Dark Matter

by Philip Kerr

  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.”

  “The centre of their community is the Church of the Refuge in Threadneedle Street,” said Newton. “Some attend the Austin Friars Chapel in the City. Others the French Conformist Church of the Savoy in Westminster. But all the Huguenots from this Tower, whether they are Mint or Ordnance, attend Threadneedle Street. I myself went to a service at the French church of La Patente in Spitalfields where I found much to admire, since many of these Huguenots do embrace anti-Trinitarian views which are familiar to me. And yet they are most secretive. I was required to state my belief that Christ was a mere man, though without sin, before they would permit me to remain during their worship, for they are very fearful of spies. And not without good reason, I think. I have heard it said often enough that they do harbour secret Papists in their midst. My own agents say the same, but that is based on nothing more substantial than their own ignorant fancy, for our spies think all Frenchmen are, when weighed in the balance, found wanting.”

  “That was also my own opinion,” I told him. “Certainly I know that there were a great many Huguenots who fought for King William at the Battle of the Boyne, including General Ruvigny himself. But I confess I have little apprehension of the true character of their persecutions. And why so many of them are here at all.”

  “But you must have heard of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew,” protested Newton.

  “I have heard of it,” I said. “But I am unable to describe what happened.”

  Newton shook his head. “I would have thought the circumstances of the massacre were familiar to Protestants everywhere. What history are they teaching young people these days?” He sighed. “Well then, let me enlighten you. On the night of August the twenty-fourth, 1572, a large number of Protestants were in Paris to see the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, the future French King and grandfather of the present French King, Lewis, married to Marguerite, who was a member of the ruling French Catholic family of Valois. The treacherous Valois family saw opportunity to extirpate Protestantism from France, and took it. Ten thousand were massacred in Paris and many more in the provinces; and it is generally accepted that as many as seventy thousand Huguenot Protestants were murdered by the Roman Catholics. Many Huguenots sought refuge in England.”

  “But that was in 1572; surely by now they would be much integrated into English society?”

  “Henry himself was spared, and eventually became the King of France; and by the Edict of Nantes, did establish religious toleration for Protestants in France. Which persisted until about ten years ago, when this same edict was revoked by his own grandson, and now many more Huguenots are fled to England again. Now do you understand?”

  “Yes. I see. But that you say there are several Huguenots here in this Tower still surprises me. One might think that the security of the Mint would demand that only Englishmen should garrison this place.”

  “Did I say several?” said Newton. “I meant many.” He collected a sheet of paper on which appeared two lists of names. “In the Mint, Mister Fauquier, Mister Coligny the assay master, Mister Vallière the melter, and Mister Bayle the moneyer. In the Ordnance, Major Mornay, Captain Lacoste, Captain Martin, Sergeant Rohan, Corporals Cousin and Lasco, and Warders Poujade, Durie, Nimmo, and Lestrade.

  “There may be others not yet known,” continued Newton. “Those who have sought refuge in England since 1685 and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes are easier to see than those whose families have been here since the defeat of La Rochelle in 1629. Major Mornay was born in this country. As was Mister Bayle, the moneyer. Being more English than French of course may make them weaker links in the Huguenot chain.”

  “Do you think that they conspire to do something? Could they have murdered Daniel Mercer and Mister Kennedy?”

  “I cannot hypothesise. That is what we must find out. It is true that there is much to connect French Protestantism and the Huguenots with the hermetic world of alchemy. But I do not believe that there is anything in these Huguenots that would make them any more protective of alchemy than I am myself.”

  “That may be so,” said I. “But what about the Templars of whom your friend in the Royal Society, Mister Pepys, spoke when we dined with him? Were the Templars not French, too? Might it not be that these Huguenots are the heirs to the Templars and their own secret? Would not such a treasure be worth killing for? It seems to me that there are many secrets hereabouts.”

  “Enough, enough,” groaned Newton. “You trouble me with your incessant speculations.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “We must keep these Huguenots under our eye,” said Newton. “And hope that they may reveal themselves. Particularly Major Mornay. I fancy that the more we know about him, the better equipped we shall be to question him again. He is not nearly as strong a character as Sergeant Rohan, who, it seems, was once a galley slave in King Lewis’s navy. We’ll not break down his defences, I’ll warrant. Meanwhile you must learn to be patient, my dear fellow. Nothing is to be gained here by acting with haste. Relations between Mint and Ordnance are delicately poised. And this Gordian knot must be unravelled if we are still to have use of the rope afterward.”

  For the next three weeks I worked with a whole network of Newton’s agents to keep the Huguenots who were in the Tower under our scrutiny. Mornay was a frequent visitor to an address in the Strand that was the home of Lord Ashley. Ashley was a Whig and the Member of Parliament for Poole, in Dorset. Sergeant Rohan often attended the courts at Westminster Hall. There he would listen to whatever case was being heard, and the real purpose of his going there seemed to be that he should meet a tall clerical man from whom he seemed to take orders, and who wore a great hat with a black satin hatband and a long, rose-coloured scarf. Bowlegged and bull-necked, the fellow proved too elusive and we lost his trail somewhere in Southwark, so that for a while, at least, he continued to elude identification.

  While I was shadowing Sergeant Rohan through the many shops that lined both sides of Westminster Hall, a curious incident occurred which left me better acquainted with him and possessed of a higher estimate of his character.

  I had for only a moment taken my eyes off the Sergeant to survey one of the many trading madams who are usually to be found there,
possessed of legal papers that help to foster the impression that they come to be clients instead of finding clients for themselves, and was chagrined to discover that I had lost him. Reflecting that I was perhaps not best fashioned to make a spy, for I was too easily distracted by strumpets, I was making my way to the great door of the Hall when, while eyeing another of these pretty jades, I collided with the person of the Sergeant himself. And he, apprehending the true reason for my want of attention to where I was going, was most amused, clapping me on the shoulder and, demonstrating an affability and complaisance I found surprising, he invited me to a nearby tavern. So I went, thinking I might learn something more of his character that might be to our advantage; and learn something of him I did, although not in any way I might have supposed.

  “Your Mister Newton,” he said, fetching us two pots of Byde’s best. “He’s a clever one. I don’t know how he came to suspect me for a mutineer, but it ain’t at all like he thinks between the Major and me. We’re old friends, him and me—old enough to forget rank when we quarrel, as all friends do now and then. When you’ve served with a man, fought alongside him in a fight, saved his skin a few times, it gives you a certain privilege. The possession of an advantage, so to speak. A debt, some might call it.”

  “You saved Major Mornay’s life?”

  “Not so much saved, as kept him alive. He and I were captured at the Battle of Fleuris, in Flanders, fighting for King William. It was the King’s first defeat in the Low Countries. That was in 1690. The French General, Luxembourg, was a cruel fellow and all his prisoners were sentenced to serve as convicts in King Lewis’s galleys, for life. Three days later, the Major and me arrived at Dunkirk, where we were placed in the galley ship L’Heureuse. Do you know what that means?”

  I shook my head.

  “It means Fortune,” said the Sergeant. “And I can tell you there is precious little of that to be found in a French galley ship.

  “Let me tell you about a galley, young fellow. It has fifty rowing benches, twenty-five on each side, six slaves chained to a bench. That’s three hundred men. No one who has not seen the work of a galley slave can possibly imagine it. I myself have rowed for twenty-four hours without a moment’s rest, encouraged by the whips of the comites who commanded us. If you fainted you were flogged until you started to row again, or until you were dead, and then your body was thrown to the sharks. Turks did most of the flogging.” The Sergeant grinned as he recollected the cruelties he described. “There’s no Christian who can flog a man quite like a Turk. Who can flay a man to the bone with a rope’s end, dipped in pitch and brine.

  “The strongest and the weakest were put together, which is how I came to row with the Major. I was at the head of a bench with the Major next to me. Dogs was what the ship’s captain called us, and like dogs was how we lived. He was a man of most Jesuitical sentiments and hated all men of the reformed faith. Once he ordered one of the Turks to cut off a man’s arm with which to beat another. For some reason, the captain took against the Major, and singled him out for an especially harsh beating. But for me, the Major would have died. I gave him half my biscuit and applied vinegar and salt to his weals to stop the beginning of a mortification to his flesh. And somehow, he survived.

  “There were many cruelties we endured, and many hardships: the heat in summer; the cold in winter; the beatings; the starvation; the cannonades from other ships. One time we were raked with langrage shot, which is a long tin box filled with bits of chain and old metal that’s stuffed down the barrel of a gun. A third of the men in the galley were blasted to pieces. All the wounded were thrown overboard for the sharks.

  “Two years the Major and I survived in that Catholic ship of damnation. Once you asked me why I hate Catholics so much. Well here’s why: We were visited by the Mother Superior of an order of Catholic sisters who offered us Huguenots our freedom if we would make an abjuration of our faith. Many of us did, only to discover that she had lied and that it was not within her power to give us freedom. It was the Captain that had put her up to it. His idea of a joke, I suppose.

  “Two years, my friend. In the galleys, that’s a lifetime. We thought our sufferings would never end. But then one day there was a battle. Admiral Russell, bless him, defeated the French at Barfleur, our ship was taken, and we were freed.”

  Sergeant Rohan nodded and then finished his ale; and I thought his story explained much that lay between himself and Major Mornay. Stunned by his tale—in truth I have hardly done it justice—I paid little attention to the curiosity about my master and his habits he now demonstrated; so that I answered many of his questions with scant regard for the danger it occasioned my master.

  Which later on was to cause me great personal grief.

  For all Newton’s obvious intelligence, we seemed no closer to identifying the perpetrators of these atrocities than we had before I had fallen sick. It was fortunate therefore that the murders remained largely unknown outside the castle walls. At the request of the Lords Justices, Doctor Newton and Lord Lucas were ordered to keep secret these atrocities for fear the general public might apprehend some threat to the Great Recoinage and perceive that this might fail, as the Land Tax and the Million Act had failed before it. With the Army still in Flanders and King William still unpopular in the country at large, his son the Duke of Gloucester so frail, and Princess Anne—who was second in line of succession—childless despite her seventeen confinements, there was great fear of national insurrection at home. And nothing was perceived to inflame discontent as much as the continued debasement and scarcity of the coin. The closing date for receipt of the old coin at full value—June twenty-fourth—was fast approaching, but there was so little of the new in circulation that the Lords Justices had secretly given out that any news that bore ill upon the Mint and the recoinage was to be suppressed.

  Yet there was much curiosity—no, concern—as to the results of Doctor Newton’s investigations. And his easily ignited and touchy character being well known in Whitehall, it was given to my brother (who, as I have said, was under-secretary to William Lowndes, the Treasury’s Permanent Secretary) to make some enquiries of me as to what progress was being made with my master’s investigations. At least this was what he said in the beginning. It was only toward the end of our meeting that I learned the real purpose of his speaking to me.

  We met at Charles’s office in Whitehall while Newton appeared before their Lordships in order to recommend a pardon for Thomas White, whose execution for coining had been deferred thirteen times on Newton’s motion in return for information.

  Even then my brother and I did not enjoy cordial relations, although I was grateful to him for finding me employment. But I was damned if in return I was going to become his creature, and had made this plain almost as soon as I was appointed to the Mint. As a result Charles saw me as an embarrassment and a possible hindrance to any substantial preferment in the Treasury, and spoke to me as he might have spoken to his servant. Which was how he spoke to most people, now that I come to reflect upon it. He had grown rather fat and self-important, and reminded me very much of our father.

  “How is your health?” he asked gruffly. “Doctor Newton told me you were ill. And that you were taken care of.”

  “I am much recovered now,” said I.

  “I would have come to see you, brother, but I was detained here.”

  “I am well enough now, as you can see.”

  “Good. So then pray tell me, what is happening in the Tower? By the by, is it one murder or two? Milord Lucas is adamant that there has been but one, and that it is nothing to do with the Ordnance.”

  “There have been three murders,” I said, enjoying the look of consternation that creased my brother’s face.

  “Three? God’s sores,” breathed Charles. “Well then, are we soon to be enlightened as to who has committed these crimes? Or must we await Doctor Newton’s pleasure in this matter? Perhaps he intends to keep these things to himself as he kept silent about his theory of light
for so long. Or perhaps he no longer has the brain for it. It is given out at Cambridge that he only took the position because his mind was gone.”

  “Does one need a brain to work at the Treasury?” I said provocatively. “I’m not sure. However there is nothing wrong with Newton’s mind. And I resent your implication that he is being deliberately secretive in this matter.”

  “So what should I tell the Permanent Secretary?”

  “I care not what you say to the Permanent Secretary.”

  “Shall I tell him that?”

  “It is you who would be judged by it, not me.”

  “And yet you owe me this employment.”

  “As you never cease to remind me.”

  “But for me, Kit, you would have no prospects at all.”

  “Did you do it for me, or did you do it for yourself?”

  Charles sighed and looked out of the window, which was heavily rained upon, as if God did think to become a window cleaner.

  “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he muttered.

  “You have not yet given me liberty to answer your questions. I will tell you what you wish to know. But you must not speak ill of a man for whom I have the greatest respect. Just as I would not do anything but speak well to you of Mister Lowndes or Milord Montagu.”

  “Halifax,” he said, reminding me of Montagu’s new peerage. “Milord Montagu is now the Earl of Halifax.”