upon myself? But a pure thought rose off that frenzy like the coil of a vapour, and lodged itself in a corner of my mind. I’d read of calculated killing. As I came of age that morning I realised what my brain was for. When he came back I would find a way … This thought I lodged in a safe place.
In speculating about where he might have gone I saw some point in making contact with the world of humankind – I would need to think their way in order to out-think him. I rummaged my random learning for any impressions as to where such an adult might go during the day, how he might exist while out of my sight; but the heaps of ideas remained as chaotic as the hotchpotch in the laboratory. With hindsight I reason now that he was meeting some contact: that he had gone back with the damned abortion to the Masonic Gentlemen’s Club or the Papist Intelligencers, or the Parisian Rosen-kreutzers, or whichever bent spy-ring was paying him. So Uncle Isaac and I had a couple of days to ourselves. As the morning went on he ran his fingers through his hair and studied and got up to look into whatever he was cooking on the furnace. I, tied to my ring, and losing my clarity, attempted with my free hand to saw my arms with pieces of shiny rubbish before dropping them as ingredients into my primal soup.