Newton’s Fire

TWENTY-EIGHT
I

Luke called Jay from a payphone by the tube station. ‘It’s not the Monument,’ he told him. ‘It’s St Paul’s. Apparently there’s an inscription to Wren: “Reader, if you want to see his monument, look around”.’

‘Oh,’ said Jay. ‘Yes.’

‘We’re off there now. Just didn’t want you worrying. Later, okay?’ He put down the phone and hurried with Rachel along Cannon Street, dodging the morning’s laggards, surly with weekend hangovers and Monday blues. They passed the southern flank of St Paul’s churchyard and strode up the front steps. A pair of French schoolteachers were struggling to corral a large party of unruly pupils and Luke and Rachel picked up their pace without a word, not wanting to get caught behind them, only to run into four police officers by the main doors, bulked up with body-armour, automatic weapons held aslant across their chests. Sudden memories of last night’s chase and fears of an ambush hit them simultaneously; but they held their nerve and the police gave them barely a glance.

It took Luke’s eyes a few moments to adjust to the interior gloom of the great cathedral, for the familiar contours to come into focus. The organist and choir burst into a few bars of glorious noise as they bought their tickets, rehearsing Handel for some upcoming service. Walking down the main aisle, their eyes were irresistibly drawn upwards to the majestic cupola with its richly painted biblical scenes, the statues of stern-faced prophets around its base and the dizzying golden gallery at its peak. The size of it. Photographs and memory couldn’t hope to do it justice. And all held up by the sixteen evenly spaced pillars that created a kind of inner sanctum in which wooden chairs had been arranged in concentric circles around a vast marble mosaic in the floor, a starburst of thirty-two points around a gleaming brass disc. And, around its rim, just as Rachel had said, a Latin phrase was inscribed.

Lector Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice

They gazed down at it for a few moments, as if expecting enlightenment to descend upon them like the Holy Spirit. It didn’t. Rachel sighed. ‘This is hopeless, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘We haven’t got a prayer.’

‘If it were easy, someone would have found it already.’

‘Maybe they have. Maybe they found it centuries ago.’

He shook his head. ‘Those people last night didn’t think so.’

‘No.’

‘So let’s assume they know what they’re about. Let’s assume that further progress isn’t impossible. Let’s assume we’re missing something.’

‘Like what?’

He slid her a wry look. If I knew that … ‘How about John Evelyn?’ he said.

‘What about him?’ she asked.

‘There were four of them on the vault’s walls. We know Ashmole’s role: he acquired papers and some other stuff from Dee and the Tradescants that he passed on to Newton. And he was also presumably responsible for organising the vault beneath the Ashmolean. We know Newton’s role. Ashmole needed him to complete and then hide whatever it was. And we know Wren’s role. Maybe he designed the Ashmolean vault. For sure he designed this place. And he linked the others together. But what about Evelyn? How did he earn his spot on the roster?’

‘Maybe he was the brains of the outfit.’

‘Sure,’ said Luke. ‘Because that was what a cabal with Newton and Wren was lacking: brainpower.’

Rachel laughed acknowledgement. ‘Okay. Brains is the wrong word. Leadership. Vision. Drive. Whatever you want to call it. I mean, weren’t his great loves city planning and horticulture?’

‘So?’

‘I don’t know. Designing parks, planting acorns, campaigning against pollution. Maybe I’m romanticising him, but he sounds the kind of person to whom long-term outcomes mattered more than taking credit.’

‘An eminence grise,’ said Luke. ‘I could buy that. But where does it get us?’

‘You asked about his role,’ said Rachel. ‘That was my suggestion. I never promised it would get us anywhere.’

Luke looked upwards. Sunlight flooded through the plain glass windows that girdled the base of the dome. The organist struck up again, and then the choir, a growing swell of joyous sound; and he felt a mild, toe-tingling vertigo at the sheer scale and glory of this place, mixed with awe at the courage and skill of the masons and carpenters and painters who’d risked their lives on precarious wooden scaffolds, just a stumble away from certain death. The weight of that thing. It was unimaginable. And all resting on this ring of sixteen slender pillars. But then he frowned. The pillars weren’t actually in a ring after all, but rather in eight pairs. An octagon holding up a dome; he shivered with the ghost of an idea. But then Rachel touched his forearm and it vanished.

‘Let’s go up,’ she said.

‘Up?’

She nodded down at the brass disc in the floor. ‘‘‘As below, it shines”.’ Then she looked up at the dome. ‘‘‘As above, it shines.” They do call that thing the great lantern, don’t they?’

‘These places needed light,’ said Luke. ‘You couldn’t just flip a switch.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But even so. It’s a theme, isn’t it? Something to investigate.’

Luke hesitated. The longer they stayed here, he knew, the greater would be the risk that those men would pick up their trail again. Yet the urge to find the truth proved stronger than caution. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.