Dark Matter

  To Naomi Rose

  Praise for

  Dark Matter

  “An engaging tale … Nobody who reads Dark Matter will ever think of the real Isaac Newton quite the same way again.”

  —Boston Globe

  “A robust recreation of life at the end of the 17th century … a most gripping and well-appointed entertainment.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “An illuminating, often crackling exploration into the mysteries of science, mathematics, religion, and human nature … Kerr’s mastery of period detail makes the story all the more delicious.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “An exciting read … The ever-versatile Kerr weaves a rich tapestry of interesting characters and period details.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Fascinating … Kerr successfully evokes a dangerous milieu.”

  —Washington Post

  “An exciting and cleverly written historical thriller … Kerr excels at bringing the past to vivid life.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A remarkable feat of evocation.”

  —Denver Post

  “Intellectually rigorous … rich as history and philosophy.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  The Tower of London

  a. Moat

  b. Water Lane

  c. Bloody Tower

  d. Salt Tower

  e. Broad Arrow Tower

  f. Irish Mint

  g. Brass Mount h. English Mint

  i. Warden’s House

  j. Master’s House

  k. Brick Tower (home of the Master of Ordnance)

  1. Chapel

  m. White Tower

  n. Tower Green

  o. Beauchamp Tower

  p. Bell Tower

  q. Comptroller’s House & Yard

  r. Entrance to the Mint (and Newton’s office)

  s. By ward Tower

  t. Middle Tower

  u. Lion’s Tower

  v. Tower Street to East London

  Prologue

  ARISE, SHINE; FOR THY LIGHT IS COME, AND THE GLORY OF THE

  LORD IS RISEN UPON THEE.

  (ISAIAH 60:1)

  swore not to tell this story while Newton remained alive.

  On the morning of the twenty-eighth of March 1727—Sir Isaac Newton having died some eight days previously—I took a coach from my new lodgings in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, with Doctor Samuel Clarke, who was Newton’s friend and commentator, to the Abbey to see Newton lie in state like some fabulous Greek hero.

  We found him in the Jerusalem Chamber, a great oak-paneled room with a large open fireplace that lies to the southwest of the Abbey, where there are some tapestries and stained glass ascribed to the period of Henry III, and marble busts of Henry IV and Henry V. It is said that Henry IV had a fit while praying one day in the Abbey and was carried into the Jerusalem Chamber where he died, thus fulfilling the prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem.

  I cannot answer for whether the likeness of Henry was a good one, but Newton’s embalmer had done his job well and not made the face up like a whore, which is a very common failing with these people. His flesh looked quite natural, being florid, soft and full, as if the man had been only sleeping. And since there was no perceptible smell, Newton having been dead for a week or more, which is a long time for a corpse to be out of the ground, I could readily attest to the efficiency of the embalmer’s hand at least, for although Spring was not quite arrived, it had been quite warm of late.

  The man I saw, laid out in an open coffin upon a great long refectory table, wore a full-bottomed flaxen wig, a plain white linen stock, and a black three-piece suit. His face was lined, somewhat heavy about the jowls and, despite a keen, aquiline nose that had always put me in mind of the Roman, not unkind. I had thought I might have perceived in the air of his face some of the penetrating sagacity which had once distinguished his composures. Perhaps even some final wisdom. But in death Newton was a quite unremarkable-looking figure.

  “He was in great pain with the stone when he died,” said I.

  “But still quite lucid,” replied Doctor Clarke.

  “Aye. He was always that. Newton was the most lucid of souls. Newton looked upon all of creation as a riddle, with certain clues that were laid about this world by God. Or perhaps as a kind of cipher which, by great concentration of mind, he might translate. I think he believed that a man who might decipher an earthly code might similarly fathom the heavenly one. He believed nothing unless he could prove it as a theorem or draw it as a diagram.”

  “Newton has given us the golden thread by which we may find our way through God’s labyrinth,” said Doctor Clarke.

  “Yes,” I said. “Perhaps that is right.”

  After dinner I returned to my lodgings in Maiden Lane. I slept uneasily, alone with my still-smouldering remembrances of him. I could not say that I had known Newton well. I doubt there was any man or woman who could ever have claimed as much as that. For he was not just a rare bird but a shy one, too. And yet I can say that for a while, with the exception of Mrs. Conduitt, I knew him as well as anyone could have known him.

  Until I met Newton I was like London before the Great Fire, and gave little thought to the poor repair of my intellectual buildings. But when I encountered his spark, and the strong wind of his mind fanned the flames in the narrow streets of my own poor brain—which were quite filled with rubbish most of them, for I was young and foolish then—the fire took hold so quickly that it raged quite unchecked.

  Perhaps, if it had been just the fire ignited by his own acquaintance, something of the man I was might have been saved. But there was also the fire in my heart that was ignited by his niece, Mrs. Conduitt—Miss Barton that was—and, in a case such as this, with fires breaking out in several places at once, and at so great a distance from each other, then the whole conflagration seemed like the result of some great and malevolently supernatural design. For one all too brief and brilliant moment my sky was quite lit up, as if by fireworks. The next, I lay overwhelmed and everything was consumed. My church maimed irreparably; my soul boiled away to nothing; my heart burned to a cold black cinder. In short, my life reduced to ashes.

  Of course, after the fire comes the rebuilding. Sir Christopher Wren’s many great designs. St. Paul’s. Yes, it’s true, I had my own projects. The fact that I am a retired colonel might leave one to suppose that something arose from the ashes of my former life. But the rebuilding was difficult. And not entirely successful. Indeed, I sometimes think it would have been better if, like King Priam slain by Neoptolemus in the burning ruins of Troy, I too had died after we parted.

  Doctor Clarke did not have the patience to be told as much. Doubtless he was still inclined to believe Doctor Newton was someone who gave sight to the blind. But any soldier will tell you that sometimes you can see too much. Even the most courageous man can become quite untrussed at the sight of the enemy. Could King Leónidas with his one thousand Spartans have held the pass at Thermopylae for two whole days if his men had seen the whole host of the Persian army before them? No, there are occasions when it is better to be blind.

  Clarke had said that Newton had given us the golden thread by which we may find our way through God’s labyrinth. Well, that is how I first perceived his work, myself. Only the creator of the labyrinth institutes it otherwise, there being no end to the labyrinth, for it is infinite, at which junction one lights upon the awful discovery that neither is there a creator. But I do not like a labyrinth so well as a chasm or an abyss into which Newton, by virtue of his system of the world and falling bodies and mathematics and chronology, lowers us upon a rope, which is a more precarious situation wherein gravity may do its invisible work.


  Invisible work. Newton knew all about that. His theory of gravity, of course. His interest in alchemy, for example. And ciphers, too. When I told Doctor Clarke how Newton had believed that a man who might decipher an earthly code might similarly fathom the heavenly one, I could have told Clarke such a story of codes and ciphers and secrets as would have made his wig smoke. But no. Doctor Clarke would not have had the patience to hear such a story as mine, for it is a difficult tale and besides, I am a soldier, without much skill in talk. Moreover, I lack the practice in its recounting since it has not been told before this day. Newton himself swore me to secrecy about this dark matter, as he himself called it. Yet now that the great man is dead I can see no reason not to tell someone. But who? And how would I have begun? I fear I am too cool to have mastered the unaffected eloquence and noble, simple style of history that would hold anyone’s attention for very long. It is the Englishman’s malady. We are too plain in our speaking to make a good tale in the telling. I must confess there is much about my own history that I have forgotten. It is difficult for me to remember all of this. More than thirty years have passed and there are many aspects to this story that seem to elude my grasp. But perhaps it is me who is lacking, for I do not find myself very interesting; and certainly not in comparison with Newton. How could I ever have thought to understand one such as he? I was not a man of letters. I could better describe a battle than a history such as this one. Blenheim, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. I fought in all those battles. There has been little poetry in my life. No fine words. Just guns and swords, bullets and bawds.

  But perhaps I might rehearse the matter in my own head. For one day I should like this story to be known. And if I should happen to be bored, I shall simply order myself to desist and I shall take no offence. I had little thought that in recalling this story I might need to write it down. And yet how else might I improve upon the telling of it, except by writing it?

  Chapter One

  Michael Maier, Septimana philosophica,1620

  THE SUN SHALL BE NO MORE THY LIGHT BY DAY; NEITHER FOR BRIGHTNESS SHALL THE MOON GIVE LIGHT UNTO THEE! BUT THE LORD SHALL BE UNTO THEE AN EVERLASTING LIGHT, AND THY GOD THY GLORY.

  (ISAIAH 60:19)

  n Thursday, November the fifth, 1696, most people went to church. But I went to fight a duel.

  Gunpowder Day was then a cause for Protestant celebration twice over: this had been the day, in 1605, when King James I had been delivered from a Roman Catholic plot to blow up the Parliament; and, in 1688, it had also been the day when the Prince of Orange had landed at Torbay to deliver the Church of England from the oppressive hand of another Stuart, the Catholic King James II. Many Gunpowder Day sermons were preached throughout the City, and I would have done well to have listened to one of them, for a little consideration of heavenly deliverance might have helped me to channel my anger against Papist tyranny instead of the man who had impugned my honour. But my blood was up and, my head being full of fighting, I and my second walked to the World’s End Tavern in Knightsbridge where we had a slice of beef and a glass of Rhenish for breakfast, and thence to Hyde Park, to meet my opponent, Mister Shayer, who was already waiting with his own second.

  Shayer was an ugly-looking fellow, whose tongue was too big for his mouth so that he lisped like a little child when he spoke, and I regarded him as I would have regarded a mad dog. I no longer remember what our dispute was about, except to say that I was a quarrelsome sort of young man and very likely there was fault on both sides.

  No apologies were solicited and none proffered and straightaway all four of us threw off our coats and fell to with swords. I had some skill with the weapon, having been trained by Mister Figg in the Oxford Road, but there was little or no finesse in this fight and, in truth, I made short work of the matter, wounding Shayer in the left pap which, being close to his heart, placed the poor fellow in mortal fear of his life, and me in fear of prosecution, for duelling was against the law since 1666. Most gentlemen fighting paid but little heed to the legal consequences of their actions; however, Mister Shayer and myself were both at Gray’s Inn, acquainting ourselves with a tincture of English law, and our quarrel was quickly the cause of a scandal that obliged my leaving off a career at the Bar, permanently.

  It was perhaps no great loss to the legal profession, for I had little interest in the Law; and even less aptitude, for I had only gone to the Bar to please my late father who always had a great respect for that profession. And yet what else could I have done? We were not a rich family, but not without some connections, either. My elder brother, Charles Ellis, who later became an MP, was then the under-secretary to William Lowndes, who was himself the Permanent Secretary to the First Lordof the Treasury. The Treasurer, until his recent resignation, had been Lord Godolphin. Several months later the King named as Godolphin’s replacement the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Montagu, to whom Isaac Newton owed his appointment as Warden of the Royal Mint in May 1696.

  My brother told me that, until Newton’s arrival in the position, there had been few if any duties that were attached to the Wardenship; and Newton had taken the position in expectation of receiving the emolument for not much work; but that the Great Recoinage had given the office a greater importance than hitherto it had enjoyed; and that Newton was obliged to be the principal agent of the coin’s protection.

  In truth it was sore in need of protecting for it had become much debased of late. The only true money of the realm was the silver coin—for there was little if ever much gold about—which constituted sixpences, shillings, half-crowns and crowns; but until the great and mechanised recoinage, mostly this was hand-struck with an ill-defined rim that lent itself to clipping or filing. Except for a parcel of coin struck after the Restoration, none of the coin in circulation was more recent than the Civil War, while a great quantity had been issued by Queen Elizabeth.

  Fate took a hand to drive the coinage further out of order when, after William and Mary came to the throne, the price of gold and silver became greatly increased, so that there was much more than a shilling’s worth of silver in a shilling. Or at least there ought to have been. A new-struck shilling weighed ninety-three grains, although with the price of silver increasing all the time it need only have weighed seventy-seven grains; and even more vexing was that with the coin so worn and thin, and rubbed with age, and clipped and filed, a shilling often weighed as little as fifty grains. Because of this, people were inclined to hoard the new coin and refuse the old.

  The Recoinage Act had passed through the Parliament in January 1696, although this only chafed the sore, the Parliament having been imprudent enough to damn the old money before ensuring that there existed sufficient supplies of the new. And throughout the summer—if that was what it was, the weather being so bad—money had remained in such short supply that tumults every day were feared. For without good money how were men to be paid, and how was bread to be bought? If all that was not subversion enough, to this sum of calamity was added the fraud of the bankers and the goldsmiths who, having got immense treasures by extortion, hoarded their bullion in expectation of its advancing in value. To say nothing of the banks that every day were set up, or failed, besides an intolerable amount of taxation on everything save female bodies and an honest, smiling countenance, of which there were few if any to be seen. Indeed there was such a want of public spirit anywhere that the Nation seemed to sink under so many calamities.

  Much aware of my sudden need for a position and Doctor Newton’s equally sudden need for a clerk, Charles prevailed upon Lord Montagu to consider advancing me in Newton’s favour for employment, and this despite our not having the fondness which we used and ought to have as brothers. And by and by it was arranged that I should go to Doctor Newton’s house in Jermyn Street to recommend myself to him.

  I remember the day well, for there was a hard frost and a report of more Catholic plots against the King, and a great search for Jacobites was already under way. But I do not remember that Newton’s reputation had made
much of an impression upon my young mind; for, unlike Newton, who was a Cambridge Professor, I was an Oxford man and, although I knew the classics, I could no more have disputed any general mathematical system, let alone one affecting the universe, than I could have discoursed upon the nature of a spectrum. I was aware only that Newton was, like Mister Locke and Sir Christopher Wren, one of the most learned men in England, although I could not have said why: cards were my reading then and pretty girls my scholarly pursuit—for I had studied women closely; and I was as skilled in the use of sword and pistol as some are with a sextant and a pair of dividers. In short, I was as ignorant as a jury unable to find a verdict. And yet, of late—especially since leaving my inn of court—my ignorance had begun to weigh upon me.

  Jermyn Street was a recently completed and quite fashionable suburb of Westminster, with Newton’s house toward the western and better end, close by St. James’s Church. At eleven o’clock I presented myself at Doctor Newton’s door, was admitted by a servant and ushered into a room with a good fire in it, where Newton sat awaiting my arrival upon a red chair with a red cushion and a red morocco-bound book. Newton did not wear a wig and I saw that his hair was grey but that his teeth were all his own and good for a man of his age. He wore a crimson shag gown trimmed with gold buttons and I also remember that he had a blister or issue upon his neck that troubled him a little. The room was all red, as if a smallpox victim did sometimes lie in it, for it is said that this colour draws out the infection. It was well furnished with several landscapes upon the red walls and a fine globe that occupied a whole corner by the window, as if this room was all the universe there was and he the god in it, for he struck me as a most wise-looking man. His nose was all bridge, as across the Tiber, and his eyes, which were quiet in repose, became as sharp as bodkins the minute his brow furrowed under the concentration of a thought or a question. His mouth looked fastidious, as if he lacked appetite and humour, and his dimpled chin was on the edge of finding itself joined by a twin. And when he spoke, he spoke with an accent I should incorrectly have supposed to be Norfolk but now know to have been Lincolnshire, for he was born near Grantham. That day I met him first he was just a month or so short of his fifty-fourth birthday.