London to search through the damp cave of Cooper's bookshop in Little Britain, and he had bribed the bookseller to allow him to sift through his mildewed storerooms.
Ripley clearly had been writing about an ancient and crucially important artefact. The ruby sphere undoubtedly was the missing link, the key to the universe. The text describing this wonder had been written in his hand, and Ripley, who had died two centuries earlier, had been a man of huge talent and integrity. But, even with these clues, Newton could do little without actually possessing the sphere. He needed to discover where it was hidden.
A week earlier he had received the invitation from Christopher Wren to attend a special meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College. The occasion was a celebration of the building of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, completed twenty years earlier. It had been Wren's first commission and was a brilliant start to the man's career.
At first Newton had been tempted to toss the beautifully embossed invitation onto a pile of papers on his desk where it would be ignored, like almost all other invitations, requests and correspondence with his peers was ignored. But apart from Wickins, Wren was the closest person he had to a friend, a man he respected more than he did any other mortal.
At the double doors to the lecture hall, Newton took a deep breath and pushed on the handles. The room was no more than a dozen yards square, and Wren, a former president of the Society and one of the most famous men in England, could pull a crowd — so the room was packed. Newton was obliged to stand just a few feet inside the door.
He surveyed the room. It was a rectangle lined on three sides with shelves extending from floor to ceiling, every inch taken up with books, their leather spines unreadable in the dim light that flickered from a pair of chandeliers. The fourth wall was painted duck-egg blue, but in places the plaster had cracked and a great jagged line ran along it and across the ceiling like a vine.
There were perhaps a hundred members here this evening. Newton knew almost all of them by sight, but was acquainted with only a few. There, near the front, was Halley and next to him stood Samuel Pepys, dressed in a vibrant orange jacket. John Evelyn was in the row behind, dipping into a worn leather pouch of snuff. Beside him sat the society painter Godfrey Kneller, whom Newton had met in Cambridge only a few months earlier when the artist had visited in preparation for his latest commission, a painting of the Lucasian Professor. Across the room sat Robert Boyle, an exceptionally tall man and stick-thin; his white wig looked almost supernaturally bright in the candlelit gloom. A few rows back,
Newton could see the two Italians who were currently guests of the Society. Giuseppe Riccini and Marco Bertolini had arrived from Verona three months earlier and they had generated considerable gossip because of their penchant for 'mollies' — boys who dressed as girls and provided specialist erotic services. To the left of them, he spotted the enchanting profile of Nicolas Fatio du Duillier, an exceedingly interesting young man to whom he had been introduced just a few weeks earlier. The boy turned and, seeing him, produced a brief, warm smile.
On a raised platform at the far end of the room sat Robert Hooke and the President of the Society, John Vaughan, third Earl of Carbery, resplendent in a purple and gold brocade tunic and a luxuriously powdered wig. As much as the earl appeared to Newton to embody the finest virtues and attributes of the English nobility, he considered the nasty little ferret of a man beside him to represent the very worst that the world could offer. Hunched and misshapen, standing only four feet ten inches even in heels, Hooke appeared to have shrunk into his chair. Newton loathed the man with every fibre of his being and he knew that Hooke felt the same way about him. The Secretary, he understood, would do anything he could to discredit or defame him, and Newton could not help remembering with amusement a particularly Janus-faced letter that he had written to this dwarf, in which he had made the comment that if he, Isaac Newton, had ever achieved anything great as a scientist it had been by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
Suddenly Christopher Wren strode to the platform. The members rose as one and applauded before settling back into their seats.
Wren, Newton was irritated to concede, did look magnificent and carried himself with regal dignity. He was a man who deserved his acclaim. He was a polymath, a professor of astronomy, an internationally renowned architect, a medical experimenter and a writer of genius. Yet he was also extremely modest. Years earlier, when Newton had been a boy, Wren had been the first to observe the rings around the planet Saturn. Yet, when the Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens had published his own observations first and had accepted the laurels for the discovery, Wren had been unruffled and entirely magnanimous. This was a stance that Newton found almost impossible to understand, but in a hidden part of his soul he knew that Wren was a better man than he because he could show such grace.
For the next thirty minutes, Wren kept his audience spellbound. His voice, low and melodious yet never soporific, drew in the listener and made the most specialised aspects of what he was describing interesting and easy to visualise. Illustrating his talk with sketches he had made, he first told the audience how he had designed the Sheldonian Theatre, and then went on to describe the engineering challenges that it had presented for him as a young architect who was both nervous and keen to impress his masters. He had produced immaculate drawings at every stage of the theatre's construction, from the floor plans that had secured his commission through the many stages of the building process to the grand unveiling of the completed project in 1669, five years after it had begun.
Newton enjoyed the talk but, after a while, he had found himself drawn back to the problem that had occupied his mind so completely since February: the meaning of Ripley's cryptic message. The room melted away. The sound of Wren's voice faded. Newton could see Ripley's words, the encrypted message and the strange drawing, as though he were holding the document in his hand. His eidetic memory could reproduce what he had seen down to the last wrinkle in the parchment but, frustratingly, such prodigious mental powers had been of almost no help in his efforts to understand what the message meant.
'It was a most startling moment. .' Wren was saying. 'The foundations were almost complete and I was most assuredly loath to see further delay, but my curiosity was piqued. I permitted the exposing of the odd construction to the limit of one day of work, as I felt it worthy. By the end of the day it had become clear. There was a natural and quite possibly an extensive cave system under this part of Oxford. I duly noted it in my diary and, with the permission of the Master of Hertford College, I ran a narrow corridor from this subterranean void to the cellars beneath the nearby college, with the thought that one day I might go back to learn more. That, sadly, was twenty- five years ago, and commitments to His Majesty have, alas, kept my enthusiasm in check.'
The audience laughed and Wren took a deep breath. 'So, forgive my digression. Now, as to the construction of the roof. .'
A tingling that had begun at the base of Newton's spine slowly rippled up through his body. As he stood transfixed, staring intently at the great architect, he could feel rather than hear the words of Ripley resonating inside his head:
When Newton tapped on the door and peered in, Wren was alone in an ante-room off the main lecture hall, removing his wig and trying to untangle his straggly grey hair. 'Well, what an excellent surprise,' he said with a smile.
'May I bother you for a moment, Sir Christopher?'
'Naturally, sir. Come in. Take a seat. Did you enjoy my lecture?'
'Yes, I did — very much,' Newton replied gravely. He was trying to control his excitement.
'I'm most honoured by your presence, sir. Indeed, we had a fine audience tonight, did we not? So, how may I help you?' Wren left his hair alone and began to remove his jacket. Newton noticed that it was stained with sweat.
'I found your description of the construction of the Sheldonian Theatre most beguiling. But. .' He hesitated briefly. 'I was particularly taken with your mention of the subterranean cave system.'
'Oh, really? I am crestfallen, sir,' Wren dead-panned. 'I thought you would have favoured talk of the engineering feat, the genius of the design, the extraordinary accommodation of Nature's forces.'
'Please forgive me.' Newton looked lost for a moment. 'I did not mean. .'
'I'm jesting, Isaac. Ye gods, it must be true what they say about you — that you never laugh and have been known to smile but once.'
Newton, po-faced, said nothing. Sensing that he had offended the scientist, Wren placed a hand on the
