She wrenched away from his grip, edging nearer the hearth.
“No,” she said, her voice grave. “It’s not for you. I won’t let you have it.”
And then she turned, her heart contracting, and opened her arms, casting the manuscript into the fire.
Surprise broke across Chilton’s face, dissolving quickly into dismay and then anger as a cry worked its way through all the layers of restraint that he had acquired in his sixty-odd years—layers applied first in the echoing hallways of the Back Bay town house where he idly loitered, book in hand, overlooked; then in his Gold Coast dormitory at Harvard, as he pulled a silver-backed hairbrush through locks that simply refused to lie along his scalp; next at his club, as he tried to master his grip on his pipe; layers waxed in the secret hallways of the Faculty Club and buffed in the faculty meetings as he watched anxiously for the inevitable discovery that his work, his life’s work, would fail. Layers that now peeled away, revealing in Chilton’s eyes the naked certainty that his deepest fear was true, that all the prestige that had been laid at his feet and burnished, carefully, over the years of his life could never suffice, could never mask the fact that he was a weak man, Manning Chilton was, a trembling and grasping little man, and that no alchemical transformation could be wrought on his soul to make him into the great scholar—into the great person—that he yearned to be.
Chilton fell to his knees in anguish, scrabbling at the glaring embers of the fire, reaching and darting his fingers in to retrieve the manuscript leaves that were already starting to curl and blacken at their edges.
Connie watched him fall, kneeling by the cauldron, which had started to bubble and steam, and she began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in a whisper. Her heart filled with pity; she hated to see this man, her once-esteemed mentor, reduced to a cowering, clutching, horrid animal. In his own desire for truth, for the wealth, prestige, and promise that the philosopher’s stone offered, he had traded away his humanity, leaving little more than a shattered void. The stone was everything that he wanted, and could never have.
She reached down to the floor, picking up the sprig of dried mint that, when added to the brew in the pot, would finally pull the sickness out of Sam. She dropped it into the cauldron, and as she did so, the fire burst forth with a smattering of bluish sparks, and Chilton pulled his burned hands away with a wail. For another moment Connie gazed on him, and then, steeling herself, she completed the incantation.
“Agla,” she said softly, and the thick white smoke began to congeal in a column in the center of the fire. “Pater, Dominus,” she continued, as the dense smoke wrapped its arms around the steaming cauldron. “Tetragrammaton, Adonai. Heavenly Father I beseech thee, bring the evildoer unto
he
,” she finished in a whisper. The white smoke bent in a sinuous arc from around the cauldron, reaching into Chilton’s mouth, eyes, and ears, and seeming to flow into his body. His eyes became obscured by smoke, and he stayed kneeling, immobile for an instant before the smoke pulled back out of his body, emptying from his mouth and billowing in reverse back into the belly of the fire. He bent forward, hacking and coughing, his arms clutching at his midsection, a long shuddering cry wrenching forth from a dark, secret part of himself.
All at once Connie felt the strength drain out of her legs, and she slid to the floor. Leaning her head against the leg of the table she rested, cradling her badly singed hands in her lap. The burns felt scraped and raw, and as she flexed her fingers, the nerves in her skin tore and spat. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the thin yellow mandrake venom bubble up out of the burns in her hands and lift in invisible droplets into the air, vanishing, pushed up out of her skin.
For a while she leaned there, watching the now tame fire crackling as Chilton wept silently into the hands pressed over his face. Then, after a few minutes, a gurgling tremor gripped his midsection and throat, and his limbs suddenly stiffened as the first seizure tore through his body, rolling his eyes backward in his head and knotting his muscles in contortions that were horrifying to behold.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, one tear trickling down her cheek as Arlo materialized by her side.
Cambridge, Massachusetts Late October 1991
A
FIRE BURNED MERRILY IN THE BRICK HEARTH AT THE REAR OF
A
BNER’S
Pub, and as Connie arrived in the doorway, she smiled. As usual, someone—maybe even Abner himself—had gone overboard with baby pumpkins, heaping little pyramids of them at the center of every table, together with paper cups full of markers and paint pens for the addition of wicked, toothy faces. At the bar, a woozy undergraduate sat wearing a cocktail dress and clip-on mouse ears, jabbing her finger into the chest of a young man in formal dress, his bow tie and cummerbund speckled with snarling pigs. “No, you lissen,” the girl was slurring, and Connie laughed.
“Halloween is the same here every year,” she tossed over her shoulder at Sam, who had appeared behind her.
“Isn’t that what you like about it?” he replied, edging past her, carrying a duffel bag. She grinned.
Connie spotted a hand thrust above the heads in the bar, flapping at her, and she and Sam picked their way through the throng to the booth near the back. It proved to belong to Liz, who rose from her seat to enfold Connie in an enthusiastic hug. “There she is!” cried Liz, squeezing her briefly before turning to hug Sam.
“Thank God you’re back,” said Thomas, shaking his head. “I am totally
not prepared to answer these essay questions. Do you realize that grad school applications ask you to write an
intellectual biography
? What does that even mean?” Liz prodded a sharp elbow into his ribs. “Ow!” he cried. “What?”
Connie dropped her shoulder bag, still stuffed with books and dirty clothing, on the floor and settled into a vacant chair with a sigh.
“So. How was the conference?” Janine Silva asked, nodding greetings at Sam.
Connie smiled out of the corner of her mouth. “Pretty good, I guess,” she said as Sam broke in. “C’mon! Tell them what happened.”
“It’s not a big deal,” she demurred, gratefully accepting the old-fashioned that a waitress had deposited on a coaster in front of her.
“What isn’t?” asked Liz through Sam’s insisting “It is
so
!”
Everyone at the table watched with expectant eyes as Connie delicately sipped at the brimming cocktail glass, her eyes closed. When she opened them, everyone was still waiting.
“Cambridge University Press said they want to see a copy of my dissertation when it’s done,” she admitted, and the table vibrated with appreciative whoops.
“I knew it,” Janine Silva said, shaking her head. “Do you have a title yet?”
Connie nodded, reaching for her notes. “‘Rehabilitating the Cunning Woman in Colonial North America: The Case of Deliverance Dane,’” she recited from the page. Liz and Thomas chinked their glasses together. Janine smiled with approval.
“A little wordy,” her new advisor cautioned, “but there’s still time to revise it.”
“So the paper went over well, is what you’re saying,” Liz said. “I wasn’t sure the Colonial Association was ready for a feminist reconception of vernacular magic.”
“I wasn’t sure either,” Connie said, “but apparently they are.”
“How are you liking chairing the department, Professor Silva?” Liz
asked, with a pointed look at Thomas, indicating that he had put her up to asking the question. He blushed, and Connie felt a wave of protective affection for him. Being in proximity to professors always made his hands clammy.
Janine shrugged. “Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, sipping at her beer, “it’s a lot of work. It was a real shock, having to step in right at the beginning of the semester like that.” She paused, looking down with a shake of her head. “What a shame, what happened to Manning.”
“What did happen?” asked Sam, accepting his own drink from the waitress.
“He fell ill,” she said, eyebrows rising. “Nobody really knew what it was at first, but then when they opened his office to get me the departmental files, they found all kinds of crazy heating elements and compounds in there. Heavy metals. Toxic stuff.” She sighed, looking down into her glass. “It looks like he started out by dabbling in some of those old alchemy textbooks that he had kicking around, you know, just to see what would happen. But now they think that he must have poisoned himself. Gradually, over several months or years. Frankly,” she said, voice growing serious, “it would account for some of his odd behavior over the past year. He was always an eccentric guy, of course, but lately…” She sighed again. “Such a pity. He used to do such good work.”
“He can’t teach anymore?” asked Thomas, looking crushed. Connie knew that Thomas had counted on working with Chilton in the coming year.
“He’s on indefinite leave,” Janine said. “Apparently, he has some extensive neurological damage from the exposure. Causes him to have grand mal seizures, almost two a week!” She took a sip of her beer, shaking her head. “Can you imagine? At his age.” Sam glanced over at Connie, who avoided his gaze.
“At any rate,” Janine continued, “the university didn’t think he could maintain a steady teaching schedule, much less chair the department. There’s talk of giving him emeritus status if his health should stabilize. But they’re
not certain that it will. Speaking of which, how are you doing, Sam? Connie told me that you had kind of a rough summer.”
“I did, just for a little while,” Sam said, looking down at his hands. “Fell from a scaffolding at a restoration job. Really messed up my leg. They think I may have clocked myself on the head, too, and that’s what really worried everyone. Especially my parents. But one day last month it all just sorted itself out.” He eyed Connie. She smiled at him.
“Really?” asked Thomas.
“Yeah.” Sam laughed. “I’ve been getting regular checkups and scans, but they tell me everything looks fine. You should have heard my father. ‘This wouldn’t have happened if you’d gone to law school,’ he kept saying.” Everyone at the table groaned.
“See—it’s not too late, Thomas,” Connie said, nudging her student under the table.
“But now you’re back to restoration work? What do you call it?” Janine asked.
“Steeplejacking,” Sam said, smiling crookedly. “Yeah. I’m just a lot more careful now with the safety harness.” He turned to Liz. “You’ve got to come up and see what I’ve done with the house. It looks incredible.”
“Does it have electricity yet?” Liz asked, dubious.
“Not quite,” he said. “Grace insists she likes it better this way. Brings her closer to the changing rhythms of the earth, or whatever.” He rolled his eyes.
“When do I get to meet your mom, Connie?” asked Janine. “You mentioned that she’d moved back, but do you ever get to see her?”
Connie smiled, twisting the coaster under her cocktail glass. “Grace kind of keeps to her own schedule,” she said.
The truth was that even though Grace announced at the end of September that she had reconsidered selling the Milk Street house, preferring instead to return from Santa Fe to her “root soil,” she found reasons not to go to Cambridge. Too much to do in the garden, or too many aura clearings to
attend to. Connie suspected that she just preferred to have Connie come to her. She had taken to spending weekends puttering with her mother in the house, which had been freed of its tax abatement by the considerable profit from selling Grace’s place in New Mexico. Together they cleared room for the herbs in the garden, trimmed the overgrowth of ivy on the windows. They did not talk about it, preferring instead to work in silence. But one afternoon, while she was poring over some scribbled notes at Granna’s paw-footed desk, Connie looked up to see a rag drag an empty dust-free stripe through the window above the desk, and through the empty stripe appeared her mother standing outside in the garden, rag in hand, smiling, long hair swinging. And Connie smiled back.
L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, C
ONNIE AND
S
AM WALKED ALONG THE BRICK
-cobbled streets of Cambridge, supporting Liz’s sagging weight between them as they headed home to Saltonstall Court.
“I still can’t believe you
burned it
,” Liz moaned, head lolling. “All that gorgeous Latin! Stuff that no one has seen in hundreds of years! Oh!” She leaned more heavily on Connie, resting her head on her friend’s shoulder with mock drama. “So selfish! There was a whole classics dissertation to be had in there, you know.”
Connie renewed her grip on Liz’s waist, hoisting her friend up a curb.
“I hated to do it,” Connie said. “But Chilton was right there. It was the only thing I could think of. He thought the missing element of the philosopher’s stone was in the book. Said something about it being the conduit for God’s power on earth.” She shuddered. “I was terrified!”
“Peter,” Liz slurred. “Thass the philosopher’s stone.”
“What?” asked Connie and Sam together, eyes meeting over Liz’s drooping head.
“I thay to you that thou art Peter, and on this rock I shall build my church! Or whatever.” Liz waved her hand like a Roman orator and then
giggled. “
Peter
is Greek for
rock
. Issa tautology. Bible’s full of riddles like that.” She hiccuped. “You’d think he woulda known that. Should of done classics, is what.”
Connie whistled through her teeth. “Incredible. So it’s not a substance. Peter is the rock—on Peter shall I build my church.” She paused. “So Chilton was sort of half-right. The philosopher’s stone
was
real. But it wasn’t a rock, and it wasn’t something that could be made from elements and experiments. It was a person—an idea. Someone who could spread God’s healing power on earth.”
“Wow,” said Sam.
Connie cast her gaze up to the night sky overhead. The orange lights of the city washed away some of the stars that could be seen in Marblehead, but that night she thought she could just see them, glittering through the haze. For a moment she closed her eyes, enjoying her secret knowledge.
Finally, she could not resist. “I’ll just say this, and you had better not say a word. Promise?” She looked into Liz’s eyes, which already were shining through their mist of alcohol.
“What?” Liz whispered.
Connie leaned in, bringing her mouth close to Liz’s waiting ear. “Radcliffe had made more progress microfilming their special collections than Harvard had.”
There was a moment of silence as Connie’s statement penetrated Liz’s brain.
“Oh, my God,” Liz said, looking into the middle distance. She blinked, and then stopped walking, turning to Connie. “Oh, my
God
. Radcliffe? I thought you said that Mr. Whatsisname Industrialist gave all the Salem Athenaeum books to Harvard,” she said, voice a fraction louder.
“Yeah,” Connie replied, mouth cracking open into a grin. “Remember how I could never get a handle on how the book should be described? How here it was an almanac, there it was a shadow book, there it was a recipe book….”
“Holy mackerel,” Liz said, understanding sparkling in her eyes.
“Exactly,” said Connie.
“You can’t be serious,” Liz exclaimed, bringing one hand to her forehead.
“Radcliffe,” Connie continued, resuming her stroll toward their dormitory, “as we all know, has one of the most renowned collections of cookbooks in the world.”
“Incredible,” Liz breathed. “No wonder Chilton never found it.”
“Yeah,” Connie said, flushing a little. Sam reached a hand back behind Liz to stroke Connie’s arm.
“So it’s still in there somewhere?” Liz asked, regaining her pace toward home.
“Yes. I changed up some of the details on the catalogue card,” Connie confessed. “I probably shouldn’t have. But at least that way I’ll know the text survives, hidden in their archives. Though”—she paused, looking up at Sam—“I think Grace was right.”
“How’s that?” Sam asked, smoothing a strand of hair back from Connie’s forehead. As he did so, a group of costumed undergraduates tripped across the street, hollering jovial insults at one another. One of the girls swanned by in a long, billowy black dress, a tall, wide-brimmed pointed hat on her head, trailing a broom in her wake. In her arms she carried a stuffed toy cat.
“I don’t think we need it,” Connie said, her pale eyes gleaming in the night.
A
BOUT THAT TIME, TWENTY-ODD MILES AWAY FROM
C
AMBRIDGE, ALONG
the roadway by the sea, dusk was creeping across Marblehead. In the distance a cannon fired, followed shortly by another, and then another, their blasts echoing off of the craggy granite face of the cliffs as the yacht clubs ringing the harbor announced the sunset. On the northern side of Old Town, past Milk Street, past a boatyard full of empty wooden hulls overturned like elephant ribs in the darkness, an older couple strolled in silhouette along the highest ridge of Old Burial Hill. They were moving toward a bench that stood on the site of the first meetinghouse in town, long since gone; it
was the spot that afforded the best view of the harbor as the surface of the water turned a lavender orange-gray in the setting sun. The couple eased themselves onto the bench, settling their backs with relief. For a while they sat, enjoying the salt air as it washed up the sides of the hill, carrying with it the faint sound of rigging clanking against the masts of sailboats moored on the water, and a few distant cries and thumping feet of children at play.
“Hey,” said the man, shaken out of his reverie. “Thah’s no dogs allowed up heah! Shoo!” He clapped his hands at a smallish dog, barely visible in the grass on the hill, who had been napping, curled up, against one of the headstones. The animal raised his head leisurely, looking at the man.
“Go on, now!” the man said. “You go on home! Get!”
The woman clucked with disapproval. “It’s all them new people,” she murmured to the man, reaching a hand up to pat his sleeve. “None of ’em can be bothered.”
“They should have a little respect,” the man groused, wrapping his arm protectively around his wife.
“They should,” she agreed, settling herself nearer to him. The orange tinge on the rippling harbor surface had started to recede before an advancing inky blue, seeping up from the hollows of the waves and spreading over the surface of the water.
The dog, meanwhile, had taken his time getting to his feet. He reached his front paws forward in a luxurious stretch, yawning. Then he moved away from the headstone where he had been sleeping, and when the man glanced back to scold him again, the creature seemed to have disappeared.