Dark Matter

  “Because I believe that whoever killed Kennedy had no understanding of the code,” explained Newton. “For there is much that is contradictious between our first enciphered message and the second; and yet the underlying elements are the same.”

  “Are you suggesting that Major Mornay’s murderer did not kill the other three?”

  “Merely that he did not kill Kennedy and Mercer. For only those two murders have the peculiar alchemical flourishes that were designed to intrigue me. Whoever killed Major Mornay only wanted him dead and out of my sight.”

  “But why?”

  “We should need to solve the cipher to know that,” said Newton.

  “So you believe that whoever killed Kennedy and Mercer merely wanted to lead you away from those golden guineas.”

  “Kennedy was killed because he was set to watch Mercer. Mercer was killed because he was being watched. Because he might have given away the names of his fellow coiners.”

  “This is most confusing,” said I.

  “On the contrary,” said Newton. “My hypothesis agrees with the phenomena very well, and I confess I begin to see the light.” He nodded firmly. “Yes, I think it very probable because a great part of what we have seen easily flows from that which would otherwise seem inexplicable.”

  “If you do not think that Major Mornay’s killer is responsible for the deaths of Kennedy and Mercer,” said I, “what do you think of him for George Macey’s murder?”

  “I like him very well for it. But there is no evidence. Therefore I can frame no hypothesis. In truth I have much neglected what I do know about George Macey.”

  Newton got up from his chair and walked over to the bookshelf where the Mint records were kept, as well as several numismatic histories, account books, law reports, Mister Violet’s Commons Report of 1651, and the small library that George Macey had owned, being a Latin primer, a book on mathematics, a book on the French language, and a book of shorthand.

  “It is not possible to know much about him now,” said I.

  “Except that his reading showed a commendable desire for self-improvement,” said Newton. “It is always best that a man educate himself. The superior education is the one wrought from private study. Even I taught myself mathematics. And yet I wonder that Mister Macey wished to learn French. My own French is less than perfect. For I like the French not at all.”

  “Since we are still at war with them,” I said, “I cannot fault you for that, Doctor.”

  Ignoring Melchior, who wrapped his tail around Newton’s hand like a whore’s shawl, Newton picked up Mister Macey’s French grammar, blew the dust off the cover—which was always considerable in the Mint office, from the constant vibration of the coining presses, not to mention the cannon—and turned the pages of the book. To my surprise, for I knew Newton had already examined the book once before, he found a paper that was pressed between the leaves.

  “It’s a bookseller’s account,” said Newton. “Samuel Lowndes, by the Savoy.”

  The Savoy was a great town house on the south side ofthe Strand, with grounds stretching down to the river. Most of it was given over to a hospital for sick and wounded seamen and soldiers, so that the whole area teemed with men recently returned from the war in Flanders—some of them terribly mutilated by grapeshot or bursting charge; and there were several poor wretches that I saw who were missing limbs or parts of their faces.

  The remainder of the building was leased out to a French church, the King’s Printing Press, two gaols—both full—some private lodgings, and a number of shops that included Samuel Lowndes, the bookseller.

  Mister Lowndes was a slight figure of a man, with an urchin’s face and a most obsequious manner so that the minute Newton and I came through his door, he pulled off his apron, put on his wig and coat, and, with wringing hands, waited upon the Doctor in a most servile, cringing way.

  “I want a bookseller,” muttered Newton. “Not a Lord Chamberlain.”

  “Doctor Newton,” exclaimed Mister Lowndes. “Why, sir, what a very great honour you do my shop by coming into it. Do you search for something in particular, sir?”

  “I search for information about a customer you had last year, Mister Lowndes. A Mister George Macey, who worked for His Majesty’s Mint in the Tower. As I do myself.”

  “Yes, I recall Mister Macey. Indeed, now I come to think more upon it, it’s almost a year since I have seen him. How is Mister Macey?”

  “Deceased,” Newton replied bluntly.

  “I am right sorry to hear it.”

  “There were certain circumstances about Mister Macey’s death which show the grim character of homicide,” explained Newton. “And it touching upon the business of the Mint, we consider it a matter imperative to speak to all who can shed some light as to what his habits were. We have recently discovered that he was customer of yours, Mister Lowndes. Therefore I would be grateful if you could assist me by bending your recollection to other people you might have seen him with; some names he may have mentioned to you; or perhaps even the books he bought.”

  Mister Lowndes looked most discomfited by the news of Macey’s murder; and yet he quickly did as Newton had asked and straightaway consulted a ledger book that contained a record of all his customer accounts.

  “He was a pleasant man,” said Mister Lowndes, turning the ledger’s thick pages. “Not an educated one like yourself, Doctor. But a conscientious one; and governed by a Christian sense of duty.”

  “Very commendable, I’m sure,” murmured Newton.

  Mister Lowndes found the page he had been searching for. “Here we are, sir,” he said. “Yes, he purchased several books of a didactic nature, as you can see for yourself. And one that surprised me very much, being so unlike the others. Also, it was expensive. Very expensive for a man of his means.”

  Following Mister Lowndes’s forefinger upon the ledger, Newton observed the written entry for a moment and then read aloud the title and author to which the bookseller did refer. “Polygraphia, by Trithemius. I know your Latin is good, Mister Ellis. But how is your Greek, sir?”

  “Polygraphia? I think that would mean ‘much writing,’” said I, whose Greek was never much good at all.

  “Quite so,” agreed Mister Lowndes. “Although the book itself was written in Latin.”

  “And yet Macey had no Latin,” objected Newton. “The elementary character of the Latin primer he bought from Mister Lowndes would seem to confirm as much.” Newton paused and tapped his bony finger upon the page of the ledger. “Did he explain why he wanted this particular book?”

  “I seem to recall that he intended it to be a gift for someone. But who I cannot say.”

  “Could you perhaps find me another copy of this book, Mister Lowndes?”

  “Not for several weeks,” admitted Mister Lowndes. “I had to send off to Germany to obtain the copy that Mister Macey ordered. You might, of course, search around St. Paul’s. The Latin coffee house near there often holds auctions of rare and expensive books such as the one for which you search.”

  Newton grunted without much enthusiasm at such a laborious prospect.

  “But I believe I know where you might have sight of a copy, at least, for I ordered a copy of this same book once before.”

  Mister Lowndes turned back the pages of his ledger until he found what he was looking for.

  “Here we are, Doctor. That other customer was Doctor Wallis. I ordered the same book for him.”

  “Doctor John Wallis?” repeated Newton. “Do you mean he that is the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford University, sir?”

  “Aye sir, the very same. I believe I said as much myself to Mister Macey. He seemed most interested by the news.”

  “So am I, sir,” admitted Newton. “So am I.”

  Early the next morning we took the flying coach to Oxford, which was a most vexatious journey, with much dangerous water on the road because of recent heavy rain, and there was almost some mischance to the coach, but no time lost, so that we ar
rived at our destination about thirteen hours after leaving London.

  Newton had many friends at Oxford. Chief among these was David Gregory, a young Scotsman who held the Savilian Chair of Astronomy and who, at very short notice, dined us very well at Merton, which is a very pretty place, and was my own college, which made me feel mighty peculiar, my being back there.

  I believe Gregory must have been about thirty-eight years of age when first I met him. He was a typical Scot, being small and whey-faced, and very fond of his bottle and his pipe, so that his rooms stank of tobacco like the most fumigated London coffee house; indeed his body seemed incapable of supporting life by any other breath than the smoke of some sweet-scented Virginia. It was to Newton’s influence that the younger Gregory owed his current eminence at Oxford. Over dinner they began to talk of Doctor Wallis.

  “But you have not met Wallis before?” asked Gregory. “He was at Cambridge, was he not?”

  “We have met, yes. More often we have corresponded. He has been most persistent that I should publish something—nay, anything—in his Opera Mathematica. No doubt he is currently reading the letter I wrote to him yesterday, and my arrival here in Oxford, as a sign that I have changed my mind upon the matter.”

  “So why do you wish to see him?”

  “It is the business of the Mint that brings me to Oxford. I was hoping that Wallis might help me with some enquiries. Yet more I cannot say, for it is a delicate matter and most secret.”

  “Of course,” said Gregory, puffing away like a Dutch boatswain. “But I don’t think that Doctor Wallis is any stranger to secrecy himself. I have heard it said that he does confidential work for milord Sunderland. I think it is something to do with the war, although I wonder how an eighty-year-old man can help to defeat the French. Perhaps he sets them calculations and bids to bore them into submission.”

  “Is he still so fond of mathematics?” exclaimed Newton.

  “Indeed he is, sir. He is a scholar of real worth, for I have seen him extracting square roots without pen or paper, to seven places.”

  “I have seen a horse clap its hoof upon the ground seven times,” Newton remarked. “But I do not think it was a mathematician.”

  “He is not your peer,” said Gregory. “You have developed mathematics quite astonishingly.”

  “For my own part,” answered Newton, “I think I have barely skimmed the surface of the great ocean of knowledge. Marvellous secrets still remain to be uncovered. It is the challenge of our age to demonstrate the frame of the system of the world. And so long as we continue to distinguish between the formal reason of nature and the act of divine will, I do not see why we should not believe that God himself does not directly inform nature so that the world necessarily emanates from it.”

  Here Newton did look at me most directly, so that when he spoke again I formed the impression that perhaps Miss Barton had reported our conversation after all.

  After breakfast the next day, we received a note from Wallis inviting us to call on him at eleven of the clock, and at the appointed hour we did go to Exeter College to see him. I did not like Exeter as much as Merton, Magdalen, or Christchurch, it being disfigured by large and unsightly chimneys, not to mention much building work being done in the front quadrangle, so that I wondered how Wallis could study there. But this was soon explained when we entered the Professor’s rooms and met Wallis himself, since it was quickly evident that Doctor Wallis was a little deaf, which was no great wonder in a man of his age. He was of medium height, with a small head and slightly infirm of gait, and leaned upon a stick and a boy of about fourteen years old, whom he introduced to us as his grandson William.

  “There, William,” said his doting grandfather. “One day you will be able to say that you once met the great Isaac Newton, whose notions of mathematics are received with great applause.”

  Newton bowed deeply. “Doctor Wallis,” he said, “I was not able to find anything general in quadratures, until I had understood your own work on infinitesimals.”

  Wallis acknowledged the compliment with a nod, and then told the boy to run along before inviting us to sit and declaring himself mighty honoured that Newton should think fit to visit an old scholar like himself.

  “Pray tell me, sir,” he asked. “Does this mean that you have reconsidered your decision not to publish your Opticks in my book? Is that why you have come?”

  “No sir,” Newton said firmly. “I have not changed my mind. I am here on the business of His Majesty’s Mint.”

  “It’s not too late, you know. Even now Mister Flamsteed sends me an account of his observations, which shall be included. Will you not reconsider, Doctor Newton?”

  “No sir, for I fear that disputes and controversies may be raised against me by some confounded ignoramus.”

  “But perhaps some other may get scraps of your notion and publish it as his own,” said Wallis. “Then it will be his, not yours, though he may perhaps never attain a tenth part of what you are already the master of. Consider that it is now almost thirty years since you were master of those notions about fluxions—”

  “I think,” said Newton, interrupting, “that you have already written me a letter to this same effect.”

  Wallis grunted loudly. “I own that modesty is a virtue,” he said. “I merely wished to point out that too much diffidence is a fault. How should this, or the next age, know of your discoveries if you do not publish, sir?”

  “I shall publish, sir, when I am minded so to do.”

  Wallis tried to conceal his show of exasperation, with little success.

  “The business of the Mint, you say?” he said, changing the subject. “I had heard you were Master of the Mint. From Mister Hooke.”

  “For the present I am merely the Warden. The Master is Mister Neale.”

  “The Lottery man?”

  Smiling thinly, Newton nodded.

  “But is the work so very challenging?”

  “It is a living, that is all.”

  “I wonder that you do not have a church living. I myself have the living of St. Gabriel’s in London.”

  “I have not the aptitude for the Church,” replied Newton. “Only for inquiry.”

  “Well then, sir, I am at the Mint’s service, although if we are to talk of money, I can tell you there’s none in the whole of Oxford.” Wallis gestured at his own surroundings. “And I cannot counterfeit anything save this show of worldly comfort. The only silver hereabouts is the college plate, and all sober men of the University are fearful of ruin. This Great Recoinage has been badly handled, sir.”

  “Not by me,” insisted Newton. “But I have come about a book, sir, not the scarcity of good coin in Oxford.”

  “We have plenty of those, sir,” said Wallis. “Sometimes I would we had fewer books and more money.”

  “I seek a particular book—Polygraphia, by Trithemius — which I would desire to have sight of.”

  “You have come a long way to read one ancient book.” The old man got up from his chair and fetched a handsomely bound volume from his bookcase.

  “Polygraphia, eh? That is an ancient book indeed. It was first published in 1517. This is an original copy which I have owned these past fifty years.”

  “But did you not order another from Mister Lowndes of the Savoy?” asked Newton.

  “Who told you that, sir?”

  “Why, Mister Lowndes, of course.”

  “I like this discovery not, sir,” said Wallis, frowning. “A man’s bookseller should keep his confidence, like his physician. What can become of a world where every man knows what another man reads? Why, sir, books would become like quacks’ potions, with every mountebank in the newspapers claiming one volume’s superiority over another.”

  “I regret the intrusion, sir. But as I said, this is official business.”

  “Official business, is it?” Wallis turned the book over in his hands and then stroked the cover most lovingly.

  “Then I will tell you, Doctor. I bought another
copy of Polygraphia for my grandson William. I have been teaching him the craft in the hope that he will follow in my footsteps, for he demonstrates an early aptitude.”

  An early aptitude in what? I wondered. For writing? Neither Newton nor I yet had any real idea what this book by Trithemius was about.

  “Trithemius is a useful primer in the subject, sir,” continued Wallis, handing the book to Newton. “Although I do not think his book could long detain a man such as you. Porta’s book, De Furtivis Literarum Notis, is more suited to your intellectual parts. Perhaps also John Wilkins’s Mercury, or The Swift and Secret Messenger. You may also prefer to read John Falconer’s Cryptomenytices Patefacta, which is most recent.”

  “Cryptomeneses,” Newton murmured to me as Wallis took down two more books from his shelves. “Of course. Secret intimations. I did not understand until now.” And seeing me remain still puzzled, he added, with greater vehemence, “Cryptographia, Mister Ellis. Secrecy in writing.”

  “What’s that you say?” asked Wallis.

  “I said I should like to read this one, too.”

  Wallis nodded. “Wilkins teaches only how to construct a cipher, not how to unravel one. Only Falconer is practical, for he suggests methods of how ciphers may be understood. And yet I think that a man who wishes to solve a cryptogram is always best advised to trust to his own industry and observation. Do you not agree, Doctor?”

  “Yes sir, I have always found that to be my own best method.”

  “And yet it is hard service for a man of my years. Sometimes I have spent as long as a year on a particular decipherment. Milord Nottingham did not understand how long these things can take. He was always pressing me for quick solutions. But I must stand the course, at least until William is ready to take over the work. Although there is very little reward in it.”

  “It is the curse of all learned men to be neglected,” offered Newton.

  Wallis was silent for a moment, as if much pondering what Newton had said.

  “Well, that is odd,” he said finally. “For now I remember that someone else from the Mint came to see me about a year ago. Your pardon, Doctor Newton. I had quite forgotten. Now, what was his name?”