The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  At the Fleet Street intersection they came upon a half-dozen whores, drinking gin and trading jests preparatory to a long night of splinting doodles in Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Slocum jerked a pistol from his belt. The trollops dispersed like a flock of guinea hens apprehending a fox within its midst.

  “’Twas recently my pleasure to read the English translation of your Principia Mathematica,” Ben said, drawing abreast of Newton. “Might I say that universal gravitation is mayhap the single most beautiful idea a person hath e’er thought?”

  “I know not what I may appear to the world,” Newton replied, “but to myself I seem to be only like a boy playing on the seashore”—a poetic dreaminess entered his voice, audible even above the clank and clamor of the Liberties—“and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered all before me.”

  “’Tis bracing to observe such humility in so famous a man as yourself,” Ben said.

  “Hooke found only common shells,” Newton said. “Leibniz couldn’t tell pretty shells from pigeon shit. Flamsteed didn’t even get to the beach.”

  The party proceeded west along Fleet Street, easily the most pestilential promenade in Jennet’s experience. The air reeked of distilled spirits, decaying cabbages, rotten fish, and human waste. Rats scurried along the cobblestones as blithely as hares capered through Marylebone Park. But the most shocking phenomenon to reach her senses was Newton’s face. His countenance was a portrait of unmitigated glee. Evidently he’d as soon catch a coiner as solve a differential equation.

  “Permit me to offer a theory concerning electricity,” Ben said to Newton. “I believe that the spark one conjures with a Von Guericke sphere partakes of the same substance as a lightning-stroke. Each resembles the other not only in giving off light, but also in its swift motion, crackling sound, crooked path, and affinity with metals. What think you, Sir Isaac?”

  “If ’tis unification beguiles you, young Franklin, you should know that my forthcoming book will explicate the very paste that binds together the world’s invisible particles. ’Twill be more momentous even than my Principia, more illuminating than my Opticks.”

  Upon reaching Whitefriars Street, Newton led them twenty paces south, then paused before an archway and, leaning into the gloom, banged on the oaken door with his shillelagh. “Open up, Mrs. Totten! Open up for the Master of the Mint!”

  “How do I know ’tis ye, Professor?” cried a hoarse female voice.

  “Because I carry thirty pounds sterling in my purse!”

  The door swung back to reveal a hunched, lardish, nearly toothless old woman holding a lighted tallow candle.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Totten,” Newton said. “Allow me to introduce Mr. Franklin and his sister, Mrs. Crompton, both of Philadelphia.”

  “Hallo, Lucy,” Slocum said, still brandishing his pistol.

  “We are delighted to make your acquaintance,” Ben said.

  Lucy Totten stared at the Philadelphians, fought back a sneer, and spoke in a flat voice. “Charmed.” She locked her rheumy gaze on Newton. “Oh, Professor, I been goin’ through the worst day o’ my life.”

  She guided her visitors down a bottle-neck passageway into a suffocating hovel, its furnishings consisting of a single chair and a few upended vinegar barrels littered with candle stubs and cooking pots. In the far corner rested an eviscerated mattress upon which a large man lay wrapped in a dark blanket, shivering and moaning.

  “I did as ye instructed me, Gunny”—Mrs. Totten cupped her hand around the barrel of Slocum’s pistol, easing the bore away from her chest—“writin’ down all his rant about the Calibans.”

  “Prithee, show me the transcription,” Newton said.

  “Not before ye offer my Billy a benediction,” Mrs. Totten said.

  “Benediction?”

  “We can’t entice any men o’ the cloth into the Fleet these days, but I’m willin’ to make do with geometry.”

  Newton shrugged vigorously, propped his shillelagh against a barrel, and followed Mrs. Totten to the mattress. Jennet stepped toward the dying man. The ticking stank of mildew. In the candle’s glow Billy Slipfinger’s blanket stood revealed as a blue greatcoat, multiply perforated, as if its previous owner had died in a hail of musket-balls. His face, stern and unforgiving, suggested an almost Shakespearean depravity, an amalgamation of Iago, Claudius, and Aaron the Moor.

  With manifest discomfort, Newton assumed a kneeling position beside the ratty bier. “So, Billy Slipfinger, thou canny old rogue, ’twould appear thou art about to meet thy Creator,” he said. “When alive thou contributed little to the glory of God, squandering thine energies on counterfeiting and copulation, but in death thou hast helped save the British Mint, for which the Almighty will surely reward thee, shabby though thy case may be in other respects.”

  Awkwardly, Newton regained his feet.

  “Thank ye, Professor,” Mrs. Totten said, her eyes moist and sparkling. “Your eloquence hath moved this impoverished widow to tears.”

  “I would have that list now,” Newton said.

  Perhaps the last thing Jennet expected to see in this unfamiliar pesthole was a fœtal prodigy of her acquaintance—but there he was: the Lyme Bay Fish-Boy, a-float in his jar at Slipfinger’s feet. She released an involuntary gasp.

  “What ails thee, sister?” Ben said.

  “I shall explain presently.” Surely this was Dr. Cavendish’s specimen. There couldn’t be two such freaks in England.

  Slipfinger’s moans grew louder but failed to enter the domain of speech.

  Lifting the lid from a soup pot, Mrs. Totten retrieved a gin bottle in which a rolled-up paper, secured with twine, lay like an ancient potion turned to cake by the passage of time. “If this ain’t worth thirty quid”—she handed the container to Newton—“then Hell’s o’erdue for a frost fair.”

  Newton unbottled the paper and put on his optical spectacles. “Mr. Slocum, whilst I study this document, you will take up my money cudgel and perform a patriotic duty.” He pointed toward a shapeless smear of gray mortar near the fireplace. “’Tis obvious Mr. Slipfinger hath secreted his handiwork within these walls.”

  “Ye’re wrong, Professor!” Mrs. Totten protested. “Billy hid only the most genuine currency round here!”

  “Sir Isaac, your vision is as keen as your Opticks is acute,” Ben said.

  Over Mrs. Totten’s shrill objections, Slocum grabbed the shillelagh, wrapped both hands around the grip, and clubbed the controversial masonry. Potato-size chunks of plaster fell away. He attacked the wall thrice more, gouging a hole the diameter of a cocked hat. A dozen bundles of paper currency, neatly tied with string, tumbled onto the floor.

  “All o’ them notes is bona fide!” Mrs. Totten wailed.

  With a snorty laugh Slocum opened the flue, then began stacking the currency in the fireplace.

  “Stop, Gunny!” Mrs. Totten cried. “Ye’re about to destroy my life’s savings!”

  “Nay, woman, he’s about to destroy a pile of paper as worthless as South Sea Company stock, a commodity on which I once lost twenty thousand pounds!” Newton slid a tinderbox from his pocket, handing it to Slocum, then turned to Ben and continued his raillery. “The South Sea directors got precisely what they deserved, long sojourns in the Tower for so blithely bribing Parliament. The Lords took their money, likewise the Commons, whereupon both houses set about blurring the distinction ’twixt a government security and a corporation share.”

  “I implore ye, Gunny!” Mrs. Totten cried. “I’m fallin’ to my knees!”

  “As I heard the tale of the South Sea Bubble,” Ben said, “the directors assumed that the War of the Spanish Succession would advantage them, with a defeated King Philip granting England exclusive trading rights with his West-Indies colonies.”

  Newton offered Ben a corroborating nod. “When Philip decided otherwise, the managers declined to involve themselves in any
species of commerce whatsoever.”

  “Verily, ye might find a suspect note or two in the pile,” Mrs. Totten conceded, “but the rest of ’em be real as St. Andrew’s shaving basin!”

  “Sir Isaac, I am perplexed,” Jennet said. “If the South Sea Company did no business, why would anyone imagine its shares to be of value?”

  “The logic of your complaint is irreproachable, but at the time I allowed avarice to befuddle my arithmetic,” Newton confessed as he perused the list of Caliban Adepts.

  Unmoved by Mrs. Totten’s entreaties, Slocum finished mounding the notes, then swaddled them in tinder and merrily struck flint to steel.

  “No, Gunny!” Mrs. Totten screeched.

  A spark shot forth, landing in the little pyre.

  “Gunny!”

  “If you persist in your complaint,” Newton told the incipient widow, “you will forfeit the thirty authentic pounds I brought you.”

  Mrs. Totten frowned and, falling silent, sank her bum into the room’s solitary chair.

  Jennet fixed on the hearth. As the flames took hold, the sham notes blackening and shriveling like broadsheets meeting Satan’s gaze, she turned to their hostess and said, “I’m curious about yon prodigy.”

  “Would ye care to buy it?” Mrs. Totten replied brightly, then immediately thought better of her cupidity. “How durst ye propose a business transaction”—a scowl contracted her face—“whilst my dear Billy lies dyin’ under my nose?”

  “Forgive my impertinence,” Jennet said.

  “Ye can have it for a quid, though the aforementioned idiot paid three guineas.” Mrs. Totten rose and shuffled toward the mattress. “Billy’s mother, a witling by any measure, convinced him that such a fœtus would bring luck, so when the prodigy-monger set up shop last year, Billy was first in line.” She adjusted the greatcoat, pulling it even with her husband’s jaw. “As ye can see, his damned Fish-Boy’s done him no good.”

  Newton cleared his throat, removed his spectacles, and, with the solemnity of a judge sending a murderer to Tyburn Tree, pronounced on Mrs. Totten’s document, declaring it authentic and valuable. He paid the woman her thirty pounds, then instructed Slocum to escort the Philadelphians back to their lodgings.

  “If you please, Sir Isaac,” Ben said, “’twas my hope we might continue discussing smoother pebbles and prettier shells.”

  “Some other time.” Newton refolded the paper and slid it into his pocket. “For the nonce the Lord Mayor and I must start drawing our plans against the Calibans.”

  “Dearest sister, I fear no demon disproof may be extracted from the Master of the Mint,” Ben said. “Not this night nor any other.”

  “So it seems,” Jennet said, heaving a sigh.

  “Demons,” echoed Newton with undisguised disgust. He grabbed his shillelagh and, approaching the hearth, agitated the ashes of Billy Slipfinger’s iniquity. “Demons, demons, demons…”

  “I shall happily purchase your fœtus, Madam,” Jennet told Mrs. Totten, “but first you must direct me to the museum it once called home.”

  “Whereas the monster costs a quid, his previous address is worth twice that much,” Mrs. Totten said.

  “I shall take the whole package, facts and fish-boy.” Jennet set the required notes in Mrs. Totten’s palm. For reasons doubtless tracing to the sad logic of life in the Fleet, the three pounds from Jennet seemed to delight the old woman no less than the thirty from Newton.

  “Ye want Le Cirque de la Lune, Lower Thames Street, hard by the bridge,” Mrs. Totten said.

  “And so I take my leave of you.” Newton locked his shillelagh under his arm. “Young Franklin, when next we meet, I shall explain how I divined the floor-plan of Solomon’s Temple from the Book of Ezekiel. This chart hath given me the precise dates for the fall of Romanism, the triumph of Arianism, the mechanical transport of human beings to the moon, and the Day of Judgment. Mrs. Crompton, ’tis apparent you’re an intelligent woman, but you must forgo your obsession with diabolism ere some magistrate arrests you for an enchantress. Farewell.”

  With all the élan of Rupert Quince exiting the stage of the King’s Theatre, Newton turned ninety degrees and strode out of the hovel.

  “I don’t understand that man,” Ben said.

  “I wonder if anyone does,” Jennet said.

  “I’ve known that beady-eyed lunatic for twenty years,” Slocum said, “and he’s still a riddle to me.”

  j

  BILLY SLIPFINGER DIED shortly after midnight, embracing his Creator with a sound that for Jennet evoked a Nimacook squaw scraping the back of a beaver pelt. She and Ben and Newton’s bodyguard remained by Mrs. Totten’s side another hour, listening to her alternately bilious and remorseful elegies for her husband.

  “Marital fidelity was ne’er his speciality, I can tell ye that,” she said. “Sometimes the wight e’en brought one o’ his narycherries home. But here’s the odd thing—them ladies always liked me. Half the time Billy would pass out drunk ere he could drop his breeches, and then the strumpet and me, we’d amuse each other all night, sippin’ gin and tellin’ tales.”

  “From my limited dealings with harlots, I would conclude they make good conversationalists,” Ben said, “for being surfeited in the flesh they grow hungry in the mind.”

  “Rather the way natural philosophers make good lovers”—Jennet patted Ben’s arm—“as their curiosity compels ’em to press e’er deeper into Aphrodite’s domain.”

  Whilst Jennet took possession of her prodigy, Ben made Mrs. Totten a gift of his embroidered handkerchief, and then the Philadelphians set out for Mayfair, protected by Gunny Slocum’s pugnacious deportment and drawn pistols.

  London by night, Jennet knew from experience, was as theatrical a world as London at noon, though instead of clerics, bankers, beggars, hawkers, and shop-keepers, the players were trollops, gamesters, drunkards, sailors, and cutpurses. All during the long walk back to Adam’s Row, Slocum supplemented the general atmosphere of menace by recounting his adventures chasing down coiners with Newton. Evidently the geometer and the ruffian were an ideal team. First Newton would detect a counterfeiter’s whereabouts via a succession of brilliant logical deductions, then Slocum would appear on the scene, offering the blackguard a choice betwixt an interval in the dock and a bullet in the brain.

  “Inexplicable force equals occult force,” Jennet muttered after they’d parted company with Slocum. “Occult force equals demonic force. Where’s the chink, Ben?”

  “We’ll find it,” he said as they mounted the steps to their rooms. “Even without Newton to light the way, we’ll find that blessed chink.”

  “From the pyre my aunt shouted, ‘Aristotle!’ She cried, ‘The elements!’ and then she named the Greek immutables.”

  “Mayhap you heard naught but the ravings of a woman driven mad with fear,” Ben said.

  “’Tis possible, aye. And yet I believe she saw the calculation ere she died, but could find no words to speak it save ‘earth’ and ‘air’ and ‘fire’ and ‘water.’”

  Jennet and Ben slept all morning and left Mayfair at half past two. Swathed in a woolen scarf and hidden beneath her coat, the bottled Fish-Boy bulged outward from Jennet like a pregnancy. Arriving at the Golden Ass, the Philadelphians quickened themselves with coffee and cake, then agreed to rendezvous that evening at the King’s Theatre, where they would learn whether Rachel intended to join their imminent Atlantic crossing. It struck Ben as nothing short of a miracle that Jennet and her “doubtless beautiful” daughter had found each other after a decade of separation, and he was “deliriously eager to meet her.”

  “I shall speak candidly,” Jennet said. “For all I want Rachel to take ship with us, I cannot help my observation that she is rather closer to your age than to mine.”

  “Your meaning’s plain, dearest. Believe me, I have no wish to further besmirch a Moderation grid that already displays lapses in abundance.”

  “’Twould be more than a lapse were Rachel to turn your head fr
om me to her. ’Twould be a rent in the fabric of the universe.”

  “I’faith, Mrs. Crompton, a man in my position hath less reason to prefer the daughter o’er the mother than doth a falconer to select a merlin o’er a peregrine.”

  “Look me in the eye, bonny Ben. Look me in the eye and say, ‘Waunnetunta.’ My heart is true.”

  “Waunnetunta.” He offered her a dulcet smile. “Turn on, turn on, Mrs. Crompton,” he added. “We shall make it glitter by and by.”

  j

  WHILST BEN TROTTED OFF to accomplish one last printing job at Palmer’s, a pamphlet for the British Anti-Slavery Society, Jennet and the Fish-Boy proceeded to Lower Thames Street and descended a series of spavined marble steps into the crepuscular world beneath the bridge. Mrs. Totten had not misled her: three sprawling canvas pavilions—red, yellow, green—lay huddled by the water like box kites awaiting a wind. CAVENDISH MUSEUM OF WONDROUS PRODIGIES, read the sign on the green pavilion. FEAST YOUR EYES ON NATURE’S MISTAKES.

  Heart scampering in her chest, she elbowed the flaps aside, stepped into the pavilion, and set the Fish-Boy’s habitat on the floor. Advancing through the murk, she found herself standing face-to-face with an old acquaintance, the Bird-Child of Bath, lit by a whale-oil lamp and resting on an exhibition table, his visage conveying his usual eagerness to quit the glassy cage and take flight. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, the feathered stillborn’s brethren greeted her. The Smethwick Philosopher looked as sagacious as always, the Turnbridge Wells Bloodsucker seemed happy in his vampiric profession, and the Kali of Droitwich retained her usual air of divinity, but the Bicephalic Girl appeared gaunt and weary, as if she’d lost one too many altercations with herself.

  There were no customers in the museum, only an impossibly ancient gentleman in a red periwig and a green frock coat, stooped over the Bicephalic Girl’s bottle, polishing it with a rag.