Dark Matter

“We must nip this in the bud,” murmured Newton, “or else the war will be lost for lack of coin to pay the King’s troops.”

Newton listened patiently to their remonstrance; and at last he raised his hands to quell the general clamour, and spoke to the disgruntled Minters.

“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “You have more to fear from the French than from this murderer, for he will soon be caught, you have my word upon it.”

“How?” shouted a man.

“I will catch him,” Newton insisted. “Even so, it is only proper that you should be properly compensated for your continuing devotion to the Great Recoinage, in the face of these heinous crimes. I will speak to their lordships and demand that you should receive a boon for your important work here. Any man who stays to work will receive an extra five guineas when this great work shall be completed. Even if I have to pay that boon out of my own pocket.”

“Does that include the day shift?” asked another.

“Including the day shift,” said Newton.

The Minters looked at one another, nodded their assent, and then gradually drifted back to their machines, at which point Newton let out a sigh of relief.

“And all the time, the Master of the Mint plays cards,” said I. “I do not think the King can know what a loyal servant he has in you, Doctor.”

“We must hope their lordships agree with you,” smiled Newton. “Otherwise I shall be considerably out of pocket. You have the copy of what was written on the wall of the Sally Port stairs?”

I handed Newton the paper, which he put away in his sleeve.

“It will be my evening’s endeavour,” he said, “to solve this conundrum, for I don’t like to be dunned and teased about things which are at base mathematical. For in any cipher I think that the frequency of vowels and consonants depend upon the rules of number, with the former being more frequent than the latter.”

It was plain to see that he relished the task that now lay before him, much as the prophet Daniel might have enjoyed revealing the will of God to Belshazzar when the fingers of a man’s hand did write upon the plaster of the wall in the great king’s palace. For my own part, however, I was very tired and, despite the close proximity to my house of a headless corpse, and the clamorous noise of the Mint being now resumed, I was looking forward to my bed.

I awoke, if awakening is how it can be described, for I hardly slept at all, at the mercy of a slight fever. But I attempted to play the Stoic and reported to the office as usual, where Newton told me that we were going to visit Bedlam.

“To see your friend Mister Twistleton. Enquiring about him this morning I discovered that he was taken there last night at Lord Lucas’s order. After Mercer’s body was discovered. Is it not strange?”

“But do you hope to question the man?”

“Why not?”

“He is mad, sir.”

“Nature seldom bestows an enduring and constant sanity even on her most advantaged sons. And if Mister Twistleton’s madness be of the kind that makes him speak whatever comes into his head, then we may find that we are able to order his thoughts for ourselves.”

We went by coach to Moorfields and the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, which was a most magnificent building designed by the same Robert Hooke whom Newton regarded as his great scientific rival, and therefore, I was not at all surprised to hear my master speak most dismissively of the shape and pattern of the hospital.

“Only a madman would make a madhouse look like a palace,” he complained. “Only Hooke could perpetrate such a fraud.”

But there was nothing palatial about Bedlam’s hellish interior.

We passed through the entrance, flanking either side of which stood statues of Melancholy and Madness, as if some horrible Gorgon had stared into the eyes of two mindless brothers, which was a better fate, to my mind, than that which lay inside, where all was screams and echoing laughter and such a dreadful picture of human misery and distasteful imbecility as would have given only Beelzebub comfort. And yet raw minds went there to make sport and diversion of Bedlam’s miserable inhabitants, many of whom were chained and placed in cells, like the animals in the Lion Tower. To my untutored eye—for I knew nothing about caring for mad folk—the atmosphere was that of an enduring Tyburn holiday, for there was cruelty and callousness, drunkenness and despair, not to mention a great many whores who plied their trade in the hospital among the visiting public. In short, the picture was a facsimile of the world at large, disjointed, supped full of horror and pleasure both, and such as would have caused any man to doubt the existence of God in his Heaven.