by Philip Kerr
“Read the book,” urged the Sergeant, “and you will know more.”
The very next Monday, Newton went straight to Whitehall to plead Sergeant Rohan’s life before Their Lordships; only they were not disposed to be merciful, despite Newton’s eloquent entreaties, and upon the appointed day, Rohan and Vallière went to their probably well-deserved deaths, with mobs jeering them all the way to Tyburn as amidst the atmosphere of a bear-baiting. Neither Newton nor I attended the executions of these two criminals, but Mister Alingham, the Tower carpenter and undertaker who did, said that the hangman was so drunk that he tried to put a rope about the neck of the clergyman who went with them to their deaths, which doubtless would have amused that heretical pair of Protestants.
No men died so unpitied, for it was the common conception that these two had been involved in the very plot to kill the King which Nostradamus had prophesied in the pamphlet Titus Oates had given to us. When Rohan and Vallière were at long last dead, their heads were fastened on two poles and pitched on the north end of Westminster Hall, to the great satisfaction of the people who saw it.
Newton spent the morning of the executions closeted with the lost gospels he had found in the Tower library, according to Sergeant Rohan’s instructions. I thought the Templars’ book to be in remarkable condition for a thing so apparently old, and I almost wondered if it were not some kind of fraud, as many of the supposed relics of Christ and the saints proved to be. The book was a codex bound in leather, with the constellation of Orion tooled most beautifully onto its surface—which was exactly like the cross Mister Pepys had shown us—and comprised beautifully illuminated pages of Latin.
When I enquired if these heretical gospels were everything he had expected, Newton said:
“Much is revealed of the nature of Jesus, the early Jewish sects, and the eternal conflict between light and dark. It is clear to me that we are forbidden to worship two Gods, but we are not forbidden to worship one God and one Lord: one God for creating all things and one Lord for redeeming us with his blood. We must not pray to two Gods, but we may pray to one God in the name of the Lord, so that we do not break the first commandment. Christ was not the son of God nor was he an ordinary man, but incarnate by the almighty power of God. He was the angel of God who appeared to Abraham, Jacob and Moses, and who governed Israel in the days of the Judges. Therefore it may be seen how prophecy is the most important aspect of Christ, and not his relationship to God; and that to the true worship of Noah, nothing more has been added.” He smiled and after a moment or two added, “In short, I feel I will have the comfort of leaving Philosophy less mischievous that I did find it.”
For ever after that he was evasive upon the subject of the Templar gospels, so that I soon ceased to mention it to him altogether.
The Templars’ book is still in the chapel as I have described. Perhaps it would provide some people with the answers that they seek. I can only say that I did not find them for the simple reason that I never read the book. For what would a second Bible or a second Koran have told me? Only that the first one was wrong. Every sect contradicts another, which is why there have scarcely been any that did not spill blood.
All such man-made systems of religion are in error, for they presume to understand how God acts. I could not see how any of could ever hope to understand God, when most of us never manage to understand one another. What chance for a man to know the mind of God, when he cannot even fathom the mind of a woman?
Newton rarely spoke to me of Miss Barton after that; and I was never invited to his home while she was there. It was not a subject that could ever have been raised between us. Which is not to say that what Mister Oates had said was without foundation.
There is some uncertainty about precisely when Miss Barton was publicly the mistress of Lord Halifax, the first Lord of the Treasury; but what is beyond dispute is that by early part of the new century Newton’s niece, who now called herself Mrs. Barton, and Lord Halifax were living together openly at his home in Bushey Park, despite his having a wife who was still alive. It was Lord Halifax who created Newton Master of the Mint, upon Neale’s death; and when Newton was knighted by Queen Anne, on the same day as Lord Halifax’s brother, in 1705, the honour was not for his services to science, nor indeed for his services to the Mint, but for his political services in Parliament to Lord Halifax—for Newton had become an MP and a supporter of Halifax in the House of Commons in 1701. Naturally, I always remembered the words of Titus Oates: that it had been a pretty niece and not fluxions and gravitation that had furthered his career; and that Newton had traded her virtue to his own advantage.
What is equally beyond dispute is that Lord Halifax made a will leaving Mrs. Barton a bequest which, including the house, was worth, upon Lord Halifax’s death in 1715 from an inflammation of the lungs, some twenty thousand pounds or more. Nor is it beyond doubt that Halifax’s powerful relatives contested the will so that the house and most of the money remained in the Montagu family. It was only then that she married Mister Conduitt.
Thirty years have passed since then.
Newton was a good old man when he died. All the wise were his brothers. He admired Noah. Noah would surely have placed Newton in his Ark.
I was invited to Newton’s funeral, and despite my feeling ill, I was determined to attend, for I did bear the man great admiration, as did all who had the inestimable honour to know the Doctor’s mind.
Of wise men I saw a great many in the Abbey to see Newton laid to rest on the evening of his funeral, there being present almost every member of the Royal Society. While the Westminster bell tolled for Newton—nine times for his being a man, and then eighty-five times for his eighty-five years of age—Mrs. Conduitt (she that had been Miss Barton) presented each guest with a mourning ring while a servant handed about sprigs of rosemary, for remembrance, and to hide the smell of death, which, despite the best efforts of the embalmer, was beginning to be all too noticeable.
When she saw me, she coloured a little but maintained her composure. “Colonel Ellis, I wonder that you can set foot in a church,” were all the words she spoke to me.
To see Mrs. Conduitt again at Newton’s funeral and have her speak to me thus was most painful. For she was every bit as beautiful as I had remembered, and even though she was in mourning I was quite distracted by her, for black suited her very much and served to contrast her own natural colours in the same way that ebony or jet will offset gold to best advantage.
I was still in love with her, of course. Even after all these years. I married, some years after I left Newton’s service and took my commission; but my own wife died of the ague some ten years ago. It grieved me only a little to see Miss Barton married to Mister Conduitt, who was a Member of Parliament. Perhaps position in society was all that she ever desired. If so, then her uncle’s funeral must have gratified her very much. Those six members of the Royal Society that bore her uncle’s pall out of the Jerusalem Chamber, through a narrow door, and down a few steps into the candlelit nave of the Abbey, were the first in the realm. These were the Lord Chancellor, the dukes of Montrose and Roxburgh, and the earls of Pembroke, Sussex, and Macclesfield. The Bishop of Rochester, attended by the prebends and choir, performed the office while the mourners were led by a Knight of the Bath. Many more came than were bid, however, and by my own reckoning there were almost three hundred present that night to watch him laid, with every civility, in the floor.
It was a fine service, of infinite light, for there were so many candles lit which shone with such a triumphant splendour upon my head that it seemed to remind me of the absolute potentiality of infinity itself. And as I sat there, my thoughts returned to my conversation with Doctor Clarke and I wondered what satisfaction God could have in our having faith in the teeth of reason? What possible use was there in saying to God that I was convinced of something of which one could not rationally be convinced? Did this not make a lie of faith? The more I considered the matter in relation to Newton, the more I perceived his o
wn dilemma. Faith required him to believe not that which was true but that which appeared to him, whose understanding was so great, to be false. The greatest enemy to his faith appeared to be his own genius. How could he whose whole life had been devoted to understanding, subordinate that which had defined him?
Perhaps alchemy provides the best metaphor for Newton’s own belief in God. For it seems to me his religion was like a regulus—the purer or metallic part of a mineral—which sinks to the bottom of a crucible or a furnace and is thus separated from the remaining matter. This regulus is hidden, and the secret is only in the hands of those who are adept. It was wisdom not yet instructed by revelation; all other religions are good sense perverted by superstition.
Is that what I believe? I should like to believe in something.
When the service was complete, a black slab was laid upon his grave, which lies but a few steps from those of the kings and queens of England. And so all broke up and I walked to Hell, which was a tavern near the entrance to Westminster Hall, in Exchequer Court; and there I thought about these matters some more.
I am fifty years of age. My life grows short. Sometimes I seem to feel my own heart rub against my backbone. It is perhaps my own mortality. Soon I will have all the answers, if more answers there be than are on this Earth. Yet even now I do believe that Newton provided us with the greatest answers of all.
Author’s Note
Among his other great discoveries, it was Isaac Newton who defined the modern concept of mass, essential for the development of matter upon which all of modern cosmology rests. Given knowledge only of the velocity of stars, Newton’s laws have enabled scientists to deduce the distribution of matter in a galaxy, of which, typically, between eighty and ninety percent is to be found spread out beyond the spiral disk and not in the form of visible stars and gas. All that modern science knows about this kind of matter is that it does not give off or reflect much light. It is called “dark matter.” And it may be of interest to the reader to note that this seemed to me to be a most suitable title for the tenebrous and crepuscular story that appears here.
The reader may also like to note that England’s greatest scientist really did work for the Royal Mint. In 1696, after twenty-five years of distinguished academe, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, better known to us today as author of the Principia Mathematica and Optics, accepted what was judged to be little more than a reasonably well-paid sinecure, as Warden of the Royal Mint, then located within the Tower of London, during the period of “the Great Recoinage.” Four years later, he became Master of the Mint, and remained Master of the Mint until his death, in 1728.
In 1696, Newton threw himself into his new tasks with customary thoroughness, pursuing coiners and counterfeiters, taking depositions from witnesses, having himself commissioned as a justice of the peace in all of the home counties, maintaining a network of informers, and sending many men and women to the gallows. The London underworld had never known an investigator quite so thorough and incorruptible, and he was soon regarded among these criminal elements with real fear and hatred. We know a great deal about Isaac Newton’s work at the Mint. But what do we know of Christopher Ellis, who is the narrator of the story contained in the book?
According to State Papers Domestic 362 (1696) in the Public Record Office at Kew, in London, the Lords Justices—the central body of government in the absence of King William III at the war with France—had agreed, on August 26, that an assistant clerk was needed for Dr. Newton following the mysterious disappearance of his previous clerk, George Macey. The clerk whom Newton chose was one Christopher Ellis, the younger brother of Charles Ellis, who, prior to his appointment as Comptroller of the Mint, was Undersecretary to William Lowndes, the Permanent Secretary to the Secretary of State for the Treasury, Lord Godolphin. (Godolphin resigned in the dying days of 1696 and was replaced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Montagu, the future Earl of Halifax, who was also Newton’s patron in the Mint.) Christopher Ellis’s appointment was approved by the Treasury on November 17 (Treasury Books, 310, 325, 1693-96) to assist Dr. Newton’s “extraordinary work” in detecting and prosecuting clippers and coiners, at the salary of sixty pounds per year, to be paid from September Quarter Day. But beyond these few facts, very little else of Christopher Ellis is known.
Newton’s interest in alchemy, as well as his dissenting, not to say blasphemous, Arian views, which made him violently opposed to the ruling Trinitarian religious orthodoxy of the day, is also accurate. And anyone wishing to know more should read Richard Westfall’s magisterial biography of Newton, as I have done. But any mistakes in the novel are my own.
I am very much indebted to Neil Agarwal of Harvard University for helping me with the code.
—PHILIP KERR, NOVEMBER 29, 2001
About the Author
Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh in 1956 and now lives in London with his wife and three children. Dark Matter is his eleventh novel.
Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, 1618
Dark Matter Reader’s Group Guide
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The theme of decoding permeates the novel. As Newton and Ellis investigate the third murder, Newton observes, “All of nature is a cipher, and all of science a secret writing that must be unraveled by men who would understand the mystery of things.” In the prologue, Ellis notes, “Newton looked upon all of creation as a riddle … I think he believed that a man who might decipher an earthly code might similarly fathom the heavenly one.” By the end of the novel, how much progress has each man made by decoding? Has Ellis decoded Newton? Has Newton gotten any closer to deciphering the “heavenly code”?
2. Upon meeting Ellis, Newton instantly launches into a James Bond-like size-up, deducing that Ellis is talented with both rapier and pistol, plays cards, has had too much red wine the night before, and has recently been intimate with a dark-haired woman with whom he’d drunk juniper ale—a feat that flusters Ellis and provides comic relief to the narrative. Where else in the story do we see Newton being purposefully sly and funny? Do these moments alter your perception of him?
3. What charade do Ellis and Newton pull off in order to extract information from Oates? What knowledge do they gain from him? How does it affect what they do next?
4. After Newton and Ellis chat about Newton’s discoveries concerning gravity, Ellis breaks away from the story to note, “In all respects he was a paragon, a human touchstone that might try gold, or good from bad.” Does this starry-eyed admiration shift during the course of the novel? Ellis goes on to witness Newton’s seeming heartlessness, his facility with lying, even his apparent willingness to trade his niece’s virtue for his own career advancement. Do these things change Ellis’s opinion of the master?
5. What is the significance of Twistleton’s mysterious utterance, “Blood is behind everything. Once you understand that, you understand all that has happened”?
6. Newton introduces Ellis to the use of prisms and the principles of refraction and refrangibility. Why? What is the metaphor here? How does Ellis act as a “prism” in the events that follow?
7. Halfway through the novel, Ellis realizes that he has lost his faith: “It was Newton’s mathematics that reduced the cosmos to a series of algebraic calculations, while his damned prisms ripped apart God’s rainbow covenant with Noah. How could God remain in heavens that were so keenly observed through a telescope and precisely described as a series of fluxions?” Ironically, Newton does not seem tormented by a similar conflict. How does he merge his faith and his science? Is the science/faith conflict pertinent in today’s world? Where do you see it played out?
8. How does Newton accomplish his dream of besting Rene Descartes?
9. The dramatic backdrop of this story is the Tower, where coiners and soldiers are perpetually at odds because of the Recoinage Act of 1696, which has forced them to share the space. What does Ellis mean when he says, “The Tower was more than just a prison and a place of safe
ty to mint the coin; it was also a state of mind, an attitude that affected all who came into contact with its walls”?
10. Ellis’s condition for working with Newton is that Newton “will always correct my ignorance.” Does Newton do a good job of this? By the end, what has Newton taught Ellis, and in what ways has he left Ellis more confused than enlightened?
11. Who are the Templars? How do they figure into the Huguenot plot of revenge against Catholics? What do Newton and Ellis do with the information that Mister Pepys gives them about the Templars?
12. Newton has a close call with the authorities when he is summoned to appear before the Lords Justices to defend himself against allegations that he is a heretic. How does he debunk Count Gaetano’s charges? Why is the Count’s derisive comment about the Dutch a mistake?
13. What do you make of Newton? Is he a likeable character? Do you trust him? Do you think he really believes his maxim that “true knowledge is the greatest treasure of all”? What do you make of his relationship with his niece?
14. Why does Ellis say that he swore not to tell this story while Newton was alive? Why does he reject the analogy of Newton leaving behind a golden thread “by which we may find our way through God’s labyrinth,” in favor of the harsher image of a chasm or abyss “into which Newton, by virtue of his system of the world and falling bodies and mathematics and chronology, lowers us upon a rope”?
Copyright © 2002 by Philip Kerr