“I will,” said Aaron, in a tone that might have rung defiantly, had Wilton not responded with a resoundingly friendly smile.
“Good man,” Wilton said. “Always double-check.”
Wilton made his way to his table.
After a moment Aaron sighed and worked a crick out of his neck. He mimicked quietly, “Always double-check.”
She spoke sharply. “Don’t joust with Wilton out of spite. You’ve got to have more sense than that.”
“Maybe I’m not being spiteful. Maybe I have other motives.”
“What?”
“Dunno,” he shrugged. “Maybe I like you.”
She blinked at the light from the clerestory. “You’re a bigger fool than I’d thought,” she said.
Aaron pushed back from the table. “Tell you what. Write me that letter recommending me to Wilton, okay? I’m not a fool. Write it and I’ll hold on to it, and if we can’t make headway in a couple more weeks then sure, I’ll jump ship. Even if it does mean working with Wilton.”
She looked at Aaron. “Why don’t you like him? He’s”—she gestured vaguely in the direction of Wilton, his students, their hair—“he’s your sort.”
Aaron hesitated. Then said, “I didn’t like how he wrote about her.”
“Who?”
“Ester.”
She watched him pull out his notebook and set to work.
On the table before her lay a document on its cushion—from the look of it, another household account, like most of the documents she and Aaron had read these past months. There were, according to Patricia Smith in the conservation lab, only fifteen documents remaining, ten of which would shortly be available; four being rather more challenging to prepare, for technical reasons Patricia Smith would be delighted to explain if she thought any historian had even a shred of interest. And of course, finally, the document Aaron had ripped, now relegated to the back of the queue.
For the first time in memory, Helen wasn’t sure she had it in her to begin work. There was no longer any point in denying the obvious. Even if Wilton should stumble, other competitors would now surely arrive. “What kind of progress do you think we’re going to make in a couple of weeks?” she heard herself say. “We’re already miles behind Wilton’s group.”
“You’re right,” said Aaron immediately. “There’s no hope.”
Turning, Helen was startled to see him smiling at her. If she hadn’t known better—and she did—she’d think he was flirting. “There’s something I need to show you,” he sing-songed.
It occurred to her he’d gone insane.
“I received this last night just after reading Wilton’s article,” he said, “and I’ve been thinking it over.” He pulled his laptop from his bag and balanced it on his knees. “I finally got an answer from that graduate student, Godwin.”
“Godwin?”
“The one in Michigan who’s researching Thomas Farrow. You may recall I wrote to him a few weeks ago. I got a vague reply, not at all helpful. Now I know why.” He opened an e-mail on his screen. She squinted at the tiny print. With a frown, he enlarged the font, and, checking that no Patricia was in sight, set the computer on the table. “Godwin thinks Thomas Farrow is the next big discovery on the philosophy scene.” Aaron scratched his chin. “He’s a little unhinged about him, actually.”
Aaron,
It’s been a while since your note, sorry. I’ve been busy. In fact I’ve finally had a paper about Thomas Farrow accepted, out next year in Archiv für Geschichte Philosophie. So now I feel I can speak a bit more freely. Not to be paranoid, but . . . no one wants to get scooped, if you know what I mean.
So you want to know about Thomas Farrow. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say I believe I’m the world’s expert—a feat that hasn’t been hard to achieve, given that no one seems to know or care about him. I’m hoping to change that, if I can get anyone to listen.
Thomas Farrow was a son of minor gentry in Worcestershire. He had sisters but no brothers, and while his father had a small fortune he was apparently not particularly generous with it where Thomas was concerned. It seems Thomas’s profligate ways had made an impression on the father—yet the father somehow remained blind to his son’s deeper intellectual nature and potential. This blindness strikes me as rather pitiable, given what we now know about the man.
Thos. Farrow doesn’t appear to have attracted the notice of his teachers during his time at Oxford, and his education was interrupted by the war. His occupation during the Interregnum is unknown, but later he was an actor—a minor one, I believe, and already past his thespian prime (if he ever had one) by the time the theaters reopened under Charles II. But the striking thing is the way he bloomed as a philosopher in 1665–67. If you didn’t know better it might seem his brief outpouring of work came out of nowhere—though a thoughtful study of his output makes obvious how deeply he was drawing on his prior experiences and studies.
I detail all of this in my forthcoming article (due out in next winter’s issue, from what they tell me) so I won’t go on here, but thus far I’ve tracked down letters by Farrow in the archives of the Royal Society, and in the papers of Van den Enden and Adriaan Koer-bagh. Some of the letters make bold assertions, others contain more detailed philosophical arguments. It’s clear, among other things, that Farrow took a position on the divine well past where even Hobbes was willing to go, which was an astonishingly risky thing to do. Farrow is frankly weighing atheism, at a time when that could mean death. His main concerns seem to be the nature of God and, depending how that question is answered, the nature of man’s moral and social obligation.
Farrow didn’t get much attention during his brief career because he never made the sort of allies who would spread the word about his work. The reason, I think, is that he was rude. He didn’t kowtow to other philosophers—none of those long flowery introductions, none of the “your mind is so great and mine is so paltry” demurrals. He went straight for the jugular. I’ve made a great find, if I say so myself: I’ve dug up a letter from Thomas Browne to a minor Royal Society member named Jonathan Pierce in which Browne complains about Farrow. He says, “This ill-mannered Farrow will unmake your argument in a single sentence brutal short.”
A single sentence brutal short. They respected Farrow at least, yes?
I owe you thanks, by the way. It’s been a slog trying to convince people this dissertation subject is worthy. Without detailing the slings/arrows of a graduate student’s life, which you’re surely familiar with, I’ll just say I was in a hole, not sure I’d even be able to get my Farrow article accepted for publication. Your e-mail threw me a rope—reminded me that people out there want to know about Farrow. To me, he is an undiscovered gem, and the fact that his career as a philosopher was cut short by his accidental death at the age of only 47 is a tragedy. The injustice of his being unknown is something I want to correct. Farrow may have been considered unimpressive during his early years, but underneath that unimpressive exterior there was a remarkable mind working. Goes to show, you never know which thinkers will turn out to be the real thing till you see what they come out with.
At least, that’s what I’m hoping my advisor will conclude, years from now.
Cheers,
Derek
Helen read the letter twice. When she turned to Aaron his face was bright with expectation.
“Do you think there’s a chance?” he said.
For an instant she considered pretending she didn’t think so, didn’t know what he meant, objected to the leap in logic that he was making. But the cautioning words she’d been about to speak dropped cleanly out of her mind. Why had she ever bothered speaking in that manner—that mincing academic language in which one pretended not to know what one knew in one’s heart, until it had been tested and objectively proved to death? What had it ever benefited her, to speak that way? And what, now, did she have to lose?