Newton’s Niece. Derek Beaven

      His Creation

      While I finished growing up, he paid me visits. First, soon after the Incident, I had a letter of his to announce the programme:

      ‘Here,’ my mother’d said. ‘He sends an enclosed for you. You may count yourself pretty fortunate.

      ‘Events which I do not specify on paper, child, have led to great alterations in my life. You have known me but a short while, and in that while you have seen me only as the thing I was; which the world now acknowledges was not a nothing indeed but a seer of new worlds and a maker of new contrivances. Nevertheless there are reasons why I must change my state. Where I saw so clearly and for so many years into the meanings of my researches, I find now my vision is muddied; perspectives have shifted, faculties altered. I’m sure he expresses himself very courtly,’ put in my mother, ‘but most of his writing sets me at a loss. You will, perhaps, not understand what I find myself compelled to write - indeed, and to the point at last,’ she said. Then she continued making out the intricate shapes on the page, ‘to you here – suffice it to say, child, that I must go on in an entirely different way. Things are not what they were with me; I shall never find my former self again, I think. A parcel of books will arrive for you shortly by my direction. You are to read them. When I come I shall hope to find you perfect in them. I hope you keep up your duty to my sister your mother, and are of service to her in her bereavement. We are all in God’s hands, to whose mercy you may be assured you are commended by

       your Unkle Is. Newton

      ‘There. He’s decided to make something of himself at last.’

      He gave me books indeed. Many, many books. I read them. I was the second woman in his life. The first was his mother, whose death he had overseen, nursing her illness himself until the last – though whether from love, guilt or social obligation I never knew. Every other representative of my current gender he seemed to regard as an advanced example of upholstery. But I was indeed his Protégée; I was one of the two chosen people.

      I knew it wasn’t love, on either of our parts, but a kind of double-tracking, which we both acknowledged without question. It puzzled me. I felt it must somehow serve us, though in a way that I was entirely unaware of. But then what was I to do with my beauty and my brain in darkest Northamptonshire? Marry? I had offers.

      I hadn’t stayed in the clothes of the wolf-boy. My mother got over her fears. Having seen the advantages of a talking female as opposed to a snarling male, she weighed up the bigotry of the community against the sense of achievement she might get from putting one over on them; and chose to have it given out that she was sending me away North to distant cousins. These were good folk, she said, who were willing to harness her son’s unreclaimability to ceaseless heavy labour, in return for a social chance for their pretty daughter. She flattered herself in the comparison, for though we were Rectory we weren’t rich, and the locality must have conceived a grim impression of the fictitious North Country cousins. Nevertheless in due course mother and son travelled off on one of Trueman’s trailers, even though the affair was technically over; and a clever sleight of hand was achieved between two out-county inns, in time for mother and daughter to meet a return transport.

      Of my father? My father lived six weeks after my return from Cambridge. It was some indeterminate disease that wasted the flesh of innocent clergymen and demanded to be flushed through with brandy. He died in delirium when the brandy ran out. He called us in as he lay dying, my brother and sister and myself. He blessed my brother, and kissed Margaret and me. He said he’d always been so proud of his two girls but poisoned worms and now woodlice were tunnelling in his legs. He screamed. Uncle Benjamin Smith, who was staying with us as he so often did, came running upstairs to see what was toward. His wig flapped as he flung into the bedchamber. But his haste was redundant; his brother-in-law had passed on.

      Thus I was acknowledged, and was called Catherine Barton, and learned how to live among people.

      

      ‘You’ve read the Fermat? And the Wallis?’ he said.

      ‘It’s too hard, Uncle.’ I sat at a desk in our house. In front of me a rare copy of John Wallis’s Arithmetica Infinitorum, the Arithmetic of Infinites, lay open, on top of a specially made copy in my uncle’s hand of Fermat’s Varia Opera Mathematica. It said:

      ‘As n becomes indefinitely large, the ratio of the area under the curve to the square enclosing it approaches the limiting value of one third;’ he said. ‘I spoke to you about limits when I last came down, didn’t I?’

      ‘Yes, Uncle.’

      ‘Well, then. Have you been idle?’

      ‘Of course not.’

      ‘Then what do you find hard?’

      ‘It would help if it were in English,’ I said.

      ‘Ha! You must stick at your Latin. Without it you’re lost.’

      ‘Yes, Uncle. But why is it so important that I learn the mathematics? I don’t take naturally to it.’

      ‘Do you think I took naturally to it?’

      ‘You must have done. You find it all so straightforward. To me it’s infinitely crooked and tangled. Why does it matter?’

      ‘It matters because … because … because of the event that we never speak about, and which must not be spoken about – you understand that, girl, don’t you? It must not be mentioned. Ever. To anyone.’

      ‘Yes, Uncle. I understand that.’ I wondered which event he meant.

      ‘Well I hope you do, for I’m wrecked if you say it. You don’t want to wreck me do you, Catherine?’

      ‘No, Uncle;’ I replied. Wreck him? How could I wreck him?

      ‘Well, then. You must learn this because I must be sure of you. Tcha! You must understand these things. I must share them with you. I must include you. Your mind must be formed according to these designs. It’s to protect you, Catherine. It will protect you from becoming idle, frivolous and wanton, as your sex are most likely to. It’s to protect you from Eve’s faults. I must have you with me. Do you understand? It is imperative.’

      I sighed, and looked again at the Wallis: a sea of Latin with numbers and diagrams afloat on it. ‘Yes, Uncle. I understand.’

      But in a few years money once again became a serious problem.

      It was my mother’s suggestion in all innocence – if I can attach that word to her – that we apply to Uncle Isaac in London to see if I might be something domestic for him. She played into our hands. I was to be with him literally.

      He paid for everything. I arrived one bitter March afternoon five years after my transformation, by the West Chester coach which ran up to the metropolis on Watling Street. He met me at the Three Cups Inn just outside Westminster and checked first of all that no one had tampered with my bundle and wickerwork hold-all, and my net bag with Nick Fatio’s gift-skull in it. Then he looked at me. ‘Well, Catherine;’ he said, ‘we recluses are both moved into the fashionable world, at last. What do you think of the great city?’ I’d never thought of myself as a recluse; I’d never voluntarily sought Northamptonshire. But perhaps he had a point, I thought to myself as I looked around me.

      ‘It’s more than I could have expected,’ I said. What comment could anyone pass who came upon that place for the first time from nowhere? I’d probably seen more people in the previous quarter of an hour than I had in the rest of my life. Cambridge was as nothing beside this. And I felt cold through and through. But I was pleased finally to be here, because it felt as though my destiny were being fulfilled. The last few years in the Midlands, during which I was learning to be human, and female, had brought me up against the tightness of village life – of life in general. The holiday of feeling light was soon over. The wolf self lay primed and potent at the back of my mind, half-known; half-impossible. He