Dark Matter

“Is that all?” He smiled a most damnedly supercilious smile. “All things appear to us and are understood through light. If fear of the darkness had not plagued the heathen, he would not have been blinded by false gods like the Sun and the Moon, and he, too, might have taught us to worship our true author and benefactor as his ancestors did under the government of Noah and his sons, before they corrupted themselves. I have given much to understand light. Once I almost sacrificed the sight in one eye to its understanding by experimentation. I took a blunted bodkin and put it between my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could. And pressing my eye with the end of it, so as to make the curvature in my eye, there appeared several white, dark, and coloured circles. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye with the point of the bodkin; but if I held my eye and the bodkin still, though I continued to press my eye with it, yet the circles would grow faint and often disappear until I resumed them by moving my eye or the bodkin.

“Light is everything, my dear fellow. ‘God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.’ As we must do, always.”

Mrs. Allen returned, for which I was grateful as I did not much care to be preached at, even by one such as Newton. For what manner of man was it that was prepared to risk blindness in search of understanding? She brought two mugs of ale which we drank and then took our leave, whereupon I, having given some thought to the early occurrences of this day, suggested to Newton it was possible those alchemical symbols he had interpreted were perhaps a kind of warning to those who threatened the Sons of the Art and their hermetick world. To which Newton proceeded to give a most dusty answer:

“My dear young man, alchemists are seekers after truth, and all truth, as I am sure you will agree, comes from God. Therefore I cannot concede that those who have committed murder are true philosophers.”

“Why then,” I said, “if not true philosophers, then what of false ones? It seems to me that Doctor Love and Count Gaetano might easily contemplate such wickedness. Those who are prepared to corrupt the ideals of alchemy for their own ends are perhaps the kind of men who would not shirk from murder. Did the Count not threaten you?”

“That was all bluster,” said Newton. “Besides, it was me they threatened, not poor Mister Kennedy.”

“Yet when first we met them outside my house,” I said, persisting in this argument, “was it not Mister Kennedy who accompanied them? And had they not by their own admission recently come from the Lion Tower? The circumstances would seem to afford some evidence against them, master. Perhaps Kennedy had some private business with Doctor Love and the Count, that gave them a grievance against him.”

“It may be,” allowed Newton, “that there is some truth in what you say.”

“Perhaps if they were invited to offer some account of where they were last evening, they might acquit themselves of any suspicion.”

“I do not think they will be disposed to answer any question I may have for them,” said Newton.

We crossed the bridge once more, where I bought some bread and cheese, for I was mighty hungry. Newton did not eat, for he was invited to dinner by a fellow member of the Royal Society, which was one of his few ways of keeping abreast of its learned activities, since he refused to go to its meetings himself so long as Mister Hooke remained alive.

“You had better come with me,” said Newton. “So don’t eat too much. My friend keeps an excellent table to which I fear I shall not do polite justice. You will help to remedy that defect in my manly parts.”

“Is it me you want, or my appetite?” said I.

“Both.”

We walked to Newgate with Newton complaining about the amount of building work that afflicted the city; and he remarked how, with one town added to an old one, soon there would be no countryside left, only London, which was quickly becoming as vast a metropolis as ever had existed, to the affright of those who lived there and were obliged to suffer its dirt and its general lawlessness; so that it was clear to me how he did not love the city much at all; and although he had told me he had grown tired of Cambridge, yet I often thought he hankered for the peace and quiet of that university town.

Bad news did await us at the Whit, for John Berningham, that had forged the gold guineas, was sick in the stomach and fit to die. Such was the number of prisoners awaiting trial or punishment in Newgate that it was easy enough to fall ill there and then to perish, for no physician would set foot in the place. But Berningham’s sickness was of a most violent and convulsive nature that made my master suspect he had been poisoned. And, questioned by my master, the cull who guarded the ward wherein poor Berningham was confined observed that he had started to vomit soon after a visit from his wife the previous evening.