“If I’m to diagnose something,” the Alchemist said rather loudly, glancing back at the smallduke, “I’ll need to ask some questions for which the lady might wish her privacy.”
Regenzi nodded and backed away, sketching a little bow to Bess. He retreated near the shop’s front door and examined a collection of microscopes and crucibles with exaggerated interest.
The Alchemist held Bess’s wrist, two fingers over the pulse. He drew out his chronometer, glanced at it long enough to suggest he might be working figures, and returned it to a fold behind his apron. Bess made a study of breathing—slowly in, slowly out, striving to master the art of her lungs filling and emptying. She could not pull her gaze from the old man.
When he spoke at last, it was in an undertone Regenzi would not have heard had he been packed into her corset.
“Beatrice. Well. I never knew your name.”
Stupidly, Bess realized she didn’t know his, either—apparently no one did, or no one ever troubled to use it. She tried to interpret his tone. He might have said “Raining today” or “Time to close shop” in the same voice. Factual. Disinterested.
“I expected you a week ago,” he continued. “Ivor sent some boy a day late. He dropped the package taking the stairs up from the lowstreet and broke half my goods.” He pinched the pad of her thumb and watched the nail turn colors. “I’m sure your master has been wondering what became of you.”
“Please,” Bess whispered. Without thinking, she closed her hands around his, squeezing as hard as she could through her shaking. “Please. You can’t.”
Two weeks before, Bess would never have dreamed of grabbing the Alchemist’s hands. There was some kind of wall around him, deflecting the foolishness of other men, their little courtesies and intimacies. Now, she clung to those hands and felt her arms quaking. He studied her a long, inscrutable time.
“Well?” Smallduke Regenzi’s impatient voice cut the air. “What’s the story, eh?”
The Alchemist’s hands returned Bess’s grasp for an instant so brief she thought she’d imagined it. And then he pulled away as easily as if she’d no grip on them at all.
“A minor hysteria,” the old man answered. He turned and stepped behind the counter again. “There are half a dozen tonics to treat it. I’ll have one prepared in a moment.”
Bess stared at the Alchemist as he resumed working, hands moving automatically among his instruments, measuring and combining. If it were not for the slow steadying of her heartbeat to prove otherwise, she might have sworn their conversation had never taken place. It was as if he had forgotten her entirely.
Soon, the Alchemist had a tiny aluminum flask sealed with a gasket-lined screw top and a dainty glass philter bottle wrapped up together in a paper parcel. He laid the order beside the stack of untouched sovereign bills and began tidying up his workspace.
Smallduke Regenzi took the package and donned his four-cornered hat once more. “A pleasure doing business. Good day to you.”
The Alchemist was busy stuffing a beech pipe. He nodded, as much to it as to his customer.
Bess stood and slipped her arm into Regenzi’s.
They were passing through the door when the old man called.
“Madam, a word.”
They turned.
The Alchemist set his pipe beside the till.
“There are some instructions for your medicine.” He began scratching on a pad of paper.
Regenzi nudged Bess with a reassuring smile and stayed outside on the stoop, searching about the pockets of his tailcoat for his cigarette case. The bell rang as the door closed between them.
Bess stepped up to the high counter. The Alchemist pushed the pad and pen aside. The pipe smoldering by his elbow smelled sweetly of marjoram and fennel.
“The philter is nothing more than distilled water and some ginger tonic,” he said. “And you’re not an hysteric, in any case.”
Bess tried to look at him squarely. “I know.”
He snorted and looked to the front window. Regenzi stood under the awning, wreathed by fog and cigarette smoke.
“Stay with that one and we’ll see how long your nerves last.” The old man folded the note and offered it between two fingers. “I have a customer in Oldtemple Down who keeps a ladies’ garment shop. She complains sometimes how hard it is to find a good clerk.”
Bess frowned and took the note. Through the ecru-colored fiber, she could see the digits of an address written in a precise hand.
“Thank you.” Somehow, the words sounded more like a question than a statement. She slipped the note into her bodice.
The Alchemist had taken up his pipe again, speaking around its stem. “Your lover has need of rather dangerous things. Be mindful what that might mean for you.”
And then he turned, shrugging past the heavy curtain separating the counter room and the storerooms beyond, as if she were already gone.
“Thank you,” Bess repeated, louder.
There was no response. As she turned, Bess heard a trilling sound, something like a whine, near her ankles.
The dog. It thrust its head out from a perch on the cash counter step, tail beating a trench in the floor. Bess bent low and smoothed one ragged ear, and for a moment, the creature was the soul of joy.
Outside, the air smelled cool and damp, promising rain. Regenzi dropped his cigarette on the stoop. Bess blinked at him. He seemed suddenly strange—a man half again her age, whiskered and groomed and full of self-assurance. He looked at her solicitously, and something in the look—so sincere and yet so false—struck her like a blow. She felt herself inch away. Regenzi raised an eyebrow and frowned.
Bess straightened. She gave him her most perfect, painted smile.
A few minutes later, he was helping her climb the stairs back into his carriage.
“Not so bad, was it, my dear?” the smallduke asked. “I told you: he may be shyster enough to frighten the locals, but put a man of means and spine in his way and it’s plain he’s just a common shopkeep.”
Bess nodded absently. She tried to recall just what Abraham had said about the Alchemist earlier. It didn’t seem to have quite been that. But things were disordered in the attic of her thoughts; she did not think much on his boasts or anything else he said the rest of the ride. She did look down at the paper parcel on the seat beside them, though.
As they entered the foyer of Smallduke Regenzi’s manor house, Bess excused herself for a headache’s sake, claimed her philter, and retreated to her rooms.
She kept the blinds drawn. She unsealed the bottle, smelled it, and considered. It did smell of ginger. She couldn’t tell anything more than that, but still—there was prudence, and then there was caution. She set the bottle aside and reached into her bodice, withdrawing the note.
Gooddame Audrea Carringer, 108th on Lower Hillside, Street 19.
It seemed a credible sort of name. Perhaps Audrea Carringer was even a real person.
But still.
Bess returned to her sitting chamber and searched its smoking box for a packet of lucifers. In the lavatory, she dropped the note into the copper basin and pressed a lucifer onto its face, watching the paper curl and cinder. Once there was just a ghost of ash left, she poured the tonic over it and pumped the tap handle to flush the basin clean.
Slowly, she undressed, shrugging and unlacing and unbracing down to her underthings. Bess curled up to sleep, knowing she would turn the kitchen maid away when she came with an afternoon cordial. Her stomach would be unsettled a long while yet. She tried to fill herself with thoughts of the ball—the gentry and peerage and even the Decadal keynotes smiling and taking her daintily proffered hand. But there was no room left inside for their silks and frippery, only a brown parcel dug deep in her guts and words of warning still sounding in her ears.
3.
It might have been the heat of the lecture hall or the swirling light of alchemical globes, shaded to accommodate the lamp film projector. Or it might have been the susurrus of conversat
ion slithering among the auditorium seats. It very likely was the presenter’s Trimeeni accent, a syrupy drawl spooning out a lengthy paper on conceptualizations of the Golden Mean as demonstrated through the flora of the upper Hebrides. Whatever the cause, though he had scarcely been out of bed three hours, the young Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers was left fending off drowsiness barehanded. He shifted about, leaned forward, rested his chin in his palm. He affected a thoughtful, sober expression that involved drawing his lips into a tight purse and his brow down to his knees, looking—for all that effort—like a nearsighted monkey in the robe of a decorated scholar.
His imagination for socially apt contortions exhausted, Chalmers stifled a yawn and checked his chronometer.
Quarter of eleven. The lecture would not end for another half hour.
The published abstract on the session scarcely resembled the business this Trimeeni deacon was carrying on about now. A sham. A trumped-up bit of buggery. Gloomily, Chalmers wondered if he were within his rights to show his contempt by sleeping the rest of the way through.
Certainly, Chalmers thought, you’re entitled not to have your time wasted. You’re the bloody keynote.
The keynote. The drowsiness left him in a rush at the thought. Chalmers checked the date window on his timepiece, though of course he knew well what it would say. Three days from now. Well, properly, two days, one hour, and fifty-one minutes. The keynote. Chalmers tried a slow, composing breath.
It did little to help.
For him, the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers—late of the seminary of Rimmerston some three thousand miles east, a gangly tradesman’s son from a plantation town—to have found himself a project of such moment, and a partner of such repute as the Reverend Doctor Nora Pierce, was still an unaccountable miracle. They were better than two decades younger than any keynote speakers the Council Bishopric had selected in ages. Chalmers lived in constant fear of some archdeacon coming up from the back of the hall to tap him on the shoulder and show him, so very sorry, that there had been a mistake in arranging the Ecclesiastical Commission’s Decadal Conference program, and he was, indeed, not in any way suited to being the keynote.
Probably, the Decadal Committee had chosen his project with Pierce strictly for its provocative title. They had debated a long time over it. Chalmers had wanted something rather straightforward. Say, “On the Movement and Accumulation of God Particles in Statistically Significant Zones: A Case Study.” The colon and subtitle had been his little creative flair. He’d been quite proud of them.
But Nora Pierce had a vision and daring quite apart from Phillip Chalmers’s. She revised the final copy of the proposal and sent it away. As first author, it had been her right. When the acceptance of the proposal was quickly followed by an invitation to keynote the once-a-decade grand conference, he’d been so pleased he’d scarcely even read the handpress-printed copy of the letter past its first laudatory sentences. He’d seen the new presentation title for the first time only a fortnight before, published as a banner on the conference packet sent by post.
It was the title that sent his fame rolling downhill, skirting the sheer edge of notoriety:
“God Is With Us: A Seven-Year Communion with the Conscious Divinity, Featuring Mathematical and Material Proofs.”
Since then, Chalmers had spent his nights pacing the floors of his rectory apartments and his days reviewing his copies of the notes Pierce had been sending by courier from Lemarcke over the summer. There was a sort of truth in that title. But it seemed a mud trap, too, sucking inexorably at his heels. A title like that promised things—not explicitly but implicitly, which was far, far worse to Chalmers’s way of thinking. His colleagues of the EC were no ruffians at a cabaret, but any audience that felt itself shorted on a spectacular premise was likely to turn sour. Chalmers spent days living on a bottle of paregoric and his jangling nerves, searching all his drawers for the evidence to exonerate himself if Nora’s presumption earned them both the boot off the EC’s rolls.
And yet, the first morning of the conference had nearly passed, and Phillip Chalmers had collected only a gracious tip of a hat while walking the Cathedral campus between lecture sessions, and polite queries after his health and rising fortunes. The fearful tap on his shoulder had not yet come.
Well. At the dinner hour, he would meet Pierce in the Commons and they would retire to his rectory apartments. They could take a meal and discuss the presentation. Perhaps, very gently, he could suggest some kind of opening remarks regarding the title—something to soften its edge. The Council Bishopric would attend the keynote, of course, and who could know whether they would share the Decadal Committee’s enthusiasm for such an audacious project? Science and theology had merged generations before those grand old men and dames were born, but for some the word “God” was still a talisman, not a synonym for the ordered processes of creation. Chalmers liked to imagine that science had the better end of things now, with conservative theology pared down to trappings and titles. But that was not an opinion on which one should wager a career. There were still women and men who crossed themselves or blessed themselves or said little prayers when they should be working figures or studying theory. It was like a race memory, the young reverend thought, something in the marrow of bone and stitching of sinew.
Perhaps it was not all bad. Science and the superstitious character of Old Religion had made their peace, in most respects. The cathedrals had been kept, for they were marvels of the forces that gave shape to God’s creation, tabernacles of physics and mathematics. Indeed, more of the massive structures had been built, though the modern versions lacked the Gothic opulence of their forbears. Their stained glass windows portrayed the fractal design of the snowflake, the nervous system of the human body, the orbital paths of comets spied at the furthest reaches of a telescope’s lens. No more virgins and shepherds giving watch in the night. To be taken seriously as a person of education, one had to see in the cosmos the hand of God—a hand that shaped and cast the first die and now studied with perfect dispassion the restless action of creation.
Chalmers had thought that, for a time. Believed it with a fervor once reserved for the Old Religion itself. Now, he was less certain.
Two days more would decide whether he was right to look with doubt on what he thought he knew.
The Reverend Phillip Chalmers felt a pressure on his shoulder.
He snapped forward in his seat with a yelp, sending his note papers shooting out from under a propped elbow. Two sheets filled with idle curlicues fell into the seats before him. A woman with a black bonnet and a pinched face glared back. She wore the brooch of an archdeaconess on the shoulder of her bodice.
“Sorry,” Chalmers said in an imploring undertone.
He looked from where the touch had come.
A page boy in the stark, clean black-and-gold collar of the EC stood by. He offered the reverend a folded note and a curt bow before departing the lecture hall.
Chalmers’s face burned as he felt the weight of many eyes. He looked to the note—long for a galvano-gram, folded twice over.
He read . . . and wished he had not.
To the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers
Lemarcke, 1st Elevenmonth, 0800
The galleon from Lemarcke has turned back to port after a malfunction in one of its sweeps. It is under repair but cannot be expected to sail again sooner than Third-day. There is steerage passage on a freighter that departs on the morrow, though the captain has made buying the berths very dear. I am told it will attain the Port of Corma by Fifth-day, which means I shall miss our keynote. Please use the notes I have sent along to plan the last of it. We shall have much to discuss when I arrive.
Regrets,
Nora Pierce, ThD, PhD, Order of the Physical Sciences, Ecclesiastical Commission
With the stiff composure of a mannequin, Phillip Chalmers rose and began gathering his papers, muttering, “Excuse me, I beg your pardon, so sorry . . .” as he walked up the aisle to the back of the au
ditorium, addressing no one in particular.
He stepped out into the hall.
He stood at the brass doors in the vestibule.
He put on his tricorn hat.
His nerves did not begin to inform him that he should be afraid until he stepped from the building onto the evergreen paths lacing the Cathedral campus. The terror crept up very slowly, quite unlike the flushed and defibrillated worry he had felt back in his seat. He walked with his hands thrust into his tailcoat pockets and shoulders shrugged up to his ears, all his grave composure carefully ordered.
It was not to last.
Nora is not coming.
Chalmers tried reframing the statement as a thought experiment, something merely theoretical. What if Nora didn’t come?
But no. That wasn’t it.
Nora was not coming.
It was cold out—far colder than an early Elevenmonth morning ought to be. His hands were already tingling, even in the depths of his pockets. Chalmers’s right fist clenched the galvano-gram. It most assuredly was real, and it was First-day of the month, and the ship from Lemarcke would not come until Fifth-day.
And then, at last, the little winding spring in his head tightened a turn too far, and Phillip Chalmers found himself running down the hill of the Cathedral campus, dodging between strolling ladies departing a laity lecture, passing parsons and deacons and reverends, leaping a squat topiary globe, and tearing around the corner of the great iron gates toward Coventry Passage. He threw a hand up to save his hat from skirling away and did not stop running until he reached the rectory.
The landlady, Mrs. Gilleyen, was dusting the foyer art. She scarcely had time to greet the reverend before the scrabbling young man was up the marble curve of stairs, taking them two at a go, his smooth-soled shoes sliding out from underneath him as he barreled into his study and slammed the door.
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