Philip Kerr - Dark Matter

I looked down at the hilt of my sword. “Yes, it is.”

“I should like to see it. If I asked you nicely, would you show it to me?”

I looked at her uncle.

“I have no objection,” he said.

No sooner had he spoken thus, than I had drawn my sword and, kneeling before her, presented it to Miss Barton upon the sleeve of my coat. “Have a care, miss, it’s very sharp.”

“I did not think you looked like the kind of man to carry a blunt sword, Mister Ellis.” She took hold of the hilt, raised my sword, and fenced the air for a moment or two. “And did you kill him?”

“If I had, I would not be standing here now,” I said. “I merely pricked him, in the pap.”

Miss Barton inspected the point of my blade in the firelight. “To think that this has drawn a man’s blood,” she breathed; and then: “I should like to learn to fence.”

“With your uncle’s permission, Miss Barton, I should be happy to instruct you.”

“No,” he said flatly. “It is out of the question. Child, what would your mother say?”

She shrugged, as if what her mother said was of no import, and then handed me back my sword. “No matter,” she said. “I didn’t come to London to have gentlemen prick me with their rapiers.”

“Not for the world,” said I.

“Indeed, no,” echoed Newton.

“Pray tell, what was your quarrel about, Mister Ellis?” she enquired.

“With whom?”

“Why, the gentleman you fought a duel with, of course.”

“A matter of such little import that I would blush to tell you, Miss Barton.”

“If I defeated you in a duel, would you tell me then?”

“I should have little choice but to do so. Even so, I should only whisper it, for fear of earning your uncle’s scorn.”

“Then we shall duel, you and I. Will you challenge me?”

“Willingly, if it will amuse you; yes, I challenge you. Which gives you choice of weapons.”

“Then I choose drafts.”

“Be careful, Mister Ellis,” advised Newton. “She does not lack for skill.”

To play drafts with Miss Barton was to understand how much she took after her uncle — whom I had often played at the Tower — for if I gave either of them first move, they were sure to beat me wholly, which, at the hand of Miss Barton, I did not much mind, her being so childishly pleased by winning. After our first game, she demanded her forfeit.

“Come now, pay up. The explanation why you duelled, Mister Ellis.”

I was pleased to have lost, for it gave me the opportunity to whisper in her exquisite ear, which was as close to her sweet-smelling neck as I could have wished to be, short of kissing it.

Hearing it she laughed out loud, and then insisted we play again; and I confess I had never in my life been quite so happy to lose five games of drafts in a row.

My master took to inviting me for supper, once a week, saying that he pitied any man such as I who was obliged to cook for himself, but I think that he saw that Miss Barton and I enjoyed each other’s company, which left him time to read, or to work upon a mathematical problem; I even went to communion with them on Christmas Day. And, by the Twelfth Day of Christmas, this pretty young woman occupied my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night, and I regarded her most fondly. However, I said nothing to this effect, at least not yet, thinking that my loving this beautiful girl should be to the discontent of her uncle, my master. And indeed I endeavoured mightily to put her out of my mind and not to love her at all except that she offered several provocations to my doing so, such as giving me a book of her favourite poems she had copied out in her own hand, and nicknaming me Tom because she said I reminded her of a cat of that name she had once owned, which was most pleasingly familiar; and once, presenting me with a lock of her hair which I kept in a little box by my bed. So that very soon thereafter she was in my head a thousand times each day.

And for the first time in a long time I was happy. For love is mostly optimism.

I never knew as wise a man as Newton. And yet he was as ignorant of the female sex as Achilles. Perhaps, had he had more knowledge of the world and girls, he might have governed her behaviour in a way that would not have left me encouraged as much as I was. And things might have turned out very differently between Miss Barton and myself.

Sometimes it is not so easy to distinguish where love ends and lunacy begins; and I fancy there are a great many Bedlamites who are love’s loyal yeomanry.

Michael Maier, Viatorium , 1618

January 1697 was an exceedingly cold month, as cold as I could ever recall and, my master assured me, the coldest he could remember since 1683, when he had stayed indoors and written his Universal Arithmetick — his most elementary work. I tried to read it, but did not succeed. Perhaps the cold slowed my intellectual parts, just as it slowed the production of new coin. For the money was still scarce, despite the very best endeavours of the moneyers, and although everyone talked of a peace with France, nothing came of it. And all the time more Jacobites were arrested, so that the country did seem mighty unstable. Meanwhile, James Hoare, the Comptroller of the Mint who had died, was replaced by Thomas Molyneux and Charles Mason, who my master said were both corrupt, and in truth they did soon feud with each other and prove to be ineffectual.

I have mentioned how Newton’s spy, Humphrey Hall, brought us information that some coiners were rumoured to have perfected a new process in application to the gold guinea coin; and it was this business that caused us to be involved in the next part of my story which Newton swiftly came to call his dark matter. Mister Hall’s discourse had greatly disturbed my master, a guinea being a much more serious thing to forge than a silver crown, or a shilling, and yet we lacked the evidence of a counterfeit coin. But on the night of Saturday the thirteenth of February, this shortcoming remedied itself.

I was early to bed and asleep when I woke to find Mister Hall in my bedchamber with a candle in his hand.

“What is it, Mister Hall?” I asked, rather alarmed to find him there because, for all the fact that he was most reliable, Mister Hall was also rather stern of countenance and old and quiet, so that he stood at the foot of my bed like Charon waiting to ferry my spirit over the marsh of Acheron. Charon’s price was one obol, but it was a guinea that Mister Hall wanted to talk about.

“I believe we have found what we are looking for, Mister Ellis,” he said in his stagnant, muddy voice. “The head keeper at Newgate has heard that a prisoner, whose name is John Berningham, has been boasting of having paid for his garnish with a false guinea.”

Garnish was what the keepers called the bribes they extracted from prisoners awaiting trial, for their better treatment; and this they paid for with rhino, or quidds, both of which meant ready money, or cash: since joining Newton’s service I had been obliged to learn a whole dictionary of criminal cant, or else I should never have understood the very depositions I wrote down; and there were times when Newton and I found ourselves speaking to each other like a couple of convicts.

“I thought we ought to go and investigate it now,” added Mister Hall, “for fear that the man will be released, or that we shall lose the guinea.”