The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

A hard, hot Von Guericke sphere seemed to form in Jennet’s stomach. “Oh, my dear child, suffer me to deliver you from this scoundrel! You’re too young to give your innocence to a rogue!”

  “I’m also too young to play Mrs. Millamant. If ’twere otherwise, I would gladly swive my way to the top of the Dramatis Personæ.” Rachel rose and turned one hundred degrees. Her scowl, unmediated now, was even fiercer than its reflection.

  Jennet brushed her daughter’s arm. “Tell me your adventures, child. I want to know ’em all.”

  Rachel flinched but did not pull away. “’Tis truly my own wayward mother?”

  “Truly.”

  “I must admit that London hath no surplus of sympathetic listeners.”

  “You shall enjoy my rapt attention for as long as you wish.”

  The melodrama that Rachel proceeded to relate began in sunlight, descended into darkness, and ended on a gray, ambiguous dawn. With undiluted delectation she recounted her first four years in India, a cavalcade of jewels, elephants, monkeys, flowers, mimosa trees, and more gods than the sky could hold. Her governess treated her with great kindness, and Rachel soon decided that Mlle. Peltier was fully the equivalent of a real mother. Alas, her father rarely stayed in Madraspatam, for a man could not function as East-Indies Postmaster-General without traveling continually amongst the settlements, but he always returned home bearing fragrant ointments and ravishing fabrics.

  Rachel’s misery began when Mlle. Peltier accepted her employer’s proposal of marriage. Although Rachel was initially pleased by the arrangement, in time a melancholia came to possess Tobias’s new wife, making her as vindictive in the rôle of stepmother as she’d been loving when employed as a tutor. Claudette Peltier Crompton took to feeding Rachel indifferently, reprimanding her constantly, and beating her regularly.

  Just when it seemed that Rachel’s ill-fortune could not increase, the fiery summer of 1722 blazed across Asia, bringing a typhus epidemic to rival the previous century’s bubonic plagues. The contagion carried off not only Rachel’s favorite priest at the Anglican school but also the elderly Hindoo neighbor-woman who’d given her a mongoose, and then, finally, her own dear father.

  Much to Jennet’s chagrin, the news of Tobias’s passing sparked within her not a spasm of remorse but a spate of deduction. His death explained why her last two stipends had failed to arrive.

  “He was a person of decency and generosity,” Jennet said.

  “He was a fool, but I loved him,” Rachel said, sidling back to her mirror. “So now there was nothing to keep me in India. My nine-month journey to England taught me much about the wickedness of the world, and ’twas only through God’s grace I arrived still in possession of my wits, my honor, and my dreams of a life on the stage. Until an hour ago, I’d ne’er acted before a London audience, and I must own ’twas a thrill much greater than the instant cure for orphanhood you’ve presumed to bring me.”

  “This talent for playing’s in your blood, child. When next we meet, I’ll tell you how I once portrayed a demon’s ward, but now you must know of the route by which I’ve landed in your dressing-chamber.”

  “I fear your escapades hold little interest for me.”

  “Methinks you’ll find ’em as enthralling as the Parable of the Greedy Porcupine.”

  As Rachel changed her clothing, trading the waiting-maid’s tattered muslin dress for a taffeta gown with puffed sleeves, Jennet unspooled her narrative, from the challenge laid upon her by Isobel—to her two failed attempts at a demon disproof—to her love affair with a Pennsylvania printer—to her imminent collaboration with Sir Isaac Newton.

  “’Steeth, Mrs. Crompton,” Rachel said when Jennet was finished, “’twould seem we share some several pints of blood but not one drop of sensibility. I’ve ne’er had the slightest taste for philosophic conjecture or Philadelphia journeymen.”

  “I beg you, withhold your judgment. I believe we’re destined to become good friends.”

  “Not with me living in London and you chasing after your inky-fingered swain.”

  “I’ll allow you’re a competent actress, but ’tis a profession hath debauched many a girl as well-bred as you,” Jennet said. “Hear my plea. Auspicious prospects lie before my Mr. Franklin. Accompany us to the New World, and we shall all make a happy life together.”

  “Pish, Mrs. Crompton. If a man’s star is not risen by his middle years, ’tis probably stuck fore’er on the horizon.”

  “Ah, but you see, my Ben is not yet thirty.”

  Rachel flung a woolen shawl around her bodice and headed toward the doorway. “He’s twenty-nine then? Twenty-eight? Impressive, but I’d still not lay a farthing on his future. How old is the man exactly?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “What?”

  “Nineteen. Twenty come January.”

  “Nineteen? Nineteen? And you durst lecture me on debauchery?”

  “I durst not lecture you on anything at all. I merely ask that you sail with us to America after I’ve brought Newton’s proof before Parliament.”

  “Your proposition’s most unappetizing. I’ll wager there’s not a single worthy troupe in the whole of Pennsylvania.”

  “Then you must found one, dear Rachel.”

  Against Jennet’s expectations, this last remark seemed to catch her daughter unawares. Rachel sighed harshly and, pursing her lips, leaned against the jamb. “Come back this Saturday night, and I shall give you my answer.” Straightening, she marched into the corridor. “But now I must bid you adieu, for I’m off to watch a cockfight with my Gaston. By your example he should be a babe in arms”—her voice rose as the shadows consumed her—“but in sooth my gallant wears a beard!”

  j

  FOR REASONS THAT Sir Isaac Newton had yet to fathom, his revelations from On High always occurred at noon. Shortly after the sun arrived overhead on the eleventh day in April of 1676, the key to the Book of Daniel had blazed through his brain. The same solar circumstances had attended his derivation in 1665 of the binomial theorem, his sudden apprehension in 1668 of a method for determining the area under a curve, and his Heaven-sent discovery in 1673 that the floor-plan of Solomon’s Temple, as documented by the prophet Ezekiel, forecast the future history of the world.

  Today’s epiphany was no different. As the noon hour came to Kensington, Newton realized that the Problem of Problems—by what means did gravity exert its pull throughout the universe?—was within his reach. He had merely to sit chairbound on his porch and think about it.

  Newton loathed his wheelchair, that hideous hooded chariot to which the physicians had condemned him, but he loathed the physicians even more. Although he admittedly didn’t know how to cure his slack sphincter or recurrent kidney stones, it was obvious that England’s doctors didn’t either. Clearly the confounded chair didn’t help. Indeed, by his own observations he was more likely to void a stone—they normally passed with little pain, praise Heaven—following a vigorous turn about his garden than after yet another interval in the wretched chair. If he attempted such a stroll now, of course, this would only provoke a wearying altercation with his day nurse, but the instant Mr. Asnault left for home, Newton would liberate himself. The best way to keep your legs was to use them.

  He swallowed a mouthful of warm coffee, repositioned his rump, and opened his heart to his mentor, God.

  In replacing Cartesian vortices with universal gravitation so many years earlier, Newton had invited on himself the accusation of occultism, and his enemies still made it routinely. But now he saw a way out. He would postulate an all-pervasive æther: not Descartes’s æther, certainly, not that ridiculous invisible-yet-physical plasma, but a divine immaterial medium dancing at the edges of the human sensorium. A difficult concept, palpable incorporeality, perhaps even paradoxical, though to the Messiah of Mechanics it partook no less of reasoned discourse than did the Pythagorean theorem.

  He rang the brass bell thrice, thereby signaling Moncriff to bring pen, paper, ink pot, and writing-board. T
he servant appeared promptly. Speaking not a word, for none dared break the silence whilst Sir Isaac was thinking, Moncriff set the equipment on his master’s lap and departed.

  The sheets came in colors: green for fancies, pink for notions, yellow for hypotheses, blue for truths. Newton selected a blue sheet, dipped quill into ink, and wrote:

  MAN = Visible Material Body

  CHRIST = Apprehensible Immaterial Body

  GOD = Inapprehensible Incorporeality

  Aye! He’d caught the scent! Midway betwixt the unknowable essence of the Almighty and the familiar fleshiness of humans lay that unique substance called Jesus Christ. In fashioning the Redeemer as He’d done, God had collaterally provided the universe with the very stuff through which action-at-a-distance might operate, objects influencing one another in eternal obeisance to the inverse-square law. Yea, verily! Occultism conquered forever! The æther that made the world go round was in truth the divinely created Body of Christ, a situation that the egregious Roman Church, with its determination to chain the Savior to a mathematically nonsensical triad, would never grasp in an æon. The Holy Trinity—pshaw! The Deity = 3 = 1 = 3—rubbish! Even the lowliest sub-sizar at Cambridge would never proffer so blighted an arithmetic.

  At the bottom of the blue sheet he wrote Gravitational Medium = Æther Christi, then set his quill on the writing-board, slumped down in his wheelchair, and closed his eyes. The sun beat against his lids, brightening his blood and filling his field of vision with a vast red sea.

  He awoke at dusk. No bird sang. No breeze stirred. The day-nurse would be gone now—hurrah: for the immediate future he could employ his body as he pleased. He blinked, staring at his writing-board. Æther Christi. Nay, he hadn’t dreamt it. Before falling asleep, he’d flushed the gravitational medium from hiding.

  Now, he would have to allow that this triumph traced partially to the tract he’d received two weeks earlier. Amongst the merits of Benjamin Franklin’s Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion was the idea that “the Infinite hath created many Beings or Gods, vastly superior to Man, who can better conceive his Perfection than we, and return to him a more rational and glorious Praise.” Was it possible that, without Franklin’s postulate of immortal intermediaries, Newton would never have fallen upon the notion of Christ’s corpus as gravity’s cause? He hesitated to say. One thing was certain: when Franklin came to dinner that evening, the Æther Christi would not be amongst the topics they discussed. For all he knew, the young Philadelphian was a budding Wilhelm Leibniz, eager to seize credit for discoveries he hadn’t made.

  Leibniz—faugh! The scoundrel had been gratifyingly dead these past nine years, and still Newton could not think on him without enduring a trembling rage. By what monumental vanity, what Olympian arrogance, had the old pretender imagined he’d devised the fluxions independently of Newton? True, Leibniz’s method of indicating maxima and minima could claim a certain originality, and he’d given his plagiarisms the novel name of calculus, but everyone knew the blackguard had maintained a band of roving sycophants, and these knaves had doubtless revealed to their master something of the new geometry brewing at Cambridge.

  There could be only one Prince of Principles in the world—why had Leibniz refused to see that? God did not traffic in redundancy—could any truth be more self-evident?

  Of course, when a man was selected by Providence to unveil the universe’s deepest mysteries, it behooved him to keep his appointment in perspective. It was one thing to be God’s viceroy and quite another to be an outright deity. Rejecting any overtures from his followers that smacked of worship, eschewing adulation at every turn, Newton had rarely regarded himself as anything more than a demiurge. Indeed, throughout his twenty-five years as Master of the Mint and his five as Warder before that, he’d always acted judiciously when exercising his powers over life and death. Yes, in most cases he’d declined to spare a clipper or a counterfeiter the noose, for left to their own devices such fiends would have bankrupted England during the Great Recoinage, and even today they were a festering pustule on the face of the monetary system. But occasionally he showed mercy, especially when the knave in question engaged in an authentic variety of groveling.

  He sipped cold coffee, purged Leibniz from his brain, and returned to his meditations. Chief amongst the properties of the Æther Christi, he now saw, was its probable participation in the microworld as well as the macro. Micro and Macro, he wrote on a yellow sheet—yellow for hypotheses. Atoms and Stars, he added. But before he could wrestle with the ramifications, Gunny Slocum, his chief informant from the Fleet, came dashing up the carriageway at the velocity of a man whose breeches were on fire.

  “Hallo, Sir Isaac! Billy Slipfinger lies feverish in his hovel, and he wishes to tell us all about the Calibans! I directed his widow-to-be to scribble down his babblings, as he’s apt to pop off at any minute!”

  Newton’s heart seemed suddenly to shoot from his body, and only after he’d vacated the wheelchair did the organ return to its customary location behind his sternum. “Well done, sir!” He rang the brass bell four times, thereby instructing Moncriff to appear posthaste. “What does Mr. Slipfinger expect in return?”

  “Thirty quid, that his Lucy might become a hag o’ means!” Slocum shouted.

  “’Sblood, I’ll pay it!” He would gladly hand over twice that amount for the facts Slipfinger presumably possessed, the names and whereabouts of every felon who ran with the Caliban Adepts, the largest gang of counterfeiters still operating in London.

  Moncriff, panting and discombobulated, materialized on the porch.

  “Fetch my money cudgel,” Newton said, setting the writing-board aside, “then fill my purse and tell Padding to hitch up the horses, for we must be in the Fleet by dark!”

  “But tonight you dine with Mr. Franklin and his sister.”

  “Hang Mr. Franklin! Hang his sister! We ride to the Liberties!”

  As Moncriff rushed back into the mansion, Newton gazed longingly at the yellow sheet. Micro and Macro. Atoms and Stars. Revealing the secret stuff that held the universe together was important, but saving the British economy mattered too. With any luck, he would be back amongst these speculations by dawn, completing them within the week. If his instincts were correct, the Æther Christi

  would ultimately rank with his greatest discoveries. Before the decade

  was out, natural philosophers would come to prize this glorious

  glue most highly—more highly even than a geometer cherished

  his Euclid, an engineer his fluxions, or an alchemist

  his great transmuter, that

  wondrous element

  called

  j

  Mercury

  was the problem.

  Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—

  from the birth of the solar system onward,

  these compliant planets had followed their predictable

  grooves, scrupulously obeying the laws given essence by Kepler

  and exactitude by Newton. But Mercury had a mind of its own. At the completion of each orbit, it did not return to the same starting point. My father knew this. So did his contemporaries. But since Mercury was close to the sun and therefore difficult to view, everyone agreed to attribute the discrepancy to observational error.

  Over the years the measurements grew more precise, and the alibi ceased to satisfy. By the time a bright young patent clerk named Albert Einstein was on the scene, astronomers understood that Mercury’s perihelion, its point of closest approach to the sun, was advancing 574 seconds of arc every century. After factoring in the perturbing gravity of the known planets, a physicist could make my father’s mechanics account for 531 of those seconds, but that still left 43 seconds in the shadowland.

  Einstein wasn’t fazed. Truth to tell, he loved those 43 extra seconds of perihelion shift, for he knew in his heart they would succumb to his idiosyncratic notions of curved space and warped time. He set about his project, and—lo and behold—his equations not only a
ccounted for Mercury’s contrariness, they maintained the same form in every frame of reference he could imagine.

  For with Einstein, you see, context was all. When Isobel Mowbray bid my dear Jennet experiment with Galileo’s principle of uniform acceleration—assuming no air resistance, a cannonball and a codfish dropped in tandem will hit the ground simultaneously—neither tutor nor pupil fully appreciated the utter strangeness of that phenomenon. But Einstein did. One day in 1907, sitting in the Swiss Patent Office, he realized that if the falling codfish focused its attention exclusively on the descending cannonball, it would never know it was moving within a gravitational field. Until the instant of impact, in fact, the fish would have every right to insist it was at rest!

  Einstein later called this “the happiest thought of my life.”

  From the moment he rationalized Mercury’s perihelion shift, the world’s cannier scientists understood that Einstein’s physics was destined to turn the Newtonian universe inside-out and upside-down. As early as 1905, Einstein had intuited that no object capable of assuming a resting state could travel faster than the vacuum speed of light. Besides liberating Maxwell’s electrodynamics from the æther frame, Einstein’s hypothesis of a light-speed barrier (the sine qua non of special relativity, but that’s another story) gave him leave to discard my father’s troublesome appeals to absolute time and absolute space (troublesome to Newton himself as well as to his rivals). By combining these insights with the narrative of the falling fish, Einstein gave the world his great construct of 1915, general relativity—a brave new geometry of local curvatures produced by the presence of mass in the universe: planets, stars, Mount Everest, African elephants, Sumo wrestlers, kitchen sinks. Under a general relativity regime, gravity was no longer an inexplicable “force” mysteriously causing “action at a distance.” Instead of heeding some occult attraction, a given planet simply pursued the straightest possible course that the context allowed: a geodesic path in space-time.

  When I first heard the popular notion that my father’s system is really just an “idiosyncratic case” of Einstein’s universe, my reaction was instinctively defensive. “That’s like saying the Nike of Samothrace is an idiosyncratic case of metamorphic rock,” I told Kepler’s Harmonice Mundi. But over the years I’ve mellowed. For one thing, Einstein’s theories are evidently true. (Yes, occasionally a physicist with time on his hands will ostensibly coax a light pulse past the 186,000 mps barrier, so that the damn thing seems to arrive before it departs, but smart money still says special relativity has a future.) For another thing, if I’m an “idiosyncratic case,” I’m an idiosyncratic case that matters. In many a nontrivial circumstance, Newtonian physics still rules. The lunar mechanics that grace my second edition informed the heart and soul of every computer program employed by NASA during the Apollo era. If you were supervising the epochal moon landing of 1969, you needed no technical manual at your fingertips besides the Principia Mathematica.