Dark Matter

Chapter Three

Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, 1618

Upon leaving the White Tower, where Newton had observed Orion through his telescope, he and I returned to the office, where we fell to discussing the murder of poor Mister Kennedy and the disappearances of Daniel Mercer and Mrs. Berningham for whose arrests Newton now wrote out the warrants.

“Yet I do not think we shall find them,” he said as he handed me the papers. “Mrs. Berningham is very likely on board ship by now. While Daniel Mercer is very likely dead.”

“Dead? Why do you say so?”

“Because of the message that was left at his lodgings. Those hermetick clues that we found upon the table almost told me as much. And because none of his own possessions were taken away. The new beaver hat that lay upon the chair would have cost almost five pounds. A man does not leave such a hat behind when he leaves somewhere of his own accord. No more would he have left a good warm cloak in such cold weather as this.”

As usual the logic of Newton’s arguments was inescapable.

I was about to suggest to my master that I should like to go to bed, for it was quite late, when there was a loud knock at the door and old John Roettier entered the Mint office.

John Roettier was one of an old family of Flanders engravers who had worked in the Mint since the restoration of King Charles. His was an odd situation: he was a Roman Catholic whose brothers Joseph and Phillip had gone to work in the mints of Paris and Brussels and who had been replaced by Old John’s two sons, James and Norbert. These two were recently fled to France, with James accused of having joined in a treasonous conspiracy to kill King William. All of which left the old man alone in the Mint, cutting seals and suspected by the Ordnance of being a traitor on account of his religion and his treacherous family. But Newton liked and trusted him well enough and accorded him the degree of respect that was due to anyone who has given public service for many years. He was a slow, steady sort of man, but straightaway we perceived that he was greatly perturbed by something.

“Oh sir,” he exclaimed. “Doctor Newton. Mister Ellis. Such a horrible thing has happened. A murder, sir. A most dreadful horrible murder. In the Mint, sir. I never saw the like. A body, Doctor.” Roettier sat down heavily on a chair and swept an ancient-looking wig off his head. “Dead, quite dead. And most awful mutilated, too, but it is Daniel Mercer, of that I am certain. Such a sight, sir, as I never saw until this night. Who would do such a thing? Who, sir? It is beyond all humanity.”

“Calm yourself, Mister Roettier,” said Doctor Newton. “Take a deep breath in order that you might give some air to your blood, sir.”

Old Roettier nodded and did as he was bid; and having drawn a deep breath, he replaced the wig upon his head so that it looked like a saddle on a sow’s back and, gathering his wits, explained that Daniel Mercer’s body was to be found in the Mint, at the foot of the Sally Port stairs.

Newton calmly fetched his hat and cloak and lit the candle in a storm lantern. “Who else have you told about this, Mister Roettier?”

“No one, sir. I came straight here from my evening walk about the Tower, sir. I don’t sleep so good these days. And I find a little night air helps to settle me some.”

“Then snug is the word, Mister Roettier. Tell no one what you have seen. At least not yet. I fear this news will greatly disrupt the recoinage. And we shall try to keep this from the Ordnance as long as possible, lest they think to interfere. Come on, Ellis. Stir yourself. We have work to do.”

We came out of the office and walked north up the Mint, as if we had been going to my house, bracing ourselves against a cold wind that stung our faces like a close razor. Between my own garden and an outhouse where Newton kept some of his laboratory equipment, the Sally Port stairs led up from the Mint to the walls of the Inner Ward and the Brick Tower, where the Master of the Ordnance now lived.

Old Roettier had not exaggerated. In the sinuous light of our lanterns my master and I beheld such a sight as only Lucifer himself might have enjoyed. At the foot of the stairs, so that he almost looked as if he might have missed his footing in the dark and fallen down, lay the body of Daniel Mercer. Except that his head had been neatly severed and now lay on its neck upon one of the steps; and from this the two eyes had been removed, which lay upon a peacock’s feather of all things, which itself lay beside a flute. While on the wall were chalked the letters

Newton’s face shone in the lantern light as if it had been made of gold and his eyes were lit up like two jewels, so that I could easily see how, far from disgusted by the dreadful scene that lay in front of us, he seemed much excited by it. And almost as soon as he contemplated Mercer’s body, Newton muttered the word “Mercury” so that I had the apprehension that the meaning of the feather and the flute were already apparent to him.

“Go to your house,” he told me, “and bring pen and paper. And fetch another lantern also.”

Trembling — for the murder had been done close by where I lived, which made me fearful — I did as I was bid. And when I returned Newton asked me carefully to copy down what had been chalked upon the stairwell, which I did as if it had been an important deposition and not the meaningless jumble of letters that I thought it to be. Meanwhile Newton went up to the top of the stairs and walked back and forth between the Brick Tower and the Jewel Tower; and upon finishing my copying, I joined him on the wall. Seeing his two lanterns held low down for his eyes to search the ground, I asked him what he was looking for.

“A great effusion of blood,” he said. “For it is impossible to behead a man without it. And yet there is none on the stairs. Not even a trail.” He straightened. “Nor here also. We must go back down the stairs to Mint Street and search there.”

In the street there was no trail of blood either. But Newton paid close attention to some wheel-tracks upon the ground.

“Within the last half hour some kind of cart has delivered a heavy load and gone away again,” he remarked. “It passed right by this place.”

I looked at the wheel-tracks but could distinguish almost nothing of what my master seemed to see so clearly. “Why do you say so?”

“Half an hour ago there was a great shower of rain that would have effaced these tracks. Observe the inward-bound tracks being very much deeper than the outward-bound ones, so that we may deduce there was a very considerable weight on the inward-bound cart. Therefore it is plain he was not murdered here but somewhere else. Likely he was brought here in the cart and then placed upon these stairs, with all the trimmings we see before us now.” And so saying he laid both his lanterns close to Mercer’s headless body and scrutinised it and the head most carefully.

My own eyes were drawn irresistibly to those of poor Mercer, and to the peacock feathers on which they lay like some sacrificial offering.

“This is much like the story of Argus,” I observed, with no small timidity, fearing Newton’s scornful laughter. Instead he looked up and smiled at me.

“Do, pray, go on,” he urged.

“Argus who was slain by Mercury,” I explained. “At the instigation of Jupiter. For it was the many-eyed Argus who did guard Io, who was the object of Jupiter’s lust, but who had been turned into a cow by Juno.” Seeing Newton nod his encouragement, I continued with my classical interpretation of this scene of murder. “Mercury played his flute so that Argus did fall asleep, and while he was sleeping Mercury killed him and stole Io. That might explain the flute, master.”

“Good,” said Newton. “And the feather?”

“I cannot account for it.”

“No matter. It is hermetick and not easily interpreted by one who is not adept. Knowledge of the secret art is akin to skill in music. The death of the giant Argus is the dark matter or blackness, for argos is Greek for shining or white. His hundred eyes are set on the tail of Juno’s bird. Which explains the peacock feather. The peacock feather is also the emblem of the evil eye and is considered unlucky.”

“It certainly was for poor Mister Mercer,” I said, although I thought myself not much enlightened by Newton’s hermetick explanation. In truth I was most unnerved by a coincidence I could see: for the sight of Mercer’s gouged-out eyes prompted me to recall the attack that Mister Twistleton had made upon my own eyes not long after my living at the Warden’s house; and thinking how the matter now seemed more pertinent than of late, I mentioned the circumstances of the attack to Newton, who sighed, most exasperated.

“I wonder that you did not think to speak to me of this before now,” he remarked. “Did not the murder of Mister Kennedy give you some cause for concern that the perpetrator might have been some lunatic person?”

“I confess that it did not,” I said. “In truth, since that time, Mister Twistleton has seemed a little less troubled in his mind, or else I should have mentioned it sooner.”

“Is there anything else you have perhaps omitted to inform me of?” Newton asked. “A man carrying a bloodied axe, perhaps? Or a peacock missing its tailfeathers that you have seen?”

“Now that I come to think of it, there is something,” I said. “Something else about Mister Twistleton.”

“This is the misery of a keen mind,” groaned Newton. “To be blunted on the wits of others.”

“Your pardon, sir, but I recall how, when I struck Mister Ambrose in the Stone Kitchen, he fell upon Mister Twistleton, and knocked a paper on the floor. And just now I have recollected how, at the time, Mister Twistleton occupied himself with the perusal of a sort of confounded alphabet of letters. Much like the one upon this wall. And in the letter we found on Mister Kennedy’s body.”

“It’s very well that you remember this, sir, and so I do heartily forgive your earlier omission. But we’ll think on this again.” Stroking the peacock feather, Newton was silent for a moment. “I have seen a rendering of this story before,” said Newton. “In a book by a Flemish gentleman named Barent Coenbers van Helpen. It was titled L’Escalier des Sages, which means ‘The Stairway of the Wise,’ and is a very fine work of the philosophy.”

“Is that why the body was placed on these stairs? Is this supposed to be a stairway to the wise?”

“It may be so,” said Newton. “And yet I suspect that the close proximity of the Warden’s house now occupied by you, my dear fellow, also touches upon this matter. For why else would Mercer have been killed in some other place and then brought here, if not to teach us something?” Almost absently Newton picked a piece of straw off the dead man’s waistcoat, and then another off his breeches. “But it is a mystery exactly what that might be.”

“Are we in any danger?”

“Where there are mysteries there are always dangers,” said Newton. “Even God hides his mysteries from the wise and prudent of this world, and it is not every man who can fit his understanding to the revelation of truth.

“Come,” he said, and leaving the stairs we fetched a sentinel from the Mint Barracks, to take charge of Mercer’s body. Then we walked back to the Moneyer’s stables. Inside the stables Newton looked at bales of straw most carefully, even the loose straw, as if, like some hard Egyptian taskmaster, he wondered if it were possible to make bricks without it. Finally he seemed to find what he had been looking for, which was a small quantity of bloodstained straw, although, he said, it was not enough to identify the stable as the place of murder.

“But very likely it may help to confirm to us how the body was transported about,” he said.

For good measure he also inspected the straw in the Comptroller’s stables, but, finding no trace of blood there, we went to the smith’s shop, where the Ordnance kept some of its horses.

Mister Silvester, who was the smith, was a most knavish fellow. He had black swinish eyes, a furious slit of a mouth, and a braggart’s voice and manner that hardly stopped short of belligerence. He looked like a pig grown ill-tempered and heavy from being fattened at the mast of a ship. Following Newton about the stable, Silvester, who was still ignorant of Daniel Mercer’s murder, asked him what he thought he was doing.

“Pray what does it look like, Mister Silvester?” replied Newton. “I am examining the quality of your straw, of course.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my straw, Doctor Newton. It ain’t damp. It ain’t mildewed.”

“But where does it come from?” Newton enquired.

“From the Ordnance’s own barn in Cock and Pye fields, every morning. I wouldn’t let my horses eat anything that wasn’t good. And I’d like to meet the man who says different.”

“I’ve seen all I need to see,” said Newton. “Thank you, Mister Silvester, you have been most helpful.

“That’s a right squirt-tailed fellow,” he said of Silvester, as we returned to the Moneyer’s stable, where we had found the small quantity of bloodied straw. “Always ready to shit on someone.”

There were twelve horses in the Mint. Six horses were assigned to each of two rolling mills, with four horses yoked to a capstan that drove simple gears which turned two horizontal iron cylinders situated on an upper floor. Here fillets of gold and silver were passed between the rolls until they were thin enough to permit the cutting of blanks. It was hard work for the horses, but they were well cared for by two horsekeepers, one of whom, Mister Adam, Newton questioned closely about his straw.

“What time is your straw delivered from the barn at Cock and Pye fields?”

Mister Adam, who was altogether more respectful of Newton, straightaway removed his cap as soon as he was spoken to, revealing a pate that was much scarred with the pox so that it looked like a chequer board.

“Well, sir, it’s the Ordnance that’s supplied from there, not the Mint. Our straw comes mostly from Moor Fields. Everything we have is separate from the Ordnance so as you would think they were France and we were England, which ain’t so very far from the truth being as how there are so many of them Huguenots in this here London Tower.”

“I see,” said Newton. “And what time is straw and animal feed delivered?”

“All times, sir. On account of how horses is the most important creatures in this place, for without them fed well and properly watered, the Mint would grind to a halt, sir. Or would not grind at all, if you see what I mean.”

“Very well,” Newton said patiently. “Then pray tell me, Mister Adam, when was your last cartload delivered? And by whom?”

“That would have been about six of the clock, sir. I heard the bell from the chapel. But as to the fellow what delivered it, sir, I really couldn’t say who he was, inasmuch as I’m sure I never saw him before. Not that that’s so very out of the ordinary. We get all sorts coming and going, and at all hours of the night.”

We came away from the stables not much enlightened; and seeing a candle in the window of the Master’s house, Newton thought to enquire of Mister Defoe if he had seen or heard anything untoward. But upon his knock, the Master’s door was opened not by Mister Defoe, but by Mister Neale himself; and what was more, we were afforded a clear view of the four men who sat around the dinner table, all of them smoking pipes, so that the room stank like a Dutch barge. These were Mister Defoe, Mister Hooke, who was the Doctor’s scientific nemesis, and Count Gaetano and Doctor Love, the two rogues who had sought to trick my master with their fraudulent transmutation of gold.

Several more sentinels trotted past on their way to the Sally Port stairs, which looked like shutting the stable door after the steed was stolen; and seeing them, Mister Neale advanced into the street.

“What means this commotion, Doctor?” he asked. “Is there a fire?”

“No sir, another murder,” replied Newton. “One of the engravers. Mister Mercer has been found dead, on the Sally Port stairs.”

“Is the culprit known?”

“Not yet,” said Newton. “I knocked at this door in the hope that Mister Defoe might have seen or heard something.”

Mister Defoe, coming to the door, shook his head. “We have heard nothing.”

The Master looked at Mister Defoe and then at the other men who stood stiffly around the table, and gave off an air of private and sinister intrigue like a dog gives off a smell of meat.

“To think that while we played cards, a murder occurred within a few yards of this door,” said Mister Neale. “It’s unconscionable.”

“Indeed it is, Mister Neale,” said Newton. “But I believe I have the matter in hand. An investigation is already under way.”

Neale shook his head. “This will do little to facilitate the recoinage,” he said. “’Tis certain to disrupt the business of the Mint.”

“That is also my first concern,” said Newton. “Which is why I have taken charge of the matter myself. I am confident that we shall apprehend this villain before long.”

“Well, then, I resign the matter to you, Doctor; and most cheerfully, for my stomach is so squeamish and watery that I cannot abide the sight of a corpse. Goodnight to you, Warden.”

“Goodnight to you, Master.”

When Mister Neale had closed the door, Newton looked at me and raised his eyebrows most meaningfully. “That,” he said quietly, “is a pretty parcel of rogues, and no mistake.”

“But why did you not warn Mister Neale about Doctor Love and Count Gaetano?” I asked.

“Now is hardly the time for that,” said Newton.“We have data urgently requiring our collection; and only out of that will arise knowledge of what has here transpired. Besides, from the reeking mist of tobacco smoke in that room, it was clear to me that the Master’s door had not been opened in a good while. Ergo, none of them could have deposited Mercer’s body here.”

Walking away from the Master’s door, Newton glanced up at the outer ramparts that lay above the King’s Clerk’s house, the Master’s house, and my own house opposite, and watched as one of the Ordnance sentries walked a cold beat along the wall.

“Whoever stood upon that wall at six o’clock might have seen a hay cart stopped on front of the Sally Port stairs,” he said. “That was the same time that we were in the White Tower, for I remember looking at my watch before beginning my observations.”

“Why not ask him?” I said, indicating the sentry on the wall.

“Because it was not he who was on guard,” Newton replied with a certitude that surprised me.

“But he would surely know the name of the man he relieved,” I said, accepting my master’s word on the sentry’s identity. “Should we not ask him now, before Lord Lucas is informed?”

“You are right,” said Newton. “Lord Lucas will only try to obstruct our enquiries, and the business of the Mint. He is a fly in a cow turd that thinks himself a king.”

We went up to the outer rampire, where the cold wind snatched away my hat so that I was obliged to chase after it lest it blow over the wall and into the moat.

“Look you there now,” said the sentry, a little surprised at our being there. “It is a naughty night to see the sights, gentlemen. Best you hold your hat in your hand, sir, unless you’ve a mind to make a present of it to the moon.”

“What is your name?” asked my master.

“Mark, sir,” said the man slowly, his eyes whirling about as if he was not quite sure of this fact. “Mark Gilbert.”

Up close, he looked to be rather small for a soldier and somewhat round-shouldered, although his countenance and manner were of one who seemed alert enough.

“Well, Mister Gilbert, this night a body most cruelly murdered has been discovered in the Mint.”

Gilbert glanced over the wall before spitting down into the Mint.

“And it is imperative that I question all who may have seen something of what happened down there tonight.”

“I’ve seen nothing out of the ordinary, sir,” Gilbert said. “Not since I came on duty.”

“And when was that?”

Before answering, Gilbert spat again so that I had the apprehension that he spat to loosen up his cogitations.

“Five o’clock, sir,” he said.

“And yet you were not walking your beat on this wall at all times since then,” said Newton. “Did Sergeant Rohan and Major Mornay not stand here for a while, also?”

Gilbert frowned that Newton should know this. “Sergeant Rohan relieved me for half an hour, sir. That’s true. But I didn’t see no officer.”

“But why did Sergeant Rohan relieve you at all? It is not common, surely, for a sergeant to relieve an ordinary soldier?”

“True, sir. I cannot say why he did that. And yet I was mighty grateful, for it is that cold, sir. At the time I did think this might be the reason, sir. And Rohan is a good sort for a Frenchie.”

“Sergeant Rohan is a Huguenot?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you say so?” Newton walked along the wall some way, leaving me with Gilbert.

“Who got murdered, then?” he asked me.

“Daniel Mercer,” I replied.

“No,” said Gilbert. “Danny Mercer? He wasn’t a bad cove, for a Minter. But murdered, you say?”

“It may be so,” I said, for I could see no purpose in alarming the fellow, and in truth I was watching my master more closely than I was listening to Mark Gilbert. Newton had walked along the rampart as far east as the Brass Mount, and back again, pausing only to pick up something from the wall beneath his feet.

“Come,” he said, brushing past me on his way back to the stairs. “Quickly. We are in haste. Thank you, Mister Gilbert.”

Then we repaired to the Byward Tower, which was the entrance to the Tower, where Newton questioned the porter, who confirmed that, provided a man was not carrying a sword or a pistol, no searches were made of those who entered the castle; and that coaches and carts were not searched until leaving, in case, like Captain Blood, they tried to steal the royal jewels. From which explanation it was plain enough to see that it would have been a simple matter to have transported a headless corpse into the Mint in a haycart.

Thence we walked down Water Lane and, entering the inner ward, made our way toward the Grand Storehouse, where, the porter had informed us, Sergeant Rohan might be found. As we drew level with the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, we saw two men coming toward us in the dark who we only latterly recognised as Sergeant Rohan and Major Mornay.

“Doctor Newton?” said Mornay. “What means this rumour? It’s given out that another body has been found.”

“Aye, Major. Daniel Mercer. In the Mint.”

“Mercer?” said Mornay. “I don’t think I knew him. Was he one of yours, Doctor?”

“Yes, Major,” said Newton. “He was one of the engravers.”

“This is most vexing,” said Mornay.

“Aye, for me, too, who must investigate it according to my own judgements.”

“Lord Lucas will need to be kept informed.”

“And he will be,” allowed Newton. “But only when I believe I know enough myself not to be wasting His Lordship’s valuable time. He has great affairs to dispatch, I daresay, great affairs.”

“Yes, most certainly,” agreed Major Mornay with something less than certitude.

“But perhaps you and the Sergeant may help me expedite my enquiries in one small matter, for you may have seen something when you both met on the Brass Mount earlier this evening. Mercer’s body was left upon the Sally Port stairs at around that time.”

“You are mistaken, Doctor,” said the Major. “We were not on the Brass Mount.”

Newton smiled his chilliest of smiles. “The world loves to be deceived.” He removed his hat and, sighing loudly, stared up at the star-encrusted sky. “But myself, I trust not the guise of the world, Major Mornay. And I do not care to be deceived when I have the evidence of my own senses to rely upon. So I say again, you and Sergeant Rohan met upon the Brass Mount and I ask you to tell me if you saw anything untoward happen below you in Mint Street.”

“I must be gone,” said the Major stiffly. “I have no leisure to throw away on your conversation, Doctor Newton. You have had my answer, sir.”

“Before you go, Major,” said Newton, “would you like your belt buckle back?”

The Major reached for the buckle of his own sword belt and, finding it gone, gasped when he saw it held like a magician’s coin in Newton’s outstretched hand.

“Silver, is it not?” asked Newton.

“How did you come by that, sir?” he asked, collecting it from Newton’s hand.

“I found it on the outer rampire,” said Newton. “Close to the Brass Mount. I believe it fell from your belt when Sergeant Rohan struck you to the ground and then wrestled you to your feet again.”

“It is not possible we were observed,” whispered Major Mornay.

“Tell me, Major, is it common practice in the Army for sergeants to strike their officers with impunity?”

“I think you are mistaken, sir,” said Sergeant Rohan. “I struck no officer.”

“No more did you threaten him, I suppose.”

“It was a private matter,” said Mornay. “Between two gentlemen.”

“Nay, sir, between an officer and a sergeant. Tell me, Major, are you still carrying the letter the Sergeant gave you?”

“Letter?”

“And you, Sergeant. Are you still in possession of the Major’s guinea?”

“What manner of a man are you?” Rohan asked, much disturbed, as if he almost believed it to be some kind of witchcraft that Newton knew so much about their affairs.

“I am a man that sees much and understands more,” said Newton. “Think on that when next you and Major Mornay discourse your hidden matter. Was that what you argued about? The most secret of secrets?”

“I know not what you mean, sir,” answered Sergeant Rohan.

“I cannot imagine that you could mistake me. I was plain enough. Even for a Frenchman to understand.”

“I’ll give you no further account of my actions, sir,” said the Sergeant.

“There’s nothing but impudence can help you out now,” said Newton.

“Come, sir,” Rohan said to Mornay. “Let’s away, lest this gentleman be foolish enough to call me a liar to my face.” Whereupon the two soldiers walked away toward the Bloody Tower, leaving me almost as surprised as they were themselves.

Newton watched their retreat with something like delight, rubbing his hands together. “I think that I have put the bear in the pit, so to speak.”

“But was it wise, Doctor, to provoke them so?” I asked him. “With two murders done here or hereabouts?”

“Three,” said Newton. “Let us not forget Mister Macey.”

“And did you not counsel caution to me, for fear that it might hinder the recoinage? Or perhaps something worse?”

“It is too late for that, I fear. The damage is done. And it has been in my thoughts this past half an hour that some disruption to the recoinage was surely intended by this murderer.”

“When this gets out, it may be the Minters will be too afeared to come to the Tower.”

“Indeed that is so. I shall speak to Mister Hall, and advise him that the wages of the Minters should be increased to take account of their fears.”

Newton glanced back at the two retreating figures of Rohan and Mornay.

“But I think that those two should be provoked, for they are much too conspiratorial. Like Brutus and Cassius. Perhaps now they will reveal their design in some way, for it seems certain there is some great secret in this Tower.”

“But, Master, how ever did you know these things? Their argument. The buckle. The letter. I think that they must have suspected you of some sorcery.”

“It was only the sorcery of two polished copper plates,” said Newton. “The one convex, the other concave, and ground very true to one another.”

“The telescope,” I exclaimed. “Of course. You saw them from the north-east turret of the White Tower.”

“Just so,” admitted Newton. “I saw them as I said, arguing most violently, so that I was surprised to see them again, much reconciled. If one thing is clear to me in this dark matter it is that Sergeant Rohan knows something that holds Major Mornay in thrall to him, or else he should have been arrested and flogged for striking an officer. I must question them both again, and separately.”

“There was a moment when I swear I thought the Sergeant would strike you. I thought I should have to speak to him by way of my sword.”

“I’m right glad to have the both of you around,” offered Newton. “Especially in as cold and dark a place as this. Why, a man might think himself come down to hell. We must find out more about Sergeant Rohan and Major Mornay. It shall be your earliest concern.”

We walked back to the Mint, where we discovered that the night shift of Mint workers had already gathered in the Street outside the Warden’s Office, and now loudly declared themselves of the opinion that the Mint was not a safe place in which to work, and that, French War or not, the King’s Great Recoinage could be hanged.

“We’ll all of us be murdered if we stay here much longer,” said one. “What with Lord Lucas and his general provocations of us Minters, and now these horrible killings, this is no longer a fit place for God-fearing men to work.”

“We must nip this in the bud,” murmured Newton, “or else the war will be lost for lack of coin to pay the King’s troops.”

Newton listened patiently to their remonstrance; and at last he raised his hands to quell the general clamour, and spoke to the disgruntled Minters.

“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “You have more to fear from the French than from this murderer, for he will soon be caught, you have my word upon it.”

“How?” shouted a man.

“I will catch him,” Newton insisted. “Even so, it is only proper that you should be properly compensated for your continuing devotion to the Great Recoinage, in the face of these heinous crimes. I will speak to their lordships and demand that you should receive a boon for your important work here. Any man who stays to work will receive an extra five guineas when this great work shall be completed. Even if I have to pay that boon out of my own pocket.”

“Does that include the day shift?” asked another.

“Including the day shift,” said Newton.

The Minters looked at one another, nodded their assent, and then gradually drifted back to their machines, at which point Newton let out a sigh of relief.

“And all the time, the Master of the Mint plays cards,” said I. “I do not think the King can know what a loyal servant he has in you, Doctor.”

“We must hope their lordships agree with you,” smiled Newton. “Otherwise I shall be considerably out of pocket. You have the copy of what was written on the wall of the Sally Port stairs?”

I handed Newton the paper, which he put away in his sleeve.

“It will be my evening’s endeavour,” he said, “to solve this conundrum, for I don’t like to be dunned and teased about things which are at base mathematical. For in any cipher I think that the frequency of vowels and consonants depend upon the rules of number, with the former being more frequent than the latter.”

It was plain to see that he relished the task that now lay before him, much as the prophet Daniel might have enjoyed revealing the will of God to Belshazzar when the fingers of a man’s hand did write upon the plaster of the wall in the great king’s palace. For my own part, however, I was very tired and, despite the close proximity to my house of a headless corpse, and the clamorous noise of the Mint being now resumed, I was looking forward to my bed.

I awoke, if awakening is how it can be described, for I hardly slept at all, at the mercy of a slight fever. But I attempted to play the Stoic and reported to the office as usual, where Newton told me that we were going to visit Bedlam.

“To see your friend Mister Twistleton. Enquiring about him this morning I discovered that he was taken there last night at Lord Lucas’s order. After Mercer’s body was discovered. Is it not strange?”

“But do you hope to question the man?”

“Why not?”

“He is mad, sir.”

“Nature seldom bestows an enduring and constant sanity even on her most advantaged sons. And if Mister Twistleton’s madness be of the kind that makes him speak whatever comes into his head, then we may find that we are able to order his thoughts for ourselves.”

We went by coach to Moorfields and the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, which was a most magnificent building designed by the same Robert Hooke whom Newton regarded as his great scientific rival, and therefore, I was not at all surprised to hear my master speak most dismissively of the shape and pattern of the hospital.

“Only a madman would make a madhouse look like a palace,” he complained. “Only Hooke could perpetrate such a fraud.”

But there was nothing palatial about Bedlam’s hellish interior.

We passed through the entrance, flanking either side of which stood statues of Melancholy and Madness, as if some horrible Gorgon had stared into the eyes of two mindless brothers, which was a better fate, to my mind, than that which lay inside, where all was screams and echoing laughter and such a dreadful picture of human misery and distasteful imbecility as would have given only Beelzebub comfort. And yet raw minds went there to make sport and diversion of Bedlam’s miserable inhabitants, many of whom were chained and placed in cells, like the animals in the Lion Tower. To my untutored eye — for I knew nothing about caring for mad folk — the atmosphere was that of an enduring Tyburn holiday, for there was cruelty and callousness, drunkenness and despair, not to mention a great many whores who plied their trade in the hospital among the visiting public. In short, the picture was a facsimile of the world at large, disjointed, supped full of horror and pleasure both, and such as would have caused any man to doubt the existence of God in his Heaven.

We found Mister Twistleton rattling his chains and wheedling charity behind an iron barricade. His naked shoulders already bore the unmistakable weals of a nurse-warder’s whip, and what wits he still possessed were much agitated by the noise and clamour of his new surroundings. And yet he recognised me immediately, and kissed my hand in a way that caused me to apprehend he believed we had come to fetch him back to the relative safety of the Tower.

“How are your eyes, Mister Ellis?” he asked me straightaway.

“Much recovered, Mister Twistleton, thank you.”

“I am sorry I gouged them. Only I don’t much like being looked at. I feel people’s eyes on me, as some men feel the heat of the sun. When I attacked you, I mistook you for this other gentleman, who I think is Doctor Newton.”

“I am he, Mister Twistleton,” Newton said kindly, and held the poor man’s hand. “But pray, why did you wish to gouge my eyes?”

“My own eyes are not so good. But your eyes, Doctor, are the hottest eyes I have ever felt. It was like God himself staring into my soul. An’t please your honour, I’m sorry for thinking it, as now I perceive that your eyes are not as unforgiving as once I had thought.”

“Is it forgiveness that you seek? If so, I give it to you freely.”

“I’m beyond all forgiveness, sir. I did a terrible thing. But I am justly punished, for as you can see, I am quite out of my wits. Even my legs will not obey my mind, for I find I can walk very little.”

“What was this terrible thing you did?” I enquired.

Mister Twistleton shook his head. “I can’t remember, sir, for I have made myself mad to forget it. But it was something awful, sir. For I never stop hearing the screaming.”

“Mister Twistleton,” said Newton, “was it you who killed Mister Mercer?”

“Danny Mercer is dead? No sir. Not I.”

“Or perhaps Mister Kennedy? Did you lock him in the Lion Tower?”

“Not me, sir. I’m a good Protestant. I bear no man any ill will, sir. Not even Roman Catholics. Not even the French King, Lewis, who would murder me if he could.”

“Why would he murder you?”

“To make me a good Catholic, of course.”

“Do you know a secret?” asked Newton.

“Yes sir. But I have sworn an oath never to reveal it to anyone. Yet I would tell you, sir. If I could remember what it was that I must never reveal. “The poor wretch smiled. “But I think it might touch upon weapons. For I was the Armourer, I think.”

“Was it to do with alchemy perhaps?”

“Alchemy?” Mister Twistleton looked puzzled. “No, sir. The only metal I have ever drawn from a fire were the musket balls I made myself. And I have seen very little real gold in my life.”

Newton unfolded a copy of the encrypted message that we had discovered on the wall of the Sally Port stairs beside Daniel Mercer’s body. “Does this mean anything to you?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said the poor lunatic. “It means a great deal to me, sir. Thank you. Here, wait a minute, I have a message for you, I think.” And having searched the pockets of his breeches, he produced a much-folded and dog-eared letter and handed it to Newton, who examined it for a moment, and then let me see that it contained a similarly confounded alphabet of letters as the previous messages that we had discovered. It might even have been the very same letter Mister Twistleton had been reading when I had seen him in The Stone Kitchen.

“But what is the meaning?” enquired Newton.

“The meaning?” repeated Mister Twistleton. “Blood, of course. Blood is behind everything. Once you understand that, you understand all that has happened. That’s the secret. You ought to know that, sir.”

“Is there yet more blood to be shed?”

“More? Why, sir, they haven’t hardly started, sir.” Mister Twistleton laughed. “Not by my chalk. There’s lots of killing to come. Lots of blood. Well, it’s like this, see? It depends on whether there be peace or war.” He tapped his nose. “More than that I can’t say, because I don’t know. Nobody knows when such a thing comes about. Maybe soon. Maybe not. Maybe never at all. Who can say? But you will help, sir. You will help get us started. You may not know it yet. But you will.”

“Mister Twistleton,” Newton said gently, “do you know the meaning of the phrase pace belloque?”

He shook his head. “No sir. Is that a secret, too?”

I shook my aching head wearily, and withdrew my hand from the madman’s increasingly tight grasp. “This is madness indeed.”

“Madness, yes,” said Mister Twistleton. “We will make everyone in London mad. And then who will cure it?”

Seeing that we were about to take our leave of him, Mister Twistleton became quickly agitated: his humour became more frantic, and within less than a minute he was raving and foaming at the mouth. This seemed infectious, for at once other lunatics began to rant and rave, and they had soon set up such a chorus of Pandemonium as would have put Hell in an uproar, with Satan himself fit to complain to the Steward about the damned noise. Immediately several nurse-warders descended upon the inmates with whips, which was a piteous sight to behold, and which prompted my master and me to advance swiftly toward Bedlam’s exit, eager to be out of that festering air.

Walking through the portico under the melancholy eyes of Mister Cibber’s statues, Newton shook his head and sighed with relief.

“Of all things, I most fear the loss of my mind,” he said. “During my last year at Cambridge I got a distemper that much seized my head and kept me awake for several weeks so that my thinking was much discomposed.”

These symptoms were becoming increasingly familiar to me, for my ague seemed to be worsening; and yet I said nothing to my master beyond enquiring if it were indeed possible for a man to be put out of his wits by seeing a ghost, as Sergeant Rohan had told me.

“There’s no question of a ghost,” said Newton. “Mister Twistleton has the pox. Did you not see the ulcerated lesions on his legs? You might also have noted his atrophied eyes, his trembling lips and tongue, and his partial paralysis. These are most symptomatic of advanced syphilis.”

“I think,” I said weakly, “that I should like to wash my hands.”

“Oh, there’s no time for that,” said Newton. “We have to go and see some hatmakers.”

“Hatmakers?” I sighed wearily. “Unless you do think to have yourself a new hat, sir — although I must confess I do think you the least hat-minded man I ever met — why on earth should we want to visit some hatmakers?”

To which Newton replied, “What? ‘Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?’” And seeing me frown, he added, “Job, chapter thirty-nine, verse thirteen.”

In the coach, Newton patted my leg and, exuding some delight, showed me the letter Mister Twistleton had given to him. To my tired eyes, the paper, which showed a familiar but disorderly mixture of letters—

— yielded no obvious meaning, but Newton declared that he discerned the same pattern that he had beheld in the previous messages we had discovered.

“But Mister Twistleton is a lunatic,” I objected.

“Without question,” agreed Newton.

“Then I fail to see why you are taking his letter so seriously.”

“For the simple reason that Mister Twistleton did not write it.”

“But how can you tell?”

“For several years I have made it my amusement to try and infer a person’s character, dispositions and aptitude from the peculiarities of his handwriting,” explained Newton. “One may even determine the state of a man’s health: for example, whether or not he is suffering from some defect in his eyes, or whether he is afflicted with some kind of paralysis.

“Considering the bold strong hand of these letters and the obvious ill health of Mister Twistleton, it is evident that the author of this message was anything but mad. There is a further point of subtler interest, which is that the author of this particular letter has studied Latin.”

“How on earth do you determine that?”

“The letters a and e occur together three times within the coded text; and where they do, the author of the message observes the convention of running them into one another as se. This indicates a diphthong, which is but a complexion or coupling of vowels, and indicates a Latin pronunciation. For example, it shows that we should pronounce the C in the word Cæsar with a hard k. Therefore I have no doubt that we shall find that the author of this message has been a scholar of sorts, which would exclude Mister Twistleton, whose education has been of a more rudimentary nature.”

“But how do you know that? It is possible he might have had some Latin.”

“Do you not remember how in response to all his ravings about war and peace, I asked him the meaning of the Latin pace belloque?”

“Yes, of course. ‘In war and peace.’ That was why you asked him that. I wondered.”

“He did not know. And it was not because his wits are disordered, but because he did not know. Ergo, he has not Latin.” Newton sighed. “You are very dull today, Ellis. Are you quite well? You do not seem like yourself, sir.”

“My headache is troubling me,” I said. “But I’ll be all right,” I added, although I did begin to feel quite ill.

We arrived in Pall Mall where the foppish Samuel Tuer, a Huguenot milliner, regarded the two of us entering his shop like a couple of Minerva’s birds, being doubtless used to more exotic peacocks, like the gaudy beau in his shop who was examining a hat with the same care and attention that Newton or myself would have devoted to a counterfeit coin. Listening to Newton’s question about plumes, Mister Tuer tossed open the lid of a little enamelled snuff-box and charged his fastidious nostrils with a pinch and then sneezed an answer to the effect that James Chase, a featherman in Covent Garden, provided him with all of the ostrich and peacock plumes for his hats, being the biggest and best supplier of feathers in London.

A short while later, arriving at the premises of Mister Chase, which was a large aviary with all varieties of ducks, crows, swans, geese, chickens, and several peacocks, Newton produced the long single feather he had brought from the Tower with its rainbow eye ringed with blue and bronze, and, explaining that he had come on the King’s business, continued thus:

“I am told you are the largest supplier of exotic plumes in London.”

“That is true, sir. I am to feathers what Virginia is to tobacco, or what Newcastle is to coals. I supply everyone — coachmakers, penmakers, furniture-makers, bed-makers and milliners.”

“This is the feather of a blue Indian peacock, is it not?”

Mister Chase, who was a tall, thin and birdlike man, examined the feather but briefly before confirming that Newton was correct.

“Yes sir. That’s a blue, right enough.”

“Can you tell me anything more about it?”

“Never been on a hat, by the look of it, for it is untrimmed. It’s a rare enough bird, the peacock, although a few rich folks like them. But peacocks has a bad disposition, sir, and must be kept apart from other fowl. Apart from the fact that this feather is from one of my birds, I can tell you very little about it, gentlemen.”

“It is one from one of your birds?” repeated Newton. “How can you tell?”

“Why, from the calamus, of course.” Mister Chase turned the feather upside down to show the horny barrel end, upon which there appeared a single blue stain. “All our feathers is marked thus,” he said. “As a sign of quality. Whether it be a swan’s feather for writing, or an ostrich plume for a ladies’ headdress.”

“Is it possible you would know to whom you supplied this particular feather?” asked Newton.

“Nearly all of my peacock plumes go to Mister Tuer, or Madame Cheret, who are both of them French milliners. Huguenots, sir. They’ve been good for the feather business.Occasionally I sell a few to ladies what want to make their own hats. Although not very often. Mister Tuer says there are plenty of women who’ll make a dress, but not many who want to make a hat.

“I did sell some to a new customer the other day. A man I had never before seen. What was his name? I cannot recall. But not at all the type of man to be a hatmaker.”

“Can you remember anything else about him?” enquired Newton.

Mister Chase thought for a moment and then said, “He looked like a Frenchie.”

“What, a Huguenot?”

Mister Chase shook his head. “Looked like one. Foreign-sounding name, I thought, although I can’t remember what it was. But to be honest with you, sir, the French are really all the foreigners I know. He could just as easily have been Spanish, I suppose. Not that he spoke like a foreigner. No sir, he sounded English. And educated, too. But then some of these Huguenots parlez-vous English pretty well. I mean, you would think Mister Tuer an Englishman, sir.”

“An Englishman, of sorts,” said Newton.

After we took our leave of Mister Chase, Doctor Newton looked squarely at me and said he believed I had need of a dish of coffee; and so we went to The Grecian, a coffee house which was popular with the fellows of the Royal Society. Quite soon after we arrived and had received our coffee, which did seem to revive me for a while, a man of about thirty years old came and sat beside us. I took him for a scholar, which was not so wide of the mark, for he was himself a fellow of the Royal Society and tutor to the children of the Duke of Bedford. His accent seemed to proclaim his Frenchness, although he was in fact a Swiss Huguenot.

Newton introduced the man as one Nicholas Fatio de Dullier, and although it was quickly plain to me that they had once been close friends, my master exhibited a coolness to Mister Fatio which made me suspect that they had quarrelled and that there was now some distance between them; and Mister Fatio himself regarded me with a degree of arch suspicion that I would have called jealousy but for the suggestion this might have raised against my master’s own character; because it could hardly be ignored that Mister Fatio was delicate to the point of being effeminate.

By now I had discovered that I had little appetite for coffee after all, and the thick smoke in The Grecian was doing nothing to improve my light-headedness; consequently my recollection of the conversation that passed between my master and Mister Fatio is hardly circumstantial. But from the outset it was clear that Mister Fatio sought to recover some of Newton’s former confidence.

“I am most glad to have found you here, Doctor,” he said. “Otherwise I should have been obliged to write to you, and tell you that yesterday a man sought me out at the home of the Duke, to ask questions about you. I think he said his name was Mister Foe.”

“I have met him,” said Newton. “Mister Neale introduced us at the Mint.”

“Mister Neale, the Master Worker?”

“The same.”

“Why, this is very strange. I had it from Mister Robartes, in this very coffee house, that Mister Neale has asked Hooke to introduce an Italian chemist, the Count Gaetano, to the fellows of the Royal Society. It is said that the Count has perfected a method for the transmutation of lead into gold. Mister Neale has already confirmed the purity of the Count’s transmuted gold, and it awaits only Hooke’s imprimatur for the introduction to go forward to the society.”

“Faith, this is good news,” said Newton. “For the Count is a scoundrel and can no more work a transmutation than you can raise the dead, Fatio.”

Mister Fatio bristled and for a moment looked most womanly so that he would have given us a gale with his fan if he had held one in his little white hand; and which I might have enjoyed, for suddenly I felt such a want of good air as a man with a halter about his neck.

“You are sick, sir,” said Newton, perceiving my want of health. “Come, let me help you to the door and a more wholesome draught. Fatio? Make some enquiries concerning this Count Gaetano with your friends on the Continent, and you will earn my gratitude.” And with that Newton helped me to my feet, for it was much as I could do to stand.

Outside The Grecian I stood swaying like a rotten tree, so that Newton was obliged to offer me his arm; and beckoning his carriage, he offered the following remarks about his friend.

“Do not deceive my good opinion of you, Ellis, by apprehending anything unseemly in my relationship with Mister Fatio, for I know what other men think of him. But he has a good heart and an excellent mind, and once I did love him as a father might love his own son.”

I remember smiling at Newton and assuring him that nothing would alter my high opinion of him; and then I think I must have fainted.

Newton fetched me to his own home in Jermyn Street and put me in a bed with fine white Holland sheets, where Mrs. Rogers and Miss Barton might nurse me, for the fever was now become an ague that left me feeling as weak as a basketful of kittens and full of shakes and sweats and the headache and pains in my legs so that I felt like some plaguey person in all symptoms save the buboes that distinguish that awful pestilence. But when the fever broke, and I saw who was my nurse, I thought I had died and was gone to heaven. For Miss Barton was sitting next to a window, reading in the sunlight, with her hair much like gold, and her eyes as blue as cornflowers; and when she did see that I was awake, she smiled and put down her book straightaway, and held my hand.

“How are you feeling, dear Tom?” she asked, using her fond name for me.

“Better, I think.”

“You have had an ague. And have been in a fever now for almost three weeks.”

“So long as that?” I heard myself croak.

“But for my uncle’s remedies, you were fit to have died,” she explained. “For it was he who effected your cure. Soon after Mister Woston, our coachman, brought you to Jermyn Street, my uncle went to an apothecary in Soho to fetch Jesuit’s bark, and also some dried meadowsweet, which he then ground to a powder in a pestle, for he had read that these sometimes served as an ague remedy. And so it has proved, for you are restored to us.”

She mopped my brow with a damp cloth, and then helped me to drink some beer. I tried to sit up, but found I could not.

“You must stay still, for you are very weak, Tom. You must rely on me and Mrs. Rogers as if we were your own hands.”

“I cannot allow it, Miss Barton,” I protested. “It is not proper that you should look after me.”

“Tom,” she laughed, “don’t take on so. I am a woman who has brothers. There is nothing to be ashamed of.”

It was some time before my condition improved enough to take proper cognisance of what had happened to me. By which time it was Lady Day. But Newton would not hear of my coming back to his service until I was fully recovered. Nor would he answer any of my enquiries relating to the investigations we had been working on. Instead he brought a piece of blackboard to my room which he did set upon a painter’s easel and, with the aid of some chalk, would, upon occasion, attempt to explain his system of fluxions to me. He meant well, of course; and yet I had not the brain for it, and these lectures in mathematics merely served to increase my resolve soon to be well again despite the fact that with Miss Barton nursing me I had good reason to lie abed thinking myself to be a man much blessed by being ill. For she baptised me with her love, and resurrected me with her tender care. When I was feverish, she mopped my brow. There were days when I lay awake and just looked at her for a whole afternoon. Other days I remember not at all. I have not the words to describe my love for her. How is love described? I am no Shakespeare. No Marvell. No Donne. When I was too weak to feed myself, she fed me. And always she read to me: Milton, Dryden, Marvell, Montaigne, and Aphra Behn, of whose work she was especially fond. Oroonoko was her favourite — although I myself did think the end much too gruesome. That book contains the history of a slave, and ’tis no exaggeration to say that by the time I was strong enough to return to the Mint, I was hers.

It was the eighth day of April, a Thursday, when I went back to work. I do remember that, and easily enough, for I could not have forgotten that milord Montagu was become the Earl of Halifax, and had replaced milord Godolphin as Lord Treasurer. And it was several days after before the business of the Mint permitted me the opportunity to enquire of Newton what had become of our investigation into the murders of Daniel Mercer and Mister Kennedy, for we had not spoken of these matters at all while I had been ill.

“As to the cipher,” said Newton, “I confess I have had no success with it, and it has become clear to me that more messages would be required in order to fathom the numerical structure that is its foundation. Mister Berningham died. Despite the ministrations of that prison drab, he succumbed to the poison he had been given. Very likely the girl did not do exactly as I told her. Doubtless she thought it madness to feed a man pieces of charcoal. And yet it might have cured him.

“I have had Mister Humphrey Hall keep a close eye on Count Gaetano and Doctor Love with very little to report except that Hooke continues to make himself their creature; and I would almost be unhappy if we were to discover some evidence of their having murdered Kennedy and Mercer before they have had a chance to murder Hooke, or, at the very least, his reputation.

“As to Sergeant Rohan and Major Mornay, I had both of them followed by two of our agents. It seems that like the Sergeant, the Major is also a Huguenot, as are several others in the Tower, both in the Mint and in the Ordnance. Naturally I was already aware of John Fauquier, the Deputy Master of the Mint, was also a Huguenot. But I did not know there were so many others.”

“It is said,” I remarked, “that the Huguenots are so numerous that there are as many in London as there are Roman Catholics. I have heard as many as fifty thousand.”

“The centre of their community is the Church of the Refuge in Threadneedle Street,” said Newton. “Some attend the Austin Friars Chapel in the City. Others the French Conformist Church of the Savoy in Westminster. But all the Huguenots from this Tower, whether they are Mint or Ordnance, attend Threadneedle Street. I myself went to a service at the French church of La Patente in Spitalfields where I found much to admire, since many of these Huguenots do embrace anti-Trinitarian views which are familiar to me. And yet they are most secretive. I was required to state my belief that Christ was a mere man, though without sin, before they would permit me to remain during their worship, for they are very fearful of spies. And not without good reason, I think. I have heard it said often enough that they do harbour secret Papists in their midst. My own agents say the same, but that is based on nothing more substantial than their own ignorant fancy, for our spies think all Frenchmen are, when weighed in the balance, found wanting.”

“That was also my own opinion,” I told him. “Certainly I know that there were a great many Huguenots who fought for King William at the Battle of the Boyne, including General Ruvigny himself. But I confess I have little apprehension of the true character of their persecutions. And why so many of them are here at all.”

“But you must have heard of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew,” protested Newton.

“I have heard of it,” I said. “But I am unable to describe what happened.”

Newton shook his head. “I would have thought the circumstances of the massacre were familiar to Protestants everywhere. What history are they teaching young people these days?” He sighed. “Well then, let me enlighten you. On the night of August the twenty-fourth, 1572, a large number of Protestants were in Paris to see the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, the future French King and grandfather of the present French King, Lewis, married to Marguerite, who was a member of the ruling French Catholic family of Valois. The treacherous Valois family saw opportunity to extirpate Protestantism from France, and took it. Ten thousand were massacred in Paris and many more in the provinces; and it is generally accepted that as many as seventy thousand Huguenot Protestants were murdered by the Roman Catholics. Many Huguenots sought refuge in England.”

“But that was in 1572; surely by now they would be much integrated into English society?”

“Henry himself was spared, and eventually became the King of France; and by the Edict of Nantes, did establish religious toleration for Protestants in France. Which persisted until about ten years ago, when this same edict was revoked by his own grandson, and now many more Huguenots are fled to England again. Now do you understand?”

“Yes. I see. But that you say there are several Huguenots here in this Tower still surprises me. One might think that the security of the Mint would demand that only Englishmen should garrison this place.”

“Did I say several?” said Newton. “I meant many.” He collected a sheet of paper on which appeared two lists of names. “In the Mint, Mister Fauquier, Mister Coligny the assay master, Mister Vallière the melter, and Mister Bayle the moneyer. In the Ordnance, Major Mornay, Captain Lacoste, Captain Martin, Sergeant Rohan, Corporals Cousin and Lasco, and Warders Poujade, Durie, Nimmo, and Lestrade.

“There may be others not yet known,” continued Newton. “Those who have sought refuge in England since 1685 and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes are easier to see than those whose families have been here since the defeat of La Rochelle in 1629. Major Mornay was born in this country. As was Mister Bayle, the moneyer. Being more English than French of course may make them weaker links in the Huguenot chain.”

“Do you think that they conspire to do something? Could they have murdered Daniel Mercer and Mister Kennedy?”

“I cannot hypothesise. That is what we must find out. It is true that there is much to connect French Protestantism and the Huguenots with the hermetic world of alchemy. But I do not believe that there is anything in these Huguenots that would make them any more protective of alchemy than I am myself.”

“That may be so,” said I. “But what about the Templars of whom your friend in the Royal Society, Mister Pepys, spoke when we dined with him? Were the Templars not French, too? Might it not be that these Huguenots are the heirs to the Templars and their own secret? Would not such a treasure be worth killing for? It seems to me that there are many secrets hereabouts.”

“Enough, enough,” groaned Newton. “You trouble me with your incessant speculations.”

“What would you have me do?”

“We must keep these Huguenots under our eye,” said Newton. “And hope that they may reveal themselves. Particularly Major Mornay. I fancy that the more we know about him, the better equipped we shall be to question him again. He is not nearly as strong a character as Sergeant Rohan, who, it seems, was once a galley slave in King Lewis’s navy. We’ll not break down his defences, I’ll warrant. Meanwhile you must learn to be patient, my dear fellow. Nothing is to be gained here by acting with haste. Relations between Mint and Ordnance are delicately poised. And this Gordian knot must be unravelled if we are still to have use of the rope afterward.”

For the next three weeks I worked with a whole network of Newton’s agents to keep the Huguenots who were in the Tower under our scrutiny. Mornay was a frequent visitor to an address in the Strand that was the home of Lord Ashley. Ashley was a Whig and the Member of Parliament for Poole, in Dorset. Sergeant Rohan often attended the courts at Westminster Hall. There he would listen to whatever case was being heard, and the real purpose of his going there seemed to be that he should meet a tall clerical man from whom he seemed to take orders, and who wore a great hat with a black satin hatband and a long, rose-coloured scarf. Bowlegged and bull-necked, the fellow proved too elusive and we lost his trail somewhere in Southwark, so that for a while, at least, he continued to elude identification.

While I was shadowing Sergeant Rohan through the many shops that lined both sides of Westminster Hall, a curious incident occurred which left me better acquainted with him and possessed of a higher estimate of his character.

I had for only a moment taken my eyes off the Sergeant to survey one of the many trading madams who are usually to be found there, possessed of legal papers that help to foster the impression that they come to be clients instead of finding clients for themselves, and was chagrined to discover that I had lost him. Reflecting that I was perhaps not best fashioned to make a spy, for I was too easily distracted by strumpets, I was making my way to the great door of the Hall when, while eyeing another of these pretty jades, I collided with the person of the Sergeant himself. And he, apprehending the true reason for my want of attention to where I was going, was most amused, clapping me on the shoulder and, demonstrating an affability and complaisance I found surprising, he invited me to a nearby tavern. So I went, thinking I might learn something more of his character that might be to our advantage; and learn something of him I did, although not in any way I might have supposed.

“Your Mister Newton,” he said, fetching us two pots of Byde’s best. “He’s a clever one. I don’t know how he came to suspect me for a mutineer, but it ain’t at all like he thinks between the Major and me. We’re old friends, him and me — old enough to forget rank when we quarrel, as all friends do now and then. When you’ve served with a man, fought alongside him in a fight, saved his skin a few times, it gives you a certain privilege. The possession of an advantage, so to speak. A debt, some might call it.”

“You saved Major Mornay’s life?”

“Not so much saved, as kept him alive. He and I were captured at the Battle of Fleuris, in Flanders, fighting for King William. It was the King’s first defeat in the Low Countries. That was in 1690. The French General, Luxembourg, was a cruel fellow and all his prisoners were sentenced to serve as convicts in King Lewis’s galleys, for life. Three days later, the Major and me arrived at Dunkirk, where we were placed in the galley ship L’Heureuse. Do you know what that means?”

I shook my head.

“It means Fortune,” said the Sergeant. “And I can tell you there is precious little of that to be found in a French galley ship.

“Let me tell you about a galley, young fellow. It has fifty rowing benches, twenty-five on each side, six slaves chained to a bench. That’s three hundred men. No one who has not seen the work of a galley slave can possibly imagine it. I myself have rowed for twenty-four hours without a moment’s rest, encouraged by the whips of the comites who commanded us. If you fainted you were flogged until you started to row again, or until you were dead, and then your body was thrown to the sharks. Turks did most of the flogging.” The Sergeant grinned as he recollected the cruelties he described. “There’s no Christian who can flog a man quite like a Turk. Who can flay a man to the bone with a rope’s end, dipped in pitch and brine.

“The strongest and the weakest were put together, which is how I came to row with the Major. I was at the head of a bench with the Major next to me. Dogs was what the ship’s captain called us, and like dogs was how we lived. He was a man of most Jesuitical sentiments and hated all men of the reformed faith. Once he ordered one of the Turks to cut off a man’s arm with which to beat another. For some reason, the captain took against the Major, and singled him out for an especially harsh beating. But for me, the Major would have died. I gave him half my biscuit and applied vinegar and salt to his weals to stop the beginning of a mortification to his flesh. And somehow, he survived.

“There were many cruelties we endured, and many hardships: the heat in summer; the cold in winter; the beatings; the starvation; the cannonades from other ships. One time we were raked with langrage shot, which is a long tin box filled with bits of chain and old metal that’s stuffed down the barrel of a gun. A third of the men in the galley were blasted to pieces. All the wounded were thrown overboard for the sharks.

“Two years the Major and I survived in that Catholic ship of damnation. Once you asked me why I hate Catholics so much. Well here’s why: We were visited by the Mother Superior of an order of Catholic sisters who offered us Huguenots our freedom if we would make an abjuration of our faith. Many of us did, only to discover that she had lied and that it was not within her power to give us freedom. It was the Captain that had put her up to it. His idea of a joke, I suppose.

“Two years, my friend. In the galleys, that’s a lifetime. We thought our sufferings would never end. But then one day there was a battle. Admiral Russell, bless him, defeated the French at Barfleur, our ship was taken, and we were freed.”

Sergeant Rohan nodded and then finished his ale; and I thought his story explained much that lay between himself and Major Mornay. Stunned by his tale — in truth I have hardly done it justice — I paid little attention to the curiosity about my master and his habits he now demonstrated; so that I answered many of his questions with scant regard for the danger it occasioned my master.

Which later on was to cause me great personal grief.

For all Newton’s obvious intelligence, we seemed no closer to identifying the perpetrators of these atrocities than we had before I had fallen sick. It was fortunate therefore that the murders remained largely unknown outside the castle walls. At the request of the Lords Justices, Doctor Newton and Lord Lucas were ordered to keep secret these atrocities for fear the general public might apprehend some threat to the Great Recoinage and perceive that this might fail, as the Land Tax and the Million Act had failed before it. With the Army still in Flanders and King William still unpopular in the country at large, his son the Duke of Gloucester so frail, and Princess Anne — who was second in line of succession — childless despite her seventeen confinements, there was great fear of national insurrection at home. And nothing was perceived to inflame discontent as much as the continued debasement and scarcity of the coin. The closing date for receipt of the old coin at full value — June twenty-fourth — was fast approaching, but there was so little of the new in circulation that the Lords Justices had secretly given out that any news that bore ill upon the Mint and the recoinage was to be suppressed.

Yet there was much curiosity — no, concern — as to the results of Doctor Newton’s investigations. And his easily ignited and touchy character being well known in Whitehall, it was given to my brother (who, as I have said, was under-secretary to William Lowndes, the Treasury’s Permanent Secretary) to make some enquiries of me as to what progress was being made with my master’s investigations. At least this was what he said in the beginning. It was only toward the end of our meeting that I learned the real purpose of his speaking to me.

We met at Charles’s office in Whitehall while Newton appeared before their Lordships in order to recommend a pardon for Thomas White, whose execution for coining had been deferred thirteen times on Newton’s motion in return for information.

Even then my brother and I did not enjoy cordial relations, although I was grateful to him for finding me employment. But I was damned if in return I was going to become his creature, and had made this plain almost as soon as I was appointed to the Mint. As a result Charles saw me as an embarrassment and a possible hindrance to any substantial preferment in the Treasury, and spoke to me as he might have spoken to his servant. Which was how he spoke to most people, now that I come to reflect upon it. He had grown rather fat and self-important, and reminded me very much of our father.

“How is your health?” he asked gruffly. “Doctor Newton told me you were ill. And that you were taken care of.”

“I am much recovered now,” said I.

“I would have come to see you, brother, but I was detained here.”

“I am well enough now, as you can see.”

“Good. So then pray tell me, what is happening in the Tower? By the by, is it one murder or two? Milord Lucas is adamant that there has been but one, and that it is nothing to do with the Ordnance.”

“There have been three murders,” I said, enjoying the look of consternation that creased my brother’s face.

“Three? God’s sores,” breathed Charles. “Well then, are we soon to be enlightened as to who has committed these crimes? Or must we await Doctor Newton’s pleasure in this matter? Perhaps he intends to keep these things to himself as he kept silent about his theory of light for so long. Or perhaps he no longer has the brain for it. It is given out at Cambridge that he only took the position because his mind was gone.”

“Does one need a brain to work at the Treasury?” I said provocatively. “I’m not sure. However there is nothing wrong with Newton’s mind. And I resent your implication that he is being deliberately secretive in this matter.”

“So what should I tell the Permanent Secretary?”

“I care not what you say to the Permanent Secretary.”

“Shall I tell him that?”

“It is you who would be judged by it, not me.”

“And yet you owe me this employment.”

“As you never cease to remind me.”

“But for me, Kit, you would have no prospects at all.”

“Did you do it for me, or did you do it for yourself?”

Charles sighed and looked out of the window, which was heavily rained upon, as if God did think to become a window cleaner.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” he muttered.

“You have not yet given me liberty to answer your questions. I will tell you what you wish to know. But you must not speak ill of a man for whom I have the greatest respect. Just as I would not do anything but speak well to you of Mister Lowndes or Milord Montagu.”

“Halifax,” he said, reminding me of Montagu’s new peerage. “Milord Montagu is now the Earl of Halifax.”

“Be not so damned high,” I continued. “Or take such offence at me, brother. Offer me some wine and some courtesy and you shall find me a turd become honey.”

Charles fetched us both some wine and I did drink and then talk.

“In truth, brother, there are so many different possibilities that I can scarce devise which to tell you first. Well then, to speak in strict chronology, it may be some forgers who are behind these murders, for one of the dead men, Daniel Mercer, had been named by others now clapped up in Newgate for coining. There is a murderous gang who are possessed of an ingenious method of forging golden guineas, and it may be that this same Mercer was murdered in order to silence him as to his involvement. The agent we set to watch this Mercer, called Kennedy, was also murdered.

“And yet there are secret alchemical aspects to the appearance of these murders that make Newton think there may be some hermetic part to their commission. This is most strange and most bloody, and I trust you will not pick a hole in my damned coat if I tell you it is also very frightening. Whenever I am in the Tower I have the constant apprehension that something untoward is about to happen to my person.”

“That’s not unusual,” remarked my brother. “At least not in the Tower.”

I nodded patiently, thinking to get out of his office soon without picking another quarrel with him.

“Then there has been some talk of the Templars and buried treasure, which would provide almost anyone with motive enough to kill men who might have held a candle to, or hindered, its discovery, I know not which. But it’s plain that there are many who have searched for a treasure already. Barkstead, Pepys—”

“Samuel Pepys?”

I nodded.

“Damned Tory,” he said.

“Flamsteed, God alone knows who else.”

“I see.”

“Then there are a number of French Huguenots in the Tower.”

“Not just the Tower. The whole country’s rotten with Frenchies.”

“They are full of secrecy, and arouse Newton’s suspicions by virtue of their secretive ways.”

“When does a Frenchman not arouse suspicion?” demanded Charles. “It’s their own fault, of course. They think we dislike them simply because we are their historical adversaries. But the truth is we dislike them because of their damned insolence and the airs they give themselves. Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jew or Jesuit, it makes no difference to me. Without exception I wish all Frenchmen to hell.” He paused. “What’s the favourite horse?”

“Newton is a most scientific gentleman,” I said. “He will not hypothesise without proper evidence. And it is pointless trying to get him so to do. One might as well stick an enema up a bottle and expect it to shit. But he is most diligent in his enquiries and although he says little, I think that he weighs these matters very carefully.”

“I am right glad to hear it,” said Charles. “Three damned murders in what’s supposed to be the most secure castle in Britain? Why, it’s a scandal.”

“If anyone can fathom these mysteries, it is he,” I declared. “Just to be near him is to feel his mind vibrate like a Jew’s trump. But I dare not ask him too much, for he is easily put out of countenance and I become obnoxious to his opinion.”

“So he and I share something in common, do we?” railed my brother.

“As soon as he has arrived at some conclusion himself, I feel he will tell me, for I have his confidence. Yet not before. Omnis in tempore, brother.”

Charles picked up his quill and, holding it over a blank sheet of paper, hesitated to write.

“Well, that’s a pretty report for Mister Lowndes,” he said, and then threw aside the quill. “God’s blood if I can’t think what to write. I could as well describe his damned Principia.” He made a bad-tempered noise. “I looked at it, and could make neither head nor tail of it. It is amazing to me that something so clever can make me feel so stupid. Have you read it?”

“I have tried.”

“I can’t understand how one book can create such a stir when I can find no one who has actually read it.”

“I don’t believe there are a dozen men in all of Europe who could say they understood it,” said I. “But they are such a dozen as might stand head and shoulders above mere mortals. And all of them are agreed it is the most important book that ever was written.”

Charles looked pained, as well he might, for I knew he had even less of a mind for these things than I had myself.

“Of course he’s very clever,” grumbled Charles. “I think we all know that. It says it in his Treasury file. But he’s a strange bird. His devotion to his duty is well known and much admired. But he cares not for praise, I think. Only to be told that he is right. Which he already knows well enough by himself. And which makes him a damned awkward customer to employ in Government. He is too independent.”

“He is a strange bird, it is true,” said I. “But one that flies so high that it all but disappears from the sight of ordinary men. I think he is an eagle that soars up to the very limits of our world and perhaps beyond, to the moon and stars, to the very sun itself. I never knew his like. No man ever did.”

“S’blood, Kit, you make him sound like one of the Immortals.”

“It is certain that his name and reputation shall evermore endure.”

“Would that reputation was so durable,” said Charles. “God’s sores, if he is so certain of posterity, then I do wonder how it is that he needs people like me to warn him that the world is thickly stocked with his enemies. For there are those who would wish that the Warden could be less diligent in the pursuit of his duties. Certain Tory gentlemen who would like to see him removed from office and who search for some evidence of his malpractice.”

“Then why did they appoint him? He himself asked for his forensic duties to be given to the Solicitor General, did he not?”

“There were some who thought that a man who had spent twenty-five years hidden away at Trinity would know little of the world. And would make a most pliable Warden. Which is why they agreed to his appointment. Do not mistake me in this, brother. I am on his side. But there are others who would find some corruption against him. Even if none were there, if you see what I mean.”

“Faith, he’s the least corrupt man I ever met,” said I.

“If not his corruption,” continued Charles, “then perhaps his deviation from what is considered orthodox. I hope you perceive my meaning here.”

At this I stayed silent for a while, long enough to find my brother nodding at me as if he had found Newton out. “Yes,” he said. “I thought that might quieten you, brother. Your master is suspected of holding certain dissenting opinions, to put it mildly. And there are others who are inclined not to put it mildly. Tongues have wagged. The word ‘heresy’ has been mentioned. And he’ll be dismissed if it be proved against him.”

“This is idle gossip.”

“Aye, gossip. But when in this world did gossip ever go ignored? Listen closely, Kit. For this was the main purpose of my asking you here today. That you might gently warn your master to be much on his guard and prepared for the moment when his enemies shall move against him. As they certainly shall, before long.”

All of which I did relate to Newton when I did see him in our office back at the Mint.

“I have suspected as much for some time now,” admitted Newton. “Nevertheless I am greatly indebted to your brother. To be warned thus is to be forearmed. However, I must conclude that no concrete thing has yet been found against me, but only a heap of froth and mischief.”

“What will you do?” I asked.

“Why, nothing,” exclaimed Newton. “Except my duty. You too. We must put it away from our minds. Do you agree?”

“If you wish it.”

“I do, most heartily.” He paused and, collecting the cat Melchior from the floor, set about stroking his fur like a feeder from the Shake-bag Club smoothing the goose-green plumage of his champion cock. I thought to leave him awhile alone with his thoughts, but then he said:

“This Major Mornay. We must look closely at him, as through a prism, and see if he be refrangible or no.”

“You have the advantage of me, Doctor,” I told him. “For I confess I know not what you mean by that word.”

“What?” exclaimed Newton. “Is it possible that you are ignorant of my experimentum cruets?”

I confirmed that I was, and so we went to my house, where Newton searched in an old brass-bound chest from which he fetched a prism of his own manufacture and showed me how the ordinary daylight was a complex mixture of colours, and how, by holding a second prism within the spectrum he had made with the first, colours could be diverted or deflected from their previous course, like streams of water. This diversion Newton called refraction, and the property of refraction he called refrangibility. All prismatical colours were immutable and could not be altered by projecting upon them other colours.

“Thus you may perceive a very useful object lesson for those of us whose occupation it is to discover matters artfully or criminally concealed: that all is never as it seems; and that purity is sometimes an illusion.”

Newton allowed me to hold the second prism and to divert the colours in various directions to my heart’s content.

“It may be that Major Mornay can be similarly refracted from his normal course,” I suggested, understanding his original meaning. “But what shall we use for a prism?”

“Something broad,” mused Newton. “Something strong and pure. Yes, I do believe I have just the instrument we need. You, my dear fellow. You shall be our prism.”

“Me? But how?”

“Has Major Mornay ever noticed that he has been followed?”

“Never. He does not seem to be a particularly observant man.”

“Then you must help him. Let the Major see that he is followed and then observe how he is refracted. Will he go away from Lord Ashley’s house without going in? Will he remonstrate with you? Whom will he tell that he is being followed? And what will happen then? It may prove to be a tedious and dangerous task to do as it ought to be done, but I cannot be satisfied till we have gone through with it.”

“I am not afraid,” said I. “I shall carry both my pistols and my sword.”

“That is the spirit,” urged Newton, and clapped me on the shoulder. “If he asks why you are following him, say that you are not. It will only serve to divert him yet further. But be careful not to fight with him, though. If you kill him we shall learn nothing.”

“And if he kills me?”

“For Miss Barton’s sake, please don’t be killed, Ellis. She would hold me responsible and I should never hear the end of it. Therefore I say to you, if you pity me, Ellis, then keep yourself safe.”

“I will, sir.”

This information pleased me enormously, of course; and for the rest of the afternoon I diverted myself with a most elegant fancy in which Miss Barton pressed my most grievously wounded body to her bare bosom as Cleopatra mourned Mark Antony. Since my recovery from the ague, I saw her but once a week, at the weekly suppers at Newton’s house; this was hardly enough to satisfy one who loved her as much as I; yet there was no proper way for us to meet more than this and so I did construct many baroque but harmless fantasies of her such as this one.

But not all my fantasies of Miss Barton were so innocent as this one.

That very same evening, when Mornay came off duty, I followed him out of the Tower and straightaway I made myself as plain as a pikestaff. Not that it mattered, for he was quickly away in a hackney and heading west along Fleet Street, which I pursued in a hackney of my own. At one of the many alleys on the east side of the Fleet Ditch, between Fleet and Holborn bridges, his coach stopped. A minute later my own coach pulled up and, having handed the driver a shilling, I looked around for Mornay, but not finding him in sight, was obliged to ask the driver who had set him down. The driver snorted loudly and then shrugged.

“He didn’t come to get married, I can tell you that much,” he said sourly. “Look, mate, I just drive them. Once they’re out the back of that coach they’re invisible.”

“I’ll tell you for a penny,” offered the links boy who had carried a lighted taper in front of my coach to light our way through the dark streets.

I handed over a coin.

“He’s gone for a bit of trumpery,” said the boy. “There’s a nice buttered bun along the alley, name of Mrs. Marsh, who keeps a nunnery where the vows ain’t so strict, if you know what I mean, sir. Just ask one of those other bunters if you want to find the place.”

The Fleet Alley was an unsavoury sort of place, though I knew it well enough from the time when I had read for the Bar. As well as being the location for many marriage houses where couples went that thought to avoid paying as much as a guinea’s tax for the privilege of getting married in a church, the Fleet was a popular area with prostitutes, especially at night, when the trade in illegal marriages dropped off a bit. Even as I walked up the alley, several jades drew open their dresses most brazenly and, showing me their cunny parts, invited me to partake of their frowzy-smelling flesh. I have seldom cared for a threepenny upright, not even when money was scarce, for this sort of buttock often works with at wang to rob you when you are engaged with cock in cunny, so to speak. But I jested with these squirrels awhile until one of them directed me along the cobbled alley where, next to a most boisterous tavern, was the jettied frame of a house whose double-height windows, separated by friezes embellished with a number of indecent grotesques, lit up the whole alley like a giant lantern.

I was divided in my own mind as to whether or not I should go in; but finally I decided that it was safer in than out and knocked upon the door, in which, after a moment or two, a lattice opened to reveal a woman who asked me my business. This was a common enough precaution in London. At that time it was not so very long since a Shrove Tuesday riot when some of London’s apprentices had pulled down a bawdy house with ropes, and most cruelly beaten the jilts that poured out of it like rats. But I knew the code well enough. Better than I could have described the importance of a judgement in any case at law.

“I hear you admit of very few,” I said, with no small humility, for some of these pussies do think most highly of themselves and the power they possess between their legs. “But I am a gentleman and can present expense in advance should you wish.” And so saying I held up my purse and jangled my coins with much intent.

“Five shillings,” said the whore. “To do what you would.”

I handed over my ounce and waited for the jilt to draw the bolts. After a moment or two the door opened and I was admitted to a small hall by Mrs. Marsh herself who, though quite presentable, was, like many of her kind, the strangest woman in her conversation. Helping me off with my cloak — which she called a toga — and taking my hat — which she called my calm — she then pointed to my sword.

“You had better leave the tail as well,” she said. “And the brace of wedges,” she added, meaning my two pistols. “Here, have you come for a fuck or a fight?”

Having assured her that my intentions were strictly amorous, I enquired of her as to whether my friend Major Mornay was already in the house.

“If you mean that officer of Guards, yes. Only we call him Monsieur Vogueavant.”

“Why? Is he so much in the front of fashion?”

“No, it’s on account of his little partiality,” said Mrs. Marsh.

“I confess I did not know he had one,” said I.

“Then you don’t know much about your friend,” she said.

“In England,” said I, “I believe that is how one remains friends with someone.”

“True,” she admitted, with a smile.

I followed her through to the parlour, where all sorts of girls sat and lay around in various stages of undress. Mrs. Marsh offered me a chair and fetched me a glass of ale. But looking around the room I could not see the Major and asked her where he might be.

“Upstairs, I’ll warrant,” she said. “See anything you fancy, dear?”

Even as she spoke, a servant came into the parlour carrying a large silver plate which he placed upon the table, and a young girl, having made herself naked, lay upon it and struck indecent postures for my amusement. It is certain that life has some strange tricks up its sleeve to play upon us for our general confoundment. If there be such a thing as the devil, he knows how to make sport of our inmost thoughts and feelings. For it could hardly be ignored that the girl who struck these wicked postures, and showed me her bumhole and the inside of her cunny, was like the very twin of Miss Barton, and I was repelled and fascinated by the prospect of her nakedness. This was the same sweet girl that I loved; and yet it was not. Could I ever look upon Miss Barton again and not remember this brazen whore that touched her own bubbies and rubbed her cunny parts so lasciviously? But things were about to become yet more vexatious, for, seeing my interest in the girl that postured, and thinking that by affording me the liberty to do what I wanted with her she might get me out of her house all the more quickly, Mrs. Marsh took the girl by the hand and raised her up from the silver platter and brought us both upstairs, where she left us alone in a bedchamber.

The girl, who told me her name was Deborah, was most lovely and, drawing back the bedclothes, invited me to lie with her; but I had no courage to meddle with her, for fear of her not being wholesome, until she sold me a length of sheep’s intestine with which I could sheath my manly parts, whereupon I fucked her. It was most ignoble of me, but all the time I stayed mounted upon her and gazed upon her face, which demonstrated much enjoyment, I told myself that this was indeed Miss Barton and that I was taking my carnal pleasure of her flesh. So that when at last I ejaculated within her, it felt like the best I had ever had, and I shuddered all down my shanks like some horrid dog, before collapsing upon her breast in the manner of one shot through the heart.

For a moment the whim of doing it thus amused me greatly.

“Want to go again, dear?” asked Deborah.

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

And then the sadness came. Of course, it is normal for a man to feel this way. But this was a sadness like no other I had ever felt, for I sensed that I had somehow tarnished the bright perfection that was the regard I had for Miss Barton. And I felt the remorse of it most acutely. So that when I heard a man cry out in pain, I almost thought the sound came from within my own breast. It was Deborah’s laughter that persuaded me the sound had come from somewhere else; and when I heard the man cry out again, this time he seemed to have been prompted by another, sharper report.

“Why does that man cry out?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s just Monsieur Vogueavant,” said Deborah, trying to coax my cock to crow again. “Vogueavant’s French for ‘stroke.’”

“I had quite forgotten him,” I confessed.

“And he is beaten with a whip.”

“A whip? Good Lord, where is there pleasure in that?”

“Not so as you would notice. I’ve beaten him myself upon occasion. But I care not for it. It’s warm work. Warmer than this. For Monsieur Vogueavant has a tolerance of pain like no other man I have ever met. And one must lay on hard to please him. The English perversion, they calls it, but Monsieur Vogueavant learned his taste as a galley slave on a French ship. His back tells the story well enough, for I never saw the like.”

Once again I heard Mornay cry out in response to the sting of the whip.

“And the Major has himself beaten in order that he should recollect his experiences? How monstrous.”

“I believe that it is more confused than that. He himself told me that he is beaten so that he will never forget his hatred of the French, and of Roman Catholics in particular.”

I was properly confounded by this information, which at least served to take my mind off the insult I had privately done to Miss Barton, and would have said more about the disgusting things men will have done to them in pursuit of pleasure, yet I feared Deborah’s abusing me for a hypocrite and so I kept silent. Which was more than she did, for momentarily she was troubled with some wind in her cunny parts, and I was moved by her farts to take my leave of her bed.

I had just started to piss in her pot, which be another good precaution against the clap, when I heard Mornay’s door open, followed by the sound of his boots stamping downstairs; and I made haste to dress and go after him.

“Why do you rush so?” asked Miss Barton’s facsimile.

“Because he does not know that I am here. And I know not where he goes now.”

“Oh, I can tell you that,” said Deborah. “He goes over the water to the Dutchman’s house in Lambeth Marshes.”

“To do what, pray?”

“It ain’t to have his fortune told by gypsies. It’s a wicked place he goes. What a man with money cannot obtain there, let him not search for it anywhere else in this world of ours. He wanted to take me there once. Offered me a guinea to go with another woman, he said. Well, I don’t mind that so much. It’s safer than going with a man. Just licking another girl’s cunny and moaning a bit. But I’ve heard tales about that place. Called The Dutchman’s. Some of the poor molls who go to work there are never seen again.”

Having for a shilling obtained some directions to this house of evil repute, I went outside onto Fleet Street, took coach, and went down to White’s Stairs in Channel Row, where, hearing a wherryman shout “Southward, ho!” I joined a boat that was crossing the river.

The moon edged out from under a black flap of sky like a curling yellow fingernail. Halfway across the river a mist descended upon our boat that was like some floating pestilence. In the distance, the windows of the leaning houses on London Bridge were lit up like a necklace of yellow diamonds.

So far I was making a sorry job of plaguing my quarry; and I hardly knew how I was going to tell Miss Barton’s uncle where my pursuit of Major Mornay had taken me. Nor knew how I would present my expenses. Would any man wish his ward to associate with a fellow that had visited such places? Especially a man like Newton, who took a dim view of all licentious behaviour and was only concerned with higher things — a man for whom the body and its needs hardly seemed to matter except as the possible medium for some scientific experiment. Every time I looked Newton in the eye, I thought of him probing it with a bodkin. What did such a man know of human frailty?

Our boat rocked on, making, it seemed to me, very little progress across the grey water, and somewhere above our heads, a seagull hovered like some invisible screaming demon. Gradually, we neared the other side of the river where the mist lightened and the skull-shaped hulls of ships loomed across our boat. A dog barked in the distance as I stepped off the boat at the King’s Arms stairs, and then all was quiet.

Lambeth was a large unruly village on the Surrey bank of the Thames, with most of the buildings grouped around the palace and the Parish Church of St. Mary, and behind these, the black masts of ships. It was separated from Southwark, with its many small metalworking shops to the east, by the marshes where many crooked houses and lonely taverns were situated. As soon as I landed I drew my sword, for it was much darker on the south side of the River, with one or two ruffianly-looking men about. I walked east, along the Narrow Wall, as Deborah had directed, until I came to the sawmills, where I turned my footsteps south, across a stinking, muddy field, to a small row of houses. Here, next to the sign of the star, which is often said to indicate a place of lewd purpose, I found the house I was looking for. I peered in at a grimy-looking window, and seeing the orange tongue of a candle, I knocked.

The door was opened by a woman who looked comely enough, although she also seemed somewhat hard and yellowish in the face, and her eyelids almost motionless; and having saluted her and paid the ten shillings she asked, which was a large sum, I went inside. A sweet, heavy aroma filled air that was thick with pipe smoke.

The woman took my cloak, and as she hung it on a peg I recognised the Major’s hat and cloak. He was here after all. “So,” she said, in a whistling accent that made me think she must be Dutch. “Will you take a pipe first, or see the show?”

I have never much liked smoking, for it gives me the cough; and I replied that I would see the show. She seemed a little surprised at this, but led me through a tattered green curtain and down a flight of stairs to a low, mean room, surrounded with greasy-looking mirrors, that was stopped from any light save a few candles, where five dull-looking men sat in the shadows and, like a theatre audience, awaited some kind of performance. I knew not what this might be, and thought another posturer was probably expected. Of Major Mornay there was no sign, and I presumed he must have gone to smoke a pipe first. Meanwhile I made no attempt to conceal myself and took a most prominent seat so that Mornay, when eventually he came in, might easily see me.

My breath came uneasily to me down in that loathsome room, for the atmosphere was filled not just with smoke but also with foreboding, as if something dreadful was about to happen. And yet, curiously, I did almost feel at my ease.

After a good deal of waiting, two women brought a nun into the room and treated her most cruelly, spitting upon her and slapping her before eventually stripping her naked; whereupon they made her lie belly-down upon the bare floor without any garment. Her arms and legs were drawn with cords to a post in each corner of the room; and all the while the poor, dull-eyed nun bore her torments without protest, as if she cared little what happened to her. As I was myself. I know not if she was a real nun or no, except to say her hair was cut very short, which is, I believe, a sign of the nun’s renunciation of the world; but she was most comely, being no more than twenty years of age, and the sight of her naked body and privy parts stirred me much.

It was now that the Major came downstairs, and I remarked to myself how he seemed to be almost ill, or drunk; but despite my very obvious position, he sat down without even seeming to notice I was there.

After she was properly secured, one of the other men stood up from his chairs and started to whip her, all the time cursing her for a damned Roman Catholic whore, and other words most obscene, so that I began to apprehend some real danger to the girl’s life. And standing up myself, I remonstrated with these men most openly, calling them monsters to mete such treatment to a woman, and entreating them all to desist, although I looked only at the Major so that at last he recognised me, and with such anger in his yellow-looking eyes that it quite froze my blood. It may have been his eyes, but it was more likely the sound of a piece cocked and the chill of a pistol pressed against my cheek that was so disconcerting.

“What’s this girl to you, then?” asked a man behind me, whose voice persuaded me that he also must be Dutch.

“Nothing,” I replied. “I care not for Galloping nuns, Quests, or Beguines, but she is human and, being so young, seems hardly to deserve such abuse.”

“Abuse you call it,” laughed the man. “Why, we ain’t hardly started yet.”

At this point the Major ran quickly out of that terrible room and up the stairs. Meanwhile the naked girl on the floor looked up at me with a most peculiar indifference, as if she cared very little for my intervention, so that I wondered if she did not mind her pain, or even enjoyed her flogging, like the Major.

“Surely she doesn’t deserve such cruelty?”

“Doesn’t deserve it?” said the voice. “What has that got to do with anything?” The voice behind me was silent for a moment. “What are you doing here?” it said at last.

I pointed upstairs. “I came with him. Major Mornay. He brought me. Only I came with little understanding of what I was to see, for he did not warn me of anything.”

“It’s true,” said the Dutch woman who had admitted me. “He did arrive not long after the Major.”

The man holding the pistol stepped in front of me so that I could see him. A most ignoble ruffian he was, with a forehead villainous low, and boils like barnacles; his red eyes were fierce, and yet his hand trembled upon the pistol which now he waved up the stairs.

“Your friend has left,” he said quietly. “Perhaps you had better leave as well.”

I moved toward the stair, glancing back all the time at the girl on the floor, whose back and bottom were already striped like a maypole.

“She cares not what happens to her,” laughed the man. “It’s the price she pays to satisfy her cravings. I wouldn’t worry about her if I were you.”

And still the girl said nothing; and endured her whipping, which commenced as soon as I had mounted the stairs, without so much as a murmur.

I hardly knew whether to believe him or not, but leave I did, although I was part minded to mount the stairs and return with my pistol in my hand to see that nothing more happened to the girl. I might have shot the one with the boils, but the other men were armed as well, and I do not doubt that they would have killed me. And for a while I was haunted by the possibility that the girl was a real fille dévote monstrously abused and perhaps even killed for their delectation, since the men all had murder in their faces, and most obviously regarded Roman Catholics with such malice that they would hardly have shirked the commission of such a wicked crime.

Much relieved to be out of that evil house, and somewhat light-headed, too, for the cloying smoke had been as thick as the river fog, I took a deep breath of cold air, and thinking Major Mornay to be long gone, I started back the way I had come, toward the wall and the river. I had not gone ten paces when he stepped out from the door of a vile-looking tavern and, trembling with anger, confronted me.

“Why are you following me, Mister Ellis?” he asked and, drawing his sword, advanced upon me with such obvious intent that no other course lay before me but to draw myself and prepare to answer his attack. True, I had promised Newton not to fight, but I could hardly see how I was now to avoid it. I snatched off my hat for ease of movement and vision, although I would have parried his first thrust easily enough had I been wearing St. Edward’s Crown, for it was plain to see that Major Mornay was indeed drunk. Which at least explained why he had taken so long a time recognising me.

“Put up your sword,” I told him. “Or I shall be obliged to wound you, sir.”

With some ferocity he redoubled his attack, so that I was obliged to fence with him in earnest. And still not troubled by any of these attacks, I allowed him to meet me, hilt upon hilt, where, so close to me that I could smell the smoke that still lay upon his breath, he asked his question a second time.

“Why are you following me, Mister Ellis?”

Thus I did almost not notice how he had armed his free hand with a dagger, and I barely had time enough to step back before he lunged at me with his second blade, only to be caught in the flesh of his left upper arm with the tip of my rapier. The dagger clattered to the ground and Mornay dropped his guard so that, bating my own sobriety, I might easily have run him through. Indeed I almost wanted to kill him, for I dislike a man who brings a knife to a sword fight. Instead I retreated several paces, which allowed Mornay to turn and flee into the darkness of Lambeth Marshes.

After a moment or two I collected his dagger off the ground, glanced at its curious shape, and then slid the blade into the neck of my boot. I hardly knew if I should feel pleased with myself. I had not killed him, he had not killed me, and there was surely some cause for rejoicing. But would Newton find much to learn from the way the Major had been “refracted,” if that was how his vile and intemperate behaviour might be described? It seemed more likely that Mornay would inform Lord Lucas, who would use the news and bruit of our quarrel to make another complaint to the Lords Justices about the conduct of the Mint. This hardly grieved my heart, for I was suddenly very tired, and thought myself very fortunate not to have been murdered. In view of my own licentious behaviour that might have been just, for I had clearly dealt sacrilegiously with Miss Barton in my heart, and I resolved never to do the like again.

The next morning Newton examined Mornay’s dagger with interest, polishing it up like some back-street bravo, while I related a purgated version of my evening’s adventures in pursuit of the Major. I left out the fact that we had fought with swords; while my explanation of how I had struggled with my own lust drew the following advisement from Newton’s ascetic lips, for I doubt he ever kissed anything other than Miss Barton’s forehead, or a book he had particularly enjoyed.

“By being forcibly restrained lust is always inflamed,” he observed gravely. “The best way to be chaste is not to struggle with unchaste thoughts, but to decline them, and to keep the mind employed about other things. That has always been my own experience. He that’s always thinking of chastity will nearly always be thinking of women, and every contest waged with unclean thoughts will leave impressions on the mind as shall make those thoughts apt to return more frequently. But pray continue with your story. I am all fascination.”

“It is finished, more or less,” I replied. “Outside the house in Lambeth Marshes he ran away and dropped that dagger behind him.”

“But you have left out the story of your sword fight,” protested Newton. “I am keen to hear that most of all. Tell me, is the Major badly wounded?”

“He drew on me,” I stammered. “And I was obliged to defend myself. I only pricked him in the arm and I daresay he’ll recover soon enough. But how did you know, master? Did he inform Lord Lucas? Is it bruited about the Tower? Has His Lordship already complained?”

“I am quite certain that Major Mornay will not inform Lord Lucas,” said Newton. “What? A Major in the Ordnance bested by a mere clerk of the Mint? His reputation could not bear the ignominy.”

“Then,” I said with no small exasperation, “how did you know that we fought?”

“Simple. You have cleaned your sword. The cup upon its hilt now gleams like a communion chalice when yesterday it was as dull as pewter. I recollect that the last time you cleaned that rapier was when you drew it in Mrs. Berningham’s defence. I daresay that when you had bettered the Major with your sword, he drew this dagger and attempted to prick your ribs with it.”

“The fight happened just as you say,” I admitted. “I don’t know why I thought to hide it from you. You seem to know everything without the need to be told of it first. It’s quite a trick.”

“It’s no trick. Merely observation. Satis est. That is enough.”

“Well then, I should like to be as observant as you.”

“But there is nothing to it, as I am often telling you. But it will come in time. If you live that long. For I believe you have had a fortunate escape. It’s clear from what you have told me, and from what is written on this blade, that Major Mornay and, very likely, several others besides are religious fanatics.”

“I saw no engraving on the blade,” I said.

“You would have done better to have polished up this dagger than your own sword,” said Newton, and handed me back the dagger, the blade of which now shone like firelight.

“‘Remember Religion,’” I said, reading one side of the blade. “‘Remember the murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey,’” I continued, reading the other.

“This is a Godfrey dagger,” explained Newton. “Many of these were forged following Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s murder, in 1678.” My master searched my face for some sign that I recognised the name. “Surely you must have heard of him?”

“Why, yes,” I said. “I was but a child at the time. But he was the magistrate who was murdered by Roman Catholics during the Popish plot to kill King Charles II, was he not?”

“I abhor Roman Catholicism in all its aspects,” said Newton. “It is a religion full of monstrous superstitions, false miracles, heathen superstitions and foul lies. But there was no more wicked lie perpetrated against the safety of the realm than that Popish Plot. It was given out by Titus Oates and Israel Tonge that Jesuit priests conspired to murder the King at Newmarket races. I don’t doubt that there were Jesuits who conspired to do much to restore the Roman Catholic faith to this country. But murdering the King was not one of their designs. Nevertheless, many Catholics were hanged for it before Oates was found to be a vile perjurer. He ought to have been hanged himself but for the fact that the law does not prescribe the penalty of death for perjury. Instead, Oates was whipped, pilloried and sent to prison for life.”

“Did Oates murder Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, then?”

“Who killed him is a more abiding mystery,” said Newton. “Some have thought that he was killed by a villain whom he had sentenced to prison as a magistrate, and who bore him a grudge. We are no strangers to such situations ourselves. I have even heard talk that Godfrey was one of those Green Ribboners that did seek to make the country once more a Republic; and that he was murdered when he threatened to betray them. But I myself favour another, simpler opinion.

“It is my belief that Godfrey strangled himself by leaning upon a ligature; he was by all accounts a most melancholy man, and feared being discovered a traitor and punished accordingly. Finding his body, Godfrey’s two brothers feared the shame and the loss of Godfrey’s money, for he was a rich man, and a suicide’s estate is forfeit to the state, being felo de se. Therefore they mutilated his body and blamed it on Roman Catholics.

“What is certain is that no one will ever know the truth now. But there are many who still persist in the belief that he was murdered by Catholics. Major Mornay’s opinion seems clear enough. His possession of this dagger and his conduct in the stews would seem to indicate that his detestation of Catholics knows no bounds.”

“What then shall we do?”

Newton’s brow gathered in a knot above his eyes and one slender finger stroked his long nose as if it had been a small shock dog, so that he did look most shrewd.

“We shall return this dagger to him,” he said quietly. “And in doing so we shall further provoke him. It is a simple matter of motion, as are many other things to which proof, one day I shall find a pencil of black lead and sum it up for you on a page of paper, so that you might understand the world. For every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it be compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. That’s as true of Major Mornay as it is of the planets and the comets. But we must also be prepared. We must be vigilant. For to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”

“But, sir, this is your great theory, is it not?”

“Well done, Ellis. But it is no theory. It’s as much codified fact as the laws of England. More so, for I have the mathematical proofs that do render these laws immutable.”

“I would understand what they mean for the world,” I said. “If I could.”

“Then understand only this,” said Newton, and dropped the Godfrey dagger to the floor so that the point was left sticking in the boards. “The fall of this dagger is the same as the fall of the moon. The force that draws this dagger also draws the moon. The force that draws the moon also guides the planets and everything that is in the heavens. For the heavens are here on Earth. That, my dear fellow, is gravity.”

The heavens are here on Earth? Perhaps this Earth is all the Heaven there is.

At first I only turned my back on Jesus. And that was Newton’s doing, for there was very little in the New Testament to which he did not take some exception. The Old Testament he could only accept in parts. The Book of Solomon was very important to him. As was Daniel. And Ezekiel. But that a man might choose those books that suited him and reject those that did not seemed to me a very strange kind of religious faith.

For a long time I believed that it was Newton’s opinions of holy scripture that had shaken the tree of my life and caused the apple of my religious faith to fall to the ground, where it started to rot and perish. But this was only part of the story. Because of Newton, asking questions became second nature to me. And I began to perceive that it is our duty to ask whether these religious things be true; and if true, whether they be good or not. If we wish to find God we must banish all ignorance of ourselves, our world and our universe.

Strangely it was those silver cups that Mister Scroope had given into Newton’s keeping for their Cambridge college that first caused me to question the Pentateuch itself. The cups told the story of Nectanebus, the last native King of Egypt, who was a magician and made models of his own soldiers and those of the enemy and set them in a tank of water to work a trick so that his enemies should be engulfed in the waters of the Nile. And this made me think that when Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt and all the Pharaoh’s armies were drowned in the Red Sea, it was no more than a story borrowed from the Egyptians. Which shook me, for if the Pentateuch was not true, then everything else that followed in the Bible could be no more than myth or legend. Thus it was that gradually I came to think that if one part of the Bible might be questioned and found wanting, then why not the whole?

Perhaps I might still have believed in God. But it was my master’s science that caused me to deny the existence of God himself. It was Newton’s mathematics that reduced the cosmos to a series of algebraic calculations, while his damned prisms ripped apart God’s rainbow covenant with Noah. How could God remain in heavens that were so keenly observed through a telescope and precisely described as a series of fluxions? Like some satanic geometer, Newton pricked the bubble of God’s existence and then divided his heavenly kingdom with a simple pair of compasses. And seeing all such mysteries conquered, my own thoughts crashed to earth from the ethereal sky like a flaming cherub, with hideous ruin. O how fall’n! how changed. It was as if once I had thought myself an angel but, finding my wings clipped by the sharp scissor blades of science, I discovered I was merely a raven on Tower Green, raspingly lamenting its cruel fate. Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never comes that comes to all.

In the officers’ quarters at the Ordnance, Major Mornay was wearing his arm in a sling. He was being shaved by Mister Marks, the Tower Barber, and was attended by Mister Whiston, the broker, Lieutenant Colonel Fairwell, Captain Potter and Captain Martin. For all his previous evening’s debauches, he seemed to be in good humour, for we had heard his voice outside the door; but even as we entered, he left off telling the brave story of how he had received the wound in his arm and, colouring like a beetroot, stared upon us as if we had been two ghosts.

“Olim, hero, hodie, cras nescio cujus,” Newton remarked with a cruel smile,

Once upon a time, yesterday, today, tomorrow, I know not whose, by which I assumed my master meant the Major to know that he was well aware that Mornay had lied about how he had come by his wound. And yet it was not a direct statement to that effect, for this might have provoked Mornay too far, perhaps into challenging Newton to a duel. My master was no coward; but he had seldom held a sword, let alone a pistol, and had not the slightest intention of being challenged. I suffered no such constraints, however, although Newton had cautioned me to give only utterance to that which he prompted.

“What do you mean by that?” Major Mornay asked Newton, his speech faltering like an admission of high treason.

“Mean? Why, nothing at all, Major. Nature has cursed me with a manner that doth sometimes seem like impertinence. It is only the disadvantage of intellect, for I think that Nature is best pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous words or thoughts.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, Doctor?” He took a cloth from Mister Marks and wiped his face carefully.

“We came to return you this dagger,” said Newton.

Mornay hardly glanced at the blade now in Newton’s hand, its handle extended, politely, in the Major’s direction, and then, briefly, at me, so that he did lie most brazenly.

“I own no such dagger,” said Mornay. “Who says I do?”

“Perhaps you do not recognise it,” said Newton, “since I have cleaned it for you. Otherwise one could not mistake such a dagger, to be sure. For it has a most noble sentiment engraved upon the blade. It says, ‘Remember Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Remember religion.’”

“Amen,” said Captain Martin.

“Amen indeed,” said Mornay. “Nevertheless it is not my dagger.”

Newton remained all smiles. “If you say so, Major, then it must be true, for you are a gentleman. And yet we should certainly not relinquish the evidence of one man’s good eyes for the vain fictions of another man’s devising.” Newton pointed at me. “This humble clerk saw you drop this dagger last night, outside a house in Lambeth Marshes.”

“I was nowhere near Lambeth Marshes last night.”

Seeing that I was about to contradict Mornay’s bare-faced lie, Newton did hold me by the arm and shake his head so slightly that I think only I perceived it.

“One of you two gentlemen must be mistaken.”

“The mistake is not mine,” said Mornay.

Newton let go my arm, which I took to mean that I was at last allowed to speak.

“Nor mine,” said I.

“Why, then, one of you — I know not which — must be a liar and a shameroon,” said Newton.

“Fetch a Bible,” I said, hardly caring that the Bible had little value for me now. “Let me swear. The dagger is his.”

“Have a care, sir.” Newton spoke gravely to me. “For you do say as much as that Major Mornay is a liar to his face, in front of all his brother officers, for which, as a gentleman, he would surely demand the satisfaction of proving his word against yours by force of arms.”

“I do say it. Most vehemently. Major Mornay is a liar. I saw him drop the dagger just as you have described.”

Mornay rose from his chair, his mouth opening and closing like a cormorant.

“Were I not incommoded by my wound, I should not hesitate to challenge you, Mister Ellis.”

“Perhaps,” said Newton helpfully, “Mister Ellis could waive his privilege of choosing weapons. I believe the Major is right-handed. In which case he might challenge you safely, so to speak, were he to be assured that pistols would be your choice of weapons.”

“Then let him be reassured,” said I. “If he seeks satisfaction of me, he has my word that I should choose to fight with pistols.”

There followed a longish silence with all eyes on Major Mornay, who swallowed loudly several times before, finally, stammering out a whey-faced challenge with less bravado than a toothless old gammer.

“We accept your challenge,” said Newton. “I shall act as Mister Ellis’s second and await your instructions.” And so saying, he bowed gravely. Then did I, before taking our leave of these now-bemused officers.

Walking back to the Mint office, feeling like a numb eel, I steeled myself for a jangle with Newton, for I was right angry to find myself manoeuvred by him like a jolly-boat. And as soon as we were alone, I argued with him on the impropriety of his conduct to me.

“Well, I like that,” I remarked. “I think a man might be allowed to pick his own quarrels and to issue his own challenges.”

“He challenged you,” said Newton, correcting me.

“Only because you painted him into a corner.”

“If I had left the matter to you, my dear fellow, the matter could never have come to a head quite so neatly.”

“Neatly, do you say? It’s not a year since a duel almost cost me my liberty. Or had you forgotten how I came into your service, Doctor? Suppose I kill him? What then? Suppose he kills me? Suppose he’s a better shot than he’s a swordsman? Damn it all, sir, I thought you intended to trip him into some confession.”

“There will be no fight,” said Newton. “He has no stomach for it. That much was easily apparent.”

“Very little that involves you is ever easily apparent to me,” I said bitterly. “In this, as in all matters, I am your creature.”

“Nay sir, not creature,” said Newton reproachfully. “I create nothing. I merely attempt to extend the boundaries of what we know. And just as the Ancients put their faith in the god Pan and his pipe, so now and then, you must do the same and let me play a tune with you. My fingers may move upon you, but the music is yours, my dear fellow, the music is yours.”

“Then I like not this tune. It’s easier to govern a rapier point than a pistol ball. And I am not such a good shot that I can comb his hair with lead. If I shoot him, I might very likely kill him. And what of you, sir? My second. Have you no thought for your position? Duelling is illegal. Sir William Coventry was sent to the Tower merely for challenging the Duke of Buckingham to a duel. To say nothing of your safety. You know, it’s not unknown for seconds to engage and take their shares, even though the main protagonists may wish it otherwise. You may be killed, sir. And then what would become of Miss Barton?”

“And I say again that it will not proceed so far. For it is plain to me that Major Mornay is actuated by the will of others in this Tower. Perhaps his old friend from the French galleys, Sergeant Rohan. His challenge was not governed by them, and I believe they will now show themselves as they seek to reach an accommodation with us. For a duel would only draw attention to them in a way that cannot serve their secrecy. What is covert always abhors a scandal. For, as you say, that is what we will have if a duel is fought between Mint and Ordnance.”

I know not what he expected. I doubt that he knew himself. For all his scientific method, it seemed a most unscientific course of action on which we were bound. Later on that day he dressed the matter up yet further and called it an experiment, but I could not believe it effectual for determining truth, and by my own thinking it was more akin to goading a bear with a hot iron. What is certain is that neither one of us had anticipated that which happened next; and for this Newton felt some shame and rightly so, since it seems to me that no one should make an experiment, so called, without having some idea of the possible outcomes. If that is science, then I want no part of it, since where is the common sense in it? To my mind it is like a girl who lets you bundle with her but does not have the apprehension that you might try and go even further. For when one seeks to discover something, sagacity would always seem to be a better guide than accident or otherwise the quest must result in things one did not seek at all.

Such as a man’s death, for example.

Major Mornay’s body was discovered hanging in the Mint that same evening. I say “in the Mint” advisedly, for the circumstance of his death provoked yet another bitter argument between my master and Lord Lucas. Mornay was found hanged, having apparently tied a rope around a crenellation atop the Broad Arrow Tower, so that when he threw himself off the battlement his feet almost touched the ground in the Mint Comptroller’s garden; and indeed it was the wife of one of the Mint Comptrollers, Mrs. Molyneux, who found the Major’s body.

Newton was summoned straightaway by Mister Molyneux, who then returned to his house to comfort his poor wife, who was most upset by her discovery. My master was still contemplating the body as might an artist who proposed to sketch the scene for a painting of Judas Iscariot, when Lord Lucas and some other members of the Ordnance arrived on top of the Broad Arrow Tower and, declaring that the Major’s death was properly a matter for the Ordnance — for it was given out immediately that it was Mornay who was dead — they sought to draw the rope still bearing him by the neck, back up the wall of the inner rampire. Which made Newton much aggrieved, and producing the ivory-handled table knife that he sometimes carried about his person, he cut through the rope so that the body fell into the Comptroller’s rhubarb, which, although medicinal, had not the power to revive the poor Major from his lethal condition.

Seeing himself cheated of the jurisdiction — for as Newton reminded His Lordship, possession is nine points of the Law — Lucas’s noble face took on an apoplectiform look and he thundered all sorts of revenges he would take on Newton when next he saw the Lords Justices, which Newton ignored as one who did not hear these threats at all. Instead he gave even closer inspection to the rope around Mornay’s neck than the Major’s previously elevated position had allowed.

“This is too bad,” he sighed. “The poor fellow.”

I had not liked the Major — he had tried to gouge me with his dagger, after all — but I, too, pitied him now as I pity all who murder themselves, for the Law makes suicide a most uncomfortable grave. And I murmured something in Newton’s earshot to that effect.

“I have attended a sufficient number of executions within the course of my duty to know how a man’s neck is affected by hanging,” said Newton. “I have observed that the neck breaks but rarely, and most often that death be occasioned by simple strangulation. The lungs are deprived of air; but just as importantly, if William Harvey’s book is to be believed, the brain is most mercifully deprived of blood.

“When a man is cut down before disembowelling, the rope hardly has time to draw tight, as occurs with a normal hanging. And yet I have noted how the geometry of his punishment always leaves its mark upon his neck, so that it may be observed how a man who slowly strangled upon the rope may be distinguished from one who hardly dangled at all.

“The level of tightening of the ligature in a hanging is always much higher than in strangulation and less likely to encircle the neck horizontally. Commonly it may be observed around the larynx in the front rising to a suspension point at the knot with its characteristic open angle behind or under the ear on one or t’other side, or at the back of the head. This means that with most hangings the impression caused by the noose will naturally be deepest opposite the suspension point.

“And yet here observe if you will,” he told me, “that the neck bears the fine impression of the rope in two different places.”

I looked at Mornay’s neck as Newton had instructed, trying to ignore the turgid tongue that protruded from his mouth like a third lip, and his eyes, which were as horribly prominent as a couple of weeping chancres, and thus I saw, as he proposed, not one but two rope marks upon the Major’s broken neck.

“What does this mean?” I enquired uncertainly. “That the rope slipped when he threw himself off the Tower?”

“No,” Newton said firmly. “That he was strangled before he was thrown off the Tower. And since strangulation is rarely suicidal, we must conclude that he was murdered.”

“Must we?”

“Yes indeed,” he insisted. “The first mark which identifies the strangulation shows even on the back of the neck where the skin is thick and the tissues are tough, and could only have been made by extreme violence and, as its corollary, a most desperate resistance. Moreover this mark is horizontal as would denote someone attacking the Major from behind.

“Now contrast the second mark, which is much more vertical and shows almost no resistant damage. This suggests that the man was dead when it was made.”

All of which made me think that Newton knew as much about how a man might hang as Jack Ketch himself, so that his arguments seemed to be quite without answer, except to say that I could utter no objection to his findings. And, as ever, I was astonished how much he seemed to know about nearly everything. But perhaps it was only fitting that the man who explained gravity should be so well informed — even, it must be said, animated — on the subject of hanging; and since then I have often considered the possibility that he was morbidly fascinated by the gallows. For my own part I find hanging a very unpleasant sight, and said as much to Newton.

“All the doctors I have talked with,” said he, “inform me that there is no pain at all in hanging, for it stops the blood’s circulation to the brain and so ends all sense in an instant.”

“I have yet to see the man turned off a ladder who bears his experience with a smile on his face.”

“What?” exclaimed Newton, and leaving off his examination of the Major’s neck, he set about an inspection of his hands, as if, like some ancient chiromancer, he might divine the origins of the poor man’s fate. “You think that we should let rogues walk free who also deserve to hang?”

“I think that there is much difference between a flash ballad and a capital crime.”

“Oh, you would have made a fine barrister,” teased Newton. And then, holding up one of Mornay’s hands, he asked me to note the fingers. “Look at his fingernails,” he said. “Torn and bloody. As if he struggled against the rope. A real suicide would meet the means of his own end with greater equanimity. It may be that the Major’s murderer bears the scars of his crime. Perhaps some scratches on his hands and face.”

Newton prised open the dead man’s jaws and, pushing aside his tongue, searched his mouth. But finding nothing, he began to search the dead man’s pockets.

“I regret that I did not foresee this circumstance,” admitted Newton. “This is my fault. I confess I did not think they would kill their own confederate. My own consolation is that by proving this is murder and not suicide, I shall save him from a dishonourable burial. But am I mistaken or did he not try and kill you last night? Why should you be sorry for him?”

“I am sorry for anyone who meets such a fate as this,” said I.

Newton paused. “Ah, but what have we here?” His long lean hands produced a letter which he unfolded.

“Now we have something,” he said, mighty pleased at this new discovery. “For this is written in the same code as those other messages before.”

He showed me the letter, which appeared thus:

“Excellent,” he said, pocketing the letter upon my returning it to him. “Our material is accumulating. Now, at last, we may make some progress in this case.”

“With three people murdered, let us hope so.”

“Four,” said Newton. “You have a habit of forgetting George Macey.”

“I had not forgotten,” I said. “How could I when the manner of his death was so memorable? But at your own instruction I had put it out of my mind. Or at least one part of my mind. And yet for all its singularity, I sometimes think his death can hardly be associated with these others.”

Newton only grunted, and seeming much preoccupied with the poor Major’s death, he walked slowly back to the Mint office — not along Water Lane, which would have been more direct, but up Mint Street; for although he did not say, I knew that he wished to avoid a further confrontation with Lord Lucas — with me following at a distance respectful to his deep thoughts.

Upon reaching the Mint office I fetched us both a cup of cider — of which he was most fond — and I observed that Newton thought some more. He sat down in his favourite chair by the fire, and removing his wig, which was always a sign that he wished his brain to be most comfortable inside his head, he held his lace stock with both hands and twisted it like a garrotte, as if he meant to squeeze something useful out of his head.

For a while I believed he did recriminate himself some more, or that his thoughts were directed toward the cipher, for although he did not examine the letter he had taken from the Major, I knew his mind was capable of holding what was written there almost at a glance. But when, after more than an hour with the cat upon his lap, he spoke again, it was to utter one word.

“Remarkable,” he said.

“What is, sir?”

“Why, the murder of Major Mornay, of course.”

“With respect, Doctor, I have been sitting here considering how unremarkable it is. Compared with the others that went before.”

“What was it you said about George Macey?” he asked.

“Why, sir, nothing. I have been silent this past hour.”

“Back in the Comptroller’s garden, sir. What were you talking about?”

“Only that it seemed hard to believe that Macey’s murder had any connection with these three subsequent murders, sir.”

“Why do you say so?”

“Its very lack of any distinguishing features, sir.”

“But do you find many such features attending the murder of Major Mornay?” he asked.

“Well, sir, there is the coded letter. We first encountered the code with Kennedy, and then with Mercer.”

“Apart from that, what else?”

I thought for a moment. “I cannot think of anything,” I admitted.

“That is what is so remarkable about this latest murder,” said Newton. “Its singular lack of features. No dead ravens. No stones in the dead man’s mouth. No peacock feathers. No flute. Nothing except the body itself and this enciphered letter. It is as if the Tower’s murderer had become mute.”

“Indeed, sir. But perhaps our murderer has nothing to say to us. And but for the presence of another message in code, one might almost think Major Mornay was murdered by someone different from the man who killed Mercer and Kennedy. Or for that matter from the person who killed George Macey.”

Newton lapsed into another of his long silences, which were best answered with silence. And it was at times like these that I put aside the murders that were done in the Tower and, picking up a sampler in my mind, returned with silk thread and tent stitches to further embroider my love for Miss Catherine Barton. Which by now was quite a piece of work. And with my own thoughts thus diverted, I dreamed of being in her company again, for it was that night that I was due to sup with her uncle and his niece; so that I almost thought Newton had looked into my mind and seen what was done there when he said that it was time we went to Jermyn Street, to sup. My heart missed a beat and my ears burned so that I was glad I was wearing my wig and Newton could not see their colour and mock my embarrassment.

The coach journey to Jermyn Street was also conducted in silence, which made me think that for all his avowed hostility to the monastic order, Newton should have made a splendid monk, albeit one like his hero, Giordano Bruno. Bruno was executed as a heretic in 1600 because of his theories of the infinite universe, the multiplicity of worlds, and his adherence to Copernicanism. Newton greatly admired Bruno, who was strongly suspected of Arianism, and certainly the two had much in common, although I do not think they could ever have liked each other. Like Cain, genius cannot abide its own brother.

Nor is genius always as honest as it could be. I already knew how Newton had pretended a show of adherence to Trinitarianism at Cambridge in order to remain the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. I was about to apprehend just how much Newton could also counterfeit a show of religious orthodoxy toward his niece, Miss Barton.

In truth she seemed more than pleased to see me accompanying her uncle, for I swear she blushed upon finding me standing in her parlour, and stammered out a greeting most tremulously, which made me feel very good inside, as if I had already quaffed a mug of the hot wine she swiftly prepared for us. She wore a lace commode upon her head, as was most fashionable, an amber necklace, and a silver lace Mantua gown which was open at the front to reveal an embroidered corset, and was most becoming to her.

After supper, Miss Barton sang to her own accompaniment on the spinette, which was as beautiful a sound as I had ever hoped to hear outside of heaven. She had a fine voice, not strong but very pure, although I think that Newton cared nothing for music, whatever its origin. At last he stood up, pulled the periwig from his head, which Miss Barton replaced with an elegant scarlet nightcap of her own embroidery, and bowed slightly in my direction.

“I have a mind to study our cipher,” he explained. “So I will say good night to you, Mister Ellis.”

“Then I must be leaving, too.”

“Shall you go?” asked Miss Barton.

“Pray, stay a while longer, Mister Ellis,” insisted Newton. “And keep Miss Barton company. I insist.”

“Then, sir, I shall.”

Newton retired to his library and, that being done, Miss Barton smiled sweetly at me and for several minutes we sat in silence, savouring our privacy, for this was the first time we had ever found ourselves alone, Mrs. Rogers having long before retired. Gradually, Miss Barton began to talk: about the war in the Netherlands and Mister Dryden’s newest book that was a translation of the works of Virgil, and Mister Southern’s latest play, being titled The Maid’s Last Prayer, which she had seen and very much enjoyed. It seemed that she was nervous and sought to find herself at ease in conversation.

“I did not see that one,” I confessed, although I might have added that her own uncle kept me too busy ever to go to see plays performed. “But I saw the one before, which was The Wives’ Excuse.”

“Which I have not seen. But I have read it. Tell me, Mister Ellis. Do you agree that cuckolds make themselves?”

“Not being married, it is a little difficult for me to speak about that condition,” I said. “But I should think that a wife would only ever be provoked to cuckold a husband because of his own failings.”

“That is my opinion also,” she said. “Although I do not think that because a man is married he must be a cuckold. For that would be scandal upon all women.”

“Yes, it would.”

In similar vein we spoke awhile, although I found it difficult to rid myself of the very vivid memory I still carried of the whore at Mrs. Marsh’s house, whose name was Deborah and who resembled Miss Barton as two peas in a pod — which made me sometimes tongue-tied, for I had the apprehension that at any moment Miss Barton might shrug off her Mantua and her silk embroidered corset and mount the dinner table and strike an indecent posture for my amusement.

And, truth to tell, her conversation seemed mighty sophisticated for a girl of her age and somewhat at odds with her youthful beauty and apparent simplicity. She even asked me about the murders in the Tower, which Newton had told her about, and it was quickly clear to me that she was not the modest white violet Newton had led me to believe she was. Indeed her discourse was so lively that I soon formed the impression that her intelligence was almost equal to his own. Certainly she had as much desire to experiment with life as he — perhaps more so, as I was about to discover. But while the garden of her mind was laid out with the same symmetry and logic as her uncle’s, much that was planted there had yet to grow to maturity.

“Mister Ellis,” she said finally, “I should like you to sit beside me.”

I drew my chair close to her, as she asked.

“You may hold my hand if you choose,” she added now; and so I did.

“Miss Barton,” I said, encouraged by our proximity, “you are the loveliest creature that any man ever beheld.” And I kissed her hand.

“Dear Tom,” she said. “You kiss my hand. But will you not kiss me properly?”

“With pleasure, Miss Barton,” I said, and, leaning forward, kissed her most chastely on the cheek.

“You kiss me like my uncle, sir,” she admonished. “Will you not kiss me upon the lips of my mouth?”

“If you will permit it,” I said, and kissed her rosebud lips most tenderly. After which I held her little hand and told her how much I loved her.

She made no reply to this declaration of love, almost as if she already knew how much I loved her and took it as no more than her due. Instead she spoke of the kiss, with such forensic choice of language as one might have used to plead in an English court of law.

“That was most enlightening,” she said, curling her fingers in mine. “Brief, but stimulating. You may do it again whenever you wish. Only this time, longer please.”

When I had kissed her again, she exhaled most satisfiedly, licked her lips as if enjoying the taste I had left there, and smiled brightly. And I smiled back, for I was in heaven. In England it was not at all unusual for young women to take the lead in sexual matters, often with the connivance of their parents. Once or twice I had bundled with a girl in the presence of her mother and sisters. Yet I had not expected one so angelic to be quite so forward.

“You may feel my breasts if you wish,” she offered. “Come, let me sit on your lap, so that you may touch them more easily.”

So saying, she stood up, untied the ribbons that laced her corset, and, baring her breasts, which were larger than I had supposed, sat down upon my lap. Hardly needing a second invitation, I gently weighed these bubbies in my hand, and kneaded her nipples, which seemed to afford her no small delight. After a while she stood up, and fearing that I might have gone too far, I asked what was the matter.

“The matter, sir,” she said, smiling, most lasciviously, “is that.” And she pointed to the unmistakable evidence that I too had enjoyed the experience; and kneeling before me, she touched my privy parts through my breeches and asked that she might look upon them.

“I have seen my brothers,” she said. “But only when they were boys. And I have never seen the privy parts of a man who was ready for love, so to speak. All that I know, which is very little, is from a book,” she added. “Aretine’s Postures. Which raises as many questions as it supplies answers. And I should like very much to gaze upon Priapus, now.”

“What if Doctor Newton should come into the room?” I said.

Miss Barton shook her head and, through my breeches, squeezed my cock most affectionately. “Oh, we won’t see him again tonight. Not now he has started to think upon that cipher. He will often cogitate upon such problems all night long. Once Mister Bernoulli and Mister Leibniz suggested a problem to him that kept him occupied until dawn. During that time I spoke to him, entreated him to go to bed, offered him some cider, and yet he paid me no heed at all. It was as if I had not been there.”

“But if Mrs. Rogers should disturb us,” I protested.

“She has gone to bed,” she said. And then: “You studied for the Law, did you not, Mister Ellis?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then you will know what a quid pro quo is, sir.”

“Indeed I do, Miss Barton.”

“Then what about a quim pro quo?”

I grinned and shook my head that she did know such a word. But amusement turned to surprise and ecstasy as she lifted her skirts and suffered me to fondle her belly, thighs, and cunny parts. And pressing my mouth to these, I licked her from stem to stern, which drew such gasps from her lips as I thought would wake the house; but each time I tried to draw my head away, she gripped my hair most tightly, and held my mouth there until she was done.

So that when finally I unbuttoned my own breeches to show her my prick and suffered her to look upon me, I was as mighty a figure as ever I have been in my life. So that Miss Barton marvelled that such a thing as human lovemaking were possible.

“To think,” she breathed, squeezing my cock in her fist, “that so large a part of a man can go inside a woman’s quim.”

“One might as well wonder that woman do give birth to infants,” said I.

“Yet how vulnerable it is,” she continued, marvelling. “How tender wounded looks its head. As if it has been struck hard about the face. And yet how frightening also. For it seems almost to have a life of its own.”

“You say more than you know, Miss Barton,” I said.

“The seed emanates from the small fissure, does it not?” she asked.

“It does and will if you are not careful,” I said.

“Oh, but I want to see the ejaculate,” she insisted. “I want to understand everything.”

“The ejaculate is most phrenetic,” I said, “and I cannot answer for where I would fetch off.” Feebly, I added, “On your gown...”

“Perhaps if I gathered it in my mouth,” she said; and before I could forbid it, she had taken my whole member into her mouth, after which I was quite incapable of resisting her further anatomical enquiry of me, for so it did feel, until I had fetched off in her mouth. Which to my horror, she swallowed.

“Catherine,” I said, withdrawing my privy parts from her cool hands, and doing up my breeches again, “I cannot think it safe that you swallowed that.”

“Why, Tom, dear, it is quite safe, I can assure you. There is no danger of being brought to bed with a child. A woman’s womb may be of her belly, but it is not connected to her stomach.” She laughed and then wiped her lips with a kerchief.

I drank a draught of cider to try to calm myself.

“That was most instructive,” she remarked. “And most enjoyable. I am most grateful to you. And in truth, now that I have seen and tasted a man’s cock in all its glory, there is much that doth seem clear to me.”

“I am very glad of it, Catherine,” said I and kissed her forehead. “But the only thing clear to me now is how much I do adore you.”

For a long while we sat in front of the fire, holding hands and saying very little. I would kiss her and she would kiss me back. And thinking us to be as intimate in all things as it was possible to be with another human being, I now made a terrible mistake.

A mistake that perhaps cost me my life’s happiness.

After we were seated again, and we did converse again, I think, again most businesslike, she did turn our conversation to the plays of Mister Otway: in particular The Soldier’s Fortune and its sequel, The Atheist, which, she and I being both Whigs ourselves, neither of us had liked particularly well. If I had left things there, it might have gone well enough between us. In time, we might even have married. But then I made some remark to the effect that I knew not how any man could remain a Christian who came into close contact with her uncle’s opinions. At which point Miss Barton seemed to form the impression that some great insult had been done to him, for she withdrew her hand from mine immediately, and the colour she had worn since our bundling quite drained away in an instant.

“Pray, sir,” she said coldly, “what do you mean by that remark?”

“Why, only what must be well known to you, Miss Barton. That Doctor Newton believes all received Christian tradition to be counterfeit and a fraud perpetrated by evil men who, for their own purposes, have wilfully corrupted the heritage of Jesus Christ.”

“Stop,” cried Miss Barton, rising suddenly to her feet, one of which she stamped like an impatient little pony. “Stop. Stop.”

Slowly I stood up and faced her, only now too late realising the truth of the matter, which was that for all her uncle’s heretical opinions — of which I could now perceive that she knew nothing — her clever discourse, her inquiring mind, and her manifest desire for me, Miss Barton herself retained the simple Christian faith of a village curate’s wife.

“How could you say such a wicked thing about my uncle?” she demanded, her eyes moistening suddenly.

I did not compound my offences by asserting that I had merely spoken the truth, for that would have added insult to the box on the ears my words had already given her; and instead I chose to compound them by explaining that it was possible that the unorthodox opinions I had imputed to Doctor Newton were mine and mine alone.

“Can it be that you believe such heinous and wicked things as I have heard you utter tonight?”

What is a lie? Nothing. Nothing but words. Could I have dissembled and preserved the bond that was between us? It is possible. Love, like a cuckolded husband, wishes to be deceived. I could have answered smoothly that I was a true Christian and that I thought my fever had returned, and she might have believed me. I might even have counterfeited a fainting attack and collapsed down upon the floor, as if I had been afflicted with the falling sickness. But instead I avoided her question altogether, which I’ll warrant was all the answer she needed.

“If I have offended you, Miss Barton, I am most heartily sorry and beg your pardon, most humbly.”

“You have offended yourself, Mister Ellis,” she said with a quite regal degree of hauteur. “Not just in my eyes, but in the eyes of Him who created you and in front of whom you will one day stand for judgement and be held to account for your blasphemy.” And then, shaking her head, she sighed loudly and added, “I have loved you, Mister Ellis. There is nothing I could not have done for you, sir. As you have already witnessed this evening. You have occupied my every waking thought these past few months. I would have loved you so much. Perhaps in time we might even have married. How else could I have permitted our earlier intimacies? But I could not love anyone who did not love Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

This was sore indeed and hardly to be endured, for it was plain to me that she intended our relationship to be at an end; and my only hope of her being reconciled to me now lay with him who had no more understanding of love than Oliver Cromwell. But still I tried to justify myself, as when one who is condemned although not yet sentenced is asked if he has anything to say.

“Religion is full of rogues,” said I, “who pretend to be pious. All I can say, Miss Barton, is that my atheism is honest and hard-wrought. I would that it were different. I had rather believe all the fables and all the legends than that this universal frame is without a mind. And yet I do not. I cannot. I will not. Until I met your uncle I had no other apprehension but that to deny God is to destroy the mystery of the world. Yet now that I have perceived how it is possible to see the mystery of the world explained by a man such as he, I cannot believe other than that the Church is as empty as a fairy ring, or that the Bible is as baseless as the Koran.”

Miss Barton shook her head vigorously. “But where does the uniformity in all the outward shapes of birds, beasts and men come but from the counsel and contrivance of a divine author? How is it that the eyes of all creatures are made the same? Did blind chance know that there was light and how it might be refracted, and did it design the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it?”

“The accident of uniformity in creation only seems to be thus,” I argued. “As once gravity and the rainbow used to seem which, now explained, are no more accidents than prisms or telescopes. One day all these questions will be answered, but not by reason of a God. Your uncle’s hand has pointed out the way forward.”

“Do not say this,” said Miss Barton. “He does not believe this. For him, atheism is senseless and odious to mankind. He knows that there is a Being who made all things and has all things in his power, and who is therefore to be feared. Fear God, Mister Ellis. Fear him as once you loved me.”

It was my turn to shake my head. “Man’s nobility is not born of fear, but of reason. If I must be kin to God by fear, then God is himself ignoble. And if your uncle does not understand this, it can only be because he does not wish to understand, for in all else he is the very spirit of understanding.

“But let us have no more high words, Miss Barton. I can see the insult I have offered you seems very grievous and shall say no more to vex you further.”

I bowed stiffly, and adding only that I would love her forever, to which she said nothing, I took my leave, already weary, to walk the several miles back to the Tower. And as I walked I had the smell of Miss Barton’s privy parts on my fingers to confirm that for a moment I had possessed her, only then to be rejected; and I was like one who had been shown the gates of Paradise only to have been denied entry. Which gave me no more appetite for my life than Judas, if such a man ever did exist. Indeed I might have hanged myself as Major Mornay was in the beginning thought to have done, but for the fear that now infected me of being nothing afterward.

It is no wonder that the early Christians could go to their martyrdoms with hymns on their lips when a place in Heaven seemed assured. But what was there for atheists, except oblivion? And without Miss Barton there was not even Paradise on earth.

It was two of the clock by the time I reached Tower Hill, and I could not have felt worse if I had been told I was to meet the hangman and his axe there in the morning. In the Lion Tower, one of the big cats moaned most pitiably, which sounded much like my own hopeless spirit, so that I pictured myself pacing up and down within the cage of my own disbelief. I passed through the gates at the Byward, with hardly a word for the sentry, Mister Grain, feeling as much sorrow for myself as any who had ever gone into that unhappy place. And when at last I reached my house, I went straightaway to bed but could not sleep all night.

So at six o’clock, with very little repose and rest, I arose and took a turn about the battlements to clear my head in a brisk wind that blew up the Thames from Deptford. London’s early-morning bustle contrasted sharply with my own preternatural calm: barges unloaded cargoes of wood and coal upon the Tower’s wharf at the same time that three-masted ships were setting sail for Chatham and beyond; while on the western side, in range of the dozen and a half cannon that were pointed at the City, maids in wide straw hats were putting down large baskets of fruit, bread and vegetables upon the ruined walls of the Tower’s old bulwark to sell unto the people that were already walking or riding by. Behind me, the flag of Saint George fluttered and snapped loudly in the unrelenting breeze, like a ship’s sail; at seven o’clock the gun on the Brass Mount fired its own salute to another day; and columns of soldiers stiffly marched their clockwork way about the Inner Ward like toys at a fair. And all the while I felt as if the world was passing me by, like a mote in a sunbeam.

My heart full of trouble, I went to the Mint office at around eight o’clock and occupied myself with filing away witness statements in the other cases we still had to deal with; until Doctor Newton came and immediately began to talk about his night’s work with the cipher, for it appeared he had not gone to bed at all. But all the time he spoke, my mind was yet at disquiet that I could not be informed how I stood with Miss Barton and if the morning still found her much offended with me.

“I have a solution,” he said, with reference to the cipher. “Of sorts.”