Alchemy Page 2

  I sense a certain arrogance in Dr Adrian Gilbert. ‘At the moment I can’t see that you have a legal leg to stand on to take an action to a tribunal.’ I watch him sag a little. Why am I saying this? There’s nothing in the in-tray. I need the money and I need to practise my profession, my craft. I pick up the plastic folder. ‘I’ll look at this and consider what you’ve told me and be in touch. I may make some enquiries of my own.’

  ‘Thank you, Ms Green. I am most grateful. How much do I owe you so far?’ He’s taking out his cheque-book.

  I hesitate. But the rent is due at the end of the month.

  ‘The Law Society recommends standard minimum fees. I think we should stick to those.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I tell him the rate per hour for a practising solicitor of four years’ standing. He writes the cheque without a quibble. Now he has me signed up, he thinks. We’ll see.

  As soon as he’s out of the door, I open the typed document and read: The Memorial of Amyntas Boston.

  This is the true memorial of Amyntas Boston now confined to Salisbury gaol for witchcraft, the which I deny, and writ in cipher as my father used for his own receipts, which is the common practice among those who call themselves the Sons of Hermes. Some would say that I am a witch by birth since they allege my father practised necromancy. He was a learned man, a magus and a chemist but no cheat or cozener or in league with the evil one. The countess would have had him live in her house as others did, the better to consult with him in her own laboratory, but he would not, for he valued his freedom too much and his pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. So he brought me up to labour alongside him, not at the furnace or the bellows, for which he had his laborant Hugh Harnham, for he said the heat of it would blacken my skin and the fumes cause me to faint, but in wiping his brow and limbs, and bringing him food and drink as he sweat much. For in seeking the stone that is the in principia of transmutation, he said only heat would do the trick of turning base metal into gold, and all things into each other, according to the laws of mutability. As the poet Spenser has it that ‘e’en the earth Great Mother of us all’ does change in some sort even though she be not in thrall to mutability, and if the earth why not all things else. It wants only the key to unlock and enter the innermost mystery. For this work I was clad only in my shirt and britches with wooden sandals to raise my feet above the hot cinders of the floor.

  As there are those who keep watch for comets all night so my father laboured many hours together, for they who seek the stone, the adepts, are possessed by this search and nothing is for them beyond it, except that they must gain their bread as others do. And for this, which was the preparation of unguents, plaisters, syrups, and draughts to summon Morpheus, I took my full share to free him for the Great Work.

  I therefore learned all that he could teach me of these mysteries so that when he died and the countess summoned me and demanded of me what skill I had, I could answer truthfully that, except for that art of transmutation which he kept secret even from me, aside from what I could see with my own eyes as he laboured at the furnace, I could do all those things she desired which was to assist her in her own concoctions. My father had been dead but a fortnight when she sent her servant to find me out and bid me come to Ivychurch, her house, where she then was in mourning, the earl himself being dead only three months.

  I was led into her chamber where she was seated against the window so that when I looked at her I was dazzled by her beauty, for the light beaming through the lace of her ruff she was as it were haloed, and at every point winked sparklets of crystal from the pearls and precious stones that adorned it.

  ‘Come here child,’ she said. ‘I could not have your father. Shall I have you instead?’

  ‘As my lady pleases,’ I answered.

  ‘My lady does please then. I shall keep you here or Dr Gilbert may be jealous to have you underfoot at Wilton. Do you know Dr Gilbert child?’

  ‘My father spoke of him madam. And sometimes they would meet at the Pheasant to talk of chemical matters.’ I did not say my father had called him very sarcastic and a great buffoon but that his relation to Sir Walter Raleigh, he was his half-brother by the same mother, gave him the licence of speaking his mind to all, both great and little.

  ‘What do they call you child Boston?’ I hung my head and did not answer. ‘Come now child, you must have a name. What did your father call you?’

  ‘Sometimes one thing madam, sometimes another.’

  ‘Shall I lose patience with you? What things?’

  ‘Sometimes Amyntas madam and sometimes…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Amaryllis.’

  ‘He was not such a great philosopher as I supposed then, since he did not know the sex of his own child.’

  ‘When he was engaged in the Great Work madam, he was forgetful of all else.’

  ‘Come closer and let me look at you.’

  I did as she commanded and as soon as I was near enough she took my chin in her white hand and turned my head first to the right and then to the left. I could smell her scent which I recognised as a distillation of roses with some other sweetness such as jasmine admixed. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Near sixteen madam.’

  ‘And yet there is no sign of hair upon your lip or chin. What is the mystery of these names? What did your mother call you?’

  ‘Nothing madam. She died in giving birth to me, and my twin brother who died with her.’ I paused.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He was christened Amyntas.’

  ‘And you are Amaryllis? Yet you dress as your brother were he alive. Do you always so?’

  ‘No madam. When visitors came to see my father’s house I dressed in female attire to attend my father.’

  ‘But were not the neighbours and his friends puzzled?’

  ‘He had no family madam. And the neighbours believed there were still two of us.’

  ‘And you, what do you believe?’

  ‘Sometimes when I look in the glass I do not know who looks back at me. Whichever I am carries the other inside.’

  ‘Such confusion we find in dreams or in the fancies of the play, where boy plays girl playing boy. Which would you choose?’

  ‘I cannot say madam.’

  ‘One day the choice will be forced on you. For now we will continue with the game. Do you bleed child?’

  ‘No my lady.’

  ‘Strange. I bled at thirteen. Well you shall be Amyntas, my page and assistant, when we are alone here at Ivychurch, or even in Ramsbury, but at Wilton, the great house, or in London if we should go there, you shall put on your woman’s clothes and not be noticed among the press of other maids. Shall you like this game child Boston?’

  ‘If my lady pleases.’

  ‘As she does. Can you read aloud child?’

  ‘Yes madam. I read often to my father, both in our own tongue and from the Latin works of the chemical masters as Paracelsus and Nicholas Flammel.’

  ‘Then you shall read to me. I have a humour to hear my brother, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Do you know his book? It is many years since I have opened it, when last I closed it for the printer, at the end of my labours to restore his work to the world in full. I have a mind to visit it again now that I am alone and my time is my own.’

  ‘My lady is still young. She may marry again.’

  ‘I am the age now the earl was when he married me but it is not the same for women. A ripe man may marry a young maid who will give him children as I did. And you are the age I was when I was espoused to him after two years at court in her majesty’s service. Sir Philip, my brother, wrote of passion between young lovers but I have never known it. Only duty. Yet a woman must marry, and not be too picky in her choice, for without marriage she has no domain, no power. When he was away the earl left all things in my hands. I have had, you could say, my own little court far removed from London. All this will change now, changes already, and will change more when I am just the dowager and mothe
r of the earl and my son takes a wife to be his countess. Enough of sighing, come my young Amyntas-Amaryllis let me hear you read to judge whether your voice and your understanding be good enough for my brother’s words.’

  So began my new life in the lady’s household as it moved here and there between her domains, now in London, at Barnard’s Castle or at her three country estates in Wiltshire or in Wales at Cardiff Castle. The young earl was still in disgrace with the queen for he had got her lady-in-waiting, Mistress Fitton, with child yet would not marry her. It was said Mrs Fitton had tucked up her clothes and gone out from the court disguised as a man in a white cloak to meet her lover. The child was born dead and Earl William, after a stay in the Fleet, banished to Wilton, where he moped about the house. His mother could not forgive him and kept herself apart while he wrote begging letters to Sir Robert Cecil to be taken back into her majesty’s favour and given some small posts which his father had held, and be freed of the royal wardship he suffered rather than enjoyed. I was glad not to go to Wilton in my maid’s clothes at this time, for the young earl was said to be immoderately given up to women.

  In the mornings my lady prayed privately and read from her own book of psalms which she and her noble brother had made together. Then when we had breakfasted on milk, white bread and honey we went to our work in the laboratory where we made medicines from all kind of herbs, seeds and minerals, both salves, cordials and other potions.

  I would chop and grind the ingredients with pestle and mortar, then transfer them according to her instructions to the limbec for distilling into the liquors that gleamed bright as gemstones, sapphire, emerald, ruby or the garnet yellow of sulphurous emetics from her own receipt ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Vomit’ for purging.

  There were many little drawers with clay boxes of substances such as I knew from my father, already powdered: saltpetre and opiates, poppy and St John’s wort, saffron, and spices from the East, sandalwood, spikenard or our own meadowsweet that brings a merry heart.

  After, her patients would come to her with all manner of complaints and sicknesses: ulcers, wounds, bruises, ills of every member and part of the body and we would apply the salves, plaisters and dressings or mix up fresh remedies to cleanse the insides, or wash the skin or eyes, and to dispel melancholy. When she had attended to her own family there would come those from the town and the villages round about because of her reputation for skill and kindness.

  All this I helped her in and also was at her side when she wrought at the business of the household and her estates, writing letters and paying bills and keeping her diurnal of instructions and accounts for food and drink, bed-linen and clothing, tutors’ and stewards’ reports, for her hand was in everything, great and small. Sometimes she would sigh and regret the days of her youth when she, her noble brother and her ladies would laugh and read together, lolling on the grass under the trees, or be pleasantly busy at their writings.

  Other times though we were all merry enough: the ladies at their cushions and tapestries according to her pattern, for she is the finest needlewoman in England at making hangings of her own devising to adorn the walls and beds of Wilton, and other her houses. As they worked I would read aloud or Signor Ferrabosco, the younger, as he was known still even though his father had long returned to his native Italy, would play upon his lute and sing of his own composing. But best of all I came to like those times when we were alone together and I read to her from the Arcadia or she opened her heart to me and talked of past, present or future cares. Then some about her began to be envious that she should spend so much time on her page and labourant who was not of noble birth. I thought I heard whisperings, words that broke off at my appearance, small acts of spite, as drink spilled by my elbow jogged when I had fresh clothes on, the toughest cuts of meat and smallest portions, and sometimes rough teasing from her ladies when she was absent. Once I heard one say that she had loved her brother too well and was like to make the same mistake again.

  Then one day she sent two of her ladies to fetch me from the laboratory when I was alone, Mistress Marchmont an old duenna, and the young Mistress Griffiths, the countess had fetched from Cardiff at her mother’s request that she might be polished for marriage and found a husband.

  ‘Why Master Boston,’ the old one said, ‘you must leave your potions and devil’s cookery and come to our lady the countess.’

  ‘Can you make love philtres Master Boston?’ the young one asked, ‘for they say you have bewitched our lady. Make me a potion that will do the same for the young earl and when I am married I will reward you handsomely.’

  I saw that I must be cautious. ‘Alas madam, there is no such thing or all physicians would be rich men.’

  ‘They say your father was a great necromancer seeking the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. Is that what you and my lady do here together?’ She began to open the many little drawers of the cabinet and put in a delicate finger.

  ‘Be careful madam for many of those substances, tasted by those who do not know their properties, are strong poisons that will harm you.’

  ‘But they are safe in your hands Master Boston. You understand them. They say that when your father’s house was cleared after his death there was found a great quantity of eggshells used in transmutation.’

  ‘I have never seen my father use such.’

  ‘What is this transmutation you all seek? Is it not against God’s will that things should become what he has not made them, as gold from base metal, or that men should live for ever?’

  ‘Nothing can be done without it is God’s will. He has made all things, even the earth itself as the poet Spenser has it, subject to mutability in some degree. We must therefore call it a divine principle.’

  ‘Unless it be of the devil and witchcraft. Are you a priest, Master Boston, to decide such matters? When were you at the university? Or perhaps you learnt such supernatural counsels from your father’s divinations.’

  ‘My father was a physician and chymist madam, and no magician.’

  ‘And have you never seen things change their nature or spirits arise?’

  ‘Both those things are possible, but by the workings of nature not the charms of magicians. Look I will show you.’ I placed a little heap of salts of mercury in a clay dish and put it over a small fire we kept always burning to heat water for cordials. ‘Now watch.’

  They both drew near. ‘It is liquefying.’ The duenna, who had not spoken since her first words summoning me to my lady, stared into the dish. ‘It is becoming silver.’

  ‘No madam, only quicksilver by the agency of the fire. Think how cold changes water to solid ice that men may walk upon or snow that drops from the sky and when it melts there is just a little, little water on the ground from a whole hill of snow, which is bound together into crystals and thence into ice rocks, only from a drift of cloud feathers.’

  ‘You are poet as well as chymist, Master Boston, or rather magician truly for there is witchcraft in words which can steal into the heart and head just as potently as poppy closes the eyes. Our lady will wonder that we stay so long. Come. Can you arise spirits in a bottle as Master Forman does? He is a great distiller of love philtres and the ladies flock to him now he is gone to London.’

  I had heard my father speak of this Simon Forman who was born at Quidhampton in our own country, but a half mile from Wilton. ‘He grows rich then at the expense of the credulous. There is nothing to love philtres but the longing, and the belief of them that take them. So my father taught me. Love comes from the heart not the stomach.’

  ‘Some say it springs rather from the loins.’

  ‘Lust is of the loins.’

  ‘And some young men would say the better for it. Ask Mistress Fitton where love and lust are joined. You must be still a virgin Master Boston.’

  I felt my cheeks redden under this assault so that I feared for my disguise and answered rashly, ‘As I trust you are and as your husband will surely discover on your wedding night.’


  ‘You are impertinent. You at least shan’t have the discovery. Others should hear of your speaking above your station.’

  Then I remembered that she claimed to come from a sometime line of Welsh princes and knew she would complain of me to my lady. But she would do it privately, behind my back.

  The duenna laughed at our jousting. ‘Green children you spit like cats in autumn. We have kept our mistress waiting too long.’ And she led the way out of the laboratory.

  As the days passed I came to understand that Mistress Griffiths was half inclined to make trial of me herself and when I read to them from Sir Philip’s Arcadia of the beauties of the naked and shipwrecked youth, Musidorus, then I found her eyes upon me in speculation if I should raise mine from the page. But I did so only to look upon my mistress, the countess, her face.

  Last night, under the spell of Amyntas Boston’s memorial I suppose, or the weird case I might be embarking on, I dreamt I was that gladiator girl they dug up in Southwark in Great Dover Street. Outside the city wall, beside the highway and about my age. They think she was a rich pagan buried with eight lamps to light her on her way. Anubis lamps, that may just mean she was a devotee of Isis some academics claim, wanting to take away her status as gladiator, to deny the existence of fighting women. When they first dug her up there was a fierce battle of words, articles, letters, interviews flying back and forth, ‘She was: she wasn’t. They did, they didn’t.’ The archaeologists found a piece of pelvic bone in the grave, female, and then lost it. Was it really lost, suppressed, stolen? Talisman or uncomfortable evidence? Someone said Petronius had written of women gladiators so I looked up his Satyricon and there it was: a girl at the games fighting in a chariot like Boadicea. But weren’t most of the male gladiators criminals, who’d been given a last chance to fight to their deaths? Where did the women come from? Were they criminals too or just captives from some war, offered the choice of slavery and prostitution or the sword? I can’t find out. Those are the kind of references the early Christian copyists would have silently let drop, along with most of Sappho.