Will Adams - Newton’s Fire

Rachel gave a soft laugh. ‘Have you ever taken the tour?’ she asked.

‘Not since school. Why?’

‘I went on it last year. A friend from Turkey was over and wanted to see the sights. Wren’s son composed an epitaph to his father. It’s on his tomb and also around the rim of a great brass ring in the floor directly beneath the dome. I can’t remember the Latin, but I do remember how our guide translated it.’

‘And?’ asked Luke.

She smiled at him, her eyes shining. ‘It says: “Reader, if you want to see his monument, look around”.’

Luke called Jay from a payphone by the tube station. ‘It’s not the Monument,’ he told him. ‘It’s St Paul’s. Apparently there’s an inscription to Wren: “Reader, if you want to see his monument, look around”.’

‘Oh,’ said Jay. ‘Yes.’

‘We’re off there now. Just didn’t want you worrying. Later, okay?’ He put down the phone and hurried with Rachel along Cannon Street, dodging the morning’s laggards, surly with weekend hangovers and Monday blues. They passed the southern flank of St Paul’s churchyard and strode up the front steps. A pair of French schoolteachers were struggling to corral a large party of unruly pupils and Luke and Rachel picked up their pace without a word, not wanting to get caught behind them, only to run into four police officers by the main doors, bulked up with body-armour, automatic weapons held aslant across their chests. Sudden memories of last night’s chase and fears of an ambush hit them simultaneously; but they held their nerve and the police gave them barely a glance.

It took Luke’s eyes a few moments to adjust to the interior gloom of the great cathedral, for the familiar contours to come into focus. The organist and choir burst into a few bars of glorious noise as they bought their tickets, rehearsing Handel for some upcoming service. Walking down the main aisle, their eyes were irresistibly drawn upwards to the majestic cupola with its richly painted biblical scenes, the statues of stern-faced prophets around its base and the dizzying golden gallery at its peak. The size of it. Photographs and memory couldn’t hope to do it justice. And all held up by the sixteen evenly spaced pillars that created a kind of inner sanctum in which wooden chairs had been arranged in concentric circles around a vast marble mosaic in the floor, a starburst of thirty-two points around a gleaming brass disc. And, around its rim, just as Rachel had said, a Latin phrase was inscribed.

Lector Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice

They gazed down at it for a few moments, as if expecting enlightenment to descend upon them like the Holy Spirit. It didn’t. Rachel sighed. ‘This is hopeless, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘We haven’t got a prayer.’

‘If it were easy, someone would have found it already.’

‘Maybe they have. Maybe they found it centuries ago.’

He shook his head. ‘Those people last night didn’t think so.’

‘No.’

‘So let’s assume they know what they’re about. Let’s assume that further progress isn’t impossible. Let’s assume we’re missing something.’

‘Like what?’

He slid her a wry look. If I knew that … ‘How about John Evelyn?’ he said.

‘What about him?’ she asked.

‘There were four of them on the vault’s walls. We know Ashmole’s role: he acquired papers and some other stuff from Dee and the Tradescants that he passed on to Newton. And he was also presumably responsible for organising the vault beneath the Ashmolean. We know Newton’s role. Ashmole needed him to complete and then hide whatever it was. And we know Wren’s role. Maybe he designed the Ashmolean vault. For sure he designed this place. And he linked the others together. But what about Evelyn? How did he earn his spot on the roster?’

‘Maybe he was the brains of the outfit.’

‘Sure,’ said Luke. ‘Because that was what a cabal with Newton and Wren was lacking: brainpower.’

Rachel laughed acknowledgement. ‘Okay. Brains is the wrong word. Leadership. Vision. Drive . Whatever you want to call it. I mean, weren’t his great loves city planning and horticulture?’

‘So?’

‘I don’t know. Designing parks, planting acorns, campaigning against pollution. Maybe I’m romanticising him, but he sounds the kind of person to whom long-term outcomes mattered more than taking credit.’

‘An eminence grise ,’ said Luke. ‘I could buy that. But where does it get us?’

‘You asked about his role,’ said Rachel. ‘That was my suggestion. I never promised it would get us anywhere.’

Luke looked upwards. Sunlight flooded through the plain glass windows that girdled the base of the dome. The organist struck up again, and then the choir, a growing swell of joyous sound; and he felt a mild, toe-tingling vertigo at the sheer scale and glory of this place, mixed with awe at the courage and skill of the masons and carpenters and painters who’d risked their lives on precarious wooden scaffolds, just a stumble away from certain death. The weight of that thing. It was unimaginable. And all resting on this ring of sixteen slender pillars. But then he frowned. The pillars weren’t actually in a ring after all, but rather in eight pairs. An octagon holding up a dome; he shivered with the ghost of an idea. But then Rachel touched his forearm and it vanished.

‘Let’s go up,’ she said.

‘Up?’

She nodded down at the brass disc in the floor. ‘‘‘As below, it shines”.’ Then she looked up at the dome. ‘‘‘As above, it shines.” They do call that thing the great lantern, don’t they?’

‘These places needed light,’ said Luke. ‘You couldn’t just flip a switch.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But even so. It’s a theme , isn’t it? Something to investigate.’

Luke hesitated. The longer they stayed here, he knew, the greater would be the risk that those men would pick up their trail again. Yet the urge to find the truth proved stronger than caution. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

Jay Cowan kept trying his uncle’s telephone numbers, but his uncle wasn’t answering and he couldn’t wait forever. He put the phone down once more and went to stand in the centre of his living room. He clasped his hands lightly behind his back and stared intently at the wall. Doing this sometimes helped him clear his mind of clutter when he had consequential decisions to make.

Jay knew he wasn’t quite like other people. It had taken him many years to come to terms with this, but now he welcomed it. His uncle Avram had shown him that he was special . Being special meant carrying special burdens, but it also meant enjoying special gifts. Most of all, it meant he had a purpose; because why else would you make something special? His uncle had shown him what that purpose was too and he had embraced it with all his heart. Now it was up to him to make it happen — even if that meant allying himself with people he didn’t much care for; people like Vernon Croke. Even, indeed, if it meant deceiving friends like Luke and the woman Rachel. For Jay had liked Rachel very much. She’d been kind and pretty, and she’d smiled warmly at him and she’d been inside his home. Not that many pretty women had ever smiled warmly at Jay, or had been inside his home.

Perhaps she would marry him one day. It was possible.

Jay had known full well that there was nothing in the vault of the London Monument. Contrary to what he’d told them, he’d actually visited the place twice. He’d sent them there, hoping to keep them out safely out of the way. Unfortunately, they’d made the correct deduction by themselves and would already be in St Paul’s by now. Telling Croke what he’d deduced would inevitably put them in danger. Yet failing to tell him might damage his uncle’s mission; a mission that Jay had committed himself to helping succeed.