Dark Matter

“The strongest and the weakest were put together, which is how I came to row with the Major. I was at the head of a bench with the Major next to me. Dogs was what the ship’s captain called us, and like dogs was how we lived. He was a man of most Jesuitical sentiments and hated all men of the reformed faith. Once he ordered one of the Turks to cut off a man’s arm with which to beat another. For some reason, the captain took against the Major, and singled him out for an especially harsh beating. But for me, the Major would have died. I gave him half my biscuit and applied vinegar and salt to his weals to stop the beginning of a mortification to his flesh. And somehow, he survived.

“There were many cruelties we endured, and many hardships: the heat in summer; the cold in winter; the beatings; the starvation; the cannonades from other ships. One time we were raked with langrage shot, which is a long tin box filled with bits of chain and old metal that’s stuffed down the barrel of a gun. A third of the men in the galley were blasted to pieces. All the wounded were thrown overboard for the sharks.

“Two years the Major and I survived in that Catholic ship of damnation. Once you asked me why I hate Catholics so much. Well here’s why: We were visited by the Mother Superior of an order of Catholic sisters who offered us Huguenots our freedom if we would make an abjuration of our faith. Many of us did, only to discover that she had lied and that it was not within her power to give us freedom. It was the Captain that had put her up to it. His idea of a joke, I suppose.

“Two years, my friend. In the galleys, that’s a lifetime. We thought our sufferings would never end. But then one day there was a battle. Admiral Russell, bless him, defeated the French at Barfleur, our ship was taken, and we were freed.”

Sergeant Rohan nodded and then finished his ale; and I thought his story explained much that lay between himself and Major Mornay. Stunned by his tale—in truth I have hardly done it justice—I paid little attention to the curiosity about my master and his habits he now demonstrated; so that I answered many of his questions with scant regard for the danger it occasioned my master.

Which later on was to cause me great personal grief.

For all Newton’s obvious intelligence, we seemed no closer to identifying the perpetrators of these atrocities than we had before I had fallen sick. It was fortunate therefore that the murders remained largely unknown outside the castle walls. At the request of the Lords Justices, Doctor Newton and Lord Lucas were ordered to keep secret these atrocities for fear the general public might apprehend some threat to the Great Recoinage and perceive that this might fail, as the Land Tax and the Million Act had failed before it. With the Army still in Flanders and King William still unpopular in the country at large, his son the Duke of Gloucester so frail, and Princess Anne—who was second in line of succession—childless despite her seventeen confinements, there was great fear of national insurrection at home. And nothing was perceived to inflame discontent as much as the continued debasement and scarcity of the coin. The closing date for receipt of the old coin at full value—June twenty-fourth—was fast approaching, but there was so little of the new in circulation that the Lords Justices had secretly given out that any news that bore ill upon the Mint and the recoinage was to be suppressed.

Yet there was much curiosity—no, concern—as to the results of Doctor Newton’s investigations. And his easily ignited and touchy character being well known in Whitehall, it was given to my brother (who, as I have said, was under-secretary to William Lowndes, the Treasury’s Permanent Secretary) to make some enquiries of me as to what progress was being made with my master’s investigations. At least this was what he said in the beginning. It was only toward the end of our meeting that I learned the real purpose of his speaking to me.

We met at Charles’s office in Whitehall while Newton appeared before their Lordships in order to recommend a pardon for Thomas White, whose execution for coining had been deferred thirteen times on Newton’s motion in return for information.

Even then my brother and I did not enjoy cordial relations, although I was grateful to him for finding me employment. But I was damned if in return I was going to become his creature, and had made this plain almost as soon as I was appointed to the Mint. As a result Charles saw me as an embarrassment and a possible hindrance to any substantial preferment in the Treasury, and spoke to me as he might have spoken to his servant. Which was how he spoke to most people, now that I come to reflect upon it. He had grown rather fat and self-important, and reminded me very much of our father.

“How is your health?” he asked gruffly. “Doctor Newton told me you were ill. And that you were taken care of.”

“I am much recovered now,” said I.