by Philip Kerr
“Does the sword belong to Mister Mercer?” he asked.
“One sword looks much like another to me, sir,” said Mrs. Allen and, folding her arms as if she was afraid to touch it, stared at it most circumspectly. “But I reckon it’s Mercer’s right enough. His father’s sword, it was.”
“The green tablecloth. Do you recognise that?”
“Never seen it before in me life, sir. And Lord only knows what a goose egg is doing on the table. Mercer couldn’t abide the taste of eggs.”
“Do you lock your door at night, Mrs. Allen?”
“Always, sir. Southwark isn’t Chelsea yet.”
“And did Mister Mercer have a key?”
“Yes sir. But Mercer was never in the habit of lending it.”
“And was your door locked when you rose this morning?”
“Yes sir. So that I almost thought I must have dreamed I heard someone in here. And yet I am certain Mercer would not have torn up these books. These books were his chief enjoyment, sir.”
Newton nodded. “I wonder if I might trouble you for some water, Mrs. Allen?”
“Water, sir? You don’t want water, not on a cold morning like this one. It is too heavy to be good for the health and will give you the stone if you’re not careful. We can do better than that for gentlemen such as yourselves. Will you take some good Lambeth ale, sir?”
Newton said we would, and with great pleasure, although it remained plain to me that in asking for water his intention had only been to remove the woman from Mercer’s room so that he might search it. This he proceeded to do and all the while commented on the appearance of the room, which he found mighty interesting.
“The emerald table, egg, sword, without doubt this is another message,” he said.
The mention of the sword prompted me to pick it up and examine it with the same judicious care Newton himself might have brought to the matter. He himself drew open a small cabinet drawer and examined a box of candles while I brandished the rapier in the air as Mister Figg, my fencing master, had once taught me. “This is an Italian cup-hilted rapier,” I said. “Ivory grip. The hilt deep-cut and well-pierced and engraved with some scrolling foliage. The blade of the lozenge section signed by Solingen, although the bladesmith’s name is illegible.” I tried the edge against my thumb. “Sharp, too. I should say this is a gentleman’s sword.”
“Very good,” said Newton. “If Mrs. Allen had not told us the sword belonged to Mercer’s father, we should now know everything about it.”
Newton, who was still examining the candles thoughtfully, caught sight of my disappointment, and smiled at me. “Never mind, my dear young fellow. You have told us one thing. That Mercer had seen better days than is evident from his present circumstances.”
I waited for him to make some disclosure about the candles, but when he did not, my curiosity got the better of me, and I did look at them myself. “They are beeswax,” said I. “I would have expected tallow candles in Southwark. Mercer was not one for economy. Perhaps he had not lost a taste for better living.”
“You are improving all the time,” said Newton.
“But what do they signify? What is their meaning?”
“Their meaning?” Newton replaced the candles in the drawer and said, “They are for light.”
“Is that all?” I grumbled, seeing that he had mocked me.
“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 t
he ward wherein poor Berningham was confined observed that he had started to vomit soon after a visit from his wife the previous evening.
“That is most coincident,” said Newton, scrutinising the contents of Berningham’s pisspot as if the proof might be found there. “It may be that she has poisoned him. But I fancy there’s a quick way we can prove it, at least to our own satisfaction.”
“How?” I asked, looking in the pot myself.
“How? That is simple. If Mrs. Berningham has left her lodgings in Milk Street, then I’ll warrant she’s as guilty as Messalina, and this poor wretch is poisoned right enough.”
“I cannot believe that lady would do such a thing,” I protested.
“Then we’ll soon find out which of us understands women better,” said Newton, and started to leave.
“But is there nothing we can do for poor Berningham?” I asked, tarrying by the fellow’s grimy cot.
Newton grunted and thought for a moment. Then, removing a shilling from his pocket, he beckoned a girl toward him.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Sally,” said the girl.
Newton handed her the shilling. “There’s another shilling in it if you look after this man exactly as I tell you.” To my surprise, Newton bent down to the fireplace and removed a piece of cold charcoal, which he then broke into small pulular fragments.“I want you to make him swallow as many pieces of charcoal as he can eat. As in the Psalms of David. ‘For I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping.’ He must eat as much as he can manage until he dies or until the convulsions cease. Is that clear?”
The girl nodded silently as once again Berningham was overcome with a fit of retching so strong that I thought his stomach would fall out of his mouth.
“Very likely it is already too late for him,” Newton observed coolly. “But I have read that charcoal absorbs some vegetable-based poisons. For I think it must be vegetable-based, there being no blood in his water, and that is sometimes indicative of something like mercury, in which case I should recommend he be fed with only the white of an egg.”
Newton nodded as if he had only suddenly remembered useful information that had been long forgotten to him. This was a distinctive characteristic of his. I was always left with the impression that his mind was as vast as a great country house, with some rooms containing certain things that were known to him, but seldom visited, so that sometimes he seem surprised at what knowledge he himself possessed. And I remarked upon this as we walked along Cheapside to Milk Street.
“As to myself,” he replied, “it very much appears to me that the most important thing I have learned is how little I do know. And sometimes I seem to myself to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself with smooth pebbles or pretty shells while a great ocean of truth lies undiscovered before me.”
“There is much that still lies undiscovered in this case,” said I. “But I have the impression, from all our activity, that we shall soon discover something of significance.”
“I trust you shall be right.”
For my own part I could have lived very contentedly without the discovery that lay before us now, which was that no such person as Mrs. Berningham or anyone answering her description lived, or had ever lived, at the house in Milk Street where Newton’s coach had set her down but thirty-six hours earlier.
“Now that I do think of it, I cannot remember that she went through the front door at all,” Newton admitted. “You have to admire the jade’s audacity.”
But the realisation that she had tricked us disappointed me, for I had entertained high hopes of her being innocent of her husband’s poisoning, which her never having lived there at all seemed after all to confirm.
“Who would have thought that I was a keener judge of women than you?” railed my master.
“But to poison your own husband,” I said, shaking my head. “It is quite unconscionable.”
“Which is why the law takes such a dim view of it,” said Newton. “It’s petty treason, and if she’s caught and it be proved that she did murder him by poison, she’ll burn for it.”
“Then I hope she is never caught,” said I. “For no one, least of all a woman, should suffer that particular fate. Even a woman that murders her husband. But why? Why would she do such a thing?”
“Because she knew that we were on to her husband. And hopes to protect someone, perhaps herself. Perhaps others, too.” For a moment he remained in thought. “Those fellows whom you did suspect of accosting her near the Whit.”
“What about them?”
“Are you quite sure that they meant her harm?”
“What do you mean?”
“By the time I saw them, you had engaged with them.”
I took off my hat and scratched my head sheepishly. “It may be that it was only their weapons and rough voices did persuade me that they meant her some harm. In truth I cannot recall that any of them laid a hand upon her.”
“I thought as much,” said Newton.
We returned to the Tower, where we were straightaway summoned to the Lord Lieutenant’s house, which overlooked Tower Green in the shadow of the Bell Tower. And in the Council Chamber where, it was said, Guy Fawkes was put on the rack, Lord Lucas met us with Captain Mornay of the Ordnance and told us that we were to address any questions regarding the death of Mister Kennedy to the Captain who, in accordance with the law, had been ordered to impanelajury of eighteen men from the Tower that it might be determined whether his death be an accident or not.
“As sure as iron is most apt to rust,” said Newton, “I tell you this was no accident.”
“And I tell you that the jury will decide the matter,” said Lord Lucas.
But Newton’s obvious irritation quickly gave way to anger when he learned that all eighteen of the men who were impanelled for the jury had already been drawn from the Ordnance and that there was to be no representation of the Mint.
“What?” he exclaimed, being most agitated. “Do you intend to have this all your own way, Lord Lucas?”
“This is a matter for our jurisdiction, not yours,” said the Captain.
“And do you seriously think that his death could be accidental?”
“The evidence for murder is very circumstantial,” said Captain Mornay, who was a most cadaverous-looking officer, for his face was most white, so that I formed the apprehension not that he powdered it, but that he might be ill. His eyes were the largest I had ever seen upon a man and very evasive, while his hands seemed very small for one of his height. In short, the whole proportion and air of his being was so peculiar and inexactly formed that, but for his uniform, I should have taken him for a poet or a musician.
“Circumstantial, is it?” snorted Newton. “And I suppose he tied his hands himself?”
“Pray, sir, correct me if I am wrong, but since one of Mister Kennedy’s arms was no longer attached to his body, there is nothing to prove that his hands were ever tied at all.”
“And the gag? And the stone in his mouth?” insisted Newton. “Explain those if you will.”
“A man may chew a stick, sir, to help him bear the pain if he knows he is to be cut by a surgeon. I have myself seen men suck musket balls to make spit in lieu of drinking water. I have even seen a man tie his own blindfold before being shot by a firing party.”
“The door to the Lion Tower was locked from the outside,” said Newton.
“So Mister Wadsworth has said,” answered Lord Lucas. “But with respect to you, sir, I know him better than you. He is a most intemperate, addle-pated fellow who is just as likely to forget his head as where he left a key. It’s not the first time that he has been negligent of his duties. And you may be assured that he will find himself reprimanded for it.”
“Are you suggesting that Mister Kennedy might have committed suicide?” Newton asked with no small exasperation. “And in such a dreadful way? Why, milord, it’s preposterous.”
“Not suicide, sir,” said Lord Luca
s. “But it is plain to anyone who has ever visited Bedlam that folk who are troubled by virulent lunacies may often pluck out their own eyes and gouge themselves. Perhaps they may even feed themselves to a lion.”
“Mister Kennedy was no more mad than you or me,” said Newton. “Why then I at least, for you, milord Lucas, begin to show some signs of delusion in this matter. You too, Captain, if you persist with this impression.”
Lord Lucas sneered his contempt, but Captain Mornay, who was Irish, I thought, seemed rather taken aback at this imputation.
“I’m sure there is nothing in what I have said to put me upon a level with a person of that stamp,” he said.
“And now, gentlemen,” said Lord Lucas, “if you will all excuse me, I have work to do.”
But Newton had already bowed and was walking out of the Council Chamber. Captain Mornay and I followed suit, with the Captain almost apologetic to me.
“I am sure I should be very sorry to affront that gentleman,” he said, nodding at the figure of my master ahead of us. “For I believe he is a very clever man.”
“He knows things which I never expected any man should have known,” I replied.
“But you understand, I have my orders and must carry out my duty. I am not free to think for myself, Mister Ellis. I am sure you can receive my meaning.” At which he turned on the heel of his boot and walked off in the direction of the Chapel.
Catching my master, I reported this brief exchange of conversation.
“Lord Lucas would have me thwarted in all things,” he said. “I think he would side with the French if I were their opponent.”
“But why does he dislike you so much?”
“He would hate whoever was charged with conducting the affairs of His Majesty’s Mint. As I told you before. This Great Recoinage has turned the garrison out of the Mint, although it was not of my doing. But I did issue all Minters with a document that protects them from the press-gang and from any exercise of the Tower liberties upon their persons, which Lucas much resents. But we shall make a fool of him yet, Mister Ellis.Depend upon it, sir. We shall find a way to make him look a proper idiot.”
