Dark Matter

Chapter Five

Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, 1618

Newton had solved the mystery of only two of the murders that were committed in the Tower by St. Léger Scroope and his accomplice and servant Robles; the unravelling of the mystery of the two other murders, and the great secret which they were intended to protect, still lay ahead of us. Now it must be explained what happened after Scroope’s house burned down, and how Newton faced the greatest hazard to his person and detriment to his reputation since ever he had been born, for this university of London called Life provides its students with a more termagant variety of education than anything that is to be found at the Cambridge schools.

The day after Mrs. Berningham’s execution, I arrived at the office to discover Newton sitting in his chair by the hearth with the air of a man most discountenanced. That he ignored my greeting to him was hardly remarkable, and in truth I was used to his ponderous silences which were sometimes very weighty indeed; but that he should have ignored Melchior’s importunate suit for his attentions was strange indeed, so that gradually I saw how his black demeanour imitated Atlas with the vault of the sky upon his broad shoulders. Having questioned Newton several times, like Heracles, and even laid hold of his arm — for it was rare that I ever touched him, he being so shy of any physical contact — I saw how the matter seemed referable to a paper he held crushed within his fist.

At first I thought the paper was something to do with the code he still laboured hard to decipher. Had not Doctor Wallis warned him about racking his brains too much in search of the solution? And it was only when a closer inspection of his person revealed the shard of an official seal upon his breeches that I understood how the paper was nothing to do with the cipher at all, but rather some kind of official letter. Having questioned my master about its contents and still received no reply, not even a movement of his usually keen eye to make me keep my distance, I took the liberty of removing the letter from his rigorous grasp and perusing the contents.

What I read was most vexatious, and it was suddenly obvious to me why Newton gave the appearance of one who had received some kind of insult to his brain — even, perhaps, some kind of paralytic stroke. For the letter was from the Lords Justices inviting Newton to appear before them next morning in an informal and unrecorded private session, in order that he should answer affidavits viva voce that he was not a fit and proper person to hold government office, being of an anti-Trinitarian, Socinian, or Unitarian and therefore heretic disposition of mind most offensive to the King and the Church of England.

This was a grave matter indeed, for while I did not think that Their Lordships would have ordered Newton put to death, they might easily have sent him to the pillory, which would have amounted to the same thing, for, as I have explained, Newton was not loved by London’s population, because of his diligent pursuit of coiners; and there were many pilloried who, pelted by the mob with brickbats and stones, did not survive the experience. Indeed, there were not a few prisoners who feared the pillory more than fines and imprisonment.

My first inclination was to fetch a physician straightaway so that some kind of cure might urgently be effected, enabling him to appear before Their Lordships and give a good account of himself. But gradually I saw how summoning a physician would only have served to create abroad some gossip about the state of Newton’s mind. If he had suffered a stroke, then Newton was beyond any physician, to say nothing of Their Lordships. But if, as I hoped, the condition was merely temporary then he would not have thanked me for bringing a physician into his affairs. Newton disliked physicians at the best of times, preferring to treat himself on the very few occasions when he was ever ill. Besides, I knew he had suffered some previous breakdown, and from which he had, by his own account, recovered; and therefore I was encouraged to believe that my course of action was the correct one. So I fetched pillows and blankets from the Warden’s house and, having made him as comfortable as I could, went to see if Newton’s coachman still attended his master.

Finding Mister Woston beyond the Lion Tower, I spoke to him.

“Mister Woston? How was Doctor Newton when you brought him here this morning?”

“He was himself, Mister Ellis, as always.”

“The Doctor has suffered an attack of illness,” I said. “Some kind of fit or stroke, perhaps. I know not how best to describe it except to say that he is no longer quite himself, as you say. And that perhaps it would be best if you were to fetch Miss Barton. But try not to alarm her unduly. It would spare her much worry while she travelled here. Perhaps you might just inform her that her uncle urgently requires her presence in his office at the Tower, and she shall understand everything for herself when she gets here.”

“Shall I fetch a physician, too, Mister Ellis?”

“Not yet, Mister Woston. I should like Miss Barton to see him first.”

Upon her arrival in the Mint office, about an hour afterward, Miss Barton greeted me with a cool civility but then, seeing the attitude of her uncle, demanded to know why I had not brought a physician to him immediately.

“Miss Barton,” I said. “If you will permit me to explain, summoning a physician may create some gossip about the state of Newton’s mind. If he has suffered a stroke, then he is beyond any physician, to say nothing of Their Lordships. But if the condition is merely temporary, then he will not thank us for bringing a physician into his affairs.”

She nodded. “That is true enough. But why do you mention Their Lordships so? Has my uncle some business with them?”

I showed her the letter I had found in Newton’s hand, which seemed to occasion within her breast some kind of hysterical reaction against myself.

“You vile and despicable dog,” she said bitterly. “I see your atheistic hand in this, Mister Ellis. Doubtless you have brought my uncle’s reputation into Their Lordships’ disrepute by your saying about him in public what you have said to me in private.”

“I can assure you, Miss Barton, that nothing could be further from the truth. Despite what you may think of me, I owe a great deal to the Doctor, and would not injure his reputation for all the world. But even if what you say were true, none of this is helping him now.”

“What do you propose, sir?” she said stiffly.

“Your uncle has referred to an occasion upon which he suffered some sort of mental breakdown once before,” said I.

“Indeed it is so. It has always vexed him most considerably that Mister Huygens spread a rumour that my uncle’s mind was lost to science. For he is a proud man and a most private person.”

“Indeed he is, Miss Barton. The most private person I ever knew.” Somewhat pointedly, I added, “There is so much about him that a person is never made privilege to, that I wonder how anyone can say he knows Doctor Newton at all.”

“I know my own uncle, sir.”

“Good. Then perhaps you will recall what happened before. Was anything done to promote his recovery?”

She shook her head.

“No? Then it is my own opinion that we should let this take its course. And that his great mind will heal itself of this malady. Until that happens, I believe we should keep him as warm and comfortable as possible.”

Gradually she seemed to apprehend the wisdom of what I had proposed, and contented herself with arranging anew the blankets and pillows with which I had surrounded her uncle’s person.

Miss Barton had visited the Tower before — to visit the Mint, the Armouries and the Royal Menagerie — but this was the first time in my presence; and saying very little to each other, for we were neither of us sure how much Newton could hear, we sat as stiff as any two statues, observing him and awaiting some change in his person. It was a most unnerving situation: Newton almost like a dead man, and yet not dead, perhaps seeing and hearing everything but unable to move or speak. And the two of us with full hearts and bittersweet memories.

“What could happen to him,” she asked, “if Their Lordships believe him to be a heretic?”

“I fear he would lose all of his preferments,” said I. “He might even be charged with blasphemy, pilloried, and then imprisoned.”

“He would not survive being pilloried,” whispered Miss Barton.

“No,” I said. “That is also my opinion. If he is to answer these charges effectively, he must have all his wits, I think.”

“We must pray for his recovery,” she said, finally, and with emphasis.

“I am sure your own prayers would help, Miss Barton,” I offered lamely.

Upon which she got off her chair and knelt down upon the floor.

“Will you not pray with me?” she asked. “For his sake?”

“Yes,” I said, although I had little or no appetite for prayer. And kneeling down beside her, I clasped my hands and closed my eyes while, for more than an hour’s quarter, she muttered away like someone most devout. For myself, I remained silent and hoped that she would assume that the hopes of my own heart were echoed in her prayers.

Toward the middle of the morning, she and I started to relax a little so that we began not to notice him. By dinnertime it was as though he were not there at all; and when Miss Barton’s stomach rumbled loudly, I smiled and offered to fetch us both something to eat from The Stone Kitchen. When she agreed with some alacrity, so that I saw how hungry and thirsty she really was, I went to the tavern, returning quickly with our food. Alas, it was too quickly, however, so that I discovered Miss Barton doing something upon the pot, for which I felt some shame and pity to her poor blushes, not to mention some anger with myself. And when I returned to the office again after a decent interval, our conversation was stiff again because of our embarrassment.

But at last she permitted that I might have done the right thing by her uncle.

“I think you have done right, Mister Ellis,” she said, “not to have brought a physician here.”

“I am very glad to hear you say so, Miss Barton, for it has worried me this whole morning.”

“I spoke unjustly to you earlier this morning.”

“Pray do not mention it, Miss Barton. It is quite forgotten.”

Day gave way to evening, with our vigil continuing, as if watching Newton were an act of religious observance. I lit a fire which warmed the room, and offered to fetch Miss Barton a shawl, which she declined; and as darkness finally chased off the last glimmers of daylight, I lit some candles and placed one close to Newton’s face so that we might apprehend any palpable change in his physiognomy; and holding the candle up to Newton’s eye, I saw the dark matter at the centre of his iris shift most perceptibly, so that I began to suspect that my master was not so very disturbed in his mind as to be reduced to the level of some living corpse. It was an experiment which I encouraged Miss Barton to repeat, to the satisfaction of her own mind that all might yet be well.

Sleep gradually o’ertook us both, and it was dawn when Melchior, leaping into my lap, awakened me. For a moment a rigidity of neck and limb kept away thoughts of any other than myself, and I forgot why it was that I had slept in the office at all; but when, a moment later, I looked for Newton in his chair by the hearth, I saw that he was gone from there, and, jumping up, I called out to Miss Barton most anxiously.

“It’s all right,” said Newton, who was standing by the window now. “Calm yourselves. I believe that I am quite recovered. I have been watching the sun come up. I recommend it to you both. It is a most enlightening spectacle.”

Miss Barton smiled delightedly at me, and for a brief instant everything that was precious to me seemed to have been restored, although in truth Newton still seemed distant to us both. I think she even kissed him and then me, on the cheek; and it was as if Miss Barton had drunk from that river in Hades which induces forgetfulness of the past; so that the two of us stood beside Newton, marvelling at his recovery and all the while grinning like horses and finding pleasure in each other’s company.

“Why, sir,” she exclaimed to him, beginning to sound an aggrieved note, “whatever was the matter? You have given us such a fright. We were sure your mind was gone.”

“I apologise for having alarmed you both,” he whispered. “There are times when my thinking so occupies me that it produces certain outward effects upon my person that give the appearance of my having suffered a stroke of God’s almighty hand. The cause is quite a mystery even to me, and therefore I don’t apologise for saying I have no other explanation for you, except to say that a great clarity of thought is usually brought about by this strange excursion from my own physical body, which, rest assured, is something I have encountered before.”

But examining his face I saw that he looked pale and drawn, as if a great weight still lay upon his soul.

“But are you quite sure you are recovered, sir?” enquired Miss Barton. “Should a physician not be called to ascertain that you are indeed as well as you say?”

“’Tis true, sir,” I said. “You look pale.”

“Perhaps you should eat something,” suggested Miss Barton. “Drink some coffee, perhaps.”

“My dear, I am quite recovered,” insisted Newton. “You did well to listen to Mister Ellis.”

“You were able to hear our discourse?” I asked.

“Oh yes, I have seen and heard everything that has gone on in this room.”

“Everything?” demanded Miss Barton. I could see by her blushing that she referred to that business with the chamber pot.

“Everything,” confirmed Newton, whose confession had chased away every remnant of her smile.

“But, sir,” I said, changing the subject for pity of her, “perhaps you are not as recovered as you think you are. For it was not earlier today that Miss Barton spoke of physicians, but yesterday. It is almost twenty-four hours since I found you seated in that chair.”

“So long as that?” breathed Newton, and closed his eyes for a moment.

“Aye sir.”

“I was thinking about the cipher,” he said absently.

“This morrow you must appear before the Lords Justices,” said I.

Newton shook his head. “Say no more on that for now,” he said.

“Then what would you have me do, sir?”

“There’s nothing to be done.”

“I agree with Miss Barton,” said I. “We should all eat some breakfast. And speaking for myself, I am uncommonly hungry.”

I never ate so much as I ate that morning. But Newton sipped some coffee and ate only a little dried bread, as if he had little appetite for food. No doubt he was much preoccupied with his meeting with Their Lordships, which was now imminent. And, after breakfast, we took Miss Barton back to Jermyn Street, at which point Newton declared, most strangely, “It is my considered opinion, that girl is in love.”

“What makes you think so, sir?” I asked coolly, although I felt myself blushing.

“I live with her, Ellis. Do you think my own niece is invisible to me? I may not read sonnets all night, but I think I can recognise love’s peculiar manifestations. What’s more, I’ll warrant I know the lucky fellow.” And with that he smiled at me, a most knowing smile, so that I found myself smiling back at him like an idiot, and thinking that perhaps there was still some hope for me.

From Jermyn Street, Mister Woston conveyed us both to Whitehall, and Their Lordships. Newton seemed more perturbed by the ordeal that lay before him than I had ever seen him; even when he had faced Scroope’s pistol, he had not seemed so much affected as he was now.

“It is only an informal audience,” he said, as if trying to reassure himself about what was to happen. “Their Lordships’ letter was most specific about that. And I have every hope that this matter will be quickly resolved. But, if you will be so kind, I should like you to record my words, in case I have need of a formal transcript of these proceedings.”

And so it was that I was permitted to enter the chamber where the Lords Justices who governed the country were assembled. Their faces did not encourage optimism, viewing Newton as if they wished to be elsewhere, and as if they had conceived some disdain for him, and would not suffer his renowned intelligence to make fools of them.

I was quickly able to perceive the true character of the allegations that were being made, and how perhaps my master had underestimated the gravity of his position — if one might say such a thing about Isaac Newton — for, soon after our going into Their Lordships, they touched upon the seriousness of the situation and their strong dislike of all religious dissenters and occasional conformists. After which the porter brought Count Gaetano into the room — he that had attempted fraudulently to deceive my master into believing that he had turned lead into gold.

Remaining on his feet, to make his statement before Their Lordships, Gaetano appeared nervous and most unpersuasive, but even so I had not expected the Italian to lie so egregiously, and there were moments during his testimony when I was so shocked at his testimony that I was almost unable to keep a note of what he said.

He charged that Newton had dishonestly solicited a bribe in order that that he should verify that the gold sample the Count had shown him was genuine. He also charged that Newton had threatened to go before the Royal Society and, upon his oath, to denounce the Count as a fraud if he did not pay my master the sum of fifty guineas; and that when the Count cautioned Newton against false swearing, my master had laughed and told him how he cared not what he swore upon the Bible, since he did not believe anything that was written in it anyway.

Reminding Newton that, by case of law of 1676, English common law was the custodian of Scripture and, to some extent, doctrine, Their Lordships said that these were serious allegations made against Newton, although he was not on trial; and that their only aim was to make certain that the wardenship of the Mint was entrusted to a fit and proper person. It was milord Harley who led the enquiry against Newton, and milord Halifax who did the most to defend him.

Newton rose to his feet to answer the Italian’s charges. He spoke entirely without emotion, as if he had been debating a matter of science with members of the Royal Society; but I could see how shaken he was by these allegations, which did cleverly mix the circumstances of the Count’s transmutation with the ambiguous character of Newton’s faith.

“I should like Your Lordships’ permission to lay before Your Lordships a letter that has been sent to me from the Dutch ambassador in London,” said Newton.

Their Lordships nodded, at which point Newton did hand me the letter to convey to their table. I got up, picked up the letter, brought it to the table, bowed gravely, laid it before them, and then returned to my chair next to Newton.

“It will confirm that the Count stole fifteen thousand marks from the ambassador’s cousin at the court of Vienna.”

“That’s a damned lie,” declared the Count.

“Count Gaetano,” said milord Halifax, handing the letter along the table for Their Lordships’ perusal. “You have spoken. You must allow Doctor Newton the chance to refute your allegations, without interruption.”

“Thank you, milord. The ambassador,” declared Newton, “informs me in this letter how he is prepared to give evidence in person that the Count has travelled Europe obtaining money under the pretence of demonstrating the transmutatory art. In London he is the Count Gaetano; but in Italy and Spain he has been the Count de Ruggiero; while in Austria and Germany he called himself Field Marshal to the Duke of Bavaria.”

Newton waited for the effect of this revelation to make its effect, before adding: “The truth, however, is that he is plain Domenico Manuel, the son of a Neapolitan goldsmith and the pupil of Lascaris, who was another great charlatan and mountebank.”

“Rubbish,” snorted the Count. “Nonsense. The Dutch ambassador is as wicked a liar as you are, Doctor Newton; either that or a drunkard and a sot, like the rest of his countrymen.”

This last remark did not sit well with Their Lordships, and it was Lord Halifax who articulated their obvious irritation.

“Count Gaetano, or whatever your name is, it may interest you to note that, as well as being a distant cousin of the Dutch ambassador, our own dear King William is also a Dutchman.”

All of which left the Italian in considerable disarray.

“Oh well, I did not mean to suggest that His Majesty was a drunkard. Nor indeed that all Dutchmen are drunkards. Only that the ambassador must be mistaken—”

“Be silent, sir,” commanded Lord Halifax.

After this, Newton had little difficulty in discrediting Count Gaetano’s story even further; and finally Their Lordships ordered the Count removed, and conveyed under guard to Newgate, pending further investigation.

“We are not out of the woods yet, I fear,” murmured Newton as the porters escorted Gaetano from the Whitehall chamber.

“Bring in the next witness,” commanded milord Harley. “Bring Mister Daniel Defoe.”

“How did he get out of Newgate?” I whispered; and yet while my bowels were wracked at what Defoe might say against my master, I let my face dissemble a different story, smiling confidently at him as he entered the chamber, so that he might apprehend the improbability of his doing any injury to the reputation of one so great.

It cannot be doubted how the Italian’s arrest had a most palpable effect on Mister Defoe; and when he came into the chamber he seemed mighty put out by the other man’s fate. But he soon recovered his composure, and proved to be a much more obdurate sort of witness.

The allegations he made against Newton were twofold: one, that he had entered a dissenting church of French Socinians in Spitalfields; and the other, that he was a close friend of Mister Fatio, the Swiss Huguenot to whom I had been introduced in the coffee shop, just before I became sick with the ague.

“This same Mister Fatio,” explained Defoe, “is strongly suspected of belonging to a cult of extreme dissenters who believe that they can resurrect a dead man in whatever cemetery they see fit.”

“How do you answer, Doctor Newton?” asked Lord Harley.

Newton stood and bowed gravely. “What he says is entirely true, milord,” said Newton, which drew a loud murmur from their Lordships. “But I’ll warrant that these matters can easily be explained to your satisfaction.

“I entered the French church in an effort to find information that might enable me to shed light upon certain murders that have occurred in the Tower, and which I believe are known to you. One of the dead men, Major Mornay, had been a member of this French church, and I went there in the hope that I might speak to the Major’s friends and to see if there were any circumstances that might have led him to take his own life.

“As to Mister Fatio, he is a young man who holds certain views that are repugnant to me. But he is a member of the Royal Society and my friend also, and I am satisfied in time that his intelligence will allow him to appreciate his youthful folly, and to see the good sense of the arguments I have frequently advanced in opposition to his obviously blasphemous views.”

At which point Newton did glance at me, as if his words were meant for me, too.

“For I believe it better that we live in a country where foolish men can be led out of their ignorance by the wiser counsel of their elders, than by torture and execution as still persist in less happier countries than ours, such as France.”

“Is it true,” asked Lord Harley, “that you, Doctor Newton, did order Mister Defoe thrown into prison?”

“Milord, what else was I to do with a man whom I caught in the very act of conducting a clandestine search of the Mint office, where there were many Government papers of a secret or sensitive nature affecting the Great Recoinage?”

“Is this true, sir?” Lord Harley asked of Defoe. “Were you apprehended in the Mint Office?”

“I was arrested in the Mint office, it’s true,” said Defoe. “But I was not searching the office for Mint papers.”

“Then what was your business in the Mint office?” asked Lord Halifax. “Did you not go there when Doctor Newton and his clerk were elsewhere?”

“I did not know that they were elsewhere. I sought to bring before the Warden information regarding certain coiners.”

“The Mint office is kept locked when my clerk and I are not there,” said Newton. “It was not I who admitted Mister Defoe to the office. Nor my clerk. Moreover, his so-called information was no more than a lie to try to explain his unauthorised presence in our office. And can Mister Defoe now swear out a warrant against one of these coiners whose names he sought to bring to my attention?”

“I did not have names,” said Defoe. “Only suspicions.”

“Suspicions,” repeated Newton. “I have those, too, Mister Defoe. Do not think that you can try to hoodwink Their Lordships as you tried to hoodwink me, sir.”

“It is you who are the liar, sir, not I,” insisted Defoe, who now played his best card. “Are you prepared to take the Test Act in front of Their Lordships, to prove that you are a good Anglican?”

This Test Act of 1673 required that a man, usually someone in public office, receive Holy Communion according to the rites of the Church of England; which was something I knew the anti-Trinitarian Newton would never do; and for a moment I persuaded myself that all was lost. Instead, Newton sighed most profoundly and bowed his head.

“I will always do what Their Lordships require of me,” he said, “even if that means humouring a man who has been imprisoned for bankruptcy and who is himself a dissenter from the established religion.”

“Is this true, Mister Defoe?” asked milord Halifax. “That you are a bankrupt?”

“It is, milord.”

“And are you yourself prepared to take the Test Act?” persisted Lord Halifax.

“Doctor Newton plays a loose game of religion and Bo-peep with God Almighty,” declared Defoe, and then hung his head. “But, in all conscience, milord, I cannot.”

Perceiving this self-righteous and peevish streak in Mister Defoe, Their Lordships dismissed him with a warning to be more careful of whom he accused in future. After which Lord Halifax moved that Lord Harley offer Their Lordships’ apologies for having had Newton endure such baseless charges by such worthless rogues as those we had seen. Lord Harley did so, but said that Their Lordships had only conducted this inquiry in the best interests of the Mint. And with that the hearing ended.

When we were outside the chamber, I congratulated Newton most warmly, and declared myself most mighty relieved at the outcome. “It is as Aristotle says in his Poetics,” I said. “That the plot is the soul of tragedy. For this plot could very easily have succeeded and left you dismissed from your office. Perhaps worse.”

“That it did not is partly thanks to your diligence, in discovering much about Mister Defoe,” said Newton. “And Mister Fatio’s, too. For it was Fatio who wrote to his friends on the Continent about Count Gaetano. But in truth my enemies were ill-prepared. Had they been stronger, they would have felt better able to reveal themselves.”

I shook my head. “To think of what might have happened, sir. You must return home at once.”

“Why must I?”

“Your niece, Miss Barton, will be most anxious to hear what has happened, will she not?”

But already his thoughts lay elsewhere.

“This has all been an unwelcome distraction from the main business in hand,” he said. “Which is the decipherment of that damned code. I have cudgelled my brains and still I can make nothing out of it.”

Over the next few weeks Newton continued to make only slow progress with the cipher, which moved me to suggest, when we were in the office one day, that he might seek the help of Doctor Wallis of Oxford. But Newton treated my suggestion with scorn and derision.

“Ask help of Wallis?” he said with incredulity, as he set to stroking the cat. “I should sooner solicit the opinion of Melchior. ’Tis one thing to borrow a man’s books, but quite another to make use of his brains. Go to him, cap in hand, and confess that I am baffled by this cipher? Why, then the man would bend Heaven and Earth to do something which I could not; and, having done so, would tell all the world. I would never hear the end of it. It would be better that I stuck a bare bodkin in my own side than let him put a thorn there to plague me with.”

Newton nodded angrily. “But it is right that you hold this up to me, for it serves to prick my thinking parts toward the devising of the solution of this conundrum. For I’ll not be dunned like some vulgar arithmetician who can practice what he has been taught or has seen done but, if he is in error, knows not how to find it out and correct it; and if you put him out of his road, he is at a complete stand.

“Yes sir, you encourage me, by God you do: to reason nimbly and judiciously about numerical frequency, for I swear I shall never be at rest till I get over every rub.”

Thus I observed that the cleverer the person, the more certain is his conviction that he is able to solve a puzzle which nobody else can solve; and that this goes to show the truth of Plato’s theory that knowledge involves true belief but goes beyond it.

After that, Newton was almost never without a black lead and a sheet of paper that was covered with letters and algebraic formulas, with which he strove to work out the cipher’s solution. And sometimes I altogether forgot that he did this work. But I well remember the time when Newton finally broke the code. All of a sudden there was great talk of a peace with the French near signing. Formal negotiations between ourselves and the French had been under way since May, at the Dutch town of Rijswijk. This was just as well, for it was common knowledge that the fleet was in a dreadful parlous state at anchor in Torbay, for want of provisions that was occasioned by the severe lack of good money. It was even said by my brother Charles that we had borrowed Dutch money to pay English sailors, and if so, then it’s certain nothing but a peace could have retrieved our situation.

The date was August the twenty-seventh, 1697, and I can still recall how I was a little surprised when Newton ignored my news of the peace and instead informed me, most triumphantly, that the deciphering of the letters was done and immediately made pertinent sense.

I accepted his word on the matter straightaway — for there was no denying the look of immense satisfaction on his face — and congratulated him most warmly upon the solution; and yet he still insisted on demonstrating the ingenious construction of the cipher in order that I might be satisfied of the truth of what he said. Newton drew his chair up to our table in the Mint office and, pushing Melchior away from his papers, showed me the many pages of his copious workings.

“In truth,” he explained, with much excitement, “a brief glimpse of how I might solve it presented itself to my mind just a few days ago, but only very vaguely. But now I see that it is all to do with constants and functions, which is but a cruder system of my own fluxions.

“The code is based in part on a system that uses a single short and repeating word, known to both correspondents, as the key to the cipher. Let us say that the keyword is your own surname. The encipherer repeats this keyword beneath his message, thus.” Newton wrote two lines of text on a sheet of paper:

“Observe,” he continued, “how all the letters of the alphabet have a numerical value from one to twenty-six.”

“The letter T in our message is the twentieth letter in the alphabet,” he said. “We add this to the key letter that appears below. This is an E and the fifth letter in the alphabet. The sum of these two letters is twenty-five, which is the letter Y. This becomes the first letter of our cipher. Of course the sum of two letters may easily be more than twenty-six, for instance with the letters T and 5. Their sum is thirty-nine. Therefore, in order that we do not run out of cipher letters, we start the alphabet again so that after the letter Z, which is worth twenty-six, the letter A becomes worth twenty-seven, and so on. In this way, thirty-nine gives us the cipher letter M. When it is finished, the whole message in cipher would read as follows.”

“The person wishing to decipher the message,” continued Newton, “executes the procedure in reverse. He writes out the cipher with the key word repeating underneath, and subtracts their numerical values. E, worth five, is subtracted from Y, worth twenty-five, which gives us twenty. Twenty-six is then added, to take account of any minus numbers. This gives us forty-six and the letter T. Equally, if we look at the cipher word XUPAY, we see that if we subtracted our keyword letter S from the cipher letter A, we would end up with one minus nineteen, which gives us minus eighteen. Minus eighteen plus twenty-six is worth eight, which gives us the letter H, from the message word LIGHT.”

I nodded as, slowly, I began to understand the character of the cipher he described.

“As I said to you before,” explained Newton, “the code we have been dealing with here in the Tower is based on this general principle of a repeating keyword. But this makes it most susceptible to solution, for the key is always in full view of him who would make the decipherment. For example, you may perceive that in the cipher the letter X occurs twice in the cipher, and both times it conceals the same message letter L. Similarly the letter U occurs three times, and twice it conceals the message letter I. And it can be observed that one quarter of the time, common fragments such as the ‘TH’ in ‘THE’ will correspond exactly to ‘EL’ in ‘ELLIS.’ This is the weakness inherent in the system.

“Therefore the person who devised this key added an ingenious and numerical force that produced a motion within the key to hide those common fragments much more effectively. And yet so simple too, for the keyword itself changes based on the message, in a simple series progression. In this system, the keyword becomes a function of the letter L.

“The first five letters of the message would be encrypted in the normal way.”

“But for the next five letters, the key changes based on the five encrypted letters — Y,T,Q,U, and H — according to whether or not the letters of the encryption appear before or after L. Any encrypted letters between M and Z cause the keyword to be incremented by one letter. But any letters before or including L cause the requisite letter of the keyword to remain the same. Or, to put it another way, Ato L are our constants, while M to Z are our variables. For example, with:”

“Y occurs after E, which causes us to increment the keyword by one letter to F This is true of T, Q, and U, but not H, so that our next keyword becomes FMMJS. This gives us:”

“In the same way X, Q, and V modify the first three letters of our new keyword, FMMJS, so that it becomes G, N, N. But C and F being before L do not cause it to be incremented, and so we have a new keyword, GNNJS. Finally we end up with this:”

“To undo the cipher you subtract the numerical values of the keyword from the numerical value of the cipher and add 26 each time. For example, Y equals 25, minus E equals 5, gives us 20, plus 26 makes 46 which makes the letter T; similarly, the last letter of our cipher A equals 1, minus G equals 7, gives us minus 6, plus 26, makes 20 equals T.

“It was a most brilliant mathematical variation, for the system becomes almost inscrutable.”

“How did you solve it, sir?”

“Thanks to Mister Scroope’s ignorant variation, I almost did not solve it at all,” confessed Newton. “He was clever enough to introduce a small mathematical series into the sample he chose from the first message he had from George Macey. He simply added one to the first letter, and then subtracted one from the second letter; then he added two to the third letter, and subtracted two from the fourth letter; and so on. It was some time before I perceived that the message chalked upon the wall near Mercer’s body was also the first line of the letter we found in Macey’s message. And having seen this, I recognised how the cipher had been used ignorantly, without apprehension, and was intended but to further darken my own understanding. It was only when I dispensed with this message altogether that the other letters began to demonstrate some mathematical consistency.

“As to solving the rest, I must confess to an element of good fortune that came my way. Nothing works more to undermine the secrecy of a code than man’s own frailty. For man is the natural enemy of mathematics, being most prone to error and habit. The plotters have consistently used two phrases as an exhortation unto their own inordinate zealotries and fanaticism. For, as you shall soon see, that is what they are: zealots and fanatics of a most egregious variety, mighty dangerous to the safety of the realm.”

Newton tried to show me the many differentiations he had made during his months of work, but there were so many quadratic expressions that he only very slightly demonstrated to my understanding how the cipher had been solved. Later on I understood it better, for I copied a letter that Newton did write to Wallis, in which he explained the workings of the code in detail, but not his mathematics, for he said that would have been to show Wallis the workings of his own mind, and he had no mind at all to do that.

But at the time all that algebra made my head ache as if I had been back in school, or in my sickbed the time Newton had thought to stimulate my recovery by explaining to me his system of fluxions; and yet the messages were clear enough and revealed a glimpse of something dreadful that was still very much afoot in the Tower.

“The two phrases they used regularly and to their eventual detriment were ‘Remember Saint Bartholomew’s’ and ‘Remember Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey.’”

“That was the sentiment on Mornay’s dagger,” I cried.

“Exactly so,” said Newton. “It was also part of the phrase that Scroope chose to embellish. Now the first message we had was upon Mister Kennedy’s dead body, put there by Mister Scroope, who had it from Mister Macey, neither of whom had any apprehension as to what it meant. I do not suppose we shall ever know how Mister Macey came to intercept this message. But I suspect that the men who have been using this cipher are so confident of its Sphinxlike imperspicuity that they have taken few precautions with where they left their correspondence. And so Macey may simply have stumbled upon it accidentally.”

Newton read out his translation: “‘Remember Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Dear Doctor Davies, I do not think we should meet as you suggested. If you were recognised visiting my house, or we were ever seen together, the news might appear in every farthing paper in the land. But I would wish to know from you by what method Roman Catholics are to be identified. You may communicate with me by letter as always through Major Mornay. Remember Saint Bartholomew’s. Yours, Lord A.’

“I believe ‘Lord A.’ is none other than Lord Ashley, the Member of Parliament for Poole, whom our spies reported that Major Mornay visited. He is the grandson of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, who once led extreme Whig opposition to the King. He was a notorious Green Ribboner and republican who fled to Holland after the Rye House Plot against King Charles.”

“I have heard that phrase,” said I. “Green Ribboner. My father used it as a term of opprobrium, but I never knew what it meant.”

“During the reign of Charles II, the Green Ribboners posed more of a danger to this realm than the French,” explained Newton. “They were a group of extreme Whigs who hated Roman Catholics almost as much as they hated monarchs, and wished to see the extinction of both in England. They would have restored the Republic and made Richard Cromwell Lord Protector once again.

“It is certain that the Green Ribboners fomented a number of plots to kill King Charles, or Roman Catholics, of which the Popish Plot of 1678, led by Titus Oates, that manufactured a false Catholic plot against the King, was the most vile — for many Catholic priests were falsely accused and put to death.

“But little or nothing has been heard of these Green Ribboners since Shaftesbury’s death, in 1683, and the Glorious Revolution that deposed the Catholic King James. With so many real Catholic plots to depose King William — first Ailesbury, then Sir John Fenwick — what need would there be to create rumours of false ones?”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “Lord Ashley and his correspondent have endeavoured to discover if there are any more Catholics who plot against King William. I should think that every patriotic Englishman would wish to identify potential traitors among us.”

“Suspend your judgement just a short while longer,” counselled Newton. “Consider next this message we had from Doctor Wallis, which Macey gave him. I believe it provides the answer to the first message.

“‘Remember Saint Bartholomew’s. Milord A. We shall identify Roman Catholics as were the French Huguenots. From the tax rolls. Also I have lists from the last time that were made by constables for the justices of the peace; also a guide made by Mister Lee, a map by Mister Morgan, and a scheme by Mister King that shall show us where all these nests of Catholic vermin are to be found. None shall escape us. Your servant, Doctor Davies.’

“Now what is your opinion?” asked Newton.

“I confess it sounds like another Popish Plot,” said I.

“It is much more serious than that,” Newton said gravely. “‘None shall escape us’? Is the matter not yet clear to you?”

“Yes, only I am afraid to say it, Doctor.”

“Then I will say it for you, my young friend. It is a plan to massacre London’s Roman Catholics that is here revealed. The tax rolls were how the Huguenots of Paris were identified on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, in 1572. It was said that some ten thousand Protestant men, women and children in Paris were murdered in one night. And yet more in the country at large.”

“But that was more than a century ago,” I objected. “And Englishmen are not like Frenchmen. We do not murder people in their beds. Besides, there are not so many Catholics in London as there were Huguenots in Paris.”

“Do you think so?” scoffed Newton. “London has many secret Roman Catholics — Church papists who pay only lip service to the Anglican Church, and celebrate their mass in private.”

“But does not the Test Act demand that they take the oaths of loyalty to the Anglican Church? A man may be fined for recusancy, after all.”

“And yet few are fined,” said Newton. “The law is a poor one, being seldom enforced.”

“I still say that in this country people are not murdered in their beds, whatever their religion.”

“Were not the Jacobite MacDonalds of Glencoe coldbloodedly slaughtered by King William’s troops in Scotland? That was but five years ago, as I recall.”

“They were Scotch,” I said, as if that explained how such a terrible thing had taken place. “Scotch victims and Scotch soldiers. What else is to be expected of the Scots? Londoners are not so intolerant. Nor are they so barbaric.”

“But if Londoners are provoked, albeit falsely,” said Newton, “what then? You are too young to remember how the Great Fire of London was blamed upon a Catholic named Peidloe, who was hanged for it, although as every schoolboy knows, it was started accidentally by a baker in Pudding Lane. As was the Southwark Fire of 1676, although another Roman Catholic, this time a Jesuit named Grove, was blamed for that. Indeed the Southwark Fire was generally perceived to have been planned by Catholics as a prelude to a massacre of London’s Protestants. And during the Revolution, did not Londoners expect to be massacred by King James’s Irish troops with whom he hoped to keep his kingdom?

“No, Ellis. Londoners are like the people of any great city: most credulous and mad. I would as soon trust a dog with a foaming mouth as depend on the varied and inconstant opinion of a London mob. I wonder that any man who has been to an execution at Tyburn could hold such a good opinion of the populace as you seem to.”

“I agree, sir, if the mob is provoked, then it is most ungovernable. But I do not see Englishmen being led by French Huguenots. How is the mob to be provoked?”

“It would not be difficult,” said Newton. “But we must find out more, and quickly, too, for we have lost much time while I have been solving this cipher.”

“I still find this hard to accept,” said I.

“Then read the message that we found on Major Mornay’s body.”

“Does that not put it beyond any doubt?” asked Newton.

“Yes,” I heard myself say. “And to think that I felt sorry for him.”

Newton nodded silently.

“But were there not four messages, master? What about the message we recovered from poor Mister Twistleton? Did you not decipher that one?”

Silently, Newton handed over the decipherment and let me read the plain text for myself. It made alarming reading:

“I must confess that this one gave me a little trouble,” explained Newton. “’Jonathan Ambrose, the goldsmith, who is know greatly to resent Newton’? That’s bad grammar. Such a thing makes a decipherer’s life most vexatious.”

“But, sir, you understate the matter most egregiously. For, according to this letter, you are in mortal danger.”

“I think that we are probably both in some danger,” said Newton.

“But in my own case, I should only be killed with the rest. You, however, are to be killed first of all. Which might be at any time.”

“Not until the King has returned from the war,” said Newton. “That is what the message says, Ellis.”

“It would explain why Sergeant Rohan was so curious about you,” I said, unhappily.

“You spoke to him?”

“Once, when I had followed him to Westminster,” I confessed. “I lost him for a while and then bumped into him. He was most affable. We had a drink together. At the time I thought that I might acquire some information about him.”

“And now you discover that he may have gained some information about me, is that it?”

I nodded miserably, ashamed to confess that I had the suspicion that I might even have let slip Newton’s address.

“No matter,” said Newton. “Information about me is not so difficult to obtain. He would have found some other means, had you not told him what you did. Therefore, calm yourself. We are prepared for them and know them for what they are: ruthless men. Doubtless Macey was tortured and killed when he tried to understand their messages. Even Major Mornay, who was one of them, was not safe when the scandal of a duel threatened to compromise their plans. We must move very carefully.”

“I wonder why they left Mister Twistleton alive,” said I.

“Who listens to a madman?” said Newton. “You said as much yourself. It is a measure of their confidence in this stratagem and their cipher that they left him alive and in possession of a coded letter. It also explains why Mister Twistleton wished to attack me. But I wish I had possessed the wit to copy down what he said to us. For I’ve an idea that he actually told us the keyword to the code himself, when we visited him in Bedlam. Do you not remember what he said when I asked him the meaning of the letters?”

“Blood,” I said. “‘Blood is behind everything,’ he said.”

“He meant it literally and cryptically,” said Newton. “For blood is the keyword to this code.” He shook his head sadly. “There are times when I seem very stupid to myself.”

“But one thing I still do not understand,” said I. “Why should this be happening here, in the Tower?”

“I have given this matter some thought,” admitted Newton. “And I have concluded that if a mob must be armed, where better to do it than from the Royal Armouries?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “There are enough swords and guns here to equip a whole army. But what are we going to do?”

“We must insinuate ourselves into this secret correspondence,” he explained. “Only then will we find the evidence to take to milord Halifax. To do that, we must know more about our plotters. Not least when they plan to commit their treason. I would know more about this Doctor Davies. Did not one of our spies follow Sergeant Rohan to the courts at Westminster Hall? Perhaps he was the man the Sergeant met there. Once we have discovered that, we shall play one against the other.”

Our spy, Humphrey Hall, was a most diligent fellow, as I have said; and the next day I went to Westminster Hall with him to see if he could identify the man whom he had seen meeting with Sergeant Rohan. But the man was not there; nor the day after that. And it was Friday, September the third, before Mister Hall spied the man he had seen meeting with the Sergeant.

I had a good look at the fellow when we followed him to The Swan with Two Necks in nearby Tuttle Street. About fifty years of age, he was a tall man but bowlegged, with a bull neck, although not powerful, so that his head scarcely protruded from his body, and his abnormally large chin, which was equal in size to the rest of his peculiar face, seemed permanently bowed toward his chest. His eyes were small and quite feral, and his brow as low as his great hat, which darkened an already purplish complexion that was clearly the result of an overfondness of wine. Above one eyebrow was a large wart. His mode of dress was not only clerical but Episcopal, for he wore a cassock and, but for a long rose-coloured scarf and a way of speaking that better suited a costermonger or a Southwark porter — for we heard him speak to the tavern’s landlord in a strident sing-song voice, so that he seemed permanently to complain rather than to speak — we might have taken him for a man of some learning, or even a lawyer, whose presence in the courts of Chancery was upon the instruction of his client, for there were many who attended that were never heard.

We followed the strange Doctor Davies to his place of lodging on the north side of Axe Yard, and collected some facts upon him from Mister Beale, who was the most talkative landlord at The Axe Tavern, farther along the street, and whose family had been in Axe Yard since before the Great Fire. He told us that Doctor Davies was a Cambridge man and the son of an Anabaptist chaplain in Cromwell’s New Model Army; he had been a chaplain in the navy; he had written a book; he had been recently married to a wealthy widow who was away visiting her relations; he enjoyed a government pension; and he was a Baptist minister in Wapping.

Having thanked Mister Beale with five shillings for his information and his silence, it was to Wapping we now went to find out more.

I have never much like Ranters, and Baptists least of all, for what kind of sect is it that follows the precepts of a man as mad as John the Baptist, who lived in the desert and ate locusts? They must surely have been mad at Wapping, for only the Lord’s fools and mad folks would have freely confessed that their minister’s real name was not Paul Davies but Titus Oates, he of that notorious Popish Plot that had fabricated allegations that Jesuit priests were planning to assassinate King Charles II in order to place his Roman Catholic brother, the Duke of York, on the throne.

It was a great shock to Mister Hall and me that a man as malign as Titus Oates was at liberty, let alone that he was preaching the word of God; and Mister Hall was so shaken by this discovery that he felt obliged to go to a church and pray. Before Oates’s vile lies were revealed, some thirty-five innocent men were judicially murdered.

The Duke sued Oates for libel in 1684 and was awarded damages of one hundred thousand pounds; and having no money to pay, Oates was cast into the debtor’s side of the King’s Bench prison. But for him, even worse was to follow. The next year the Duke ascended to the throne and Oates was put on trial for perjury before Mister Justice Jeffreys, whose declared regret was that the Law did not prescribe Jack Ketch himself; and the following day, whipped from Newgate to Tyburn — which is about two miles. He was also sentenced to be imprisoned for life and pilloried once a year — which has killed many a stronger man than he. And this was the last I had heard of Titus Oates until that September’s Friday afternoon.

Wishing to discover how Oates had been set at liberty, I went to visit Mister Jonathan Taylor, a friend of mine who was a barrister in the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster Hall and whose reputation was that he was a veritable almanac of legal matters. And he quickly completed the legal history of Titus Oates until that same date. Taylor told me that when William came to the throne in 1688, Judge Jeffreys was imprisoned in the Tower and Oates petitioned Parliament for redress against his sentence. And it says much about the anti-Catholic sentiments that were once again abroad in the country that, in the face of all the evidence that he had conspired in the death of many innocent men, Oates was given a free pardon and quietly released from prison in December of that same year. According to Taylor, he was even granted ten pounds a week from the Secret Service money — which was no small sum. He then wrote a long account of his treatment that was published under the title A Display of Tyranny. Taylor told me it was a work that was reckoned to be a most villainous and reviling book against King James, by all who read it, which Oates then presumed to present to King William, although the King certainly could not do anything but abhor it, speaking so infamously and untruly of his late Queen’s own father King James as it did.

When I informed Newton that Doctor Davies was none other than Titus Oates, he was as much astonished as Mister Hall and I had been; and yet he quickly declared that it all made perfect if unpalatable sense that Oates should be involved in a plot to massacre London’s Catholics.

“Evidently prison and a whipping have taught Mister Oates very little,” he said.

“Is it possible that milord Ashley does not know the real identity of Doctor Davies?” said I. “For I cannot conceive that milord Ashley would have any dealing with such a devil if he knew who he was.”

“Was it not the Earl of Shaftesbury, Ashley’s own grandfather, that helped promote Oates to inform the Privy Council of the Popish Plot? But for him, Oates would never have been heard of.

“I believe it is significant also,” Newton added thoughtfully, “that this plot should be taking place when the country is trying to end a war. It was the same with the Popish Plot, which took place when King Charles was concluding a peace with the Dutch. There are some men for whom peace is always unwelcome, for peace means an end to lucrative government contracts for the supplying of an army and a navy. Worse still, it means paying off the army, and that means asking the Parliament for money, which always serves to increase its power at the expense of the aristocracy.”

Newton shook his head. “There’s much here that disturbs me greatly,” he admitted. “But you have done well, my young friend. It is certain you have uncovered one of the ringleaders in this conspiracy. And yet I would know still more of their plans. I doubt that Sergeant Rohan or any of these other Frenchies could be persuaded to tell us more. And yet Oates might talk.”

I frowned. “I don’t see how or why,” I said.

“I have met the young milord Ashley,” said Newton. “At The Grecian; and at the Kit Kat Club. I would say he is about your age and build, and a dreadful snob. Which may be another reason why he has not met Titus Oates. But we may exploit that to our advantage. We shall send Oates a coded letter inviting him to meet Lord Ashley at some place we shall appoint. And there Oates will tell us everything.”

“But how? I still don’t understand.”

“Because you will act the part of Lord Ashley, of course,” said Newton.

“I?”

“Who else? I am too old. But I may play the part of your manservant. We shall borrow a handsome coach and six from milord Halifax. And we shall hire you some fine clothes, as might befit the future Earl of Shaftesbury. We will arrange to meet Oates outside the Kit Kat Club in Hampstead where I know him to be a member. And the three of us shall go for a drive about the countryside, as if we were three men with much to hide.”

“But will this work, sir? If you are marked for assassination, then perhaps Titus Oates knows your face.”

“I am not such a remarkable-looking fellow,” said Newton, “although I do say so myself. Besides, I seem to recall that Lord Ashley has a servant who wears an eye patch. As shall I. It will help to disguise me.”

“So I am to be an actor, then, as well as a clerk?”

“Yes indeed, Ellis. Just like William Mountford, is it?”

“With respect, sir, that is a poor example you choose. William Mountford, the actor, was murdered.”

“Was he?”

“Do you not recall it? Lord Mohun was tried for it.”

“I do recall it now,” said Newton. “And that he was not murdered for his acting, but for his association with a lady to which Lord Mohun objected.”

“I had better keep a pistol hidden in the coach,” said I, “so that if we are discovered, we shall be defended. For I believe your plan to deceive Oates and his Huguenot friends to be the most dangerous thing we have ever done.”

“We shall do all we can to protect ourselves. Mister Hall shall be our postillion. And he too shall be armed. God willing, we shall prevail.”

And, drawing up a clean sheet of paper, he wrote out the following message:

On Monday morning we bought my suit of clothes at the second hand, from Mister George Hartley’s shop in Monmouth Street, with the promise that he would buy them back from us when we had finished with them. I wore a silk suit, a pair of silk stockings, a velvet cloak, and a fine beaver hat that was trimmed with an ostrich feather; also a fine knotted cane with a silver head, a little sword with a gilt handle, a large mouchoir of scented silk, a silver periwig, a pair of soft, jessemy-scented gloves, a blue sash, and around my waist a large fur muff for my hands in which I did conceal a small pistol. It was as fine a set of clothes as ever I had worn, although I was somewhat discomforted by the information from Mister Hartley that my clothes had been stripped from the corpse of a dashing highwayman named Gregory Harris who had been hanged at Tyburn, and whose clothes had been sold by his executioner, as was the hangman’s perquisite. I completed my lordly apparel with a good deal of powder on my face, my wig and my coat, a little snuff box, and a few affected airs. In truth I felt like a most modish creature, the more so when Newton told me that I went as handsomely as any lord he ever saw. And my only cause of regret was that Miss Barton could not see me and declare herself of the same opinion as her uncle.

In the evening, at around seven of the clock, milord Halifax’s coach collected Newton and me from the Tower and drove us north up to Hampstead and the Kit Kat Club, which met at The Upper Flask Tavern in Heath Street. And while we drove through the town, people kept looking upon us, for the coach was very fine, with glass windows, two liveried coachmen and six black horses with their manes and tails tied with green ribbons that matched our livery.

At a few minutes before eight, our coach drew up outside the tavern in the village of Hampstead, which is a most fashionable part of London, being very high up on a pleasantly aired plateau. The Kit Kat was a most ardently Whig club that for a while was the most famous club in London, and its members included Mister Swift, Mister Addison, Mister Steele, Mister Vanburgh, Mister Dryden, Mister Congreve, Mister Kneller, Lord Ashley, and the same Lord Mohun who had killed the actor William Mountford, and who later killed the Duke of Hamilton in a duel. The club was lit up like a lantern and already noisy, so that I saw the wisdom of the club being here instead of in the City, for some of the younger members had a rakehellish reputation, and bonfires in Heath Street where the Pope was burnt in effigy were not uncommon.

For the quarter of an hour my master and I sat in the coach awaiting the arrival of the vile Titus Oates, and I began to worry that he would not come.

“Perhaps he suspects something is wrong,” said I.

“Why should he?” asked Newton, who looked most threatening with an eye patch. “For all of the conspirators believe that their cipher remains inviolate. He will come. I am certain of it.”

Even as he spoke, Mister Hall, who was acting as our postillion, saw a tall figure arriving up the hill and alerted us that our man was coming, so that we had but a little time to prepare ourselves for the dog’s arrival.

“Remember,” said Newton, “you are a Member of Parliament and the future Earl of Shaftesbury. You need never explain yourself. Much of the time your conversation will have to improve upon what he himself tells you. I shall assist you if I can, but I cannot presume too much or it will look suspicious. We must be exceedingly subtile with this fellow.”

When Oates came alongside the coach, Hall stepped down and opened the door, whereupon Oates, recovering his breath, for it was quite a walk from Axe Yard, bowed gravely.

“Have I the honour to address Lord Ashley?” he asked in his pompous, ringing voice, which reminded me of my choirmaster at school.

“This is His Lordship,” said Newton. “If you are Doctor Oates, come up, sir.”

At this, Oates appeared taken aback, and then looked at Doctor Newton for a moment, so that he seemed upon the point of going away again.

“Is there something wrong, Doctor Oates?” asked Newton.

“Only that I do not go by that name anymore, sir,” said Oates. “At His Lordship’s own suggestion.”

“If you prefer, we shall call you Doctor Davies,” suggested Newton. “But you need not concern yourself on this matter. I enjoy His Lordship’s complete confidence in this matter. As in all others.”

Oates nodded and, climbing aboard, sat down heavily and with evident relief. Hall closed the door behind him, and immediately I noticed how a strange, cloying smell did attach to the person of Oates; and after a short pause to allow Hall to climb up again, I rapped on the roof with my cane so that we should drive back to London. Outside I heard the coachman crack his whip and we started south, down Heath Street, toward the City.

“This is indeed an honour, milord,” said Oates, most unctuously. “I never met your grandfather, but from what I knew of him, he was a very great man.”

I yawned ostentatiously and dabbed at my mouth with my mouchoir as I had once seen Lord Halifax do when we were at the Treasury.

“And I am happy to be of service to you, as I was to him,” continued Oates. “Nay, not happy. Delighted and greatly honoured, too.”

“Façon, façon,” I said with a foppish show of impatience. “Do let us get on. And pray do not call it my service, Doctor Oates, for this matter is too desperate to be done only on my account. In truth, you see me quite unnerved by the gravity of our design. So much so that I came up to Hampstead to take the waters. But now I desire that you might put my mind at rest that everything is made ready. It’s not scruple of my conscience that made me write to you, sir, but want of confidence in our enterprise. I do swear I wish every Roman Catholic to the infernals, yet, mal peste, it’s a beastly nuisance, for I still fret that something will go awry. But you have been through this all before, Doctor Oates. You are our Achilles in this endeavour, and because I am so chagrin and disquieted these past few days, I would have your counsel. That is why I wrote to you and summoned you, sir.”

“Then be assured, milord,” said Oates, “everything is just as it should be. Mister Defoe’s pamphlet that will help to incite to anger all good Protestants is already printed and only awaits the proper occasion for its distribution.”

“I should like to read that pamphlet,” said I. And then to Newton: “Why have I not seen it, John?”

“You have not seen it, milord?” asked Oates. “I was informed that Lord Lucas had shown it to you.”

I shook my head. “Perhaps he did show me something,” I admitted. “But I’m afraid that I lost it.”

“I have some more at my lodgings,” said Oates. “I could show you one now if you wished.”

“Yes, indeed you shall,” said I. “We will take the coach to your lodgings, Doctor Oates, and you shall fetch me one of these pamphlets of yours.”

Newton leaned out of the coach window and instructed the coachman that when we reached London we should drive to Axe Yard.

“And yet I am more concerned to know the mettle of our confederates, Doctor Oates,” I told him. “Lord Lucas will vapour most hotly about the men of the Ordnance and how they are loyal to him. But after all, a lot of these are Frenchies. What of good Englishmen? And when last I saw him I said to him à d’autre, à d’autre. Tell it to the others, my lord, but not to me. For I thought him all bluster and grimace, and his explanations did not convince me. But I have heard you are a man of much subtlety, Doctor Oates. My grandfather always said as much. Which is why I have met you à la dérobée, which is to say secretly. That is to say, Lord Lucas does not know that I am speaking to you. Nor does anyone else for that matter, and I would prefer if it were kept that way.”

“Your Lordship does me great honour,” said Oates, bowing his head and trying to stop the self-satisfied smile that did appear upon his enormous chin, which was quite as big as the rest of his face.

“Subtlety and integrity, Doctor Oates. You are a man to call a spade a spade.”

“Your Lordship is too kind,” smirked Oates.

“So I would know how many we really are, and not what Lord Lucas sees fit to tell me. And what are our chances of success.”

“We are not so many,” said Oates. “But we are enough.”

“Ods my life, Doctor, now you sound like Lucas. Not so coy, I pray you, or else I shall believe that this plot is mere fancy. The wise man builds his house not on sand but on a rock. So I would know who we may rely on, for I trust not men who have no names.”

Oates’s eyes narrowed and he stared out of the window for a moment as Hampstead became the manor of Tyburn, with its many dairy farms that supplied London’s milk and cheese, so that I almost believed he suspected something was amiss, and I placed my hand on the loaded pistol concealed inside the fur muff that lay on my lap like a dead spaniel. Instead he nodded with much thoughtfulness.

“Milord,” he said, most pleadingly, “it’s safer that you do not know. And yet I wonder why Lord Lucas should not have kept you better informed. ’Tis most strange.”

“Lucas is not a considerate man,” said I. “Indeed I may tell you in secret that I do not like him.”

“He is most impatient, and intemperate, it’s true,” agreed Titus Oates. “Why then, I will tell you as much as I know myself. Inside the Tower there’s him, Captain Lacoste, Captain Martin, Sergeant Rohan, and several men of the garrison: Cousin, Durel, Lasco, Devoe, Harald. Then, in the Mint there’s Mister Fauquier, the Deputy Master; Mister Collins, one of the assay masters, who did descend from Coligny, the great Huguenot admiral who was butchered by the French Catholics upon Saint Bartholomew’s; Vallière, who works the melt, Mister Silvester, the smith, and Peter Bayle, the victualler. That’s thirteen all told in the castle itself.

“Outside the Tower there are almost a hundred Englishmen in the barracks at Whitehall and at Somerset House; and among them several more Huguenots: Colonel Quesnal, Major Laurent, Major Sarrazin, Captain Hesse, Captain Popart, Lieutenant Delafons, and Sergeant Barre.

“Among the civilians there are perhaps a hundred more, including myself; Sir John Houblon at the Bank; Sir John Peyton; Monsieur Piozet, who’s pastor at the Savoy; Monsieurs Primerose, La Mothe, Chardin, and Moreau, who are on the grande comité français. In Soho there is Monsieur Guisard, whose father was burned for heresy, and Monsieur Peyferie, as well as several dozen hatmakers, buttoners, silk-weavers, drapers, chandlers, apothecaries and wigmakers in the City that do number at least six or seven dozen.

“Last of all, there’s Mister Defoe the pamphleteer, Mister Woodward the publisher, and Mister Downing, his printer; not to mention the several incendiaries who will help me to set the blaze at Whitehall, including young Mister Tonge, who knows much about raising fires.

“They are all good Protestants, milord,” declared Oates. “Therefore be assured that our chances of success are high.”

“For the conflagration,” said Newton, “will surely be blamed upon the Papists.”

“Aye,” said Oates, “for it is only what they would do had they sufficient opportunity.”

“Who would doubt such a thing after the Ailesbury Plot?” said Newton. “Or the insurrection of Sir John Fenwick?”

“And yet,” said I, “so many Jacobites have been arrested this year that I fear they are driven underground and we shall find fewer Papists than there are. Were not all Papists banished ten miles from London, last February?”

“Aye, milord,” said Oates. “But the measure was relaxed after only a month; and those few who were obliged to leave were soon back, like rats after the Fire.”

“Then pray tell me, Doctor Oates, how accurate are your lists of who is to be killed? We do not want any Papists getting away.”

“I’ll warrant none shall escape, milord,” said Oates, grinning most fanatically so that I saw how much he relished the bloody prospect that was plotted. “We shall begin with the Spanish Ambassador’s house in Wild Street, Covent Garden, that bestows a Roman Catholic aura upon that whole area. I expect to find papers there that were compiled for the Catholic Minister Apostolic in Flanders as to how many Papists there are in England and Wales, and their names. I do not think we shall slaughter fewer Catholics than Huguenots were murdered in Paris, milord.”

“It seems only appropriate that the number should be the same,” murmured Newton. “But when will it be done?”

“Fool,” said I, counterfeiting to Oates that I already had this knowledge, for I did not think it good that we should seem to know nothing. “I told you already. The damn fellow never listens, Doctor. Tell him.”

“Why, when the King returns from Flanders, of course,” said Oates. “What good is a Catholic plot to kill the King, if the King is somewhere else? It will all come out after this man Isaac Newton is murdered. For with his death, which will be blamed on the Catholics, the rest of their damnable plot will be revealed.”

“How is he to be murdered?” I enquired. “I have heard he is a mighty intelligent fellow, this Isaac Newton. He may yet outwit you.”

“I have not the precise details. But his movements are known to us. He will be assassinated in the street, and the blame put upon a notorious Roman Catholic who works in the Tower.”

“After the peace is concluded, then,” Newton said coolly, as if we were discussing the murder of some stranger.

“That is what we are waiting for, of course,” said I. “Let me die, but you are an ass, John. A mischief to you. Of course it will be after the peace, for when else will the King come back?” I glanced at Titus Oates and shook my head wearily. “Sometimes I wonder that I keep him in my service, Doctor, he abuses me so.”

We spoke again, and gradually and with great subtlety, we learned much of their plans, so that when the coach drew up in Axe Yard, which was between King Street and the cockpit in St. James’s Park, we knew a great deal except what was in the pamphlet which I now pronounced myself most eager to read.

“I will fetch it straightaway,” said Oates and, opening the coach door, climbed down to the street and went inside his house.

“That is a foul, roguish fellow,” remarked Newton.

“Most foul,” said I. “Un étourdie bête, and no mistake.”

“A senseless beast, yes, quite so.” Newton smiled. “And you, sir, have missed your true calling. What an actor you would have made, my dear fellow. Your Frenchified English is most appropriate and aristocratic. Bien tourné, so to speak. I am indeed impressed.”

“Thank you, sir. And now we shall find out what our Mister Defoe has been writing.”

“That’s another rogue,” said Newton. “I hate all those who issue anonymously what they neither wish nor dare to acknowledge as their own. It’s simple cowardice.”

When Oates came back to the coach with one of his damnable pamphlets, I gave him a guinea, for which the wretched and loathsome fellow was most grateful, turning it over in his curiously blackened fingers, which made me think we had done well to have given him a real one instead of the false ones we had recovered.

“But I would you say nothing to Lord Lucas of our meeting,” said I. “Or else he may think I go behind his back in this enterprise. And he is a person who gives off a most persecuted air, so that I do not want the fatigue of explaining myself to him. I swear he makes himself seem the most persistently wronged person I have ever met.”

“I have seldom met His Lordship,” said Oates. “Yet from what Sergeant Rohan told me, that is indeed his reputation. But Your Excellency may be assured that I shall say nothing to anyone of our conversation. And I look forward to making Your Lordship’s acquaintance again, perhaps when we have made England a better place to live in.”

“You mean without Papists.”

Oates bowed his horrible acquiescence.

“Amen to that,” he said.

Upon which Newton closed the coach door and we drove away, most horrified by what we had heard and much afeared of that knowledge to which we were now privy.

Newton often talked of the story of Belshazzar’s impious feast and the secret writing that Daniel did decipher. Indeed the Book of Daniel was one of his most favourite in the Bible, being full of numerical prophecies. He wondered why those wise men of Belshazzar could not read the words: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. “Numbered, weighed and divided.” Perhaps they feared to give bad news to the King, whereas Daniel feared only God. Newton once told me that in Aramaic the words also meant three coins: a gold mina, a silver tekel (which was the Aramaic equivalent of a shekel), and the brass peres, which was worth but half a mina; and that this was the first recorded joke, being a pun on these three coins, and that I should imagine Daniel telling Belshazzar that his kingdom was not worth threepence. And why was it not worth threepence? Because Belshazzar was foolish enough to drink a toast to the gods of gold, silver and bronze using the metal vessels that his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple in Jerusalem.

This particular anecdote says much about Newton: herein may be found his interest in numismata that was stimulated by being at the Mint; but of greater importance is the meaning of the words themselves — “numbered, weighed and divided” — which encapsulate Newton’s own philosophy and his contribution to the world. Now that I come to think of it, Newton’s whole life could be compared to that disembodied hand whose writing so astonished all the king’s own soothsayers and astrologers, for he had such little interest in his own body that it might not have existed at all.

Like the prophet Daniel, Newton had a low opinion of prophets and wise men in general; and he was especially scathing toward Mister Defoe’s pamphlet that made much of a prediction by the French astrologer, Michel de Nostradamus — whose fame was widespread, although he was dead more than a hundred years — that there would be a conspiracy to kill King William.

“No man can prophesy the future,” said Newton when we were back at the Mint, having read the pamphlet aloud in the coach. “Only God in Heaven can reveal the secrets of the world, through men, who are his chosen instruments. It is he that maketh known what shall come to pass. But it is given to man to understand God’s world only by scientific inquiry and proper observation, and not by horoscopes or other foolish magic.

“And yet the common people are most credulous from their great ignorance,” he said. “And readily believe in such nonsense. Therefore it’s the proper job of science to exorcise these demonhaunted worlds, and to bring light to the regions of superstition. Until then, man will be the victim of his own stupidity, much preyed upon by the likes of Nostradamus, whose prophecies only seem accurate by virtue of their cryptic style and ambiguous content. Thus it seems to me entirely fitting that we should discover perjurers and villains such as Titus Oates and Mister Defoe making employment of the Frenchman’s mountebankeries. For therein lies the true work of horoscopes, as fitting tools for liars and impostors.

“But our Mister Defoe’s a clever man,” admitted Newton. “A most skilful propagator. He blames the lack of coin on Roman Catholic goldsmiths that hoard much bullion. It was the same in Paris in 1572 when the currency was also much debased and it was suspected that the Huguenots hoarded money, for their good business reputation was well known.

“Also, Mister Defoe mentions that the Duke of Barwick comes from France with a Jacobite Irish army, which is sure to cause a deal of panic. There is nothing like an Irish threat to make Englishmen feel uneasy and resentful. And if Whitehall burns while this pamphlet be abroad, then there’s no answering for what might be done in the name of Protestantism. Especially if there are arms made available to the people.

“We must stop this pamphlet and then alert Lord Halifax.”

Early the next morning several of the money police accompanied Newton, Mister Hall and me to Bartholomew Close, by Smithfield. Armed with a warrant, we entered the premises of Mister Woodward and Mister Downing whom Oates had himself named as the printer and publisher involved in the plot, and, under the provisions of the Plate Act we impounded their printing press on the pretext that it was suspected of being a coining press. Protesting most vehemently, Woodward and Downing insisted that their press could not possibly be used for anything other than printing pamphlets, which gave Newton the excuse he needed to seize all of these pamphlets also, saying that Woodward’s pamphlets would be required as evidence to support his contention that the press was being used for printing and not coining. It was a most ingenious albeit disingenuous course of action, and taken not a moment too soon, as it later transpired that a few dozen of these incendiary pamphlets were already being distributed in London.

A day or so later we went by coach to Bushey Park to see milord Halifax.

This was the first time that I ever spoke to His Lordship, although I had often seen him at the Treasury and in Whitehall, and Newton asked me to accompany him because of the gravity of what he was going to tell His Lordship — for he was worried that even he might not be believed, the story was so fantastic.

Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, was about thirty-five years of age. For a while he had been a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, which was where, despite the difference in their ages, he and Newton had become friends. Halifax had been one of those signatories to the Prince of Orange to pursue his own and his Queen’s claims to the throne of England; and it is certain he was no lover of Papists. In appearance he was a very handsome man, and the manor of Apscourt very fine also, and I was very taken by him then, for he showed me much courtesy and remarked that one of his own names was Ellis and how we were perhaps once related. Which greatly enamoured him to me.

Lord Halifax listened most carefully to Newton’s story and, when it was over, fetched us all a glass of wine himself.

“Monstrous,” he remarked, “that such a thing should be contemplated here in England, and in this century.”

“Monstrous indeed,” agreed Newton.

“They have surely forgotten how France was condemned by all of Europe for the way that they butchered those poor Huguenots. If history is, as Dionysus tells us, philosophy from examples, then it’s clear that the example has been forgotten, and the philosophy not learned.”

“Your Lordship puts it very well,” said Newton. “I have taken the liberty of preparing a list of those men we believe to be involved in this plot.”

Lord Halifax glanced at the list and hardly got further than the two names that led it, before he spoke again, most soberly.

“I see that we must proceed very carefully,” said His Lordship. “For Lord Ashley and Lord Lucas are powerful men and doubtless they would deny everything; and even against you, Doctor, their word would carry. And yet we have some time, you say?”

“Until the peace is concluded and the King returns home,” said Newton. “I do not think they will act before then.”

“Then we must bide our time,” said Lord Halifax, “and make our preparations. I shall speak to milords Somers, Wharton and Russell. I should like the Government to act as one in this matter, the matter being most delicate. For the moment you may leave these matters to me, gentlemen. In the meantime, Doctor Newton, I would have you guard your own person most carefully, for it would go ill for all our preparations against these conspirators if some harm were to befall the uncle of the delightful Miss Barton.”

This surprised me, for I had no idea that His Lordship was acquainted with that lady.

“I am beside him nearly always, milord,” said I. “And I am armed with sword and pistols. So is Mister Hall.”

“You see?” said Newton. “I am well protected.”

“That is good,” said Lord Halifax. “Nevertheless, Doctor, I should like you to stay away from the Mint until this business is over. If the Tower be full of such a dangerous contagion, it seems foolish to put yourself in the way of it. There is already so much feeling against Roman Catholics abroad in London that I do not doubt how killing you, Doctor, would work some dreadful effect upon the population. It would need only someone to come forward and swear Mister Ambrose and Mister Roettier out of their lives for the design of an assassination against the King to be the spark that would ignite the whole city in a more awful calamity than the Great Fire.

“Therefore I say to you, Doctor Newton, keep yourself from the Mint and leave these matters to me. I shall come to Jermyn Street if I need to speak with you.”

“If you think it necessary, milord,” said Newton, bowing gracefully. “We will do as you say.”

The Treaty of Ryswick that ended the war was announced in the London Gazette on September the sixteenth, and signed on the twentieth. During the month that led up to the Treaty and the month afterward, things grew somewhat easier at the Mint, for, with the signing of the peace, the financial crisis that had afflicted the country for want of money to pay for the war eased most considerably.

Having to visit Newton in Jermyn Street so much, to conduct the business of the Mint, I saw more of Miss Barton again. I saw no sign that she might still be in love with me, despite what Newton had told me. Her behaviour to me was courteous but cold; not that Newton did perceive any difference between us, for he was quite blind to how things are between men and women. Besides, Miss Barton was often out, although I knew not where, since neither she nor Mrs. Rogers, nor Newton himself, saw fit to tell me; but several times Miss Barton and Newton were guests at Halifax’s house in Bushey Park, while I remained in Jermyn Street, with Mrs. Rogers. But despite her apparent indifference to me, ’tis certain I was distracted by her, which is but a poor excuse how I managed to put the threat to Newton’s life to the back of my mind; and how he was almost murdered.

One unseasonably warm day, my master and I were encouraged to walk instead of going about our business more safely by coach; but whatever the reasons, it is certain that we had relaxed our guard. We were coming away from Whitehall, where we had been interviewing Mister Bradley, who was an under-clerk in Lord Fitzharding’s office, and Mister Marriott, who had confessed to a fraud involving the conversion of exchequer bills into specie bills, and were proceeding to The Leg, a tavern in King Street, to review our depositions, when two ruffians armed with swords came out of Boar’s Head Yard and advanced upon us with very obvious intent.

“Have a care, sir,” I yelled to Newton, and pushed him behind me.

Had there been just the one I should have drawn my own sword and engaged, but since there were two I had little alternative but to use my pistols. At the sight of these they fled into George Yard on the other side of The Leg, and believing I had them cornered, I started to follow until, thinking better of it, I turned back to King Street. It was well that I did, for both men had dived into the back door of The Leg and were now coming out of the front door immediately behind my master, with their swords raised. One of them lunged at my master, who, seeing his assailant out of the corner of his eye, twisted himself to one side, clear of the blade, which passed harmlessly through his coat.

I did not hesitate. Nor did I miss. The first man I shot through the side of the face, and though I did not kill him, it is certain he would have starved to death, such was the mutilated state of his mouth. The second I shot through the heart, which was to suppose that he had had one. Newton himself, although splashed with the blood of one of his attackers, was unhurt but quite shaken, for he trembled like a tansey pudding.

“See what he has done to my coat,” he said, putting a finger through the hole his attacker’s blade had left there.

“Better than your belly,” said I.

“True.”

At the discovery of the hole, Newton felt obliged to go into The Leg and take a glass of brandy wine to steady his nerves.

“Once again I am indebted to you, and the excellence of your marksmanship,” said Newton, who still looked most pale. He raised his glass to his lips and drained it gratefully. “I confess I little thought they would try to kill me in broad daylight.”

“We do not know that they won’t try again,” said I.

“I don’t believe that those two will try again,” remarked Newton.

“Others may try,” said I. “From now on, we must only move around the city by coach.”

“Yes,” he said, almost breathless with the fright of it. “You are probably right. A coach from now on, yes. That would be safer.”

A parish constable arrived, and Newton said that our two assassins were ordinary footpads that had tried to steal Newton’s purse.

“Why did you tell him that?” I asked when the constable was gone.

“Because it’s what I would have supposed, had I not known of the Green Ribboners’ Plot,” he explained. “I see no reason to let it generally be known that there has been an attempt on my life. We must do or say nothing that will alarm the plotters until Lord Halifax is ready to move against them.”

“Until this is over,” I told him, “you must not be on your own.”

“No, you are right. You must come to Jermyn Street. At least until this is all over.”

And so for a while I lived at Jermyn Street again.

Mostly Miss Barton avoided being alone with me; but one day, while Newton was resting in his room, and it being a most inclement day, we found ourselves alone with each other. I had no idea how to broach the subject of her apparent estrangement from me, but I felt that I must say something, or die.

“Will you play drafts, Miss Barton?”

“No, thank you, sir, I am reading.”

“Come, will you not play? I am much improved since our last encounter. I am learning much from the Doctor’s style of play.”

She turned her page, with eloquent silence.

“Miss Barton,” I said at last, “I rely upon what once passed between us to justify my asking you now if you think it possible that you will ever look upon me as your friend again.”

She said nothing, but kept on reading her book.

“If it seems at all likely that you will ever find it in your heart to forgive me.”

Now she looked at me over the top of her book and beat me with her eyelashes. “It is not I who needs to forgive you, Mister Ellis, as I think I have made plain to you, but almighty God.”

“But this is most unfair. Must we bring God into this?”

“Let me ask you a question, Mister Ellis. Are you still of an atheistic frame of mind?”

“I cannot, in all conscience, say that I am not.”

“You are under my uncle’s roof as a guest, Mister Ellis; as am I. We must try to get along as best we can. But I will tell you this, sir. I am a good Christian woman, Mister Ellis, and your views are repugnant to me. And your views being repugnant, it should be plain that you are also repugnant to me, so long as you shall hold them.”

“Then surely it is your Christian duty to help me back to Christ,” said I.

“It is not for me to show you the error of your thinking. That is not what is lacking in you, sir. Faith cannot be taught, Mister Ellis, like an alphabet. You must do that for yourself. I will not. I cannot.”

That same night, alone in my room at Newton’s house in Jermyn Street, my earlier conversation with Miss Barton, combined with a sense of apprehension that another attempt on Newton’s life might be made, made me restless, and finding it impossible to sleep, I resolved to go out and take the air of Hyde Park.

I had started down the stairs when I thought I heard a man’s voice in the kitchen. Newton was already abed, and Mister Woston had lodgings elsewhere. Returning to my room for a pistol, I went downstairs to investigate, and about halfway down I heard the man’s voice again. It was not a man saying anything that I heard, so much as a man groaning in his sleep.

Outside the parlour door I paused to cock my pistol, certain now that there was an intruder. And turning the handle, I advanced boldly into the room, with my pistol extended before me.

The sight I beheld was more terrible to me than any murderer could ever have been. In the candlelight which revealed her complete nakedness, Miss Barton knelt in front of Lord Halifax, who did serve her from behind like any common bawd. She stifled a scream as she saw me in the doorway. And seeing the pistol in my hand, Lord Halifax withdrew himself from inside her body, held his arms up in front of his head, and whimpered most piteously while Miss Barton tried to cover her naked parts with a tablecloth. And I stood there, saying nothing, but breathing like an angry bull. I almost put the pistol to my own head and pulled the trigger, such was the pain and disappointment that I felt. But after a moment or two I put up my gun and, begging their pardon for having put them in fear of their lives, explained that I thought I had heard an intruder, and then excused myself from their presence. Neither he nor she said a word; and yet by their situation all was suddenly plain to me. Newton had been right: his niece was in love; but not with me. It was Lord Halifax she loved.

I could not remain in that house. And not for the first time I walked from Jermyn Street to the Tower in a state of abject misery, hardly caring if anyone killed me. In truth, I would have welcomed death. For the injustice of it was only too painful to me. How could the she who had lectured me on a good Christian life give herself to another man within only a month or two of giving herself, more or less, to me? Of course the difference was plain; he was Lord Halifax and I was plain, poor Christopher Ellis. Better to be an earl’s mistress than a poor man’s wife.

After that terrible evening, Miss Barton was only infrequently at Jermyn Street when I called, and more often at milord Halifax’s house, in Bushey Park, so that she and I were almost never alone in each other’s company again.

Even now, thirty years later, it pains me to write about it. But this is small beer beside the main part of my story, which must yet be concluded; and I must relate how our spies and those of the Government kept close watch on Oates and the rest of the conspirators so that in early November, when it was given out that the King would return on November the fourteenth, the government was able to act in a most subtile way.

The very few copies of Mister Defoe’s pamphlet, with its supposed prophecy of Nostradamus, that had got into circulation had still managed to raise a great public stir among Londoners, and there was much talk of conspiracy against the King; and therefore it was plain that a move against any shade of Protestantism, no matter how extreme or malign, would have been a source of real provocation to the mob. And so the Government was obliged secretly to bring down a regiment of soldiers from out of the north of England that it could trust. This being done, one night close to the return of the King from Flanders, finally we did act against the conspirators.

One evening, early in November, Newton and I were playing drafts at his home in Jermyn Street, when he received an urgent letter from Lord Halifax. As soon as he read it, Newton was all purpose.

“Come on, Ellis, get your hat and cloak, the time has come to arrest these traitors. A search for Jacobites has been undertaken,” he explained. “Arrests are already being made. According to milord Halifax’s letter, the Tower has been put under a curfew, with many men arrested both inside and outside its walls. We have been detailed to arrest that vile creature Oates.”

“Sir,” I said, arming myself to the teeth, as they say, “will you not take a weapon yourself?”

“If I did, I think I would have more to fear from myself than any rogue we might meet tonight,” he said, declining my offer of a pistol.

We drove to Axe Yard, near St. James’s Park, and along the way we saw London given the aspect of a city in a state of siege. Trained bands of men marched up and down the streets. The guards had been changed at Whitehall and Somerset House, with cannon placed around the former. The Temple gates were shut, the great thoroughfares barricaded, so that I did begin to worry that Mister Oates, hearing and seeing the commotion, would escape us.

“Do not concern yourself about that,” said Newton. “He has been watched closely by Lord Halifax’s men these past few weeks, and it only remains for us to have the honour of bringing the principal conspirator into custody.”

“But will the mob permit the arrest of so many Protestants?” I asked.

“It has been put about that all those arrested are Papists,” explained Newton, “being either disaffected Englishmen or French spies, although the truth is that these are the same French Huguenots or Green Ribboners that have plotted to massacre London’s Roman Catholics.”

Which, I confess, did seem to me to be a most dishonest and Machiavellian way of governing a country.

Outside Mister Oates’s house, I removed one of my pistols from its holster and cocked it, before knocking loudly upon the door. By now I was an old hand at making an arrest, and had dispatched Halifax’s men to the back of the house, in case Oates still thought to give us the slip.

“In the name of the King, open up,” I called out, all the time pressing Newton back with my free hand in case any shots came forth. Finally, the door not being opened, Newton ordered the Treasury men to break in the door; and this being done, with a great deal of noise that did bring all the inhabitants of Axe Yard out of their houses, I entered the little house, followed, at a safe distance, by Newton and the rest. But the house was empty.

“I fear our bird has flown,” I said, coming downstairs, having inspected the upper part of the house. “These fools have bungled it. Either that or they have been bribed.”

Newton was examining the bowl of an old clay pipe most closely. “I wonder,” he murmured, scooping the contents onto a fingernail, and tasting these.

“Bungled it,” I repeated loudly, for the benefit of the Treasury men who were in the house. “For they would not dare to take a bribe.”

“Not flown, I’ll hazard,” remarked Newton finally. “Merely gone out.” He pointed to a handsome silver snuff-box that lay upon a table. “I do not think he would have left that behind if he intended not to come back.”

“Then we may wait for him here,” said I.

Newton shook his head. “All London is in a commotion,” he said. “He will soon guess that something has gone awry with his plans. He may yet hear something that makes him bolt. No, we would do well to pursue him before he returns here.”

“But how?” said I. “We know not where he has gone. Unless it be to Westminster Hall.”

Newton shook his head. “It is long past nightfall. The shops will be shut by now. No, I have a mind he has gone somewhere else.”

“Of course,” I said. “The Swan with Two Necks, in Tuttle Street. Or perhaps the Baptist church in Wapping.”

“It may be that we shall find him there,” allowed Newton. “Or it may be that we shall find him somewhere else.”

“I confess I am at a loss where else we may look,” I said.

“This pipe is still warm,” said Newton, handing it to me.

“Why, so it is,” I said. “Then he cannot be long gone.”

“Exactly so. But notice, more particularly, the thick black encrustation of the pipe bowl. That is not tobacco.”

“It is like dried treacle,” said I, examining the pipe bowl. “Is it charcoal?”

“No, not charcoal, either. Do you recall how when we saw Mister Oates, his fingers were quite blackened? And how a curious odour did adhere to his person?”

“Yes, it was most particular. For I did think I had smelt that smell somewhere else.”

“In Southwark,” said Newton. “At the place where you went when you did follow poor Major Mornay.”

“Yes,” said I. “How did you know?”

“This is opium,” said Newton, touching the bowl of the clay pipe. “Paracelsus, and more recently an English apothecary, Thomas Sydenham, have learned to use opium in sherry wine for its medicinal properties. Here it is known as laudanum. The Dutch, however, have introduced the practice of smoking it; and in Turkey, where the practice has taken hold, it is called Mash Allah, which means “the work of God.”

“They were Dutch, the people who did keep that disreputable house in Southwark.”

“That much you did tell me yourself at the time. Opium is most efficacious in the relief of pain, which is a mercy of God, of course, but when smoked it is also a most consumptive habit. A man, or a woman, might bear a beating more easily, having smoked opium.”

“I see what you mean, sir.”

“All of which makes me suppose that were not Mister Oates to be found at The Swan with Two Necks, in Tuttle Street, we would do well to look for him in Southwark. Did once you not lose Mister Oates while you were following him in Southwark, before you knew who it was that you followed?”

“Yes sir,” said I. “And now that I come to think of it, it was not very far from that stew where Mornay went.”

“It would also explain why Mornay did not recognise you immediately. He was probably stupefied with opium. You yourself remarked upon the fact that you thought he was drunk.”

“I too would have been drunk if I had remained in that place. For the fumes were most intoxicating.”

“Can you remember the place?”

“I think so.”

“Good. We’ll call in at The Swan and then, if he’s not there, we’ll head down to the river and get a barge across.”

We took the Treasury men with us, although they must have wished they were elsewhere, such was the disdain with which Newton treated them after their letting Oates walk out of the house in Axe Yard right under their noses. Of that blackguard there was no sign at The Swan with Two Necks in Tuttle Street; and we were soon across the river and in Southwark where, as before, a fog was settling on the low roofs and jagged chimney stacks. There were few lights in the darkness to illuminate our way, and once or twice we slipped in the mud of the marshes so that we were thoroughly wet and mired by the time I had guided us, as best as I remembered, to the Dutchman’s house.

Newton sent two of the Treasury men round to the back of the house, in case Oates should try to slip away, and warned them that if he did escape, they would pay dearly for it. Then, producing my pistols once more, I knocked loudly, in the name of the King.

At last the door was opened, and by the same bawd I recognised from before. And seeing my pistols, she called out some name — I still know not what it was — at which point a gigantic hound came scrambling out of another room, barking furiously all the while, which quite took me by surprise; and the animal would surely have torn out my own throat, or Doctor Newton’s, had I not fired both pistols at its boxlike head and killed it. I was still trembling like a leaf as we entered the place, which was reeking of opium — for so I knew it now. Posting two more men at the front door, we searched upstairs and found several small cubicles, and in each of them, lying on a filthy bed, a man or a woman smoking a pipe full of that Mash Allah, that work of God, of which Newton had spoken earlier. Much to my relief, almost the first person I found was the so-called nun who had been whipped for the pleasure of the men in that room downstairs; she was alive, although so stupefied by the pipe she was smoking that hers hardly passed for life, and it was clear that she submitted to her degradation for the pleasures and oblivion of the pipe she now nursed in her blackened fingers.

Oates himself lay in the cubicle next to hers, wreathed in an evil spirit of white opium smoke. Seeing us, and hearing our warrant, he climbed slowly to his feet; but if we had expected the man to show fear and denial — and in truth we had grown used to fear and denial from the men and women we arrested — we were wrong, for Oates was all languor, submitting to the manacles I clasped around his wrists without demur.

“But we have met before, have we not?” said Oates, as we marched him outside. “I did believe that you were Lord Ashley, and you were his servant.”

It was at this point that one of the Treasury men spoke to us.

“Where to now, Doctor Newton?” he asked.

“The Whit,” said Newton.

Oates’s near motionless eyes lit up like coals. “I am honoured,” he said, inclining his head in Newton’s general direction, “to be arrested by the great Doctor Newton.” Oates smiled his smile, like a great sleepy snake, methought, which did prompt my curiosity as we made our way back to the river.

When at last we were in a boat, and on our way across the river, I could restrain my curiosity no longer. “You seem, Mister Oates, most sanguine about your arrest, the collapse of your plot,” said I, “and the prospect of your imprisonment.”

“Milord,” he said, grinning, “for I know not what else to call you, the Whit and I are old acquaintances. But I think that I shall not be there for very long, this time, Protestant feeling being right now so strong against Roman Catholics in this country.”

“We shall see,” murmured Newton.

“Might I ask, were we betrayed?”

“Only by your own carelessness,” said Newton.

“How so?”

“I deciphered your letters.”

Oates looked disbelieving. “If that is so, Doctor, then I would simply ask you to name the keyword that we used.”

“Willingly. It was ‘blood.’”

Oates whistled. “Then it is true what they say, that you are the cleverest man that ever was.”

“I deciphered it, yes,” said Newton. “But I would still know more of how it was devised.”

Oates waited for a moment as surprise gave way to recollection.

“The original cipher was devised by a French diplomat, Blaise de Vigenère, in 1570. He was secretary to King Charles IX until it was discovered that he was a Huguenot, upon which he left the court and devoted himself to his ciphers. His work was taken up by Monsieur Descartes.”

“Do you mean René Descartes, the philosopher?” said Newton.

“I do, sir. He lived in Poitiers as a student when Poitiers was still Huguenot. Which was where I came across it. When I was in a French seminary.”

“But Mister Descartes was a Roman Catholic, was he not?”

“Mister Descartes’s family was Roman Catholic, but Descartes had many close family connections with the Huguenots and was all his life a great friend to our Protestant religion. It was Mister Descartes who refined De Vigenère’s code and made it impregnable until this day when you solved it, Doctor.”

“Then my triumph is complete,” said Newton. “For I would have defeated Monsieur Descartes above all men.”

“No doubt you shall be well rewarded for your endeavour. By Lord Halifax.”

“To know that it was the mind of Descartes I struggled to overcome is reward in itself,” said Newton.

“Oh, come, sir,” said Oates. “‘Tis well known that you are much preferred by Lord Halifax. It is already whispered that when Mister Neale leaves the Mint, you will be the next Master.”

“A false rumour, sir,” replied Newton. “There, at least, you have the advantage of me, lies and false rumours being your own stock in trade.”

“But does it not gall you, sir? To know that the reason for your preferment is not your fluxions and gravitation, no, nor even your excellent mind? Does it not sit badly with you, sir? To know the real reason you thrive?”

Newton stayed silent.

“Even in this poor light, I see the truth of it plain upon your face,” continued Oates.

“Be silent, sir,” commanded Newton.

“I don’t say I blame you, sir. I would probably do it myself.”

“Be silent, sir,” insisted Newton.

“What man in our situation would not trade the virtue of a pretty niece, to the advantage of his own career? ’Tis given out that Lord Halifax is much taken with the girl. That he has made her his mistress and his whore. Lord Lucas had it from Lord Harley, who had it from Halifax himself. She is seventeen, is she not? Now that’s a fine time for a girl. Her cunny is not too young. Nor too old. It’s like a tomato when there is still a little bit of green in it. Sweet and firm. A girl of quality, too, so that her cunny is a clean one. For there’s many a bawd that plays at being a virgin. But the real thing is something else. And who else could afford such pleasures as that but a rich man like Lord Halifax? For the price he has paid is your preferment, Doctor.”

“That is a damned lie, sir.” And so saying, Newton struck Oates, slapping him hard on the face, which was the first time and last time I ever saw such a thing.

Oates bowed his head. “If you say so, sir, I shall believe you, even if all London does not.”

After that we all stayed silent.

I, most of all.

Yet it was already my opinion that Miss Barton was become Lord Halifax’s whore for no other reason than she wanted to be.

Thus was a great disaster in the realm most narrowly averted. Although in the face of my own disaster I must confess I hardly cared. But what was worse, so little was done afterward to punish the principal ringleaders of these seditious men that a man might have thought there were some in the Government who were in league with those who had promoted this mischief. And which did explain why Oates had seemed so calm in the face of this disaster to his plans. At least that was what Newton thought when we discussed the matter afterward; and he said it was often thus, that the common people were held to account for themselves while their betters went scot-free.

Titus Oates was prosecuted not for treason or sedition, but for debt; in 1698 he was released and, most unaccountably, granted a lump sum of five hundred pounds and three hundred pounds a year on the Post Office in lieu of his pension. No explanation was ever discovered by Newton as to why this came about.

Or at least none that was vouchsafed to me. But that Oates continued his seditious activities seems most certain, for the Whitehall Palace was burned to the ground on January sixth, 1698, and only the Banqueting House survived. It was given out that a Dutch laundrywoman had been careless with a hot iron. Much later on, Newton had information that the woman was not Dutch at all, but a French Huguenot.

No action was taken against milords Ashley and Lucas. They were not even arrested. Lucas remained the Lord Lieutenant and welcomed Tsar Peter the Great upon his royal visit to the Tower of London in February 1698. Lord Ashley resigned as the Member of Parliament for Poole in 1698, and succeeded his father as the third Earl of Shaftesbury in 1699. He retired from all public life in July 1702, following the accession of Queen Anne. John Fauquier continued as Deputy Master of the Mint, while Sir John Houblon even became the first Governor of the Bank of England.

The King returned to England, landing at Margate on Sunday, November fourteenth, 1697. It rained almost continuously, but the weather did little to dampen the enthusiasm of all loyal Englishmen for the return of William; all over London, bells were rung, and it need hardly be said that guns were fired at the Tower, which brought down the ceiling in my house. Two days later the King arrived back in London, in a very pompous procession, although many who remembered it said that it was not as pompous as the return of King Charles.

Tuesday, November the second, was a Thanksgiving Day for the peace, and despite more wet weather, there were fireworks in the evening. The next day, many of the French Huguenots that were arrested as supposed Jacobites were tried for high treason. In courts that were closed to the general public, they loudly protested that they were no Jacobites, nor any Roman Catholics, but their offers to prove they were not Papists by taking the sacramental tests under the Act were ignored as being sharp and cynical — captious attempts to thwart justice. In truth there was precious little justice about, that December, and the trials were more show than substance, with the sentences, in Shakespeare’s phrase, a foregone conclusion. More than one hundred men were transported to the Americas, but six, including Vallière and Rohan, were sentenced to death.

Sunday, December the fifth, was the first Sunday St. Paul’s had any service in it since it was consumed at the conflagration of the City. The work was still not complete, with Sir Christopher Wren’s great dome still not built; but the choir was finished and the organ looked and sounded most magnificent. Newton and I attended the service, with Mister Knight preaching on the Epistle of Jude, verse three, in which the brother of James exhorts that Christians should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. Mister Knight applied this text against the Socinian doctrine, which was only a short step away from the Arianism of my master.

Upon our return to the Mint, some days later, after an absence of several weeks, Newton received a message that Sergeant Rohan — who was held in Newgate, where Newton’s reputation for obtaining pardons for them that gave him information was well known — wished to meet with him in order that he might impart a great secret.

“What? Another damned secret?” I said.

“It is the Tower,” said Newton, as if that were all the explanation needed.

Which was true indeed. The Tower was more than just a prison and a place of safety to mint the coin; it was also a state of mind, an attitude that affected all who came into contact with its walls. Even now I am haunted by its memory. And if you would speak to my ghost you must look for me there, for it was while I was in the Tower that I died. Not my body, it is true, but my heart and soul, which were most certainly murdered while I was in the Tower. Young ladies that wished to conceive of a child were in the habit of visiting the Tower armouries, intent upon sticking a bodkin into the large codpiece of King Henry VII’s foot-armour. It is too late now, of course, but I wonder that I did not think to prick his breast that I might have found myself a new love and, perhaps, even a new life in Christ.

We travelled to Newgate to find that James Fell, who had been the head keeper, was now dismissed. But all else remained the same, with the Whit still a place of much misery, although Sergeant Rohan was not as sorry for himself as I might have expected. He met us in the condemned hold, from which darkness the only escape was with a candle, with no resentment and much cheerfulness considering that he had clearly been beaten, and the awful fate that now awaited him. Since he had said nothing at his trial, he now began with a full confession of his crimes, all of which we heard with the lice cracking loudly under our feet; and it was the most extraordinary admission that I ever did hear in that dreadful place.

“That I did, I did because I believed it to be right,” he said. “The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day has hung over me all my life. And all Huguenot Protestants such as myself have better reason than any to hate Papists. I hate Papists as other men hate the clap or the plague, and I would willingly lose my immortal soul to see every one of them dead.”

“George Macey was not a Catholic,” said Newton. “No more was your Major Mornay.”

“Poor Macey,” said Rohan. “I’m sorry he was killed. In searching for coiners in the Tower, he stumbled upon our plot, as perhaps you did yourself, sir; and it was suspected that he would betray us, when he came to understand more of what we were up to. When he was found in possession of one of our coded letters, that sealed his fate. It was Mister Twistleton who, being the Tower Armourer, took charge of the torture, at the instruction of Major Mornay, so that we might find out exactly how much he knew and who he might have told; and if the code had been broken. I think it was Macey’s screams that affected Mister Twistleton’s wits, for his mind was never the same again.”

I neglected to mention Newton’s own diagnosis of Twistleton’s madness — his syphilis — for fear of stopping the sergeant’s explanations.

“Mornay was mad anyway,” he continued. “A careless fellow, and even though we served on a French galley together, I don’t much regret killing him. He was a perverted sort of man, and had become most unbalanced, so that he was a liability, as you might say.”

After having seen what I had seen in the Southwark marshes, I found it only too easy to recognise the truth of this myself.

“You may as well know that you and the lad here were marked to die as well.”

“I know it,” said Newton. “Some of the letters we translated spoke of it.”

“And yet you still came here?”

“We bear you no ill will,” said Newton. “Do we, Ellis?”

“None at all, sir.”

“But who were those two who tried to kill me?” asked Newton.

“Paid assassins, sir. Riff-raff. A couple of coiners who bore you a grudge. Mister Vallière was waiting inside that tavern to say that he recognised old Roettier and Mister Ambrose from the Tower as having killed you.” The Sergeant spat. “Many’s the time I’ve wanted to kill old Roettier. His whole stinking family’s a nest of Catholic spies. The only reason he’s not dead already is that it was thought he might be more useful to our cause if he was left alive to be blamed for this or that.”

“But who would have believed that an old man like that would murder anyone?” I asked.

“In times like these, people will believe what they want to believe.”

Newton nodded. “And what do you believe, Sergeant?”

“How do you mean?”

“You are a Socinian, are you not?”

“Aye sir. But that’s still a good Protestant.”

“I agree with you there. And because you are condemned, I will tell you that I do hold many of your own beliefs, for I am of the Arian persuasion.”

“God bless you for that, Doctor.”

“But I think we have chosen a bad time to reappear in the world, for it seems the world has grown tired of sectarian disputes.”

“True, sir. Tired and cynical. I little thought I would ever be condemned as a damned Jacobite and Roman Catholic.”

“Their Lordships would hardly have dared to condemn you as a Protestant,” said Newton. “Not with all the feeling against Catholics there is in the country now. And yet I must also tell you I believe you are justly convicted. For you would have murdered so many that England would have been held in much opprobrium, as France was after the Huguenots were massacred. And I am firmly of the belief that such an atrocity would have given King Lewis an excuse to break the peace we have just made. But that you should be punished for the sins of your betters, as well as for your own, seems to me especially unjust. Christ asks only that we follow the example of his life, and not the meaning of his death.”

At which I uttered some remark to the effect that the rich had fine scented gloves with which to hide their dirty hands. Which was a remark directed at Newton as much as Their Lordships in Government.

“And yet I am rich, too,” said the Sergeant.

“Rich?” said I. “How so?”

“What else do you call a man who knows where the treasure of the Templars might be found?”

“You know where the treasure is?” said I, much excited by this news.

“I do. And I will tell you where it is to be found, if you can you get me out of here.”

“I think I can do very little for you,” said Newton. “Not even for the treasure of the Templars. But I shall plead for your life before the Lords Justices. I shall tell them that I do not think it right that you should be punished while others who did counsel you in this matter do go free. Not for any treasure, though. But because I believe you to be less culpable than several others.”

“That’s all I ask, sir. Why, then I’ll tell you about the secret, sir. For there I take you upon your word. If you say you will do something, I know you will do it. That is your reputation in here, and in the Tower. But mostly I will tell you about the treasure because you are of my own religious persuasion and have no faith in the Trinity, and believe that the Father is greater than the son. For the proof of that, why, sir, that’s the treasure I speak of.”

“I would give much to see that proved to my own satisfaction,” said Newton. “True knowledge is the greatest treasure of all.”

Of this I was less than sure; had I not been happier when I myself was ignorant?

“But what is this secret and how did you come by it?” asked Newton.

Sergeant Rohan took a swig from the bottle of gin I had brought him out of charity.

“Bless you for this, lad,” he said. “Well, sir, to cut a long story short, following the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, Count Hugh of Champagne, the patron of the Cistercian Order, went to Jerusalem and ordered his vassal Hugh of Payns to found the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ on the Temple Mount, this being the site of the Temple of Solomon that was rebuilt by Herod, and destroyed again by the Romans. Prior to this, it was said that the Cistercians sought the help of Greek scholars to translate certain texts found after the capture of Jerusalem that spoke of a buried treasure beneath the Temple Mount. And that the Poor Fellow Soldiers that became the Templars were ordered to look for this treasure.

“There have been many stories about what that treasure amounted to. Some have said it was the treasure of King Solomon that was Sheba’s tribute. Others that it was the Holy Grail. Some believed they found the embalmed head of Jesus Christ. But it was none of these. Neither was it the Ark of the Covenant, the lance that pierced Christ’s side, nor the blood line of Jesus Christ.

“It was the texts themselves that were the treasure, for these were nothing less than the original Greek texts of the lost Gnostic Christian texts, including those gospels that were regarded as heretical by the Apostle Paul, and which were later suppressed by the early Church, for these books prove that Christ was only a man, that he did not rise from the dead, and that the established Christian dogma is a blasphemy of the truth and evil teaching. That is why the Templars were accused of heresy and blasphemy: for possession of these forbidden books of the New Testament. And for translating them from Greek into Latin. That is the book of the devil they were accused of possessing. That is why they were persecuted throughout Europe and burned at the stake.”

Newton looked thunderstruck, as if he had discarded darkness and clothed himself in light.

“That is the treasure,” Sergeant Rohan continued triumphantly. “That is what the kings of Christendom tried so earnestly to find: the Templars’ book. And that is why we hate the established Roman Catholic Church, for it is the Romans who have suppressed this truth for a thousand years. Many Huguenots were descended from Templars. And therefore we have a double reason to hate Papists, for they have persecuted us twice.”

“But what other gospels can there be?” I asked.

“Did not Christ have twelve apostles?” Sergeant Rohan said scornfully. “And yet there are only three Gospels by apostles that are in the New Testament. Where is the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of James? For that matter, where is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene?”

“Mary Magdalene,” repeated Newton. “Is there such a thing?”

“Aye,” said Sergeant Rohan. “It was she who told the apostles the things that were hidden from them, that only Christ himself told her. But it is Peter you will want to read most of all, sir. For it is he who speaks strongest against the Christianity of Paul. It is Peter who refers to Jesus as a dead man. And learning this, you will know the truth at last, and be free.”

“But where are these books?” Newton asked hoarsely.

“They are contained in one book in the library at the Tower,” said Sergeant Rohan. “A copy of the book came to the Tower with the Templars who were imprisoned there, and was hidden under the altar in St. John the Evangelist’s Chapel that is now a library. The safest place for the book was thought to be right under the noses of their persecutors. And there it has stayed ever since.”

“But where is it now?” asked Newton. “For the altar is gone.”

“On the tribune gallery, above where the altar once stood, is a window. In the window is a simple wooden box in which you will find the book. Many enlightened men who were in the Tower have read the Templars’ book, for knowledge of its existence was only ever given to those who could not take the book away, and who were themselves educated or persecuted, or both. Sir Thomas More, the Wizard Earl, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Bacon, to name but a few.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing; and I only wished that Miss Barton could have been present to hear what the Sergeant had to say, and see the look of keen fascination that illuminated Newton’s face. I might have pointed to him and asked her if she still believed her uncle was the good Anglican she thought. “What?” I said. “No gold at all?” Which drew me a look of contempt from my master.

“Not all men who have known of the Templars’ book were interested in the treasure it contained,” said the Sergeant. “Sir Jonas Moore knew of the book, but he was not interested in truth. Only in gold. He found what gold there was, in the box with the book. But he thought there might be more.”

“And what of the Saltire Cross?” asked Newton. “And Orion the hunter?”

Sergeant Rohan looked puzzled, and took another swig from the bottle.

“Was there not some significance in these for the Templars?” persisted Newton, who was referring to the cross that Mister Pepys had shown to him.

“Only that when Templars were buried, their arms were crossed across their bodies saltireways,” said the Sergeant.

“That is common enough,” said I.

“Aye, now. But not when the Order of Templars was first created,” insisted the Sergeant. “As for Orion, in the Greek his name means a mount or mountain.”

“Oros,” said Newton. “I did not think of that. Yes, of course. There have been several times during this case when I have been as blind as Orion. Only now does the darkness truly clear and I see all things in the light.”

“Those upon whom the Spirit of Life descends,” said the Sergeant, “when they are bound together with the power, will be saved and will become perfect and they will become worthy to rise upward to that great light.”

“What is that scripture?” asked Newton.

“The Secret Book of John,” answered the Sergeant. “The light is not the son, but Almighty God the father.”

Newton nodded. “Amen,” he said quietly.

“There is a Muhammadan mosque close by the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” said the Sergeant. “It covers the rock upon which Abraham prepared Isaac for sacrifice, and is the spot from which their prophet ascended into Heaven. I have not seen it. But I have heard how there is an inscription there which says, ‘O ye people of the Book, do not exceed the bounds in your religion, and speak only Truth of God. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, is only an apostle of God, and his Word which he gave unto Mary, and a Spirit proceeding forth from him. Therefore believe in God and his apostles, and say not Three. It is better that you should do so. For God is only one God, and it is far from being his glory that he should have a son.’”

“Amen indeed,” murmured Newton. For a moment he seemed almost overcome. Then he said, “I little thought when I came here, Sergeant, that my eyes should be opened so wide. All my life I have endeavoured to look upon the light of God, and I thought no man could see more of his truth than I do myself. But it is perhaps appropriate that it should be a man like you who reveals more of Him unto me. For God, who best knows the capacities of men, hides his mysteries from the wise and prudent of this world and reveals them unto babes. The wise men of this world are too often prepossessed with their own imaginations and too much entangled in designs for this life.”

“Read the book,” urged the Sergeant, “and you will know more.”

The very next Monday, Newton went straight to Whitehall to plead Sergeant Rohan’s life before Their Lordships; only they were not disposed to be merciful, despite Newton’s eloquent entreaties, and upon the appointed day, Rohan and Vallière went to their probably well-deserved deaths, with mobs jeering them all the way to Tyburn as amidst the atmosphere of a bear-baiting. Neither Newton nor I attended the executions of these two criminals, but Mister Alingham, the Tower carpenter and undertaker who did, said that the hangman was so drunk that he tried to put a rope about the neck of the clergyman who went with them to their deaths, which doubtless would have amused that heretical pair of Protestants.

No men died so unpitied, for it was the common conception that these two had been involved in the very plot to kill the King which Nostradamus had prophesied in the pamphlet Titus Oates had given to us. When Rohan and Vallière were at long last dead, their heads were fastened on two poles and pitched on the north end of Westminster Hall, to the great satisfaction of the people who saw it.

Newton spent the morning of the executions closeted with the lost gospels he had found in the Tower library, according to Sergeant Rohan’s instructions. I thought the Templars’ book to be in remarkable condition for a thing so apparently old, and I almost wondered if it were not some kind of fraud, as many of the supposed relics of Christ and the saints proved to be. The book was a codex bound in leather, with the constellation of Orion tooled most beautifully onto its surface — which was exactly like the cross Mister Pepys had shown us — and comprised beautifully illuminated pages of Latin.

When I enquired if these heretical gospels were everything he had expected, Newton said:

“Much is revealed of the nature of Jesus, the early Jewish sects, and the eternal conflict between light and dark. It is clear to me that we are forbidden to worship two Gods, but we are not forbidden to worship one God and one Lord: one God for creating all things and one Lord for redeeming us with his blood. We must not pray to two Gods, but we may pray to one God in the name of the Lord, so that we do not break the first commandment. Christ was not the son of God nor was he an ordinary man, but incarnate by the almighty power of God. He was the angel of God who appeared to Abraham, Jacob and Moses, and who governed Israel in the days of the Judges. Therefore it may be seen how prophecy is the most important aspect of Christ, and not his relationship to God; and that to the true worship of Noah, nothing more has been added.” He smiled and after a moment or two added, “In short, I feel I will have the comfort of leaving Philosophy less mischievous that I did find it.”

For ever after that he was evasive upon the subject of the Templar gospels, so that I soon ceased to mention it to him altogether.

The Templars’ book is still in the chapel as I have described. Perhaps it would provide some people with the answers that they seek. I can only say that I did not find them for the simple reason that I never read the book. For what would a second Bible or a second Koran have told me? Only that the first one was wrong. Every sect contradicts another, which is why there have scarcely been any that did not spill blood.

All such man-made systems of religion are in error, for they presume to understand how God acts. I could not see how any of could ever hope to understand God, when most of us never manage to understand one another. What chance for a man to know the mind of God, when he cannot even fathom the mind of a woman?

Newton rarely spoke to me of Miss Barton after that; and I was never invited to his home while she was there. It was not a subject that could ever have been raised between us. Which is not to say that what Mister Oates had said was without foundation.

There is some uncertainty about precisely when Miss Barton was publicly the mistress of Lord Halifax, the first Lord of the Treasury; but what is beyond dispute is that by early part of the new century Newton’s niece, who now called herself Mrs. Barton, and Lord Halifax were living together openly at his home in Bushey Park, despite his having a wife who was still alive. It was Lord Halifax who created Newton Master of the Mint, upon Neale’s death; and when Newton was knighted by Queen Anne, on the same day as Lord Halifax’s brother, in 1705, the honour was not for his services to science, nor indeed for his services to the Mint, but for his political services in Parliament to Lord Halifax — for Newton had become an MP and a supporter of Halifax in the House of Commons in 1701. Naturally, I always remembered the words of Titus Oates: that it had been a pretty niece and not fluxions and gravitation that had furthered his career; and that Newton had traded her virtue to his own advantage.

What is equally beyond dispute is that Lord Halifax made a will leaving Mrs. Barton a bequest which, including the house, was worth, upon Lord Halifax’s death in 1715 from an inflammation of the lungs, some twenty thousand pounds or more. Nor is it beyond doubt that Halifax’s powerful relatives contested the will so that the house and most of the money remained in the Montagu family. It was only then that she married Mister Conduitt.

Thirty years have passed since then.

Newton was a good old man when he died. All the wise were his brothers. He admired Noah. Noah would surely have placed Newton in his Ark.

I was invited to Newton’s funeral, and despite my feeling ill, I was determined to attend, for I did bear the man great admiration, as did all who had the inestimable honour to know the Doctor’s mind.

Of wise men I saw a great many in the Abbey to see Newton laid to rest on the evening of his funeral, there being present almost every member of the Royal Society. While the Westminster bell tolled for Newton — nine times for his being a man, and then eighty-five times for his eighty-five years of age — Mrs. Conduitt (she that had been Miss Barton) presented each guest with a mourning ring while a servant handed about sprigs of rosemary, for remembrance, and to hide the smell of death, which, despite the best efforts of the embalmer, was beginning to be all too noticeable.

When she saw me, she coloured a little but maintained her composure. “Colonel Ellis, I wonder that you can set foot in a church,” were all the words she spoke to me.

To see Mrs. Conduitt again at Newton’s funeral and have her speak to me thus was most painful. For she was every bit as beautiful as I had remembered, and even though she was in mourning I was quite distracted by her, for black suited her very much and served to contrast her own natural colours in the same way that ebony or jet will offset gold to best advantage.

I was still in love with her, of course. Even after all these years. I married, some years after I left Newton’s service and took my commission; but my own wife died of the ague some ten years ago. It grieved me only a little to see Miss Barton married to Mister Conduitt, who was a Member of Parliament. Perhaps position in society was all that she ever desired. If so, then her uncle’s funeral must have gratified her very much. Those six members of the Royal Society that bore her uncle’s pall out of the Jerusalem Chamber, through a narrow door, and down a few steps into the candlelit nave of the Abbey, were the first in the realm. These were the Lord Chancellor, the dukes of Montrose and Roxburgh, and the earls of Pembroke, Sussex, and Macclesfield. The Bishop of Rochester, attended by the prebends and choir, performed the office while the mourners were led by a Knight of the Bath. Many more came than were bid, however, and by my own reckoning there were almost three hundred present that night to watch him laid, with every civility, in the floor.

It was a fine service, of infinite light, for there were so many candles lit which shone with such a triumphant splendour upon my head that it seemed to remind me of the absolute potentiality of infinity itself. And as I sat there, my thoughts returned to my conversation with Doctor Clarke and I wondered what satisfaction God could have in our having faith in the teeth of reason? What possible use was there in saying to God that I was convinced of something of which one could not rationally be convinced? Did this not make a lie of faith? The more I considered the matter in relation to Newton, the more I perceived his own dilemma. Faith required him to believe not that which was true but that which appeared to him, whose understanding was so great, to be false. The greatest enemy to his faith appeared to be his own genius. How could he whose whole life had been devoted to understanding, subordinate that which had defined him?

Perhaps alchemy provides the best metaphor for Newton’s own belief in God. For it seems to me his religion was like a regulus — the purer or metallic part of a mineral — which sinks to the bottom of a crucible or a furnace and is thus separated from the remaining matter. This regulus is hidden, and the secret is only in the hands of those who are adept. It was wisdom not yet instructed by revelation; all other religions are good sense perverted by superstition.

Is that what I believe? I should like to believe in something.

When the service was complete, a black slab was laid upon his grave, which lies but a few steps from those of the kings and queens of England. And so all broke up and I walked to Hell, which was a tavern near the entrance to Westminster Hall, in Exchequer Court; and there I thought about these matters some more.

I am fifty years of age. My life grows short. Sometimes I seem to feel my own heart rub against my backbone. It is perhaps my own mortality. Soon I will have all the answers, if more answers there be than are on this Earth. Yet even now I do believe that Newton provided us with the greatest answers of all.