The Fiona Letters

By Ralph Bowden

Fiona is the good buddy and scientific confrere of the young William Thomson, newly appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University in 1849. Unconventional, uninhibited, and brilliant, she provides the keys to his scientific discoveries. She also takes it upon herself to tutor him for his forthcoming marriage bed with his young, priggish, cousin. Fiona herself has to marry quickly as a cover for her and William's lovechild, and settles into a life of frustratingly respectable motherhood in Belfast, while William's career in science and engineering takes off into a knighthood and eventually a peerage. Fiona and William manage occasional passionate trysts for 20 years, but finally, after a crisis, have to give each other up. Rooting out the letters that document the secret Fiona/William affair involves adventure, passion, and another outrageous Fiona.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ralph Bowden
• Release date: Jun 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301272655

Ralph Bowden

Ralph Bowden has entertained himself by writing mostly fiction for almost 30 years, through and following careers as an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry, a history professor, a home builder, an alternative energy consultant, an instructional designer, and a technical writer. Twenty-six novels, four story collections, a volume of collected short fiction, and a three-act play reside, mostly unread, on his hard drive. He likes all of his word children. Realistically, some of them are probably flawed and maybe even terrible. Others might entertain readers besides himself, but Ralph hasn't the time or ego drive to promote and sell, nor the stomach for collecting rejection letters. Self-publishing avoids all that and is quick. If somebody finds and likes what he has written, fine. If not, the world will go on (or not) just the same.

Book preview

Part I

Chapter 1.

Adam Bauer rubbed the bridge of his nose where his glasses, now pushed up onto his thinning hairline, had been sitting many hours. The initial buzz from research in the primary sources was wearing off. A month with the Kelvin papers at the University of Glasgow had yielded nothing beyond what Silvanus P. Thompson had compiled after Lord Kelvin’s death in 1907. Now, 60 years later, another month of reading in the hallowed Cambridge University Library’s bigger Kelvin collection had likewise uncovered no new keys to the development of the once-great scientist’s thinking.

Adam still had to go through the last three of six large, black metal containers, referred to in the catalog only as Kelvin Papers, Tin Boxes. Dr. Santora, Adam’s adviser back home, expected him to be thorough. He’d better find something; coming back with nothing but a wasted National Science Foundation fellowship – a first for the history department – could endanger his degree prospects.

He set his glasses back down, rubbed his hands together in the November chill seeping in through the library’s old stone walls, picked up the next bundle and groaned; more copies of letters on tissue blotter paper from Lord Kelvin probably after about 1890, when he began to use the technique to keep records of his correspondence. The copies were hard to read, and the bulk of them related to Kelvin’s many patents and business connections, so they were unlikely to yield anything scientifically interesting.

Thorough, thorough, thorough, Adam muttered to himself, as he squinted through the tissue paper at the fuzzy purple ink. Again, these were letters on Kelvin’s consulting fees and his many expert-witness gigs, and to the firms that were manufacturing his improved mariner’s compass, sounding device, telegraph and laboratory instruments, and dripless water taps. A few letters declined invitations to invest or speak to various organizations, and more were brief answers to letters soliciting his advice on everything, from a supposed new technique to restore hearing loss (Cannot possibly be effective), to what he thought of motor cars (. . . the devices are dangerous and tend to promote personal selfishness. Strict speed limits should be rigorously enforced.). As the grand old man of Victorian science at the turn of the century, Lord Kelvin was treated as a universal authority, and seemed to believe it himself; the tone of the letters was pontifical and oracular.

Adam ground along, reading every word. Fortunately, most of the letters were in the neat, if characterless, script of Lord Kelvin’s personal secretary, George Green. A few short ones, however, were in Kelvin’s own, increasingly irregular and angular scratchings.

About half way into the bundle, Adam came across a longer letter in Kelvin’s hand. The greeting immediately grabbed his attention:

December 12, 1904

London

My Dearest Fiona,

I hope you can read this. I’ve not been well, and my hand shakes. George does most of my correspondence, but I can’t use him for this.

My Dearest Fiona? Who was that? Adam had seen no personal letters among the other blotter copy bundles he had read so far. Unlikely to shed much scientific light, but still.

The doctors tell me I’m in for an operation to fix my trouble. It’s not serious, they say out of one side of their mouth, and then again maybe it is, at least for someone as ancient as I. It has got me to remembering and thinking about a lot of things.

Adam sat up straight and read with renewed interest. He knew Kelvin had had his prostate enucleated in December, 1904; he had already found the surgeon’s proud report on the new type of operation he had performed on an anonymous famous scientist. Silvanus P., with Victorian delicacy, made reference only to a serious operation, which it certainly would have been in 1904 for someone Kelvin’s age, 80. That he recovered fully and lived another active three years was due to his always vigorous constitution. The surgeon had described him as wiry and tough.

My good friend Silvanus Thompson has recently offered to pull together my scattered letters into a biography. He has been here recently, taking notes from my ravings, and I have promised to hand everything over to him.

Not everything, of course. I still have a locked box of your letters that no one has ever seen and must never, which is why I am returning them to you now under separate post, along with my heavy old heart. I haven’t been able to open the box for thirty years for fear of weeping like a child, remembering everything. So much we had, and so much the years and circumstances have taken from us.

Adam paused a moment to process. Heavy old heart? So much we had? Had Kelvin and this Fiona been involved in some kind of affair? It was hard to imagine. There was no hint of anything un-Victorian about Kelvin in Silvanus P.’s two massive volumes, or any of the other voluminous biographical literature. Kelvin, a celebrity in his time, was utterly respectable and above reproach. His only passion was British science. The letter went on to a second sheet:

It would never do for the box to fall into the wrong hands. I think I could trust Silvanus, even if he knew, but he doesn’t need to. Not that I care a whit what the future thinks of me generally, but in this particular instance there are too many still alive who would be distressed. I don’t like to think what knowledge of us would do to James’ cousins and nephews. If they knew, they might rise up against you with their wild Irish outrage. Thank goodness we managed to hide most of ourselves from James himself, and he had the decency to overlook and forgive what he did know. A good man.

And James Jr., too. Has he never showed any inclination towards philosophy? I’m glad to see in the papers that he is still making speeches and being a passionate patriot and good liberal unionist. I wish he and I had an excuse to communicate, but I suppose the generations are not meant to communicate, and we should let them go.

. . . we managed to hide most of ourselves from James? That was incriminating. But who could that have been? Kelvin must have known a thousand men named James, including his father, his brother, and innumerable relatives, friends, and scientific correspondents, many of whom were more or less Irish. And James Jr.? What was this? Presumably Fiona’s son. Why should Kelvin want to communicate with him? Was he . . . no, that was too much to think of. Adam read on:

And Fanny would be quite crushed and disillusioned. She knows your name only as a scientific confrere, that strange Irish woman who read T and T’ and claimed to understand it. Ah, you understood so much more, and I have missed our thought rambles almost as much as all the rest we had.

So, it overlapped his second wife, Fanny, whom he married in 1874. But did it also overlap his first wife, who died in 1870? And was Fiona married to James at the time? Thought rambles? On what? Had Kelvin discussed scientific matters with this Fiona? Victorian women didn’t do science, certainly not Natural Philosophy, a broad term for all the branches of physics. Yet he says she read Thomson and Tait, the comprehensive textbook that Kelvin – then only William Thomson, professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow – had co-written with his friend P.G. Tait, who held the same chair at the University of Edinburgh. It came out in 1867, about the time William Thomson became Sir William Thomson, in recognition of his contributions to the first and second transatlantic cable ventures.

Have you kept up on the latest stuff coming out of these children doing philosophy? No ether, they say! All is a vacuum! In what, then, do the vibrations of light exist? Electric waves, they say, and refer to Clerk-Maxwell. What kind of explanation is that? It makes no sense at all. I can’t help feeling that they are headed off into nihilism and abandoning our goal of reality. But here I am, muttering and grumbling, a troll under the bridge from the past to the future.

. . . our goal of reality? Kelvin and this Fiona woman apparently shared a kind of metaphysics. Did she possibly influence its formation? Hardly likely; after his early years, Sir William was notoriously so full of his own ideas and thoughts that he never listened to anybody.

As to the letters, I beg you to burn them – I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Or lock them up in something so only we will ever know, remembering – I know I shall never forget – for however long we yet may have and after that, it will never have happened and the world will go on just the same.

Throw this in the fire too.

Yours, ever and always,

Wm.

Well! He signed his name Wm. After 1894, when he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Kelvin of Largs – the first peerage ever conferred supposedly for scientific contributions – he always signed it K, or Kelvin. This Fiona was obviously a very special old friend, at the least, and this letter was a very interesting nugget. A sidetrack, of course, and probably inconsequential for Adam’s thesis. Kelvin’s brief comment on the ether was typical of his well-known opinions, and nothing new. But Adam transcribed the whole of the letter onto two 3x5 cards before plowing on through the rest of the blotter copies in the bundle, none of which were scientifically relevant.

By 6:30, Adam had had enough for the day. Outside, in the drizzle, it had been completely dark for two hours. His eyes felt gritty, and his stomach was growling loud enough to resonate embarrassingly in the cavernous reading room. Despite Julia’s insistence, he had skipped lunch. She would expect him home for supper soon.

As he returned the bundles carefully to the third metal box, arranging them so he would know which he had read and which he had yet to go through, he was conscious of someone at the end of the table watching him. He looked up and found a blond-headed fellow about his age – early-to-mid thirties – with what looked like the first box of the Kelvin papers. Adam picked up his box and on the way to the desk to turn it in, passed the other researcher. He mouthed Kelvin? silently, to him, and beckoned him to retreat to the hall where they might confer – any talking in the reading room was frowned upon.

Sven Knudsen, the blond introduced himself. From Denmark, where he was taking a sabbatical from the Åarhus University Physics department to work up some short papers he might be able to publish in continental scientific journals, historical notes in the development of classical physics. Right now, I’m looking into Kelvin’s insistence on formulating Maxwell’s equations so they couldn’t generate a fully electromagnetic wave. This was a much narrower focus than Adam’s.

Really? Sounds interesting, though I suspect the subtleties would elude me. I’m an historian, not a physicist, Adam admitted, and while I’m more or less familiar with the math, I can’t claim real fluency. He went on to report what he had found in the Glasgow collection, and so far in the first, second, and third tin boxes. Sven had just started on the first box this afternoon. After ten or fifteen minutes, it was clear they still had much to talk about, and Adam invited Sven to join him at supper. Julia always fixes way more than I can eat. She likes to keep me fattened up.

You’re here with your wife? Sven asked. No, I couldn’t just appear like that. She should have some notice.

All right, then, tomorrow? I’m sure she’ll be glad of a new face.

Chapter 2.

Yes, Julia would be glad of anything new, he thought, as he walked out through the dreary drizzle of campus and then the half mile to their flat up on Alpha road. She’d been complaining ever since they got off the plane in Glasgow at the end of August that all Adam wanted to do was grind away in some moldy library ten hours a day. She had wanted to rent a car and do some touring on the way down from Glasgow to Cambridge in October, but Adam felt he couldn’t afford the time or distraction. The grant isn’t paying me to gad about; I’m here to do a dissertation.

‘Gad about,’ indeed! And what am I supposed to do? I’m just infrastructure? Cook, go to market, spend all day out in a river beating your clothes on a rock or something? Sorry, I’m not a squaw.

But, in fact, she’d had enough to do handling domestic details and learning her way around Glasgow, first, and now Cambridge, interesting places, both. And on weekends in Glasgow, when the University Kelvin museum was closed and the weather was decent, Adam had gone with her on jaunts. They’d taken a ferry out the Firth of Clyde to an island where annual highland games were being held with squealing bagpipes they could hear for miles over the water, kids doing traditional dances, burly men in kilts hurling logs, and so on. He’d taken her to Largs, the little Scottish west-coast settlement where in the 1870’s Sir William Thomson had built Netherhall, his ugly baronial castle with state-of-the-art plumbing. In Cambridge, they’d gone to concerts in the various chapels, and just the week before they’d chugged in a red, double-decker bus 30 miles up across the flat, dull East Anglian countryside to Ely cathedral for a performance of the Monteverde Vespers, a glorious aural experience, with the choir and antiphonal tenors resounding back and forth in the ancient stone edifice. It wasn’t Julia’s kind of music but she’d put up with it. "Anything to get out and do something, she’d griped. She’d tried to be supportive, and had struggled through Silvanus P.’s life and letters, though she came away from it with a deep dislike of Kelvin: Spoiled kid, egotistical climber, and then the stuffiest old fart that ever lived. Why couldn’t you do a dissertation on Byron, Hemingway, Keats, or Yeats, or whoever it was, somebody who really lived life, not some tedious old scientist."

Well now, she’d have to rethink Kelvin, Adam realized, as he plodded up the stairs to their flat.

Finally, she said, as he came in the door. She put her Newsweek down and got up from the couch. The noodles are probably mush or all stuck together . . . oh, you’re soaked! I told you to take a raincoat this morning.

Julia was still a mystery to Adam, even after seven years of marriage. Part of her was sweet and caring toward him, sometimes even maternal. She was smart, interesting, and attractive. But she bore more scars from life than Adam, who’s upbringing as the elder son of a conservative Michigan farm couple had been relatively trauma-less. Julia’s father, whom she had idolized, just disappeared without a trace when she was 15. She’d rebelled against her strict and oppressive mother, running off to California for several years to flower into love and speech freedoms, the early women’s movement, and lots of pot. Back in Boston, where Adam found her in a B.U. evening history course, she was recovering from a brief and disastrous marriage to a folk singer. She was 25. Her rebel had burned out, but her ashes were still liberated. When are you going to propose? she asked after they’d been dating for almost a year. Always cautious, he needed that final push. Her acceptance was similarly unsubtle: Sure. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll take a solid and steadfast stodge over an exciting hunk any day.

Adam knew he was more than a ‘solid and steadfast stodge.’ Maybe he wasn’t exciting, but he was darkly handsome, and had enjoyed the attentions of several marriage-motivated girlfriends. His job as an engineer was secure and paid reasonably well. Julia knew and cared nothing about science, technology, or Adam’s work developing specialized microwave antennas for space probes. But Adam had many interests beyond engineering. His co-workers razzed him as an intellectual snob because he listened to classical music and was always signed up for evening courses in something. Living with Julia, who was taking a degree in political science and going on for an MAT at Harvard, stimulated Adam. His job and the people he worked with bored him. When she finished her degree, he quit and she supported him while he got his Master’s in European History and started course work toward a PhD in the history of science. As long as Julia was busy teaching high school history, she’d been fine with Adam pursuing his scholarly passions. They got along peaceably, for the most part, shared household duties, and accommodated to each other. But this leave of absence from teaching had deprived Julia’s life of the structure that had kept her settled, or maybe just distracted from what might otherwise have frustrated her. She’d been difficult recently.

Well, he had some goodies for her this evening that might help. First, he told her about Sven Knudsen, and how Adam had invited him to supper tomorrow.

A physicist? Is he weird, like most of them? What’s he doing with Kelvin?

Adam started to explain Sven’s interests and how they related to his own, but she quickly redirected to more immediate issues. Thank goodness we got a set of four of everything. Is he married? Is his wife here with him?

Adam had to admit that he’d not thought to ask.

Oh, you’re impossible! If she’s here, what’s he to do? Leave her at home? You have to talk to him tomorrow and make sure she’s invited too. Then call me.

He’d been right. Julia was energized about having a guest for dinner, and went on and on – what she’d cook, what sort of wine would go with it, and how she’d have to do something to the drapes and re-arrange the living room.

They’d gone to bed and turned out the light before Adam remembered the letter.

Oh yeah, it seems old Kelvin had an affair sometime, possibly with a married woman.

What!? Julia said, sitting up so fast the bed sounded like it did when it was about to collapse, which it had done once before. I thought he was the ultimate eminent Victorian, virtuous and dull.

"Is virtuosity, I mean virtueness, virtue, damn it, a requirement for dullness? I wouldn’t have thought he was dull."

Well I certainly can’t think he could have turned any woman on, except maybe somebody like Fanny, who was just as socially climbing as he was. What did the letter actually say?

Oh, he just talks about how great it was, what they once had, and how . . . I don’t know, how her husband – that’s James somebody, an Irishman – died without knowing much, and that’s a good thing, and how Fanny mustn’t ever find out.

This puts a whole different light on Kelvin! Julia crowed. He was just as hypocritical as everybody else. His image was a lie! And the implications of that . . .

Do you like him any better because of it? Would you rather have him be a Victorian prig, or a hypocrite who defied contemporary standards in secret? Of course, either way, it doesn’t have anything to do with his science.

I’ll bet it does. I want to see that letter. Did you copy it?

Yes. I wrote it on two cards.

You need a photocopy. Is it the actual letter? Did she return it to him?

No, it’s a blotter copy. I’ve had to read a lot of them, they . . .

Why do you suppose he kept something so incriminating?

Damned if I know. He probably got distracted after he blotted it. He was eighty, after all, and not well.

Didn’t he have a secretary? Wouldn’t she have blabbed?

He, Adam corrected. Kelvin’s secretary was George Green. If he ever found it, he probably had the decency to ignore it.

Yes, I suppose. Hypocrisy was built into the Victorian mindset. How could they stand themselves?! I’ve got to see what it says. Julia turned on the light.

Adam grumbled about having to roll out of bed. He dug the cards out of his briefcase and handed them over. She read the letter partway through before exclaiming,

James Jr.!? You didn’t tell me there was a love child!

That’s not entirely clear. It could just be . . .

Of course it is! Why would he be interested in Fiona’s son by James? This is big! Kelvin may have actual descendents! FitzKelvin!

Now I wouldn’t jump to that . . .

"You’ve got to follow this up! There could be people running around today who don’t know who their grandfather or great grandfather was. You owe it to them."

Why?

Julia redirected again. Even you must be able to see how different this is. She looked over at him, accusingly. She brings out a warmth, a humanity that’s completely missing in everything else he wrote. He’s a whole different person. Of course it’s relevant! You can’t understand the science without understanding the man who produced it. And he had a son! Don’t you see what that does?

"Frankly, no. Natural philosophy is an intellectual discipline, not an emotional thing. So what if he sired a bastard? I’d have a hard time trying to convince Dr. Santora and the committee that Kelvin’s illicit relations with some woman had any effect on his interpretation of natural phenomena." Adam could feel Julia freeze up into fury as he said it, but it was too late.

That’s the sexistest thing I’ve ever heard! she hissed. "You men are bloodless robots! I don’t want to hear any more." She threw the cards on the floor, turned out the light, and rolled away from him. He knew where at least some of Julia’s sensitive buttons were and should have had sense enough not to push one.

Chapter 3.

Julia wasn’t up yet Thursday morning when Adam put on his coat to leave for the library at eight fifteen, after walking on eggs to retrieve his note cards from the floor, shaving, dressing, and feeding himself. She wasn’t asleep – Adam could tell that from her breathing – but probably just didn’t want to deal with him.

At the last minute before he went out the door, she mumbled something about calling her. Adam had no idea what she was saying and stuck his head into the bedroom.

What?

Tell me if he’s bringing his wife.

Sven? You still want to do that?

Why? Were you going to tell him I’m such a bitch that you couldn’t bring him here?

Adam knew the less said the better. I’ll call you, he promised, and left.

The sun was actually out for the first time in a week, and the air held a crispness that hinted of real fall for a change. The drab farmland around Cambridge had so far shown none of the rich fall colors that Massachusetts always displayed. Of course, there weren’t many trees to show them. On campus, some big, stately old trees quietly lost leaves, but with a very English reserve. Custodians, in their ties, sweaters, and tweed suit coats, kept flower beds meticulously groomed. That didn’t seem fallish, somehow, and Adam felt seasonally deprived, even though the basic fall driver, the shortening of days, was certainly working. The sun was barely creeping above the rooftops as Adam walked down the slight grade that passed for a hill toward campus. It would be gone again by four in the afternoon.

At the library, he requested the third Kelvin box again, took it to his customary table, and set to work where he had left off the evening before. The reading room seemed even clammier this morning, and Adam kept his coat on over the sweater that had become his uniform for a month. There were only three other researchers of some sort working. One of them had an irritating sniffle and refused to blow his nose.

Sven came in about nine, put in his order at the call desk and came over to where Adam was working. Lunch at noon? he whispered. Adam nodded.

A few minutes before 12, Adam got up, stretched, and walked over to where Sven was going through one of Kelvin’s green calculation notebooks. The only lunch options were to walk off campus to one of the noisy pubs or settle for the little snack bar tucked away as an afterthought beneath the library anteroom. Since it was now drizzling out, they chose the snack bar. It wasn’t much, but seemed a little warmer than the reading room, and did have a buffet counter with two hot soups. Adam had the tomato soup, Sven the potato and onion. They sat at one of the half dozen small round tables.

I don’t know about you, but my fingers have been freezing all morning, Adam said.

Yes. These old stone buildings are impressive, of course, but thermal disasters. My home campus is only a few years old and much more American.

They compared notes about their universities, funding, degree processes, teaching loads and so on. Adam was impressed