Derek Beaven - Newton’s Niece

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.

‘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!’