Newton’s Niece. Derek Beaven
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of his notes to the walls of a room and then went back to work. So they were able to pay him. But you see that he had then, and has always had since, shadowy backers in his doings, some human, some magical. And that is part of the mystery. But I know all this because I was there and saw what drove him.
Listen and I will tell this also before the Elixir is made. He had his eye on me.
I’ve indicated how I spent the time after the night of Fatio’s attack. The first morning I was more or less left to myself in the laboratory. My uncle worked. Elizabeth’s face appeared to me, at times weeping, at times blank, once terrible and mocking; so that I wrenched her beloved picture from my mental eye and returned to the material present. At one stage I tried to entice the cat to come within range so that I could torment him. Perhaps he picked up on my bouts of shuddering; because he seemed well aware of the intended violence, and stayed just out of range, purring and smiling. However, as I said, I was gradually evolving a mentality of revenge, which reduced my emotion at the time, and sent the image of the night into its own locker. To some degree. And this is a repression, which, as I look over my account, I realise is a precise term. For I repressed what I knew and had grasped, so that here I’m able to recover it, to remember it as a concept, and to set it down. But I also realise that at the time I knew in another way what it was that had made me feel so wolflike before, and why it was that, though I hated my rape and was tied, I had accepted it. This knowledge I cannot now recall, though I try and try, even stubbing my pen at the paper in my frustration. I’m only aware that then, that morning, I did have the key both to the inexpressible experiences that had formed me and to the repressible one which had begun to change me.
My uncle may have noticed something was different, for at midday he thawed a little and I was untied. He had brought pieces of bread and meat. He seemed to acknowledge that he had some duty of care towards me. I must be fed even if his life had become ashes. It dawned on me how I should act; I grew very submissive and helpful. I made noises about assisting him with the work. I tidied up some of the mess. I controlled my face and stroked the cat. So we passed the day, at the end of which he nearly smiled on me, and asked whether the cords were really necessary. I shook my head and looked sadly down.
On the next day, after a morning’s alchemical labour, we went out to a nearby house to buy a pint of soup in one of his cans. We’d become a social unit. My arms remained untied. I nodded to my acquaintance, Slack, the Porter, as if all were well.
Isaac went up to his chambers to prepare the soup, and left me, so great was his trust in my new demeanour, to mind the furnace in the laboratory and sand clean a few vessels, some for a new step in the work and some to eat the soup from. My mother would have imagined he’d done wonders with my devil. I saw to the fires, worked with energy and finished quickly.
And then I crossed the garden, climbed the stair to his chambers and padded in with the pair of scrubbed-out iron bowls, whose insides had curious patterns left by melted metals. I came upon my uncle standing on a stool against the wall, holding a brace and bit. He looked round with a start and got down.
‘My portrait,’ he said suddenly, as if to explain himself, although through the years I’d got well used to the oddest of activities. ‘I am, it seems, become famous, boy,’ he said, looking at me guiltily. ‘They want my likeness and are sending a limner. I thought I should be ready to hang the picture.’
I made a singing noise.
‘But of course he won’t leave the picture here,’ he said, out-thinking himself. ‘Or only briefly, perhaps. Ah, no. Probably not at all. Of course. You caught me in a moment of folly, my boy, and the drill bit has gone right through the wall in any case.’
Into my bedroom? I moved to put down my bowls and get a brush to sweep up the mess.
‘Forgive me, boy. I’m … not myself. Foolishness.’ And he turned his head away, leaving me feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable. No one had ever asked my forgiveness. ‘I’ll use it for something. That rack of polishing pastes wants mounting somewhere out of the way.’
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