Newton’s Fire (26 page)

Queenstown Station was a ten-minute walk. They made it in five. They bought tickets at a machine, joined the platform scrum. The first train was too full for any more passengers, but they squeezed onto the second. ‘Can’t say I blame Jay,’ murmured Rachel, her face jammed against Luke’s throat. They changed at Vauxhall, headed north three stops. A great wave of commuters washed them out the exit, and there it was, a great Doric column topped by a gilded urn glowing brilliantly in the morning sunlight. Its door was locked, however, and no one answered Luke’s knock. Fifteen minutes till opening.

Rachel beckoned Luke over to see some Latin text inscribed in the stone. ‘Look at the date,’ she said. ‘Sixteen sixty-six comes out as MDCLXVI in Latin. Each letter used exactly once.’

‘That’s one reason they called it the
annus mirabilis
,’ nodded Luke. ‘Though actually they were expecting an
annus horibilis
. Six six six was the number of the beast, so people were pretty certain it was going to be bad. Then there was a comet in late 1664, another in 1665.’ In fact it had been the same one coming back from orbiting the sun, but hardly anyone had realized that. ‘People were expecting all kinds of terrors. Then the plague arrived. And the Great Fire. You can see why they thought it ordained. But the year wasn’t all bad. It was Newton’s own
annus mirabilis
too. The year he supposedly saw the apple fall and so solved all the secrets of the universe.’

‘Supposedly?’ asked Rachel. ‘Are you saying the apple never fell?’

‘No, it probably did,’ admitted Luke. ‘Newton certainly told the story himself, though not till he was an old man. And for sure he exaggerated its significance. He wanted to make it seem he’d had his breakthroughs early, because of that priority dispute with Leibniz I—’

He broke off as a portly, balding man arrived outside the Monument’s door, popping the last bite of a croissant into his mouth even as he fished keys from his pocket. They hurried to intercept him. He held a hand over his mouth to prevent a spray of crumbs. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said.

‘Please,’ said Rachel. ‘We don’t want to go up. At least we do, but we’re mainly here to see your basement.’

‘My basement?’ he frowned. ‘There’s nothing there.’

‘There is to us,’ said Luke. ‘We’re science historians. Your vault is scientific history.’

‘Go through the City Authority. They can arrange it for you.’

‘We’re only in London for the day,’ said Luke. ‘We go back home this afternoon.’

‘Please,’ said Rachel. ‘Just a quick peek. We’ll be gone before you know it.’

He sighed extravagantly, as if they didn’t realize the trouble they were putting him to. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But not a word to your friends, okay? Or they’ll all be here wanting to see it.’

‘Our secret,’ said Rachel. ‘We promise.’

Deception and subterfuge didn’t come easily to Jay. Apart from anything else, he found it hard to read on people’s faces whether they believed him or not. He’d therefore become anxious that Luke and Rachel had seen through his efforts to send them on a wild-goose chase and were planning to double back to see what he was up to, so he’d followed them at a cautious distance all the way to Queenstown Road Station. Even that hadn’t made him feel entirely secure. He’d kept expecting them to reappear from the station, so he’d found it impossible to tear himself away. He’d chided himself for excessive caution, but such compulsions were part of his condition, and there was little he could do about it.

When he’d finally convinced himself it was safe, he hurried back to his flat and bolted himself in. He drew the thick curtains to encase himself in the comforting cocoon of their privacy. Then he unzipped the case Luke had brought and set the laptop inside on his desk.

This was why he’d hustled them off earlier. This was why he’d sent them to the Monument.

He opened it up, turned it on, checked for recently opened files. It took him to a folder of photographs and a word document. He copied them to his own machine then zipped the laptop away again as it had been before, so that Luke and Rachel wouldn’t know. Then he went through the photographs. What he saw amazed and gratified, yet ultimately disappointed, him.

It wasn’t there.

He went through the photographs again, allowing himself enough time with each to imprint them onto his mind and build up a composite image of the vault. Then he sat back and let his brain whirr and hum with ideas and combinations, with deductions and inferences. He pulled volumes down from his shelves. He browsed the internet. He bought, downloaded and consulted various journal articles and e-books. And finally a feeling settled on him, a feeling of such perfect clarity that it was a joy. He knew where it was. He knew
precisely
where it was. And this time there was no possibility of a mistake. He smiled with satisfaction as he reached for his phone.

Uncle Avram was certain to be pleased.

The trap door was locked in place by a pair of steel bolts. The custodian grimaced as he stooped to release them. Then he raised the trapdoor by its handle. A steep stone staircase spiralled down into a small circular room. Luke ducked his head to avoid the stone lintel as he descended; but it was instantly obvious that there was nothing there but dust and an air-conditioning unit.

‘Told you,’ said the man.

They inspected and photographed the place anyway, but that was that. They thanked him and retreated back upstairs, brushing grit and cobwebs from their hair. ‘Are you open yet?’ asked Rachel. ‘For going up top, I mean.’

The man shot the bolts and checked his watch. ‘It’ll be a fiver each,’ he said.

They set off upwards. Slit windows at regular intervals allowed Luke to gauge their progress, as did a glance over the handrail at the lengthening corkscrew beneath. The stairs narrowed to single file as they neared the top. The breeze outside was surprisingly strong. ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Rachel, tucking hair back behind her ear.

‘Maybe we’ll know when we see it.’

The Thames lay grey before them, twinkling with morning sunlight. The London Eye and other buildings of the South Bank offered hazy reflections of themselves on its rumpled surface, as did a warship moored near Tower Bridge. Rachel peered through the safety mesh down at Pudding Lane, seat of the Great Fire. ‘Can you imagine how that poor baker must have felt?’ she asked. ‘To have burned down half of London.’

‘If he really did,’ said Luke.

‘How do you mean?’

‘No one at the time believed it was an accident. They blamed enemy action. They actually strung up some poor French halfwit for it. But the powers-that-were needed it to have been an accident. So they held an inquiry and
hey presto
, a negligent baker.’

Rachel frowned. ‘Why did they need it to have been an accident?’

‘A quirk of the law. Landowners had to rebuild any property destroyed in an act of war, but tenants were on the hook for accidents. Parliament was made up of landowners. Guess which side they came down on?’

Rachel laughed. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘A little,’ admitted Luke. ‘There was a genuine concern that if landlords had to pay, London would never be rebuilt. Tenants had little choice: they needed somewhere to live. Besides, it probably was an accident. Fires were common enough: all those wooden houses, all that open flame. And this one would have burned itself out, just like the rest, except for a brutal wind that kept scattering embers and starting new blazes. No arsonist could have arranged that. And even then the mayor could have contained it by knocking down some houses as a firebreak; but he was too cheap. My only point is that everyone takes it as settled that it was an accident, but it’s not. And if it really was arson, there have been some pretty interesting names in the frame, not least our friends Sir Christopher Wren and John Evelyn.’

‘No way!’

‘Wren was a highly ambitious architect,’ said Luke. ‘He wanted a cathedral of his own, because that was how you made your name at the time. He’d already been commissioned to repair St Paul’s before the fire, because Cromwell had left it in such a terrible state. But the Dean didn’t have enough money to demolish and rebuild, as Wren wanted, so he insisted he mend and make do instead. Then came the fire.’

‘And Evelyn?’

‘He
hated
London. A loathsome Golgotha, he called it. He wanted it rebuilt on the European model, with great piazzas, avenues and parks; with a decent sewage system and the banishment of noxious trades.’

‘Disliking pollution isn’t the same as arson, Luke.’

He grinned. ‘Did you know that within days of the fire, both Evelyn and Wren had come up with plans for completely remodelling the city?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘I’m still not buying.’

‘Me neither,’ smiled Luke. ‘Not while we can blame the French.’

The northern skyline was crowded with the blockish monsters of the City. To the west, the morning sun put a halo around the dome of St Paul’s, while early-bird tourists on the outside galleries struck sparks with their camera flashes. They found themselves staring raptly at it. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Luke.

‘St Paul does seem to keep popping up,’ agreed Rachel.

‘Our cabal inscribed both sides of that plinth to him. Once for the Damascene conversion, the other to Balinus the secret alchemist. But why settle for a plinth in a secret vault in Oxford when you’ve got a building with his name on it at the very heart of your new Jerusalem?’

Rachel gave a soft laugh. ‘Have you ever taken the tour?’ she asked.

‘Not since school. Why?’

‘I went on it last year. A friend from Turkey was over and wanted to see the sights. Wren’s son composed an epitaph to his father. It’s on his tomb and also around the rim of a great brass ring in the floor directly beneath the dome. I can’t remember the Latin, but I do remember how our guide translated it.’

‘And?’ asked Luke.

She smiled at him, her eyes shining. ‘It says: “Reader, if you want to see his monument, look around”.’

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