by Jane Jakeman
It was the landlord of the Green Lion.
“Good God, man, what are you doing here?”
“No, Lord Ambrose, I beg you—don’t call anyone!”
The man’s face was twisted with fright. I dragged him upright, and Sandys shut the door behind us. The landlord was stammering with fright, but he managed to get out a coherent sentence at last.
“I saw it, you see. When he stopped for a drink.”
“Who, man? Who stopped?”
“The carter, the one who came to Jesmond Place. It wasn’t true, what I told you—that he said he couldn’t delay.”
I suddenly understood. “The man who was bringing a load of goods to this house? You said he drove straight on here.”
“Yes. Well, it wasn’t quite true.”
This usually means “In fact, it was an out-and-out lie,” and so it proved in this case, for the landlord went on: “He did stop at the Lion for a mug of ale. Said he’d come from Bristol without a break and his throat were as dry as a bone.”
“But your wife said he wouldn’t pause for a drink.”
“That’s what I told her, my lord. Naomi was upstairs when he came. So while he was having a sup in the bar…”
“What did you do?”
I had guessed, but I let him tell me. Confession is always more interesting than accusation; it is so much more informative.
“I went outside into the yard—he’d asked me to give the horse some feed—and I lifted up the cover on the cart. It was lashed down, but in one place it had come loose a bit—because of the jolting on the road, I suppose. Anyway, I pulled up a corner of it.”
He added, pleadingly, “Just a few inches!”
“And what did you see, man?”
He stopped. Terrified yet somehow in the grip of a fascination, he stared at me, tension working in the muscles of his face, so that the fat cheeks were twitching involuntarily.
Yet it was not fear alone that possessed him. I could have sworn to that, for there was a look in his eyes as though he were gazing at something distant, yet extraordinary. It was the recollection of what he had seen. He was like a man remembering a vision.
Plainly, in the rough inn-yard, he had seen something that had changed his life.
He whispered the word.
“Gold. Pure gold, my lord. Lumps of it.”
He moistened his lips. “Heaps of gold. As if it were just dug up out of the ground. Rocks of gold, with blisters and bubbles of gold in them. Just lying under the tarpaulin covering the cart. There in my yard.”
“Oh, you idiot!” scoffed Sandys. “How can you have been so deluded! What made you think it could be gold?”
The landlord whispered again, as if overheard by some presence, as if the object of his desires had been a living thing invoked by his words. “It was in gleaming pieces, as if it had been quarried with a pick, not minted—all edges and pieces, yellow—like little mountains of gold. And—”
“And?”
I took a somewhat threatening step toward him, but it was not really necessary. He was possessed still by his vision, recounting it as if it had been a dream.
“I heard the fellow coming out toward the yard so I quickly covered up the cart again. The man came outside and climbed up on the cart and drove on—to this house, to Jesmond Place. So I—”
“You have come after it.”
I finished the sentence for him.
The magic left his face. He became again a fat, terrified fool.
“I thought if I had just a little piece of it, just a tiny little piece of it, it would be enough to keep us for the rest of our lives. I didn’t dare take any then—I thought the carter might check the load before he drove on.”
“So you came here in search of it? As a thief, in fact.”
“Oh, I beg your lordship, just let me go. Let me get back—I’ve never done anything like this before. Never even been tempted to. But there was something about it—the way it was heaped up there in that cart. As if it was thrown there for the taking. It’s been in my mind ever since. I’ve never slept one night through without dreaming about it. And I got to thinking—it must be here somewhere, in Jesmond Place.”
I looked at Sandys. The penalty for such an attempted theft was hanging. This silly innocent fellow, tempted to his death by what he had glimpsed beneath the cover of a cart in an inn-yard!
I stood aside and motioned toward the door.
The fellow started to escape.
Suddenly, I shot out a hand and grasped him by the collar.
“A word with you first,” I hissed in his ear.
I don’t know what he was expecting, but my question clearly surprised him.
“The name of your inn, the Green Lion. Where does that name come from? I have never heard of any inn or alehouse in the length or breadth of the country with such a name. Did you call it that?”
He was taken aback.
“The name, my lord? Why, there’s nothing in the name! I do believe it’s been called that for more’n two hundred year—since old Charnock came to Combwich. They say he stayed in the inn at first, before he had a house in the village.”
“Charnock?”
“Yes, my lord. This young fellow who’s here now—his family’s from Combwich. Old Thomas Charnock must have been his great-grandfather, or great-great—I can’t count ’em. They hands things down, in that family. Didn’t you know? The young fellow’s from these parts.”
It had never occurred to me to wonder where Charnock had sprung from. Nor to Sandys either, or so I judged by the expression on his face.
But what the landlord said next, as he squirmed to get away from me, was even more astonishing.
“Ask Dr. Henderson, my lord. He lives in Charnock’s house.”
Henderson!
Open-mouthed, I let go of the landlord’s sweaty collar and he slipped like a fat wraith through the doorway.
But I knew now what lay at the heart of this corruption. “It’s here, somewhere,” I whispered, “and if we find it, we’ll save an innocent woman from the gallows.”
“And a fool from his folly,” added my companion.
“Oh Sandys, we are on no moral crusade! If men derive pleasure from being gulled, let them proceed! But we need some proof of what is going on, and I believe I know something of this Dr. Henderson. Let me go and speak with him, and perhaps I can coax a few things out of him.”
Sandys spoke hastily as we hurried downstairs.
“Lord Ambrose, do not be impetuous,” he hissed. “Remember you are not now on some wild Greek island. This is the English countryside!”
“Yes, I will take care to bear in mind that I am not among civilized people and to behave with corresponding savagery.”
“I am always most fearful when your lordship is most flippant, for I fear the grain of truth in your humor.”
“Thank you, Sandys.” By this time, we had reached a back door; dawn was breaking outside and a blackbird whistled its sharp call of alarm as I opened it. A chorus of hedge-birds, ragged but exceeding loud, near-deafened us, but seemed to leave Jesmond Place and its occupants unawakened and unmoved.
‘There is still some time before the household will be stirring, Sandys. Will you keep watch over Lady Jesmond to ensure her safety, while I ride to Combwich to find this Henderson?”
I did not, this time, dignify Henderson with the title of “Dr.”
Thus I left Sandys, with a rug wrapped around him, sitting in the passageway outside her ladyship’s chamber in the early dawn light, wondering why he was being such a fool as to get himself into this situation…and shuffling about to get into a more comfortable position.
CHAPTER 20
The village of Combwich was as I remembered it, anonymous, slumbering in the early light. If the church at Otterhampton had been a mouse asleep, this village resembled a lazy gray cat stretched out from nose to tail, down to the tidal creek on the river.
The head, so as to speak, was the Green Lion, which stood
at one end of the long curving street. This, the village thoroughfare, which I had glimpsed on my first journey to Jesmond Place, culminated in a narrowed bottleneck winding up the hillside, which was the tail of the sleeping cat, to continue my fanciful analogy. The houses overlooked the river, where there was an old timbered dock stretching out into the water, or pressed up opposite each other so that the villagers must look into one another’s windows, were there any activities of interest to observe, which had seemed a remote possibility, I must confess. The town might once have been quite a little port: it snoozed quietly now, gently sleeping on mud and rock.
But I had misjudged Combwich. Something was evidently stirring here.
At the Green Lion, the sign with its painted pea-green beast creaked gently in a breeze; the landlord’s wife was up and about early in the yard, pegging out sheets and wearing a fine pair of scarlet shoes as she danced back and forth across the dusty yard with her laundry. She greeted me with no trace of embarrassment or hint of what might have passed with her husband after we had released him and he had bolted like a rabbit from Jesmond Place. Probably, she had been innocent of his attempt to gain a portion of the “gold” for himself. She had not seen that glittering substance with her own eyes; perhaps she remained untainted.
I did not think of it as real gold; I knew what it was. Suddenly, that one word, the name of Henderson, had clicked into place as smoothly as a key turning the tumblers of a great lock, and I understood what was happening at Jesmond Place.
She directed me to Charnock’s house.
“A little way outside the village, alongside the river, my lord. An old place, all on its own there. You won’t mistake it.”
Yes, all on its own. That fitted the puzzle, too. Like Friar Bacon’s tower in Oxford, just on the edge of the town.
One of them had lived there, long after Bacon.
They were recommended to have isolated dwellings, in those old books.
The houses overlooked the way, and the air hung dusty and stale between them. Here and there, a face was distinguishable within, swimming like a pale fish in the darkness of some tiny room, moving to stare as I passed, some of the dwellings so low I could not see into the lower rooms at all. Zaraband danced down, graceful even on the steep, unsure footing, like a creature in a dream, as indeed she must have appeared to the watching eyes within those houses.
We reached the last narrow houses of the huddle and swung left to follow the bank. Beyond, a small stream ran across our path, with a ramshackle bridge over it, and just beyond the bridge was a tall gray-stone house, bigger than any of the village dwellings, and clearly set apart from them.
“You won’t mistake it.” That was what the landlady had said.
As I drew nearer, I could see the door was painted, worn and peeling, but still visible as a dull orange-red, and upon it were markings in black. Moons, circles topped with crosses, three radiant suns grouped in a triangle.
I rapped upon the door.
The man who answered my knock was taller than I am, with old bones as worn and fine as carving beneath his paper-white face. He could not hold himself upright under the lintel of the painted door.
A tattered fur cloak hung about his hunched shoulders.
I was struck with a kind of sorrow to see this: the betrayal of a fine mind; the shipwrecked old age of a fiery intelligence. I had a reluctance to apprehend the fullness of the disaster which had overtaken him.
He looked up into my face, for what seemed a very long time, and the black pupils of his eyes seemed to sink deep into my mind, but I knew it was a trick to hold my gaze, a habit put on with his conjuror’s cloak. So I stared back, and he flinched and spoke first, and it was a small kind of victory. But I was startled by his words.
“I knew you would come.”
“Do you know me, then?”
“No. But I know you are the man who will end it. I see it in your face. To tell you the truth, it is a relief to me, at last, to have done.”
We entered the dark hallway.
“My study is upstairs. I get more light for the work, when I need it. I keep it dark, mostly.”
At the top of the stone steps was a square chamber, and there he took me. Almost led me, for my eyes were still unaccustomed to the dim light. Gradually, the dazzling ceased.
I was in a room hung with black and gold, shutting out the light, with a curtain stretching over the outline of a window. Henderson cannot have needed much light recently. A small breeze fluttered the edge of the blackness.
He stood and paused, as if he expected to deliver a speech, but I gave him no opportunity. I knew now what “the work” was.
“Yes, I have come to end it.”
There was no point in delaying.
I strode across and tore down the curtain. It was rotten: it came away at one pull and fell with a heap of cracked plaster, old curtain rings and spiders, all upon the floor. The dawn light poured in.
I heard the old man cry out behind me.
The black velvet of the walls was revealed in the daylight as shabby, dusty, faded to brown streaks in places. And now I could see that a table covered with a deep crimson cloth stood in one corner of the room.
“Very well, damn you! See it all!”
With a dramatic gesture, Henderson crossed to the table and pulled the cloth off.
Beneath it lay a great glass flask, and within that, floating on some thick green liquid, were the heads of two children. One seemed to have a ruddy dark red-gold countenance and flaxen hair: the other a face of albino white and long silver locks that floated on the viscous surface.
Even I turned aside in horror. The atrocities of war, these I have seen, men tortured, cut apart, dreadful deeds done in the heat. But such deliberate, careful dismemberment of the innocent… I forced myself to look again.
They were of wax. Carefully modeled and painted, the lips tinted in red, a mass of wig-hair attached to the unnaturally glistening scalps.
The old man sat down and bowed his head.
“Who are you? I do not know your name.”
“Ambrose Malfine.”
I sat down opposite him. He was at an end, but I could take my time. We both knew it.
He started at my name. “I have heard of you. They said at Oxford that you were the most brilliant student of your generation—and that you fled the place. Well, I cannot blame you.”
“And you are Dr. Henderson, once the most gifted of scholars in the University, the leading light of science. And now…”
I gazed round and gestured at the tawdry furnishings; the shelf of dirty glass, vials, retorts, alembics, presented an ironic mockery of the orderly rows of vessels I had seen ranged in Daubeny’s laboratory in Oxford. Above the shelf, the neat rows of scientific books I had seen there were parodied in Henderson’s “laboratory” by an untidy row of grubby, dog-eared folios. This was the black knowledge, the mock science, that destroyed its own practitioners with its greed and folly.
“And now, you are an alchemist. That is to say a fraudster, a trickster, a man with whom a fairground conjuror compares most favorably! How much does Sir Antony pay you?” The yellowish lips parted in a sort of laugh.
“More than science does, my dear young fellow!”
“You caught him with your false promises. I suppose you told him you could—what is it you and your fellows claim to do? To change base metals into gold?”
“Yes, Ambrose, but it would be true to say also that he trapped me with his money. I was a poor man, remember, born to a humble family, and given a miserable pittance at Oxford. Oh, I started out quite innocently. I was making an exploration of arcane science, of medieval studies such as the writings of Friar Bacon.”
That was what had alerted me. Friar Bacon’s tower, at Oxford. And who had lived there later but another student of the esoteric and occult sciences! The name lingered so irritatingly at the back of my mind.
“And you studied the works of his successors, I presume. Such as the man who lived
in Bacon’s tower in Oxford, who was supposed to be a magus—or some say, a magician. An alchemist, was he not?”
“Yes, the very same. He was known as the last English alchemist, but that is not true, of course. There were later ones. Charnock lived in Bacon’s tower, but he left Oxford and came back to the West Country where he was born. And he came here, to Combwich. This was Charnock’s own house.”
I was startled.
“But that was two and a half centuries ago, was it not? Then who is the fellow at Jesmond Place, the pale-faced little creature who trails around the house?”
“Another Charnock, his descendant. I came here, you see, in pursuit of the older Charnock’s work. I thought something written might survive—I was curious as to what experiments on metals he might have conducted, and so forth.”
“Was that why you left Oxford?” I asked.
“Yes, I left Oxford for Bristol. Bristol, you know, was where the alchemist Samuel Norton came from. He was much more famous than old Charnock, and I originally went to see if I could find out anything about him. But there seemed no remaining trace of Norton—and then I learned that Charnock had been in these parts also. And so I came here and found this house, just as he had left it, with all his books and his vessels. They had shut everything up. He had married a local woman, and his family still lived in the house. Everyone had been afraid to touch his things—they were just country people round here, full of superstitions. There were still his drawings on the walls, and astronomical figures marked upon the doors. These wax heads were old Charnock’s—and these velvet hangings here. His descendant, the young man who is now at Jesmond Place, was sitting in this very room when I first came here. He was trying to understand the books, you see.”
He pointed to the row of dusty blackish leather-bound volumes.
I walked round the room and pulled a book off the shelves at random.
The Key of Alchemy by Samuel Norton, 1577.
I flipped through the stained and dusty old pages. Some things I could make partial sense of. The male and female principles which create the Philosopher’s Stone—those, I take it, were represented in Henderson’s lair by the nasty waxwork heads, which might persuade the credulous if displayed in a dim light. There was something else I recognized: some of the woodcuts had been colored over and there were various creatures, a deer, a snake, and a fierce-looking beast carefully painted in a vitriolic shade: “the Green Lion.” The village inn had been connected with old Charnock.