people to mass and to swear never to abandon the Roman religion. Old men imprisoned, women raped and whipped, young men sentenced to the galleys, and old mothers burned alive.”
“You speak as if you witnessed these cruelties yourself, Sergeant,” I observed.
“Twenty years I’ve been at war with the French,” said the Sergeant. “I know what they are capable of.”
After a few minutes spent debating this issue with Rohan, who was most obstinate in his hatred of Jesuits, I wished Sergeant Rohan and Mister Grain good night and left the Byward with a borrowed lantern, which did little to allay the apprehension of seeing a ghost that our talk had increased in me.
Walking quickly home to the warden’s house, I thought much about those Jesuits who had been tortured, perhaps with the same Skeffington’s Gyves that had been used on George Macey. It was easy to imagine some tormented priest haunting the Tower. But reaching home and being warm in bed, with a good candle in the grate, I began to think again that ghosts were idle fancies and that it was probably better to be afeared of those living men who had murdered my predecessor and who were still at liberty to kill again.
The next morning, I took a wherry boat from London Bridge to York Building stairs. Upon alighting, I and others found the mud on the jetty quite frozen over, which was so hazardous to our company that I thought fit to complain to the watermen that the steps should have been salted and kept free of ice so that passengers might step off a boat without threat to life or limb. At this the watermen, who were weatherbeaten, strong-looking men, merely laughed, and, sore from the previous evening—for I still had the apprehension that I had been the butt of the Ordnance’s joke—I started to draw my sword; but then I saw my master standing by the water tower and thought better of pricking their arses.
“You were right to contain your anger,” he said, when at last I was safely on the embankment beside him, “for there’s not a more independent lot of men in London. They are generally temperate, for a drunken waterman would hardly be trusted, and yet they can be most violent. If you had drawn your sword you would very likely have found yourself in the river. A seven-year apprenticeship makes a poor man most obdurate in defence of his rights and knowledgeable of his proper duties, which, alas, do not include the cleaning of the jetties. For the Thames, being a tidal river, would make a mockery of anyone that swept these walkways free of mud. High tide was but one hour before you landed.”
Bridling under my master’s lecture, I said that I had no idea he knew so much about London watermen and the tides that affected their trade.
At this he smiled thinly. “About watermen I know only what most people know about all London workmen: that they are a blight. But about tides I know a great deal,” he said. “You see, it was I who first explained them.”
And as we took a short coach ride up to the Maypole in the Strand, Newton proceeded to tell me how by propositions mathematically demonstrated he had deduced the motions of planets, the comets, the Moon, and the sea.
“So it is the gravitational effect of the Moon that makes the tides?” I said, summing up his own much longer account of this celestial phenomenon. Newton nodded. “And you received all this from the fall of an apple?”
“In truth, it was a fig,” he said. “But I cannot abide the taste of figs, whereas I am most fond of apples. I have never been able to tolerate the idea that it was the fruit I despise most in the world that gave me my idea of how the world moves. And it was only the germ of my idea. I remember thinking that if the power of gravity could extend to the top of a tree, how much farther might it extend? And indeed, I perceived that the only limit to its power was the size of the bodies themselves.”
It was clear that Newton saw the world in a different way from everyone else; which made me feel mightily privileged that I enjoyed such a great man’s confidence. Perhaps I was beginning to understand a little of the excellence of his mind; but this was enough to appreciate that it was only my failure to grasp a little more of the actual theories themselves that stopped him and me from becoming friends. In truth, we were always separated by such a wide river of knowledge and ability that he was to me like a man must seem to an ape. In all respects he was a paragon, a human touchstone that might try gold, or good from bad.
The question of why the name of St. Leger Scroope had seemed familiar to my master was answered almost as soon as we arrived at his place of business, in a house at The Bell, near the Maypole. A servant answered the door to us by whose manner of dress—for he wore a small cap upon his head—I took to be a Jew; and having enquired our business, he nodded gravely, and then went to fetch his master.
Scroope himself was a tall man, at least six fingers higher than me, with a black periwig, a beard turned up in the Spanish manner, and fine clothes which were as rich as gold and silver could make them. I thought Scroope recognised my master immediately, although he waited until the Doctor had explained the purpose of his visit before giving expression to this knowledge.
“But do you not know me, Doctor Newton?” he asked, smiling strangely; and seeing Newton’s eyes narrow as he struggled to find Scroope in his remembrances, the goldsmith’s face took on a disappointed aspect.
“I confess, Mister Scroope, that you have the advantage of me, sir,” stammered Newton.
“Why then, that it is a first for me, sir, for I never yet knew any man who could best you.” Scroope bowed handsomely. “Pray, let me remind you, sir. I was your fellow commoner at Trinity College, Doctor Newton, assigned to your tuition, although I neither matriculated in the university, nor graduated from it.”
“Yes,” agreed Newton, smiling uncertainly. “I remember you now. But then you had not the beard, nor the wealth, I’ll hazard.”
“A man alters much in twenty-five years.”
“Twenty-six, as I recall,” said Newton. “Also that you were much neglected by me, although you were not unusual in that respect.”
“Science will thank you for that neglect, sir. I was not a very diligent student, and events have proved that you were better employed with your opticks and your telescope. Not to mention your other chemical studies.” At this Scroope smiled knowingly, as if my master’s devotion to alchemy had not been such a great secret afterall.
“You are very gracious, Mister Scroope.”
“It is easy to be gracious to one whom all of England honours.” Mister Scroope bowed once more, which made me think him a most obsequious fellow, better suited to fawning on a king than smithing gold. “But my conscience has its own particular mortification,” added Scroope, whose civilities began to grow tiresome to me. “For I left no plate to the college, as was expected from a fellow commoner. Therefore, to assuage my embarrassment, sir, I should be grateful if you would accept some baubles on behalf of the college.”
“Now?” asked Newton. Scroope nodded. “I should be honoured.”
Scroope left us alone for a moment while he went to fetch his gift.
“This is most unexpected,” said Newton, handling Scroope’s walking stick with some interest.
“Is this one of the three students you ever had?” I asked, remembering what he had told me upon our first acquaintance.
“I am embarrassed to say that he is.”
“Oh fie. I think Mister Scroope has more than enough embarrassment to cover both your consciences.”
“I was a very dull fellow at Cambridge,” admitted Newton. “Dull and most inhumane. But I am a better man since I came to London. This work in the Mint has broadened my horizon. And yet it is not as broad a horizon as perhaps that of Mister Scroope. I fancy he sometimes visits places where a man must be doubly vigilant.”
“How do you mean, sir?” I asked.
“He wears a sword, like most gentlemen. And yet he has also been at some pains to conceal a sword inside this stick. Do you see?”
Newton showed me how the body of the stick ingeniously concealed a blade, two or three feet long, so that the handle of the stick was also the handle of a short but useful-looking rapier. I tried the blade against my thumb.
“He keeps it sharp enough,” I said.
“You would not need to take such precautions unless you had some tangible danger to fear,” he argued.
“Are not all goldsmiths subject to such dangers?” I suggested. “They have more to lose than just their lives. I wonder that you do not carry a sword yourself.”
“Perhaps you are right,” allowed Newton. “Perhaps I might carry a sword. But I do not think I shall ever need to carry two swords.”
