Newton’s Fire

TWENTY
I

The room was maybe twelve feet tall and eight-sided, its walls rich with sculptures that stretched and shrank as Luke turned the lamp this way and that, making them seem eerily alive. There was an altar of some kind in the centre, or maybe a plinth, for it looked roughly the shape and size to hold a small sarcophagus. There was no sarcophagus on it at that moment, however, nothing but dust.

He glanced at Rachel to share the moment with her. She was staring raptly upwards. He looked up too. A great hemispheric dome of blue-black loomed high above them, a wondrous night sky inset into it: a silver crescent moon, galaxies of tiny diamonds, constellations of emeralds, rubies and sapphires, and comets with outstretched tails of crushed crystal that pointed them towards the peak and centre, where a dazzling golden sun presided like God over creation.

‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ murmured Rachel, holding her camera down low to capture as much of it as she could.

‘Never.’

But he tore his eyes from it all the same, for there was too much else to look at, and time was precious. The wall to the right of the door had been sculpted into some kind of mystical tableau. Between a pair of flame-topped pillars, four gowned men studied and discussed some kind of scroll unfurled on a table. Hammers, trowels, squares and compasses and other such tools decorated the walls, while in the far background tiny figures laid out the perimeter of a new city upon a distant hill.

‘It looks Masonic,’ murmured Rachel, taking a photograph.

‘It is Masonic,’ he agreed. Several letters and numbers had been chiselled along the foot of the wall. He crouched, the better to read them. ‘BE 22108 BF,’ he said. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Some kind of signature?’

‘With BE and BF being the initials of the sculptors? Could be. What about the numbers?’

‘The date, maybe?’ suggested Rachel. ‘The twenty-second of January, 1708?’

‘Or the twenty-second of October, 1698? Or even ’88?’

‘Maybe.’

They let it lie, went to the next wall. It was carved in relief, too, borders of cascading flowers framing a life-sized portrait of an elderly man in scholar’s robes. There were two lines inscribed at the foot of this one. The uppermost was simply the man’s name: Elias Ashmole. And directly beneath it: BE 10460 BF. Luke glanced back at the first panel. ‘Same initials,’ he said. ‘Different number.’

They moved together to the third wall. Another portrait, but this time shockingly familiar. Everything was there, from the intellectual high brow to the casually open collar and the exuberant cascades of curled hair. A direct copy from a Kneller portrait the great man had commissioned himself in celebration of the Principia.

‘Sir Isaac Newton,’ murmured Rachel, reading the inscription.

Luke glanced down. Curiously, unlike on the first two walls, the inscription didn’t look quite centred, but was offset a little to the left instead.

Rachel now read out its lower line. ‘BH 01256.’ She gave a sigh. ‘So much for my initials and date theory.’

‘Maybe it’s a cipher of some kind.’

‘Saying what?’

‘I don’t know. It’s in cipher.’

She laughed and gave him a playful slap. ‘I thought maybe you’d know the kind of ciphers these guys used.’

He shook his head. ‘Olivia might. Or my mate Jay. Newtonian ciphers are right up his street.’

‘And he’s in Oxford, is he?’

‘London.’

‘That’s helpful, then.’

They moved to the next wall. Another portrait. ‘John Evelyn,’ read out Rachel. ‘The diarist, right?’

‘Among other things,’ said Luke. Like so many notables of his era, Evelyn had been a polymath: a pioneer in horticulture, medicine and city planning, and one of the driving forces behind the Royal Society. He had a line of cryptic characters beneath his name too. BC 10484. Luke crouched down and ran his finger over them, as though touch might reveal their secrets, like Braille. But all he got was dust. He stood again, looked around. Someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to build this place and make a gallery of its walls. Yet they’d also bricked it up and hidden it down a well shaft so that no one would ever know it was here. Why?

Rachel was already on the next wall. ‘Sir Christopher Wren,’ she said.

‘Makes sense,’ nodded Luke. ‘He wasn’t just mates with Newton and Ashmole, but with Evelyn, too.’

‘So he links them all together.’ She stooped to read out the cipher. ‘KD 11201,’ she said, glancing up in case inspiration had suddenly struck. He shook his head.

They went together to the last two walls, a double-width panel showing a single scene: a great tower at the heart of a walled courtyard. ‘What the hell?’ asked Rachel.

‘The Temple of Solomon,’ said Luke. ‘Taken from one of Newton’s own drawings, I think.’

‘Newton drew Solomon’s Temple?’ frowned Rachel.

‘He was one of the world’s great experts,’ Luke told her. ‘He wrote a famous treatise on it. At least, it was ostensibly about the Sacred Cubit of the Jews, but in truth it was about the Temple. It needed to be rebuilt for the Second Coming, you see, and as the Bible gave its measurements in cubits, you had to know how long a cubit was, or you’d build it wrong. And who better to get it right than Isaac Newton, old Jeova Sanctus Unus himself?’

‘And these other guys? Wren and Evelyn and Ashmole? Were they Temple geeks too?’

‘Wren was,’ said Luke. ‘A couple of days after his daughter died, he got blitzed with Robert Hooke and spent the whole night talking about the Temple. And Evelyn would have known it as well. The Temple had been designed by God, you see, so it was, by definition, perfect. Any city planner worth his salt had to be familiar with it.’ He turned the lamp back on the first wall. ‘And it ties into that, too. Solomon’s Temple is the basis of Masonic lore.’

‘Olivia said Ashmole was a Freemason,’ said Rachel. ‘And you said there were rumours about Newton. What about the others?’

‘I don’t know about Evelyn, but Wren for sure. Freemasonry came out of the construction industry, remember, and London was the construction capital of the world at the time, thanks to the Great Fire. And guess who was responsible for commissioning all the main work?’

‘Don’t tell me: Sir Christopher.’

‘They say he was the number two Mason for a while,’ said Luke. ‘And the first Grand Lodge met bang next door to St Paul’s Cathedral. There’s even a plaque to it.’

Rachel sighed deeply. ‘So what is this place? A monument to these men?’

‘Not to them. By them.’ He turned the lamp on the central plinth. ‘Maybe in honour of whatever Ashmole left Newton to complete, which was meant to go on that.’ He went across, wiped away dust, found nothing beneath.

‘Here,’ said Rachel. Some lines had been inscribed in a panel of green marble halfway along the plinth’s side. He crouched beside her to read them.

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:

And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?

‘St Paul on the road to Damascus,’ said Rachel. ‘I wonder if there’s another on the other side.’

They went around to check and were rewarded.

Below as above, above as below

As it once was, so it will be

Look to my father, the sun, my mother, the moon

In the belly of the wind was I carried

Nurtured in dry earth

Up from this world I rise

So sayeth I, Thrice Great Hermes

‘The Emerald Tablet,’ murmured Luke.

‘What on earth’s it doing here?’

He shrugged. The Hermetic texts had caused intense excitement when they’d been discovered during the Renaissance. People had believed them written in deepest antiquity, perhaps even at the time of Moses himself. Their prestige had faded, however, once they’d been correctly dated to the early centuries AD. Yet alchemists had continued to revere them, especially this particular text. Newton had been so intrigued by it that he’d even studied Arabic in order to make his own translation.

Rachel raised an eyebrow when Luke told her this. ‘Is this his?’ she asked.

‘No. But I think it’s based on his. Just a lot shorter.’

Rachel sighed and shook her head, then she stood and worked her spine. ‘Pelham and Olivia will be having kittens,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Luke. ‘It’s time we were getting back.’