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 the 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?”
