Alchemy: an historical psychological suspense thriller of perfect murder

by Chris James

  ‘I have no doubt that Alchemy was written by Nicolas Flamel – but the science is certainly not his. That belongs to Perenelle Flamel, close to death by the time it was completed. The science is dark – too dark for mere mortals. But alas, it works.’

  I burst out laughing. The professor’s face turned decidedly sour. I recalled such rapid changes of mood in him, during my youth. But I stood my ground, flinging the document down.

  ‘Ah. Right then. That proves it. And what bright arse wrote this? Some pimply-faced junior at the British Museum? Frankly, Professor, that means less to me than a fart in St. Paul’s.’

  The professor turned the document over to reveal a rhyme and a signature above it – a signature I recognised only too well.

  ‘A pimply-faced junior by the name of Leonardo da Vinci, actually,’ he said, stabbing the signature with a crooked finger.

  Heavens.

  I tried not to show my dismay. Leonardo, my lord and master? He had appraised Alchemy thus? I studied the signature; ran my fingers over it. They trembled. Leonardo da Vinci, 1507. I was quite sure it was indeed the old master’s. I was lost for words. Had I been sitting on this divine master’s approved work for years and not taken it seriously? But there was something I had to tell the professor, tell him before–

  ‘You’ve learned to capture desire. Today’s demonstration proves that without doubt. But of all people, you, Jacob Silver, are the only man I know alive today who could crack this, that one thing that has eluded man for–’

  ‘But it doesn’t work,’ I blurted out. There. I’d told him. I held up a glass of golden liquid – the liquid that was the elixir the professor sought so badly, made exactly as prescribed in Alchemy. Every ingredient meticulously researched, over a hundred. This was his prize. And it didn’t work. Gaslight shining through the glass caused a full array of coloured light to dance across the professor’s face. He seemed taken aback; reduced to a pupil awaiting his master’s lesson. My lesson.

  ‘You– You’ve solved this one, too?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘It took a while. A good deal of effort. But, yes. After deciphering one hundred and twenty-seven medieval ingredients, I had it. I´ve named it Elixir 32 – my thirty-second attempt at getting it right – but it just doesn’t work, Professor. To even think it would in the first place is complete and utter madness.’

  Crash!

  His cane smashed down on the bench. I was startled as he snarled into my face. I backed away.

  ‘If I’m mad for believing immortality is possible, then let me be called mad – but only by any man that can prove it is not.’

  ‘But– I tried everything. It didn’t–’

  He turned to a certain page and pointed to the five lines of gibberish that had evaded him back in my college days. ‘You deciphered these ingredients? The catalyst?’

  I looked closely at the text, an assortment of characters from a dozen or more languages and alphabets. ‘Well, no. Not that. That’s all gobbledegook. There’s no such–’

  Crash!

  The cane again.

  ‘Then you haven’t cracked it, boy! Like the three hundred before you who didn’t crack it, either!’ His stare was intense. I feared he might turn the cane on me. But this was my house. My home. He had no right to be there, insulting me. I was not his enslaved pupil in the catacombs any longer.

  ‘Er. . . It’s late,’ I said, although not as boldly as I had hoped. ‘We’re both tired. I dare say you have a long way to travel.’ I opened the door and nervously ushered him out. His mood changed in an instant.

  ‘No. I’ve nowhere more important to go. I’ll stay as long as it takes. Till we solve this riddle. Prove the formula. Break this infernal code,’ he said quite politely, as Betsy sprang from the hallway shadows, curtsied and offered him his cloak and hat.

  ‘The master will put it to Emily, sir,’ Betsy offered, without consulting me. ‘Come back in the morning, can you?’ And then the two of them headed to the front door.

  Just get rid of him, I wanted to scream after them, still trembling from his outbursts. I heard them in the vestibule.

  ‘And how is Emily?’ the professor asked, as if he actually cared.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Betsy assured him. ‘Never been better. They must be the happiest couple in all London.’

  And we don’t need you coming along, spoiling it, I wanted to shout up the stairs.

  But the professor’s response disarmed me. ‘One seldom comes across such joy in these miserable times. Good night to you, madam.’

  And then he was gone.

  The faded manuscript copy was still on the bench and I decided to take it up to bed with me – amused by the rhyme above Leonardo’s signature. Well, at least one person had cracked it – and claimed it works.

  Betsy met me on the stairs. ‘It’s a wonderful opportunity, Master Jacob. You could make a name for yourself, solving this one.’ Then she bade me goodnight.

  Of course, I knew she was right. I would have an enviable reputation if I could equal Leonardo’s findings and prove the formula worked, publishing the result to the world. But I somehow doubted the professor had any intention of popularising our discovery.

  Emily had stayed awake to learn what had taken place. I sat on her bed and told her the full story.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Emmy. But I won’t neglect you, I promise. I’ll get rid of him as soon as I can. But he’s right. We probably are the only two mad enough to try this. Even so, you mean the world to me. I’ll find his wretched solution and then we’ll be rid of him. Six months, that’s it. I’ll give him until Michaelmas Day. If the end’s not in sight by then – I’ll heave him onto the street.’ I turned the manuscript over to read the rhyme. I hoped she would find it as amusing as I did. ‘Listen to this. . .

  Be warned thou prying eye

  These formulae thou dost espy

  Only those who dare ferment

  Each and every experiment

  Shall find the door and turn the key

  To mankind’s dream: Immortality.

  ‘And signed by the man himself, my own master and father of all science: Leonardo da Vinci.’

  I wasn’t sure that Emily realised the significance of that endorsement, or understood that I now felt it essential to drop everything else and solve that one last riddle which I had so foolishly ignored. Leonardo had turned it into a more worthwhile quest, a challenge. I kissed my darling goodnight and switched out her light, my mind racing with endless possibilities for getting back to work.

  ‘Stark raving mad, you ask me,’ Emily called out as I went off to my own bedroom. ‘Night-night.’

  Chemistry paraphernalia bubbled when, dressed in my apron, I led the cloaked professor into the laboratory the next morning.

  ‘And Emily approves?’ the old scholar asked cautiously, slipping on an apron.

  ‘Indeed. I think she’s just as excited as I am. I rose early and dealt with the day’s prescriptions. So, let’s get started on this elusive riddle, shall we?’

  Betsy Pollock waddled into the lab and took the professor’s cloak and hat. She smiled at him in his apron and left.

  I pored over the questionable text in Alchemy, puzzled. ‘I bow to your superior knowledge and experience, Professor. Not gobbledegook – a code of some sort.’

  ‘Precisely, Master Jacob. Apply your mind. Stretch the imagination. We don’t have much time.’

  ‘Much time?’ I asked him.

  ‘Michaelmas Day is not that far away,’ he answered. It was as though he had been reading my mind. But then I recalled that Michaelmas Day was the date upon which Alchemy instructed that, once these illusive ingredients had been added, the concoction should be consumed.

  I took some rice paper, placed it over the text. ‘First, I’ll trace it. Then, my father’s library. Everything on medieval medicine. Look for similarities.’

  The professor, Betsy and I filed into the laboratory with our arms piled high with ancient books. Betsy bl
ew off the dust. The professor and I spread them over the benches, studying each and every one closely, comparing the text from Alchemy.

  Later, by gaslight, we were exhausted, having examined hundreds of pages between us.

  ‘Betsy’s made the bed up for you in the spare room, Professor,’ I told him, as he headed for bed with a candle. ‘We should finish the rest of these books tomorrow. I hope that yields something.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’ asked the professor, yawning as he shielded his candle from the draught.

  ‘The Ancient Institute of Apothecaries and Alchemists,’ I said, ‘wherever they are.’

  ‘Er, no, Master Jacob,’ the professor said nervously, placing his hand on my arm. ‘We shouldn’t go disturbing them, not unless it’s a last resort, you understand?’

  I didn’t understand, but thought that perhaps the professor had good reason. Was it that he did not want the institute to know he was close to perfecting the elixir? Had they forbidden him to work on it? I had no idea, but found the whole thing intriguing.

  ‘Of course, we could try the Apothecaries Hall – I heard when I was taking my examination there that they boast of a huge medieval medical library,’ I said.

  ‘Er, no, no, no,’ insisted the professor, becoming flustered. ‘We don’t want to disturb them. It might resurrect ill feeling over dealings I’ve had with them in the past.’

  ‘Ill feeling?’ I pressed.

  ‘Not now,’ he said, edging off towards his bedroom, ‘but I will tell you one day.’

  ‘The British Library, then,’ I called up the stairs, sure that he would have to agree. ‘Everything ever written on the subject,’ I added, heading upstairs after him. ‘I’ll find it, never fear.’

  But he had gone to bed.

  The magnificent dome of the British Library Reading Room within the British Museum at Bloomsbury was believed to have covered more books than any other place in the world when Stanley Silver put his unborn son’s name down for a pass upon its inaugural opening in May, 1857. The pass duly arrived on Jacob Silver’s tenth birthday, twenty-three years later, and the library became the fountain from which young Jacob sated his thirst for knowledge when his father or teachers could not provide the answers he so eagerly sought.

  As a child, Jacob knew every square inch of the huge spider’s web-like floor arrangement, and the librarians, stymied by awkward requests from visitors, would often seek out Jacob to guide them to the correct shelf. In those days, if it were outside school hours, he was sure to be present.

  Now he was calling daily to crack this code, it was the librarians’ turn to assist Jacob. They introduced him not only to their more serious members in the reading room but to department heads in the British Museum itself. That handful of lines copied from Alchemy tied up acknowledged authorities on chemistry, physics, cryptology, Egyptology, calligraphy, ancient Greek, Aramaic, Chinese and Japanese texts, Sanskrit, numerology, and astrology, for weeks on end.

  Convinced he was on to something revealing, one official took Jacob to the library of St Paul’s Cathedral where, in the cool and eerie catacombs, they were given cotton gloves and access to illuminated volumes on witchcraft and curses over five hundred years old. Hundreds of hours of mind-numbing scrutiny resulted in Jacob learning exactly, and precisely, nothing to help him crack his code – but an awful lot he didn’t know about witchcraft.

  Enquiries went on for month after month. The first Michaelmas Day came, and although the professor was as irritable as sin, it passed without a murmur, due to their level of concentration. Jacob did detect a degree of frustration coming from the professor from that day forward.

  Almost every expert Jacob consulted was adamant that such an array of symbols in his five-line riddle could only be a code, of some sort, and not any specific language.

  He finally received a letter from the British Museum staff:

  ‘You have letters from the ancient Greek Cyrillic alphabet, others from Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese, Latin and bits from before Christ. Some symbols are reversed; some are inverted; others are rotated. Someone is challenging you. Testing you. It is most certainly a code. And a number of us here are sure that the writer was concerned with religion,’ wrote the Head of Languages. ‘If and when you do solve it, we would be delighted to learn of the result. Good Luck!’

  Jacob showed the letter to Emily that night, as proof that he was onto something – and assured her he would soon solve the mystery, emphasising how much he was missing their time together during the day.

  ‘Then the sooner you crack it, Jacob, the better,’ Emily urged, ‘We can get back to life as normal once that wretched man has gone.’ After he straightened her pillows and kissed her goodnight, she asked: ‘What of the gallery and the paintings they have yet to sell?’

  ‘No word yet. Jean-Louis has buyers for the prize painting but none have yet come forward for any of the others, people just stop and admire, he says, every day.’

  ‘And may I remind you that you haven’t painted a thing for over six months,’ Emily said, tutting, as Jacob blew out her lamp. ‘Next, we’ll have the grocer knocking at the door yelling to be paid. Do some proper work and get rid of that damn man and his puzzle, or we could end up in Carey Street.’

  While the professor frittered away valuable chemicals with innumerable failed experiments in the laboratory, other wild-goose chases led Jacob to Great Queen Street, near Covent Garden, and the archives of the Freemasons’ Grand Masonic Lodge, and the ancient Order of the Knights of St John, at St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell. Another three months were wasted. It was only then, at the point of exhaustion and walking home to Blackfriars, that Jacob found himself in Black Friars Lane, less than half a mile from his home, passing a grand building, with the grander title of The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, the very place he had taken his first examination at his mother’s insistence – Apothecaries Hall. It was now a whole year since he had begun work on solving this riddle. Was there no end to it? Reminding himself that this was the place the professor had insisted, twelve months before, that he should not approach, Jacob, so frustrated from his failures thus far, decided to ignore his over-sensitive mentor and take matters into his own hands. With any luck, he imagined, the professor would have forgotten all about it. Jacob clung to the high iron gates and made up his mind to return during office hours.

  ‘Is that the Institute?’ Jacob asked Betsy that evening after arriving home, aware she somehow had a connection. Wasn’t it the Institute that sent her for his housekeeping vacancy? he recalled. He never did get to the bottom of that.

  ‘You’ll need to ask the professor,’ she replied, making excuses to leave him and go to bed. ‘But don’t disturb him now; he went to bed early with a headache.’

  Jacob was sure he heard them whispering down in the basement before retiring himself. He had heard the word institute quite clearly. As he climbed the stairs he could hear the professor shouting and hoped he would be in a better temper in the morning when Jacob told him that he was going into Apothecaries Hall – like it or not.

  If, indeed, The Worshipful Whatnot was The Institute, from whence Alchemy came, Jacob was confident that he would find a solution there. He sensed he was close to solving the riddle. And, ever the optimist, that was what he told Emily as he kissed her goodnight and turned out her light – and had told her just as confidently almost every night for over three hundred nights.

  If Emily was annoyed over the exorbitant amount of time Jacob was devoting to the professor, and Alchemy, rather than herself, despite the old man’s agreed tenure having well expired, she did not choose to convey it, just then.

  But she surely would, soon enough.

  And what of her offer of marriage? Had he forgotten? Did he no longer care? She had proposed that they lived as husband and wife in common law – and he had accepted – over a year ago. But each time Jacob had attempted to fulfil their arrangement, and there had been many, and tried to persuade her to move from her room
to his, Emily had complained.

  ‘Not while that man remains in our house,’ Emily had decreed, referring to the professor sleeping at the end of the corridor. ‘I need privacy, absolute privacy.’

  In an effort to appease her, after four months Jacob had removed the professor from upstairs and, after much explanation and apology, accommodated him in the anteroom, off the basement laboratory. On what was to be their first night together as man and wife, Emily had insisted on being wheeled straight back to her old room after being disturbed by a serenade of clanking and hissing coming from the basement – the pneumatic wall separating the professor’s anteroom being opened, or closed.

  ‘Is he shut in, or shut out?’ Emily yelled, making her way out of Jacob’s bed. ‘This isn’t good enough! I need to feel safe and secure in my own house. Get rid of that man!’

  And no matter how hard he tried to share her bed over the ensuing months, Emily would not succumb, insisting that the professor had to go – or she would. In addition, Emily made it quite clear that whenever Jacob finished his duties, whatever they were, he was to call in on her, on his way to bed.

  ‘I then have the added security of knowing you are close – to protect me,’ she had informed him. ‘The day I am neglected by any man,’ she had stressed upon him many a time, ‘is the day I leave.’

  Dutifully, Jacob had done as requested and not missed a single night. He paid homage to his darling mistress, praying inwardly outside her closed door that, one night, she would invite him to come inside, close the door behind him and crawl into bed bedside her. And every night she denied him with a crushing excuse:

  ‘A headache.’ ‘Too tired.’ ‘It’s rather late,’ or ‘It’s too early.’ ‘You’re too excited,’ or ‘You’re not excited enough.’ ‘I haven’t brushed my hair,’ or ‘I’ve just brushed my hair; you’ll mess it up,’ or ‘I need to be in the mood.’ ‘I’ve had a hard day,’ or ‘I’ll need all my energy for tomorrow.’ ‘You smell of chemicals’ – or ‘old books’; ‘London smog’ or ‘laboratory fog.’ And so on…