Will Adams - Newton’s Fire

Rachel nodded. ‘So he stopped his experiments and his hallucinations stopped too.’

‘He stopped doing them himself, at least. As President of the Royal Society, he appointed his own Curator of Experiments and had him concentrate almost exclusively on electricity.’

‘Looking for the philosopher’s stone by proxy?’

‘Isn’t that what you’d have done? Hire some poor wannabe to take the shocks and the visions on your behalf?’ He glanced at the door. ‘Maybe we’re getting carried away. Let’s run it by Jay, see what he thinks.’

They went through to the kitchen. Jay was so absorbed in his decipherment that he didn’t even notice them. He simply carried on scribbling on his pad, trying out words then crossing them out. He gave a cry of excitement as he tore off a sheet of paper and started afresh. Luke and Rachel watched as he wrote rapidly and confidently, then clenched a fist in triumph.

‘Success?’ asked Luke.

Jay whirled around. He shook his head and made to turn over the pad, but Luke put his hand on Jay’s to stop him, allowing him and Rachel could see what he’d written.

As above it shines

So below it shines

Ye monument

Of Sir

Christopher Wren

Croke returned to the basement gallery in good time to witness the drill breaching the chamber beneath. It took another fifteen minutes, however, to remove the various bits and then feed down the endoscope.

Morgenstern came to stand beside him. ‘I spoke to our friend in Washington earlier. Our Vice President wants to watch live when we find it. But if he wakes her and there’s nothing there, he’ll have my ass for breakfast. So the way I figure it, we take a quick peek ourselves. If it’s there, we pull the endoscope back up, give her a call and pretend like we’ve just broken through. Otherwise, we let her sleep. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

They clustered around a laptop to watch the feed as the camera burrowed its way down, its integrated lighting flaring in the narrow borehole. Suddenly it emerged into the chamber and went dim. The operator adjusted his controls and the screen brightened once again. A block of stone came into view below, ghostly figures on every side. Yet it was hard to see anything clearly, making it both miraculous and frustrating at the same time.

The endoscope snaked lower and lower. Then Croke saw something that made him freeze. ‘The floor,’ he said tightly. ‘Zoom in on the floor.’

The operator nodded; the camera focused. They all leaned closer to the screen. Yes. It was as he’d thought. There were footprints in the dust. Trainer footprints. He closed his eyes in disbelief. So that’s where Luke and the girl had been hiding. Even more frustratingly, they must have sneaked away while they’d been drilling, or the coach driver wouldn’t have been able to pick them up and drive them to London.

He turned abruptly, strode out of the gallery to the well. He noted in stony silence the dangling rope and the black gash in the shaft wall two-thirds of the way down. Anger washed over him in a great wave, but he didn’t have time to indulge it. Whatever secrets were down there, Luke and Rachel already knew them. And they had a five-hour head start too.

He had some serious catching up to do.

‘The Monument of Sir Christopher Wren,’ murmured Rachel. ‘That’s the London Monument, right? I mean, Wren did build it, yes?’

‘Yes,’ said Luke. ‘Him and Hooke.’

‘You don’t look convinced.’

‘Hooke and Newton loathed each other,’ said Luke. ‘I can’t imagine them willingly collaborating on a project.’

‘What else could it be?’ asked Jay.

Luke nodded and went through to the front room, looked out the window; but of course there was no view of it from there, hidden by the houses opposite and all the other buildings put up in the three hundred and fifty years since the Great Fire. ‘As above it shines, so below it shines,’ he said. ‘What do you think it means?’

‘If you’d give me some more context,’ said Jay, ‘maybe I could tell you.’

Luke glanced at his laptop, wondering whether the time had come. Then he recalled the grief he’d brought down on Pelham. The last thing he wanted on his conscience was more collateral damage among his friends. ‘We think Newton may have hidden something valuable,’ he said. ‘We think this may tell us where.’

‘The Monument has a flaming golden urn on its top,’ nodded Jay. ‘To symbolize the Great Fire. That must be the “As above, it shines”.’

‘And the “as below”?’

‘There’s a vault,’ said Jay. ‘Wren built it to conduct astronomical experiments. Or so he claimed. But he never used it much. All the traffic threw off his instruments.’

‘Then that must be it,’ said Rachel. ‘Is it still there?’

Jay nodded. ‘I tried to visit it once. They wouldn’t let me in. The only access is through a trapdoor in the floor at the foot of the main staircase, so they have to keep it closed during the day. But they said I’d be welcome to see it if I ever got there before they opened.’

‘And when’s that?’ asked Rachel.

Jay brought up the Monument’s home page on one of his screens. ‘Eight thirty,’ he said. ‘You can make it if you leave right now. You can catch a train from Queenstown Road.’

‘Aren’t you coming?’ asked Rachel.

He shook his head vigorously. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not during rush hour. Too many people.’

‘We can take a taxi,’ said Luke.

‘We’ll never get one here in time. They’re always booked up at this time of day. The train’s your only hope, believe me. And you have to leave right now. Come back afterwards. Tell me about it.’

Rachel nodded. ‘We’ll take pictures.’

‘Good. Great.’

‘What if we have any questions?’ asked Luke. ‘You know Wren and Hooke far better than I do.’

‘Call me.’ He wrote down his numbers, gave them to Luke.

Queenstown Station was a ten-minute walk. They made it in five. They bought tickets at a machine, joined the platform scrum. The first train was too full for any more passengers, but they squeezed onto the second. ‘Can’t say I blame Jay,’ murmured Rachel, her face jammed against Luke’s throat. They changed at Vauxhall, headed north three stops. A great wave of commuters washed them out the exit, and there it was, a great Doric column topped by a gilded urn glowing brilliantly in the morning sunlight. Its door was locked, however, and no one answered Luke’s knock. Fifteen minutes till opening.

Rachel beckoned Luke over to see some Latin text inscribed in the stone. ‘Look at the date,’ she said. ‘Sixteen sixty-six comes out as MDCLXVI in Latin. Each letter used exactly once.’

‘That’s one reason they called it the annus mirabilis ,’ nodded Luke. ‘Though actually they were expecting an annus horibilis . Six six six was the number of the beast, so people were pretty certain it was going to be bad. Then there was a comet in late 1664, another in 1665.’ In fact it had been the same one coming back from orbiting the sun, but hardly anyone had realized that. ‘People were expecting all kinds of terrors. Then the plague arrived. And the Great Fire. You can see why they thought it ordained. But the year wasn’t all bad. It was Newton’s own annus mirabilis too. The year he supposedly saw the apple fall and so solved all the secrets of the universe.’

‘Supposedly?’ asked Rachel. ‘Are you saying the apple never fell?’

‘No, it probably did,’ admitted Luke. ‘Newton certainly told the story himself, though not till he was an old man. And for sure he exaggerated its significance. He wanted to make it seem he’d had his breakthroughs early, because of that priority dispute with Leibniz I-’