Newton's Niece by Derek Beaven

Author:Derek Beaven [Beaven, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007401918
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1994-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Inertia

After I’d done with Nick, I expected the world to become a different place, but it was ashes. Limitless, slakeless ashes. All my charge had voided itself.

There’d been a chase. And a last drench of desperate adrenalin. Morland had appeared: a dark, rapt, telescope-bearing shape which brushed past me on silent shoes as I studied the fate of my enemy. He’d leapt in fright – we both had. We stared at one another for a moment. His telescope dropped and smashed its glass; I heard it. Then I ran for the gate, and the security of Charles’s company. There were shouts behind us. ‘Job! Phil! We are robbed!’ We both hurried off along the path to the place by the Thames where my women’s clothes were hidden. Two or three minutes must have passed before booted figures lurched out of the night at us while I was half-naked and pulling up my gown. I expected – I think we both expected -some terrible attack. In desperation I threw myself at Charles in a passionate kiss, moaning and shivering and writhing against him. The pursuers were taken aback at the sight of my moonlit female flesh. They stopped at us and then veered off. Then one called: ‘Have you seen thieves? A thief. A young man; not so tall.’

I shrieked and clutched my gown to me. ‘Are you murderers? Help! Save me my dearest! It is my husband’s man! We’re found out! I knew we should be!’ Charles drew his sword.

‘Keep off, you whatever you are! Leave us! It’s alright my love. We’ve seen no one! Begone! Or I’ll use my sword!’

In this confusion of meaning the voices from the dark retreated, muttering.

And so we got off, and picked our way home to Charles’s Westminster rooms. And there I collapsed.

There was no murder charge, for there was no corpse. Charles told me.

‘He’s not dead, Kit.’

‘What? But I saw him.’

‘He is alive. I made enquiries. But he’s paralysed. It’s given out that the Swiss gentleman at Mr Morland’s suffered a terrible stroke. He cannot speak, and is confined to a chair.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m amazed. But perhaps …’

‘He may recover.’

‘Then I shall try again.’

‘Kit! Isn’t this enough? And if he recovers the power of speech? What then?’

‘Do you think we shall be touched, Charles?’ I said. ‘Do you think he knows who did for him? And even if he does, will he come out and say Catherine Barton dressed as a boy and that well-known assassin Halifax gassed and poisoned me as I sought to have obscene congress? I don’t see it. Do you?’

But even so I had no release from myself. Indeed I suffered a continuing fall into a kind of lethargy. I became as I had seen my uncle become: motionless in the saloon, withdrawn and collapsed, not moving the whole day sometimes, yet preoccupied and intensely active in my head with irrational terrors, and visions of wolves and children in the forest. The shadow of a great evil one seemed to come over me, so that I genuinely believed myself possessed.

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