Michael White - Equinox

So Newton had the ruby sphere. This was Wickins's worst nightmare come true. He tried to think through the pain. The cool water on his arm helped, but the burn was agonising and his head felt like a dozen workmen with mallets were slamming into his skull as though attacking a resistant mound of rock.

Wickins remembered the timepiece that Newton kept in his room and went to check it. The fourth hour after midnight had passed. He must have been unconscious for a long time. He cursed under his breath. Cupping his hands in the water bowl again he swilled some water around his mouth before spitting it out, red, into the bowl.

Once again he tried to think, but the pain continued to stifle his thoughts. Newton had gone. He could be close to Oxford now, or perhaps he had gone elsewhere to prepare. The conjunction was less than twenty-four hours away. What was Wickins to do? He could send a message to Oxford, but he could not trust a courier with such a grave matter. And besides, what would he say?

A few moments later he was heading out the door, making for the stables, his jacket and hat on, bag over his shoulder.

The stable boy was not best pleased to see Wickins but a shilling brightened him up and he led the way to the stalls. Newton had been there earlier in the evening, the boy told him, but he had said nothing and had seemed even more distracted and unfriendly than usual.

Wickins chose a chestnut mare, one of the best horses in the stable, and gave the payment to the lad in a sealed envelope to be passed on to the bursar. He would, he told him, explain everything to the stable master upon his return a few days hence. He had urgent business to attend to and he simply could not waste a moment. Then, feeling half-dead, Wickins snapped the reins, pulled the mare round and headed for the gates and the main road beyond.

He made Ickwell village, sixty miles west of Cambridge, in two hours, and as the sun rose full above the hedgerows, a fresh horse, a grey gelding, took him through Brill, Horton-cum-Studley and then Islip before he joined the road that would take him to the Eastgate of Oxford. He reached the city walls an hour and a half later. At a trot, he turned along Merton Street before dismounting and allowing a boy to lead the horse away. Then he headed straight for University College.

'Great shit!' Robert Hooke exclaimed as John Wickins finished recounting his story. 'A pox on the man.' And he took a huge snort of snuff up his nostril.

They were sitting in a commodious apartment in University College overlooking The High, a set of rooms that Robert Boyle occupied each August as part of his honorarium. Wickins felt utterly drained and his arm and head throbbed. He had been received by Boyle who, in spite of the fact that he looked frail and tired himself, had insisted that he inspect and treat the other man's wounds immediately. With practised delicacy, he had probed at the blistered skin on Wickins's forearm before bandaging it tightly. To his sore head Boyle had applied a paste of cat urine and mouse droppings that he found particularly efficacious for headaches. As the old man tended him, Wickins described the recent events in Cambridge. Boyle was calm and he absorbed the information with a sigh here, a mild grunt there. Occasionally pausing for a moment in the task of tending the wounds, he would search Wickins's face, his piercing green eyes searching for something indefinable. Then Hooke had arrived, responding to the urgent message taken to him by a footman. The very opposite of Boyle, he had blustered and fumed, sworn and cursed before throwing himself into a chair by the empty fireplace.

'That abominable creature, that.. that… clyster-pipe,' he growled, reaching for his pouch of snuff.

Wickins, in spite of his agonies, was shocked. 'Sir, please, refrain. .'

'Why should I refrain?' Hooke snapped back. 'There is no better way to describe your esteemed Lucasian Professor. Indeed, 'tis perhaps too mild a description. And I might add that you, sir, are little better than he.'

At that moment Wickins could see precisely why Newton so loathed the man. Hooke's twisted, stunted frame was almost as ugly as his personality.

'Come now, gentlemen,' Boyle interjected. 'I think John would be entirely happy to concede before us here that he has made errors over the matter of his room-mate. But what is now essential is to forge solutions, not recriminations.'

'But it was I who warned you both,' Hooke insisted. Turning from Wickins to Boyle, he added. 'There is no limit to the man's ambition. I told you, sir, in London, after Wren's talk, that Newton had discerned something of value.'

'I do not even recall his presence there,' Boyle replied.

'He stood to the rear of the hall, close to the door. I glimpsed him from the stage. I was not mistaken. He was gone almost as Wren reached his conclusion.'

'And you claimed that you confronted Wren on the matter.'

'I did,' Hooke said almost as a whisper. 'But he would tell me nothing. The man has never liked me.'

Wickins failed to stifle a snort. 'Master,' Wickins said looking across to Boyle. 'I am devastated by my stupidity over this. But if I may be allowed a single expression of self-mitigation, it would be simply to say that even if we had held genuine suspicions about Newton's awareness of the ruby sphere, I would have found it almost impossible to believe that he had the knowledge to snatch the precious thing from under our very noses. Nor could I have brought myself to believe that he might know what to do with it if he had.'

'It was you, dullard, who was assigned the task of watching over the demon!' Hooke exclaimed.

'Gentlemen,' Boyle said, 'I have neither the energy nor the will to repeat myself this sorry morning. You must drop this malice, or else all may be lost. If you do not start to assume the mantle of intelligence and dignity, our friend Isaac Newton will have the better of us. And, make no mistake, he is a most formidable opponent.'

They fell silent for a moment. Wickins was suddenly aware of the sounds of the city coming through an opened window. It was almost nine o'clock and, although Oxford was virtually empty of students, the city remained alive with the noises of traders and street hawkers, of carts ambling along The High. Far off, the clatter of hammers and the crisp rush of saw against wood could be heard as builders worked on repairs to a college roof.

'What are your thoughts, Master?' Hooke refrained from looking in Wickins's direction. 'You know my feelings about Newton. He is piss-proud. Others know this to be true — some from bitter experience. But only a fool would deny his brilliance.'

'Your words are typically plain, Robert, but of course they are true. It pains me to say such a thing, but I fear we must assume the worst. Newton will be working with others. That is a necessity even he cannot avoid, however much he would naturally hate the fact. We must also assume that these men have been in this city a while and that, in spite of our failure to learn of such things, they have bloodied their hands. We all know what the ritual entails.' Boyle looked at each of the other men gravely.

'Gentlemen, through inaction we now face terrible danger. We must, each of us' — he fixed Hooke with a stare that would have made stronger men wither — 'do all that is within our power to thwart the Lucasian Professor tonight. Time is against us, my friends. We must begin our preparations immediately.'

Detective Chief Inspector Monroe's office was as austere as the man himself. His desk filled a third of the room and it was empty except for a top-notch computer, a pair of phones and a tray of pens. There were no pictures on the walls and a single, almost dead spider plant dangled its leaves down the side of a filing cabinet. Two worn chairs were positioned at the corners of the desk facing Monroe's own low-backed PVC swivel chair. But it was none of these things that made the first impression: it was the smell, an unpleasant medley of fast-food odours. Evidently, Laura mused as she took the chair offered her by the DCI, Monroe was a man who thought proper lunches were a waste of time and resources.