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.
Over this Newton and Fatio together lifted a ceramic cover to marry up with the iron rim, but not before they’d threaded a fine chain through the top. For the first time I noticed that this chain hung down from the interior of the chimney. Its dangling end was so designed that a little biting clip could fasten on to the wire from the glass egg. The whole apparatus now seemed complete, with the egg nested in its cover and seated in its ironware, but it remained to them to feed in the downpipe from the alembic and make all the seals up with fireputty.
‘So,’ said my uncle, ‘the hermaphroditus must be roasted over the coals until he’s ready to give up his star semen. This essence rises up with desire and we draw the spirit down this long condensing tube so that it fertilises the Queen here.’ Then he went over to his workbench and took one of his notebooks. He motioned us to sit down.
‘Twelve years ago I felt I was on the verge of solving the riddle of the metals, but it merely drew me on to torment me and left me weeping and bereft – as indeed I find myself now. Had it not been that I wrestled with Heavenly Nature and overcame
‘You speak of your Principia, Sir?’
‘I do, Nick. But this earthy trade came near to wrecking me. I felt as though I should die with grief. Listen.’ And he began to read from his notes:
‘May 10 1681’ I understood that the morning star is Venus and that she is the daughter of Saturn and one of the doves. May 14 I understood the trident. May 15 I understood “there are indeed certain sublimations of mercury” &c as also another dove: that is a sublimate which is wholly feculent rises from its body’s white, leaves a black faeces in the bottom which is washed by solution, and mercury is sublimed again from the cleansed bodies until no more faeces remains in the bottom. Is not this very pure sublimate sophic sal ammoniac? May 18 I perfected the ideal solution. That is two equal salts carry up Saturn. Then he carries up the Stone and joined with malleable Jove also makes sophic sal ammoniac, and that in such proportion that Jove grasps the sceptre. Then the eagle carries Jupiter up. Hence Saturn can be combined without salts in the desired proportions so that the fire does not predominate. At last mercury sublimate and sophic sal ammoniac shatter the helmet and the menstruum carries everything up.
‘Two years later I made Jupiter fly on his eagle.’
‘Sir, I had no idea you had achieved these things,’ said Fatio. ‘You told me nothing of it.’
‘Yesterday I completed the retracing of those steps, ready to put everything to trial today as I told you, in the light of what I now suspect.’
‘That you are mocked? I still do not know what you mean, Maître.’
‘That it is not possible to separate off the Me from the It. The Us from the That.’ And he pointed to the fire. ‘It is my worst fear – that what goes on in there depends on us, and on what goes on out here. It is that which I put to the test today.’
I looked out of one of the windows. It had started to rain heavily on to his Biblical garden. A man stood outside. Great drops bounced on and battered at the opium poppies, and at the stranger’s wide, black hat. We, inside, were both awestruck by the solemnity of my Uncle Isaac’s tones.
Could he predict the weather? I don’t know how he was so confident there’d be a thunderstorm overhead that day; and not just a late Summer drift either, but a full blaster from off the North Sea, with proper maritime impulsion in it. Perhaps some Intelligence was looking after its own, or perhaps he had some secret since lost. Why not? There must be such things. Unless he called it up … I just preserve the image of him in my mind’s eye, up there on the chapel tower with Charles Montagu (for that was the name of the visitor) in the pouring rain with the great kite soaring into the whelming grey above him, and his hands looking disproportionate because of the huge ceramic gauntlets with which he was controlling the string. A thin rope, separate from the kite’s actual string, ran from the top of the laboratory chimney up to heaven. I began to understand what was being done, and something of its danger. However, no member of the College seemed remotely to concern himself with Mr New-ton’s eccentricities. Occasionally scholars in cloaks, or servants, or deliverymen passed across as much of the open space as they had to until they could get themselves under cover again. They hardly looked up. Maybe they were used to him. I was not used to this.
Popular wisdom ascribes the origin of this kite activity to Benjamin Franklin. I imagine the masonic tradition which hovers around so much of early science carried the technique to him, but he certainly didn’t invent it. It occurred to me that this was what I’d seen darkly illustrated in the Tableau de Riches Inventions.
But