Dark Matter

“Might, sir? Might? This was six months ago, when I was still finding my way around this strange place. And I can frame no hypothesis after such an interval of time. For to me the best and safest method of philosophising seems to be, first, to inquire diligently into the evidence of things and to proceed later to hypothesis for the explanations as to how they are. What might or might not have happened is of little concern to me. The investigation of mysteries and difficult things by the method of analysis ought ever to precede the method of composition.

“That is my method, Mister Ellis. To know it is to hit my constitution exactly, sir. But your questions do you justice. I will continue to appreciate your honesty, sir, for I would not make you my creature. But always speak to the point. And make your earliest study my scientific method, for it will stand you in good stead, and then you and I shall get on very well.”

“I will study you and your method most diligently, sir,” said I.

“Well then, what think you of the house and garden?”

“I like them very well, Doctor Newton. I think I was never so lucky at cards as I have been in entering your employment.”

This was true. I had never lived on my own. At the Bar I had shared rooms with another man; and before that, I had been at the University of Oxford where I had lived in college. And it was a great pleasure to close the door of a whole house behind me and be by myself. For all my life I had been obliged to find a space away from brothers and sisters, students and pupil barristers in order that I might read, or dream. But the first night I spent in my new house at the Tower was very nearly my last.

I had gone to bed early with a number of essays on the amendment of English coins that had been written by the leading minds of the day, including Doctor Newton, Sir Christopher Wren, Doctor Wallis, and Mister John Locke. These had been commissioned by the Regency Council in 1695 and Newton had suggested they would give me a good grounding in the various issues surrounding the recoinage. These did not encourage me to stay awake, however; my evening’s reading was as tedious as anything I had seen since abandoning my legal studies; and after an hour or two, I put the candle in the fireplace and pulled the quilt over my head with scarcely a thought for the superstitious fancies that had beset me earlier.

I do not know how long I was asleep. Perhaps it was as little as half an hour, perhaps much longer, but I awoke with a start, as if I had pulled myself out of the grave and back into life. Immediately I was possessed of the certainty that I was not alone; and holding my breath I became convinced that the dark shadows of my bedchamber were animated with the respiration of another. I sat up and, my whole body swayed by the beating of my own heart, I listened as closely to the tenebrous atmosphere as if I had been the prophet Samuel himself. And by and by I was able to distinguish the sound in my own bedchamber as of someone sucking air through a quill, which made my hair stand on end.

“For God’s sake, who is there?” I cried and, swinging my legs out of bed, I went to fetch the stub of candle from the fireplace to light another and illuminate the gloom. In the same instant out of the shadows spoke a voice that chilled me to the bone.

“Thy Nemesis,” said the voice.

I had a brief glimpse of a man’s face and was about to answer when, in a most inhuman manner, he attacked me, forcing me back onto the bed where, with all his weight upon my chest, he set about trying to gouge at my eyes with his thumbs, so that I cried out murder. But the strength of my assailant was formidable and although I caught him a couple of good blows about the head, the power of his attack never faltered and I thought for certain that I should be murdered and if not killed then blinded. Desperately, I forced his hands away from my eyes only to have him fasten them about my throat. Sensible of the fact that I was surely being strangled, I kicked out, in vain. A moment or two later I felt a great weight lifted from my chest and assumed that my soul had begun its upward motion to heaven before, finally, I realised that my attacker had been pulled off me and was now under the restraint of two members of the Ordnance, although he tolerated their hold upon him with such calm that I wondered if these two sentinels detained the right man.

A third member of the Ordnance, one Sergeant Rohan, helped me to come to myself with a little brandy so that I was at last able to stand and confront my assailant in the light of the lantern the Yeoman Warders had brought with them.

“Who are you?” I demanded to know in a voice hardly my own, it sounded so hoarse. “And why did you attack me?”

“His name is Mister Twistleton,” reported the strangely spoken Sergeant Rohan. “And he is the Tower Armourer.”