Newton’s Fire

by Will Adams

  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

  II

  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.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I

  ‘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-’

  He broke off as a portly, balding man arrived outside the Monument’s door, popping the last bite of a croissant into his mouth even as he fished keys from his pocket. They hurried to intercept him. He held a hand over his mouth to prevent a spray of crumbs. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Please,’ said Rachel. ‘We don’t want to go up. At least we do, but we’re mainly here to see your basement.’

  ‘My basement?’ he frowned. ‘There’s nothing there.’

  ‘There is to us,’ said Luke. ‘We’re science historians. Your vault is scientific history.’

  ‘Go through the City Authority. They can arrange it for you.’

  ‘We’re only in London for the day,’ said Luke. ‘We go back home this afternoon.’

  ‘Please,’ said Rachel. ‘J
ust a quick peek. We’ll be gone before you know it.’

  He sighed extravagantly, as if they didn’t realize the trouble they were putting him to. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But not a word to your friends, okay? Or they’ll all be here wanting to see it.’

  ‘Our secret,’ said Rachel. ‘We promise.’

  II

  Deception and subterfuge didn’t come easily to Jay. Apart from anything else, he found it hard to read on people’s faces whether they believed him or not. He’d therefore become anxious that Luke and Rachel had seen through his efforts to send them on a wild-goose chase and were planning to double back to see what he was up to, so he’d followed them at a cautious distance all the way to Queenstown Road Station. Even that hadn’t made him feel entirely secure. He’d kept expecting them to reappear from the station, so he’d found it impossible to tear himself away. He’d chided himself for excessive caution, but such compulsions were part of his condition, and there was little he could do about it.

  When he’d finally convinced himself it was safe, he hurried back to his flat and bolted himself in. He drew the thick curtains to encase himself in the comforting cocoon of their privacy. Then he unzipped the case Luke had brought and set the laptop inside on his desk.

  This was why he’d hustled them off earlier. This was why he’d sent them to the Monument.

  He opened it up, turned it on, checked for recently opened files. It took him to a folder of photographs and a word document. He copied them to his own machine then zipped the laptop away again as it had been before, so that Luke and Rachel wouldn’t know. Then he went through the photographs. What he saw amazed and gratified, yet ultimately disappointed, him.

  It wasn’t there.

  He went through the photographs again, allowing himself enough time with each to imprint them onto his mind and build up a composite image of the vault. Then he sat back and let his brain whirr and hum with ideas and combinations, with deductions and inferences. He pulled volumes down from his shelves. He browsed the internet. He bought, downloaded and consulted various journal articles and e-books. And finally a feeling settled on him, a feeling of such perfect clarity that it was a joy. He knew where it was. He knew precisely where it was. And this time there was no possibility of a mistake. He smiled with satisfaction as he reached for his phone.

  Uncle Avram was certain to be pleased.

  III

  The trap door was locked in place by a pair of steel bolts. The custodian grimaced as he stooped to release them. Then he raised the trapdoor by its handle. A steep stone staircase spiralled down into a small circular room. Luke ducked his head to avoid the stone lintel as he descended; but it was instantly obvious that there was nothing there but dust and an air-conditioning unit.

  ‘Told you,’ said the man.

  They inspected and photographed the place anyway, but that was that. They thanked him and retreated back upstairs, brushing grit and cobwebs from their hair. ‘Are you open yet?’ asked Rachel. ‘For going up top, I mean.’

  The man shot the bolts and checked his watch. ‘It’ll be a fiver each,’ he said.

  They set off upwards. Slit windows at regular intervals allowed Luke to gauge their progress, as did a glance over the handrail at the lengthening corkscrew beneath. The stairs narrowed to single file as they neared the top. The breeze outside was surprisingly strong. ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Rachel, tucking hair back behind her ear.

  ‘Maybe we’ll know when we see it.’

  The Thames lay grey before them, twinkling with morning sunlight. The London Eye and other buildings of the South Bank offered hazy reflections of themselves on its rumpled surface, as did a warship moored near Tower Bridge. Rachel peered through the safety mesh down at Pudding Lane, seat of the Great Fire. ‘Can you imagine how that poor baker must have felt?’ she asked. ‘To have burned down half of London.’

  ‘If he really did,’ said Luke.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘No one at the time believed it was an accident. They blamed enemy action. They actually strung up some poor French halfwit for it. But the powers-that-were needed it to have been an accident. So they held an inquiry and hey presto, a negligent baker.’

  Rachel frowned. ‘Why did they need it to have been an accident?’

  ‘A quirk of the law. Landowners had to rebuild any property destroyed in an act of war, but tenants were on the hook for accidents. Parliament was made up of landowners. Guess which side they came down on?’

  Rachel laughed. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘A little,’ admitted Luke. ‘There was a genuine concern that if landlords had to pay, London would never be rebuilt. Tenants had little choice: they needed somewhere to live. Besides, it probably was an accident. Fires were common enough: all those wooden houses, all that open flame. And this one would have burned itself out, just like the rest, except for a brutal wind that kept scattering embers and starting new blazes. No arsonist could have arranged that. And even then the mayor could have contained it by knocking down some houses as a firebreak; but he was too cheap. My only point is that everyone takes it as settled that it was an accident, but it’s not. And if it really was arson, there have been some pretty interesting names in the frame, not least our friends Sir Christopher Wren and John Evelyn.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Wren was a highly ambitious architect,’ said Luke. ‘He wanted a cathedral of his own, because that was how you made your name at the time. He’d already been commissioned to repair St Paul’s before the fire, because Cromwell had left it in such a terrible state. But the Dean didn’t have enough money to demolish and rebuild, as Wren wanted, so he insisted he mend and make do instead. Then came the fire.’

  ‘And Evelyn?’

  ‘He hated London. A loathsome Golgotha, he called it. He wanted it rebuilt on the European model, with great piazzas, avenues and parks; with a decent sewage system and the banishment of noxious trades.’

  ‘Disliking pollution isn’t the same as arson, Luke.’

  He grinned. ‘Did you know that within days of the fire, both Evelyn and Wren had come up with plans for completely remodelling the city?’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘I’m still not buying.’

  ‘Me neither,’ smiled Luke. ‘Not while we can blame the French.’

  The northern skyline was crowded with the blockish monsters of the City. To the west, the morning sun put a halo around the dome of St Paul’s, while early-bird tourists on the outside galleries struck sparks with their camera flashes. They found themselves staring raptly at it. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Luke.

  ‘St Paul does seem to keep popping up,’ agreed Rachel.

  ‘Our cabal inscribed both sides of that plinth to him. Once for the Damascene conversion, the other to Balinus the secret alchemist. But why settle for a plinth in a secret vault in Oxford when you’ve got a building with his name on it at the very heart of your new Jerusalem?’

  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”.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I

  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, dodgin
g 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.’