Richard Bentley winced. His decision to install a spectacular new staircase in the Trinity Master’s Lodge had been a matter of considerable controversy.
‘The cost has been much exaggerated,’ Bentley replied primly.
‘One can only hope so,’ Newton muttered, putting an unsteady foot on the first step, ‘or I doubt Trinity will be buying any actual books for a while.’
‘Ha! There speaks His Majesty’s Master of the Mint,’ Bentley said, but rather too loudly and pretending to laugh. ‘I hope you haven’t come here in your official capacity, Sir Isaac. Am I to be audited?’
‘I do not audit, Mr Bentley. I am not a clerk.’
‘I was being merry, Sir Isaac.’
‘Then I envy you that ability,’ Newton said, puffing as he laboured up the last of the stairs. ‘I am come not in any official capacity, Mr Bentley, but on an entirely personal matter. A matter, in fact, of the utmost privacy.’
‘You intrigue me, sir.’
‘So private that it will require the swearing of a solemn and binding oath of secrecy.’
‘My goodness, how exciting.’
‘It is. But not for us.’
Bentley helped the great man into his drawing room where wine was served, after which Newton instructed Bentley to dismiss all the servants and lock the doors.
‘Now draw the curtains if you will, sir, and light a candle,’ Newton said. ‘For this thing which must remain in darkness should begin in darkness.’
Bentley couldn’t help smiling at the old man’s sense of drama. Newton was well over eighty, after all, and perhaps approaching the doddering senility of Shakespeare’s seventh age.
When the room had been rendered suitably dark and mysterious, Newton produced a cross and made Bentley swear an oath upon it.
‘Do you, Richard Bentley, on your honour as Master of Trinity College and before God as a Christian gentleman, swear that all that passes between us in this room will remain in this room and no word or hint of it shall ever be divulged to another soul, save to one person and that be in a letter to your successor?’
Bentley agreed.
‘Kiss the cross and repeat your promise,’ Newton demanded.
Again Bentley did as he was told, but this time the indulgent smile was replaced with just a hint of impatience. Newton might be universally acknowledged as the greatest mind in England and probably all the world but he, Bentley, had written the celebrated Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, which was no small thing either.
‘There, Mr Bentley,’ Newton said. ‘You are become a Companion of the Order of Chronos. The first of their number! Unless you count me, which I suppose we should. So let us say the second of their number.’
Bentley gave a spacious wave as if to indicate that he was content to be number two. ‘Chronos. God of Time?’
‘The very same, Mr Bentley.’
Newton settled himself into the beautiful new Queen Anne winged chair on which he was sitting and took a sip of claret. ‘You will recall,’ he began, ‘that many years ago, at the time when first we corresponded on theological matters, I had some disturbance of the mind?’
Bentley nodded uneasily. He was indeed aware. There could have been few members of Britain’s intellectual establishment who hadn’t known about the nervous breakdown Newton had suffered thirty years earlier at the height of his fame. Or the deranged and paranoiac letters he had written at the time to both friends and rivals, letters filled with wild accusations of conspiracy and betrayal. Or the dark talk of alchemy and the search for hidden messages in the Bible, which had led many to conclude that Newton’s mind was gone for ever.
‘The world believes I had a fit,’ the old man went on. ‘That my mind was crazed with madness.’
‘You were over-worked, Sir Isaac,’ Bentley said soothingly.
‘They thought me mad, Bentley,’ Newton snapped, ‘and well I might have been, for what I’d discovered should have driven anyone to lunacy.’
‘Discovered, Sir Isaac? But all the world knows what you discovered and you are rightly lionized for it.’
‘The world knows only what I published, Mr Bentley.’
For the first time Bentley’s supercilious manner deserted him.
‘You mean,’ he asked, ‘there’s more?’
The great philosopher was silent for a moment. The creases on his thin, lined face deepened a little and the heels of his shoes tapped on the parquet floor. He scratched absent-mindedly at that famous long, lean nose, then passed the hand beneath his wig to scratch his head.
‘You remember how it was a year before my madness,’ Newton began, ‘when you delivered your little lecture … what was it called?’
‘A Confutation of Atheism,’ Bentley said. ‘Though I venture “little” is too small a word. It was after all considered the most—’
‘Yes, yes,’ Newton interrupted. ‘Whatever its size, in it you sought to show that my work proved the existence of God. That my great theory of planetary movement self-evidently required the hand of an intelligent designer, the architect of all things.’
‘Yes I did, Sir Isaac. I treasure the letters of approval you sent to me at the time.’
‘Well, I was grateful for your intervention. Some called me a heretic then. Many still do.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t put it as strongly as—’
‘Don’t mollycoddle me, Mr Bentley. A heretic is what they call me. But just because I question the theology of the Trinity doesn’t mean I’m not a Christian man.’
‘Sir Isaac, is this really the place to …’ Bentley could see that Newton was about to go off on his infamous and downright dangerous hobbyhorse.
‘The trinity is a mathematical impossibility!’ Newton barked, slapping the little table on which his glass was standing and upsetting his wine. ‘Three separate entities cannot also be the same thing. Three peas cannot also be one pea! Any more than can a father, a son and a holy ghost. Such a thing defies logic. Besides which, it is idolatry, because if the Father and the Son are the same thing, then those images of a dying man we put upon our crucifixes are also images of his father, hence images of God. Hence idolatry, sir! And they call me blasphemous.’
Bentley was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. This wasn’t the sort of conversation anybody wanted to have, even in private. Particularly a person like him, who owed his position to the monarch’s patronage. It hadn’t been many years since people had been burned in England for things like denying the Trinity.
‘Uhm … is the question of the Trinity relevant to what you came here to discuss, Sir Isaac?’ Bentley enquired gently.
‘Since you ask, no, actually it isn’t,’ Newton admitted grumpily.
‘Hmm. Well, perhaps we should return to this business of Chronos, of which you spoke. You mentioned unpublished discoveries, Sir Isaac? That would indeed be an extraordinary and exciting thing.’
Newton accepted another glass of wine to replace the one he’d spilled. It seemed to calm him, for when he spoke again he had regained his composure.
‘You know that I’ve had more time for thinking than most men, Mr Bentley,’ he said. ‘I am a bachelor. I’ve been little in the company of women save for my nieces and I’m no hand at social intercourse. All of the effort people commonly expend in the cultivation of love and friendship I have been able to devote to my observing the workings of God’s universe.’
‘Of course, of course, Sir Isaac.’
‘When first I wrote to you about atheism,’ Newton went on, ‘I let you know that I was happy that the world should come to understand the effect of gravity on planetary motion. I could see that my great idea which explained the movement and the shape of the cosmos was beautiful and allowed for a still fixed and ordered universe ordained by God.’