Newton’s Fire

ONE
I

A country house attic, Suffolk, England, Sunday June 5th

Luke Hayward was lifting a stack of documents from the cardboard box when he glimpsed the sliver of sepia paper about two thirds of the way down. It looked altogether more intriguing than anything he’d seen so far. Stiffer and older and with a fractionally compressed edge, as though it had been cut by a blunted guillotine. His heartbeat accelerated slightly; but only slightly. Experience had taught him not to get his hopes up at such faint hints of promise.

He put the stack down on the dust sheet, lifted off and set aside the top half, then a bit more, exposing the front of a faded manila folder on which someone had scrawled S.I.N. in smudged black ink. His heart gave another kick, more pronounced this time, more warranted. His mouth was dry, he realized; he swallowed some saliva then paused to wipe his hands, deliberately taking his time. If disappointment awaited him, as surely it did, he could at least defer it a few more moments.

He crouched down, lifted up the front flap of the folder with his index finger, pulling the sheet with it a little way, too, as though glued to it by habit; but then he lifted the flap further and it released with a faint whisper and fell back and outwards; and Luke froze for a moment, staring down at it in disbelief.

Six months he’d been hunting. Six months. Yet not once in that time had he ever truly thought he was going to find anything. Not truly. Not in his heart. Not if he was honest with himself.

But he’d have recognized that handwriting anywhere.

He set the flap back down, rose to his full height, took a pair of white cotton archivist’s gloves from his pocket and pulled them on over his fingers like a surgeon prepping for an operation. He smoothed the dust sheet out over the attic floorboards, brushed away some dust and grit of fallen plaster, then opened the folder all the way. There were four sheets of the paper, he could now see, not just one. He fanned them out a little. Each bore the tell-tale creases of once having been folded into quarters and slit along one edge to make a miniature notebook, much as he’d sometimes done himself as a child, playing at being a spy. Almost certainly alchemical papers, then, for it had been one of the great man’s quirks to dedicate such notebooks to his alchemical studies. But the sheets had been unfolded many years ago, and the decades spent weighted down near the foot of this tall stack of papers had pressed them flat.

It was too gloomy here for Luke to read. He carefully picked up the top sheet, took it to the nearest window. The light was better here, but still not ideal, for the panes were small, dirty and obscured by fingers of ivy. Besides, the writing had blurred and faded a little over the centuries, perhaps from these less than ideal conditions, exposed to extremes of heat and cold and damp. Add to that the characteristic tightness and closeness of his handwriting, and the arcane subject matter of the text, and it took Luke a good two minutes just to make sense of the top three lines.

Saturn will put into your hand a deep glittering mineral wch in his mine is grown of first matter of all metals. If this mineral after its preparation wch he will show until thee is in a strong sublimation mixed, with three parts

The passage stopped abruptly mid-sentence. Beneath it, though upside down, thanks to Isaac Newton’s quirk with the notebooks, was a citation from St. Didier’s Triomphe Hermetique, one of the alchemical texts the great man had most admired. It had been published in 1689, if Luke’s memory served, though Newton hadn’t got hold of his own copy until 1690. Luke held the sheet up to the window again. When he squinted hard at the paper itself, he could just about make out a watermark: a horn at the top, the capitalized letters IR beneath it. He knew the paper well. Newton had bought a large stock of it in the mid 1680s; had used it, on and off, until around 1695. Put together with the Saint-Didier citation, it dated this paper to first half of the 1690s; most probably from autumn 1692 to late 1693, the most intense period of alchemical experimentation and study in Newton’s life.

Luke’s hand was trembling a little, he noticed. As an academic specialising in the Scientific Revolution, he’d seen thousands of pages of Newton’s handwriting and annotations over the years; and many hundreds in the past year alone, when dismissal from the university had given him the time to begin the research for his long-planned biography. But none had affected him quite like this, for they’d all been in libraries and museums and private collections. They’d all been known about, studied, debated.

But this was new. This could be anything.

He turned the page over. Again the patchwork writing, passages in English, French and Latin. It had been Newton’s practice, when studying any new field, to read the acknowledged authorities in it, preferably in their original language, copying out any passages that particularly caught his eye. Luke recognized a citation from Philatheles and two lines from the Emerald Tablet, but otherwise the extracts were unfamiliar.

He returned the page to its folder, picked up the second sheet, hesitated. He’d promised Penelope Martyn he’d let her know at once should he find anything. He also needed to photograph these pages and email them to his client’s lawyer. But he couldn’t resist another quick look. This sheet too was filled with alchemical passages; but there was something else overleaf, something different: four words scrawled so fiercely near its foot that Newton had evidently damaged his quill while doing it, for the ink was thick and blotted.

Fatio O my Fatio

He set the page carefully down, conscious of a warmth in his throat and cheeks, flushing slightly with vicarious embarrassment, as though he’d walked in by accident on someone’s private shame. And, just for a moment, he felt uncertain what to do.

No. That wasn’t quite true. He knew exactly what he was going to do.

It was just that he felt wretched about doing it.