Equinox

Chapter 8

London: October 1689

Gresham College in the heart of the City was an oasis amidst the squalor and filth of London. Although the buildings were old and crumbling and there had been increasingly vociferous calls to redevelop the site, it possessed a tranquillity and a mesmerising charm that belied its sorry physical state. Its appearance was also remarkably understated for the regular meeting place of some of the greatest minds of this or any other age.

The Royal Society had been founded almost thirty years earlier by Christopher Wren and a few close associates. It had quickly grown, gaining royal approval and with it a name. But in recent years that name had diminished in stature. Part of the problem for this illustrious gathering of men was that they could never settle anywhere for long. Their original home had been here within the faded grandeur of Gresham College, but after the twin tragedies of the terrible plague of 1665 and the Great Fire the following year the college had been requisitioned by the City merchants whose own premises had been destroyed. Then it was transformed into a temporary Exchange while a new financial centre was under construction. The Royal Society, with its books and its experimental apparatus, its sextants and charts, its telescopes and microscopes, had been offered the library of Arundel House by the owner, the Duke of Norfolk. This was located a couple of miles to the west, in a street just off the Strand. Here the Society had continued to meet for a while to discuss the latest scientific ideas and to conduct scientific investigations organised by its Curator of Experiments, Robert Hooke.

While it was ensconced in Arundel House, the society started to publish books, including Hooke's own Micrographia and John Evelyn's Sylva , and, keeping up a tradition begun by the earliest scientific societies in Galileo's Italy, it also published a journal, the Philosophical Transactions , in which there were descriptions of discoveries and reports of lectures and the works of the Society's members. But then, after a few years in Arundel House, they had been obliged to start meeting again at Gresham College, in rooms put aside for the purpose by the influential Hooke, a Fellow of the college.

Although Isaac Newton knew all this, as he entered the main quad of Gresham College at two minutes before six, the darkening western sky drenched in orange, he felt almost no affinity with the Society that he had joined as a young man of twenty-nine, seventeen years earlier. In spite of the fact that the illustrious Fellows had published his Principia Mathematica , a book that had made him the most important scientific figure in the world, during the past decade he had attended the Royal Society no more than a handful of times. He could consider no other member his friend, and he was barely able to extend a degree of trust to just three other figures within the scientific community. The elderly Robert Boyle was one, the young genius Edmund Halley was another, and the third was the man who had persuaded him to leave his cloistered world of Trinity College, Cambridge to visit London this evening: Christopher Wren.

However, the main reason for Newton's conspicuous absence from Society meetings had been the even more conspicuous presence of Robert Hooke. The man had become a bitter enemy almost as soon as they had met and when, in 1676, the Society members had elected Hooke to succeed Henry Oldenburg as Secretary, Newton had offered to resign his own Fellowship. Persuaded to continue by those who saw him as a man too valuable to lose, he had finally capitulated. But he had vowed to attend meetings only when it suited him to do so.

Newton understood that people considered him to be a difficult man. He was undeniably someone who shunned the company of others and he cared nothing for the effect this had on the sensibilities of those around him. He was completely self-contained and proud of it. He needed no one, but people needed him and they would grow to rely upon him increasingly in the future, of that he was sure. It was sentiments such as these that had kept him in his laboratory in Cambridge. The only man in whom he had confided a little was John Wickins, a scholar of theology and his room-mate for more than twenty-five years. But, Newton ruminated as he crossed the quad and passed under an archway to turn left into a stone passageway, even Wickins understood only a fraction of what was going on in Newton's mind and almost nothing about what actually happened in the laboratory so close to his own bedchamber.

As he thought about this, Newton cast his mind back some six months to the morning when he had been forced to change the direction of his investigations. It was the morning when he had learned of the ruby sphere. It was his greatest secret and he could discuss it with no one. For days and nights he had done little else but ponder the meaning of the message left by George Ripley. He had scoured every text in his possession. He had returned to London to search through the damp cave of Cooper's bookshop in Little Britain, and he had bribed the bookseller to allow him to sift through his mildewed storerooms.

Ripley clearly had been writing about an ancient and crucially important artefact. The ruby sphere undoubtedly was the missing link, the key to the universe. The text describing this wonder had been written in his hand, and Ripley, who had died two centuries earlier, had been a man of huge talent and integrity. But, even with these clues, Newton could do little without actually possessing the sphere. He needed to discover where it was hidden.

A week earlier he had received the invitation from Christopher Wren to attend a special meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College. The occasion was a celebration of the building of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, completed twenty years earlier. It had been Wren's first commission and was a brilliant start to the man's career.

At first Newton had been tempted to toss the beautifully embossed invitation onto a pile of papers on his desk where it would be ignored, like almost all other invitations, requests and correspondence with his peers was ignored. But apart from Wickins, Wren was the closest person he had to a friend, a man he respected more than he did any other mortal.

At the double doors to the lecture hall, Newton took a deep breath and pushed on the handles. The room was no more than a dozen yards square, and Wren, a former president of the Society and one of the most famous men in England, could pull a crowd — so the room was packed. Newton was obliged to stand just a few feet inside the door.

He surveyed the room. It was a rectangle lined on three sides with shelves extending from floor to ceiling, every inch taken up with books, their leather spines unreadable in the dim light that flickered from a pair of chandeliers. The fourth wall was painted duck-egg blue, but in places the plaster had cracked and a great jagged line ran along it and across the ceiling like a vine.

There were perhaps a hundred members here this evening. Newton knew almost all of them by sight, but was acquainted with only a few. There, near the front, was Halley and next to him stood Samuel Pepys, dressed in a vibrant orange jacket. John Evelyn was in the row behind, dipping into a worn leather pouch of snuff. Beside him sat the society painter Godfrey Kneller, whom Newton had met in Cambridge only a few months earlier when the artist had visited in preparation for his latest commission, a painting of the Lucasian Professor. Across the room sat Robert Boyle, an exceptionally tall man and stick-thin; his white wig looked almost supernaturally bright in the candlelit gloom. A few rows back,

Newton could see the two Italians who were currently guests of the Society. Giuseppe Riccini and Marco Bertolini had arrived from Verona three months earlier and they had generated considerable gossip because of their penchant for 'mollies' — boys who dressed as girls and provided specialist erotic services. To the left of them, he spotted the enchanting profile of Nicolas Fatio du Duillier, an exceedingly interesting young man to whom he had been introduced just a few weeks earlier. The boy turned and, seeing him, produced a brief, warm smile.

On a raised platform at the far end of the room sat Robert Hooke and the President of the Society, John Vaughan, third Earl of Carbery, resplendent in a purple and gold brocade tunic and a luxuriously powdered wig. As much as the earl appeared to Newton to embody the finest virtues and attributes of the English nobility, he considered the nasty little ferret of a man beside him to represent the very worst that the world could offer. Hunched and misshapen, standing only four feet ten inches even in heels, Hooke appeared to have shrunk into his chair. Newton loathed the man with every fibre of his being and he knew that Hooke felt the same way about him. The Secretary, he understood, would do anything he could to discredit or defame him, and Newton could not help remembering with amusement a particularly Janus-faced letter that he had written to this dwarf, in which he had made the comment that if he, Isaac Newton, had ever achieved anything great as a scientist it had been by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Suddenly Christopher Wren strode to the platform. The members rose as one and applauded before settling back into their seats.

Wren, Newton was irritated to concede, did look magnificent and carried himself with regal dignity. He was a man who deserved his acclaim. He was a polymath, a professor of astronomy, an internationally renowned architect, a medical experimenter and a writer of genius. Yet he was also extremely modest. Years earlier, when Newton had been a boy, Wren had been the first to observe the rings around the planet Saturn. Yet, when the Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens had published his own observations first and had accepted the laurels for the discovery, Wren had been unruffled and entirely magnanimous. This was a stance that Newton found almost impossible to understand, but in a hidden part of his soul he knew that Wren was a better man than he because he could show such grace.

For the next thirty minutes, Wren kept his audience spellbound. His voice, low and melodious yet never soporific, drew in the listener and made the most specialised aspects of what he was describing interesting and easy to visualise. Illustrating his talk with sketches he had made, he first told the audience how he had designed the Sheldonian Theatre, and then went on to describe the engineering challenges that it had presented for him as a young architect who was both nervous and keen to impress his masters. He had produced immaculate drawings at every stage of the theatre's construction, from the floor plans that had secured his commission through the many stages of the building process to the grand unveiling of the completed project in 1669, five years after it had begun.

Newton enjoyed the talk but, after a while, he had found himself drawn back to the problem that had occupied his mind so completely since February: the meaning of Ripley's cryptic message. The room melted away. The sound of Wren's voice faded. Newton could see Ripley's words, the encrypted message and the strange drawing, as though he were holding the document in his hand. His eidetic memory could reproduce what he had seen down to the last wrinkle in the parchment but, frustratingly, such prodigious mental powers had been of almost no help in his efforts to understand what the message meant.

'It was a most startling moment. .' Wren was saying. 'The foundations were almost complete and I was most assuredly loath to see further delay, but my curiosity was piqued. I permitted the exposing of the odd construction to the limit of one day of work, as I felt it worthy. By the end of the day it had become clear. There was a natural and quite possibly an extensive cave system under this part of Oxford. I duly noted it in my diary and, with the permission of the Master of Hertford College, I ran a narrow corridor from this subterranean void to the cellars beneath the nearby college, with the thought that one day I might go back to learn more. That, sadly, was twenty-five years ago, and commitments to His Majesty have, alas, kept my enthusiasm in check.'

The audience laughed and Wren took a deep breath. 'So, forgive my digression. Now, as to the construction of the roof. .'

A tingling that had begun at the base of Newton's spine slowly rippled up through his body. As he stood transfixed, staring intently at the great architect, he could feel rather than hear the words of Ripley resonating inside his head: Seek the sphere under the earth, 'tis cocooned in stone, great learning above and earth below.

When Newton tapped on the door and peered in, Wren was alone in an ante-room off the main lecture hall, removing his wig and trying to untangle his straggly grey hair. 'Well, what an excellent surprise,' he said with a smile.

'May I bother you for a moment, Sir Christopher?'

'Naturally, sir. Come in. Take a seat. Did you enjoy my lecture?'

'Yes, I did — very much,' Newton replied gravely. He was trying to control his excitement.

'I'm most honoured by your presence, sir. Indeed, we had a fine audience tonight, did we not? So, how may I help you?' Wren left his hair alone and began to remove his jacket. Newton noticed that it was stained with sweat.

'I found your description of the construction of the Sheldonian Theatre most beguiling. But. .' He hesitated briefly. 'I was particularly taken with your mention of the subterranean cave system.'

'Oh, really? I am crestfallen, sir,' Wren dead-panned. 'I thought you would have favoured talk of the engineering feat, the genius of the design, the extraordinary accommodation of Nature's forces.'

'Please forgive me.' Newton looked lost for a moment. 'I did not mean. .'

'I'm jesting, Isaac. Ye gods, it must be true what they say about you — that you never laugh and have been known to smile but once.'

Newton, po-faced, said nothing. Sensing that he had offended the scientist, Wren placed a hand on the younger man's shoulder. 'Forgive me. I meant no insult, my friend.'

Newton took a step back and bowed. 'No offence taken, I'm sure. Sir, I was enamoured with your entire talk, but the cave fascinated me. Perhaps this interest comes as a result of some inexplicable primeval connection in my mind. Whatever it may be, I would like to know more about it.'

'Sadly, I can add almost nothing to what I said earlier tonight. It was a quarter of a century ago. I was young and idealistic and I believed I could go back to explore at my leisure.'

'But there are caves under the Sheldonian?'

'Oh, indeed there are. But they remain unexplored.'

'Did you record the layout on paper?' 'I did not.'

'So what exactly did you see?' Newton found it hard to keep the rising excitement out of his voice.

Wren frowned. 'There were two openings, I recall. I had the workmen dig around them for a day, as I said. They uncovered a flat roof, a winding corridor, tunnels. I sent two men down with a lantern. Yes, it's coming back to me now. They were gone an inordinately long time. And we were about to dispatch a search party-after them when they re-emerged, a little shabby and feeling somewhat sorry for themselves.'

Newton raised an eyebrow. 'What had befallen them?'

'I managed to obtain from them only a few facts. Apparently, there was some sort of maze beyond the opening. But they were confused about even this.

One of the men said it was a natural convolution of the tunnels, the other thought it was a demonic creation. They were superstitious and ignorant workmen, of course, but I could not have spared anyone with more intelligence at that time. It was perhaps a little foolish of me to digress from the work to which I was committed. It appeared that there were natural corridors leading off towards Hertford College to the south-east and to a point beneath the Bodleian Library almost directly south. I knew from experience that at Hertford College the cellars extend far underground with tunnels leading outward in the direction of my theatre. It was a trivial matter to join them up, and in that way I thought I was satisfying the calling of my curiosity and respecting my muse. You understand?'

Newton seemed far away, staring at Wren without speaking. Then he pulled himself together.

'Apologies, sir,' he mumbled. 'I was totally absorbed by your words. I do understand. We must satisfy our muse lest we shrivel up and die.'

'Quite.'

Newton appeared to have nothing more to add and an uncomfortable silence fell between the two men.

'Well, if that is all you seek, Isaac. .' Wren said.

'I'm most grateful to you,' Newton responded abruptly. 'Most grateful. Farewell, Sir Christopher.' He bowed and made for the door.