The Alchemist's Daughter (5 page)
“My dear?”
“How are we to find the money to feed another mouth, or worse, to pay his wages?”
“Ah, but that is no longer a difficulty, daughter. Remember the funds Her Majesty has advanced me.”
“And did you not think, since we are now so rich, that I could have used an assistant? Father, I have been bent over the washing-vat since dawn, because we have no servant, and I believed there was no money to send out the linen.”
“You had only to mention it, Sidonie.”
“Yes, well,” said Sidonie grimly. “There. Now I have mentioned it. And who, may I ask, is this apprentice you have so summarily hired?”
“No apprentice, daughter. A fully qualified assistant. He comes with the highest credentials, having worked abroad with alchemists in the courts of . . . ”
“And have you proof of that,” interrupted Sidonie, “or merely his word?”
“My dear, have you so little faith in my judgment? He supplied letters of reference, needless to say.”
“As did your last assistant but one,” Sidonie reminded him caustically. “The one who nearly set fire to the house.”
Simon Quince said with a look of contrition, “Sidonie, I have only two hands, and there are only so many hours in the day. I cannot accomplish this great work by myself.”
Sidonie dropped into her chair, put her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and gave a sigh of defeat. “Have your assistant, then, Father. Though I mislike the man, for he has a peculiar look about him. And from now on I will send out the linen to be washed.”
The scarlet red colour of the flying lion . . . resembles the
pure and clear scarlet of pomegranate seeds . . . It is like a
lion which devours all the purely metallic nature and
transmutes it into its own substance, namely, into pure and
true gold, finer than that from the best mines.
â Nicholas Flamel,
The Hieroglyphic Figures
“Kit, he is so foolish, my father â so sure of success, and so far from succeeding. The fault is mine. I have let him go on, with one ill-fated experiment after another, doing nothing to discourage him.”
Kit plucked an apple from a low-hanging branch and tossed it into Sidonie's lap. “What could you have done? It is hardly a daughter's place, to chide her father for his faults.”
“I should have smashed his flasks and alembics on the hearthstones,” said Sidonie fiercely. “But how could I have known where his foolishness would lead him?”
“Sidonie, are you so sure he will fail? Have not other alchemists succeeded?”
“Dr. Dee has succeeded, my father says. And Edward Kelley, Dee's assistant. But they had a secret elixir, a red powder which is needed to complete the transformation from dross to gold.”
“Where does one find this elixir?”
“I think you are supposed to make it, but that is the most difficult part of the process. Too difficult for my father, at any rate.” She bit absentmindedly into the apple. It was still green, and so sour it made her lips pucker. She grimaced and spat it out.
Kit said, “My father sold a packet of sleeping powder to one of the servants from Whitehall Palace. It is all the talk of the court that Dr. Dee, who is living abroad at Trebonam, turned part of a warming pan into silver, and sent it to the Queen.”
Sidonie looked up with sudden interest. “Yes, as proof of his experiments. That is the very warming pan my father talked about. The tale must be true, then.”
“If you can believe palace gossip. The Queen must believe it, because they say she has sent a great many letters to Dr. Dee, imploring him to return.”
“So he can turn more warming pans into precious metal.”
“So it would seem. In any event, there is more to the rumour.”
“Kit, do not torment me. Prithee, go on.”
“Dee and Kelley are said to have come into possession of a Powder of Projection. This must be the elixir â the red powder â of which your father spoke.”
“And where did they find it?”
“Buried in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, so the story goes.”
“Why ever there?”
“Well, they do say it is the most magical place in England, because Joseph of Arimathea hid the Holy Grail in the Chalice Well.”
“Then Kit, I must go to Glastonbury.”
Kit stared at her. “What, on the strength of some muddled rumour whispered round the palace?”
“Perhaps the rumour is not muddled. Palace servants overhear a great many secrets, and some of them are true. If my father can make gold for the Queen while Dee and Kelley are tarrying in foreign courts, then his fortune is assured.”
“Sidonie, this is utmost folly. I did not imagine you so imprudent.”
“What is imprudent,” Sidonie said, “is to do nothing, and see my father's head stuck on a pole over Tower Bridge. Kit, if I have any gift at all for seeing what is hidden, then I should use it for my father's sake. I will look into the crystal, and maybe see if this tale of Dee's proves true.”
Sidonie carried the scrying crystal upstairs to her bedchamber, unwrapped it and set it carefully on her table amidst a clutter of papers and books. She drew the curtains over her dormer window to shut out the slanting evening light, pulled up a cushioned bench, sat down, and stared resolutely at the crystal. She could feel her heart beating too quickly, her stomach knotting with apprehension.
If this gift or curse of mine will save my father, she told herself sternly, then I needs must find the courage to use it. Deliberately she slowed her breath, emptied her mind, let her gaze narrow and change its focus.
But how to begin?
Perhaps
, she thought,
if I make a picture
in my mind . . .
What had her father called Dr. Dee's red powder, the secret elixir of transformation?
The red lion
, he had said. She thought at once of those proud heraldic beasts that guarded Hampton Palace. The picture leaped fully formed into her mind: a dark red lion, the colour of crimson silk, rampant on a field of gold.
Strangely, in spite of her misgivings, the scrying seemed easier this time. The glass cleared almost at once, revealing vivid images in its depths.
She saw, first, an ancient abbey of grey stone, roofless and fallen into ruin, its tall arched doorways open to rain and wind. That vision faded, and now a solitary hill rose sheer from a level plain. Around its steep slopes a spiral path coiled, and its narrow summit was crowned by a broken tower.
And then the light faded from the heart of the crystal, and mist flowed in.
A ruined abbey. A hill crowned by a broken tower.
Since King Henry dissolved the monasteries some fifty years before, there were crumbling abbeys the length and breadth of England. How could she be sure that the image she had scried was Glastonbury?
Kit will know
, she thought.
The world is not such a mystery
to Kit as it is to me.
Thou and I
Have thirty mile to ride yet
By dinnertime.
â William Shakespeare,
Henry IV, Part I
“What new plots are afoot, Sidonie, that you send me urgent messages with the bookseller's 'prentice?”
Kit vaulted over the garden wall and flung himself down in the warm shade under the apple tree.
“âCome at once and I will reveal all.' Now there's a communication to set the blood astir.”
Sidonie laughed. “I knew that the greater the mystery, the sooner you would arrive. No plots, Kit. A journey. I have made up my mind to go to Glastonbury.”
Abruptly, Kit sat up. “What, now?”
“Nay, in a fortnight. This is my one chance, Kit, before the autumn rains make the roads impassable. In mid-month my father goes to London with his new assistant, to visit the bookshops and spend the Queen's money on alchemical supplies. He plans to stay for a week or more with his great-aunt Catherine, who is ailing. Until he returns I will be alone in the house, save for our new maid-of-all-work, and her I will swear to secrecy, on pain of instant dismissal.”
“And what part do I play in all this?”
“Why, I would have you come with me.” She smiled at his look of consternation. “Kit, you would not have me travel alone? And what else have you to do, now that you have decided against a scholar's life?”
“My father would have a quick answer to that,” said Kit.
“But a herbalist can always find an excuse for searching fields and hedgerows, however distant â and is there not special magic in the Glastonbury earth?”
“And you,” sighed Kit, “have an answer to everything.”
“Then it's decided,” Sidonie told him. “You are compiling a new book of medicinal herbs that grow in the Vale of Avalon, and on the slopes of Glastonbury Tor.”
“And you?”
“I am your sister, and your assistant,” said Sidonie. “In a fortnight, then?”
“And have you a pair of horses hidden somewhere about your cottage, Sidonie? Or do you propose we go by shank's pony?”
“We can go quicker by carrier's cart than on foot. I have made inquiries â there is a carrier returning from London to Salisbury every Monday. In Salisbury we can hire post horses, or walk if we must.”
The morning of their departure Sidonie rose by candlelight, put on an old woollen kirtle, a sensible felt hat with a shady brim, and her stoutest shoes. Fastened to a cord around her waist were her leather purse, a number of small bags filled with useful herbs, her scissors and sewing case, and a clove-studded orange in a pomander ball to ward off plague. The scrying crystal, wrapped in several layers of felted cloth, went into a capcase of her mother's, along with spare petticoat and stockings. She dropped her Euclid into one of her pockets, and gathered together her provisions â a loaf of bread, some cheese and cold bacon, a jug of elderberry wine. Then she threw over her shoulders a well-worn and out-of-fashion cloak from her mother's clothes-chest.
Leaving the servant Emma snoring softly in her curtained alcove, Sidonie tiptoed down the stairs. There was one more task she must attend to. She went into her father's workroom, took a folded paper from her pocket, and laid it on the table with an empty retort for a paperweight.
“Father,” she had written. “I have gone to Glastonbury. Kit is with me, and I will be soon returned.” If all went well, she meant to be safe home before Simon Quince left London, and he need never see the message.
She gave a last housewifely glance around, and closed the cottage door quietly behind her. Kit, wearing high boots and a travelling cloak as countrified as her own, was waiting in the garden. Together they set out through the deserted lanes of Charing Cross, past the sleeping cottages, to catch a carrier wagon bound with a consignment of Rhenish wines for a manor house at Salisbury.
