Derek Beaven - Newton’s Niece

‘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?’

‘It makes it difficult to know who you are,’ I said.

‘It’s not difficult for me,’ said Pawnee.

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘It’s very difficult for me.’

‘What do you mean, was I ever anything else? Tony!’ Etta leaned back out of the door and shouted up at the top flight. Tony!’

‘Etta was a bird,’ Pawnee said, thoughtfully. Her skirts rustled. She was dressed now in normal clothes; the native rig was just for the surprise. ‘A beautiful crow with dark shiny feathers. She flew high above the forest looking for babies and earrings, until there was a great fire, and the forest went away. Then she flew higher and higher. Edmund too was a crow. He found her in the tent of the sun; her wings were bleeding. Dark, dark blood. There were two drops. One was me and one was Kit.’

‘What’s so difficult for you, Kit?’ said Etta. ‘Are you talking about Charles Montagu?’

‘Everything,’ I said. ‘And my time is speeding up so much. So much.’

When they had gone I went in to join my uncle. He was occasionally drunk – ish. From the solitude of evenings when no one came.

‘What do you think of me, Catherine? Do you think I’m greatly changed?’

‘Greatly, Uncle.’

‘But not so greatly as you, eh, boy? I have maintained my gender.’

‘Have you, Uncle?’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Mean?’ A pause, during which he took another glass of the brown fluid he had in front of him.

‘D’you know what it is I do? What I did today, for example.’

‘No, Uncle.’

‘I found a series of mistakes in the accounts submitted to me by Mr Blackwall, my Superintendent of Works. I took luncheon. I interviewed a Person of Quality who thought he was interviewing me. And I saw to it that a notorious coiner was committed to be hanged. Catherine!’

‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘Well, do you hear me, or not?’

‘I hear you, Uncle.’

‘And you say nothing?’

‘What would you have me say?’

‘You have no comment at all.’

‘Am I not conformable? Do I displease you? What should I say?’

‘That I have nothing left of my former … frenzy?’

‘Your devil has left you, Uncle.’

A pause. ‘You speak mighty directly, when you speak at all, Catherine.’

Another pause. I could find no words that would fit him.

‘Don’t you find me strange, Kit? I leave the universe alone. I could wish I’d always left it alone.’

‘Don’t you find me strange, Uncle? Strange beyond belief?’

I wished he smoked, so that there might be a substance to these intervals.

‘What do you think of Charles, Kit?’

‘He’s a great man who is fabulously rich and runs the country almost. And he makes you feel cheerful with his visits. He is your friend.’

‘Do you think he looks handsome, Kit? Why don’t you sew or something of an evening? Etta Bellamy embroiders. Didn’t my sister teach you to sew?’

‘She tried, Uncle.’ His face eased into an uncertain smile.

‘Ah.’ Then again: ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Charles. Do you think he’s handsome?’

I’d lost the grip on my sex. I wondered if, being a little the worse for drink, he was going to make some appalling confession regarding his feelings, and to ask for my opinion – or my blessing.

‘Yes. He’s a good-looking man, in an unconventional way; although he’s smaller than you,’ I ventured carefully.

‘Well?’ he said, looking pointedly at me. I glanced down and smoothed my skirt. ‘Are you blushing, Kit?’

‘You needn’t confide in me, Uncle. Shall I make you some coffee?’

‘The Devil, Kit … I beg your pardon. But you don’t have to play the coy virgin with me.’

‘Isn’t that what I must play, Uncle?’ With the merest trace of an intention to wound.

‘Not if you’ll have him, Kit. I grant you he can’t consider marriage, even though he’s free now. Sadly. But he thinks a good deal of you.’

I felt dazed, as though I were a sycamore seed, newly fallen from the tree.

That night in my bedroom I realised the true significance of my uncle’s choice of décor. He wasn’t just the civil servant he claimed to be. He had a new project which had actively outstripped mine. He was way ahead of me. It was a whorehouse – a laboratory whorehouse – and I was the whore.

‘Catherine!’ My uncle’s voice called me from my bedroom. I checked my hair and face, leaning over my dressing-table, holding my shell-backed hand-mirrors ludicrously poised behind my ears. My head hurt. My belly hurt. My skin was tender. My breasts were sore. And I’d woken feeling too hot. I tipped some scent water out and rubbed it on my wrists and temples.

‘I’m coming, Uncle!’

I’d been working at my project the night before: the last point, the one about the Lupine Disposition. How difficult it was to make myself look at it, and yet how it nagged at me and made itself of all the most important Question. How its meaning vanished out of my mind just when I thought I had the next move and was about to put my ink on to the page. What had made me feel and act as that monster? Why that animal in particular: wolf, dog, what have you? An accident of birth? A fault in my incarnation? I see myself wrestling then, as I wrestle now, with the recurring words of the room, the man, the wig and the stick.

‘Catherine!’

They were just words, leading to an impossibility, which I’d attempted to displace with those reasonable alternative explanations even as I jabbed my cut quill on to the paper in the frustration of non-recall. The words led to an impossibility, because everything I knew in the world said the opposite so loudly: that God was watching over us, that parents took care of their children, that Adam and Eve had been naughty and were deservedly expiating their sin throughout history, that the Church taught the truth through clergymen on both sides of my family, and that my Uncle Isaac had blessedly transcribed the word of the Creator for the New Age. What matter that as far as I could see, as I’ve said, Isaac’s version, his creation itself, was a deadness in a glass jar against whose hard outside God’s knuckle might knock in vain? That seemed to bother nobody else. They all seemed mightily satisfied with it, and could get on with their businesses the better for it.

‘Aren’t you ready yet!?’

“The merest moment, Uncle. My earrings. Then I’ll be down!’