“Gone midnight when his lordship rolled in on Wednesday night,” Lizzie Haswell said with disgust. “Came back chilled to the bone, covered in muck, and saying as how Jack Chandler’s sheep kept coming and going, and how he’d seen little red twinkling lights where the Woolsthorpe spinney ought to be.”

Mrs. Beesley shook her head and tutted. “A few too many spiced ales down the Dog and Fox, if you ask me,” she said.

Lizzie nodded agreement. “He said he’d gone into the meadow to see what was amiss and got swallowed in swirling veils of colour. Said his body just seemed to melt away, and his mind got filled with strange voices.”

She paused to take a sip of her tea.

“He was up with the larks the next morning though,” she continued. “All bright eyed and bushy tailed. No thought for me stopping up half the night, worried sick as to where he’d got to. Had his eggs and bacon and then just disappeared off into his study without a by-your-leave, and sat there working right way through till bedtime.”

“Making horrible smells about the place again?” asked Mrs. Beesley, and Lizzie shook her head. “Not this time, no,” she said. “Fluents and fluxions was all he kept saying. Fluents and fluxions … fluents and fluxions. Like I’m supposed to know what the bloody hell they are.”

She paused again and moved to take another sip of tea, but stopped with the cup raised only halfway. “No, I tell a lie,” she said. “He also reckoned he’d had some preliminary thoughts as to how he might ‘address the quadrature of curves’.”

Mrs. Beesley frowned and wrinkled up her nose in puzzlement, and Lizzie just shrugged.

“Well, you need to find somebody else to keep house for, Lizzie Haswell,” said Mrs. Beesley. “And smart about it,” she added. “Him making horrible smells with his red sulphur and sophic mercury, and then wandering the lanes late at night. No good’ll come of it, you mark my words. It’ll all end badly, and then where’ll you be?”

* * *

In the month following, the two women were again chatting in Woolsthorpe Manor kitchen.

“Another twice he’s been out since,” Lizzie Haswell said. “Both times leaving late and coming back in like he’s got the cat up his arse. He calls them the ethereals – these things as put strange voices in his head. Says they transport him into some ‘nether world’ and then ‘illumine his imagination’ and ‘get his creative juices flowing.’”

“Hmm, don’t like the sound of that,” said Mrs. Beesley. “Are you sure he’s not been paying calls on Mistress Dugdale?”

“No-o,” said Lizzie, dismissively. “He didn’t mean them sort of creative juices; he was meaning his inventing of things to do with his chymistry, and natural philosophy, and all that.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Beesley, feeling a little offended, and not much the wiser.

Lizzie pressed on.

“A couple of weeks back – after what he calls their second intervention – he got busy doing experiments to explore the composition of sunlight. Spent hours playing about with little glass prisms and lenses, and cutting holes in the parlour curtains, and at the finish he said he was able to ‘set out some thoughts on inflexion’.”

“Well, I’ve got no idea what the devil that is,” said Mrs. Beesley, “But it sounds a lot better than stinking the place out with sulphur, I suppose”.

Lizzie agreed. “The week after that – after their third intervention – he said he found himself able to extend some ideas shared by his friend Robert Hooke, and that he could then ‘formulate the relation between a cannonball’s trajectory and the path of the moon’.”

“Cannonballs? And the moon?” said Mrs. Beesley. “I think he’s going soft in the head, Lizzie.”

“Probably so,” Lizzie concluded, and the two women then finished their teas and each took a generous slice of Goseping cake.

* * *

It was only at the ethereals’ fourth intervention, in the January of 1667, that things seriously went awry.

After finishing his supper on the 22nd, the master of the Manor took himself off for a walk down Watery Lane, and Lizzie Haswell – no longer able to contain her curiosity – decided to follow.

When they came to the track leading to Jack Chandler’s farmhouse, she saw what seemed to be red flashes of forked lightning within the ground mist shrouding the land to her right. She saw too that in the elevated tussock grassland beyond, there were at one moment sheep, then no sheep, then sheep again – following an irregular alternation with images of a fiery volcanic landscape that repeated to the accompaniment of excruciatingly high-pitched siren calls.

She knew from her master’s descriptions, of course, that it was sights and sounds such as these that accompanied the ethereals’ interventions, but these seemed altogether more violent and more assaulting to the senses than those he’d described.

As she stood and looked on, her vision suddenly became flooded with lights of many colours, and shortly thereafter she found herself unable to sense her own body, and unable to speak or to see.

* * *

In the morning following, having had no answer to her repeated knocking at the kitchen door, Mrs. Beesley let herself in regardless.

Lizzie Haswell was seated ashen-faced at the kitchen table, her hair disarrayed, and her eyes focussed miles away.

Her master, Isaac, was pacing the room disconcertingly wild-eyed, with his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his right boot missing.

“Dark holes and black matter, I think they said,” he mumbled. “And something about gravity and the curving of space. They seemed in such pain and their voices so discordant though, I couldn’t digest it all.”

Lizzie Haswell looked up forlornly. “They said time can be bent … but it can’t, can it?” she whimpered. “I mean it’s not a bendy sort of a thing.”

“Don’t you go fretting about that, Lizzie,” Mrs. Beesley comforted. “I’ll put the kettle on and make you and me and Mr. Newton a nice cup of tea.”