by James Morrow
the purpose behind her journey, did Walter
experience the feeling
you humans
term
j
Anger
had oft-times
burned in the breast of
Walter Stearne, anger over the
stupidity of jurists, the dexterity of demons, and
the guile of witches, but none of his former furies could compare
with the rage he felt against Isobel Mowbray shortly after he entered her luxuriously appointed prison-cell in the Great Tower, showed her the terse message from Jennet—BOUND FOR CAMBRIDGE, RETURNING SUNDAY—and demanded that she interpret it.
“’Twould be my supposition she means to involve Professor Newton in the trial,” Isobel said.
“Dost mean Isaac Newton?” Walter asked, livid and perplexed.
“The same.” Evidently seeking to relieve an itch, she slid her hand across her scalp, its fleshly terrain recently made barren by Walter’s razor in his search for Satanic excrescences. “’Tis doubtful, of course, that Newton could attend the assizes on such short notice. If such comes to pass, however, he’ll argue not only for my innocence but for greeting all cries of witchery with skepticism.”
“Then he’ll be declaring himself a friend to heretics, a traitor to faith, and an enemy of the King. Mark me, Lady Mowbray, the cleansing enterprise is no respecter of persons. During this century the Paracelsus trident and the Malleus Maleficarum have snared many a mortal as eminent as Newton.”
Isobel finished rubbing her dome. “My dear, foolish brother-in-law, will you not see that all is lost when we permit books to do our thinking for us? Not even Scripture deserves such sovereignty, much less Krämer and Sprenger.”
“’Twould appear you would spit on both.”
“The Bible is safe from my saliva, but I would not scruple to plunge your hoary Malleus into a vat of hog’s bile.”
Before Walter left her prison-cell, Isobel deigned to make a helpful observation concerning Jennet’s possible location. Knowing that Newton’s letter might prove essential to her mission, the child had quite likely begun her adventure by tramping to Mirringate Hall.
Thus it was that early on Saturday morning Walter roused the Colchester constable, an enterprising Anabaptist named Elihu Wedderburn, and hired him to ride posthaste to Ipswich, interview Mistress Mowbray’s employees, and use any information thus obtained in tracking down Jennet. At noon the following day Wedderburn reported back. Jennet had indeed visited Mirringate, he told Walter, and she was indeed in quest of Newton: such at least was the story told by the estate’s chief steward, Rodwell. Upon apprehending this news, Wedderburn had galloped to Cambridge-Town and made appropriate inquiries at Trinity College, but evidently no one had noticed the wayward girl.
Dusk found Walter in his garden, smoking his pipe and battling a despair not far from despondency, when a curious caravan appeared in Wyre Street. First came a dwarfish hunchback, dressed like a coxcomb in velvet waistcoat and silver-buckled boots, his pate adorned by a frothy chestnut periwig surmounted by a tricorn. He sat astride a tan horse, its withers speckled like a grouse egg. Two harnessed horses followed, straining to pull a decrepit Gypsy wagon, its sides emblazoned with the words, MUSEUM OF WONDROUS PRODIGIES—TEN MONSTERS FOR SIXPENCE—DR. BARNABY CAVENDISH, CURATOR. In the driver’s box reposed a stout, cherubic man, holding the reins and wearing ill-matched castoff clothes.
But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it. Never before had that particular parable touched Walter so deeply. When he saw his daughter sitting beside Dr. Barnaby Cavendish, he experienced only the mildest urge to beat her senseless with a quarterstaff. On balance he felt exceeding joy. “Jennet!” he cried, vaulting over the garden gate and rushing to meet the parade, which by now had come to a stop. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. “Oh, my darling child, praise all the saints, thou hast returned!”
Jennet gestured toward the dwarf. “Father, I’m pleased to present Isaac Newton.”
Walter halted abruptly, as if his heels had become mired in joiner’s glue. ’Steeth, she’d actually done it—she’d coerced the Arian heretic into appearing at the witch-trial!
“Good evening, Professor Newton,” Walter effused with mock deference. How strange that, though Newton’s reputation for genius had proceeded him, no rumor of his crooked frame had ever found its way to Colchester. “Our entire town is honored by your visit.”
The geometer dismounted and, doffing his tricorn, shook Walter’s hand. “I am likewise honored to be here—and particularly honored to stand in your presence, for the Pricker of Colchester enjoys a formidable reputation within the Royal Society.”
“How’s that? You’ve heard of me?”
“In my circle thou art known as Satan’s bane,” Newton said.
A sudden warmth flowed through Walter, as if he’d consumed several swallows of Barbados rum. “Truly, now?”
“Truly. I hope that our differing views on the pliancy of demons shan’t prevent us, as two learned gentlemen, from visiting a public-house ere long and immersing ourselves in ale and metaphysics.”
“Satan’s bane?”
“Quite so. I am passing eager to tell the estimable Mr. Hooke, from whom I appropriated the inverse-square law, that I’ve met you in the flesh.”
Walter performed a rapid mental calculation: if the Crown could drag out its case over four or five days, Newton might become so frustrated—or feel so affronted—that instead of addressing the jury he would return to Trinity College in a huff. “I must thank you profoundly for protecting my daughter.”
“The hero of the hour is this man here”—Newton indicated the prodigy-monger, whose fat face broke into a smile—“for he shepherded Miss Stearne all the way from Ipswich to Cambridge-Town.”
Although this Cavendish was manifestly a rapscallion and a boor, the rules of conviviality required that Walter now bid his two visitors join him in the garden for a mug of cider or a glass of shrub. Blessedly, Cavendish declined the invitation, explaining that he wished to show his museum about the town, and Newton likewise tendered his regrets, citing a desire to speak with Lady Mowbray’s barrister.
After her new friends had departed, Walter looked Jennet directly in the eye, his irate blood pulsing in his jaw. “Child, you must ne’er again go running off like that.”
“I had no wish to cause thee unhappiness, sir.”
“I am much of a mind to birch you.”
“That is thy prerogative.”
“Professor Newton hath no business at this trial.”
“I disagree,” she said.
“Dost not love thy father?” he asked.
“I bear thee considerable love, sir, but I love my Aunt Isobel as well, who would have me love truth above all else.”
“Truth’s a mystery, as we learn in John 18:38. I won’t see you in the Moot Hall tomorrow. Is that a firm and lucid fact?”
“Aye, Father,” she replied in a tone of marginal impertinence. “Firm as a hobnail. Lucid as a scrying-glass.”
Three hours later, having further reprimanded his prodigal daughter with a slap on the cheek and a cuff to the ear, Walter walked to the Red Lion, where Judge Harold Bucock and his entourage had been in residence since the start of the assizes, interviewing witnesses, planning strategies, and emptying tankards. For the fifth time that week, Walter sought out the Crown’s advocate, Hugh Collop, a man as nimble of body as of mind, adept at swimming, shooting, riding, and bowls. The two anti-Satanists assumed their favorite table by the hearth, Walter sipping a saucer of coffee, Mr. Collop quaffing ale.
Learning of Newton’s unexpected arrival on the scene, Collop exhibited a surprising dearth of dismay. “Have no fear,” he told Walter. “We needn’t protract our case merely to keep this wily popinjay off the witness-stand.” Elaborat
ing, Collop predicted that under no circumstances would Judge Bucock allow Newton to rail against the principle of diabolism per se. Even if the geometer managed to waft out some perplexing equation that putatively refuted the demon hypothesis, Bucock would silence him with Scripture—Exodus 22:18 and its unassailable brethren.
This forecast struck Walter as plausible, and hence he returned to Wyre Street with a buoyant gait and a song on his lips. So cheerful was his mood, in fact, that he invited Dunstan and Jennet to join him for an evening of five-card lanterloo. His daughter refused, adducing an unsettled stomach, and consequently father and son played alone. All during the game Jennet sat by the hearth humming “Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow” whilst contemplating a small glass prism.
Alas, the lanterloo match quickly turned tedious, ruined by the law of averages. For every trick Walter won, Dunstan took a trick as well. Each of Walter’s payments for loo was eventually matched by an identical sacrifice from Dunstan.
“A person could more easily make his fortune wagering on a one-legged wrestler,” Walter said with a quick laugh.
“Or a one-armed archer,” Dunstan snickered.
“Or a cock without a beak,” Walter said, tittering.
Whether by clumsiness or intent, Jennet dropped her prism, which struck the wooden floor with a resounding thud. “A person could more easily make his fortune,” she said, invective dribbling from the corners of her mouth, “wagering that demons cannot be disproved.”
j
SHORTLY AFTER SUNRISE Walter and Dunstan slid into their softest woolen hose, buttoned up their best ruffled day-shirts, put on their velvet waistcoats, and betook themselves to the Moot Hall. No sooner had the master pricker seated his son in the spectators’ gallery, right behind the seedy Dr. Cavendish, than the lad took out his sketching-folio and began creating a waxen portrait of his Aunt Isobel, who sat inertly in the defendant’s box, her bald head concealed by a plain woolen cap. Assuming his rightful place at the prosecution table, Walter settled back to enjoy Satan’s latest defeat at the hands of English justice.
In his long black robe and spotless white periwig, Harold Bucock presented a rational and authoritative figure, and it soon became apparent that he ran an equally rational and authoritative courtroom. It took him but ten minutes to silence the hall, elicit Isobel Mowbray’s plea (“Guilty only of naïveté, for ere my arrest I failed to see that prickers do the Devil’s work”), and instruct the Crown’s advocate to interrogate his witnesses.
Although Ipswich was a full fifteen miles away, every one of the defendant’s victims had managed to reach Colchester—their desire to see Lucifer humiliated, Walter sensed, had inspired them no less than the promise of unlimited ale and gratis lodgings—and by day’s end six honest Englishmen had offered testimony, persuasive by dint of its ineloquence, to the depravity of the accused.
A particularly vivid statement came from a land surveyor, Nicholas Fian, who confessed to receiving money from a certain nameless baron, that a boundary dispute might go against Lady Mowbray. Two days after submitting his corrupt findings, Fian had watched in horror as a wolf carried his youngest child into the forest. Almost as harrowing was the testimony of a miller, Godfrey Hawke, who claimed that, a week after he’d sold a dozen wormy sacks of flour to Mirringate Hall, his wife had tripped and fallen beneath the grindstone, consequently suffering a crushed leg and a mangled hand.
All during her victims’ recitations, Walter’s sister-in-law remained perfectly still, her expression fixed, eyes frozen, as if some errant Medusa had turned her body to granite. Isaac Newton, by contrast, observed the proceedings in a state of great animation. Often as not he would commit a witness’s remarks to paper, writing with a frenzy matched only by the industrious pen of the official scrivener, and he counterpointed each testimony with loud incoherent mutterings, so that Bucock was repeatedly obliged to beg his silence.
The following morning the four remaining witnesses told their stories, the last such narrative, from a huntsman named Ezra Trevor, being especially memorable. After illegally bagging a deer on Lady Mowbray’s estate, Mr. Trevor had come home to find his cottage overrun by centipedes. One of the vermin had bitten his youngest daughter, who fell into a delirium when the poison reached her brain, her fever breaking only after sixteen hours of thrashing agony.
Bucock declared a noontime recess, and within five minutes the entire population of the Moot Hall had transplanted itself to the Red Lion. Needing a clear head for his upcoming performance, Walter abstained from ale and cider, consuming only some cold beef and a glass of shrub. Hugh Collop’s witnesses passed the interval consoling each other over the incommensurate reprisals with which the defendant had punished their peccadilloes.
At one o’clock the Court reconvened, and shortly thereafter Collop called Colchester’s celebrated master pricker to testify.
Mayhap because Lady Mowbray occupied such a lofty social station, Walter found himself reporting the results of the witch-tests in terms more poetic than usual. He spoke of the trident’s “plaintive peal” as it indicted the Devil’s mark on Isobel’s calf, of the moat’s “poignant gurglings” as it expelled her flesh, and of the “guttural chant” the toad-familiar had sung upon reunion with its mistress.
For the climax of his presentation, the Crown’s advocate put Roger Mapes on the witness-stand. Solemnly the Vicar of Ipswich explained why he had removed his daughter from the defendant’s baleful influence. His reasons included not only Lady Mowbray’s practice of “sacrificing beasts to Lucifer” but also her “wizardry with prisms” and her “unrestrained penchant for dragging Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ down to the level of the Arian geometer Isaac Newton.” How clever of Collop, Walter thought, to elicit Newton’s name at this juncture. How cunning of him to poison the very waters in which Humphrey Thaxton sought to float his client’s case.
During the first two days of the trial, Colchester’s gossip merchants had gleefully trafficked in the rumor that a celebrated English philosopher would testify for the defense. Some guessed John Locke, others Robert Hooke, still others Edmund Halley. Thus it was that on Wednesday morning at nine o’clock, when Sir Humphrey inaugurated his presentation by summoning Isaac Newton, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, the gasps that rushed through the Moot Hall issued not from surprise but from the extravagant fulfillment of expectation—combined, perhaps, with a certain consternation over Newton’s crook-backed frame. Adopting a demeanor that defied his canted spine, the geometer strutted down the aisle and hopped into the witness-stand. Walter was pleased to note that, as Newton gave his oath, his tendency to foppery came immediately to the fore. Not only did he grab the Bible with an absurd flourish, he brought it to his lips and kissed it.
Thaxton began by asking Newton to explain why the Mowbray case had inspired him to travel a full thirty miles from Cambridge-Town, whereupon the witness took complete command of the interview. Pivoting, he stared at each juror in turn.
“Good men of Colchester, a ponderous matter lies upon your shoulders,” Newton said. “Ere the week is out, you must decide whether so-called witches have the power to enjoin wicked spirits and thereby tamper with the world’s most fundamental mechanisms.”
Hugh Collop leaped up, obtained the judge’s permission to address the Court, and proceeded to argue that the world’s most fundamental mechanisms were a subject for philosophic treatises, not sworn testimonies. “’Tis not witchcraft that’s on trial here,” he concluded, “but rather a particular witch.”
To Walter’s profound disappointment, Bucock responded with a prolix opinion to the effect that, in light of the defendant’s status as a landholder, Professor Newton must be allowed to speak.
“A most learned ruling, Your Honor,” Newton said, beaming Bucock a smile. Again the geometer listed toward the jury. “I’ve been asked to give my reasons for enduring a long day in the saddle, raising many a welt on my arse, merely so I might address you dozen sons of peddletwats.”
“Naturally Sir Humphrey hopes I’ll instruct you mutton-heads in the fallacies underlying the demon hypothesis,” Newton said, “but I now see ’twould be easier to teach a sheep not to shit on Sunday. Aye, I’ve got a proof at my command, so astute it makes incubi and succubi stand revealed as mere idylls of the imagination, yet who amongst you boasts wit enough to follow it? You doltish sons of fastfannies couldn’t solve a quadratic equation to save your cods from a woodcutter!”
Walter could scarcely believe his ears, credit his eyes, or accept his good fortune.
“Howbeit, ere I depart, let me toss a valuable nugget of celestial mechanics your way.” Newton reached toward his chestnut periwig, seizing the longest curl like a carillonneur pulling a bell-rope. “Since writing my Principia Mathematica, I’ve come to see ’tis fornication, not gravitation, causes the planets to wander. You heard me right, jurors. Each time a gentleman sticks his doodle inside a lady’s happy-sack, he makes a deposit in that grand erotic fund from which the universe draws its energy. Heed now the Principia Priapica! Law one: a virile member at rest rarely stays at rest! Law two: the speed of the semen is directly proportional to the force of the orgasm! Law three: for every illicit ejaculation there is an equal and opposite story to tell your wife!”
What happened next was so astonishing that for an instant Walter thought he was home in bed, dreaming the ruination of Sir Humphrey’s case. But this was not a dream. Newton was actually cupping his palm around his privates and drawing the fingers together as if squeezing milk from an udder.
“’Sheart, jurors, if you’ve got one of these bolts in your breeches, you need no other explanation for the Earth’s perambulations. Tomorrow you must all take the day-coach to Cambridge-Town, that I might show you the evidence. Do I swive my rooming-companion from knickers to noggin each night in the sacred name of Baconian experimentalism? Aye! Do I ram my strumpet-pump into John Wickin’s bum-hole every morning by way of verifying my philosophy? Indeed! Do I shag any sub-sizar who’ll assent to my glad-adder till he cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ Verily!” At last he removed his hand from his crotch, dissolving the shocking tableau. “Farewell, you knavish sons of narycherries! The Mowbray woman will go to her grave blameless as the lamb, but Newton’s not the wight to tell you why!”