Newton’s Fire

by Will Adams

  I

  Parking anywhere near the centre of Oxford was always a challenge, but Pelham finally found a space in a residential street where he barely had to nudge the cars either side. They walked briskly and found Albie waiting by a side door of his college, pacing back and forth, checking his watch. ‘This better be important, Olivia,’ he said, kissing her briskly on the cheek. ‘I’m supposed to be giving some wretched talk.’

  ‘It is important,’ said Olivia. ‘And we’re terribly grateful.’

  He waved them inside, then led them with the cautious stoop of a tall man in an old building. They reached a stock room. He gave a courtier’s wave at the array of remote-sensing devices on the shelves and slouched like problem youths against the facing wall.

  ‘You’ve got a Mala!’ said Rachel, going straight to it. ‘Fantastic.’

  Albie winced. ‘Our moon-buggy is a fine machine too,’ he said, steering her towards its neighbour. ‘A real workhorse.’

  ‘We’ll look after it, I swear,’ promised Olivia. ‘We’ll bring it straight back.’

  Albie sighed. ‘Tomorrow will be fine,’ he said, as Luke and Pelham gathered up the Mala and its peripherals. ‘So what are you looking for?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ Olivia told him. ‘Really, I can’t. But if we find anything, you’ll be the first to know.’

  ‘I should damned well hope so.’

  The old Ashmolean was closer than the car, so they headed straight there. Their route took them past the Sheldonian. ‘Maybe it wasn’t the alchemists’ network,’ mused Olivia, frowning at it. ‘Maybe it was this guy.’

  ‘You mean Wren?’ asked Rachel.

  Olivia nodded. ‘One of Newton’s closest friends. One of Ashmole’s, too.’ Her museum was bang next door. ‘There’s even a suggestion he may have helped design this place,’ she said, leading them up its front steps. ‘At least, that’s what we tell people.’

  Rachel smiled. ‘Must add a bit of cachet.’

  ‘And makes it harder for the council to tear us down.’ She unlocked and opened the door, turned off the alarm, switched on lights. They found themselves in a display gallery that also served as reception and gift shop. An internal staircase led both up and down. They went down, passed through more doors into a large display room crowded with neat ranks of glass-topped display cabinets, and with sundials, grandfather clocks and other large chronometers against its walls. ‘Conrad said it was in here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know exactly where.’

  ‘Great,’ said Rachel. ‘Then let’s start looking.’

  II

  Walters had stopped off for a burger with Pete and Kieran. The mood was gloomy; the trail was cold. They were beginning to talk of giving up for the night and starting fresh in the morning when his mobile finally rang. He swallowed away a mouthful of dry bread and meat. ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know who the hell you think you are,’ said a man.

  ‘Makes two of us, mate,’ Walters told him. ‘You sure you got the right number?’

  ‘This is the number I was given. I was told you wanted information about one of our SatNav systems.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Walters. He beckoned to Kieran for a napkin and something to write with. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘I don’t know who the hell you think you-’

  ‘Yes. I got that bollocks the first time. Where are they?’

  ‘Oxford city centre.’ He read out the GPS coordinates, gave the name of a road. Walters read it back to make sure he had it right. ‘And they went straight there from Cambridge?’

  ‘They stopped for a while at a place called Oddington.’ He read out coordinates for that too.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Walters.

  ‘This kind of thing shouldn’t be allowed,’ said the man, determined to get it off his chest. ‘Honestly, I don’t know who you people think you are.’

  ‘We’re the people you just shopped one of your customers to,’ Walters told him, with a certain satisfaction. ‘So I wouldn’t go moaning about it if I were you.’ He ended the call, picked up the remains of his burger and fries, examined them dispiritedly for a moment, tossed them back down. Then he nodded to Kieran and Pete. ‘Come on, fellas,’ he said. ‘We’re in business.’

  III

  Luke leaned against the wall and watched admiringly as Rachel assembled the Mala then set to work. No hesitation, no fumbling. It was always a pleasure to watch someone who knew exactly what they were doing. But then he sensed Pelham looking wryly at him. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ smiled Pelham.

  Olivia, meanwhile, had spread the Newton papers out on a glass-topped cabinet. ‘The papers of J.D. and J.T.’ she said, tapping the fourth line of Newton’s enigmatic message.

  ‘We think J.D. is John Dee,’ said Luke, going to join her. ‘We don’t know who J.T. is.’

  ‘I do,’ said Olivia. ‘And it’s not a “he” so much as a “they”. The John Tradescants, father and son.’

  Pelham shook his head. ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘Most people haven’t,’ said Olivia. ‘Though they should have done. By rights, this place should have been named after them, not Ashmole. It was their collection that he left to Oxford, not his own.’

  ‘The Tradescantareum hardly trips off the tongue,’ said Pelham.

  ‘Who were they?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘The father was a gardener. His boss sent him to Holland to buy some seeds and he caught the collecting bug. This was around 1610, when the world was really opening up. The Americas, China, India, Africa. He travelled to all parts, gathering specimens and other curiosities to put on display in his Lambeth home. The Ark, he called it. Charged a shilling a time. There was a huge market for curiosity shops back then. The more sensational, the better.’ She nodded towards the rear. ‘We found a mermaid’s hand out back when we put the extension in.’

  ‘A mermaid’s hand?’ asked Luke.

  ‘So the Tradescants claimed,’ she smiled. ‘Turned out to be the paw of a manatee. Still. A wonderful find.’

  ‘And the son went into the business too?’

  ‘Took it over when his father died. Unfortunately for him and his wife, that’s when Ashmole showed up. A really nasty piece of work, I’m afraid. He set his heart on their collection. The poor Tradescants never realized. Ashmole was an aristocrat, you see, so they trusted him. Then he got John blind drunk one night and somehow tricked him into leaving him the entire collection. Tradescant sued to get it annulled, but he died before his case could be heard. And then the court sided with Ashmole over Tradescant’s widow.’

  ‘Maybe Ashmole was in the right, then,’ said Luke.

  ‘Sure. Because courts always put poor widows ahead of wealthy aristocrats. Besides, there’s a curious story about Ashmole just after the Civil War. He fought with the Royalists, so was in the doghouse. Then in 1646 he was inducted into a Staffordshire society of Freemasons. It’s one of the earlier mentions of Freemasonry in English history, seventy years before the first Grand Lodge was formed in London. And within another week, he was swaggering around London like he owned it.’

  ‘By virtue of being a Freemason?’

  ‘That’s how it looks. And, afterwards, Ashmole was forever taking people to court. He used to gloat about never losing a case. But then he wouldn’t, would he? Not if he knew which courts had Masonic judges.’

  ‘Maybe that was his link with Newton,’ frowned Luke. ‘There have been rumours forever about him being a Mason. One of his disciples even became Grand Master of-’

  The Mala began suddenly to screech. Rachel muted the volume, checked the display. ‘Your man Josten was right,’ she told Olivia. ‘There is something down there. Big and iron, just like he said.’ She swept the detector left and right. ‘And some kind of cavity too.’

  ‘How deep?’

  ‘Ten feet. Twelve feet. Something like that.’

  ‘Pipes?’ suggested Luke.

  ‘Maybe.’ She swept the GPR back and forth, mapping it
s edge, a rough circle perhaps ten feet in diameter. She adjusted the Mala’s controls, the better to investigate the interior of this circle, checking data as she went. ‘I’m getting something else,’ she said, as she reached the centre. ‘Another metal.’ She checked the readings, frowned, checked again. Then she looked up at them all with the strangest expression on her face.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Luke.

  ‘Gold,’ she said.

  SEVENTEEN

  I

  There was silence in the basement gallery, save for the ticking of clocks around the walls. Olivia folded her arms emphatically as they turned to her. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘No, what?’ asked Pelham. ‘You don’t even know what we’re about to suggest.’

  ‘Yes, I do. You’re about to suggest I dig up my floor. And the answer is no. This is a museum, not an oil field.’

  ‘We’ve got to,’ said Pelham. ‘Don’t you realize what a find this is? There could be anything down there.’

  ‘Exactly. Which is why we’re not going to risk damaging it.’

  ‘But we-’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. That’s the end of it.’

  ‘Then what do we do?’ asked Rachel. ‘We can’t pretend it’s not there.’

  ‘And we won’t. I’ll call Albie first thing in the morning. He can verify your readings, put together a plan. And when we next have an appropriate window, he can excavate with the kind of care something like this demands.’

  Luke glanced at Pelham. Pelham nodded. ‘I’m afraid there’s something about this business we haven’t told you yet,’ he said to Olivia.

  Olivia’s eyes narrowed. ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’re not the only ones looking for this,’ said Luke. He told her about his day: his anonymous client, Rachel’s aunt, Crane Court and their narrow escape from Pelham’s apartment.

  Olivia listened in stony silence. ‘How could you keep this from me?’ she demanded, when he was done. ‘Don’t you realize how much trouble you’re in? How much trouble you’ve put me in?’

  ‘None of us are exactly here by choice,’ said Pelham.

  ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Luke. ‘You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry. We all are. But we’re riding a bolting horse here. It’s all we can do to cling on.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ said Olivia. ‘You still can’t dig up my floor. I don’t care who’s after you.’

  Luke crouched, placed his palm flat on the floor, tantalized by the mysterious gold just a few feet beneath. Yet he knew in his heart that Olivia was right. Even if they could get down, this was too important a site to risk. He smiled wryly at Rachel. ‘Your aunt asked me something earlier. She asked me why a man like Newton would take a job at the Royal Mint. I gave her the usual reasons: status, income, London. But the truth is that no one really knows. What if this is why? I mean, Newton drove himself crazy with alchemical experiments in 1693. What if that wasn’t pure research? What if he’d simply needed a large quantity of gold to complete whatever Ashmole left him? He was an alchemist; of course he’d have tried alchemy first. But when that failed him, where would he have turned?’

  ‘The Royal Mint,’ murmured Olivia.

  ‘The position of Warden had always been a sinecure,’ said Luke. ‘But not under Newton. He designed new coining presses, invented new alloys. He oversaw an entire recoinage of the realm. And he was the greatest mathematician in British history, so I’m guessing he could have run rings around the auditors. He could have taken however much gold he’d needed and no one would ever have known.’

  Pelham grinned down at the floor. ‘Sir Isaac’s stolen bullion,’ he said. ‘How cool is that?’

  ‘All the more reason to treat it with respect,’ said Olivia.

  Rachel had gone to consult the Newton paper. Now she frowned. ‘I think maybe we’re missing a trick,’ she said, tapping the text. ‘I mean we’re all pretty much agreed on what this means, right? Ashmole left something to Newton on the understanding that he’d complete it, bring it here and hide it beneath the floor. But this was a working laboratory by then. The foremost laboratory in England. And then an anatomy room. That’s right, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Olivia. ‘Why?’

  ‘So you were absolutely correct earlier when you said that Ashmole couldn’t possibly have expected Newton to come here with a pickaxe and dig up the floor. Which means there must have been some other way down. A way that both he and Newton knew about.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ said Olivia. ‘We’ve rebuilt this place god knows how many times. If there were any secret passages or the like, we’d have found them long ago, believe me. And even if one had somehow escaped our notice for over three hundred years, do you honestly expect us to find it in just one night?’

  ‘You can’t think of anything?’ asked Luke. ‘No anomalies at all?’

  She shook her head. ‘We found an old septic tank when we put in the extension out back. But that was only a few feet deep, and we’ve concreted it up, anyway. And then there was the old well, of course. But that’s it.’

  ‘The old well?’ asked Rachel dryly. ‘You don’t mean as in “Salomans House well concealed”?’

  ‘Oh my good lord,’ murmured Olivia, clasping her hands by her mouth. ‘Yes, I rather suppose I do.’

  II

  There was little Croke could do to help search Crane Court, so he settled himself into a penthouse apartment and watched it live on a vast plasma TV. Speculative reports were interspersed with loops of footage, one of which even included a brief clip of himself and Morgenstern arriving earlier. But every so often they’d cut to aerial shots, and there was something perversely satisfying about being able to hear those selfsame helicopters clattering above his head.

  His mobile rang. He checked the number. Walters. ‘Are you in Oxford yet?’ Croke asked him.

  ‘On our way,’ said Walters. ‘But we may have found something. Thought you’d want to know at once.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Redfern and the others stopped off in a place called Oddington. Kieran’s been checking it out and the house nearest where they parked belongs to a woman called Olivia Campbell. An Olivia Campbell runs something called the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, about fifteen minutes walk from where they parked. Thing is, they put on a History of Chemistry exhibition there a few years back. The programme’s on their website. And guess who helped organize it? Only our friend Pelham Redfern.’

  ‘Then that’s where they’ve gone,’ said Croke.

  ‘So it would seem. We’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘And you three can take care of them yourselves, right? Only I want to keep this to ourselves if we can.’

  ‘Let us check it out. I’ll call you back if we need help.’

  ‘Good.’ Croke finished the call, stood there frowning. A museum in the heart of Oxford. What an odd place to go to ground. He was still brooding on this when Morgenstern came in.

  ‘Just completed the second scan,’ he told Croke. ‘Nothing. And we double-checked those anomalies against the plans, like you suggested. But they’re all water or sewage or other utilities.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s not here?’

  Morgenstern gave a shrug. ‘Police scanners are designed to find recent disturbances, organic remains, explosives, that kind of shit. For something like this, we should maybe get in some geological or even archaeological equipment.’

  It was the word ‘archaeological’ that did it, for some reason. Croke held up a hand for quiet, to buy himself time to think. The Museum of the History of Science. What if Luke and the others hadn’t gone to ground? What if they knew something he didn’t? ‘Bear with me a moment,’ he said. ‘I want to make a call.’

  He tried Jerusalem first, but Avram wasn’t answering, so he rang his nephew in London instead.

  ‘Yes?’ asked Kohen.

  ‘The Museum of the History of Science in Oxford,’ said Croke.

  A mom
ent’s silence. ‘Ah,’ said Kohen. ‘Yes.’

  Anger descended upon Croke like the holy spirit. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The Museum of the History of Science used to be the Ashmolean. The Ashmolean was also once thought of as Salomon’s House. In fact, if the E.A. in Newton’s message refers to Elias Ashmole, as seems plausible under this hypothesis, then it’s probably more likely to be the …’

  Croke held his cellphone down by his side to prevent himself from yelling. When he’d calmed a little, he raised it again. ‘Are you telling me we closed down half London to search in the wrong fucking place?’ he asked. He gave Kohen the chance to reply, but all he got was silence, so he ended the call before he said anything unforgivable.

  ‘We’re searching in the wrong place?’ asked Morgenstern.

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘And this Oxford Museum of yours? That’s the right place?’

  ‘That’s how it looks.’

  Morgenstern nodded as he digested this. His lips tightened and a little colour rose in his throat. He could use this as an opportunity to distance himself from this fiasco, Croke knew, or he could remind himself that this was his Commander in Chief’s top priority. Thankfully, he chose the latter option. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘then we’d better get down there, hadn’t we?’

  III

  The well had originally been just behind the Ashmolean’s rear wall, but the recent extension had brought it inside. Olivia led them to it. Its head was knee high and perhaps three feet across, and it had been fitted with a black-painted winch and handle to make it into a feature, even though its mouth was covered by a sheet of safety glass bolted to the brickwork.

  ‘Back in a mo,’ said Olivia. She vanished upstairs and returned heaving a battered blue toolbox. Luke found himself an adjustable wrench and went to work. The bolts didn’t come easily, not even after oiling. But finally he had them. They lifted off the safety glass, rested it against the wall. A noxious smell oozed up from the darkness. Luke took a torch from the toolbox, aimed it down. Water glittered blackly from the foot, minutely disturbed by fragments of brickwork they’d dislodged while removing the glass. He pointed the torch at each section of shaft wall in turn, but it all looked perfectly normal.