Ghostwalk (12 page)

As the plague approached, the men of the watch and ward, a kind of territorial army, boarded up all minor entrances to the city, purified the few people who were allowed to enter in smoke-filled waiting places, and poisoned all the city cats and dogs. At night searchers carried the sick and dead to the pesthouses, where the sick were put into isolation and tended. If any man, woman, or child survived at a pesthouse for a full lunar cycle—and some did—they were allowed to return to the city at two
A.M
., on the condition that they fumigate their lodging with lime-slaked smoke with the shutters closed for a full two hours before dawn. A Lazarus returned from the dead.

I could see from the reproduction of the old map pasted into
The Alchemist
that seventeenth-century Cambridge had had its own kind of moat, where the King’s Ditch had once been dug to keep out the Vikings, a ditch from one point of the River Cam to another making a protective circle of water. I traced with my finger on the map the irregular arch of the King’s Ditch round to where it joined the natural watercourse of the river and down to that strange oval of ground just next to Trinity, where the river passed around Garret Hostel Greene and where they would build the Wren Library in the 1670s.

Turning the map so that the oval lay to the left of the city, so that north was at the top, the map of Cambridge, ringed by water, suddenly seemed to me a reversed image of Newton’s drawing of his own eyeball, with the oval of Garret Hostel Greene as the pupil. I put the two pictures next to each other—Newton’s eye looking to the right and the eye of Cambridge looking to the left. Another coincidence. One image echoing the other. In the spring of 1665, while Cambridge aldermen were working hard to keep out all infections from the fragile city, protecting and closing down all its borders and entrances, Newton, in his rooms at Trinity, was sticking sharp objects into his own eye socket, opening it up in order to understand the laws of light.

I turned the prism, Newton’s prism, over in my hand and watched its imprisoned colours glint at me, pools of blue and the occasional flash of red. It seemed to have a knowledge behind its hard surfaces, pools into which I might never reach, secrets it would never tell; it was as silent as Elizabeth herself.

But Elizabeth
wasn’t
silent—I had her words; I could reach into these pages and find her, as she pursued Newton through Cambridge streets in search of better tools to understand light. Why, she asked, did Newton stay in a plague-stricken city after all the other undergraduates and fellows had been sent away for their own safety in July 1665? The answer was the prism.

In August 1665, Newton would have seen the wagons and the searchers making their way around the streets, their bells tolling, carrying the sick and the dead on carts past Trinity and down Jesus Lane to the pesthouses out on the common. He would have watched the strange effects of light through billowing smoke as the wind blew through the city’s empty streets, a wind blown across the Fens from the Urals. Cambridge would have been surreal that summer: embattled, boarded-up windows and gateways, tolling bells and silences, smells of brimstone and pitch.

For a man sleepless, half starved, and with his eyes burned and exhausted from experiment, a man whose imagination was fired by thoughts of apocalypse and prophesy, the city must have seemed like a vision from Revelations. At a time when for many others the four horsemen of the apocalypse were virtually at the gates of the city, it was as if the plague simply did not exist for the young philosopher. He saw it, perhaps even felt his own fragility in it, but fragility was no more of any consequence than the pain in his eyes caused by the optical experiments.

Newton stayed because he was not finished; his questions were still unanswered. He would not leave his laboratory rooms, where his optical notes and mathematical papers were laid out with minute calculations and summations of infinitesimal arcs of curves and algebraic symbols, not for the four horsemen, not for anything. Believing in spirits as he did and in the miracles of alchemy, and watching his own extraordinary success, he must have felt that something divine was passing through him, perhaps even that it had conferred an immortality on him that would protect him from the plague. But he had also reached the limits of what he could do with his own eye. Now he needed a prism to answer new questions he had framed about the composition of colour. The prism would come to him if he waited—some of the finest glass sellers in Europe would converge on Stourbridge Fair in late August.

Near the end of that first summer of plague in Cambridge, Isaac Newton bought a prism at Stourbridge Fair. One of his relatives recorded that memory many years later:

In August 1665 Sr I, who was then not 24 bought at Sturbridge Fair a prism to try some experiments upon Descartes book of colours and when he came home he made a hole in his shutter & darkened the room & put his prism between that & the wall found instead of a circle the light made
with strait sides & circular ends &c. wch convinced him immediately that Descartes was wrong & he then found out his own Hypothesis of colours though he could not demonstrate it for want of another prism for wch he staid till next Sturbridge Fair & then proved that he had before found out.
¹⁴

Puzzlingly, Newton remembered buying a prism at Stourbridge Fair in the year that the records show the fair was cancelled because of the plague.
¹⁵
But, given that the cancellation was not announced until August, it is likely that many of the traders who came by water, setting off from their homes in Europe long before they could possibly have heard about the outbreak of the plague, would have continued sailing the fen waterways to the north, reaching Stourbridge Common without coming anywhere near the city, or its watch and ward. The aldermen might then have taken the view that so long as the traders stayed out of the city, the fair posed only a moderate health risk to the citizens of Cambridge, given that most of the students and fellows had already left the city in July. So Newton stayed to buy the prism and wander through the curiously empty and depleted fair, and when the sun’s lowered elevation in late August or September brought those first optical experiments of 1665 to a close, he returned to his hometown Woolsthorpe, where sometime in that autumn or the following autumn, in his mother’s orchard, he determined the basis for the law of gravitation.

On his return to Cambridge the following spring, Newton began a new series of light experiments in April 1666 with an additional prism in his rooms in Trinity.
¹⁶
This time he turned his largest room into a giant eyeball, with a hole in the shutter of his window acting as the retina. Through the hole in the shutter he directed and turned and reangled the rays from the sun which fell on the shutters of his room for about two hours a day around noon. Newton would be ready, waiting for the sun to travel round, busying himself in preparation or writing up his notes from the previous day, laying out paper and pens, ready to record the details of his complex and varied experiments, for the sun would not oblige him for long. He had been waiting all winter for this.

Other natural philosophers before Newton had used prisms to experiment with light and colour, including Descartes,
¹⁷
but no one yet had made the projected spectrum large enough or let the rainbow-freighted ray travel far enough. Newton let the beam of coloured light travel twenty-two feet from the hole in the shutters at his window to the wall at the other end of his room; there, where the beam met the wall, it made a rainbow-coloured shape three times as long as it was wide. He coined the word
spectrum,
or ghost, to describe the lozenge shape that glowed on his wall, narrow in the middle with curved edges. The shape of his ghost was conclusive—the seven coloured rays from the shutter hole were travelling at different speeds, for otherwise they would have made a circle.
This
was how colour was made: rays of light travelling at different speeds.

Gradually, through a series of experiments with several prisms, Newton came to prove that colours are simple; white light is the mixture. Colours make white; colours come first; white is a hybrid. This claim was a simple one, but it also turned current knowledge upside down. Until 1666 white had been associated with simplicity and purity. Now Newton argued—and indeed had proved—that individual colours were
first
principles, pure and simple. White was made of colour. Jan Vermeer had come to know this too by a different route, also using camera obscuras and prisms at around the same time as Newton’s experiments in Cambridge. So had the Dutch painters de Heem and Osias Beert, who studied the whites of oyster flesh in their table pieces. White, the Dutch painters knew, was laden with other colours, a heady and complex mixture—never pure. In Cambridge, Newton had proved it.

But with the smoke and smell of burning brimstone and superstition seeping through shutters everywhere in the city, at a time when God’s wrath seemed visible on every street and punishment ubiquitous, few might have been interested in a young man’s claims that he had worked out how white was made. For the moment the young man was silent. He checked his notes. He honed his observations and kept his own counsel.

It was when I finished that last page of Elizabeth’s chapter that I glimpsed the rubbed-out pencil annotations on her script for the first time, in the right margin, next to the section on Revelations and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Handwritten and erased, surviving only as tiny imprints, those marks might have escaped my notice if the bright morning light, falling on the paper at a certain angle, had not brought them into visibility for a second. Elizabeth Vogelsang had written in the margins of this section two questions:

Did he think he was invincible? Had someone made him think he was invincible?

And then, sometime later, she had rubbed both questions out.

Newton, Elizabeth believed, had come to think himself invincible. In 1665 and 1666 he believed his body to be beyond the reach of plague or death. And she believed that someone had been responsible for that Faustian audacity.

Eleven

I
met Kit a week or so later down at the café in Chesterton; afterwards she walked with me down Landing Lane and Ferry Path, the towpath into town. She was heading for her stall, I for the library. We had, for once, time to spend. It was one of those fine October days—the sun on the river, bushes and trees along the riverbank, a spectrum of greens. From time to time runners jogged past us. Reflected colours ran from the brightly painted barges into the water. Greens—so many greens all around us: the silver-green of the underside of the willow trees, the emerald of the grass along the bank, the mottled grey-brown-greens of the scrubland of the common on the other side. Virginia Woolf had once described the riverbanks as being on fire on either side of the Cam, but there was no such fire here now. Or at least not yet. There was red—rowan berries, rose hips, pyracanthas—but the red sat against the astonishing palette of autumn green like the sparks of a newly lit fire, like drops of crimson blood in the hedgerows. It was yet to pull itself to a blaze or a haemorrhage. And those famous willow trees she had described as weeping in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders, had been pollarded since she walked here, so there was no elegant weeping for them anymore, only the flurry of silver-green leaves, shorn demented heads against the sky. The river still reflected everything that passed over it, as it had done for Woolf, who would drown herself in another river in 1941: sky, bridges, red berries, and from time to time the colours melted, forked and quaking, as rowers oared their way through the reflections, only to form again as if their surfaces had never been broken.

“Crimson,” Kit said, waking me from a muddled reverie on colour and light. “That’s what everyone wants right now. Shades of burgundy and claret. I’ve just dyed a whole load of cotton shirts—they’ve all come out slightly different shades, depending on the porousness of the original material. Perfect. Won’t look like a job lot. Bet I sell all of them by the end of the week.”

“What? Sorry…Missed that.” I was watching the ripples in the water fanning out from one of the rowing boats.

“Shirts, you know, the stall. Your mind’s wandering again. You asked why my hands are so red. I’ve been dyeing clothes and I forgot to wear gloves. Berry colours are in again, so I’ve been dying shirts red—for the stall.”

“Sorry, yes. Lemon juice might do it. He did that too.”

“Who did?”

“Newton…dyed things.”

“Isaac Newton dyed things?”

“Yep. He had a book full of recipes for colours that he started about the time he came to Cambridge. He was an experimenter. Always trying things out, you know: poisoning birds, putting mirrors on the top of church steeples to test how long the light took to move from mirror to mirror, dropping things from towers, sticking things in his eyes, boiling things, mixing things, writing down the results.”

“OK. How did he make red?” Was she laughing at me?

“Can’t quite remember. Yes, I can.” Blurred words came into focus. “Sheep’s blood drained into a bladder, hung out to dry in the sun to make a powder, then mixed with alum water when needed. There was another one in which you boil brasill, whatever that is, and then he writes that if you would have it a ‘sad red,’ mingle it with potash water; if a light red, temper it with white lead. Christ, I’ve only read the transcription of that notebook once and I remember it all. What do you think a ‘sad red’ is?”

“What’s Elizabeth’s book like? You’ve finished it?”

“Brilliant—full of the most wonderful detail about Cambridge. I’m completely lost in it.”

“I can tell.”

“Sorry. I’ve been sleeping badly. It’s as if Elizabeth is there—in the seventeenth century. Not reconstructing it but actually
there
.”

“Sounds like that’s where you are too. So what’s the problem?”

“Problem?”

“You’ve had a frown on your forehead since you moved to The Studio. You’ll have to be careful—the wind’ll change and that face will stick.” Another boat cut its way through the water, a small blond coxswain driving the rhythms of the oars with a voice too big for her small frame.

Kit was wearing a long purple coat over grey linen trousers and a T-shirt. With her stained hands and the jewellery around her neck, her hair piled on top of her head, she made people turn their heads. She knew she did that. She walked tall and the coat, made of some thick cotton which she had probably dyed, billowed around her in the wind. I imagined her being swept up like a character in a García Márquez novel, in her own billowing clothes, swept off like an angel or Madonna in some kind of purpled apotheosis. Seventeenth-century Cambridge would have been filled with such billowings, I thought, when the winds were high and all the undergraduates wore their gowns—billowings of purple and black in winds that blew into that labyrinth of streets straight from the Ural mountains in Russia.

Today, it blew through my hair, tugged at my skirt, stung my eyes. In France the wind was aromatic, full of the smell of soil and ripe crops. Here it just smelled of mould. That was the marshland.

“When does coincidence stretch to improbability, do you think?” I asked her. “I mean, at what point do you say to yourself that something completely beyond the bounds of probability is happening to you?”

“That’s a hard one. Explain.”

“There’s a whole series of things…none of them sounds very significant in itself. OK, there was this piece of paper.”

“A piece of paper?” I’d forgotten how sceptical Kit had become. It was reassuring. She’d have an explanation, if anyone did.

“Just listen, won’t you? I spotted the corner of a piece of paper in the garden under a lavender bush. I must have dropped it when I’d been working out there the day before because it was from one of Elizabeth’s notebooks—I recognised her handwriting, or what was left of it. There were snails crawling all over it.”

“Snails?”

“Yes, snails. Just ordinary mindless garden snails…They’d eaten sections of the paper and the rain had washed out the ink, but I could still just read what was there. I traced out the words with my pen—they were still visible, and I worked out that it was Elizabeth’s transcription of a notebook Newton kept when he was around twenty and had just arrived in Cambridge. It’s an important notebook because Newton wrote it in code and it wasn’t decoded until 1963 by Newton’s biographer, Richard Westfall. Elizabeth had transcribed a section from the decoded notebook.”

We stopped now under a rowan tree, its berries scarlet against the dark green leaves. The wind was blowing the river water in arced shapes, like bows stretched from one bank to the other. Kit was out of breath.

“Sorry, I’m not following. What’s weird about any of this?”

I passed her the piece of paper, folded into four. It looked more like a paper doily after the snails had finished with it. She began to unfold it.

“Just don’t let go of it,” I said. “It’s blown away four times now. OK, I said it didn’t amount to much in itself. It’s what’s
in
the notebooks that’s interesting. Westfall spent months decoding that early notebook in the 1960s. He must have thought he’d find something of scientific importance, judging by the amount of time he spent on it, that he’d uncover—I don’t know—mathematical notes or reflections on optics perhaps. You know what he found? Not mathematics or formulas, but
sins
—two lists of Newton’s sins. The first set of forty-eight was headed ‘Before Whitsunday 1662,’ and a further nine were listed as ‘After Whitsunday 1662,’ arranged as if they were an account book. Imagine the intimacy of that—seeing that list for the first time since Newton actually recorded them secretly, guiltily, three hundred years earlier.”

“What kind of sins? Fornication, buggery, bestiality? Consorting with a witch?” Kit unfolded the piece of paper as if it were a page from a pornographic magazine.

“No, nothing so dramatic. Mostly little things. Stealing cherries, sticking pins into people’s backs in church, getting irritable, making things on Sundays.”

“Newton stole cherries? Was the gravity apple stolen? That would make a good story…”

“Be serious. It’s awful.”

It wasn’t until I checked Elizabeth’s page against Westfall’s typed transcription that I felt how awful it was—the young man writing out his sins in code. It moved me. There was something bald and relentless about it, a man’s conscience flayed like a rabbit, all glistening sinews and blood. I imagined him wrestling with his conscience, trying to live according to his understanding of the Bible, failing, punishing himself, and starting again, over and over. He had no sense of humour; I could feel how tired he was with his constant relapses, struggling with a God who was watching him all the time.

“Poor bloke,” I said. “‘Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times; Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections; Not living according to my belief; Not loving Thee for Thy self; Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us; Not desiring Thy ordinances…’”

“You’ve
memorised
them?” Kit checked the accuracy of my recitation against what she could read on the paper.

“No, but that’s the point. I can practically recite them and I’ve only read them once. It’s the same with the recipes for colour. You know what my memory’s like—I can’t even remember my nine-times table. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“So? Your memory’s improved since your undergraduate days. That’s no big deal. Nothing to get alarmed about. Why did Newton have to count them like this, number them, make a list like an account book?”

“Because they stopped him from being pure. They were the obstacle. And every now and again, on feast days, on Whitsuntide, they would all be cancelled out. He’d be given a clean slate. At those points he would be pure and powerful and his magic would be at its strongest.”

“What magic?”

“His alchemy. He was starting to practise alchemy.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I don’t
know
anything. But when you ask me questions like that I can just answer them without thinking.”

Kit lit a cigarette and passed me back the piece of paper. I went on.

“Kit, do you remember Cameron taking us to that Methodist chapel in Wales when he and I drove out to visit you at that holiday cottage you and Maria took for the summer? There was a service on and we sat at the back?”

“Christ, yes—the sermon about sin.” She exhaled cigarette smoke into the autumn air. “The sweaty minister.”

“He started out by asking us all to think about the very last sin we’d committed; then, he said, think of all the sins committed by all the people in your house since breakfast, and…”

Kit fell into the rhythms of the minister’s sermon—she remembered it more clearly than I did: “‘Think of all the people in your street,’” she chanted in a mock Welsh accent, “‘think of all the people in your city, in your country, in the world. Now multiply that by three hundred and sixty-five—all the days in a year. Now think of all the years since Christ died—two thousand long, long years…’ The pile of sins just got bigger and bigger…I couldn’t keep up with the math. Three hundred and sixty-five times two thousand. What’s that?”

A passing runner in shorts and a T-shirt, catching a fragment of a Welsh sermon where he had never heard one before—on a riverbank no less—turned for an explanation, jogged a few steps backwards, then gave up listening and was gone.

“I know,” I said. “Those rhythms. Suddenly, after building up and building up, numbers getting bigger and bigger so your head swam, he
stopped.
Must have stopped for about half a minute before he said just three words: ‘Then Jesus came.’ Cameron laughed out loud at that. Outrageous. I thought we were going to be asked to leave. Then the minister said it again. ‘Then Jesus came and took away all the sins of the world.’ He told us to imagine the scale of all of that sin and then to imagine it all gone. Just like that. It was a brilliant sermon. I’ve never forgotten it because it made me think about sin differently—like a kind of infestation, sins multiplying, breeding, like germs.”

“Or rats…And what about Newton?”

“Newton was an alchemist, but he thought he wasn’t pure enough. The first thing you had to be as an alchemist was pure. He knew he wasn’t. He could be pure for a few hours; then some bad thought would creep into his head and spoil everything, take his strength and his magic away. Every morning he’d wake with a new set of resolutions and self-punishments, and by breakfast it would have all started again, the spiteful thoughts, the desire for vengeance, like an infestation.”

“That’s why he was angry?”

There were swans now, six of them, swimming upstream, battling against the wind and the current. Three small children were playing with a silver kitten outside the Fort St. George pub, trailing a piece of string along the ground for it to chase. Great tubs of geraniums and late nasturtiums exploded with colour. Passing under Victoria Bridge we sat on a bench next to the lock to watch children throwing lumps of bread to the uninterested, overfed swans. The day had brightened and the colours of the painted barges opposite glowed surreally in the sun. A pretty couple, both with thickly dreadlocked hair, roped their bicycles onto the flat asphalted roof of a barge called
The Unmissable
and disappeared below, behind rainbow-striped curtains.