Authors: Rebecca Stott
With what are you embroiled, Lydia Brooke?
“Morazapine is an antipsychotic drug,” I said slowly. “He told me about it.”
“Yes, it was to start with. But Cameron also discovered its paralysing effects, which he tested and strengthened in his lab.”
“He would never have set out to—”
“Make a formula that would be used in a chemical weapon? No, of course not. But once he put in a fund-raising bid to a company he knew had links to arms dealers, once he’d taken the huge research grant they gave him and the new lab, research assistants, and lab equipment, and the nomination for that international award in neuroscience, he’d given away any control he might have had about the future uses of that formula—”
“He was weak,” I said and then, hearing myself defend you like that, I snapped, fragmenting into a thousand pieces. “Get away from me,” I said suddenly, into the darkness of the room, as tears began to sting my face. “Get out. I can’t hear any more.”
“I’ll be back in an hour,” Will said, quietly. “I’ll be down in the garden by the river if you need me.”
“Don’t come back,” I said. “Don’t come back.”
“I’m taking your mobile and the landline handset with me,” she said. “So you don’t try to call anyone. I’ll be back in an hour. I’m taking your keys; mine don’t work in the lock anymore.”
Twenty-eight
I
wasn’t afraid of what she might still tell me; I had to stand and face it. Despite my injuries, I could have walked away that morning, taken the side door and the path through the garden to the gate in the wall, without Will seeing me. I could have called you on your mobile from the pay phone in Landing Lane, reached you in Florida, or wherever you were; I could have left you a message. Or simpler still, I could have phoned the police and told them where to find Lily Ridler.
So why didn’t I? Because I was curious, and it wasn’t a benign kind of curiosity, it was something dark and ravenous—ravens scavenging over a corpse, dark, urgent, and visceral. For years I’d ignored my endless small suspicions about your words and explanations; I hadn’t wanted suspicions enmeshed with love. Yes, I knew you had lied, to me and to Sarah, serially and compulsively, all the time we’d been lovers. Lied, not only as a way of keeping the affair going, not only as a means of controlling a life that had become fractured into multiple secrets, but also because you had forgotten the difference between truth and lies, and recently you had come to lie when you didn’t need to, badly. You’d left the Volvo at Trinity and walked to The Studio, you said. I drove to the Trinity car park an hour later. It wasn’t there. You were visiting a friend in Nottingham for the weekend, you said. I found the receipt for the hotel in Munich in your wallet. You were driving back to the lab, you said. I watched a dark unmarked car pick you up from Landing Lane.
So I didn’t leave The Studio. I walked up and down in the undulating, shoaling light, talking to you. When Will came back an hour later, I said, “You’ve made a mistake. He could never be caught up in all of this.”
“He is.”
“I’ve known him for so long…”
“I know. And you’ve been lovers for years. Don’t tell me. He’s too kind to be involved in anything so violent. He has children. Pets. He reads Rilke, makes love to you. Look, people are complicated. Your Cameron runs NABED; he orders animals to be mutilated and people attacked to discredit us, all in the name of the freedom to experiment on animals. He thinks he is doing the right thing, of course. He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t. I’ve heard tapes of one of the Syndicate meetings. He thinks he’s doing what’s necessary to defend what he calls civilisation and civilised values. Some civilisation, eh?”
“Do you know how long we’ve been lovers?”
“Yes. That sort of information is easy to come by. It’s that kind of war. You have to know where your enemy’s weak spots are.”
“So that’s why I was attacked last night.”
“I told you. We are a nonviolent organisation. What happened to you last night has nothing to do with any animal-liberation group.”
“But everything to do with NABED?”
“Yes.”
“But if NABED is the terrorist wing of the Syndicate and Cameron Brown is one of them, he would have known I’d be attacked last night. He would have sanctioned it.”
Did you? Could you have done that?
“No, not necessarily. There are things happening in the group—allegiances are breaking down. Petherbridge is especially dangerous. I would always have said that you’d be the safest of all. Cameron—they—wouldn’t go that far. And you being attacked would expose him too—expose you as his lover. Think what the press would do if they got hold of that story. That’s a hell of a price to pay, to lose you and his wife at once.” Yes, I could see that.
“So it doesn’t make sense.”
“It only makes sense if there’s some kind of internal battle going on. Cameron is having to fight for his corner. I’m sure the attack on you last night was meant as a warning to him. And that’s not good, because he’s been acting as a brake in the last few months, questioning some of their decisions, opposing others. Now that the testing stage is almost complete, he’s being kept out of certain decisions. He no longer knows everything. But he’s still the only one who knows how the formula works or how to develop it. They wouldn’t have it without him. He’s the linchpin for everything, but not for much longer. With the tests almost complete, he’s making himself dispensable.”
“What’s to be done?”
“There’s nothing for you to do. You don’t even have to believe anything I’ve said. You can put it all down to paranoia. We have to sit it out. If I’m right, they’ve used you to send their message to him.”
“What if the message doesn’t get through?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if I don’t tell the police and if I put off seeing Cameron when he gets back from America—until my face has healed, that is—then there’s no need for him to ever know. Then the message won’t reach him.”
“But you have no idea what that will do.”
“It’ll throw a spanner into the works. Might stop whatever’s happening, or slow it down?” I was clutching at straws.
“Best thing you can do is to finish the book and then move back to Brighton. Get out of the cross fire. It won’t go on forever. But it is going to get worse before it gets better. Especially now.”
I didn’t see Will again after she left The Studio that day. I didn’t see her again until the court case. I tried to speak to her during the time they held her at the Parkside Police Station, but they wouldn’t let me. I wanted to ask about you and her, but I never did because there was never the time, nor could I have found the words.
That last morning, as she left The Studio, heading north again, she gave me a brown envelope.
“You won’t like me for this,” she said. I had to squint to see the writing, but I recognised the shape of Elizabeth’s handwriting before I could read the letters. The envelope was addressed to Will Burroughs at an address in Chesterton.
“She posted me this the day before she died,” Will said. “See—the postmark is the sixth of September. There’s a note. It simply says, ‘Dear Will, sorry to be oblique but I wonder if you might keep this in a safe place for a few weeks. It’s a draft of something. A precious piece. I’ll let you know when I need it back. It’s the only copy, so keep it carefully.’”
“Have you opened it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It’s a chapter of
The Alchemist.
It’s called ‘The Crimson Room.’”
“It can’t be called ‘The Crimson Room.’ That’s not possible. My chapter’s called ‘The Crimson Room.’ Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Has anyone else read it?”
“Only Emmanuel Scorsa.”
“Emmanuel Scorsa. The neuroscientist in the hospital? How the hell?”
“He’s one of us, works undercover like me. He’s been working at the Histon lab for a year or so. When he first came to Cambridge, I had to brief him about the layout in the lab. I’m the only one who knows—I worked inside that unit for six months before Cameron took the job there. Emmanuel came to The Studio sometimes at night after Elizabeth died because we thought it was safe. Then you arrived.”
“But why did you show him? Were you lovers?”
“No, we weren’t lovers. There are rules about that, for Christ’s sake. I showed him the chapter because after Elizabeth died I didn’t know what to do. Everything and anything was possible—I started imagining even more conspiracies.” She paused, uncertain how much to say. “I knew Cameron very well once, as part of my work. When Elizabeth died, some of my people were saying that Cameron was behind it…but that made no sense because he and his mother were so close. He talked about her all the time. I couldn’t believe…”
So Lily’s relationship with you had become emotionally “complicated,” despite everything you stood for.
“No, you were right,” I said. “That’s unthinkable.”
“They pulled me out for a bit when I got sick. I started to see things here at The Studio—strange lights. My vision got weird. I think I must have had a bit of a breakdown.”
“And what did Scorsa say?”
“Not much. He told me to bring the chapter here and leave it somewhere safe. We both knew it was pretty incendiary stuff, though those ideas and theories Elizabeth had about alchemy and murder were also weirdly plausible. I couldn’t see the point of all that energy, really. Elizabeth’s obsession. You know: a whole ten years given over to uncovering a network of alchemists and then ending up with a theory about a grubby little set of murders in Cambridge. Pathetic, really. Think what that energy and intelligence might have done for us. Do you know how many animals we kill to eat in this country alone every year?” she said, opening her eyes wide.
“I couldn’t even begin to guess,” I said.
“Eight hundred million animals, every year. Doesn’t that just do your head in?”
“So it’s been here all the time.”
“What? The chapter? Yes, I stuck it behind some of the books in the big bookcase. I didn’t want Sarah finding it when she was clearing out the house. It’s yours now. Better late than never, I suppose. I just thought it might make your job a bit easier if I gave it to you. Make it easier for you to leave Cambridge.”
“But why didn’t you give it to me before?”
“I didn’t think that Elizabeth wanted you or anyone else to have it. She didn’t tell me anything. I was trying to do what she wanted, but it doesn’t seem to matter now. Look, if it gets you out of Cambridge quicker, it will have been of some use.”
Twenty-nine
I
n the silence that followed Lily’s leaving, I knew that despite the pain in my eyes, I could not postpone reading that final chapter, a chapter I had already sketched in my head from Elizabeth’s original notes and inferences. Those facts had begun to speak for themselves. Outside in the garden, nothing moved; the wind had dropped. The lights reassembled on the walls, like a spectral gathering, solemn and still, as if restlessness had ceased, for the moment. I was sure that I knew now what she had discovered, that terrible truth, about a great man’s climb to power, about the price Newton was prepared to pay for the red robe, the Lucasian chair of mathematics. Yes, I was sure that Elizabeth had tracked Newton the alchemist to his lair, that she had found him out. This was her chapter:
The Crimson Room
The fact that Newton was appointed to a prestigious fellowship at Trinity College in 1667 is remarkable. He was certainly in the running—his scholarship made him eligible—but he had not distinguished himself academically, and he had given a poor performance in his examination for the scholarship.
Few Newton scholars have anything to say about the unusual circumstances by which the Trinity fellowships had become vacant by 1667. An American academic, Louis Trenchard More, who published a detailed biography of Newton in 1934, is an exception. He presents the vacancies as being the result of good fortune: “On October first [Newton] was elected a Minor Fellow. There were nine fellowships vacant that year, as no elections had been held in 1665 and 1666. One of them was made by the death of the poet, Cowley; two of the other vacancies were caused by Fellows falling down staircases—whether the result of defects in the stairs or of excessive conviviality may be left to the imagination…One of the Senior Fellows…Barton, had been ejected from the college in the preceding June on the grounds of insanity.”
27
Even Michael White, whose more recent biography of Newton claims that Newton was, as an alchemist, “the last sorcerer,” ascribes the vacancies to luck, and seems not to know that the falls of Valentine and Greswold resulted in deaths: “By chance, that year the number of vacancies had been inflated by several retirements and a death occasioned by events which vividly convey the atmosphere of Restoration Trinity. A senior fellow had been recently removed on the grounds of ‘mental aberration’ of some unknown variety, and two other fellows had been forced to retire through injuries sustained after falling down the staircase leading to their rooms while in a drunken stupor. A fourth, the poet Abraham Cowley, had died after catching a fever brought on by a night spent sleeping in a field after a bout of heavy drinking. Luckily for Newton, this created a lengthy enough list to give him an opening.”
28
Luckily for Newton.
Richard Westfall fails to mention the deaths of the Trinity fellows at all, regarding them perhaps as less relevant than the vote rigging and corruption in the elections, which he describes as common practice in Trinity at the time. However, he does describe Newton’s unusual behaviour in the months from his return to Cambridge in March 1667 to his appointment to fellow status in October 1667. Westfall implies that the young man ought to have been nervous: “As with the scholarship three years earlier, Newton’s whole future hung in the balance of this election. It would determine whether he would stay on at Cambridge and be free to pursue his studies or whether he would return to Lincolnshire, probably to the village vicarage that his family connections could have supplied, where he might well have withered and decayed in the absence of books and the distraction of petty obligations. On the face of it, his chances were slim. There had been no elections in Trinity for three years, and as it turned out there were only nine places to fill…How could an erstwhile subsizar of whatever capacity hope to prevail against such odds?”
29
Strangely, as Westfall points out, Newton’s financial accounts for 1667 (laid out after his list of sins) show that the young man was acting in a way that revealed absolutely no anxiety about his future: “Neither in Newton’s papers nor in the surviving anecdotes does a hint of tension over the outcome [of the examinations] appear. His accounts present a picture of relaxation which almost belies our other evidence of unremitting, introverted study. Soon after his return, he spent 17s 6d [£92 in current rates] to celebrate his Bachelor’s Act and on subsequent occasions tossed away another of the £10 [£1,000] he had pried loose from Hannah Smith and then some with ‘acquaintances’ at taverns. He cheerfully confessed to a loss of 15s [£81] at cards, compensated perhaps by a purchase of oranges for his sister. The accounts radiate confidence as well. He invested £1 10s [£163] in tools, real tools, including a lathe, such as he must have longed for in Grantham—not the purchase of a man seriously expecting to move on a year hence.”
30
In 1667 Newton clearly did not think his stay in Cambridge was going to be temporary. He was already celebrating his future. Could he have known the outcome of the elections in advance? And how would that have been possible unless Barrow, Babington, and others had told him? Where did all this confidence come from? What had he been promised, and by whom?
On being elected a fellow in 1667, Newton turned his rooms into a crimson chamber. Instead of taking the new rooms allocated to him as a fellow, he continued to use those he shared with Wickins, between the Great Gate and the chapel, the rooms that adjoined the laboratory and physic garden. After being elected, he paid for these rooms to be redecorated and bought new crimson furniture and hangings, as well as new carpets and pictures and a whole wardrobe full of expensive clothes.
Newton had shown an obsession with the colour red since he had copied out those earliest recipes for mixing colours in the Grantham notebook; that obsession would persist into his old age. In a list of possessions drawn up by Catherine Conduitt after her uncle’s death, she records “a crimson mohair bed complete with case curtains of crimson Harrateen” and in the dining room “a crimson settee.”
31
Other items included crimson drapes and valances in the bedroom, a crimson easy chair, and six crimson cushions in the back parlour.
Red was the colour of power in Cambridge—Barrow, as the Lucasian Professor of mathematics, was the only fellow of the college to wear a scarlet gown. Scarlet robes marked out a special kind of status in the city too, for the aldermen exchanged their ordinary gowns for scarlet gowns on ceremonial occasions, for churchgoing, and for the pomp required for the opening of the Stourbridge Fair.
32
There was talk in the college now, whisperings that connected Newton to the deaths of Greswold, Valentine, and Cowley, that embroiled Newton in talk of conspiracies and poisonings and murder. Those were suspicious deaths, at least collectively. He and the other newly elected fellows had gained from them. But Newton was the only one who had access to the physic garden and the poisonous plants that were said to grow there. What was the truth behind these rumours?
One figure has been overlooked by Newton’s historians. Ezekiel Foxcroft, some ten years Newton’s senior, a fellow of King’s College and lecturer in mathematics, had been travelling between London, Cambridge, and Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, carrying messages and manuscripts for his mentor, the philosopher Henry More, since the early 1660s. At Ragley Hall, he had presided over scores of complex alchemical experiments in the company of important alchemists, including his own mother and her companion Anne Finch. In his rooms at Cambridge or at Ragley Hall, he was working on the translation of the powerful Dutch alchemical text
Chymical Wedding,
a book divided into seven chapters, seven days of revelation. It was a book cross-hatched with sevens. He had been preparing to take on the mantle of power that had been promised him for a decade or more. The Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, they said, was his.
33
Then, in 1661, a boy called Isaac Newton came to Trinity College. Hearing from Barrow about the dexterity of the young man’s mathematical skills and from Henry More about the young man’s alchemical skills, Ezekiel went to call on the young subsizar in 1662.
34
That first meeting was undoubtedly awkward, for Newton, both competitive and territorial, would have instinctively bridled to meet More’s brilliant Cambridge protégé, Foxcroft. In time Foxcroft forged a friendship with Newton, over late-night discussions of Euclid and of Descartes and of geometry and algebra. It would not have taken Ezekiel long to divine the heat and steel of Newton’s mind, the way he turned numbers into spirits, made them do magic. He saw Newton’s fury in the sequences of calculations spread out over the floor of his rooms. God, Ezekiel understood, had chosen this charmless and driven young man, and was now dragging him through night and day to truths never before glimpsed, even by Euclid or Descartes.
In 1664, Newton began a new notebook, entitled “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophiae.”
Struggling against his own envy, for he had been raised by his mother and by her friend Henry More to believe himself to be the greatest of the next generation of alchemists, Ezekiel Foxcroft saw himself dethroned. He came to understand that it was his part to play lieutenant to this general, John the Baptist to this Messiah. He would do so willingly, he told the older men, More and Barrow and Babington; he would show Newton where to acquire the tools he needed, he would bring him alchemical manuscripts from London or from More’s library in Ragley. He would accelerate the pace of Newton’s discoveries. He was true to his word, at least at first, for this was a new kind of power.
Foxcroft flattered Newton. He told him that he had been chosen, that he was invincible, that he was a kind of god. He pushed him further and further, bringing him manuscripts at night, when Wickins slept and when he and Newton could be invisible. Ezekiel insisted that Newton keep their friendship flawlessly secret. No one must know that the two men met or that they assembled alchemical formulas together in Trinity College rooms. He set Newton initiatory tasks to test his mettle and to strengthen his alchemical powers. Under Ezekiel’s influence, Newton came to believe that he could do anything, that everything he did was sanctioned by divine authority, that nothing could stop the flood of knowledge passing through him—secrets about light, colour, gravity, numbers. As the conduit of divine knowledge he was untouchable. Ezekiel had said so.
In 1665–66, Newton scratched out the fundamentals of what would come to be called the calculus.
Foxcroft listened to Newton. When Newton complained that he had no power, that soon he would be forced to leave Trinity and go back to farming, Foxcroft undertook to clear Newton’s path to a fellowship. It was a grave decision and one that he made alone. For Newton to be assured of the fellowship, there had to be a high number of vacancies among the existing fellows. Ezekiel realised quickly that there was only one way to achieve this. It would not be easy and the risks were high, but with careful planning and care, murders might be made to look like accidents.
In 1665, in his rooms in Trinity, Newton proved that white light was made up of colours and took to his bed, temporarily blinded.
Foxcroft drew in a draper’s delivery boy, Richard Herring, who had friends who worked in the Trinity kitchens. Knowing of the boy’s fascination with alchemy, he sought him out in the Red Hart in Petticury, promising to teach him the secret of the philosopher’s stone. Instead, telling the boy about initiation rituals, he taught him how to gather and process the leaves of the belladonna plants growing in Newton’s physic garden at Trinity. He showed him how belladonna skillfully administered produced an effect that looked like drunkenness: hallucinations, dilated pupils, respiratory distress, and disorientation. Under the right conditions, it could produce a fatal fall. In time and with more promises and some threats, the boy agreed to slip small amounts of poison surreptitiously into the food of two Trinity fellows. In the shadows of a Trinity staircase Foxcroft moved the plot to its completion. Greswold died from a fall in 1665, Valentine in 1666; the plague outbreak gave Foxcroft an additional cloak behind which to work.
In 1666, working by candlelight late into the night, Newton devised a method of calculating the exact gradient of a curve, a method which would come to be known as differentiation.
Not everything went according to plan. In May 1665, Abraham Cowley’s fall down a staircase did not result in his death. The poet, suspecting a plot, fled Cambridge to his house in Surrey. It took two years for Herring and Foxcroft to reach him, and to succeed where they had earlier failed. The effects of belladonna also proved to be unpredictable. In 1666, when Herring tried to poison Francis Barton, another fellow at Trinity, Barton fell into a deranged and insane state; he was so sick that it was impossible to entice him onto the staircase outside his rooms. The master of Trinity, convinced that Barton was a danger to himself, sent him away to his family home in the countryside. It was a plague year. No one asked any questions. Foxcroft let Herring believe that the plot had worked, that the boy had succeeded in his final act of initiation, that this was the last death.
Sometime in 1665 or 1666, somewhere between a garden in Woolsthorpe and a garden in Trinity, Newton carved out the rules of gravitation.
What Foxcroft had started seemed to have no end. When Newton complained that the great alchemical secrets were being spread abroad and that they would soon become diluted and impure, Foxcroft undertook to silence all those who had betrayed such secrets, moving in disguise through London streets, calling on alchemists, clearing the way, purifying—in Newton’s name.
35
The blood on Foxcroft’s hands nullified all his alchemical experiments; he watched them spoil, he told his mother, Elizabeth, keeping from her the terrible reasons for their spoiling, knowing how much she would berate him for his sacrifice. Now, defeated, weakened, he determined to do all that was left to him and in which he might be useful—the translation of alchemical texts. For a few years the translation of
Chymical Wedding
occupied his mind and compensated in minor ways for his lost powers.