Derek Beaven - 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.