Newton’s Niece. Derek Beaven
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.
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