Prudence set her jaw and laid the spent pipe aside. She reached for the bag.
“I’ve no more use for it,” she said simply.
Without another word Prudence rose, pocketed the little bag, and with a nod at the surprised Robert Hooper, strode across the riotous main room of the Goat and Anchor, through the weighty tavern door, and out into her future.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Early July
1991
C
ONNIE TOOK A LONG SWALLOW OF HER COCKTAIL, AND WHEN SHE
lowered the glass back to the bar, she noticed with irritation that her hand was trembling. Abner’s had lately acquired an acoustic version of Led Zeppelin’s greatest hits, which was playing for the entire hour that Connie had been leaning at the bar. Janine was running late, as was her wont. Connie reflected that if Janine did not walk through the front door within the next five minutes, the odds were better than even that she would stand up and break her barstool over the jukebox. In her mind she lifted the heavy stool and brought it down over the glass dome of the jukebox, feeling the crunch of the dome collapsing under the stool’s weight, hearing the music drawl to a blessed stop. She smiled with satisfaction at the fantasy.
“Connie, hello, hello,” breathed Janine Silva, settling her weight on the stool next to Connie and dropping her bag at her feet. “I’m so sorry I’m late. What are you drinking? Old-fashioned?” She held up two fingers to Abner
behind the bar, who gave her a nod and turned away. Janine leaned on one elbow and applied a pair of bright purple reading glasses to the end of her nose.
“So,” she said, and Connie, still sitting in profile, took another long swallow of her cocktail. Connie reached into her cutoff pocket, pulled out the key that she had found in Granna’s house, and clapped it down on the table before turning to look at her professor.
“The very day I moved into my grandmother’s house, I found a key that fits nothing,” she said. Janine’s face grew perplexed. “And inside the key I found a name. Deliverance Dane.” She raised a fresh fingernail to her mouth and gnawed at it as Abner dropped two heavy tumblers of liquor, beaded with moisture, before the women and Janine wordlessly slid a few dollar bills across the bar.
“It turns out,” Connie continued, pushing her empty tumbler away and reaching for the fresh one, “that Deliverance Dane is an undocumented Salem witch. Unlike all the other victims, she was a healer or cunning woman. And she left a record book of her work.”
“But, Connie! That’s wonderful!” Janine exclaimed, eyes widening. “What a coup for you. People can spend their whole lives and never find a source that unique! And what a rich area of inquiry for the history of women…” She trailed off as she saw Connie frown.
“I know!” Connie cried, her voice catching. “But now Chilton’s threatening to get my funding yanked if I can’t find it! And then these vandals came to my house.” She took a deep hiccuping breath, suppressing the tears that were welling up in her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”
Janine pressed her lips together in concern and placed a soft hand over Connie’s with a reassuring pat. “Okay, okay, one thing at a time. First of all,” she said, “I’ll only say this to you because we are friends, and I’ll expect this never to leave our confidence.”
Connie nodded, wiping at her eyes. Her junior mentor leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “Manning Chilton…,” she began, then hesitated, taking a sip of her cocktail and gathering her thoughts. “Of course Manning
is an eminent scholar, and of course his standing in the department is impeccable.”
Connie’s brows swept down over her pale eyes. If Professor Chilton’s reputation had been blemished somehow, Connie’s entire professional future could be compromised. Janine cleared her throat again, glancing around the dim bar interior before inching her barstool closer to Connie’s knees. “It’s just that his recent research…well, it’s taken a turn for the
idiosyncratic.
”
“What do you mean?” Connie asked, confused. She knew that he was planning something significant for his keynote address at the Colonial Association meeting in the fall, but she did not know the substance of it.
“For a long while he was working on the use of alchemical symbolism in Jungian psychoanalysis,” Janine said, voice barely audible over the music and the murmur of summer school students in the booths at the rear of the room. “He was interested in alchemy as a way of understanding a world that reasoned by similarity, rather than by the scientific method. He thought that the language of alchemy could provide a psychoanalytic interpretation of premodern magical thinking and ritual. But the last paper that he delivered at the Association of Historians of the American Colonies was a little more…” She seemed to rummage in her mind for just the word that she wanted. “Literal,” she finished. “It was more literal.”
“Literal? In what way?” Connie asked, leaning forward. Janine’s soft breath brushed across her face, smelling faintly of peppermints.
“Have you ever heard of an alchemical concept called the philosopher’s stone?” Janine asked.
“Sure,” said Connie, her confusion deepening. “It was one of the major goals of medieval alchemy, wasn’t it? Some mythical substance that could turn base metal to gold, but it was also the universal medicine, able to cure any illness. Right? But no one ever knew what it was exactly, or its true color, or what elements it consisted of. All descriptions of it and recipes for it were couched in riddles. It could only be revealed by God.”
“Exactly,” said Janine. “One of the riddles said that the philosopher’s stone is a stone that is not a stone, a precious thing but without value, unknown
but known to all. Well, the usual contemporary attitude toward alchemy is that it’s just the historical ancestor of modern-day chemistry. And in a sense that’s true, since alchemy was really the first time that scholars started to experiment with natural materials to see if they could be changed from one form to another. But many academics, Chilton among them, have emphasized the religious elements of medieval alchemy.”
“Religious?” Connie asked.
“Sure,” Janine replied. “The alchemists reasoned by analogy. According to them, the world around us contains meaning, and the patterns of the universe mirror the patterns of our selves. It’s the same kind of thinking that underlies astrology: the movement of stars and planets both mirrors us and influences us, so that if we read them properly we can reveal truths about everyday life. So they started out by trying to sort the world into a set of categories based on similar qualities. You’ve got the sun on one hand, which rules heat, masculinity, progress, dryness, day. And then you’ve got the moon on the other, which is cold, femininity, regression, dampness, night. And every substance consisted of four basic elements: earth, fire, air, and water. And there are four qualities: heat, cold, humidity, and dryness. Everything on earth, they thought, could be described using these categories. Gold, for example, might be a combination of sun, earth, fire, heat, and dryness, which describes its color, texture, usefulness, what have you. I’m just guessing, but you see what I mean.”
“I think so,” Connie hazarded, unsure if she understood Janine’s point. “It’s just so weird to try to think in those terms. Gold is just an element, right?”
“Yes, but they didn’t exactly know that in the Middle Ages,” Janine said. “The world was a weird-looking place before we knew about atoms and DNA. They were trying to figure out what its component qualities were, not just to understand the world better but also so that they could try to
control
it. Alchemy says that these elements and qualities can be manipulated by gifted men, causing substances to change their form beyond what nature intended. They compared the crucible in which metals were melted to the
human body, which transforms substances, too—food and water become bone and sinew. Sperm transforms in the body, like a seed in the earth, bringing something out of nothing. So the search for the philosopher’s stone, or the Great Work, required the purest elements and the highest degree of talent. It was like the search for perfectibility, both in substance and in the soul.”
“But this is all pseudoscience,” Connie protested. “It hasn’t been taken seriously in…” She paused, thinking. “Two hundred years! At least.”
“Well, that’s not what Chilton argued,” Janine said. “I was there for the talk, and let me tell you, it was a real shocker. The paper dealt with the private journals of respected seventeenth-and eighteenth-century chemists—Isaac Newton among them—who also conducted serious research into what used to be called ‘vegetation of metals’ as the key step. That was a concept that connected the transformation of minerals under heat and pressure with the growth of plants and animals. Manning proposed that the base material in the riddle might be carbon, the basis of all life, which of course can be transformed under heat and pressure to anything from coal to diamond. He claimed that there was one further transmutation for carbon that was out of the reach of current science, but that might be accessible using alchemical techniques.”
“Techniques?” Connie echoed.
Janine heaved a small sigh. “Connie, he was arguing that the philosopher’s stone could be real. Essentially, he thought that alchemy shouldn’t be considered as a
symbolic
way of looking at human thought and reason after all, but should be taken at
face value
.”
Connie’s eyes widened, and she imagined her advisor standing at a raised podium, a bright light—the slide projector—splashing a dark red image of a stone across his face and into his eyes. He was pounding his fist on the lectern, and his mouth was moving, but the only sound that she heard was laughter. She blinked, and the image was gone. One hand rose to touch her temple, which had started to throb.
Janine laughed, continuing. “Gives me a headache, too. Well, of course
the conference panel had a field day. Accused him of ahistoricism, at the very best, and of needing a long vacation at the worst.” Janine exhaled through her teeth and dropped her voice even further. “The university president even had a conversation with him afterward. Asked if chairing the department was proving too taxing. That is strictly between you and me, by the way.”
“That,” said Connie, sitting back on her stool, “is surprising.” It seemed incredible. What had Chilton said?
Wait until you have seen what I have to offer
. The threatened loss of his chair in the department would be devastating for him.
“Well,” Janine continued, “you know Manning. You can imagine how he took their reaction. It was a real blow.” She shook her head. “So if he’s being even more strict with you than usual, now you’ll have an idea why. I think he feels like he needs to come back from that to some extent. Rehabilitate his reputation. If he can point to an accomplished protégée who is doing serious, innovative work, then…” She trailed off, reaching her hand forward to finger the key.
“This is beautiful. Is it antique?” she asked, turning the key in the warm light of the bar.
Connie said nothing. As she brought the heavy tumbler to her lips, a tongue of liquor sloshed over the rim, and she reached up to clutch the trembling glass with her other hand, smothering its movement before Janine could see.
T
HE
V
OLVO CREAKED TO A HALT, A LARGE DROPLET OF RAINWATER
splotching across the windshield. Connie paused, pressing her palm against her chest and feeling her heartbeat thrumming at an uneven pace, like a runner dashing and then stopping to rest, panting, up against a tree. She had told Janine Silva about the bizarre circle symbol burned into her front door, and Janine had responded with shock and concern. What did she mean,
burned
? Who would want to vandalize her grandmother’s door? What had
the police said? Well, so long as she had filed a complaint, she supposed there was nothing else to do. Though it must have been unnerving, especially as Connie was staying there alone. Did she feel safe?
Connie scowled, glaring out of the car window at the shop front across the street. Another few fat raindrops fell onto the hood and roof, plonking on the metal and rolling down the glass, leaving snail-like trails in their wake. Of course the circle, with its wisps of smoke drifting out of the black scars in the wood, asserted the problem of
why
much more acutely. Over their hours in the living room after the policemen left, Sam getting up at intervals to cast his flashlight nervously across the yard from the window, no answer was forthcoming.
The police are right, it’s just weird kids from Salem
, Liz asserted. The explanation satisfied none of them.
When they could not figure out why the circle had appeared, they turned their attention to its possible meaning. “‘God my helper,’” Liz translated, together with the Greek letters
alpha
and
omega
, perhaps another indication of the godhead, the divine that is both the beginning and the end. But beyond that, the word
Agla
, the bizarre array of crosshatches—it clearly meant
something
, but they could not fathom what. Finally exhausted by tension and fear, she and Liz retired to the musty four-posters upstairs, not protesting when Sam insisted on staying, flashlight in hand, half-awake in the armchair by the fireplace as dawn started to creep across the sky. Connie shivered at the memory as a rumble of thunder lurked low in the sky, sounding like a beast or monster prowling three streets over.
The quiet gong rang out as Connie opened the door of Lilith’s Garden: Herbs and Magickal Treasures to find the same earringed woman behind the counter, hair in a giant bun atop her head this time, sorting receipts on the glass-topped counter.
“Blessed…be,” she said, recognizing Connie, and flipped closed the book that she had been reading, cover facedown.
“What does
Agla
mean?” Connie demanded without preamble, hands planted on her hips. How she resented this woman with her ridiculous earrings, the profits of her store built on the dead shoulders of a bunch of inno
cent people. Connie’s eyes bored into hers, and she perceived that the woman felt herself to be a very kind and sensitive person, intuitive, but that most of her supposed intuition derived from her own soft view of the world. She was not a bad person, this earringed woman—her world was just very padded and small.
“What?” asked the woman, confused, tensing in her chair behind the cash register.
“
Agla
,” Connie said, too loudly, stepping nearer to the counter. “I want you to tell me what it means. Especially when it appears in some crazy circle surrounded by a bunch of hatch marks.” Her voice tightened, and the woman’s discomfort radiated from her in nearly visible waves.