The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [107]
He did not know whether his heart was king or Parliament, but it had already had its say.
“You see, I come unarmed this time,” he remarked, as jovially as he could.
She did not take it so lightly. He was struck again by her beauty and by the serious lines of her face, by her enigmatic little smile that seemed to mean nothing. “When I was a young girl,” she said, “no gift would have been greater to me than meeting for one minute Sir Isaac Newton. I read his works over and over—in secret, you understand, so no one would know that a woman had the impertinence to— Well, that's beside the point. I worshipped Newton and his philosophies. I lived for the beauty, the elegance of his mathematical demonstrations. I took a place as a transcriber in the French Academy of Sciences just to be near those who discussed his theories.” Her eyes were lamps of darkness, empty of pleading or argument. She was just talking, as she might to herself.
“And in the end, I killed him. He wasn't the first man I killed; he wasn't the last. I understand how you must feel, but I think we must talk, you and I. We share something.”
“If you mean a love for Newton, I hardly see how—”
“No.” Her voice sounded strange. “No. You see, we have met before.”
“At Venice.”
She shook her head. “You were in Boston—I was in Paris. You called yourself Janus. I called myself Minerva.”
A tingle like a thousand needles crept across his face and down his limbs. His heart tripped oddly, and the room seemed to blur at the edges.
“What are you telling me?”
“I was the amanuensis of a man named Fatio de Duillier. Mr. F. I watched his aetherschreibers. He was working, I knew, on some sort of weapon for the king, but I did not know what. It was a great secret, and a key element was missing. Fatio … could not find it. Since the problem was even more a cipher to me, I did not either, nor did our English colleague, Mr. S. But then I got a letter signed Janus, which made strange claims: that he had found a way to tune an aether-schreiber, that he also had a solution to part of Fatio's problem. And there was an equation. I took it, hid it, worked on it in my room, corrected it, then rewrote it as if Mr. S—”
“Stirling,” Franklin said. “Stirling.”
“Stirling? Well, I never knew— In any event, it was the answer Fatio was looking for. It was only later that I understood what he was doing, what I had done. And much, much, later that Vasilisa Karevna told me the story of a young boy named Benjamin Franklin, come to London from Boston because he feared he had given the French an awful secret.”
Franklin put his head in his hands. “I didn't—I was only fourteen. I wanted to make my mark in the world early, to show—”
“And I only wanted to solve an equation. And yet look what our ambitions did together.”
“No,” Franklin said. “No, no!” He leapt up, started to pace, pounded the wall with his palms instead. “No! No! This was not how it was supposed to be! By God!” He whirled on her. “Do you know? Do you know how long I've imagined finally meeting the Frenchman who called down the comet? Do you? I knew him, knew him in my heart. An evil, corrupt man, a man who would do anything, who cared no more for human life than a horse cares for the fly it swats! A terrible man, a sick man, a twisted bastard of science and Satan. And now you tell me—you rob me—” He couldn't go on. He didn't know what he was saying.
“Fatio was a pathetic creature,” Adrienne said, “but even he wasn't evil. I think, in the end, he only wanted to show Newton that he was worthwhile, after Newton broke with him.”
Franklin gritted his teeth. It sounded right. How often had he felt the same way, when he was Newton's apprentice?
“Louis XIV was a sick old man who thought he was saving his country. He was deceived, too.”
“Someone is