Newton’s Niece

These thundering epithets were my uncle’s oaths. They were the areas in which he saw the greatest evidence of the underlying whoredom that clogged up the works of things; and showed moreover that Descartes had become for him almost the Antichrist, together with his other bêtes noires; which was surprising in the light of what I said before, and had occurred because he’d realised that in the wake of I think therefore I am his necessary God was rapidly disappearing down a Cartesian vortex. You should imagine that in these Words lay twenty years of utter frustration at the labyrinth the whole subject of chemistry represented to him.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Nick, soft and startled, unwrapping from its basketwork protection a large glass object – not the homunculus – which he had brought.

‘However, things have come to a pass,’ said Isaac, taking the object without comment as if somehow its production were pre-arranged and the conversation merely for the benefit of some audience beyond the immediate action, ‘which seems to demand that the arcanum of the Mysterium is attempted. Under properly controlled conditions,’ rolling these phrases grandly off his tongue to intimidate the other man with his intellectual authority even as he took the key ingredient. ‘For I don’t see how else we might know the complete ins and outs of the curiosity referred to so often, and so grossly, in the tomes.’ He jerked his head again towards his shelves.

‘You mean that never before have you …? You haven’t …? You’ve never tried …? Never done …? In all these years?’ said Nick, allowing the sexual innuendo to build up in all these silences while maintaining a look of wide-eyed scientific innocence on his foxy little face.

‘No, Sir. I have not,’ replied my uncle firmly. ‘I’ve been seeking the Net, the Atomic Theory, a matter of weights, truth and values, not questing vainly after fools’ promises.’

‘Ah. Bien sûr. Bien sûr,’ the Swiss nodded.

‘But today Philosophy demands this ultimate. I tell you, Sir, something I would not confess to any other. To none other.’

‘Monsieur Isaac, what is it you have to confess to me alone? It is a boundless honour you do me with this intimacy. What is it, Maître? What?’

‘It is … I have of late, Sir, entertained more than ever my … my dark suspicion.’

‘Suspicion, Isaac?’

‘A terrible suspicion. A suspicion that … that I am mocked.’

‘Mocked? By whom? Ah, Monsieur …!’

‘Do not interrupt me, Sir, I beg you. Mocked by … by all this. By my own Art. By these metals. By … but it’s of no account. I’ve been under such strain these months. It is nothing. Of no account. Take no thought for a moment’s lapse. Come along, boy, we must take the vessels down to the greater Athanor.’

And he led us down the stairs in a curious parade of three, bearing strange gifts out to the micro-temple where we should generate the divine child. But Nick wouldn’t give up.

‘Mocked, my dear Monsieur Newton? How is this? My feelings for you, Maître. Maître, my love … and respect for you.’

‘Sir! The Athanor.’ We entered the laboratory.

‘Isaac!’

‘Don’t tempt me, Nicholas. I’ve had such sorrow at your hands. Four years I have known … Don’t mock me now, Sir. I’m about to do a terrible thing because of you; and this … creature,’ indicating me.

I felt my eyes widening and my lips peeling back from my teeth.

‘You! Yes, you … !’ suddenly turning on me, his demeanour madly changed, and then breaking away with his head in his hands. ‘The satyrs mock the lame smith even as he attends to his fire. But you two shall be initiates and I shall burn the corruption out of you as I’ve burnt it out of myself and these metals.’ He flicked at his mercury-white, disordered hair. ‘No. Forgive me. That’s unjust. For my hard heart reaches out to you both in … it is such a knocking in my breast …’ tears sprang to his eyes and he could hardly breathe to say the phrase,’… in love. There. It is a word I have given to no one else before this moment. You are the chosen ones.’

I think we were both aghast.

‘But my mission!’ he went on, turning away as if to cover the lapse. ‘Don’t you understand how important it is that I should be utterly … But of course you couldn’t. Although I thought perhaps, Nicholas, my dear … my dearest … friend, that you might have … Never mind. Listen, both of you.’ He took from his bench a great leather book and exposed the pages to us. ‘The work of Alchemy is said to be a Christian work, a Platonic fulfilment of … of love. What we do in the fire, according to these writers from the past, from the dead, is to purify the flesh of the world. And I? I’ve sought only to understand. I’ve sought to understand what it was that lay behind the trumpery and lewd filth it was all dressed up in. What was the star regulus, the dove, the eagle, the Babylonian dragon, the Green Lion, the menstruations and ferments of the actions of the Sal Ammoniac, the royal or uncommon sperm? What were they? Find them, said my soul. Uncover their truth. These I would, by my pure … my nearly pure life lay at His feet, saying Father, so hath your servant performed.’ The book fell open at its title page: its Tableau de Riches Inventions. I saw the representation of an eagle flying. Far up in the sky, it was attached by a string from its beak to a sealed vessel below. My uncle went on: ‘And yet He kept all from me in this matter. For years. For years! But what does He ask of me now? To be drawn into the very flesh of these emblems even as the old writers describe? To find my passions, even my very flesh, set … set alight so that I may not separate myself from the business I … we … do. God mocks or instructs … Or the Devil does!’ and he heaved a great sigh, ‘and this grotesquerie that we embark on now is what I must do to put Him to the test as He puts me; saying, very well, let us try whether we can all burn away the faeces of carnality, for this glass may be the vessel, but so is this body and this room and this unusually quadratic College in which we find ourselves locked up together. In our own torment. Oh I am all broken in pieces.’ He paused and stared from the brick of the small furnace, to Nick, to me. Then he picked up his thread again, ‘Could it be that even as I attempted with cool head to construct the sense of the wretched books, they have with their cold pages constructed me?’

Outside the laboratory the wicked East Anglian wind was getting up. Sure enough, a storm rumbled in the distance. We raked out, woke and refuelled the main furnace, and then bellowsed it until it was roaring, with a terrible white incandescence inside its walls. Into this heat we lowered, Fatio and I, according to my uncle’s instructions, the conical crucible that contained part of the work from yesterday. Within a short while I saw the clay grow a kind of transparent orange. My uncle set on top of this an alembic, which I gathered was to collect a distillate as it ran down a long tube, which he wound round so that the nozzle entered the orifice of another furnace. This we also renewed, and installed in it a bath of iron which was spiked by its feet into the clay of the floor. To my amazement, he poured into it the contents of my great fermenting bowl – the one I’d filled with bits at random. He muttered to find so much trash at the bottom of it, but seemed to believe the decanted soup was satisfactory for his purpose. Then, he took Fatio’s sealed glass which I’d brought down from his chambers. I had a chance to inspect it closely. It was egg-shaped. Coming from each end of the egg were metallic projections fused through the shell, which was intricately silvered and obscure. It seemed designed to stand by itself in a fitting in the base of the iron bath, so that the thick wire coming out of its top stuck up towards the chimney.

Over this Newton and Fatio together lifted a ceramic cover to marry up with the iron rim, but not before they’d threaded a fine chain through the top. For the first time I noticed that this chain hung down from the interior of the chimney. Its dangling end was so designed that a little biting clip could fasten on to the wire from the glass egg. The whole apparatus now seemed complete, with the egg nested in its cover and seated in its ironware, but it remained to them to feed in the downpipe from the alembic and make all the seals up with fireputty.

‘So,’ said my uncle, ‘the hermaphroditus must be roasted over the coals until he’s ready to give up his star semen. This essence rises up with desire and we draw the spirit down this long condensing tube so that it fertilises the Queen here.’ Then he went over to his workbench and took one of his notebooks. He motioned us to sit down.

‘Twelve years ago I felt I was on the verge of solving the riddle of the metals, but it merely drew me on to torment me and left me weeping and bereft – as indeed I find myself now. Had it not been that I wrestled with Heavenly Nature and overcame

‘You speak of your Principia, Sir?’

‘I do, Nick. But this earthy trade came near to wrecking me. I felt as though I should die with grief. Listen.’ And he began to read from his notes:

‘May 10 1681’ I understood that the morning star is Venus and that she is the daughter of Saturn and one of the doves. May 14 I understood the trident. May 15 I understood “there are indeed certain sublimations of mercury” &c as also another dove: that is a sublimate which is wholly feculent rises from its body’s white, leaves a black faeces in the bottom which is washed by solution, and mercury is sublimed again from the cleansed bodies until no more faeces remains in the bottom. Is not this very pure sublimate sophic sal ammoniac? May 18 I perfected the ideal solution. That is two equal salts carry up Saturn. Then he carries up the Stone and joined with malleable Jove also makes sophic sal ammoniac, and that in such proportion that Jove grasps the sceptre. Then the eagle carries Jupiter up. Hence Saturn can be combined without salts in the desired proportions so that the fire does not predominate. At last mercury sublimate and sophic sal ammoniac shatter the helmet and the menstruum carries everything up.

‘Two years later I made Jupiter fly on his eagle.’

‘Sir, I had no idea you had achieved these things,’ said Fatio. ‘You told me nothing of it.’

‘Yesterday I completed the retracing of those steps, ready to put everything to trial today as I told you, in the light of what I now suspect.’

‘That you are mocked? I still do not know what you mean, Maître.’

‘That it is not possible to separate off the Me from the It. The Us from the That.’ And he pointed to the fire. ‘It is my worst fear – that what goes on in there depends on us, and on what goes on out here. It is that which I put to the test today.’

I looked out of one of the windows. It had started to rain heavily on to his Biblical garden. A man stood outside. Great drops bounced on and battered at the opium poppies, and at the stranger’s wide, black hat. We, inside, were both awestruck by the solemnity of my Uncle Isaac’s tones.

Projection

Could he predict the weather? I don’t know how he was so confident there’d be a thunderstorm overhead that day; and not just a late Summer drift either, but a full blaster from off the North Sea, with proper maritime impulsion in it. Perhaps some Intelligence was looking after its own, or perhaps he had some secret since lost. Why not? There must be such things. Unless he called it up … I just preserve the image of him in my mind’s eye, up there on the chapel tower with Charles Montagu (for that was the name of the visitor) in the pouring rain with the great kite soaring into the whelming grey above him, and his hands looking disproportionate because of the huge ceramic gauntlets with which he was controlling the string. A thin rope, separate from the kite’s actual string, ran from the top of the laboratory chimney up to heaven. I began to understand what was being done, and something of its danger. However, no member of the College seemed remotely to concern himself with Mr New-ton’s eccentricities. Occasionally scholars in cloaks, or servants, or deliverymen passed across as much of the open space as they had to until they could get themselves under cover again. They hardly looked up. Maybe they were used to him. I was not used to this.

Popular wisdom ascribes the origin of this kite activity to Benjamin Franklin. I imagine the masonic tradition which hovers around so much of early science carried the technique to him, but he certainly didn’t invent it. It occurred to me that this was what I’d seen darkly illustrated in the Tableau de Riches Inventions.

But Fatio too was impressed at the sight. And we could make out the miniature aqueducts Uncle had made from the chapel deluging the water from above on to the courses in the garden. Four tiny rivers rushed in Eden. Lightning ripped the clouds in the distance behind the College roofs. As the thunder boomed, Nicholas hurried me out of the rain to the interior of the laboratory. The storm was coming nearer. I ran to catch up a poker and stood with it next to the furnace watching him while he was latching the door. My lips snarled away from my teeth. I measured his skull, then turned the weapon side-ways, while still regarding him, until its point stood in the hottest part of the fire. It was a defensive action, you understand. My plans for settling him were not nearly advanced enough.

‘No, boy. I mean you no harm. It was all a misunderstanding. Besides there is much to be done. Projection, boy. The great work. We are chosen. We must … co-operate.’

Once again I was unable, as it were, to bite. He had the craft, it seemed, to rob me of my will, so that I was confused about what was real, what had really happened and what had not. He acted as if there were no matter between us, and I had difficulty holding on to the truth of my memory in face of that mesmeric exercise. How could this be? It was a mystery; nevertheless there I was, snarling, but morally disarmed for the time being. He actually touched me, moved me to a station where I could pump the bellows; and I went, mute and obedient, to work.

The fire roared and whitened; my face scorched. Thunder again. He was moving about behind and around me, checking the apparatus with a light risky touch, as if to have hands close to that focus was to court death – which, of course, it was, for who could tell exactly how and when the kite would catch hold of God?

Something was going on in the apparatus. I speculated on that egg Fatio had brought, which was sitting in the juice of my fermentation bath, opaque, pregnant. How had the man happened to bring exactly what my uncle expected? How was it that the whole apparatus seemed to have been designed around it? What was Projection? They had spoken of the snake Uroboros. I imagined a horrible creeping thing of the earth trapped in that glass prison, as my soul was trapped in me, live, poisonous.

And so I expected any moment that the momentous would happen. But seconds stretched into minutes, and, while there was the rattle of rain and the surge of wind and a constant rumbling from all around, nothing roared down the chimney; although occasionally some water penetrated its fall and hissed into the heat. I ran to the door and unlatched it. Fatio looked up and made after me, but all I had in mind was to look up again at Uncle Newton. There he was, alone and soaking on the tower in the puffy wind; no, there was Charles Montagu too, struggling with a safety rope perhaps. Uncle Isaac, near-exhausted it could be by now, working at the string to keep the kite high, staggering about in whatever space there was against the leads; and there it flew, still up, far away, in danger of disappearing into the actual cloudbase. Fatio pulled me back within by the arm. I hated his grip, but submitted. Backs against the wall, and well away from the central furnace, we sat down on the floor to wait.

He was calm, as if his nerve allowed by daily discipline for this scientific extremity. I had to admit he was calm. The apparatus shuddered in its excessive heat. He took out something from his coat pocket that looked like a musical instrument – possibly a high flute – and then began to take powder from a box he drew from another pocket. I didn’t see the details of the little ritual that went with the preparation of his smoking mixture, but I understood what he was about when he took the crazy chance of striding quickly to the furnace to get some end of charcoal to light it with. Then he was back near me against the wall.

He puffed a while for his own satisfaction, inhaling in short breaths from the pipe. Then he passed it to me – it was wooden, a hard, dark wood, inlaid with yellow amberish material and fitted with metallic rings.

‘Keep puffing, boy,’ he said in his accent. ‘If you don’t keep puffing it will go out, and one of us will have to dare to go near the fire again.’ He laughed. ‘I have seen it done once before, but I would not tell him that. At least, I have seen it tried.’ He laughed again. I sucked anxiously on the pipe. At once a bitter-sweet fume choked me. I made noises which came closer to speech than I was used to, apart from my singing. Hard smoky consonants were forced from my throat.

‘Again! Again! It will do you good. It will cure you of your … impediments.’

I snatched some down into my lungs as I had seen him doing. I coughed. He moved closer and held it for me in my mouth till I had no choice but to breathe in a good quantity. Then he took it back and smoked at it himself a moment or so. I wanted more, for my wishes were altered and my discretion suspended in a way I did not understand, so that between us we got through it and I learned how to bear the smoke and cough less.

However, the last pulls hurt me and I stood up. But my standing was unlike any standing I’d made before; it was a lurch into a vault, and the vault was full of my feelings and childhood – I did not recognise them but knew they were mine. I looked down, it seemed an immense distance, to the floor. My feet were the feet of a wolf, a story-book wolf, grey, thin, feral; I felt the coil of my wolf thighs above the narrow ankles, strung up like clock-springs. And there were my hands, intricate with grey fur, from which the sharp nails protruded. Suddenly the room was alive with the language of smell winding its detail through the long passage that led from the end of my subtle nose to my brain. Nick’s smell, sickening, evil; my own, amplified incredibly and full of the tones of unhappiness. Traces of Uncle Newton lifting and curling almost visibly from every object in the place; and the sharp odour of cat. Then I knew again why I felt half-animal and why I could not speak; and the space was peopled with horror. I know I knew it then, I say. But it was not graspable in the way I name and describe things to you now, and so as I write I weep almost with frustration that I can’t get it back. But I do remember what, drugged, I saw.

‘And if by the help of such microscopical eyes, a man could penetrate further than ordinary into the secret composition and radical texture of bodies … ’ so wrote Mr Locke as I was to read in after-times. And the description fits also the effect of my directing my visual attention to what, in those expanded seconds of dislocated time, my nose had noticed first. Surfaces unstitched their finish. Their microstructure revealed itself; things indeed lost their proper names with their boundaries and I became a connoisseur of edges and gaps. Now these gaps became vortices, threatening, and, as I said, peopled. Worst of all I remember here, I saw in my vision the central mystery of the apparatus at the focus of the room. What was that white-hot crucible but a chamber of volcanic torment? There, strapped to a griddle, a two-headed two-breasted naked monster of man and woman endured for eternity. But as I observed, and possibly as a result of my act of observation, its flesh sublimed from its body and its bones darkened to a char, then whitened into a crumbly ash – and it was gone up, into the miniature vault of the alembic, searching its path out of one system, and down as feculent distillate into the next. Where I followed it.

Yes, the sun man (who despite his beams wore a dark wide-brimmed hat like Charles Montagu’s that I had seen through the lattice in the first rain) and the moon woman stood up to their thighs in a primal sea. And in the sea, my sea, were the grains of all meaning, and the essential chemical spirals of all fish, beasts, plants and people, looping and squirming over one another, enquiring of me how they should combine. But there were also the metals, some clearly radiating. I could see their emissions which were stark and dangerous like the warnings certain animals carry on their skins. In the sea too there were faint streaks of blood – mine, perhaps, from scraping at my arms.

Between Charles and the woman floated the egg, now transparent to my altered sight. It did indeed contain the snake, but it was a snake that shimmered with an unbearable bright scaliness, while its part-human face gripped its own wilfully penetrative tail. The jaws were bound shut with a thin twist of cord so that the tail of flesh was locked in the mouth. It looked at me with a pleading complicity. There was shaking, either its or mine, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps it pleaded for release – or to be left unnoticed. I could not continue to look.

My body was seized and spun round. I knew what was intended, and hated it. At the focus of the hatred was a figure. It was not Nicholas, although part of me grasped that he was its inspiration. And it had got at me, leering and terrorising, in an appalling slowness of feeling. I struck out, again and again with all my force, desperate to grind or smash that awful presence away, that mask with eyes and tongue, that wigged man in a room holding a stick. I wanted only to empty the eyes out, to shut fast the jaws with their nightmare bite on that hateful tongue poking, poking out of and into its hole.

The room erupted in blue light and fire. I screamed.

A Shift

A blurred rectangle of sky. By degrees it assembled itself into its panes of glass, held in the lattice of their joinery: the casement window of my uncle’s chamber. The moth window. And I lay on a horsehair couch, hardly conscious of anything else; adrift, in fact, on the impulselessness of my body. The window filled my whole attention. Pale clouds, crinkled here and there through irregularities in the glass, were tinged by a weak, filtered sunshine.

A face next to me. It was my uncle’s. He looked reverential, somehow, and worried. A sense of dusk. A pewter vessel with a spout that jutted towards me was raised in his hand near my face.

‘Do not try to move. This is to drink.’ I sipped from the spout. It was something slightly bitter but warming, some herbal concoction. Of course I did try to move. I lifted my head.

‘I can lift my head,’ I said, in a high tone of absolute amazement. And what I meant to be amazed by was not the movement but the voice. I had spoken. How strange and different my body felt, before sleep overcame me again.

A doctor in a wide coat – a full man with a full wig. But not the man.

My mother. The window. The doctor said of me: ‘She is out of danger in my opinion. Of course there will be a need for rest, and I suggest a … change of lodging? Not equipped for … young woman … impressionable age. Family of course. Still … ’ And he was gone.

I levered myself up on the couch and found myself wrapped in a rush of linen which laced at the front. I wondered if I had died. ‘Mother.’ My voice came out again with that breathy high sound. She looked at me. I don’t know what there was in her face. Distance? Discomfort? Dislike?

‘Aye, it’s my child alright,’ I heard her say, ‘but bewitched or unbewitched I don’t know.’ My uncle came into view. ‘What am I to do, Isaac? What am I to say? I came up from Robert’s rectory with a manchild, though I grant you a knotted one, and now must take him back in skirts.’ She looked at him and then at me. ‘What am I to do? A girl! It’s a miracle, but a damned one. A cranky one, Isaac, and I can’t take it in.’ She began to breathe too quickly and sat herself down on one of his bleak chairs, while he hovered behind her, wearing his wig for protection, perhaps, but uncertain whether to touch her shoulders by way of comfort. ‘I can’t take it in. Should I cry and praise the Lord. Should I throw my arms about him … her, and weep on … her bosom.’ I saw her wince as if with disgust. ‘It’s too much, Isaac. You’ve gone too far. Too far. How can this be God’s work?’ And she did begin to snivel, and to shake a bit. ‘What shall I tell people? Robert? Family? People in Bridgstock? Oh, I shall be hanged, Brother. Do you realise? It’s me they’ll hang. Godfearing folk like they. They won’t like this. They’ll find a way. Or drowning! I shall be drowned!’