The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Jennet laughed, though not so long as to demean Ben’s story, which was far more fable than drollery. “Your parable’s most piquant, sir. How readily we settle for the speckled ax.”

  “Unless I embrace my perfection-matrix in full,” he said, nodding, “I shall ne’er learn how far I might go in eradicating my defects.”

  She twisted the focus knob, and suddenly a Jovian satellite popped out of the blackness. “Ah, there she is, elusive Io. I’ve seen her only once before, back in the Mirringate observatory.”

  “How does the goddess appear?”

  “A yellow ball, as if made of sulphur.”

  “Sulphur? She’s a kind of Von Guericke sphere then? My dear Mrs. Crompton, ’twould seem we’ve solved the riddle of Heaven’s fire.” He offered her a coy smile and a mischievous wink. “Each time Jehovah desires to hear the boom of thunder, He sets His hand on spinning Io, and seconds later those mighty sparks called lightning-bolts come forth!”

  j

  TURN ON, TURN ON—we shall make it glitter by and by. The imperative became their private chant, something they could sing to one another whenever it seemed that their affaire de coeur lacked a future. If they simply kept the wheel moving, minds and bodies bent to the task, their love would never lose its luster.

  The instant Ben finished with the day’s obligations at Keimer’s, they would seek each other out, some times in his garret, sometimes in her townhouse, remaining together until he left for work in the morning. When it came to carnal matters, she normally played the teacher, he the novice (and never did concupiscence know a more eager pupil), but in the other arena of their nakedness, the languidly flowing Schuylkill, these rôles were reversed, Ben instructing Jennet in how to control her buoyancy and move her limbs per the advanced principles set down by Monsieur Thévenot in his Art of Swimming. But beyond the mattress and the river they were equals, two curious pilgrims peering through Ben’s telescope, leaning over his microscope, constructing vacuums with his air-pump.

  “Here be the problem,” she said. “Monsieur Descartes hath revealed to philosophers a universe cloven down the middle, thinking minds on one side, dead matter on the other. But the world’s fore’er in motion. Inexplicable forces hoist the seas to shore, pull our planet round its star, and put Dr. Halley’s comet to flight.”

  “Say ‘inexplicable force’ to a Continental Cartesian, or even a Cambridge Platonist, and he replies, ‘occult force,’” Ben sighed.

  “Say ‘occult force’ to a priest, and he replies, ‘demonic force,’” she groaned. “Say ‘demonic force’ to a witchfinder, and he reaches for his pricking needle.”

  “So we’re stuck. Flies in molasses.”

  “And yet I shall persist.”

  “Most admirable, Mrs. Crompton.”

  “A speckled ax is ne’er best.”

  Rare was the tryst in which they neglected to exchange gifts. Their corporation trafficked lavishly in tokens: flower blossoms, autumn leaves, sparkling stones, burnished beetles, pithy sayings, the poems of Catullus. Although the majority of these favors were discovered rather than purchased, occasionally one lover would notice some astonishingly apropos artifact in a shop window. Thus it was that he bought for her a cedar-wood model of the Trojan Horse, whilst she presented him with a miniature Blaeu press capable of printing individual playing-cards.

  Early in October her regular monthly visit to the Chestnut Street bookshop called Ephram’s brought her face-to-face with what she took to be the latest edition of Newton’s masterwork, its title rendered in English: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Leafing through the volume, she discovered to her delight that, thanks to the labors of one Andrew Mott, her native tongue informed the entire text. The ideal birthday present for Ben, she realized. The price was two pounds, an amount that gave her pause, as her summer stipend from Tobias had not arrived. In the end she decided that recklessness was the better part of romance, and she blithely acquired the Principia’s newest incarnation.

  Later, as she made her way down Market Street, the precious bundle pressed against her breast, a delightful question formed in her brain. Why wait four months to please Ben with the translated Principia when she could please him with it right now? Reaching the Godfrey house, she retrieved her key from beneath the stoop, then ascended the rear stairwell at a giddy pace, her imagination offering her an entrancing glimpse of Ben’s plump cheeks lifting in a smile as he took the book in hand.

  She entered the bed-chamber, finding it empty, a circumstance she chose to exploit by hiding the Principia beneath his pillow. She proceeded to the laboratory. No Ben. She rushed into the parlor. Her gallant sat on the divan, his complexion ashen, his fingers entwining one another, so that his hands suggested spiders in carnal embrace.

  “My darling, you look unwell.”

  “I am stricken with foreboding,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “’Twould seem Dame Fortune means to pluck me from the City of Brotherly Love and carry me clear to England.”

  “England?”

  “For reasons I do not apprehend, Governor Keith hath lately formed a good opinion of me, and he urges that I sail to London without delay. I am to purchase, upon his credit, a new handpress and two cases of type, that I might open a shop in Philadelphia dedicated to our province’s printing needs. Oh, Mrs. Crompton, I fear you will decline to join me on this voyage.”

  “How can you imagine such a thing?”

  “Are you not pledged to remain in America, battling your brother’s noxious band?”

  “Unless I undertake to murder the cleansers with pistol and ball, a course forbidden by my own perfection-matrix, my mere proximity cannot threaten ’em. Rather than endure our separation, bonny Ben, I would follow thee into the coldest cave in Arctica or across the hottest plain in Hell.”

  He vaulted off the divan and showered her cheeks with kisses. “I was afraid I’d be forced to chose ’twixt the livelihood I love and the love for which I live.”

  “Think on your clearheaded Silence Dogood. Were she blessed with a swain such as yourself, ’tis certain she would ne’er leave his side.”

  “To England, then?” he said.

  “To England,” she replied.

  But instead they went to the bed-chamber and removed all their clothing.

  “A splendid idea hath popped into my brain,” he said. “Upon arriving in London, we shall search out Isaac Newton. Unless his madness is ascendant, I shall persuade him to favor us with his insights into the electric force.”

  “’Tis a pilgrimage you will make alone, for I’ve yet to forgive the man his betrayal of Aunt Isobel.” She retrieved the Principia from beneath the pillow, passing it to Ben. “When you face the old lion, you’ll want him to place his signature on this, thereby increasing its worth.”

  “’Sbody—the very translation I’ve been seeking!” He flipped back the cover. A scowl overwhelmed his smile. “I’faith, Mrs. Crompton, this Newton’s a far handsomer wight than you’ve described.”

  He displayed the frontispiece, which had somehow eluded her initial perusal of the text. Her pulse quickened. Her skin prickled. Skillfully rendered and crisply inked, the engraving depicted a man who, whatever his faults and virtues, was certainly not Isaac Newton.

  “This is somebody else!” she protested.

  “How so?”

  “Newton’s a crook-backed gnome of weak chin and eyes set wide apart! How could I e’er forget the face that sealed Isobel’s doom?”

  “’Tis one thing for an artist to flatter his subject, and quite another for him to draw the wrong man entirely. There’s surely some chicanery here, for when you speak of a crook-backed gnome, one imagines either Shakespeare’s Richard the Third or philosophy’s Robert Hooke.”

  “Hooke of the Micrographia?”

  “The late, great Robert Hooke, Newton’s eternal antagonist.”

  Ben dashed from the bed-chamber and returned anon holding a splayed copy of Hooke’s Lection
es Cutlerianæ.

  “Your gnome mayhap?” he asked, showing her the frontispiece.

  As she scrutinized the image, a sour fluid traveled from her stomach to her chest—for this was indeed the very dwarf she’d met thirty-five years earlier in Newton’s rooms at Trinity.

  She snapped the treatise shut as if to mash a midge betwixt its leaves. “’Steeth, Ben, this Hooke hath played me false! He hath played us all false—myself, Aunt Isobel, Barnaby Cavendish, the whole Colchester Assizes of 1689! Everything’s so clear now. By standing before the Court as Newton, Hooke sought to ruin his rival’s reputation. What a swinish thing to do! ’Tis an un-Christian thought, but I’m glad the man’s dead!”

  “Might this mean the real Newton’s no maniac after all?”

  “It means much more, my love. It means we need but present ourselves to Newton and tell him of the murderous Purification Commission, and in a trice he’ll give us his demon disproof!”

  They set both books aside and stiffened their tongues, that each might probe the other’s mouth.

  “You will find your new Principia an enchanting text,” she said. “Proposition Fifty-seven: ‘Two mutually attracting bodies describe similar figures about their common center of gravity.’ Proposition Eighty-five: ‘If a body be attracted by a second such entity, and its attraction be vastly stronger when ’tis contiguous—’”

  “All I ask of Heaven, Madam, is to share with thee a common center of gravity.”

  “We share it, bonny Ben, now and forever.”

  “I am your lodestone, Mrs. Crompton. Your lodestone and your polestar all combined, my lovely lady, my sweetest Jennet, my brave Waequashim of the Nimacook.”

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Eight

  abababababababab

  In Which Jennet at Last Meets the Avatar of Her Ambition, Tho’ with a Result She Did Not Foresee

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  To conceal the scandalous nature of their relationship, Ben suggested that whilst crossing the Atlantic and living in London they should represent themselves as a middle-aged mother and her philosophically inclined son, but Jennet found this a monumentally offensive idea. “If we adopted such a ruse,” she declared, “I could ne’er again enter our love-bed without imagining myself Jocasta about to swive her Œdipus.” Having no desire to complicate their carnal life with mythic incest, Ben withdrew his proposal, whereupon Jennet convinced him that she should instead pose as a prodigy-monger in search of new specimens, traveling with her younger half-brother. Thus it was that in the guise of siblings they booked passage on the brigantine London-Hope, scheduled to sail from Philadelphia on the fifth of November, 1724, and reach England by Christmas.

  The first of the voyage’s several disasters occurred when Jennet and Ben arrived on Vine Street Wharf only to learn that the berths they’d reserved in the great cabin had been appropriated by a Mr. Hamilton of Trenton and a Mr. Russell of Wilmington. The purser offered no apology, insisting that Mr. Franklin and his half-sister should have anticipated all along their displacement by “gentlemen of stature” (Hamilton being a New-Jersey barrister, Russell the master of a Maryland ironworks). And so it came to pass that Jennet and Ben spent the next seven weeks in steerage, sharing accommodations with two dozen other passengers and sleeping in hammocks whose sole pretension to privacy was a translucent linen curtain separating the sexes. Only by exploiting the London-Hope’s peripheral geography did the philosophers achieve connubial embrace. On one occasion they connected in the supply compartment atop a pile of sailcloth, another time in the cargo hold behind six hogsheads of sot-weed.

  Even more troubling to Jennet than their wretched quarters was her unhappy stomach, which in the thirty-five years since her previous Atlantic crossing had grown sensitive to the sea’s vicissitudes. For each day that she was up and about on the main deck, she had to spend two in her hammock, sipping medicinal tea from the private store of their shipboard acquaintance, Thomas Denham, an affable Quaker merchant who shared the great cabin with Hamilton and Russell. By the midpoint of the crossing her condition had improved somewhat, less in consequence of Denham’s tea than of Ben’s tenderness, for he was ever prepared to sooth her with kisses, mop her brow with cool water, and read to her from Mr. Defoe’s romance of shipwreck and survival, The Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

  The third, final, and worst misadventure happened near the end of the voyage, when Ben entreated the ship’s master, a sour old Jacobite named Bertram Annis, to let him examine the mail-pouches for the endorsements that Governor Keith had promised to place on board. Puffing discontentedly on his pipe, exuding smoke and irritation, Captain Annis led Ben and Jennet belowdecks to a tenebrous compartment as large as a wigwam, carpeted in canvas and jammed with more than at hous and pieces of mail. The subsequent search took nearly two hours, during which interval the philosophers turned up packets intended for bishops, solicitors, judges, physicians, tobacco merchants, stock-jobbers, and linen-drapers, but not a single letter addressed to a London printing-house.

  “Mayhap I should gift Mr. Keith with a perfection-matrix,” Ben said, “featuring a special new grid labeled Mindfulness.”

  Later that afternoon, as she and her gallant strolled about the quarter-deck in the company of Mr. Denham, Jennet mentioned that Ben’s London prospects were now uncertain, a set of letters recommendatory from Sir William Keith having gone mysteriously astray. With no further prompting Denham proceeded to impugn the Governor’s character, explaining that in all matters financial Keith was a notorious bluffer. A letter of credit from Sir William would be “a shabby and paradoxical thing,” for the man had not a speck of credit to give.

  Ben bore this setback stoically, announcing that he would seek a journeyman’s position with a London firm and thereby master the newest British printing techniques. By pursuing this course, he argued, he might become so expert in his trade that ere long some “honest and principled edition of Keith” would set him up in business. Mr. Denham agreed that the scheme was worthy, adding that he would happily refer Ben to his friend Samuel Palmer, who ran a printing-house in Bartholomew’s Close.

  At this juncture Jennet made bold to ask whether perchance Mr. Denham’s circle also included Isaac Newton.

  “Nay, but I number amongst my associates a certain Henry Pemberton, who doth travel in the illustrious man’s orbit,” the Quaker replied. “If thou wish it, Mrs. Crompton, I shall acquaint thee with Dr. Pemberton upon our disembarkation.”

  “Such an introduction would greatly please me,” she said, panting as her stomach protested the London-Hope’s pitch and took exception to its roll, “for ’tis imperative I speak with Mr. Newton betimes.”

  “I cannot say he’s favorably disposed toward receiving visitors, but at last report he was remarkably hale for a man of eighty-two,” said Mr. Denham. “Newton’s a knight now, not to mention President of the Royal Society and Master of the Mint, his Arian faith having deprived him of his professorship.”

  “From figuring comets to forging coppers—a considerable descent,” Ben said.

  “By my lights ’tis felicitous he came to the mint when he did,” Denham said. “Had Sir Isaac not supervised the Great Recoinage of this century past, our nation might today be poor as Ireland.”

  This was the first Jennet had heard of Newton’s having rescued England from bankruptcy, and she was delighted by her deduction that his prestige would now be at its zenith. If she could indeed persuade him to publicly excoriate the Conjuring Statute, that venerable abomination might very well go extinct ere the April rains came.

  “I’ve ne’er been certain whether God favors my project or not,” she said to Ben, “but at least the great Newton’s about to land in our camp.”

  “In matters of creation and salvation, I’ve heard that God’s the superior personage,” he replied. “When it comes to making a purely rational argument, however, ’tis surely Sir Isaac you want as your champion.”

  j


  ON THE MORNING of December the twenty-fourth, following a one-night stopover in Gravesend, a town so stupefyingly sterile in Jennet’s view that even Salem-Village would have profited by comparison, Captain Annis piloted his brigantine up the Thames and put to port in London. As Jennet and Ben joined the parade of voyagers marching down the gangway, Mr. Denham proposed to meet his new friends that evening for a pint of ale and a bite of Christmas goose. Ben replied that as a vegetarian he would forgo the goose, but he and his sister would be glad of Mr. Denham’s dinner-time companionship, and so they agreed to converge at eight o’clock on the Scribbler’s Quill in Chiswell Street.

  The search took all day, but Jennet and Ben at last secured lodgings in Adam’s Row, Mayfair, for a mere five shillings a week. It seemed to her that their landlady, a Catholic widow who maintained seven cats on the premises, was skeptical of their claim to be half-siblings, and the woman’s doubts were surely aggravated by the haste with which they scampered up the stairway. Had Mrs. Wilcox subsequently placed a curious ear to the bed-chamber door, her suspicions would have received scandalous corroboration through the sounds of exultant breathing intermixed with choruses of “Enlarge the overlap!” and “Turn on, turn on!”

  In contrast to Sir William Keith, Thomas Denham proved a man of his word. When Jennet and Ben arrived at the Quill that night, Mr. Denham was already at the table, bearing a letter recommendatory for Ben and drinking ale with Henry Pemberton. As the evening’s conversation progressed, it became clear that Pemberton, a loquacious and exuberant young physician whose rowly-powly form struck Jennet as but a parody of Ben’s elegant stockiness, was indeed on friendly and even filial terms with Newton, having published in the Philosophical Transactions an article that en passant disproved certain Leibnizian principles concerning the force of descending bodies. (Apparently the surest way to beguile Newton was to make the late Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz look doltish.) Alas, Pemberton was not sanguine concerning “Sir Isaac’s willingness to speak with either a curator of dubious attainment or a printer of invisible reputation.” Howbeit, he promised to “charm the old wizard” as best he could, and Jennet slept well that evening, confident that their petition lay in capable hands.