Philip Kerr - Dark Matter

“You do well to remind me of it,” said Newton. “But I have not lacked for diligence in obtaining more information.

“Macey was, by several accounts, a most diligent man, but not an educated one, although he does seem to have made an attempt at improving himself. None of this amounted to very much, however, and it seems that Macey often had recourse to consult the mind of a man I suspect was one of Macey’s informers, a goldsmith by the name of St. Leger Scroope. Oddly it is a name that I seem to be familiar with, although I have been unable to fathom why. And since Mister Scroope was to have been out of the country until about this time, I confess I have not pursued the matter any further, and therefore your reminder is most opportune. We shall try and visit Mister Scroope tomorrow, at his place of business in the Strand. It may be that he can shed some further light on a letter written in a foreign language that was rumoured to have come into Macey’s possession, about which, according to Mister Alingham, the Tower carpenter who was a friend of his, Macey was much exercised to comprehend.”

Out of the coach window I saw the familiar castellated outline of the Tower appear in the moonshine like King Priam’s city bathed in the glow of Zeus’s silvery eye. The coach pulled up at the Middle Tower, close by the Barbican wherein the lions restlessly groaned, and set me down upon the esplanade. Before closing the door behind me, Newton leaned out into the cold and feral-smelling night, for the wild beasts below did much pollute the air with their excrements, to speak to me one last word before I took my leave of him.

“Meet me outside the water tower at York Buildings tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, when we shall call upon Mister Scroope. And after that we may visit this Berningham fellow at the Whit.”

Then Newton rapped on the roof of the coach with his stick and the little red chariot was rattling away to the west, along Thames Street.

I turned and approached the guard near the Byward Tower, who was well away from his post, and for a moment I stopped to talk with him, for it was always my habit to try to improve relations between the Mint and the Ordnance. We spoke of how to keep warm on duty, and which Tower was the most haunted, since I never walked about the Tower at night without being afeared to see some spirit or apparition. For shame I could not help it; and yet to speak in my own defence, so many dreadful things had happened there that if anywhere be haunted it might be the Tower. The guard believed that the Jewel Tower, also known as the Martin Tower, was a place of many ghostly legends. But we were soon joined in this conversation by Sergeant Rohan, who knew the Tower as well as any man.

“Every quarter has its own ghostly legends,” opined Sergeant Rohan, who was a great burly figure of a man, almost as wide as he was tall. “But no part is so scrupulously avoided as the Salt Tower, which, it is said, is much disturbed by spirits. As you know yourself, Mister Twistleton, the Armourer, saw a ghost there, which is what lost him his wits. I myself have heard and felt things there I know not how to explain, except to say that their origin be malign and supernatural. Many Jesuit priests were tortured there, in the lower dungeon. You may see the Latin inscriptions carved upon the wall by the hand of one.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He was taken to York in 1595,” said Rohan, “where he was burned alive.”

“Poor fellow,” said I.

Rohan laughed. “Think you so? He was a very fanatical sort of Roman Catholic. Doubtless he would have done the same to many a poor Protestant.”

“Perhaps so,” I admitted. “But it is a very poor sort of philosophical argument that we should do unto others before they do unto us.”

“I doubt there are many philosophers who could know what a needful capacity for cruelty most Roman Catholics have,” insisted the Sergeant. “Dreadful things were done to the Protestants in France during the dragonnades of 1681 and 1685, when King Lewis’s soldiers were quartered in the homes of Huguenots and allowed full licence to behave as cruelly as they wished in order that many might make converts to Rome. Believe me, lad, there were no conceivable cruelties which these brutal missionaries did not use to force people to mass and to swear never to abandon the Roman religion. Old men imprisoned, women raped and whipped, young men sentenced to the galleys, and old mothers burned alive.”

“You speak as if you witnessed these cruelties yourself, Sergeant,” I observed.

“Twenty years I’ve been at war with the French,” said the Sergeant. “I know what they are capable of.”

After a few minutes spent debating this issue with Rohan, who was most obstinate in his hatred of Jesuits, I wished Sergeant Rohan and Mister Grain good night and left the Byward with a borrowed lantern, which did little to allay the apprehension of seeing a ghost that our talk had increased in me.

Walking quickly home to the warden’s house, I thought much about those Jesuits who had been tortured, perhaps with the same Skeffington’s Gyves that had been used on George Macey. It was easy to imagine some tormented priest haunting the Tower. But reaching home and being warm in bed, with a good candle in the grate, I began to think again that ghosts were idle fancies and that it was probably better to be afeared of those living men who had murdered my predecessor and who were still at liberty to kill again.

The next morning, I took a wherry boat from London Bridge to York Building stairs. Upon alighting, I and others found the mud on the jetty quite frozen over, which was so hazardous to our company that I thought fit to complain to the watermen that the steps should have been salted and kept free of ice so that passengers might step off a boat without threat to life or limb. At this the watermen, who were weatherbeaten, strong-looking men, merely laughed, and, sore from the previous evening — for I still had the apprehension that I had been the butt of the Ordnance’s joke — I started to draw my sword; but then I saw my master standing by the water tower and thought better of pricking their arses.

“You were right to contain your anger,” he said, when at last I was safely on the embankment beside him, “for there’s not a more independent lot of men in London. They are generally temperate, for a drunken waterman would hardly be trusted, and yet they can be most violent. If you had drawn your sword you would very likely have found yourself in the river. A seven-year apprenticeship makes a poor man most obdurate in defence of his rights and knowledgeable of his proper duties, which, alas, do not include the cleaning of the jetties. For the Thames, being a tidal river, would make a mockery of anyone that swept these walkways free of mud. High tide was but one hour before you landed.”

Bridling under my master’s lecture, I said that I had no idea he knew so much about London watermen and the tides that affected their trade.

At this he smiled thinly. “About watermen I know only what most people know about all London workmen: that they are a blight. But about tides I know a great deal,” he said. “You see, it was I who first explained them.”

And as we took a short coach ride up to the Maypole in the Strand, Newton proceeded to tell me how by propositions mathematically demonstrated he had deduced the motions of planets, the comets, the Moon, and the sea.

“So it is the gravitational effect of the Moon that makes the tides?” I said, summing up his own much longer account of this celestial phenomenon. Newton nodded. “And you received all this from the fall of an apple?”

“In truth, it was a fig,” he said. “But I cannot abide the taste of figs, whereas I am most fond of apples. I have never been able to tolerate the idea that it was the fruit I despise most in the world that gave me my idea of how the world moves. And it was only the germ of my idea. I remember thinking that if the power of gravity could extend to the top of a tree, how much farther might it extend? And indeed, I perceived that the only limit to its power was the size of the bodies themselves.”