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FIRST DAY
That someone rearranged the furniture during the night, I have no doubt. This is how I came by the egg-sized lump above my left eye socket—my collision with the remarkably accurate clock young Christiaan sent me—it is a lucky thing its pendulum caused no laceration. Or perhaps I forgot that I’d hung it from the seventh rafter. Do advancing years conspire to subvert my Art? The works sent off to Emmerich for refitting, so great was the impact. Adela must have sensed something amiss, for she arrived early and with a poultice already prepared. This temporary indisposition prompted some belated calculations. My progressed Mars opposes my Natal Saturn and the Dragon’s Tail is transiting, yet my work proceeds unhindered.
SECOND DAYA welcome diversion. Roberto’s pebbles rattling against the transom just as my wandering imagination foundered on the unforgiving shoals of chemistry. Truth to tell, I’d sacrificed just the tip of my most inessential digit to an exploding beaker shard—I fear I have lost some portion of my former skill. Glad of help with the bandaging, during which Roberto informed me that he had caught a duck to speak.
“It is important,” I told him with gravity, “now that you have made him the gift of language, that you give your fowl to understand that whatever form we may take, we are all stuff of the Creator’s essence.”
Roberto paid scant attention to my injunction. Either he thought its triteness beneath comment or was, perhaps, too enmeshed in his own imaginings to respond. In any case, he turned on his heels and departed abruptly, only to return a moment later with the creature perched on his shoulder. After a long interview, it is clear that the duck can both speak our rich Saxon tongue—its slight inflections are due, I think, to the nature of the ornithic apparatus—and also, in some manner, reason, though how he came by these prodigious faculties is open to conjecture. This is either a rare pedagogy or something less natural. Roberto’s delight is inexpressible—he dotes on the creature, which, in its manner, returns the affection—but I cannot help bur think that this latest diversion betokens some more consequential deployment of his powers.
Having determined to elevate my injured member and spend the day in contemplation, I am now seized by an irresistible impulse to return to work. Might the duck be some sort of mechanism? If so, it is crafted by a subtler hand than mine.
THIRD DAYThere is not a vessel intact in the laboratory and fully half my manuscripts are reduced to ashes, yet I am infused with a great sense of accomplishment. I have eliminated a host of false possibilities and remain convinced as ever that the volume of a gas varies in relationship to pressure, yet am at a loss to find a means of proving this to my or anyone else’s satisfaction. At any rate, I have discovered a new and potent explosive. A lengthy walk for the first time in a fortnight—even the stench of the blubber works enchanted the evening air. Am I now prey to visions, or was one of our ubiquitous bay pochards lurking, its white feathers half obscured among the budding leaves of my linden? Surely this prosaic fowl is no itinerant muse in disguise. My sanguinity restored, I shall sleep like a lamb without intervention.
