College servant knocked. We were all silent as he lugged in a box of logs. It was well after dark. He cleared some utensils and left. My uncle pressed Nicholas to stay the night. He accepted. But where was he to sleep, seeing that Monsieur Newton already had company? Isaac offered immediately to turf me out of my room: ‘He can sleep on the floor.’ Fatio experienced an access of nicety concerning the prior rights of family over friends: ‘But no. It is not to be dreamed of, Maître.’
Uncle made a sort of gasp and offered his own room. Monsieur pursued him with a knowing eyebrow. Uncle became uncannily silent.
‘No, no. Pas du tout.’ Nicholas would couch himself on his cloak between the Desk of Opticks and the Athanor of Alkhimia.
Take my bed, man. For God’s sake.’
‘Pray, Maître, do not trouble yourself. I would not dream … Why, there is no man in all Europe whom …’ and into fragments of French or Latin, or whatever, as was his fashion of compliment. And so, heavy with implications, they played out their game of offer and refusal, until Nick Fatio won, as he was bound to do, being the more calculating of two mathematicians.
Therefore, after some geometrical discussion which I was not equipped to follow, we all retired at more or less the same time, with the newcomer promised to stretch out by the furnace in the main chamber on the horsehair-stuffed seat, after he’d taken some more wine. My uncle found the night cords my mother had left and bound my wrists to the two head-posts of the spare bed, which was the configuration in which I had slept on my back for as long as I could remember.
Some chiming clock of the city and a pressure against my mouth woke me at about two. I opened my eyes to the almost pitch-blackness of an abominable assault. A male smell under my nose. Faint pallor of linen suggesting the presence of a part-clothed torso. His voice above me whispering in a foreign language. Fear mapped me to the bed. Something automatic made me try to scream but I had no voice, only a poor rasping in the throat. And my mouth had opened, which was the worst thing it could have done. Invasion; the thing stuffed back and forth in my head; the taste; the revolting sensation of being gagged at the very back of the palate, while held down by superior force. But for some reason I couldn’t bite, and the violation continued, against my will but beyond my control. Why couldn’t I bite? I felt waves of panic. My breath was knotted into my grimace, my neck locked rigid. I was sure I should die. Until I found myself at last panting through my squashed nostrils, like the choked dog in the farmyard. But it wasn’t enough. The torso was all over my face. Not enough air to survive on. The fight for air. I would not survive. Could not. All my chest and throat contorted in the effort, the drag for air. A point of black pain expanded in a rush towards me, until it enveloped me totally.
Then I was out of myself and looking down from the ceiling in the small-hours murk which only a window’s faint moon-and-starlight illuminated, at a larger person over a smaller one’s head; whose hair was held down by a fist, and whose trunk thrashed between tied cords. I saw my knees rear up and catch him so that he grunted, withdrew and tried to wrestle me over on to my front. Great heaves of longed-for breath filled those lungs. In such dark, however, he clearly hadn’t grasped the fact about my strung wrists; my body wouldn’t turn. I watched myself twist and hurt. Then he gave that up and returned to the mouth, penetrating it and jerking on his violent weight. Why did I, that sufferer below me, comply? I watched the asphyxiation build up once more. I watched my renewed thrash.
Maybe a minute. He shuddered and came off. And again I saw the desperate lungs permitted at last to inflate themselves in relief.
I remember having a discarnate idea which seemed, incredibly, to exist everywhere around us both. I would sing. I would.
I did. And that was what now in fact filled the room with a powerful and almost tangible vibration:
Let us with a gladsome mind
I felt myself, as I returned to my body, swallow the stuff that was in my mouth. It was a reflex. And now I felt what I had only watched a moment ago – the great gulps of air rushing down my throat between each phrase of the hymn.
Praise the Lord for he is kind. For his mercies ay endure Ever faithful, ever sure.
I was squinting in the darkness into a startled face which itself had just made a sound: some little feminine squeak which mingled with my last two lines. It reminded me of a creature I’d once seen cornered – a hare which somebody had tried to make a pet of. He moved at once to escape but the noises had aroused my troubled uncle, because I heard him hurry round to my doorway. There was a crash of breaking glass followed by a cry of pain and a rational curse. Then his dark bulk appeared in the frame, and I could sense him peering in. Fatio turned and was clutching at his breeches, trying to tie or pull them up – I don’t know which. My uncle roared in a roaring whisper:
‘Villainy! Whoredom! Fornication! Caught in the net! By Christ Almighty!’ And then he burst into tears.
Fatio claimed first in French and then in English that he’d been in search of a chamber-pot, being blind drunk, and had tripped over my bed in the dark. Then he too burst into tears and fell to grovelling at my uncle’s feet, licking them and proclaiming his own mathematical limitations in an attempt to smother the memory of the incident in all of our minds.
‘Maître, you are the foremost mage of all Europe. An intellectual Volcanus. Before which I humble myself, like the savage who knows no salvation, in abject Abasement. You have anatomised Light and thus have delivered us from our Darkness and Error; you have interrogated Change itself and given it Number; Movement, the Divine, you have glimpsed the limit; Prophecy! Gravity! The Moon! And you are trying for the Stone, and shall see it, yes, yes, draw even the constellations from their spheres and peer into the immortal Mind itself. It is that Faculté Incroyable which has so drawn me to you, has enforced my presence here, to be with you and none other. You must know that as soon as ever I heard of you I suffered that force you alone have justified – impulsion from a distant Attractor: I was drawn; I was conjured. And still I am drawn back to you here after you have bid me depart and I meant to be absent for ever.’
At last I could close my mouth. Something vomited back from my stomach. I spat up and growled and spat up again over myself and bared my teeth in shock. Inside I was weeping but no tears would come out of my wolf-eyes. The dark bulk of Uncle Isaac knelt down to break his hindering clasp. He put his arms around the snivelling one, and then took his, Fatio’s, luxuriant, curling, blond hair and jerked it back in a tragic gesture.
‘Not Mars with Venus, neither. Not betrayed with Venus. Nor even the messenger boy of the Olympians. But, to my eternal shame, Cerberus.’ Visibly demonstrating a profound agitation, he picked him up like a child and returned him to the horsehair. I understood nothing that had passed.
No more was said. I doubt if any of us slept much more that night, but there was no more migration of place. In the morning I was freezing in my own sweat.
And no mention at all was made of the dark offences of the small hours. A servant brought food. We ate. Then I was tied to the desk, shivering and panting by turns. My neck and shoulders were filled with cramps. Newton kept sighing and staring at the furnace. Fatio began to shave, then he gave up. He proceeded to unpack his saddle-bag. He claimed to have a homunculus in a bottle. From Egypt, he said. Furious, my uncle went to cast it out of the window, hurling up the sash in preparation, and saying:
‘Nay, Sir. We do God’s work here. At least by daylight.’
That was the sash by which I gassed the moth in the curious jar when I was ten,
