Newton’s Fire

handwriting badly, making it even harder to read and surely diminishing its value as evidence should they need to show it to a sceptic.

Pelham spread the pages on his desk, opened curtains to improve the light. ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Rachel.

‘Anything that sticks out,’ said Luke.

‘That’s helpful.’

Pelham tapped the bottom of the sixth page. ‘How about this?’ he asked.

Luke glanced over. Like the other pages, it was mostly alchemical citations. But Pelham was right: there was something very different in its bottom left quarter.

Received from E.A.

12 plain panels and blocks SW, 2 linen rolls

S T C, E S D, L A A, B O J

Papers J.D. J.T.

On completion, E.A. asks that ye whole be in SALOMANS HOUSEwell concealed.

‘E.A.?’ asked Pelham. Who’s E.A.?’

‘No idea,’ said Luke, squinting closer. ‘You think it could be “F.A”? Newton was friends with a Francis Aston at Cambridge.’

‘It’s not an “F”,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s an “E”.’

‘Then I don’t know,’ said Luke. ‘Newton’s mother’s maiden name was Ayscough, but I can’t think of any Edwards or Elizabeths among his cousins.’

‘Ebenezer?’ suggested Pelham. ‘Ezekiel?’

‘Let’s come back to it,’ said Rachel. She pointed to the second line. ‘“12 plain panels and blocks SW, 2 linen rolls.” Any ideas?’ Luke shook his head. Pelham too. ‘Then what about these groups of letters?’ she asked, pointing to the third line.

Luke pulled up a browser on Pelham’s laptop. ‘Read them out for me,’ he said. He typed them in as she went, four clusters of three, then ran a search. But Google gave them nothing. ‘What’s the next line?’ he asked.

‘Papers J.D. and J.T.,’ said Rachel.

‘J.D. couldn’t be my old mate Doctor Dee, could he?’ asked Pelham. ‘I mean he was a John, so to speak. And for sure it gives us an alchemical link.’

‘He was dead eighty years by 1690.’

‘He may have been. Not his papers. In fact …’ He snapped his fingers. ‘I think I know who E.A. is.’

‘Who?’ asked Rachel.

‘A bunch of Dee’s papers went missing after his death,’ said Pelham. ‘Notes on his conversations with Enochian angels mostly.’

‘His what?’ asked Rachel.

Pelham grinned. ‘Dee was convinced he could use the Book of Enoch to communicate with angels. He thought he could open the gates of heaven from the inside and so precipitate the Apocalypse and the Second Coming. But first he needed to find an honest medium.’

‘Oh, was that all?’

‘He tried a few. None worked. Then he hired the great Edward Kelley. A complete rogue and one of my major heroes. He wasn’t satisfied with fleecing Dee rotten; he also convinced him that the angels had ordered them to swap wives for the night.’ Pelham laughed loudly. ‘Hats off, eh?’

‘And Dee bought it?’ asked Rachel, incredulously.

‘Damn right,’ said Pelham. ‘You don’t fuck with Enochian angels.’

Luke shook his head. ‘What’s this got to do with E.A.?’

‘The Dee papers that went missing,’ said Pelham. ‘There was no sign of them for years. Decades. Then one day this old couple bought a wooden chest in an estate sale. It looked empty, but they kept hearing noises inside, so they jemmied off its bottom and found a secret compartment stuffed with strange bundles.’

‘Dee’s missing papers,’ said Rachel.

‘Give the girl a coconut,’ said Pelham. ‘Anyway, the husband dies and the widow remarries some new guy who knows a man who likes that kind of thing.’

‘Who?’

Pelham tapped the initials. ‘Elias Ashmole,’ he said.

Rachel frowned. ‘The founder of the Ashmolean Museum?’

‘That’s the one. And I’ll tell you something else: Ashmole claimed some of the papers were burned by a maid.’ He shook his head. ‘Maids who value their jobs don’t throw random sheaves onto the fire. So what if Ashmole kept certain papers back to send them on to Newton? What if he blamed the maid to explain the gaps in the record?’

‘Were Ashmole and Newton friends?’ asked Rachel.

Pelham nodded at Luke. ‘He’s the one writing the book.’

Luke shook his head. ‘Not friends, no. But they were contemporaries, and they worked in the same fields; and for sure they knew of each other. They were both early members of the Royal Society, for one thing. And they were Britain’s two leading alchemists. Ashmole published one of the great alchemical compendiums: the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum.’

‘And Newton would have known of it?’

‘God, yes. His own copy is at the University of Pennsylvania. I saw it a couple of years ago when I was over there for a conference. Newton had dog-eared half the pages, and scrawled annotations over the rest, a certain sign that he thought extremely highly of it.’

‘So Newton rated Ashmole,’ said Rachel. ‘Would it have been mutual?’

Luke laughed. ‘Best I can tell, Newton wrote these pages sometime around 1693. That’s four or five years after the Principia Mathematica came out, give or take. The Principia changed the world, particularly for the educated elite like Ashmole.’ Hardly anyone alive had been able to follow Newton’s mathematics, but anyone could grasp the basic point. The universe had been made mechanical. The heavens were suddenly predictable and therefore no longer to be feared as the message boards of capricious and wrathful gods. ‘“Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in night,”’ said Luke. ‘“God said Let Newton Be, and all was Light.”’

Pelham squinted at him. ‘Wasn’t Pope paid to write that?’ he asked.

‘Doesn’t mean it wasn’t true,’ said Luke. ‘Trust me on this: if Ashmole had owned something extraordinary, something mathematical, particularly something alchemical, Newton would have been his man.’

Rachel had pulled up a biography of Ashmole on the laptop.

‘Sorry to be the one to toss in the monkey wrench,’ she said. ‘But Ashmole was dead by ’93. He died in May ’92.’

‘That still fits,’ said Luke. ‘It just makes whatever this was a bequest rather than a gift.’

‘Something Ashmole couldn’t bear to part from while he was alive,’ suggested Rachel.

‘Or something too explosive to share,’ said Pelham.

Luke nodded. ‘That would explain those guys from earlier.’

‘But what the hell is it?’ asked Rachel. Only silence followed her question, however. ‘Maybe if we knew more about Ashmole,’ she said. ‘All it really says here is that he founded the Museum. What else did he do?’

‘I know someone who could help,’ said Pelham. ‘Olivia something, forget her surname. Runs the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. I put on an exhibition with her a few years back, about the transition from alchemy to chemistry.’

Luke shook her head. ‘Why would she know about Ashmole?’

‘Because her museum’s in the original Ashmolean building,’ said Pelham. ‘And she’s an historian of science. So she’s bound to know something, right?’