Dark Matter

“That is a foul, roguish fellow,” remarked Newton.

“Most foul,” said I. “Un étourdie bête, and no mistake.”

“A senseless beast, yes, quite so.” Newton smiled. “And you, sir, have missed your true calling. What an actor you would have made, my dear fellow. Your Frenchified English is most appropriate and aristocratic. Bien tourné, so to speak. I am indeed impressed.”

“Thank you, sir. And now we shall find out what our Mister Defoe has been writing.”

“That’s another rogue,” said Newton. “I hate all those who issue anonymously what they neither wish nor dare to acknowledge as their own. It’s simple cowardice.”

When Oates came back to the coach with one of his damnable pamphlets, I gave him a guinea, for which the wretched and loathsome fellow was most grateful, turning it over in his curiously blackened fingers, which made me think we had done well to have given him a real one instead of the false ones we had recovered.

“But I would you say nothing to Lord Lucas of our meeting,” said I. “Or else he may think I go behind his back in this enterprise. And he is a person who gives off a most persecuted air, so that I do not want the fatigue of explaining myself to him. I swear he makes himself seem the most persistently wronged person I have ever met.”

“I have seldom met His Lordship,” said Oates. “Yet from what Sergeant Rohan told me, that is indeed his reputation. But Your Excellency may be assured that I shall say nothing to anyone of our conversation. And I look forward to making Your Lordship’s acquaintance again, perhaps when we have made England a better place to live in.”

“You mean without Papists.”

Oates bowed his horrible acquiescence.

“Amen to that,” he said.

Upon which Newton closed the coach door and we drove away, most horrified by what we had heard and much afeared of that knowledge to which we were now privy.

Newton often talked of the story of Belshazzar’s impious feast and the secret writing that Daniel did decipher. Indeed the Book of Daniel was one of his most favourite in the Bible, being full of numerical prophecies. He wondered why those wise men of Belshazzar could not read the words: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. “Numbered, weighed and divided.” Perhaps they feared to give bad news to the King, whereas Daniel feared only God. Newton once told me that in Aramaic the words also meant three coins: a gold mina, a silver tekel (which was the Aramaic equivalent of a shekel), and the brass peres, which was worth but half a mina; and that this was the first recorded joke, being a pun on these three coins, and that I should imagine Daniel telling Belshazzar that his kingdom was not worth threepence. And why was it not worth threepence? Because Belshazzar was foolish enough to drink a toast to the gods of gold, silver and bronze using the metal vessels that his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple in Jerusalem.

This particular anecdote says much about Newton: herein may be found his interest in numismata that was stimulated by being at the Mint; but of greater importance is the meaning of the words themselves—“numbered, weighed and divided”—which encapsulate Newton’s own philosophy and his contribution to the world. Now that I come to think of it, Newton’s whole life could be compared to that disembodied hand whose writing so astonished all the king’s own soothsayers and astrologers, for he had such little interest in his own body that it might not have existed at all.

Like the prophet Daniel, Newton had a low opinion of prophets and wise men in general; and he was especially scathing toward Mister Defoe’s pamphlet that made much of a prediction by the French astrologer, Michel de Nostradamus—whose fame was widespread, although he was dead more than a hundred years—that there would be a conspiracy to kill King William.

“No man can prophesy the future,” said Newton when we were back at the Mint, having read the pamphlet aloud in the coach. “Only God in Heaven can reveal the secrets of the world, through men, who are his chosen instruments. It is he that maketh known what shall come to pass. But it is given to man to understand God’s world only by scientific inquiry and proper observation, and not by horoscopes or other foolish magic.

“And yet the common people are most credulous from their great ignorance,” he said. “And readily believe in such nonsense. Therefore it’s the proper job of science to exorcise these demonhaunted worlds, and to bring light to the regions of superstition. Until then, man will be the victim of his own stupidity, much preyed upon by the likes of Nostradamus, whose prophecies only seem accurate by virtue of their cryptic style and ambiguous content. Thus it seems to me entirely fitting that we should discover perjurers and villains such as Titus Oates and Mister Defoe making employment of the Frenchman’s mountebankeries. For therein lies the true work of horoscopes, as fitting tools for liars and impostors.