Newton’s Niece. Derek Beaven
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here and get some fresh air. You look poorly, my dear. My dearest. Kit.’ He put his arm on my waist. I froze. I didn’t know how to act. ‘Our lines first crossed when you were ill at Cambridge. You were fourteen, I believe. How old are you now?’
‘Nineteen.’ Were my teeth chattering?
‘I pray you’re not ill again now that we curve together. Heavens, these are hard lines. A shared locus. Asymptote. No. The game defeats me and you shall have to help me out. Help, Kit.’ His hand played with the gatherings at the top of my skirt, his fingers just pressing in to find the flesh of my hip. I wondered sweatily what figure he’d have used if I’d said dots. But the game had defeated me from its outset. I think it was something he’d composed and was hoping to pass off as spontaneous – a word-screen to hide behind. Yes I really did feel as though there was something more wrong than I could put down to emotional stress. Had Pet laced me too tightly? ‘I’m sorry’ I said. ‘Let me sit down.’ But before I could do so a wave of nauseous faintness swept over me and I fell – or would have fallen had he not caught me in his arms and held tightly on to me. I recall his forceful hand next to the fabric roll at my buttock. It was at this moment that my uncle returned to the room.
I remember finding myself in a carriage – a specially hired one, I imagine, because I don’t think we owned one at that point – sitting opposite Pet. I remember there was singing coming from beyond the window – no doubt some balladeer at a public house. It was a country scene as I looked out, and Pet said to me: ‘Don’t touch your face.’ She intercepted the hand I was involuntarily raising as I stirred from my drowse.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Your face. You mustn’t touch it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Madam. Miss Kit. Your illness.’ She looked at Pawnee.
‘Ah!’ I said.
Once the worst of the temperature and delirium had begun to abate they’d lost no time in shipping me off to better air. My uncle wrote to me at Mr Gyre’s farm north of Oxford, also alarmed for my face and suggesting cow’s milk for the remains of the fever.
l am
Your very loving Unkle
Is. Newton
I am very comfortable here I thank you, my dearest Uncle Isaac. Charles’s man saw to everything and the people, and then returned to London, having ridden beside the coach all the way and made sure that we were provided for most generously in the journey. I am well enough recovered to write, and to be up and about in the house; which is very well kept up and quite large. Mrs Gyre has been most kind, as have all in the household. I want for nothing and am not permitted to exert myself. They make sure I rest after meals on a settee in front of the fire. Indeed the weather has been very cold, but the airs are fresh and no doubt do me good. I shall be writing to my mother and to my sister Margaret to tell them not to worry any more on my score. Pawnee and Pet keep me company and play me at cards; and make sure that I do not give way to scratching! Which I can assure you is a hard thing to do, as the pocks are very provoking until they fall off. We go out for strolls beyond the herb garden when the sun shines. Pet is very taken with the life in the country and the Landscapes that are to be seen; she is wide-eyed at having so much of an horizon, and thanks you very much for the gift of the coat. She wishes me to send her love and duty to Tony and Mary and that she is quite well, and so I would beg you to pass this on. Please also pass my love and best wishes to Etta; I believe her vomitings are usual and will pass. I hope you are recovered from your cold in the head and that the temporary setbacks you mentioned are now resolved. It would please me to know when you would have me home.
Your obedient Niece and Humble Servant
C. Barton
The moon had shone into my bedroom where a last drench of fever was flushing through me. I’d opened the window to get the freeze of the air on to my skin, and then I’d seen my moonlit self in the mirror. I’d sat with my shift off my shoulders poking, scratching and squeezing at the pock scabs on my face. I don’t know whether I’d wanted to rid myself of them or to scar myself, my dangerous beauty, for life.
But now it was Spring. I was recovered. My uncle had insisted that I stay out of the city until I could be reckoned safe. It was strange to have been ill and to have been, in a sense, mothered by the people around me. Women’s arms embraced me as if I belonged. The old house was relaxed and safe in a way that I’d never known before. The place had no hooks, no sense of dark memories. The look of the timbers didn’t make me feel unaccountably tense or churned up in the stomach. They were just the timbers, and it was just a country home; for which the mistress cut flowers as soon as there were any to be had, and the com figures and drying herbs hung up comfortingly in the big kitchen, where unless there were visitors we mostly took our meals informally, all together. I say ‘all’ since there was an assortment of children and a couple of aunts of indeterminate ages, together with an old servant and a sort of housekeeper woman. Of course, I reasoned to myself at other times, it could well be that Charles was paying them to be good to me, as perhaps he was, since someone must have arranged all this. Nevertheless, overpaid or not, I couldn’t help sensing a genuineness in their treatment of me, that both pleased and threatened – I had no practice in receiving it.
My separate bedroom looked out over the wooded April scene I came to love; there, lambs and kids had begun appearing in the paddock. Yes, I still had the bad dreams, the twisted nights and violent preoccupations, but they receded into what you might call proportion; they didn’t matter so much.
Pawnee said: ‘Mrs Gyre has a gardener who has a niece.’
I said: ‘Yes, Pawnee.’
‘She is a niece you should see.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll see when you see her. Come on.’
I followed her down into the old hall, and then out via the kitchen halfdoors. A week of warm weather had dried the mud and muck of the yard. We went beyond the new brick and timber sheds where the carts and wagons were now kept.
‘There;’ she said. ‘Good morning, Tempest. That is what he’s called. I told you I’d bring Mistress Catherine Barton. He thinks I’m a gypsy, Kit, pretending to be resident and probably up to no good.’
‘I beg yours, Ma’am,’ said the gardener, seeing that I was English-looking, and dressed as well as Pawnee.
‘I’d suspect him of blushing if his cheeks weren’t more tanned than mine anyway,’ said Pawnee. He grinned and started to spit. Then thought better of it. This wide-jawed grin held my attention. He had no overbite – his teeth met edge to edge all round. The girl with him looked up from the weeding where she was kneeling. I turned away from the curious teeth and found myself staring at her instead – with a peculiar sense of recognition. Where …?
‘Well?’ Pawnee said with a certain air of triumph. The face was the face I saw every morning in my mirror. She was my double.
‘Heavens!’ I said. And like a mirror image her eyes widened at the same time as mine – I guess as the impulse of recognition affected her too. She was, at a hazard, about seventeen. She straightened up and then reached out at a head of the rose-bush, as if to smudge away a parcel of aphids. ‘Can you tell me your name?’
‘Lucy’lizabeth, Miss.’
‘I have a confession, Kit.’
‘A confession?’
‘Now that you’re better I can tell you.’ Pawnee sat with me on my bed, holding my arm through hers, while morning sunshine flooded in from the outside world. With my free arm I put down the