Dark Matter

“But for my uncle’s remedies, you were fit to have died,” she explained. “For it was he who effected your cure. Soon after Mister Woston, our coachman, brought you to Jermyn Street, my uncle went to an apothecary in Soho to fetch Jesuit’s bark, and also some dried meadowsweet, which he then ground to a powder in a pestle, for he had read that these sometimes served as an ague remedy. And so it has proved, for you are restored to us.”

She mopped my brow with a damp cloth, and then helped me to drink some beer. I tried to sit up, but found I could not.

“You must stay still, for you are very weak, Tom. You must rely on me and Mrs. Rogers as if we were your own hands.”

“I cannot allow it, Miss Barton,” I protested. “It is not proper that you should look after me.”

“Tom,” she laughed, “don’t take on so. I am a woman who has brothers. There is nothing to be ashamed of.”

It was some time before my condition improved enough to take proper cognisance of what had happened to me. By which time it was Lady Day. But Newton would not hear of my coming back to his service until I was fully recovered. Nor would he answer any of my enquiries relating to the investigations we had been working on. Instead he brought a piece of blackboard to my room which he did set upon a painter’s easel and, with the aid of some chalk, would, upon occasion, attempt to explain his system of fluxions to me. He meant well, of course; and yet I had not the brain for it, and these lectures in mathematics merely served to increase my resolve soon to be well again despite the fact that with Miss Barton nursing me I had good reason to lie abed thinking myself to be a man much blessed by being ill. For she baptised me with her love, and resurrected me with her tender care. When I was feverish, she mopped my brow. There were days when I lay awake and just looked at her for a whole afternoon. Other days I remember not at all. I have not the words to describe my love for her. How is love described? I am no Shakespeare. No Marvell. No Donne. When I was too weak to feed myself, she fed me. And always she read to me: Milton, Dryden, Marvell, Montaigne, and Aphra Behn, of whose work she was especially fond. Oroonoko was her favourite—although I myself did think the end much too gruesome. That book contains the history of a slave, and ’tis no exaggeration to say that by the time I was strong enough to return to the Mint, I was hers.

It was the eighth day of April, a Thursday, when I went back to work. I do remember that, and easily enough, for I could not have forgotten that milord Montagu was become the Earl of Halifax, and had replaced milord Godolphin as Lord Treasurer. And it was several days after before the business of the Mint permitted me the opportunity to enquire of Newton what had become of our investigation into the murders of Daniel Mercer and Mister Kennedy, for we had not spoken of these matters at all while I had been ill.

“As to the cipher,” said Newton, “I confess I have had no success with it, and it has become clear to me that more messages would be required in order to fathom the numerical structure that is its foundation. Mister Berningham died. Despite the ministrations of that prison drab, he succumbed to the poison he had been given. Very likely the girl did not do exactly as I told her. Doubtless she thought it madness to feed a man pieces of charcoal. And yet it might have cured him.

“I have had Mister Humphrey Hall keep a close eye on Count Gaetano and Doctor Love with very little to report except that Hooke continues to make himself their creature; and I would almost be unhappy if we were to discover some evidence of their having murdered Kennedy and Mercer before they have had a chance to murder Hooke, or, at the very least, his reputation.

“As to Sergeant Rohan and Major Mornay, I had both of them followed by two of our agents. It seems that like the Sergeant, the Major is also a Huguenot, as are several others in the Tower, both in the Mint and in the Ordnance. Naturally I was already aware of John Fauquier, the Deputy Master of the Mint, was also a Huguenot. But I did not know there were so many others.”

“It is said,” I remarked, “that the Huguenots are so numerous that there are as many in London as there are Roman Catholics. I have heard as many as fifty thousand.”