homunculus sat also in its curious jar. It was a little septic foetus, cushioned on its placenta, and hermetically sealed, by some glassblower, in a vacuum. Nicholas prevented its fate:
‘Maître! Non! Non seulement est I’homoncule fort précieux, mais encore pourrait-il être le truc même qu’il nous faut.’
My uncle hesitated. And then:
‘pray, Sir, get thee behind me. For years I’ve sought the justification of God in the secret of these metals and in these,’ he indicated the walls full of leather-bound volumes, ‘testaments. And I have sought freedom from the Fiend – at least, as I said, by day. The homunculus is but an emblem – a figure of rhetoric. It is not a literal requirement and refers to a state of the metals. As such this is an obscenity and declares in its horrible shape the continued presence of the evil one. My only hope is to maintain the restricted path. I shall try to keep up my shattered honour, sir, and my reason, as I am a gentleman and a Protestant; otherwise it shall not be done. When you return,’ and I could see his disciple’s sweet foxy eyes receive the hint that the straight path was compromised even as it was declared, ‘take care that you not bring that abortion with you.’
It was enough. The Swiss collected his saddlebag and blanket, and affirmed that he would go out into the city to find a barber to attend to him. He did not return that day. My brain ran again and again on what had happened. I was wound up in a kind of shock, because there was no grounding of it. And most of all I wondered why it was that I’d submitted. It made it somehow my fault: I deserved all I got. I was already half-brute. What else could I perform upon myself? But a pure thought rose off that frenzy like the coil of a vapour, and lodged itself in a corner of my mind. I’d read of calculated killing. As I came of age that morning I realised what my brain was for. When he came back I would find a way … This thought I lodged in a safe place.
In speculating about where he might have gone I saw some point in making contact with the world of humankind – I would need to think their way in order to out-think him. I rummaged my random learning for any impressions as to where such an adult might go during the day, how he might exist while out of my sight; but the heaps of ideas remained as chaotic as the hotchpotch in the laboratory. With hindsight I reason now that he was meeting some contact: that he had gone back with the damned abortion to the Masonic Gentlemen’s Club or the Papist Intelligencers, or the Parisian Rosen-kreutzers, or whichever bent spy-ring was paying him. So Uncle Isaac and I had a couple of days to ourselves. As the morning went on he ran his fingers through his hair and studied and got up to look into whatever he was cooking on the furnace. I, tied to my ring, and losing my clarity, attempted with my free hand to saw my arms with pieces of shiny rubbish before dropping them as ingredients into my primal soup.
The Portrait
I look back through memory’s peephole. This laboratory, the place where I learnt my science, has no modern counterparts. No long mahogany school benches here; no gas points nor curving slender taps; none of those tripods and burners, and cupboards full of flasks; none of the distinctive microsensitive balances, preserved in glass cases; nor instant electricity piped down red cables from a suspended matrix. Not here either the functional fluorescent hum of the research lab, with its white coats and computers. No spectacles parked on the bridge of a painstaking nose. No female student glued by the eyelids to a microscope. Not a decerebrate cat in sight.
In fact he kept home for an intact and enormously well developed tomcat who used to snuggle up by day near whichever of the furnaces was alight. I had always disliked the cat, but at least it went out at night. Mr Newton’s cat was an amatory legend of the college, if not the city: a feline Don Giovanni who had his own cosy hell to return to through one of the draught holes in the skirting. He would also follow my uncle up to his chamber and slip into a haven hotter still. And that was the place of his body-building activities. Simply, he ate most of my uncle’s meals; for, as I said before, Isaac rarely troubled the company in Hall, and, if he remembered, ordered food to be sent up to him. But because his custom was to become totally absorbed in his project of the moment, he’d take merely a bite or two before another idea struck him, and then he’d dash back to his metals or his notes or his instruments. So the cat profited.
But in the garden room – the laboratory – there was usually no food, and the cat went there for solitude and repose. From the outside, the laboratory looked like a little negative mimicry of the College itself, which was built in a square around a magical fountain. So the laboratory sat in my uncle’s private garden as if in a tiny quadrangle. And if it looked oddly shaped and hardly able to compose itself under its tiled roof, this was because its ground plan was an exact and secret replica of Solomon’s Temple. Moreover, the garden – which in my memory looks like any number of formal ornaments of the period, with its mathematical division into four quarters and its little intricacies of flower beds – this too had its secret. For it was a representation of Eden, being planted with medicinal herbs from all the four continents we then knew of, each in its geographical set, and watered by special Rivers of Paradise that Uncle had ducted from the roof of the chapel, so that when it rained he might as Adam, or Solomon, or Jesus look out over the unfallen book of Nature. Apples, even, that Newtonian fruit, grew neatly pruned and disciplined along the walls on either side of the entrance. It being September, those that there were on the little trees glowed with ripeness.
Inside, and viewed from the Corner of Fermentation, this laboratory was what we should call a study cum sitting-room cum garage, albeit in Biblical configuration. It had three elaborate fireplaces, built around a central chimney. There was also a clock on a bracket and the remains of the tall water-pressure cabinet with which he’d played a density joke on a carpenter. On the stone floor there were three tables and some oaken chairs all covered with books and curiosities. There was one of his famous telescopes on a stand, and a number of other mechanisms in brass and leather which I didn’t like the look of then, and can’t put a name to in the recalling. Two pendulums made like delicately swinging miniature cupboards hung from the roof timbers. And he’d built a mobile close stool to save time. But above all there were his tools and his vessels. Everywhere lay the implements of a master craftsman: chisels, pliers, saws, tongs, ladles, scribers, grinders, a treadle lathe, bellows, gauges, rulers, compasses, hammers, drills; and everywhere else there were crucibles, flasks, coppers, cannikins, leathers, leads, cauldrons and tubes. For he’d become above all a wonderful artisan; the apotheosis of all those energetic and ‘Puritan’ young men from the skilled trades who for decades before the civil war attended lectures and evening classes in practical arithmetic, geography, navigation, weights and measures – in short, mathematics – because they wanted to take destiny into their own hands. And thought they’d done it when a precisely ground cutting edge traced out a significant locus that terminated in some royal vertebrae.
But these young men married and were mercantile. If they somehow supplied a context for his activity they don’t explain his origins or singular obsessions, the most fraught of which was alchemy. What motivated Mr Newton, Professor Newton even, to this solitary passion of Prima Materia? I, seeing him at that time through my wolf’s eyes, could tell something: that he was a stunned being.
It suits our view now to look back and see him as a superior brain. Having lived quite long and seen many, I wonder if there is such a thing. In those days anyway it would not have occurred to us to think so. As samples of tissue go, brains are all much of a muchness. If we’d had the word maybe we would have seen ourselves then as aerials, that might through grace receive God’s messages. We resonated; we were attuned; we rode down signals with the angels. Intellect, and its dysfunctions, were visitations we permitted, were granted, or had imposed on us. And some of us were thought to have been instructed by devils.
In any case, what could be more intelligent than language itself? I have my own reasons for resisting the cult of Genius. I say my uncle merely made himself proficient in the codes that were newly developing then, and cross-fertilised them for the sake
