Newton’s Niece

The Portrait

I look back through memory’s peephole. This laboratory, the place where I learnt my science, has no modern counterparts. No long mahogany school benches here; no gas points nor curving slender taps; none of those tripods and burners, and cupboards full of flasks; none of the distinctive microsensitive balances, preserved in glass cases; nor instant electricity piped down red cables from a suspended matrix. Not here either the functional fluorescent hum of the research lab, with its white coats and computers. No spectacles parked on the bridge of a painstaking nose. No female student glued by the eyelids to a microscope. Not a decerebrate cat in sight.

In fact he kept home for an intact and enormously well developed tomcat who used to snuggle up by day near whichever of the furnaces was alight. I had always disliked the cat, but at least it went out at night. Mr Newton’s cat was an amatory legend of the college, if not the city: a feline Don Giovanni who had his own cosy hell to return to through one of the draught holes in the skirting. He would also follow my uncle up to his chamber and slip into a haven hotter still. And that was the place of his body-building activities. Simply, he ate most of my uncle’s meals; for, as I said before, Isaac rarely troubled the company in Hall, and, if he remembered, ordered food to be sent up to him. But because his custom was to become totally absorbed in his project of the moment, he’d take merely a bite or two before another idea struck him, and then he’d dash back to his metals or his notes or his instruments. So the cat profited.

But in the garden room – the laboratory – there was usually no food, and the cat went there for solitude and repose. From the outside, the laboratory looked like a little negative mimicry of the College itself, which was built in a square around a magical fountain. So the laboratory sat in my uncle’s private garden as if in a tiny quadrangle. And if it looked oddly shaped and hardly able to compose itself under its tiled roof, this was because its ground plan was an exact and secret replica of Solomon’s Temple. Moreover, the garden – which in my memory looks like any number of formal ornaments of the period, with its mathematical division into four quarters and its little intricacies of flower beds – this too had its secret. For it was a representation of Eden, being planted with medicinal herbs from all the four continents we then knew of, each in its geographical set, and watered by special Rivers of Paradise that Uncle had ducted from the roof of the chapel, so that when it rained he might as Adam, or Solomon, or Jesus look out over the unfallen book of Nature. Apples, even, that Newtonian fruit, grew neatly pruned and disciplined along the walls on either side of the entrance. It being September, those that there were on the little trees glowed with ripeness.

Inside, and viewed from the Corner of Fermentation, this laboratory was what we should call a study cum sitting-room cum garage, albeit in Biblical configuration. It had three elaborate fireplaces, built around a central chimney. There was also a clock on a bracket and the remains of the tall water-pressure cabinet with which he’d played a density joke on a carpenter. On the stone floor there were three tables and some oaken chairs all covered with books and curiosities. There was one of his famous telescopes on a stand, and a number of other mechanisms in brass and leather which I didn’t like the look of then, and can’t put a name to in the recalling. Two pendulums made like delicately swinging miniature cupboards hung from the roof timbers. And he’d built a mobile close stool to save time. But above all there were his tools and his vessels. Everywhere lay the implements of a master craftsman: chisels, pliers, saws, tongs, ladles, scribers, grinders, a treadle lathe, bellows, gauges, rulers, compasses, hammers, drills; and everywhere else there were crucibles, flasks, coppers, cannikins, leathers, leads, cauldrons and tubes. For he’d become above all a wonderful artisan; the apotheosis of all those energetic and ‘Puritan’ young men from the skilled trades who for decades before the civil war attended lectures and evening classes in practical arithmetic, geography, navigation, weights and measures – in short, mathematics – because they wanted to take destiny into their own hands. And thought they’d done it when a precisely ground cutting edge traced out a significant locus that terminated in some royal vertebrae.

But these young men married and were mercantile. If they somehow supplied a context for his activity they don’t explain his origins or singular obsessions, the most fraught of which was alchemy. What motivated Mr Newton, Professor Newton even, to this solitary passion of Prima Materia? I, seeing him at that time through my wolf’s eyes, could tell something: that he was a stunned being.

It suits our view now to look back and see him as a superior brain. Having lived quite long and seen many, I wonder if there is such a thing. In those days anyway it would not have occurred to us to think so. As samples of tissue go, brains are all much of a muchness. If we’d had the word maybe we would have seen ourselves then as aerials, that might through grace receive God’s messages. We resonated; we were attuned; we rode down signals with the angels. Intellect, and its dysfunctions, were visitations we permitted, were granted, or had imposed on us. And some of us were thought to have been instructed by devils.

In any case, what could be more intelligent than language itself? I have my own reasons for resisting the cult of Genius. I say my uncle merely made himself proficient in the codes that were newly developing then, and cross-fertilised them for the sake of his overriding purpose: to get back all the control his birth and treatment had stripped him of, and to blot out everything else.

His father died before he was born. He was delivered, so my mother told me, a little bloody foetus that no one expected to come to life. They put it aside to be dealt with later. It lay, cold, and further out than the remotest galaxies for half an hour or more, which it might have experienced as longer than an ice age. At first, no one noticed it had started to move. Eventually the bundled mess in the corner turned into a baby, and they began with surprise to push pap into its mouth.

When little Isaac was no more than an infant, his mother, my grandmother, married Rector Smith, for financial security, on the condition that she left the child at Woolsthorpe. Rector Barnabas Smith, almost the squire, did not suffer the little children … Isaac was only allowed to make visits, brought over by his grandmother. Was this bar sufficient motivation for his whole later career? I doubt it. But I tell you this: as soon as he was old enough he tried to burn down their house.

He was an angry, isolated boy, though not a complete wolf; strong enough to suffer no fools and find few friends. He made models -windmills and other curious engines – from being inquisitive and much alone. He sought with miniatures the secrets of power and control. And when he was fourteen he forced himself to make friends with the girls at his lodgings in Grantham where he’d been sent to the Grammar School. But that didn’t last, since they were out for more, it seemed. Love and so on. So he became difficult and solitary again, because the womb sang of interstellar distances, rejection and all he could not speak of.

Then circumstances put money his way, together with a sponsor, so that by a train of associated events he arrived at Cambridge, and was as lonely and powerless as he’d always been. The great Alma Mater fornicated and drank and prayed and idled her way along, leaving him little, hurt and open again, unnoticed in this corner for a year. He survived, convincing himself that by austerities he might become pleasing to God.

God in his turn took several more months to be convinced by Isaac’s mortifications; then responded by thrusting in his way the submissive and equally lonely Wickens, who had a friend who owned a copy of Descartes’s Geometry. Reading Descartes, Uncle Isaac saw his chance to grapple something back in face of whatever it was that had happened to him. It was a great secret tool that could put power into his hands. A Language of Shapes.

When he came up to Cambridge, Mathematics was a nothing – it was all but forbidden, or at least irrelevant to the business of cramming the heads of the future incumbents of the Church of England, like my father, with thirty-nine articles. The prescribed education my uncle found tedious; he wouldn’t and couldn’t do it except to pass through the hoops which would keep him there – and offer the time and space for his secret vice: Mathematics. Mathematics as subversion; Mathematics as terrorist barrels under the House of the universe – or his stepfather’s house as it was to him when he was a boy. Why else would anyone bore themselves with the study of Mathematics unless there was a significant payoff – world-shaking power, revenge, and personal, Godlike, self-esteem?

But at first the Descartes horrified him. He could make nothing of it and went to bed in despair that he should be overcome by another’s words or diagrams. However, on the next day he went to it again and stayed up late by candlelight until he was four pages in. And so on. And this was his method, driven by day and by night and by an intensity of anxiety and desire, to give up all company or other solace in order to stabilise his sense of weakness, his cosmic helplessness, and the violence of his lust. It was this single-minded dedication, as I remember him admitting to someone much later, which was his character. ‘I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into the full and clear light.’ He forced himself, and was forced, to think on the matter in hand to the exclusion of all others. And so it was with all God’s and Mother Nature’s intimate secrets: her petticoat Light, her fluxional Change, her capacity to attract, her Mirror the Moon; and His eternal Motions.

By night … but by what right, you ask again, do I so assault Genius, that most treasured of latter-day concepts, which enables us to label other folk as lesser lights and use them accordingly in our monstrous schemes? Wasn’t he a Cambridge Professor at twenty-six or whenever? Listen. The Lucasian Professorship was equally a nothing. It’s true that he’d invented the calculus. He did this because his mathematics was entirely self-taught, and from only the most modern, analytical treatise of the times. So his thought was undamaged by any educational process. His boldness, arrogance and persistence paid off. Dr Barrow and Mr Babington slotted him into the Professorship. Dr Barrow, who was Lucasian Professor before my uncle, passed it across to him even as he stepped up the next rung of his own career ladder. It was a hobby-horse: they were the only two men in Cambridge who knew a surd from a tangent, anyway. Do you think students crammed the halls to hear the great ‘Dr Newton’ expounding the conic sections? Do you think they hung on his syllogisms as if he were a second Abelard? No one came. It was a purely financial arrangement, for which he must deliver a certain number of lectures. Every so often, then, Isaac read out some pages of his notes to the walls of a room and then went back to work. So they were able to pay him. But you see that he had then, and has always had since, shadowy backers in his doings, some human, some magical. And that is part of the mystery. But I know all this because I was there and saw what drove him.

Listen and I will tell this also before the Elixir is made. He had his eye on me.

I’ve indicated how I spent the time after the night of Fatio’s attack. The first morning I was more or less left to myself in the laboratory. My uncle worked. Elizabeth’s face appeared to me, at times weeping, at times blank, once terrible and mocking; so that I wrenched her beloved picture from my mental eye and returned to the material present. At one stage I tried to entice the cat to come within range so that I could torment him. Perhaps he picked up on my bouts of shuddering; because he seemed well aware of the intended violence, and stayed just out of range, purring and smiling. However, as I said, I was gradually evolving a mentality of revenge, which reduced my emotion at the time, and sent the image of the night into its own locker. To some degree. And this is a repression, which, as I look over my account, I realise is a precise term. For I repressed what I knew and had grasped, so that here I’m able to recover it, to remember it as a concept, and to set it down. But I also realise that at the time I knew in another way what it was that had made me feel so wolflike before, and why it was that, though I hated my rape and was tied, I had accepted it. This knowledge I cannot now recall, though I try and try, even stubbing my pen at the paper in my frustration. I’m only aware that then, that morning, I did have the key both to the inexpressible experiences that had formed me and to the repressible one which had begun to change me.

My uncle may have noticed something was different, for at midday he thawed a little and I was untied. He had brought pieces of bread and meat. He seemed to acknowledge that he had some duty of care towards me. I must be fed even if his life had become ashes. It dawned on me how I should act; I grew very submissive and helpful. I made noises about assisting him with the work. I tidied up some of the mess. I controlled my face and stroked the cat. So we passed the day, at the end of which he nearly smiled on me, and asked whether the cords were really necessary. I shook my head and looked sadly down.

On the next day, after a morning’s alchemical labour, we went out to a nearby house to buy a pint of soup in one of his cans. We’d become a social unit. My arms remained untied. I nodded to my acquaintance, Slack, the Porter, as if all were well.

Isaac went up to his chambers to prepare the soup, and left me, so great was his trust in my new demeanour, to mind the furnace in the laboratory and sand clean a few vessels, some for a new step in the work and some to eat the soup from. My mother would have imagined he’d done wonders with my devil. I saw to the fires, worked with energy and finished quickly.

And then I crossed the garden, climbed the stair to his chambers and padded in with the pair of scrubbed-out iron bowls, whose insides had curious patterns left by melted metals. I came upon my uncle standing on a stool against the wall, holding a brace and bit. He looked round with a start and got down.

‘My portrait,’ he said suddenly, as if to explain himself, although through the years I’d got well used to the oddest of activities. ‘I am, it seems, become famous, boy,’ he said, looking at me guiltily. ‘They want my likeness and are sending a limner. I thought I should be ready to hang the picture.’

I made a singing noise.

‘But of course he won’t leave the picture here,’ he said, out-thinking himself. ‘Or only briefly, perhaps. Ah, no. Probably not at all. Of course. You caught me in a moment of folly, my boy, and the drill bit has gone right through the wall in any case.’

Into my bedroom? I moved to put down my bowls and get a brush to sweep up the mess.

‘Forgive me, boy. I’m … not myself. Foolishness.’ And he turned his head away, leaving me feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable. No one had ever asked my forgiveness. ‘I’ll use it for something. That rack of polishing pastes wants mounting somewhere out of the way.’

I looked thoughtfully at the soup and my bowls.

‘Yes. I forget about food, sometimes. I suppose we’ve got to eat, haven’t we? But don’t touch this cucurbit. I’ve got something important going and it has to boil continuously. Use the lower hook, here. No, not that one. And don’t whatever you do …’ etc.

The soup cheered us both up. In the afternoon we returned to the laboratory where he said he had something very delicate to do. I read; which is to say that I looked at the diagrams in one of his Alchemical books. I could make no sense of their inscrutable Latin.

But the Alchemical illustrations were intoxicatingly curious. I could see now why men became obsessed with the mysterious quest. Not that Isaac was that kind of romantic. His aim was to demystify the whole corpus and win the game. His great gamble was that, hidden behind the flounces of fantasy, the Green Lion, Virgin’s Milk, Tailbiter, the Mysterium Conjunctionis, the Net, and so on, there was some genuine key to matter carried down from Mosaic times or before, and therefore stamped with a Biblical authority, as if God had delivered Nature to us in a brown paper package but supplied the instructions in Japanese. For he was caught on the notion of God the Artificer. He had to be. His whole position was that there was a Master Mechanic behind the whole creation, who had worked expertly in the construction of a neat little engine for us, which was clear and rational, if complex. But, since its creation, whores, devils and whoremongers, and Papists dressed as whores, princes and whoremongers had used the blueprints to wipe their backsides. He blamed the inscrutable nature of inherited wisdom thus to avoid offending God.

Now had he not believed this way, as in my cloudy way I did myself at the time, because it was in our family and the tradition in those parts, then he must have become a mere fornicator or incendiary. But more and more he felt himself led towards the role of Favoured Apprentice in whom I am much pleased. Which disturbed and motivated and thrilled him the more success he had. Why, I’d seen him with my own eyes searching the Scriptures again and again, and I realised later that he was checking and rechecking for the timescale of the great winding down, the Apocalypse and the second coming. Not for vanity, but to see whether he was the … you know; because it would affect his plans, his conduct. Should he speak out now, or should he wait? Should he denounce the Church of England as a harlot and start rooting out the money-changers – he’d researched the proof – or should he keep quiet? Of course he did speak out on King James – with some success. I was much younger, and didn’t know what the Glorious Revolution was. But everyone had been suddenly very proud of mad Uncle Isaac, and he was made an MP. But then even after the Principia there still remained the tantalising matter of the metals; and the fact that this so resisted solution suggested that indeed the time was not fulfilled. And then there were the shadowy backers, about whom he never spoke, and who supplied him with materials and manuscripts.

I looked at the strange images, finely engraved. A man stood in a boiling bath with a crow on his head. A peacock in a bottle in a garden of paradise. A crucified snake. A man having his head split open with an axe so that a beautiful virgin might emerge fully clothed from the incision. A king and a queen pressing their naked bellies together as they drowned in a river. Tools of revenge?

So the day passed. Then more soup and a meal sent up from Hall. Sure enough there was a new rack of jars neatly mounted on the wall. And the Autumn evening fell into night. He had placed a screen across the door to my bedroom. Thoughtfully. My heart warmed to him for a moment. I was getting used to the liberty of being my own attendant and sleeping without cords. I took in a copper of warm water. By candlelight I went naked and stood in it to clean my body. Then stretched up and felt my own breast there in the flickering glow to see whether Fatio’s knee had left a mark. Of course there was none, in spite of the sensation I had. Was it his hungry eyes I felt on me? There was a crash from beyond as if my uncle had bumped into something.

I found the lens in the morning when he had gone out to enquire about something to do with a horse and Mr Locke. I was clearing up our breakfast when I saw that the stool was broken. It was a pretty little stool, the one he’d been standing on to drill the hole. I looked up at the rack of jars, thanks, as I now know, to Mr Locke’s Associative Theory. Among the jars was a little brass cylinder. I dragged over a chair and stood up to examine it more closely. It was an exquisitely made eyepiece, its brazings bright and new. From this level I could also see the hole in the wall behind the jars. I placed the eyepiece into the hole, drawn on by the train of ideas. It fitted exactly. I applied my eye to the lens and the whole of my bedroom leapt into view.

Love’s Limbeck

‘I’m ready to attempt Projection,’ said my uncle quietly, as if it were an everyday sort of thing.

‘But, Maître,’ said Nick, ‘I had no idea you would embark on such a thing. If I had known I would never have left you. I would have been here, with you, by your side at such a time.’ And then he continued in a Swiss Latin which lost me. But I knew the falseness and flattery of it from its tone.

It was a grey, squally day. The air was full of droplets; they blew finely against the casement windows, then dried again – a faint cold precipitation of Winter in our jar. He had just arrived. My Uncle Isaac and I had spent all the previous afternoon preparing the furnaces – all five, in both rooms – which he had constructed himself; I’d never felt so involved – in anything. My uncle was keyed up, and kept moving from one place to another, checking the colour of this one’s glow, supervising the firing of that, or the rich boiling of another, giving me instructions and then taking the tongs or the bellows out of my hands. ‘No, no, no, not like that; like this. See? Stronger. Not that strongly. Let me. Here.’ And mere was the occasional ‘Good’, and just the occasional ‘That’s right.’ So despite my discovery of the lens we still had a good time together, sweating and chuckling, both so excited about I didn’t know what that we neither of us touched the food sent up. The cat bloated.

Some of the pictures in the books had shown a man and a woman standing on either side of a brick oven, she wearing a moon and he a sun. I fancied myself absorbed into the magic of the curious process, as playing a part in a masque. My mother had once allowed me to stay to see a masque in Cambridge. In the figure of the magical heroine I’d allowed myself to suspect that there was a condition of life unlike my own imprisonment – my imprisonment in the male body of a wolf creature. Now I allowed myself in thought to escape into this masque of earth and fire, full of roar and hiss, strenuous lift, and dip to your partner. I tasted salt sweat whenever I licked my lips. Then, when it was late, and we’d banked up the fires because we were exhausted, and the amalgam in the larger crucible was skimming with a faint crinkly green, like the burnish on a housefly, while the last concoction in its glass needed to cool down for some hours, I slipped out of my clothes and into bed too quickly for the lens; to fall nearly asleep, nearly elated.

But Nicholas showing up next morning changed the whole atmosphere.

‘It is not a position I would naturally have occupied;’ said Isaac.

‘Pardon me? Position?’

‘The position of Projector. It smacks of sorcery. Quackery, charlatanism,’ said my uncle. ‘I told you we do God’s work here. We proceed along rational paths. The grand drama is not my way, Monsieur Fario. What I’ve been seeking to do, as you, Sir, must know … For it’s I who’ve brought you to this converse with matter, and opened your eyes a little – though you imagine yourself already an adept, and once sought to betray me in London with the …friend … you wrote of, claiming to have made a production of the medicinal Stone to sell! Yes indeed, Sir, I know you what you are, since I went there to London to find out all and expose the traducement.’ Fatio’s face turned white. ‘But we shall say no more of these thing;’ went on my uncle, his voice trembling. ‘What I’ve been seeking to do is to bring logic and order to my subject. Mine, Sir. I have made it mine enough.’ He looked up at the shelved volumes, and at the open ones, and a sudden rage lit up his face. He brought his fist down on the desk quite unexpectedly and a whole case of stoppered bottles threatened to smash themselves against each other. ‘It is an art hopelessly … forgive me … Papist! Cartesian! Hookish! And Athanasian!’