Philip Kerr: Dark Matter

I do not know how long I was asleep. Perhaps it was as little as half an hour, perhaps much longer, but I awoke with a start, as if I had pulled myself out of the grave and back into life. Immediately I was possessed of the certainty that I was not alone; and holding my breath I became convinced that the dark shadows of my bedchamber were animated with the respiration of another. I sat up and, my whole body swayed by the beating of my own heart, I listened as closely to the tenebrous atmosphere as if I had been the prophet Samuel himself. And by and by I was able to distinguish the sound in my own bedchamber as of someone sucking air through a quill, which made my hair stand on end.

“For God’s sake, who is there?” I cried and, swinging my legs out of bed, I went to fetch the stub of candle from the fireplace to light another and illuminate the gloom. In the same instant out of the shadows spoke a voice that chilled me to the bone.

“Thy Nemesis,” said the voice.

I had a brief glimpse of a man’s face and was about to answer when, in a most inhuman manner, he attacked me, forcing me back onto the bed where, with all his weight upon my chest, he set about trying to gouge at my eyes with his thumbs, so that I cried out murder. But the strength of my assailant was formidable and although I caught him a couple of good blows about the head, the power of his attack never faltered and I thought for certain that I should be murdered and if not killed then blinded. Desperately, I forced his hands away from my eyes only to have him fasten them about my throat. Sensible of the fact that I was surely being strangled, I kicked out, in vain. A moment or two later I felt a great weight lifted from my chest and assumed that my soul had begun its upward motion to heaven before, finally, I realised that my attacker had been pulled off me and was now under the restraint of two members of the Ordnance, although he tolerated their hold upon him with such calm that I wondered if these two sentinels detained the right man.

A third member of the Ordnance, one Sergeant Rohan, helped me to come to myself with a little brandy so that I was at last able to stand and confront my assailant in the light of the lantern the Yeoman Warders had brought with them.

“Who are you?” I demanded to know in a voice hardly my own, it sounded so hoarse. “And why did you attack me?”

“His name is Mister Twistleton,” reported the strangely spoken Sergeant Rohan. “And he is the Tower Armourer.”

“I did not attack you, sir,” said Mister Twistleton with such a show of innocence that I almost believed him. “I don’t know who you are. It was the other gentleman I attacked.”

“Are you mad?” I said, swallowing uncomfortably. “There is no other gentlemen here. Come sir, what harm have I done to you that you should attack me?”

“He’s mad all right,” said Rohan. “But as you can see for yourself, there’s no harm in him now.”

“No harm in him?” I repeated with no small incredulity. “Why, he very nearly murdered me in my bed.”

“Mister Ellis, is it?” asked Sergeant Rohan.

“Yes.”

“He’ll not trouble you again, Mister Ellis. I give you my word on it. Mostly he’s close kept in my own house, under my cognizance, and never troubles nobody. But tonight he slipped out when we wasn’t looking and fetched up here. We were out looking for him when we heard the commotion.”

“It’s lucky for me you did,” said I. “Another minute and I wouldn’t be talking to you now. But surely he belongs in Bedlam. Or some other hospital for the distracted and lunatic.”

“Bedlam, Mister Ellis? And have him chained to a wall like a dog? To be laughed at like an animal?” said one of the Yeoman Warders. “Mister Twistleton is our friend, sir. We couldn’t let that happen to him.”

“But he’s dangerous.”

“Most of the time he’s exactly as you see him now. Quite calm in himself. Don’t make us send him there, Mister Ellis.”

“Me? I don’t apprehend how any of you are under my compulsion, Mister Bull. His care is your own affair.”

“It won’t be if you report the matter, sir.”

“Christ Jesus have mercy upon us,” shouted Mister Twistleton.

“You see? Even he asks your indulgence,” said Rohan.

I sighed, exasperated at this turn of events: that I should be attacked in my own bed, near strangled and then asked to forget all about it, as if this had been some foolish schoolboy prank and not a case of attempted murder. It seemed a perfect mockery of the Tower’s reputation for security, how a lunatic should be allowed to wander about the place with no more restraint than some wretched raven.

“Then I must have your word that he will be kept under lock and key, at least at night,” said I. “The next person might not be so lucky as I was.”

“You shall have my word,” said Rohan. “Right willingly.”

I nodded my grudging assent, for I seemed to have little choice in the matter. From what Newton had told me, relations between the Mint and the Ordnance were already quite bad enough without my becoming the author of yet more bad feeling. “What was it that put him out of his wits?” I asked.

“The screams,” said Mister Twistleton. “I hear the screams, you see. Of them as have died in this place. They never stop.”

Sergeant Rohan clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re a good fellow, Mister Ellis,” he said. “For a Minter, that is. He’ll not trouble you again, I promise you that.”

In the days and weeks that followed, I often saw Mister Twistleton about the Tower and always accompanied by a member of the Ordnance; and in truth he always seemed well enough not to be shut up in a madhouse, so that I congratulated myself how I had made a most charitable judgement in the matter; and it was several months afterward before I wondered if I had not made a dreadful mistake.

With public matters in a most sad condition and the country hardly fit to be governed, the Mint worked twenty hours a day, six days a week. As did Newton, for although he had nothing to do with the organising and stimulating of the recoinage, he slept very little, and on the rare occasions when he was not about the business of hunting coiners and clippers, he would occupy himself with the devising of a solution for some mathematic problem or other that would have been set by one of his many mischievous correspondents — for it was their most earnest desire to catch him out in his calculations. But there was always plenty for us to do, and soon we were frequent visitors to the Fleet Prison or to Newgate, to take depositions of evidence from various rogues and scoundrels, many of whom suffered the full penalty of the law.

I mention just one of these cases now, not because it pertains to the telling of this horrible and secret story, which greatly vexed my master for almost a whole year, but to show how many other legal matters at the same time were occupying his virtuoso mind.

The Lords Justices of England ruled the country in the absence of the King, who was fighting the French, with no great success, in Flanders. They had received a letter from a William Chaloner, a most clever and egregious forger, who alleged that money had been coined in the Tower containing less than its proper weight of silver, that false guineas had been made there, and that blanks and guinea stamps had been stolen out of the Mint. My master was ordered by their Lordships to investigate these allegations, which he was obliged to do, although he knew full well that Chaloner was Mercury himself when it came to rhetoric and that he had sold their Lordships a worthless jade. In the meantime, Peter Cooke, a gentleman lately condemned to death for coining, sought to bilk the hangman by telling us that the same Chaloner had been his accomplice, as were others.