On one of our meandering adventures, we walked arm in arm through some of the more deserted halls of court. Richard seemed to know all the ins and outs of the palace.
“You seem to be fingering that pouch at your side quite often,” Richard said.
“I hadn’t even realized it.” It was the truth. I had gotten so used to the weight of the pocket watch at my side that I hadn’t realized I was playing with the drawstrings of the pouch.
“It’s almost as if you’re guarding something of great value.”
“Really?” I wouldn’t have called the watch something of great value, but I thought it was interesting that he thought I was guarding something. Of course, Richard didn’t know I had the watch in there. . . . I didn’t quite know why I was hiding that from him, but I figured he just didn’t need to know.
Richard shrugged. “Only trying to figure you out, my lady. There’s just so much to you.”
I didn’t want him to figure me out. I didn’t know how he would look at me if he did.
“So what is it like living at court?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Shouldn’t you know the answer to that question as much as I do?”
“No, it’s not the same,” I said. “I haven’t been here as long as you have.”
“That’s true, but you do realize I had a life before court as well, don’t you?” Richard said.
“With your family?”
“With my family. I used to live in a quieter place than court.”
“I can imagine that almost any place would be quieter than court.”
“We didn’t have that many festivities at home, no.”
“What was it like there?” I asked.
I was curious what “home” was to Richard. I wanted to know all of him. I couldn’t shake Henley’s words about the scratches on Richard’s arms, even though I was sure he was wrong. I needed to prove to myself that Richard was exactly what he seemed.
“Pretty standard,” he said. “Mother. Father. Brothers. I’ve had a good enough relationship with all of them. I’ve been fortunate.”
“No sisters?”
“One stillborn. But that was before I was born. After that, nothing. All boys,” Richard said. “I’m sure we drove my poor mother crazy, but my father loved it. He always said all that running around reminded him of his boyhood.”
“Do you still see them?” I wished I could have a family like that, but I tried not to let that show in my voice.
“Of course. I see my father and my oldest brother when they visit court to pay their respects to the king. My mother sometimes comes with them. They don’t come too often, though. Father prefers it at home in the country. But that’s fine by me. I’m learning to be on my own now. I think that’s something everyone needs to learn at some point or other in their lives. Besides, I have Lady Sutton to keep me company. “
I nodded. Richard talking about his father reminded me of Henley and his father, but I was glad Richard had a better relationship with his father than Henley had endured with his own.
“And how about you? I’ve never heard you speak of your family.”
I thought about Eleanor Shelton and her father back in Lithuania. I thought about my own foggy memory of my—Cynthia’s—mother. In a way, Miss Hatfield was the only real mother-like person I had. Or used to have.
“I-I’d rather not,” I said. “. . . It’s a sore subject.”
I thought Richard would question me further, maybe even about my modern phrasing—did they even say things like “sore subject”? —but he let it go. That was one of the things I was growing to love about him.
“And the future?” he asked, catching me off guard. “Talk about the past is all well and good, since that makes us who we are, but what about the future?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered truthfully. “I’m not sure where I’ll go from here.”
“That’s a good answer,” he said.
“I’m sure you were looking for something a bit more concrete.”
“No. Just something honest,” Richard said. “It’s normal not to know. That’s all for the better. It makes you create your life instead of just choosing your path.”
I paused and let his last words linger. “I’m not sure I agree with that. Sometimes we’re given choices we can’t run from.”
“That’s true. But that doesn’t mean you have to take them.”
I let it go, as Richard had let go the topic of family for me. There were some things that even he didn’t, or couldn’t, understand.
“I almost forgot. Eleanor, I have a surprise for you,” Richard said, his cheerful tone returning.
I automatically looked toward his hands.
“No, no. I don’t have it with me.” He laughed, opening his hands to show me they were empty. “I guess I shouldn’t have called it a surprise since I had told you earlier. It’s the clock you wanted commissioned.”
My legs almost froze, but I willed them to keep walking in pace with Richard. I couldn’t show him how big of a deal this was.
“What about the clock?”
“I convinced the clockmaker to make it.” He said it so simply, but his words changed my world.
“Oh, Richard!”
“It makes you that happy? I can let you know when he’s done,” Richard said. “I mean, I had a feeling you would be pleased, but not like . . .”
I hugged him. He never did finish his sentence.
We walked in a comfortable silence, my body not much more than a foot away from his, before Richard spoke again.
“Eleanor, I’d like to show you something, with your permission, of course.”
“As long as it isn’t something that springs out and bites me, sure.”
Richard only smiled, and I wondered if this was something serious.
“I want you to get to know me,” Richard said. “I know that sounds childish and maybe even foolish, and I know you understand parts of me very well already, but I want you to understand all of me.”
I didn’t know where he was going with this, but I let him take my hand.
“So this is it?” I turned around to get a good look at the room.
There were so many twisting tubes and pipes of unknown liquids that occasionally I would lose sight of Richard.
The room was unusually large for court, but the many tubes and vials of simmering liquids made it feel a lot smaller. The sour smell of copper hung on both of us. Everything was arranged in rows on countertops, as if long ago, when the room was started, it was meant to be neat. However, more recent additions seemed to crowd the tabletops and bulge out into the walkways.
“If by that you mean is this the place I disappear off to, then yes, this is it.” Richard’s voice scattered, hitting the copper tubes and echoing back to me. “The royal alchemist’s lab. And you’re here as an official guest of the apprentice to the royal alchemist of the king, but if anyone asks, I don’t know a single thing about your coming in here, because it’s probably forbidden. Sir del Angelo, the royal alchemist, doesn’t like people being brought in here and seeing what he’s up to. Knowing him, there’s probably an explicit rule somewhere banning visitors.”
“It’s remarkable.” My whisper carried to him.
A tabby cat sauntered over to us and stretched against Richard’s leg. He bent down to scratch him behind his ears.
I thought back to the scratches I had seen on Richard’s arm. So there was a cat. I felt more and more silly for ever having doubted him.
“I wanted to bring you here so you could see where I work,” Richard said. “It’s another part of my life. Another thing I wanted to share with you.”
I moved slowly, as if in a china shop. Everything looked terribly important.
“Do you want me to explain what some of these things do?”
I nodded and walked to Richard’s side.
“You see, according to Sir del Angelo, the king is most concerned with two things. The first is gold, of course. What monarch in the
ir right mind isn’t concerned with gold?” Richard cracked a grin in my direction.
He pointed to what looked like a blackened kettle. “That’s what we use to melt gold. There are two types of alchemy,” he explained. “The first, where you make gold out of a completely different substance like copper. And the second, where you multiply gold—you take a small amount of gold to start the reaction to make it into larger amounts of gold. You can see that the second method is the slightly easier one. It’s also the one we’re most concerned with.”
Richard paused to make sure I was following.
“Go on,” I said. He seemed to like that I was interested.
Richard told me about different processes of melting and preparing gold, using metals that were inert but also had high melting points. Though most of it went over my head, and I knew they would never really make gold, I knew what they were learning was amazing, and told him as much.
Richard’s cheeks flushed. “Well, we haven’t quite managed to make gold yet. But we’re close.”
“That’s still incredible.”
Richard looked adorably embarrassed.
“And what’s the second thing?” I asked.
“The second thing?”
“You said that the king was primarily concerned with two things: gold and—”
“Immortality.”
I knew he was going to say it. I remembered the king’s interest in immortality from my audience with him, but I still felt my skin go cold from hearing Richard say that word.
“The king’s young, but he knows that his youth won’t last forever,” Richard said. “Even kings don’t have eternal life, and that’s what frustrates him.”
“Have you found anything?”
Richard laughed. “If I figured out the secret to immortality, I’d be one of the first people to never die.”
“Wouldn’t that be something,” I muttered.
“It would be! And the king, certainly, would be very pleased.”
“So it’s safe to say you haven’t found anything yet?”
“Unfortunately,” Richard said, but I didn’t find myself sharing the same sentiments. “Sir del Angelo actually thought he had figured it out a year ago. He had tinkered with a solution for months, reading through Greek texts and collecting the necessary herbs and metals for the reactions. He was so excited, so sure that this time around it would work.”
“And?”
“Well, there’s not much to it. It didn’t do anything.”
“Can I see the potion? Is there any left?” I didn’t know what made me ask that, especially after Richard had admitted that it didn’t work.
Richard took my hand in his own, and I didn’t pull away. It felt warm—as if I could sink into all of him. It reminded me of what I had felt with Henley before . . . before all of this.
He led me down a row of violet-colored liquids and silver vials.
“This is it,” Richard said. “Failed distilled life.”
He gestured toward a single bottle on the countertop. Amid all the clutter in the rest of the room, it stood out, though the bottle itself was only as big as my thumb.
The liquid inside was as clear as the glass of the bottle. The only way I could tell that there was in fact anything inside the bottle was the distorted image I saw through it. Displayed in a small glass bottle, it looked a lot like the vial Miss Hatfield had used to turn me immortal.
“And you’re sure it doesn’t work?”
“We both tried it,” Richard said. “Well, by ‘we’ I mean ‘they,’ because I hadn’t gotten a position as his apprentice yet. But they did do various tests on animals with shorter life-spans, and elderly people who ended up dying anyway. Trust me. That’s all that’s left after our many trials. We used to have at least a gallon of it.”
“Really? And it still didn’t work?” I mumbled, stooping to take a closer look at the liquid in the vial.
I stood up to see Richard looking amused.
“I’ve never seen a girl look so engrossed with something like this,” he said. “If I had known it would help me out with women, I would have brought all the ladies of court up here years ago! All the ladies save for Lady Sutton, of course. Don’t need that one.”
I smirked at his attempt at being cute.
“Tell you what, since you seem to be so enamored with that little thing, why don’t you keep it? I was ordered to dispose of it anyway.”
My eyes went wide. “The bottle?”
“Yes. Why not? It doesn’t have a use anymore. Besides, I quite like the idea of you holding on to something of mine.”
I rolled my eyes, but still pocketed the vial.
“I know you secretly find me dashing,” he said, holding my hand to lead me out of the maze of tubes.
I looked up at him. “Do you expect me to confirm or deny that claim?”
“No.” He patted the back of my hand. “I just wanted you to know that I know.”
When we were back out in the more spacious hallways, I turned to him. “So why alchemy?”
He shrugged. “My oldest brother was the one to take over the family estate, of course. The second son went into the church, and the third son became a soldier, as is customary. Then there was me. I suppose my father didn’t know what to do with me. Alchemy was the next most useful thing he could think of. Christopher’s younger than me, but because he’s the youngest, he’ll be at home for a while.”
“And do you actually like it?” I had to ask.
“It’s more than just liking it. It makes me somebody.”
I recognized something in him: that feeling of not mattering in the world. It was as if you could die and not be missed. Everyone would keep going, keep living, because you weren’t a crucial part in the machine. Or even a part at all.
“Just like you make me feel as though I’m somebody.”
I was surprised. When I looked up at him, I couldn’t see the warm honey color of his eyes through my tears.
The hand that was still holding mine pulled me closer, until we were touching nose to nose. And then he kissed me.
I didn’t pull away.
There was a crash as one of the vases on the pillars fell, and I took a step backward. I knew that was Henley.
TWENTY
WHAT IN GOD’S name was that?
Henley spoke almost before I managed to close the door to my room.
His words—even his voice—should have extricated some sort of response from me. I should have felt a jolt. Maybe some sort of pain. Relief that he was still here, even. But there was nothing.
Every word Henley uttered was low and punctuated with a tension I didn’t need to see his face to feel.
“I don’t know.”
I wish I could say the room was spinning and that I felt guilty for kissing him back, but the room was fine, and I was fine. Instead, I saw everything with a perfect clarity I hadn’t known in ages. Sure, I was confused; I kept waiting to feel that guilty dryness in my mouth and that lump in my throat, but it just wasn’t there.
“I don’t know where that came from.”
But that must have felt right—at least on some level—because you didn’t fight him at all. I know. I saw.
I hated that Henley had seen what had happened.
I clenched my fists to steady myself.
Privacy was something I didn’t have anymore. I knew it was something Henley didn’t have control over, but I couldn’t stop myself from hating him because he couldn’t look away. And thinking this way made me hate myself.
I looked down to see my fingernails digging into my palms, leaving two rows of bloody red crescent marks.
I-I’m at a loss—
I sat down at the edge of my bed. It wasn’t just Henley. I knew it must have felt worse for him, and there wasn’t anything I could say to make it better. If there was, I would have said it in a heartbeat.
God, Rebecca . . . You—you have really hurt me this time.
“You don’t understand—”
“You know that’s not possible.”
Is that it? Are you running from me because you feel trapped with me always here?
“I always feel trapped. But that’s regardless of whether you’re here or not.”
You know I can’t change this. If I could, I would.
“It’s not you. You’re not at fault. Richard—Richard is just different.”
Is that supposed to make me feel better?
I ignored him. “Don’t ask me to explain it, because I barely know myself. He has this unmistakable draw, this passion. I don’t expect you to understand. You’re distant—a disembodied figure. And he’s here. Actually here.”
There was silence on the other end, and if it had been any other conversation, I would have thought Henley had lost interest and stopped listening.
I do understand that feeling—that draw. That’s how I feel about you.
I hated myself for being the cause of Henley’s hurt. I had known that this would happen. And yet I couldn’t stop it.
Richard. Richard was different. I know everyone says that, but it was true. There was something in Richard so animated—almost fervid—that it made even someone like me feel alive for once. For the first time in a long time, I was seen. It was an energy that scared me—something I had never seen anyone else have.
I knew it was natural to compare Richard with Henley, but it was sickening at the same time. I didn’t want to do this to Henley. I kept falling and Henley kept being there to see me fall.
“Henley, you know I love you,” I said.
I pray every day that that’s still true. But you love Richard too.
I opened my mouth, but Henley cut me off.
Don’t even try to deny it. I know it’s true.
I closed my eyes, shutting them tighter with each passing second.
And I’m not angry.
“No.” I opened my eyes to feel warm tears rushing down my face. “Be angry. Be furious with me.”
The Time of the Clockmaker Page 19