Newton’s Fire Read Free Page A

banged open, Manfredo and Vig sprinting in, handguns already drawn, alarmed by the tinkle of breaking glass. ‘It’s all right,’ Croke assured them. He nodded at Irina, slumped unconscious in her armchair. He turned to Manfredo. ‘Take her back to our friend from this morning, would you,’ he said. ‘Tell her she comes with my compliments, to celebrate our deal.’
    Manfredo holstered his gun. ‘Yes, sir. And afterwards?’
    ‘Meet us at the airport. We wouldn’t want to miss our slot.’
    ‘No, sir. Anything else?’
    Croke knocked back the dregs of his Bloody Mary, set his glass down on the counter. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’d better call Francesca in Geneva for me. We should probably let her know I’ll be needing a new assistant.’

TWO
     
I
     
    ‘You found them,’ said Penelope Martyn in an awed murmur, when Luke tracked her to her kitchen. ‘I don’t believe it.’
    Luke allowed himself a smile. ‘I don’t either,’ he admitted.
    ‘And? Are they … are they what you were hoping?’
    He didn’t quite know how to answer that. Her house was grand but badly rundown; and he’d got the distinct impression, when they’d chatted earlier, that a windfall would be more than welcome. ‘They’re alchemical papers,’ he said carefully. ‘Four sheets, written front and back. Citations from other authors, as far as I’ve been able to tell.’
    ‘Oh.’ She tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the shadow of disappointment from her expression. ‘So not his original work then?’
    ‘I’m afraid not.’ He’d already explained to her the sliding scale of value for Newton’s papers: the highly prized letters he’d written to both his famous and lesser-known friends; the coveted annotations for
Principia Mathematica
and
Opticks
; the significantly lesser interest in his theological and alchemical writings, especially those that didn’t represent Newton’s own thinking, but were merely his transcriptions of other authors. ‘It could have been worse,’ he said. ‘They could have been his papers from the Royal Mint.’
    ‘Newton was at the Royal Mint?’
    ‘He joined just a year or two after he wrote these pages, as it happens. Ran the place for decades. Oversaw a complete recoinage of the realm.’
    She shook her head. ‘Why would a man like Newton take a job like that?’
    Luke shrugged. It was a question that had vexed many academics over the years, and no one had really come up with a satisfactory explanation. ‘The
Principia Mathematica
had made him a star,’ he said. ‘We think maybe he wanted to go to London to bask in all that glory. The Royal Mint was his ticket. And the money was pretty good too, especially after he was appointed Master.’
    ‘Oh, well.’ She touched the papers with her fingertip. ‘Is there
anything
of interest in them?’
    ‘I haven’t been through them properly yet,’ Luke told her. ‘I wanted to show them to you at once. Besides …’ He gestured at the cramped handwriting, the upside-down passages, the esoteric words, the passages in Latin and French, indicating how hard they were to read. ‘But there is at least one thing.’
    ‘Yes?’
    He pointed out the four words to her. Then, unsure of her eyesight, he read them out aloud. ‘It says “Fatio O my Fatio”.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’ She frowned. ‘Who’s Fatio?
What’s
Fatio?’
    ‘It’s a who.’ He stooped to unzip his laptop case, pulled out his digital camera. ‘A he, to be precise. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. A young Swiss mathematician who became a close friend of Newton’s in the early 1690s. Perhaps even a
very
close friend.’
    ‘
Very
close?’ She tipped her head to one side. ‘You’re not implying …?’
    Luke smiled. ‘It’s possible. Some people certainly think so.’
    ‘Sir Isaac Newton? And some young Swiss man?’
    ‘There’s no evidence whatsoever that anything physical ever happened between them,’ said Luke, setting the first page square on the tablecloth, the