Philip Kerr - Dark Matter

Mister Twistleton shook his head. “I can’t remember, sir, for I have made myself mad to forget it. But it was something awful, sir. For I never stop hearing the screaming.”

“Mister Twistleton,” said Newton, “was it you who killed Mister Mercer?”

“Danny Mercer is dead? No sir. Not I.”

“Or perhaps Mister Kennedy? Did you lock him in the Lion Tower?”

“Not me, sir. I’m a good Protestant. I bear no man any ill will, sir. Not even Roman Catholics. Not even the French King, Lewis, who would murder me if he could.”

“Why would he murder you?”

“To make me a good Catholic, of course.”

“Do you know a secret?” asked Newton.

“Yes sir. But I have sworn an oath never to reveal it to anyone. Yet I would tell you, sir. If I could remember what it was that I must never reveal. “The poor wretch smiled. “But I think it might touch upon weapons. For I was the Armourer, I think.”

“Was it to do with alchemy perhaps?”

“Alchemy?” Mister Twistleton looked puzzled. “No, sir. The only metal I have ever drawn from a fire were the musket balls I made myself. And I have seen very little real gold in my life.”

Newton unfolded a copy of the encrypted message that we had discovered on the wall of the Sally Port stairs beside Daniel Mercer’s body. “Does this mean anything to you?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said the poor lunatic. “It means a great deal to me, sir. Thank you. Here, wait a minute, I have a message for you, I think.” And having searched the pockets of his breeches, he produced a much-folded and dog-eared letter and handed it to Newton, who examined it for a moment, and then let me see that it contained a similarly confounded alphabet of letters as the previous messages that we had discovered. It might even have been the very same letter Mister Twistleton had been reading when I had seen him in The Stone Kitchen.

“But what is the meaning?” enquired Newton.

“The meaning?” repeated Mister Twistleton. “Blood, of course. Blood is behind everything. Once you understand that, you understand all that has happened. That’s the secret. You ought to know that, sir.”

“Is there yet more blood to be shed?”

“More? Why, sir, they haven’t hardly started, sir.” Mister Twistleton laughed. “Not by my chalk. There’s lots of killing to come. Lots of blood. Well, it’s like this, see? It depends on whether there be peace or war.” He tapped his nose. “More than that I can’t say, because I don’t know. Nobody knows when such a thing comes about. Maybe soon. Maybe not. Maybe never at all. Who can say? But you will help, sir. You will help get us started. You may not know it yet. But you will.”

“Mister Twistleton,” Newton said gently, “do you know the meaning of the phrase pace belloque?”

He shook his head. “No sir. Is that a secret, too?”

I shook my aching head wearily, and withdrew my hand from the madman’s increasingly tight grasp. “This is madness indeed.”

“Madness, yes,” said Mister Twistleton. “We will make everyone in London mad. And then who will cure it?”

Seeing that we were about to take our leave of him, Mister Twistleton became quickly agitated: his humour became more frantic, and within less than a minute he was raving and foaming at the mouth. This seemed infectious, for at once other lunatics began to rant and rave, and they had soon set up such a chorus of Pandemonium as would have put Hell in an uproar, with Satan himself fit to complain to the Steward about the damned noise. Immediately several nurse-warders descended upon the inmates with whips, which was a piteous sight to behold, and which prompted my master and me to advance swiftly toward Bedlam’s exit, eager to be out of that festering air.

Walking through the portico under the melancholy eyes of Mister Cibber’s statues, Newton shook his head and sighed with relief.

“Of all things, I most fear the loss of my mind,” he said. “During my last year at Cambridge I got a distemper that much seized my head and kept me awake for several weeks so that my thinking was much discomposed.”

These symptoms were becoming increasingly familiar to me, for my ague seemed to be worsening; and yet I said nothing to my master beyond enquiring if it were indeed possible for a man to be put out of his wits by seeing a ghost, as Sergeant Rohan had told me.

“There’s no question of a ghost,” said Newton. “Mister Twistleton has the pox. Did you not see the ulcerated lesions on his legs? You might also have noted his atrophied eyes, his trembling lips and tongue, and his partial paralysis. These are most symptomatic of advanced syphilis.”

“I think,” I said weakly, “that I should like to wash my hands.”

“Oh, there’s no time for that,” said Newton. “We have to go and see some hatmakers.”

“Hatmakers?” I sighed wearily. “Unless you do think to have yourself a new hat, sir — although I must confess I do think you the least hat-minded man I ever met — why on earth should we want to visit some hatmakers?”

To which Newton replied, “What? ‘Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?’” And seeing me frown, he added, “Job, chapter thirty-nine, verse thirteen.”

In the coach, Newton patted my leg and, exuding some delight, showed me the letter Mister Twistleton had given to him. To my tired eyes, the paper, which showed a familiar but disorderly mixture of letters—

— yielded no obvious meaning, but Newton declared that he discerned the same pattern that he had beheld in the previous messages we had discovered.

“But Mister Twistleton is a lunatic,” I objected.

“Without question,” agreed Newton.

“Then I fail to see why you are taking his letter so seriously.”

“For the simple reason that Mister Twistleton did not write it.”

“But how can you tell?”

“For several years I have made it my amusement to try and infer a person’s character, dispositions and aptitude from the peculiarities of his handwriting,” explained Newton. “One may even determine the state of a man’s health: for example, whether or not he is suffering from some defect in his eyes, or whether he is afflicted with some kind of paralysis.

“Considering the bold strong hand of these letters and the obvious ill health of Mister Twistleton, it is evident that the author of this message was anything but mad. There is a further point of subtler interest, which is that the author of this particular letter has studied Latin.”

“How on earth do you determine that?”

“The letters a and e occur together three times within the coded text; and where they do, the author of the message observes the convention of running them into one another as se. This indicates a diphthong, which is but a complexion or coupling of vowels, and indicates a Latin pronunciation. For example, it shows that we should pronounce the C in the word Cæsar with a hard k . Therefore I have no doubt that we shall find that the author of this message has been a scholar of sorts, which would exclude Mister Twistleton, whose education has been of a more rudimentary nature.”

“But how do you know that? It is possible he might have had some Latin.”

“Do you not remember how in response to all his ravings about war and peace, I asked him the meaning of the Latin pace belloque?”

“Yes, of course. ‘In war and peace.’ That was why you asked him that. I wondered.”

“He did not know. And it was not because his wits are disordered, but because he did not know. Ergo, he has not Latin.” Newton sighed. “You are very dull today, Ellis. Are you quite well? You do not seem like yourself, sir.”