Newton’s Fire (20 page)

‘Whatever you say.’ Walters ended the call and drove up Broad Street all the same. Sure enough, there were dark figures in a pair of cars parked across the road from the museum, and strange shadows in nearby alleys.

‘I don’t like this,’ muttered Kieran. ‘Too much bloody law.’

‘The boss knows what he’s doing.’

‘Yeah. Looking after his own interests, not ours.’

‘Our interests
are
his interests. If we go down, he has to realize we can take him with us.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’ But he didn’t feel as confident as he made it sound. He drove on, guided by his SatNav, until he found the red BMW with the black soft top parked exactly where it was meant to be. Dark and unoccupied. He drove on a little way, found an empty spot with a decent line of sight and reversed into it. Maybe Luke and the others were hiding out in the museum. Maybe they weren’t. Either way, if they ever made it back to their car, Walters intended to make them regret it.

Luke held the rope for Rachel, then leaned out into the well shaft to help her should she need it. But she made it back up easily enough, was greeted at the top by helping hands. He waited until she was clear then followed. Olivia shook her head sorrowfully at the state of them both, as if they’d let themselves and her museum down. ‘I’ve a change of clothes for you, my dear,’ she told Rachel. ‘If you don’t mind looking a bit dowdy. But Luke is beyond my help.’

They repaired to her office, a cluttered small space with three desks, a sink and an area for making tea and coffee. Rachel went off with a change of clothes, but Luke had to make do with the sink, staining the water brown. Olivia loaded the photographs onto a museum laptop, then she and Pelham began hurrying through them, firing questions as they went. They reached the first shot of the inner chamber and Olivia drew in a sharp breath. ‘Good lord!’ she murmured. ‘The Rosicrucians.’

‘I thought the Rosicrucians were a myth,’ said Rachel, arriving back in the room in her borrowed blouse and tweeds.

‘Not a myth exactly,’ said Olivia. ‘A hoax, maybe. Though it’s hard to be sure even of that.’

‘How do you mean?’

Olivia nodded. ‘This was 1610, 1615, something like that. Copies of a mysterious letter called the
Fama Fraternitatis
began appearing in European cities. A Rosicrucian manifesto advocating a new world order run by natural philosophers. One passage of the letter described a multi-sided chamber discovered behind a false wall. It was topped by a dome, lit by an inner sun, and filled with treasure from around the world. It had a plinth too, and on it lay the body of Christian Rosencreutz.’

Rachel frowned. ‘Are you saying we’ve found his tomb?’

Olivia shook her head. ‘No, no, no. That was in Europe somewhere, and many decades before this. My only point is that Ashmole, Newton, Evelyn and Wren would absolutely have known about it. So this chamber isn’t a coincidence. It’s a reference. An
homage
.’ She tapped her keyboard, brought up a word file, paged down. ‘This is a talk I gave on the elder Tradescant,’ she told them. ‘He started collecting his specimens and curiosities right around the time the
Fama Fraternitatis
was published. Look at this bit.’

‘A man admitted into the mysteries of heaven and earth through divine revelations and unwearied toil. In his journey through Arabia and Africa he collected a treasure surpassing that of Kings and Emperors, but finding it not suitable for his times, he kept it guarded for posterity to uncover, and appointed loyal and faithful heirs. He constructed a microcosm corresponding to the macrocosm and drew up a compendium of things past, present and future.’

‘That’s about Tradescant?’ asked Luke.

‘No. Rosencreutz. It’s from the manifesto. But that’s exactly my point, because it could easily be about either Tradescant or even Ashmole. It was certainly how Ashmole saw himself. He used to tell this story about his baptism, how his godfather had had some kind of epiphany at the font, and cried out that his name should be Elias after the prophet Elijah. They were all expecting a new Elijah at that time. He was prophesied to bring strange things to light and begin a golden age of grace; which was what the Ashmolean was explicitly designed for.’

‘And so Ashmole built himself a vault in order to be buried here with all his treasures,’ suggested Rachel.

Luke shook his head. ‘That plinth wasn’t big enough, not for a grown man.’

Pelham was still peering at Olivia’s text. ‘Such an ambiguous word, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Treasure, I mean. Listen to this: “During his journey through Arabia and Africa, he collected a
treasure
surpassing that of Kings and Emperors.”
You all seem to be assuming that it was some great hoard of different things. But why shouldn’t it refer to a single treasure? The proverbial pearl worth all the tribe.’

‘A treasure that surpassed that of Kings and Emperors,’ murmured Rachel. ‘What could it be?’

‘John Tradescant the Elder went on a famous voyage to the Mediterranean,’ murmured Olivia. ‘When word got out he was paying good money for curiosities, traders flocked from all across North Africa and Arabia to flog him stuff. He ended up with so much that he and his son lost track of it all. That’s how Ashmole got involved. He catalogued their collection.’

‘What if he spotted something while he was at it?’ murmured Luke. ‘What if
that’s
why he set his heart on the collection?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘Why take all of it? Why not just that piece?’

‘Greed,’ said Luke. ‘Or maybe he was scared of tipping the son off.’

Olivia nodded. ‘Ashmole only got to inherit the collection after Tradescant the younger and his wife both died. John went first. Guess what Ashmole did? He bought the house next door to the widow, then watched to make sure she didn’t sell anything on the sly. He made her life hell, by all accounts, and then one day she was found drowned in her garden pond.’

Rachel looked shocked. ‘He murdered her?’

‘More likely hounded her to suicide. But the outcome was the same. And when he went to take possession of the collection, he flew into a rage and cursed her for hiding pieces from him. Then he took a lease on her house and searched it from top to bottom.’

‘Looking for the treasure?’

‘Makes sense, doesn’t it? But he lost interest after a month or so, and sublet the house to someone else.’

‘Implying that he’d found it,’ said Luke. ‘But he lacked the skill to complete it, so he turned to his friend Wren who brought in Evelyn and Newton to complete their little cabal.’

‘Good lord,’ said Olivia. ‘Yes. Of course. Their cabal!’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Luke.

‘The word comes from Kabbalah, but it was made famous in England because of five Ministers of Charles II. Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale. Put their initials together and you’ve got yourself a cabal. Now look at our four lovelies: Ashmole, Newton, Evelyn and Wren.’

‘Anew?’ said Pelham. ‘Not much of a message, is it?’

‘You have to read the whole room,’ said Olivia. She bought up the photo of the four Masons studying their plan while workmen laid stones on the hill behind. ‘What’s going on here?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘They’re
building
.’ Now she scrolled forwards to the final double panel. ‘And here’s the Temple of Solomon, eternal symbol of the holy city. Put our cabal in the middle and what have you got?’

‘Christ,’ muttered Luke. ‘They were building a new Jerusalem.’

‘A new Jerusalem?’ said Rachel. ‘Here in Oxford?’

‘Or maybe not here,’ said Olivia. ‘Maybe that’s why the vault’s empty. I mean, don’t get me wrong,
of course
Ashmole would have wanted it here. He was a vain man and this was his building. But he died long before Evelyn, and decades before Newton or Wren; and none of those three had any personal stake in this place. And, for people like that, Oxford was never the new Jerusalem.’

‘Where, then?’

‘London, of course,’ she said. ‘Capital city of the Church of England. And finding a suitable spot would hardly have been a challenge. Wren was rebuilding the whole damned place.’ She shook her head in disbelief at the magnitude of it all. ‘I need to call Albie,’ she said. ‘He has to see this.’

‘No, Olivia,’ said Pelham.

‘Yes. Can’t you see how
important
this is? There are implications.
Huge
implications.’ She opened her address book, picked up the handset, began to dial. But then she stopped abruptly and dropped the handset like it had scalded her. ‘It echoed,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what happens when people are listening?’

‘Stay here,’ said Luke. He hurried through the darkened lobby to the shuttered front windows, slid a shutter latch, opened it just enough to see shadows in the two cars parked across the street. He latched the shutter again, checked that the windows and front door were securely bolted, returned to Olivia’s office. ‘They’re there,’ he said.

‘Our friends from earlier?’ asked Pelham.

Luke shook his head. ‘Different cars. And if they’re tapping our phones, I’d say police.’

‘How did they find us?’ asked Rachel.

‘Maybe they worked out Sous Ashmolean for themselves,’ said Pelham.

‘Then what are they waiting for?’

‘Reinforcements?’ suggested Luke. ‘A warrant?’ He turned to Olivia. ‘Is there a back way out?’

Olivia nodded. ‘There’s a fire escape upstairs. It leads onto the alley.’

‘Is it alarmed?’

‘I turned it off when we came in.’

‘I’ll go check,’ said Pelham. ‘You guys get everything together.’

Luke zipped Olivia’s laptop away in its case, pocketed the digital camera, went with Rachel to the door.

‘Come on,’ he said to Olivia.

‘No,’ said Olivia. ‘I’m staying.’

‘You have to come,’ begged Rachel. ‘These people are bastards.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said fiercely. ‘This is
my
museum. Damned if I’m going to let them run loose in here without being around to watch.’

Pelham came back in. ‘They’re out back too,’ he grimaced.

‘How many?’ asked Olivia.

‘I saw three. There could be more.’

‘Oh, hell,’ said Rachel. ‘We’re trapped.’

Croke sat in the back of the Range Rover as the NCT convoy sped west along the M4, passing other traffic in a blur. ‘The police won’t try to stop us, right?’ he asked Morgenstern.

‘We know what we’re doing.’

Croke nodded. Morgenstern had impressed him not just with his swift switch of focus to Oxford, but also with his willingness to carry on searching Crane Court merely to keep the media distracted. They reached their exit. Roads narrowed, traffic thickened.

A call came in on Morgenstern’s cell. He frowned as he listened, turned to Croke. ‘Someone inside the museum started to make a call, then hung up,’ he said. ‘And they just checked out the fire escape.’

‘They’re on to us.’

Morgenstern nodded. ‘Shall I send the police in?’

‘How long till we get there?’

‘Another four minutes. Maybe five.’

‘If anyone comes out, have them grab them. Otherwise they’re to hold off.’

He watched out the window as Morgenstern relayed the order. Sunday night in Oxford, everything closed, quiet, dead, the few pedestrians startled by the sudden rampage of their convoy, faces bleached by their headlights. They slowed before turning into Broad Street, not wanting to attract unnecessary attention, pulled up outside the museum. Croke got out along with everyone else. Morgenstern had hand-picked this team himself; with all the media still in London, there was no great need for him to stay covert. A few NCT men hurried around the museum’s sides, while others went down to the basement door. But Morgenstern and Croke and the remainder marched straight up the front steps. ‘What now?’ asked Morgenstern.

Croke shrugged. ‘We knock,’ he said.

The double rap on the front door sent a shudder through Luke and the others. ‘We know you’re in there,’ shouted a man. He sounded American. ‘Open up or we’ll come in anyway.’

They looked helplessly at each other. Only Olivia had anything to suggest. ‘The well,’ she said. ‘You’ll have hide back in the vault.’

‘They know we’re in here,’ said Luke. ‘They’ll find us.’

‘They know
someone’s
in here,’ countered Olivia. ‘They don’t know who or how many. If you three hide—’

‘You two,’ said Pelham to Luke and Rachel. ‘They saw me on the fire escape. Besides, even if I made it down the well, I’d never make it back up.’ He patted his gut regretfully. ‘Wages of sin, and all that.’

‘We’re not leaving you,’ said Rachel.

‘Yes, you are,’ said Pelham. ‘Olivia and I can credibly claim to be working on a new exhibition. That won’t wash if you’re found here too. And if they think you’re on the loose, they’ll treat us better from fear of you raising the alarm. Speaking of which …’ He scrawled a phone-number on a scrap of paper. ‘My sister,’ he told Luke. ‘She’s a lawyer and she’s fierce. Call her if you possibly can.’

‘Will do.’

Another knock on the front door, louder and more insistent. They hurried to the well. ‘How will we get back out?’ asked Rachel, staring down.

‘The rope, of course,’ said Pelham.

‘But we can’t leave it dangling there or they’ll be bound to see it. It’ll lead them straight to us.’

‘I’ll take care of that,’ said Olivia. ‘Just get down there.’ She turned and vanished back up the steps.

‘You won’t get anywhere looking like that,’ said Pelham, nodding at Luke’s filthy shirt. He stripped off his jacket and gave it to him.

‘Thanks, mate,’ said Luke. He felt Pelham’s wallet and car keys in the pockets, offered them back.

‘You’ll need them more than me,’ said Pelham. ‘Just call my sister.’

Something crashed against the front door. They were breaking their way in.