by Louis Bayard
—The challenge, Margaret, at least as I see it, is to destroy all the impurities in the base element while, in the same breath, reconstituting the balance of elements that adheres in Nature. The resulting metal would perforce share in the, the quintessence which may be found in the planets and stars and heavens.
He would carry on, but he has come to dislike this teacher’s voice of his. And would it not indeed tempt fate to speak of the alchemist’s true object? That philosopher’s stone whose very perfection would have the power to transmute creation itself?
Men as great as Aquinas and Roger Bacon have broken themselves against that rock, and it is with no small qualm that he enlists Margaret in their ranks. He can have no great expectations of her success—or anyone’s—but he cannot bear to bar this door against her any more than he could have closed it on himself. And so, on that first day, he can do no more than smile and take two steps back.
—Call out if you have need of anything.
And here is his final touch: the damask curtain, which he’s attached to the ceiling by iron rods, dividing the laboratory in half. With a courtly nod, he closes the curtain after him. She is alone.
A full minute passes before she is able to move. And even then she trusts herself to perform only the simplest acts.
Pick up lead bar.
Drop bar in glass flask.
Place flask in rack above brazier.
Light coals.
Wait.
The transformation is slow at first, nearly invisible. First a skin of sweat appears on the bar. Then a bubble of silver wells up. The lead shimmers, bubbles—then, with shocking abruptness, throws off a coruscation of red flame, which dies in the next instant, leaving behind a coat of brittle ash. Having expressed itself in this fashion, the lead withdraws into itself, and no amount of heat will coax it back.
With her cotton gloves, Margaret lifts the flask off the coals and peers inside. Black. The color of failure, she knows that much. A sign that the dross, after its brief flirtation with “other,” has gone back to being dross.
And yet it is not the black that stays in her mind. It is that flash of red. This is what draws her back the next evening: the possibility of seeing it once more and persuading it to stay just a fraction longer, and then a fraction longer still, until it is bound in a transformative spiral, spinning through every last color of the rainbow.
She experiments with temperature: low and infrequent doses versus higher initial heat with longer periods of cooling. She adjusts the positions of flask and flame. She uses a vise to exert varying degrees of pressure on the lead. She tries different kinds of coal: anthracite, bituminous. The red refuses to come back.
Harriot had assumed at the start that she would devote only an hour a night to alchemical studies and spend the rest of her time assisting him with his optics. But it becomes harder and harder for her to break away. One night, he calls her name three times without her hearing. He must thrust his face finally around the curtain and declare, with mock gravity:
—My dear Miss Crookenshanks, I have the distinct honor of informing you I shall be taking the refractive measure of brown mortar.…
Normally, she would smile. Tonight, she is like a sleeper roused before her time.
—Of course.
He can hear the hesitation. His brows draw together. He says:
—Why should you not carry on as you are?
—Are you quite sure?
—I would not stay the tide of progress.
Each day, without intending it, without even noticing, she steals more and more time for herself. He never complains. Indeed, he becomes almost unbearably solicitous on her behalf, tiptoeing from corner to corner.
—So sorry, my dear. I dropped the shoeing horn.…
And when he is not apologizing, he is making excuses to absent himself.
—A little stroll should clear the head.…
He is gone for upward of an hour at a time. And though he returns always in high spirits, she can see how carefully that cheer has been constructed. She imagines him stacking it, brick by brick, in the hallway outside.
—Good fortune, Margaret? No? Well, stay at it.
But no amount of effort will reverse her fortunes. Every day is a roster of burnt fingers, scalded wrists, seared eyebrows. Flasks explode. Boiling pitch scorches the walls, eats through the floorboards. Mysterious gases sting her nostrils, scald her throat.
And what does she have to show for it? Cloddish residues that are neither earthly nor transcendent. Lumps of nothing.
* * *
One evening Harriot comes back to find her at the furthest extremity of despair, staring at a cracked vessel and a deposit of black lava crusting over on the worktable.
He says nothing, only makes a show of reaching into the flask’s remains.
—Take care! she calls. —You shall be burned.
—Ah, but what is this?
With a sly smile, he draws forth a fully formed gold ring.
—You have wrought wonders, Margaret!
She cannot help herself, she laughs. But when he extends the ring toward her, she understands it is more than a joke.
—Have no fear, he assures her. —It is not a betrothal ring. You may wear it wherever you like. Or keep it under your pillow, I shall take no offense.
She chooses, in the end, to place it on the fifth finger of her left hand, reasoning that it will be less in the way there. They say no more on the subject, but the next morning, by the light of her window, she finds a message on the ring’s inner surface.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Nothing comes from nothing.
Being still unversed in the atomists, she cannot know these are Parmenides’ words. Or that Parmenides was squaring himself against the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. According to the Greeks, the world could never have been fashioned from a void for the world has always in some form existed and will always exist. Man is mortal, matter eternal.
Margaret knows nothing of this. All she can feel at first is the negation of these words. Nothing comes from nothing.
It is, finally, her own faith in Harriot—in his faith in her—that drives her toward an opposite construction. Nothing can be accomplished if nothing is expended. Which means that everything smolders with possibility.
Some day, she thinks, I will give him a ring of his own. From my very own gold.
She slides the ring back onto her finger and sets to work.
* * *
After lead comes zinc. Then tin. No elements have ever been subjected to greater trials. Blaze after blaze, they go up like Christian martyrs. And there stands Margaret, minutely observing their agonies, charting every torment of color and form. And the greatest torment of all: to come away with nothing but charred and oozing lumps.
She is not too proud to confide her bafflement to Harriot.
—Is the pneuma not composed utterly of atoms? Like all living matter? How can those atoms not be reconfigured under duress? Water, after all, becomes ice. Fire becomes ash. How can lead resist its own transformation?
Harriot shakes his head.
—There is no earthly reason.
Only later, thinking over his words, does she hear the passing stress he has placed on earthly. She has rushed into this labor without a backward look, but in quiet moments she can understand why a man as pious as King James should have a special horror of alchemy, blurring as it does the distinction between creator and created, making man the author of his universe.
* * *
And then, one afternoon, in the midst of heating copper, something extraordinary happens. After contracting into the usual sullen black lump, it springs forth with color.
And such color! Silver … violet … blue … green …
She can feel her own breath curling back on her. The peacock’s tail.
The very effect she has been striving toward all these weeks. Prima facie evidence, or so it is believed, that an element is being transfo
rmed and perfected.
And it is happening here. Now. Before her half-disbelieving eyes, the green is giving way to an electric yellow, a resplendent orange. And as she watches, the orange at last explodes into red.
No mere flash this time but a stately procession through red’s full spectrum, from rose to ruby to crimson and, finally, to a scarlet of extraordinary vibrancy, a scarlet that any Roman priest would have been proud to robe himself in.
She does not realize how loudly her gasp has resounded, but in the next instant, Harriot is tearing open the curtain and gazing at the last dying echo of red. The color of perfection, and she has called it into being.
And how apart from him she feels in that moment. No matter what he says, no matter how he strives to tune himself to her, that red belongs to her. It always will.
* * *
They have grown awkward in each other’s presence. No longer anticipating each other’s movements, they bump and jar, or else they stop just shy of collision and stare at each other in confoundment.
The only time they are at ease is in bed, and even here she is not entirely his. Not as she was before, when his skin and his body commanded her full attention. Now her responses are the product of reflex, and though she endeavors to hide her feelings, he feels them. One night, with more than a trace of bitterness, he asks:
—What can be infecting your mind, I wonder? Visions of aurum?
Not gold at all, she wants to tell him. A dinner table.
And at this table sit Aristotle and Aquinas and Kepler and Copernicus and Bruno and Tycho Brahe—and Thomas Harriot—all gathered for supper. And there lies the place that has been cleared for her, and how can she bring herself to sit there? What has she, Margaret Crookenshanks of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, done to merit it?
It is the bitterest of all ironies that, in seeking to be worthy of him, she should drive him further and further away.
He no longer apologizes for making noise.
He no longer stays awake for her.
He is always up and about by the time she wakes.
She no longer notices when he pokes his head around the curtain.
* * *
The more she fails, the more she presses on, and the more the rest of the world falls away. When she is not working in the laboratory, she is immersing herself in hermetic texts, for it is an article of faith that today’s alchemists are merely rediscovering the lost art of the ancients, which lies hidden behind nearly infinite veils of allusion, symbol, allegory.
And so she leafs through the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The old myths of King Midas, of Jason and the Argonauts, of Hercules and his seven labors. But no matter how hard she plies herself, the words simply stare back at her.
In early July, she switches her attentions to quicksilver. The effects on her are slow to build, but they are dire. Two of her back teeth fall out. Her hands fall into fits of palsy. Each morning she finds a deposit of hair on her pillow.
It is the fumes that affect her most. One afternoon, she is observing the final stage of devolution when a cloud of gas spews from the flask and envelops her whole. Every last nerve in her is stopped like a clock.
—Margaret!
Harriot kneels over her. She has just enough presence of mind to forestall him.
—I am quite well.
She rises to her feet. Gives her apron a brush and, after one last sway, heads straight back to the table.
He watches her for some minutes. Then disappears on the other side of the curtain.
* * *
The next afternoon, she is coming down the stairs when she finds Harriot in his traveling clothes. It is a sign of how far things have gone that the sight of him venturing out by himself neither surprises nor alarms her. It is for politeness’ sake that she asks:
—Where are you bound?
—To see a friend.
43
THERE IS THIS much comfort: Walter Ralegh has seen worse lodgings.
His current cell, after all, is larger than a ship’s cabin. More comfortable, to be sure, than the Guianan forests, where he spent so many insect-haunted nights. Safer than Cádiz. Closer to the heart of things than Munster or the Isle of Jersey. The ventilation is good, the chest and table functional, and if the straw pallet isn’t quite to scale, what bed has ever been large enough for Sir Walter?
Yes, thinks Harriot, if one didn’t care about imminent death, one could do far worse than the Bloody Tower.
Sir Walter pokes at his teeth with a sweetwood pick.
—I hope the meal agrees with you, Tom.
Fried rabbit. Shoulder of mutton. Hen boiled with leeks and mushrooms. Two glasses of Italian white vernage.
—It does.
—You brought your pipe, I trust.
They seat themselves by the fire—even in the height of summer, the Tower is bone-cold—and Ralegh’s servant lights their tobacco for them, and they puff in silence and with no small contentment. For a minute or two, they might actually be back in Sherborne Castle.
Except for one troubling detail: Ralegh’s beard.
Always so neatly combed before. Always tapering to the same exquisite point, with no aid from the curling irons that other gentlemen favor. Hanging now loose and shapeless, like a beaten rug swinging from a kitchen window.
—They have forbade me razors, you see.
Leave it to Ralegh to divine the tenor of his thoughts.
—I had wondered, yes.
—I assured them that, should I ever again attempt to destroy myself, I would find more effectual means than a razor. As you know, I have a tolerable familiarity with poisons.
And yet it was not some exotic toxin that Ralegh chose three weeks earlier but a humble carving knife, driven straight toward the heart—arrested only by the intervention of Ralegh’s rib. His secretary, Edward Hancock, was far more successful in taking his own life, and this is perhaps the largest humiliation that has yet been heaped upon the great man’s head. Or is it rather a perverse testament to his life force that he cannot, no matter how he tries, erase himself.
The wound now is hidden away behind layers of black velvet, and the great man’s gaze is veiled with torpor as he turns toward the window.
—Bess and Wat? They are well?
—They are Raleghs.
—Raleghs without a roof before long.
—You have many friends who will take them in.
—I have more enemies, I fear.
He knocks the ash from his pipe against the hearthstone.
—They blame me for Essex’s death, of course. They say I intrigued for it.
—That is not so.
—You say that because you know me, Tom. The common man knows me only by repute.
He sets his pipe down. Labors to his feet.
—I should be grateful for a spot of exercise.
It is another gesture to Ralegh’s status that he is allowed his own walking place on the walls. In fine weather, he can see all the way to Greenwich. Today, a steady rain falls on London, merging with the river and mist to enrobe the Tower in a mock curtain, disappearing the moment it is touched.
—I’m afraid I have made quite a mess of things, Tom.
—Not through any sin of yours.
—Then I need not defend myself?
—Oh, my friend! How could I suppose you capable of such infamy? In league with Spain? Conspiring against the king’s life? It is an insult to all reason.
—And yet they are bound on proving it. Lacking any proof, they will only make their own. Already, Cobham has accused me. Under torture, the other conspirators will follow.
—You have walked out of Lion Gate a free man before. You will do so again.
The great man smiles softly.
—Never mind, Tom. —I wish only to be assured that Bess and Wat will not starve.
—Of that you have my word.
Ralegh looks down toward the river. Even now, ships with square sails come driving through the ra
in. From Holland, from Sweden. From Genoa, Venice, France. Places he will never see again.
—You came here by water, Tom?
—It was the only way. The city has shut down.
Ralegh nods. —They say the plague is even making its way up the Tower. Three yeomen warders have been carried off in as many days. Perhaps I will be saved the dance of empty air after all. And the butcher’s block.
—I beseech you, my friend. Do not speak in this way. Recall—please—your family, your friends, holding you fast in their prayers.…
—And to whom are they all praying, Tom?
Sir Walter’s eyes are no longer sleepy but cold and bright. Speaking very deliberately, Harriot answers.
—To that God Who created the universe. Who even now steers our ship’s course by virtue of His loving and eternal wisdom.
—Naturally.
Sir Walter’s voice is dry as kindling.
—All the same, Tom, you have recalled me to something I have been meaning to ask you.
—Yes?
—What has happened to our dark treasure?
* * *
It is the same question the Earl of Northumberland posed all those weeks ago. And here is the natural result. As the waterman ferries him upriver to Syon House, Harriot’s mind washes back to that summer night at Sherborne.
Only the five of them in attendance: Harriot, Ralegh, Northumberland, Marlowe … and a stranger to their midst. Marlowe’s latest acolyte, granted (at Kit’s request) a rare berth in the Academe’s sanctum.
Being green and easily cowed, the young man sat off to the side for most of the night, refraining from comment. It was Harriot who, out of character, took the lead. For he wished to speak of Virginia.
—Sir Walter here may tell you what my charge was. To take stock of such natural and human riches as might be useful for commercial exploitation. Do I misspeak, Sir Walter?
—No.
—Toward that end, I traveled at great length, and with great delight, amongst the Algonkins. From village to village I passed, taking great care to develop a special familiarity with the priests. Who were in the whole most welcoming to me and most fascinated by all I had to show them. Guns and mathematical instruments. Compasses and spyglasses, astrolabes. The simplest things would occasion the greatest awe. The spring clock! Mark how it goes of itself, with no hand to set it in motion. Hail the spring clock!