The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Laughter pealed from all three students.

  “Say, lads, I hear Newton once challenged God to a game of chess,” the pocked scholar noted. “He offered the Almighty a pawn advantage and the first move.”

  More laughter rang through the twilight.

  “Last January a score of us ventured to take instruction from the man,” the fat scholar explained to Dr. Cavendish. “We could make no sense of his inaugural lecture, and e’er since then he’s been—I swear it—he’s been spouting his hydrostatics to an empty hall.”

  The students had a half-dozen more Newton stories at the ready, and by being an appreciative audience Jennet and Dr. Cavendish eventually came to possess the long-sought-for fact: the geometer occupied rooms in Great Court, second floor, a suite fortuitously indicated by the pointing scepter of the sculpted King Henry VIII surmounting the main gate.

  Although she desired to track down their quarry at once, Dr. Cavendish insisted that she was too hungry and tired to make a persuasive presentation. There was wisdom in this argument, she reasoned, and so she let him lead her to a nearby public-house, the Turk’s Head in Green Street, where they renewed themselves with beef and drink—a tankard of ale for the curator, a dish of coffee for Jennet. All during supper she practiced aloud her plea to Newton, a performance that brought to Dr. Cavendish’s face an expression combining perplexity with admiration.

  “You talk of the inverse-square law, and I’m thoroughly puzzled,” he told her. “You discourse upon action at a distance, and I’m entirely confounded. You speak about refrangible rays, and ’tis all opaque to me. In short, my remarkable young friend, thou hast mastered the art of obfuscation, and if our man’s not completely dazzled, then I say the Devil take him!”

  j

  DWARFISH, HUNCHED, CONCEITED, AND BRILLIANT, Robert Hooke disliked resorting to deviousness when seeking proper credit for his genius, but the malice of his rivals oft-times required that he stoop to their station. The knavery he now so meticulously enacted was in his view utterly necessitated by the knavery that begat it. Had the arrogant Isaac Newton deigned even once to count Hooke his equal in philosophy, he would never have been reduced to riding out from London, skulking around Great Court, and invading the blackguard’s rooms.

  The conditions were ideal. Newton was away at Woolsthorpe, supervising the planting on his mother’s farm, and his rooming-companion, John Wickins, had left Cambridge-Town permanently to become a clergyman in Stoke Edith. Gleefully Hooke set about his task. In the depths of his bones he knew that Newton and Wickins were guilty of the grossest indecencies, and with luck he would discover evidence on the premises. He began with the writing-desk, eventually locating nine letters, the most pathetic being an appeal for money from a Grantham apothecary, the most peculiar being a query from a landed Ipswich woman who thought gravitation had something to do with witchcraft, the most compelling being Hooke’s own speculations concerning the lunar irregularities. Newton was a sodomite—of this Hooke was certain. The world would learn of his depravity—to this end Hooke was pledged. All he needed was one incriminating epistle, a single revealing journal entry, or a solitary love token, salaciously inscribed.

  The desk contained no such treasure. He moved on to the wardrobe, inverting the pockets of Newton’s breeches and waistcoats.

  The great rivalry stretched back to 1672, when the Royal Society had asked Hooke, as Curator of Experiments, to endorse Newton’s essay called “A New Theory About Light and Colors” prior to its publication in the Transactions. Hooke, with good reason, had declined. Any competent philosopher knew better than to leap from mere facts to grand hypotheses, and yet near the end of his treatise Newton had done just that, venturing that light must be corpuscular, not wavelike, in nature—a lapse that Hooke had conscientiously brought to the Society’s attention. Sadly, the affair did not end there, for Newton had proceeded to bully and harass his peers into demanding that Hooke give the essay another look. They even bid him re-create the experiments in question. Re-create them! As if the author of the renowned Micrographia was so obtuse that only the most tangible demonstration could penetrate his brain!

  The wardrobe, alas, held no damning papers. Hooke lit a candle, dropped to his knees, and searched under the bed.

  For nearly a decade he had stoically borne the Humiliation of 1672, until finally a golden opportunity presented itself. With typical smugness Newton had offered the Society what he claimed was the last word on the Tall-Tower Problem: his calculations putatively showed that an object dropped from a twenty-mile-high minaret would, owing to the Earth’s rotation, describe a spiral and land eastward. But the jackanapes had erred! The dropped object would travel eastward only if the minaret stood on the Equator, and furthermore the path of descent would be elliptical! At the Society’s next meeting, Hooke did his duty, exposing Newton’s blunder and presenting the correction.

  There were no tell-tale epistles under the bed, so he proceeded to the bookshelves. Systematically he removed each volume and shook it, seeking to dislodge the littera crusis.

  Someone knocked on the door, causing Hooke’s pulse to accelerate, his arteries to distend, and his cunning to construct a narrative. Yes, he was indeed prowling through Newton’s personal possessions, but only to acquire proof that the geometer had pirated the inverse-square law from him, a formula accorded much uncredited display in Book Three of the Principia Mathematica.

  “Come in!”

  A peculiar pair strode into the room. Leading the way was a prepubescent girl, her arms encircling a copy of Newton’s bloated treatise. Behind her came a bewigged and stumpish man who looked as if he’d just finished portraying a jolly gnome in a dumb-show for children.

  “Prithee, forgive our unsolicited arrival, Professor Newton,” said the girl, quavering with anxiety, “but ’tis desperation brings me to your door.”

  “Listen to my young mistress,” the gnome said, “a child of the rarest intelligence.”

  The girl approached Hooke and fixed him with the pleading stare of a water spaniel. “Only the author of the Principia Mathematica can save the day.”

  “Methinks you exaggerate,” Hooke said, wondering how he might profit by the intruders’ error. “There be many brilliant men in England. Robert Hooke, for example.”

  The girl said, “Mr. Hooke’s Micrographia is an authentic masterwork—”

  “Indeed.”

  “But hear me out. My maternal aunt is Lady Mowbray of Mirringate Hall, the very philosopher with whom you corresponded last summer concerning a possible relationship ’twixt wicked spirits and your gravitation.”

  “Ah…” Hooke muttered, recalling the absurd query he’d read twenty minutes earlier.

  “Through the machinations of a vicar, a magistrate, and my own misguided father, Isobel Mowbray hath been wrongly accused of witchery,” the girl continued. “Come Monday, she goes before Colchester Assizes.”

  “I don’t mean to sound mistrustful, child,” Hooke said, “but if you’re a landed woman’s niece, why doth your servant dress like a beggar?”

  “I’m nobody’s servant, sir, save your own,” the gnome said. “Call me Dr. Barnaby Cavendish. I shall state my business betimes, but first I ask that you consider Miss Stearne’s proposal.”

  The girl lifted the cover of her Principia and slipped out a folded sheet, passing it to Hooke. “In your letter to my aunt, you told her that demons are but desires of the mind.”

  Hooke studied the alleged missive from Newton. It was indeed written in his constipated hand, and it indeed demeaned wicked spirits as but “desires of the mind.” At least the jackanapes was right about one thing: despite what Glanvill, Boyle, and those other Platonist pud-pounders believed, it was preposterous to imagine Lucifer’s troops raising a tempest or desiccating a cow at the mere solicitation of a hag.

  He turned to the girl and said, “Tell me your tale in full.”

  For the next quarter-hour the Stearne child outlined her plan. Although Lady Mowbray ha
d retained the celebrated Sir Humphrey Thaxton as her advocate, she explained, the prosecution’s case remained formidable. If England’s most eminent natural philosopher were to address the jury on Lady Mowbray’s behalf, however, offering his “pretty proof” against witchery, she would surely avoid the noose.

  Hooke deposited his rump on the chair behind Newton’s desk and descended into a profound meditation. This was not the first time a Royal Society fellow had been asked to attend a witch-trial and gainsay the demon hypothesis. Shortly before he died, Oldenberg had intervened in a sorcery case, though the obtuse jury still returned a guilty verdict; in 1681 Wren had attempted to deliver a Northhampton virago from the gallows, but his noble efforts went for naught; the following year Halley had bootlessly employed his prestige on behalf of a supposed warlock at Chelmsford Assizes. And so it was that an exquisite design now blossomed in Hooke’s imagination. He would indeed go to Colchester: not with the intention of saving the defendant—enough philosophers had wasted their energies on such endeavors—but to show the world the bedrock debauchery that lay beneath the facade called Isaac Newton.

  “I feel close to a decision in this matter,” Hooke said to the Stearne child, “but I wish to know more about your friend.” Rising, he stared at the gnome and asked, “What brings thee to Trinity, Doctor Cavendish?” He hoped his sardonic pronunciation of “Doctor” registered with the man.

  “For the better part of my career,” Cavendish said, “I’ve been curator to a museum of fœtal astonishments, assembled o’er the course of my worldwide travels. I now hope to sell ’em to your Royal Society.”

  This prodigy-monger was doubtless a scoundrel, and yet his proposition, like the child’s, might be turned to advantage. “Sir, I fear you mean to deceive me,” Hooke said. “You have acquired your monsters not by going round the world but by loitering round the morgue. I shan’t hold your grandiloquence against you, however, for’t happens that the Royal Society is seeking to expand its anatomical collection. If yours be worthy prodigies, they have in sooth found a buyer.” And as the man who discovered the Cavendish trove, Hooke thought, I am likely to become Curator of Biological Specimens, with all concomitant honors.

  “I shall confer ’em at an exceeding reasonable price,” Cavendish declared.

  “You shall rob us blind if you can, myopic at the least,” Hooke said. “We offer eight guineas apiece for such freaks. Take it or leave it.”

  “Verily, sir, I shall take it!”

  “The Society gathers in London come Friday. You and I shall conclude our business then and there.” Hooke condescended to draw near Cavendish, close enough to suffer the man’s rancid breath. “Now, concerning this girl’s request, I must ask you a question, scholar to scholar. Does it not seem probable that the jurymen will disdain the testimony of one so stooped and stunted as myself?”

  “Methinks the average Colchester citizen would indeed expect the paragon of mathematicians to display a rather different geometry,” Cavendish replied. “Aye, but once they hear your lapidary speech, they are certain to o’erlook your dilapidated frame.”

  “A most logical supposition.” Hooke, turning, presented the child with his warmest smile. “It pleases me to report I’ve reached a favorable conclusion regarding your scheme.”

  Barely had the word “conclusion” escaped his lips than his young petitioner set her Principia on Newton’s desk and flung her arms about his trunk in a gesture of delirious joy. Much to his dismay, the girl overtopped him by an inch.

  “My aunt hath oft-times compared thee to our Savior,” she said. “Her meaning’s now entirely clear to me!”

  Hooke stifled a moan. Newton as Christ? A ludicrous notion at best. “I see you own a copy of my Principia,” he said, gesturing toward the jackanapes’s badly organized amalgam of Euclid, Kepler, and Galileo. “If you like, I shall inscribe it.”

  “Accept his offer, Miss Stearne,” Cavendish said. “’Twill certainly increase its value.”

  “Sir, I should be grateful,” she said.

  Hooke dipped quill into ink pot. “Your associate speaks truthfully,” he told the girl. “Indeed, the only tome liable to fetch a better price than a signed Principia would be a Lectiones Cutlerianæ bearing Mr. Hooke’s autograph.”

  Whilst Cavendish and the child looked on with approving smiles, he opened the Principia and decorated the title-page with the words Isaac Newton.

  Later that night, asleep in his room at the Crow’s Nest, Hooke dreamed that he and Newton were testing their rival solutions to the Tall-Tower Problem. To demonstrate how the Earth’s spin affected a descending object, Hooke drew forth his dirk, sliced Newton’s breeches, amputated his cods, and tossed the pair off a lofty crag. Newton’s manhood

  followed an elliptical path to the ground. Waking near dawn, Hooke

  carefully reviewed the reverie, and the more he thought

  about it, the farther he fell into an

  intense tranquility and an

  exceeding

  j

  Peace,

  I believe, is the

  most desirable of all political

  arrangements, whether its beneficiaries are

  nations, clans, marriages, or books. Yes, pitched battles

  have their glory and spectacle, but peace reverses war’s cruel algorithms, and so I much prefer it. When my insectile agents came to me last week and announced that the Malleus Maleficarum desired a truce, I instructed them to prepare the necessary documents. We would leave our bibliophagic armies in the field—the field in this case being a vacant lot on Fortieth Street in midtown Manhattan—but there would be no immediate clash of arms.

  So now I have time on my hands. I spent yesterday afternoon toying with the famous puzzle of the Monkeys and the Typewriters. Would you like to try it? This is not the usual dusty old math problem, I promise you. You’ll have fun. Really. While you’ll be obliged to employ an unenthralling operation, raising a number to various powers, the results will prove entirely antic.

  The conundrum in question originates with Thomas Henry Huxley’s famous illustration of the rôle played by chance in biological evolution. Huxley noted that if you sat a thousand immortal monkeys down at a thousand indestructible typewriters, they would eventually produce, along with a considerable quantity of nonsense, all the works of Shakespeare. I’ve decided to raise the stakes. Instead of settling for Shakespeare, let’s have our immortal monkeys generate every book ever written. No, better yet, every book ever written, plus every book that ever will be written, plus every book that never was and never will be written.

  Now. Here’s the problem. How many unique manuscripts would such a library contain?

  If we permit the monkeys to compose entirely in lower-case letters, then each keyboard will comprise 45 buttons: 26 Roman characters plus 10 Arabic numerals (including zero), a period, a comma, a question mark, a colon, a dash, a pair of parentheses, a carriage return, and a space bar. For purposes of the experiment, assume that each manuscript contains 600 pages of 25 lines each, 60 characters to the line.

  I’ll give you a minute.

  Want another minute? Fine.

  Figured it out?

  For those of you who got stuck, the number of unique manuscripts produced by Huxley’s immortal monkeys is 45 raised to the 60th power to the 25th power to the 600th power, that is, the operation of 45 multiplied by 45 carried out 900,000 times.

  We’re talking about a large library. Infact, we’re talking about an unimaginably large library, a Fechnerian labyrinth, a Borgesian honeycomb, a bibliographic phenomenon that would fill the known universe to overflowing. But we’re not talking about an infinite library—not by a long shot.

  Somewhere in the Thomas Henry Huxley Memorial Library is an exact reproduction of the Holy Bible. Somewhere in the Huxley Memorial Library is an exact reproduction of the Holy Bible with a series of haiku about pizza toppings substituted for the Book of Daniel. Somewhere in the Huxley Memorial Library is a version of Go
ne With the Wind in which Scarlett O’Hara enjoys a ménage-à-trois with Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes. There is also a version in which Scarlett O’Hara enjoys a ménage-à-trois with Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes while they all prove Fermat’s Last Theorem together. And a version in which Scarlett O’Hara enjoys a ménage-à-trois with Socrates and the Marquis de Sade while Rhett Butler fellates Ashley Wilkes on Saint Andrews links during the World Cup.

  Somewhere in the Huxley Memorial Library, a completely effective treatment for human liver cancer is described in full. There is also a detailed but bogus refutation of that treatment, a truthful refutation of the bogus refutation, and a bogus refutation of the truthful refutation of the bogus refutation, the latter featuring a cameo appearance by Jack the Ripper offering tips for housebreaking your llama.

  And somewhere in the Thomas Henry Huxley Memorial Library lies a perfect facsimile of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

  But it is not signed by my father.

  Nor is it signed by Robert Hooke pretending to be my father.

  Mere words are inadequate for communicating the revulsion I suffered when the Curator of Experiments violated me in that manner. Were such encounters reducible to mathematics, I would convey my aversion by first calculating the quantity of delight I felt when Jennet held me in her hands that day in Isobel’s library and then determining the reciprocal of that ecstasy.

  You must remain mindful, however, that the true villains of my story are not depraved persons but psychotic theologies. Given enough time, I could identify and celebrate a dozen virtues in Robert Hooke—or Andrew Pound—or even Walter Stearne. In Stearne’s case, for example, there is no question that he loved his daughter. Indeed, the more firmly I set my mind to the task, the more clearly I recall that, after reading of Jennet’s reckless intention to visit Cambridge,

  he endured a remorse so profound as to squeeze from his psyche

  all other sensations. Only hours later, upon apprehending