Newton’s Niece

In spite of my uncle’s letters, his books and his educational visits, I lost belief sometimes that the hope of moving on could ever be fulfilled. Yet he must be instructing me to some purpose. I did study. I even worked at the mathematics, but without much cheer or success. Well, not in his terms. And I wondered how Christ might make me free, as Mr Witham, the curate, said He would when he stood behind me for my organ lesson, catching and releasing his breath. I felt moreover there was some other important matter I must prepare for. My destiny; my purpose. I mean beyond my purpose of revenge. I remembered my first conversation, and my uncle’s anguished uncertainty over Who it was that had set him up.

So, yes; I was pleased to get to London.

His house was in Jermyn Street, a pleasant location as befitted a man of some distinction. It was made of sober London bricks, and, like much of the new London, was in the so-called Dutch style; the roof was tiled. It stood out dark against the setting sun. I was so glad of the fire in the first room. Heated wine. Supper. Like me he’d acquired some sort of social touch in the intervening years; the dishevelled projector had been laid to rest behind a fine suit of clothes and a regular wig. He showed me round.

The interior of the house was all done out in red: drapes, beds, sofas and seats. At the time I was amazed; with hindsight the phrase whorehouse taste leaps to mind. It was such a contrast with the rooms I’d come to know at Trinity – as if a child had been asked what colour it wanted most in the world, and been indulged. But the furniture was good – obviously; much more luxurious than anything I’d seen in the country. Better than the Smiths’ house, where Uncle Benjamin, Isaac’s stepbrother, was now squire. I unpacked in my room, hanging up my few outfits, and stuffing the wolf-boy’s breeches, coat and hat into a small chest. He’d got me a good bed with four posts. Here in my bedroom there was another decorative dimension: expensive frilly white lace. And the drapes? Red. All red. Was this really his choice?

If it was, then he’d been overfulfilled in another matter, as I learned in growing used to London. That was of gold: he commuted each day to the Mint at the Tower of London, where he saw to the coinage. He took me to see: vast furnaces, noise, bellows, the brilliance of liquid metals. A grand scale of activity beyond the conception of the most obsessive souffleur. I felt here he was in his element at last. Can you imagine the fruition to an alchemist of the ceaseless pourings and runnings, pressings, millings and stampings of purest gold and silver; the quiet beauty of the metals ever set off deliciously against the clamour and filth of their surroundings – for the place was driven on horse power and full of shit.

To be truthful, this was also my early impression of London itself, except for the great concourses and squares, and those were plagued with pigeons. I’d expected it all to be easy. But the city leaned on you with its unconcern, its hardness. No new season offered itself here. In the streets I was alone in a throng. I even missed that stifling camaraderie of the village women as I began to learn how to live in this callous jostle. It took me weeks before I could stomach the sheer concentration of people, with their dogs and their total household excretions. A smoky, smelly, muddy, milling, wintry place.

In the Jermyn Street house I was comfortable enough, though. I was indeed something domestic; I was his housekeeper by virtue of my sex. What else could I be?

A man and woman and their daughter lived on the top floor and did the cleaning and maintenance and some of the cooking for us, in return for their keep. Their name was Pointer; we called them by their Christian names, Tony, Mary and young Pet. I had nominal charge over them, but in practice they were entirely self-sufficient as to how things should be done for Mister Eye, as they called him. Having by now been introduced at one or two other houses less obsessively furnished, I framed a second hypothesis about our red frilly decor. Perhaps it was Mary’s uneducated taste. Perhaps she’d been given a free hand by my lofty uncle to set about making the place an elegant London address, without having any sense of elegant restraint.

While I was a newcomer, Mary and Pet fussed around me. ‘Oh, Mistress Catherine, you’ll ‘ave suitors by the dozen, you will. Look at her eyes, Pet, and that pretty mouth. You’ll have to look alive, Missy, as the sailors say, ‘cause the young men here are all up to the chances if they can, aren’t they, Pet? She knows! I know myself! But if you keep your wits about you, dear, you’ll be all in the clear and have no end of a following. Won’t she, Pet? Just you make sure they keep their hands out of your pocket. Such a pretty shape, my love. You don’t have to put up with anything you don’t want. Till you decide you do want it, that is. Eh, Pet?’ She nudged her daughter for the joke and then returned to me. She seemed to want to touch my hair and adjust my caps and my dress. And then she was full of advice on society seamstresses and milliners. Good ones, it turned out.

Pet, who had soft eyes but was rather plain, didn’t seem to resent her mother’s enthusiasm for my looks. They both giggled and sparked themselves up at the prospect of love opening a lively market outlet in the house.

Love? Love? The city had love on its lips; it pressed the word into the currency of every encounter; it worked at love. But it was compulsion – as mechanical as the Mint, and as sweated. What was it that kept these people at it, toiling and moiling, breeding and hoping? And they were compelled to wear their love, as it were, on the outside. I was amazed at the openness, the show. I had never, except in the interchange between my mother and Mr Trueman in their farewells at Cambridge, seen love acted. Here I saw the rich kissing or preening in St James’s Park. It was thought nothing that powdered men who found me walking there in company they knew should slip a hand across my bosom, even as they looked into my violent eyes and left me alone. As the Spring hastened on and the weather warmed up, whores sat out at the street alehouses with a crescent of painted nipple showing above the basque, sipping their cans and talking with tradesmen; and smart gentlewomen shopping near the Abbey aped something of their style. Men walked with their arms round their wives, or mistresses. I saw other people whom I met at my uncle’s lean dinners roll eyes at each other; I met folk who were engaged in intrigues; I heard salacious talk at times in passing; and there were the Sunday mornings when rhythmic gasps and creakings came from the top floor of our house as the Pointers enjoyed their lie-in. One week I met a woman who was famously in love. She came to the house on some Royal Society pretext. When her man appeared at last in the hallway she flung herself on him with an almost tangible rapture. Despite my own passionate compulsions, I was terrified. And sad. Love? What was it? Sex? How? There was a place, Pet told me, somewhere in London, where a woman did headstands in a booth so that the passing wits and gallants could attempt her with thrown coins. Why?

In May I saw a man forcing two boys into a coach by hitting them with a cane through the rents in their rags, and when I got home I was shaken and sick.

My uncle and I were manifest public virgins.

He took me to the theatre. By the close I believed not only the actors but the audience to be false. Again I tortured myself as to the meaning of this place.

‘These people, Uncle. What on earth is it they’re doing? How does it keep on going?’ I watched them. Daily they flooded along the streets about their various businesses; they lied, double-dealt and cheated; they apparently exchanged coinage, credit, and body fluids with very little prompting; they laughed, festered and grew old. They clung to life until they died. They appeared content with their orbits, eating, drinking, smoking and paying. Their story was private – I found no real way in, nor did I wish to; for I knew it was lacking in something, as I was myself. It was his city, his creation – as I was myself. Whither more naturally than here should we gravitate in our sadness? Commercial London. He was Warden of the Mint; Charles Montagu had fixed it for him, and all the universe had died.

Nevertheless I was also glad; for in this bleak description I recognised my own purpose, and began work on my Project. Which was to find the gaps in his.

I often thought about Nicholas. Perhaps he was somewhere in London even now. Perhaps he lay at night in some house in the streets I passed through every day, and was within reach, so that I had only to bend my intellect to his discovery in order to make all good. At such thoughts I felt my pretty lips lift away from my pretty teeth, found my pretty nails pressed against my own pretty cheeks.

‘Do you ever see Monsieur Nicholas, Uncle?’ I asked one afternoon when we were entertaining. His hand holding the new decanter shook momentarily so that some of the wine splashed over the side of Charles’s glass on to the oak table-top. It started to run down the imperceptible gradient of the wood towards Sir Christopher Wren’s lap. Henrietta Bellamy caught the little stream in time and headed it off until she could get hold of a napkin. Later Etta and I stood side by side at the mirror in the drawing-room to which we had gone while the men of science compared notes.

‘Etta. Is it easy to be married in London?’

‘Easy? What an odd thing. As easy as anywhere, Kit.’ She teased at a stray of hair behind her ear.

‘No. Being married. Is it an easy thing?’

‘Edmund is a jewel. I love him. He makes everything so easy, my dear. Positively delicious. Why is your hair always swept up, Kit? Don’t you wish for a change?’

In reply I took hold of her right-hand index finger and raised it to the centre of my brow, then just above, until it touched the concealed bump under the front wave I wore. She pushed at it of her own accord. I felt still the sharp pain whenever it was disturbed.

‘Ow!’

‘My dear. You’re deformed. I’ve found a flaw in your beauty.’ She bent to kiss my cheek.

‘Only a little deformed, Etta.’

‘I wonder if my hair would go in your style. On you it looks … stunning sometimes, Kit. Sometimes I think you have no conception of your looks.’

‘Am I a mess?’

‘No. Quite the contrary, dear. You’re always well turned out. It’s that I believe you know nothing of your effect on others. On men. On women, for that matter.’

‘No? What’s my effect?’ I dabbed at myself in the mirror again.

‘It’s useless my telling you. I can hear by your tone of voice. Your effect. You know. But you don’t know, do you?’

‘Etta. Did you see my uncle’s hand shake as I mentioned the name Nicholas?’

‘No. When was that?’ Delicately she re-applied a patch to her cheekbone.

‘When you had to mop up the wine.’

‘Oh. No, I didn’t notice. I was talking to Wren. He was just leaving. Should I have?’

That was something, Etta, that you know nothing of. It was a gap.’

‘A what?’

‘A gap. I see these moments. They are special. I call them gaps.’

Pawnee

That Summer of 1699 a schism in the Royal Society led to informal scientific demonstrations taking place at our house. We set up a rival outfit. The true cause was my uncle’s hatred of Dr Hooke, whose vainglorious mediocrity, he said, lodged by the barb in the institution’s flesh, so that twist as it might it couldn’t shake the accursed old duffer off. What my uncle’s faction actually did in these evenings was not so much different from the authorised meetings.

‘What is it that you have there, Mr Van de Bemde?’

‘A pint of slugs, Mr Gregory.’

‘Are they live slugs, Mr Van de Bemde?’

‘Not at present, Sir.’

‘I’m afraid I must be going. My deepest apologies, Gregory, Newton, Gentlemen.’

‘Let the record show that at the time of Sir Christopher’s departure, the slugs were dead, but their juice is still applicable.’

‘So recorded.’

I showed Wren out and escaped to my own bedroom. I’d coped with the gassing of the hedgehog in the bell jar, and the nerve poison from Batavia. But the dog had been too much. I noted that my uncle hadn’t liked it either, but he’d let them carry on. Food for my dreams: the way the gentlemen sat round unmoved while it cried and twitched. And now the man with the slugs. I who plotted revenge had motive, but how had these creatures offended? Should the gentlemen not anatomise their enemy Hooke?

Yet these were enlightened, modern men. They’d rebuilt the country and the city out of a legacy of war, disease and chaos. They must have good reason. Gaps. Where were the gaps? What was it that would get behind such sober, influential folk as these Londoners?

In my commonplace book I made a note of the chemicals for the gassing, and of where they were kept. And of the Batavian extract.

My uncle had showed me his notebook written from both ends. He’d got its prodigious supply of paper from his stepfather Smith when he was a boy, and it had served his whole career. It showed how he’d started when he was a young student. He’d put: ‘Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis arnica Veritas.’ Then ‘Quaestiones Quae-dam Philosophicae’, which I rendered, having learned my Latin lessons, as: ‘Plato and Aristotle are beloved to me but I’d rather know the truth. Certain philosophical interrogations.’ And he’d gone on from there. Through motion and conies and optics, to God, the creation; even to the soul, and sleep, and dreams. His thought was free. I wrote therefore:

‘Certain questions of a young woman wishing to know the truth’ Then:

‘1) Jesus said, I come not to bring peace but a sword. Is this the razor of the anatomist?

2) Is God well pleased? Has He indeed come down again? Is that Him? Downstairs?’

Then, frightened, I shut the book so that no one should see it. But of course in my bedroom my confident self knew that no one could really be watching me. God was more remote to my mind – if He existed. I was as advanced as that! Beyond Locke even! Despite the terms of my Quaestiones.

I tried again:

‘3) If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. In this work I shall be free. Though I am in the world, I am not required to be of it. What is it to be free?

4) Is it a bold thing for a woman to devote herself to study and experiment? Is it an unattempted thing? Am I the first?

5) If motion in this age of progress and wonders is determined as my uncle has shown, how shall Christ intervene to bring comfort to the tormented? Are we but bodies ceaselessly continuing in our right lines? What forces are impressed on us? Hunger? Disease? Lust? Blows? Blades? Have we in us inherent forces? What is Love?

6) These lovers sport in the public eye. But in private, when there is no one to see, what is it they say and do? What feel?

7) Why will not my passion discharge? Is a woman’s body inferior to a man’s in this? Is a woman’s mind capable of discharge?

8) Why does my time hasten away, faster than my uncle’s clock, so that I am always afraid? Are these the last days?

9) Why am I so frightened of my words ….?

10) What forces have I reacted to, so that I should once have been’, and my pen hesitated, ‘of a lupine disposition?’

I shut the book. Not much for the start of a Principia, I thought. I felt I had done something shocking.

Having hidden these deliberations, I went out of my bedroom and walked to the end of the passage until I came directly in front of the steep back stairs, which continued their upward oak pathway to where the Pointers lived. This was the place from which I contacted them about household matters. We usually shouted up. I’d never yet intruded upon their flat, although nominally I had the right. They had an air of security.

I called quietly: ‘Mary! Pet!’ There was no answer. I called again, then hoisted my skirts and stepped up, hanging on to the rope and placing my little shoes sideways on the well worn, almost vertically raked flight. At the top I stared around in the dark, waiting for my eyes to adjust. There were two doors in front of me, at right angles to one another, and an extension of the little landing space that led off to my left.

I knocked on one of the doors. No reply. I opened it cautiously. Darkness. And the other – dark too.

Down the whole flight of the back stairs, I searched for a spare light in the kitchen, from which the Pointer family was equally absent. They must have gone out on some family jaunt; I didn’t know what these London people might do at night. Perhaps he’d given them some expenses to blow. I sheltered my candle up again, right up to their privacy, and looked in for the second time. It flickered on a sparse, easy domesticity. There were the embers of a fire. Here was the parents’ bed, made, normal. There were the careful wife’s shelves of knick-knacks, a chest and a press. I noticed Tony’s gardening boots and galoshes; Mary’s stays and stockings drying over a horse. A covered chamber-pot. A washing bowl. Blue blinds drawn over the little casement. Pet’s child drawings on expensive birthday paper propped over the hearth.

In the other room, their parlour, there were chairs round a little table, and the sofa that Pet must sleep on was covered and turned back ready, with a pillow at the wall end. My eyes took in baskets, a coal scuttle and irons. Knives were on the table, and unwashed plates with the pieces of a loaf on them; a newspaper; a Bible; candlesticks; a rack of plates; a collection of unglazed jugs and metal ones. A corner held a pile of mending and a wig-stand on the floor with an old wig of my uncle’s on it, presumably awaiting some sort of repair. In the air there hung the odour of the folk I lived below: food and must and smoky body smell. I sensed my own separateness from this close, human place.

I picked up one of the knives and went back to the bedroom. Putting the candle carefully down on the press, I lay on the marital bed. My mind ran on the possibility of some alternative demonstration. That I should hoick my skirts up to my waist, spread my legs, and cut my wrists open perhaps, waiting to be found. I poked the point of the knife into the candlelit flesh of my left wrist, teasing up a peak of skin.

Was that a sound? I got up, alert, grabbed the light, then tiptoed back to the entrance of the parlour. No. No one was coming. Near the door I caught my hem and hurt my toe on a heavy cobbler’s last which stood on the boards. I noticed the ends of the wig trailing on to the floor. I stole the great drapy thing and took myself back down to my own room, suddenly powerfully aware that these lacy red appointments were nothing to do with Mary; that they must spring from my uncle’s design and from nowhere else. I had the flash that they were designed for me.

One morning I walked with Pet to Etta Bellamy’s house up further towards Hyde Park, where I was invited for tea. I had my suspicions that Etta was pregnant. I wondered who else there might be at the house, in case I should not be able to ask her. To my surprise there were lots of women there, a few of whom I knew. Etta was nowhere to be seen. I left Pet on the edge of the gathering with someone else who was a maid, then made my way toward the kitchen. A middle-aged fair woman called Margery came towards me carrying a tray of cakes.

‘Where’s Etta?’ I asked. ‘Hello Margery,’ getting my addresses in the wrong order.

‘You’re going in the right direction. Hello Kitty.’

It was a few steps down at the end of the passage into the kitchen. Etta and a number of other people were in the midst of the swelter, managing the supplies for the entertainment.

‘What is it?’ I whispered, getting near her free side and blotting her forehead with my pocket handkerchief.

‘You’ll see. Don’t ask all these people, either. I’ve left you in the dark. For a surprise. Nothing ever surprises you. I’m determined to.’

‘Are you pregnant?’ I asked. It was horribly bad manners. The question just came out. Sometimes I made these social gaffes. I can’t even remember if that word was current then. Probably I asked was she breeding, but it seems in memory the natural sort of language I would have blundered with.

‘Are you mad?’ she replied.

‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say now.’

‘It’s alright. Go up and wait in my saloon with all those other gossips.’

We drank expensive China tea from expensive little dishes. Etta played the society hostess, which is what she was. We rustled and fanned. We ate the cakes. I sat daringly on the floor as did one or two other younger girls. More status-conscious older women squeezed themselves on to the various seat levels. Pet and the ladies’ maids had to stand at the sides.

‘Now,’ said Etta. She opened an interior door. Through it, after a brief pause, walked a young girl whose skin was like fine leather, whose black hair hung in huge braids, and whose clothing was stiff, like leather too, in the form of coat and trousers covered with beadwork wildlife. ‘I introduce to you – Pawnee,’ said Etta. ‘She is an Indian Queen from Virginia, or thereabouts.’

‘Good day, ladies,’ said Pawnee, in impeccable English. ‘I hope the time of year finds you all well.’

Etta aimed a whisper at me. ‘Are you surprised?’

I was surprised.

‘A gap!’ laughed Etta.

‘A gap indeed,’ I said.

At my uncle’s house I said to Pawnee and Etta: ‘Do you know how when you are grown up the weeks and years seem to pass more rapidly than they did when you were a child?’

We were sitting in the back room looking out of the double doors at the sun on the goose-pecked grass between the honeysuckles in the yard.

‘I know what that is;’ said Pawnee. “The world is speeding up.’

‘Of course it isn’t.’ Etta contracted her nostrils; it exaggerated the fineness of her noble nose for a moment. ‘Why should it?’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘Well I hope it’s not, for my children’s sake.’

‘There. I was right,’ I said. ‘Rude but right. Sometimes when I know things I blurt them out. I can’t help it, it seems. But admit it, my dear.’

‘You are preoccupied,’ she replied. ‘Edmund is very skilful.’

‘What’s that? What is skilful?’ The other two both laughed.

Etta choked out: ‘Edmund is, Kit.’

And Pawnee added: ‘Let’s hope the world doesn’t speed up on him, then.’

‘My world is speeding up,’ I said. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Etta. My uncle’s fine bracket clock chimed the quarter.

“This is a prismatic sextant, Charles, in a new mode. I finished it last night. You’ll be impressed with the notion, I believe.’

‘Isaac, your ingenuity. It’s very fine.’

‘Take it. With my esteem. Oh, and make sure you show it to some-one when you call at the Admiralty. What a pity Cherry Russell’s no longer quite placed.’

‘Isaac. I’m overwhelmed.’

‘I’ll teach you to use it.’

‘You don’t subscribe to this Millennialist hysteria, then?’

‘It’s not according to my calculations,’ said my uncle seriously. ‘And if we are to adjust our calendar the false prophets will find themselves mightily confused.’ Charles laughed.

Round the fire in the back room on an evening when the red curtains were drawn and only a few candles were lit, I said to Pawnee: ‘I was once a boy. I was changed by my uncle into a girl.’

‘I was once a polecat,’ she said. ‘Were you ever anything else, Etta?’

Etta came back into the room, from which she’d been half out, putting on her mantle. ‘I must get home. Could you tell Tony I’m ready, Kit. Are you ready, Pawnee?’