Brimstone

by Skinner, Alan

  Yet the plucky girl didn’t even wait for Styche to get his cloak. She delivered her summons and, with scarcely a thought for the terrors of the night, she raced back to Fenwick Square to help her friend.

  Jenny couldn’t stop the blood. She’d dammed the flood but it still seeped from the wound, each drop taking the young man’s life with it. She cried silently, watching the pale face grow paler, and raged against the men who had done this. She held the wound closed with her fingers and felt the blood, slick and slippery, run over her wrists and soak into her tunic and shift.

  Pitch and Harcourt had searched the rest of the house by the time the doctor arrived. They had found no one, though they had feared that they would find Antrobus slaughtered in one of the rooms. His study had been ransacked; whoever searched had been not only thorough, but destructive.

  Styche was a skilled physician. Though there was little he could have told Jenny about herbs and medicines, he had surgical skills beyond hers. He had her apply pressure in just the right places while he closed the wound. Jenny had dressed it with dragon’s blood to speed the healing and thicken the blood. Between them, they gave Tom a chance to live.

  Pitch and Harcourt carried the injured man inside and up to the front bedroom. It was Antrobus’s room, but it got the afternoon sun and Styche thought that might help the patient – if he lived that long. And, at the moment, Antrobus wasn’t there to claim it. As they laid Tom in the bed, Styche looked at him doubtfully. ‘It’s a small chance he’ll live,’ he said. ‘It’s the bleeding inside that will kill him but maybe your dragon’s blood will save him. I’ve never seen it prepared like that before, Jenny.’

  Harcourt looked at Styche and Jenny. Styche’s apron was deep red but Jenny was soaked in blood from head to foot. ‘I put water on the hearth to heat. There’s but one tub I’m afraid, Doctor, and I reckon Jenny needs it more than you, though there’s a bucket by the back door to wash yer ’ands,’ he said. ‘You’ll not want to be in the kitchen, Jenny, so I’ve put the tub in the front room. Emily’s filling it now.’

  Styche’s concern was for his friend. ‘Where’s Richard?’ he muttered to no one in particular. No one answered; it was the question they were all asking.

  Styche washed his hands and went home, promising to come in the morning. In return he made Pitch promise to let him know if there was any word of Antrobus. Harcourt left to find Rayker. Pitch covered poor Laylor’s body with a sheet and Emily surprised everyone by getting a bucket and cloth and cleaning the blood that seemed to be everywhere.

  ‘You’ll need clean clothes, Jenny,’ said Pitch. ‘Antrobus won’t have anything that comes near you, but I’ll see what I can find. Emily will bring them to you. I’ll close the doors and you can have your privacy.’

  Jenny stripped off and stepped into the round wooden tub. She drew her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees. The water was soothing but there was no balm for the sorrow she felt. Laylor was dead and a young man, not much more than a boy, was perilously close to being the same, and her master was missing. She rested her head on her knees and closed her eyes.

  She heard the door of the sitting room open. It must be Emily with some clothes, she thought.

  ‘Jenny!’ came the surprised voice of John Antrobus.

  Chapter 12

  Parchment and Ink

  ‘You look like the alchemist, not his apprentice,’ said Emily. ‘Almost.’

  Jenny looked down at herself and wondered what on earth she did look like. Pitch had found a long white shift, a black tunic and a black surcoat. They were far too big, but Emily had found a leather belt that she put round the waist of the shift, and rolled the fabric under the belt until it no longer dragged on the floor. She pinned and tucked until the surcoat just brushed Jenny’s shoes. There wasn’t much she could do about the tunic in a hurry, and fortunately it was hidden by the cloak. It would at least allow her to get back to Rumpkin’s.

  John had been very apologetic about bursting in on Jenny. The front door was open and he saw no one, he said. Naturally, he came into the sitting room first ...

  More than apologetic, he was distressed. He asked question after question, many repeated, and he heard many answers the same.

  Rayker arrived shortly after. Harcourt had found him at the barracks, recruiting for the expedition against the outlaws. Jenny could see the anger in his eyes over Laylor’s death, and the injury to Tom Blunt. He went to see Tom, but the young man was still unconscious. When Laylor’s body was removed, he stood by the side of the cart looking at the shrouded corpse. As the cart clattered away, Rayker stared into the night long after the cart had left the square.

  Finally, he walked back into the sitting room. Immediately John burst out in anger, ‘Cleve has done this! They have kidnapped my father!’

  ‘Master Antrobus,’ said Rayker, ‘Cleve may well be behind this, but we cannot be certain.’

  ‘Who else can it be? They already plot against us, trying to destroy our crops. We must tell the Duke! He must do something!’

  Jenny opened her mouth to speak but thought better of it. She look closely at her master’s son.

  Rayker did speak, firmly. ‘The Duke will be told. And I will look into the possibility that Cleve was behind this. But we must be certain.’

  John faced Rayker, anger in his face. ‘We cannot just sit and do nothing!’ he shouted.

  ‘I don’t intend to,’ said Rayker coldly. ‘I have lost one man, likely two, and failed to keep your father safe. I will find who did this, Master Antrobus, you can be sure of that.’

  John dropped into a chair and ran a hand over his brow. ‘Forgive me, Rayker. I’m sorry for raising my voice. I’m just beside myself with worry.’

  ‘Understandable,’ Rayker replied. ‘Though it seems to me that you’re in a good position to help.’

  John’s face showed his surprise. ‘Me?’ he said. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Everyone knows you’re now partners with Perroquet. I find it hard to believe that, if Cleve were behind this, their master alchemist wouldn’t know of it.’

  ‘Hah!’ John snorted. ‘And if so, he’s unlikely to confess to me.’

  ‘True,’ Rayker agreed. ‘But it’s surprising what slips from a man’s tongue when you’re listening closely enough.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try,’ said John. ‘I leave for Cleve tomorrow.’ He shook his head. ‘I came here tonight to say goodbye to my father. Now I have no stomach for that city.’

  ‘It’s late,’ said Rayker. He looked at Jenny and Emily. ‘You’ll barely make it back to Rumpkin’s before she locks her door.’

  ‘And leave poor Tom with no one to look after him?’ said Emily indignantly. ‘I suppose you think Pitch will nurse him.’

  ‘I nursed wounded men enough when I was a sergeant in the guard,’ said Pitch, smiling. ‘But I warrant not a man among them would have preferred my hands mopping their brow to yours, Mistress Trickett.’

  ‘I think Emily and I should stay here tonight,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Good enough,’ Rayker said. He paused, then looked at Pitch.

  ‘One thing puzzles me, Pitch,’ he said. ‘You spoke to some of the neighbours and none of them saw anyone leave with Antrobus. For one man, or even two, to slip in or out of Vale unseen is easy. For at least three men, escorting a prisoner, let alone one as recognisable as Antrobus, to go unnoticed, is odd.’

  ‘I can’t figure it,’ said Pitch. ‘I’ll ask the rest of the neighbours, and the wardens of the other squares, in the morning.’

  ‘Good,’ said Rayker. To Emily and Jenny he said, ‘Pitch and Harcourt will watch the house tonight. They’ll stay inside.’

  ‘Kitchen or sitting room?’ Pitch asked Harcourt.

  ‘I’ll take the kitchen,’ Harcourt said magnanimously. ‘You have older bones and the chairs are softer here.’

  ‘I’d best see the Duke.’ Rayker gave a humourless smile. ‘He won’t be pleased to be disturbed this late. In the morning, I�
�ll organise a search for Master Antrobus.’

  ‘Jenny,’ said John suddenly, ‘was anything taken from my father’s study?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jenny. ‘I haven’t had time to check.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll just have a quick look before I go,’ said John. ‘If something is gone it would be a clue to what they’re after.’

  Rayker took his leave. Harcourt and Pitch went to their posts and Emily trotted up the stairs to look in on Tom. John and Jenny went into the study. She wasn’t prepared for what she saw. The study had been completely ransacked. Every book had been thrown from the shelves, and the desk had been smashed, in case it hid secret compartments. Portraits had been ripped from the walls, and pieces of parchment and precious vellum were strewn across the floor. The searchers had been either frustrated and angry, or just mean, for they had even emptied the inkwells on the floor and walls.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jenny glanced at the wall to the left of the hearth. Ugly splotches of ink spattered the wall but the door itself was closed.

  John was watching her closely. ‘I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the room. My father had this rebuilt as his study after I left. It used to be a storeroom. Strange; it looks smaller now.’ He smiled at Jenny. ‘Everything looks smaller when you come back.’

  They gathered all the papers and put the books back on the shelves. Then they left, closing the door behind them. Jenny noticed that John had taken the papers. He saw her glance at them.

  ‘I’ll sort them out. My father would be distressed to have his work treated so,’ he said. ‘We’re lucky they weren’t smart enough to take his papers when they didn’t find what they wanted.’

  Once again Jenny bit back the words she was about to speak. She stood in silence as John bid her goodnight and left.

  *

  The next few days brought no news of Antrobus. He had disappeared.

  Rayker spent two days recruiting new men and then he went into Queerwood in search of Jack’s lair. He had been gone for three days, and still there was no word from him. Ewan Swift had agreed to meet him and his men and guide them through the wild forest.

  On the morning before he left for Queerwood, Rayker received a message from John. The young alchemist was sure that Perroquet knew nothing of Antrobus’s disappearance, but he was equally sure that Cleve was responsible. Again, he urged Rayker to convince the Duke to take action against their neighbouring city state. Yet, Rayker knew, without proof the Duke would do nothing.

  Emily kept her horse-riding appointment the next morning, though she was so distracted that Beth thought Emily didn’t like her. Being a rather spoiled girl, the young royal couldn’t stand not being liked. Before the ride was over, she had decided that Emily would be her companion – and Emily would like her.

  Apart from giving Beth something to strive for, Emily spent most of the time sitting by Tom’s bed. The young man still hovered near death. He had regained consciousness for very brief periods once or twice, which Styche said was a good sign. And when she wasn’t with Tom, Emily was with Jenny.

  As for Jenny, she read, plucking from the workroom shelves and from the study, every book and manuscript she understood. She was determined that the work she and Antrobus were given to do would be done, even if he wasn’t in Vale to do it. Hour after hour she spent in the workroom, looking at each liquid, mineral and metal in the books; she tried each piece of equipment and even some of the processes.

  There was so much to learn and Jenny found it exhilarating. Each morning she woke and her first thoughts were of things she had learned the previous day. She ate breakfast quickly, impatient to be at her books. She barely noticed anyone. Even when Rumpkin remarked loudly to the others that ‘a cert’n boarder seems to think she were too good to ev’n to talk to the likes of us,’ Jenny was too busy thinking about distillation, reduction and dissolution to defend herself. She absently muttered, ‘How terrible’ and continued thinking about why sugar dissolves and salt doesn’t.

  She soon found that she had to start organising what she learned. It was one thing to have it in her head but quite another to work out how to use it all. She scoured the shelves in the workroom and found a ream of parchment bound by a cloth string. She found quills and ink and set about writing down everything she read. Sheet after sheet of parchment was quickly filled with (rather untidy) writing. Once she had several sheets full of notes, she realised something: what all the alchemists before her were searching for was the connection between everything in the world. They were looking for the essence of life, and its order. They sought the relationship between things, between the planets and stars in the sky and the metals and plants of the earth. All things, said the books, were composed of only four materials: earth, air, fire and water. And at the root of all metals were just two: brimstone and quicksilver.

  She came across an earthenware pot sealed with a cork and an oiled piece of leather. Quicksilver read the label. Jenny lifted the pot from the shelf and was surprised by its weight. She poured a very small amount on to the work table. The strange liquid metal skated on the tabletop like a skittish silver fox. She laughed as she chased it across the surface, trying to return it to the pot.

  She marvelled at the soft, bright yellow crystals of sulphur. Each rock looked like a magical mountain, ringed by enchanted castles with luminescent towers.

  Antrobus was constantly on her mind. She worried and wondered but she knew she could do little to help. Finding people was what Rayker did, and apparently he was very good at it. She came to the workroom each day and forced herself to stop fretting. One morning when she entered the room, she froze, then called Harcourt. Her guardian angel rushed in. Jenny was sure someone had been in the room. There were things out of place, not where she was sure they had been the night before. There was a stale, unwashed human odour, mixed with damp and rotting vegetation. But though she and Harcourt searched, nothing appeared to be missing and she soon forgot about it.

  After four days, she began to test some of the things she was learning. She mixed crystals she found in boxes with liquids she discovered in jars on the shelves. She lit a small oil burner on the bench and over the hot tongue of flame she reduced plants to ashes, minerals to powder and salts to vapour. She mixed liquids with other liquids, with salts and with minerals. Mists of purple, yellow and pink floated around the workroom; smoke the colour of the sky found its way to the windows and curled out into Vale; and foul, malodorous vapours caused her to gag and rush to the open wall. Everything that happened, she wrote on a piece of parchment – even when she heated some yellow crystals with a pinch of brownish-black powder and singed her hair and almost burnt off her eyebrows.

  Emily would come in while she was working and find her with her hands stained, her clothes spotted with holes from liquids she’d splashed on them, paper scattered over every table and patches of dried ink everywhere.

  ‘You’re a mess,’ said Emily. ‘You look like a troll.’ Jenny glanced at her tunic and at her arms and hands, and thought perhaps she did. ‘You know,’ continued Emily, ‘you’d be quite beautiful if you paid more attention to your clothes and did something with your hair. Instead, you spend all your time reading and making things bubble and boil. You seem to deliberately make yourself as unattractive as possible. How do you expect a man to take any interest in you when you look like a witch?’

  ‘Pass that bottle. No, not that one, the one that says Aqua Regis,’ was all Jenny said. She noticed that Emily took extra care of her appearance every time she went to visit Tom, just in case he regained consciousness long enough to notice. It seemed she had forgotten all about John Antrobus. When Jenny had asked, as offhand as she could, whether Emily had finished the ‘invitation’ and sent it to him, Emily had made a face and said she had grown up since then and she had never really been interested in him, anyway. Jenny wondered how much growing up one could do in a few days. Then she went back to her books and notes and experiments, and never thought about how she was g
rowing up.

  She came across an illustration of an athanor, a furnace very much like the large one in the corner of the workroom. Jenny fired the large furnace and before long she could distil liquids and reduce substances. It seemed to her that through these processes she was transforming the substances from one thing to another. Fascinated and astounded, she worked from early morning until late at night. And always, one of Rayker’s men was at the door or escorting her safely to Rumpkin’s long after the sun had set.

  Her quill scratched furiously on the parchment. There was so much to learn.

  *

  Antrobus was tired. Tired of the dark; tired of the cold; and heartily tired of trying to find the wooden bucket that served as a chamber pot. He wanted to bathe, to smell fresh air, to be warm, to sleep in a bed instead of the creaky wooden pallet with a mattress stuffed with so little straw it wouldn’t feed a mouse. More than anything else, he wanted to go home.

  How long had it been since they’d last come in? He couldn’t tell. A day? Two days? He guessed somewhere in between. He tried to sense any change in temperature that would indicate whether it was day or night. A while ago he thought it was warmer but he couldn’t be sure. He had been imprisoned out of the reach of the sun.

  He closed his eyes. There didn’t seem to be much point keeping them open when it was dark. Perhaps he’d fall asleep and then he wouldn’t feel the cold and the damp. He opened his eyes again. Why do memories come more easily when one’s eyes are closed, even in the dark? And he didn’t want the memory of Laylor; he didn’t want to see again how the man had died, so brutally, so bloodily, trying to protect him. But he had no choice. Memories don’t ask permission to be there, but come univited.

  He’d had an early supper that evening and was in the sitting room when he’d heard Tom call. Walking into the room, he saw Tom standing rigid, his face red with anger and defiance. Behind was a man holding a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other. The point of the sword was pricking Tom’s neck and the pistol was pointing straight at Antrobus’s chest. The man smiled and raised his finger to his lips. He was tall and well built. His face was clean-shaven and he might even have been good-looking once. The scars on his cheek and brow didn’t help, but most of all it was his eyes that made him unattractive. They were hard, pitiless eyes.