Philip Kerr - Dark Matter

“The fight happened just as you say,” I admitted. “I don’t know why I thought to hide it from you. You seem to know everything without the need to be told of it first. It’s quite a trick.”

“It’s no trick. Merely observation. Satis est . That is enough.”

“Well then, I should like to be as observant as you.”

“But there is nothing to it, as I am often telling you. But it will come in time. If you live that long. For I believe you have had a fortunate escape. It’s clear from what you have told me, and from what is written on this blade, that Major Mornay and, very likely, several others besides are religious fanatics.”

“I saw no engraving on the blade,” I said.

“You would have done better to have polished up this dagger than your own sword,” said Newton, and handed me back the dagger, the blade of which now shone like firelight.

“‘Remember Religion,’” I said, reading one side of the blade. “‘Remember the murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey,’” I continued, reading the other.

“This is a Godfrey dagger,” explained Newton. “Many of these were forged following Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s murder, in 1678.” My master searched my face for some sign that I recognised the name. “Surely you must have heard of him?”

“Why, yes,” I said. “I was but a child at the time. But he was the magistrate who was murdered by Roman Catholics during the Popish plot to kill King Charles II, was he not?”

“I abhor Roman Catholicism in all its aspects,” said Newton. “It is a religion full of monstrous superstitions, false miracles, heathen superstitions and foul lies. But there was no more wicked lie perpetrated against the safety of the realm than that Popish Plot. It was given out by Titus Oates and Israel Tonge that Jesuit priests conspired to murder the King at Newmarket races. I don’t doubt that there were Jesuits who conspired to do much to restore the Roman Catholic faith to this country. But murdering the King was not one of their designs. Nevertheless, many Catholics were hanged for it before Oates was found to be a vile perjurer. He ought to have been hanged himself but for the fact that the law does not prescribe the penalty of death for perjury. Instead, Oates was whipped, pilloried and sent to prison for life.”

“Did Oates murder Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, then?”

“Who killed him is a more abiding mystery,” said Newton. “Some have thought that he was killed by a villain whom he had sentenced to prison as a magistrate, and who bore him a grudge. We are no strangers to such situations ourselves. I have even heard talk that Godfrey was one of those Green Ribboners that did seek to make the country once more a Republic; and that he was murdered when he threatened to betray them. But I myself favour another, simpler opinion.

“It is my belief that Godfrey strangled himself by leaning upon a ligature; he was by all accounts a most melancholy man, and feared being discovered a traitor and punished accordingly. Finding his body, Godfrey’s two brothers feared the shame and the loss of Godfrey’s money, for he was a rich man, and a suicide’s estate is forfeit to the state, being felo de se . Therefore they mutilated his body and blamed it on Roman Catholics.

“What is certain is that no one will ever know the truth now. But there are many who still persist in the belief that he was murdered by Catholics. Major Mornay’s opinion seems clear enough. His possession of this dagger and his conduct in the stews would seem to indicate that his detestation of Catholics knows no bounds.”

“What then shall we do?”

Newton’s brow gathered in a knot above his eyes and one slender finger stroked his long nose as if it had been a small shock dog, so that he did look most shrewd.

“We shall return this dagger to him,” he said quietly. “And in doing so we shall further provoke him. It is a simple matter of motion, as are many other things to which proof, one day I shall find a pencil of black lead and sum it up for you on a page of paper, so that you might understand the world. For every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it be compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. That’s as true of Major Mornay as it is of the planets and the comets. But we must also be prepared. We must be vigilant. For to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”

“But, sir, this is your great theory, is it not?”

“Well done, Ellis. But it is no theory. It’s as much codified fact as the laws of England. More so, for I have the mathematical proofs that do render these laws immutable.”

“I would understand what they mean for the world,” I said. “If I could.”

“Then understand only this,” said Newton, and dropped the Godfrey dagger to the floor so that the point was left sticking in the boards. “The fall of this dagger is the same as the fall of the moon. The force that draws this dagger also draws the moon. The force that draws the moon also guides the planets and everything that is in the heavens. For the heavens are here on Earth. That, my dear fellow, is gravity.”

The heavens are here on Earth? Perhaps this Earth is all the Heaven there is.

At first I only turned my back on Jesus. And that was Newton’s doing, for there was very little in the New Testament to which he did not take some exception. The Old Testament he could only accept in parts. The Book of Solomon was very important to him. As was Daniel. And Ezekiel. But that a man might choose those books that suited him and reject those that did not seemed to me a very strange kind of religious faith.

For a long time I believed that it was Newton’s opinions of holy scripture that had shaken the tree of my life and caused the apple of my religious faith to fall to the ground, where it started to rot and perish. But this was only part of the story. Because of Newton, asking questions became second nature to me. And I began to perceive that it is our duty to ask whether these religious things be true; and if true, whether they be good or not. If we wish to find God we must banish all ignorance of ourselves, our world and our universe.

Strangely it was those silver cups that Mister Scroope had given into Newton’s keeping for their Cambridge college that first caused me to question the Pentateuch itself. The cups told the story of Nectanebus, the last native King of Egypt, who was a magician and made models of his own soldiers and those of the enemy and set them in a tank of water to work a trick so that his enemies should be engulfed in the waters of the Nile. And this made me think that when Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt and all the Pharaoh’s armies were drowned in the Red Sea, it was no more than a story borrowed from the Egyptians. Which shook me, for if the Pentateuch was not true, then everything else that followed in the Bible could be no more than myth or legend. Thus it was that gradually I came to think that if one part of the Bible might be questioned and found wanting, then why not the whole?

Perhaps I might still have believed in God. But it was my master’s science that caused me to deny the existence of God himself. It was Newton’s mathematics that reduced the cosmos to a series of algebraic calculations, while his damned prisms ripped apart God’s rainbow covenant with Noah. How could God remain in heavens that were so keenly observed through a telescope and precisely described as a series of fluxions? Like some satanic geometer, Newton pricked the bubble of God’s existence and then divided his heavenly kingdom with a simple pair of compasses. And seeing all such mysteries conquered, my own thoughts crashed to earth from the ethereal sky like a flaming cherub, with hideous ruin. O how fall’n! how changed. It was as if once I had thought myself an angel but, finding my wings clipped by the sharp scissor blades of science, I discovered I was merely a raven on Tower Green, raspingly lamenting its cruel fate. Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never comes that comes to all.