Newton’s Fire

TWO
I

‘You found them,’ said Penelope Martyn in an awed murmur, when Luke tracked her to her kitchen. ‘I don’t believe it.’

Luke allowed himself a smile. ‘I don’t either,’ he admitted.

‘And? Are they … are they what you were hoping?’

He didn’t quite know how to answer that. Her house was grand but badly rundown; and he’d got the distinct impression, when they’d chatted earlier, that a windfall would be more than welcome. ‘They’re alchemical papers,’ he said carefully. ‘Four sheets, written front and back. Citations from other authors, as far as I’ve been able to tell.’

‘Oh.’ She tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the shadow of disappointment from her expression. ‘So not his original work then?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ He’d already explained to her the sliding scale of value for Newton’s papers: the highly prized letters he’d written to both his famous and lesser-known friends; the coveted annotations for Principia Mathematica and Opticks; the significantly lesser interest in his theological and alchemical writings, especially those that didn’t represent Newton’s own thinking, but were merely his transcriptions of other authors. ‘It could have been worse,’ he said. ‘They could have been his papers from the Royal Mint.’

‘Newton was at the Royal Mint?’

‘He joined just a year or two after he wrote these pages, as it happens. Ran the place for decades. Oversaw a complete recoinage of the realm.’

She shook her head. ‘Why would a man like Newton take a job like that?’

Luke shrugged. It was a question that had vexed many academics over the years, and no one had really come up with a satisfactory explanation. ‘The Principia Mathematica had made him a star,’ he said. ‘We think maybe he wanted to go to London to bask in all that glory. The Royal Mint was his ticket. And the money was pretty good too, especially after he was appointed Master.’

‘Oh, well.’ She touched the papers with her fingertip. ‘Is there anything of interest in them?’

‘I haven’t been through them properly yet,’ Luke told her. ‘I wanted to show them to you at once. Besides …’ He gestured at the cramped handwriting, the upside-down passages, the esoteric words, the passages in Latin and French, indicating how hard they were to read. ‘But there is at least one thing.’

‘Yes?’

He pointed out the four words to her. Then, unsure of her eyesight, he read them out aloud. ‘It says “Fatio O my Fatio”.’

‘I don’t understand.’ She frowned. ‘Who’s Fatio? What’s Fatio?’

‘It’s a who.’ He stooped to unzip his laptop case, pulled out his digital camera. ‘A he, to be precise. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. A young Swiss mathematician who became a close friend of Newton’s in the early 1690s. Perhaps even a very close friend.’

‘Very close?’ She tipped her head to one side. ‘You’re not implying …?’

Luke smiled. ‘It’s possible. Some people certainly think so.’

‘Sir Isaac Newton? And some young Swiss man?’

‘There’s no evidence whatsoever that anything physical ever happened between them,’ said Luke, setting the first page square on the tablecloth, the better to photograph it. ‘Though they did spend a week together in London one time, when no one else even knew that Fatio was in the country.’ He checked the image in his digital display, turned the page over to photograph its reverse. ‘And Newton later implored him to live with him in Cambridge.’

‘My word.’ She let out a bark of a laugh. ‘Maybe that’s why Uncle Bernie wanted these papers.’

Luke set the second page in place. ‘How do you mean?’

A little colour pinked her cheeks. ‘They called them “confirmed bachelors” in my day,’ she said, with just a hint of a smile, as though unaccustomed to revealing family skeletons, yet rather enjoying it. ‘“Not the marrying kind”. I had no idea what that actually meant. I simply assumed Uncle Bernie hadn’t yet met the right woman. I even hoped I’d be able to help find her for him myself. He was so nice to me. The only Martyn who truly welcomed me into the family. But then I called on him without warning one afternoon.’ She gave another of her barking laughs and blushed even deeper. ‘Well, I’m sure you can imagine.’

‘Must have been a shock,’ said Luke, photographing the third paper.

‘For both of us,’ she admitted. ‘All three of us, I should say. We girls were so naive back then. You wouldn’t believe.’

He photographed the back of the last page, held up his camera. ‘May I email these off? The sooner my client gets them, the sooner he’ll make an offer. If he wants them, that is.’

‘And I’m not obliged to accept, you said?’

‘Of course not. All he asks is the opportunity to make the first bid.’ His client’s lawyer had been absurdly emphatic about that, repeating it at every opportunity. ‘You’ll be perfectly free to accept it, reject it or negotiate something better.’ The house was too remote for his own WiFi service, but Penelope had assured him earlier that he’d be welcome to use the wired broadband she’d had put in to tempt her grandkids to come and visit. He plugged his laptop into her router, transferred the photographs, attached them to an email and sent them on their way. The high resolution files were big, however, and her connection was slow. ‘This could take a while,’ he said.

‘We’ll have a nice cup of tea,’ said Penelope.

He toured the walls as her old kettle struggled to the boil, looking at family photographs. A surly lot, for the most part, with long noses and sour upper lips, posing grudgingly for the camera. But then he reached a picture of a young woman with short brown hair and an enchanting smile leaning against the driver door of an old grey-blue Rover.

‘My great-niece Rachel,’ Penelope said, appearing at his side with a plate of shortbread biscuits. ‘She’s one of your lot.’

‘My lot?’

‘An academic. She’s doing her doctorate at Caius College, Cambridge. She wants to be a lecturer like you.’

‘Ah,’ said Luke, a touch guiltily. He’d used old university letterheaded paper for his correspondence with Penelope; and somehow he’d neglected to let her know about their parting of the ways following his convictions for assault and offences against the Terrorism Act. ‘What’s her field?’ he asked.

‘The archaeology and history of the ancient Near East, I think. Something like that, anyway. Between you and me, I find it terribly hard to follow.’

‘She looks nice.’

‘As opposed to my own brood, you mean?’

‘I didn’t mean that at all,’ protested Luke, a little too hotly. ‘I just meant that she looks nice.’ His laptop beeped, sparing his further blushes. He went to check it. The battery was running low. ‘Mind if I recharge?’ he asked.

‘Be my guest.’ She pointed him to a spare socket, cleared her throat, now suffering from awkwardness of her own. ‘I hate to ask,’ she said, ‘but do you have any idea exactly how interested your client might be in these particular papers?’

Luke hesitated. He’d already given her a ballpark estimate and was reluctant to do more. Go too low and she’d think he was trying to fleece her; go too high and he’d be setting her up for disappointment. He checked his screen to find that the photographs were on their way, gave her a blandly optimistic smile. ‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough,’ he said.