Newton’s Fire

SEVENTEEN
I

There was silence in the basement gallery, save for the ticking of clocks around the walls. Olivia folded her arms emphatically as they turned to her. ‘No,’ she said.

‘No, what?’ asked Pelham. ‘You don’t even know what we’re about to suggest.’

‘Yes, I do. You’re about to suggest I dig up my floor. And the answer is no. This is a museum, not an oil field.’

‘We’ve got to,’ said Pelham. ‘Don’t you realize what a find this is? There could be anything down there.’

‘Exactly. Which is why we’re not going to risk damaging it.’

‘But we-’

‘No. I’m sorry. That’s the end of it.’

‘Then what do we do?’ asked Rachel. ‘We can’t pretend it’s not there.’

‘And we won’t. I’ll call Albie first thing in the morning. He can verify your readings, put together a plan. And when we next have an appropriate window, he can excavate with the kind of care something like this demands.’

Luke glanced at Pelham. Pelham nodded. ‘I’m afraid there’s something about this business we haven’t told you yet,’ he said to Olivia.

Olivia’s eyes narrowed. ‘Go on.’

‘We’re not the only ones looking for this,’ said Luke. He told her about his day: his anonymous client, Rachel’s aunt, Crane Court and their narrow escape from Pelham’s apartment.

Olivia listened in stony silence. ‘How could you keep this from me?’ she demanded, when he was done. ‘Don’t you realize how much trouble you’re in? How much trouble you’ve put me in?’

‘None of us are exactly here by choice,’ said Pelham.

‘You should have told me.’

‘Yes,’ admitted Luke. ‘You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry. We all are. But we’re riding a bolting horse here. It’s all we can do to cling on.’

‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ said Olivia. ‘You still can’t dig up my floor. I don’t care who’s after you.’

Luke crouched, placed his palm flat on the floor, tantalized by the mysterious gold just a few feet beneath. Yet he knew in his heart that Olivia was right. Even if they could get down, this was too important a site to risk. He smiled wryly at Rachel. ‘Your aunt asked me something earlier. She asked me why a man like Newton would take a job at the Royal Mint. I gave her the usual reasons: status, income, London. But the truth is that no one really knows. What if this is why? I mean, Newton drove himself crazy with alchemical experiments in 1693. What if that wasn’t pure research? What if he’d simply needed a large quantity of gold to complete whatever Ashmole left him? He was an alchemist; of course he’d have tried alchemy first. But when that failed him, where would he have turned?’

‘The Royal Mint,’ murmured Olivia.

‘The position of Warden had always been a sinecure,’ said Luke. ‘But not under Newton. He designed new coining presses, invented new alloys. He oversaw an entire recoinage of the realm. And he was the greatest mathematician in British history, so I’m guessing he could have run rings around the auditors. He could have taken however much gold he’d needed and no one would ever have known.’

Pelham grinned down at the floor. ‘Sir Isaac’s stolen bullion,’ he said. ‘How cool is that?’

‘All the more reason to treat it with respect,’ said Olivia.

Rachel had gone to consult the Newton paper. Now she frowned. ‘I think maybe we’re missing a trick,’ she said, tapping the text. ‘I mean we’re all pretty much agreed on what this means, right? Ashmole left something to Newton on the understanding that he’d complete it, bring it here and hide it beneath the floor. But this was a working laboratory by then. The foremost laboratory in England. And then an anatomy room. That’s right, yes?’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia. ‘Why?’

‘So you were absolutely correct earlier when you said that Ashmole couldn’t possibly have expected Newton to come here with a pickaxe and dig up the floor. Which means there must have been some other way down. A way that both he and Newton knew about.’

‘There isn’t,’ said Olivia. ‘We’ve rebuilt this place god knows how many times. If there were any secret passages or the like, we’d have found them long ago, believe me. And even if one had somehow escaped our notice for over three hundred years, do you honestly expect us to find it in just one night?’

‘You can’t think of anything?’ asked Luke. ‘No anomalies at all?’

She shook her head. ‘We found an old septic tank when we put in the extension out back. But that was only a few feet deep, and we’ve concreted it up, anyway. And then there was the old well, of course. But that’s it.’

‘The old well?’ asked Rachel dryly. ‘You don’t mean as in “Salomans House well concealed”?’

‘Oh my good lord,’ murmured Olivia, clasping her hands by her mouth. ‘Yes, I rather suppose I do.’