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
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
“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
