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While it was ensconced in Arundel House, the society started to publish books, including Hooke's own Micrographia and John Evelyn's Sylva , and, keeping up a tradition begun by the earliest scientific societies in Galileo's Italy, it also published a journal, the Philosophical Transactions , in which there were descriptions of discoveries and reports of lectures and the works of the Society's members. But then, after a few years in Arundel House, they had been obliged to start meeting again at Gresham College, in rooms put aside for the purpose by the influential Hooke, a Fellow of the college.

Although Isaac Newton knew all this, as he entered the main quad of Gresham College at two minutes before six, the darkening western sky drenched in orange, he felt almost no affinity with the Society that he had joined as a young man of twenty-nine, seventeen years earlier. In spite of the fact that the illustrious Fellows had published his Principia Mathematica , a book that had made him the most important scientific figure in the world, during the past decade he had attended the Royal Society no more than a handful of times. He could consider no other member his friend, and he was barely able to extend a degree of trust to just three other figures within the scientific community. The elderly Robert Boyle was one, the young genius Edmund Halley was another, and the third was the man who had persuaded him to leave his cloistered world of Trinity College, Cambridge to visit London this evening: Christopher Wren.

However, the main reason for Newton's conspicuous absence from Society meetings had been the even more conspicuous presence of Robert Hooke. The man had become a bitter enemy almost as soon as they had met and when, in 1676, the Society members had elected Hooke to succeed Henry Oldenburg as Secretary, Newton had offered to resign his own Fellowship. Persuaded to continue by those who saw him as a man too valuable to lose, he had finally capitulated. But he had vowed to attend meetings only when it suited him to do so.

Newton understood that people considered him to be a difficult man. He was undeniably someone who shunned the company of others and he cared nothing for the effect this had on the sensibilities of those around him. He was completely self-contained and proud of it. He needed no one, but people needed him and they would grow to rely upon him increasingly in the future, of that he was sure. It was sentiments such as these that had kept him in his laboratory in Cambridge. The only man in whom he had confided a little was John Wickins, a scholar of theology and his room-mate for more than twenty-five years. But, Newton ruminated as he crossed the quad and passed under an archway to turn left into a stone passageway, even Wickins understood only a fraction of what was going on in Newton's mind and almost nothing about what actually happened in the laboratory so close to his own bedchamber.

As he thought about this, Newton cast his mind back some six months to the morning when he had been forced to change the direction of his investigations. It was the morning when he had learned of the ruby sphere. It was his greatest secret and he could discuss it with no one. For days and nights he had done little else but ponder the meaning of the message left by George Ripley. He had scoured every text in his possession. He had returned to London to search through the damp cave of Cooper's bookshop in Little Britain, and he had bribed the bookseller to allow him to sift through his mildewed storerooms.

Ripley clearly had been writing about an ancient and crucially important artefact. The ruby sphere undoubtedly was the missing link, the key to the universe. The text describing this wonder had been written in his hand, and Ripley, who had died two centuries earlier, had been a man of huge talent and integrity. But, even with these clues, Newton could do little without actually possessing the sphere. He needed to discover where it was hidden.

A week earlier he had received the invitation from Christopher Wren to attend a special meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College. The occasion was a celebration of the building of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, completed twenty years earlier. It had been Wren's first commission and was a brilliant start to the man's career.

At first Newton had been tempted to toss the beautifully embossed invitation onto a pile of papers on his desk where it would be ignored, like almost all other invitations, requests and correspondence with his peers was ignored. But apart from Wickins, Wren was the closest person he had to a friend, a man he respected more than he did any other mortal.

At the double doors to the lecture hall, Newton took a deep breath and pushed on the handles. The room was no more than a dozen yards square, and Wren, a former president of the Society and one of the most famous men in England, could pull a crowd — so the room was packed. Newton was obliged to stand just a few feet inside the door.

He surveyed the room. It was a rectangle lined on three sides with shelves extending from floor to ceiling, every inch taken up with books, their leather spines unreadable in the dim light that flickered from a pair of chandeliers. The fourth wall was painted duck-egg blue, but in places the plaster had cracked and a great jagged line ran along it and across the ceiling like a vine.

There were perhaps a hundred members here this evening. Newton knew almost all of them by sight, but was acquainted with only a few. There, near the front, was Halley and next to him stood Samuel Pepys, dressed in a vibrant orange jacket. John Evelyn was in the row behind, dipping into a worn leather pouch of snuff. Beside him sat the society painter Godfrey Kneller, whom Newton had met in Cambridge only a few months earlier when the artist had visited in preparation for his latest commission, a painting of the Lucasian Professor. Across the room sat Robert Boyle, an exceptionally tall man and stick-thin; his white wig looked almost supernaturally bright in the candlelit gloom. A few rows back,

Newton could see the two Italians who were currently guests of the Society. Giuseppe Riccini and Marco Bertolini had arrived from Verona three months earlier and they had generated considerable gossip because of their penchant for 'mollies' — boys who dressed as girls and provided specialist erotic services. To the left of them, he spotted the enchanting profile of Nicolas Fatio du Duillier, an exceedingly interesting young man to whom he had been introduced just a few weeks earlier. The boy turned and, seeing him, produced a brief, warm smile.

On a raised platform at the far end of the room sat Robert Hooke and the President of the Society, John Vaughan, third Earl of Carbery, resplendent in a purple and gold brocade tunic and a luxuriously powdered wig. As much as the earl appeared to Newton to embody the finest virtues and attributes of the English nobility, he considered the nasty little ferret of a man beside him to represent the very worst that the world could offer. Hunched and misshapen, standing only four feet ten inches even in heels, Hooke appeared to have shrunk into his chair. Newton loathed the man with every fibre of his being and he knew that Hooke felt the same way about him. The Secretary, he understood, would do anything he could to discredit or defame him, and Newton could not help remembering with amusement a particularly Janus-faced letter that he had written to this dwarf, in which he had made the comment that if he, Isaac Newton, had ever achieved anything great as a scientist it had been by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Suddenly Christopher Wren strode to the platform. The members rose as one and applauded before settling back into their seats.