“Professore Bentivoglio, this is Miss Theosebeia Hope,” said Vellacott. “She is my niece, and has come to stay with me for a time until her mother arrives from France. She has extensive training in alchemy, and I believe she might be of help to us.”
My father showed no discomfort at these lies, and I added this to my growing list of his unfavorable character traits.
“Miss Hope,” continued my father, “may I introduce Professore Ludovico Bentivoglio. He has come at my invitation from the University of Bologna, where he is head of their recently established department of alchemy.”
Ludovico did not bow, but continued to finger his talisman in an agitated manner. His sleeve dropped down as he did so, revealing scars on his forearms that could almost match mine. He stared at me with hostility.
“A pleasure,” I murmured. I sank into a curtsy without lowering my gaze. Ludovico did not respond. “Bologna is in the Papal States, is it not?”
“Yes.” The professor looked, if possible, even more peevish at this reminder.
“And yet yours is the only department of alchemy in any university in Europe,” I said. “How was His Holiness the pope convinced to allow it?”
Professore Bentivoglio tossed his head, and his mouth curled into something like a smile.
“The Holy Father has many troubles,” he said in his thick accent. “Your assurdo Revolution especially. Spies and traitors are everywhere, even in the Vatican. If alchemy can make help for him, then…” He held out his hands, flourishing his fingers as he did so.
“Complimenti, Professore,” I said. As much as I might want to return his hostility with some of my own, there was nothing to be gained that way. “Your department is a great thing for alchemy.”
The professor’s beady eyes softened, and I seized this moment of lessened ill will to cross the room and examine the contents of the brazier. Closer up, I could see that the smoke had a faint tinge of silver to it. This had happened to me several times in my first failed attempts to prepare the elixir. I knew exactly what was needed next, and that the window to add it was small. I could feel the men’s eyes on me, expectation in my father’s gaze and suspicion in Bentivoglio’s. I suppressed a smile. I was about to show them just what kind of alchemist I was.
I turned to Dominic. “Are you preparing the tincture of mercury to add next?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Yes.”
“It won’t work on its own,” I said. “There is still too much sulfur in the composition. You will need to purify it with stibnite.”
“The text says nothing of stibnite,” said Bentivoglio.
I glanced at the book that lay open on the table. It was Brother Basil’s Twelve Keys, the same we and Jābir had used as our starting place. Brother Basil was supposedly a sixteenth-century monk, though even that was shrouded in mystery. Even by the standards of alchemists, Basilius Valentinus was notorious for misdirection and secrecy. He was also famous for giving away immense amounts of silver to the poor. It made his works the most promising, and the most baffling to approach. It had also made me entirely determined to conquer them.
“Not in the receipt, but it is in the Decknamen,” I said. Decknamen were figurative illustrations, useful for alchemists who wanted to keep their secrets, and extremely irritating to those of us who wanted to discover them. Sometimes the Decknamen were mere ornaments, but more often they were a code. Brother Basil’s were the latter, and I had deciphered it.
“The Decknamen are a distraction,” growled Ludovico. “They are like what fortune-tellers say—they can mean whatever you wish.”
I shook my head. The Decknamen were frustrating, certainly. Some authors even put misdirection in them, to throw off unworthy adepts. But all of alchemy was frustrating. A true adept could not afford to dismiss any sources of knowledge because they were difficult to decode. But I left this aside.
“I have followed the instructions as written myself several times, and always reached this point—” I gestured to the brazier. “Before the composition broke.”
“Ours broke last time, as well,” said Dominic, earning a furious glare from Professore Bentivoglio.
“Are you saying you know what the Decknamen mean, Thea?” asked my father.
I went back to the table and opened Basil’s book to the first woodcut, showing a king, a bridge, and a wolf jumping over a fire. An old man stood nearby, holding a crutch and scythe. I pointed to the king.
“The king of metals, obviously gold,” I said, and Ludovico made an impatient noise.
“Ovviamente,” he muttered. Obviously.
“Before his marriage, the composition, the king must be purified by the wolf—see how the wolf is jumping toward him over the fire with his jaws open? The fire is the purification process and the wolf is the substance that will devour the king before his ‘marriage.’ This”—I pointed to the old man holding a crutch and scythe—“is Saturn. He represents lead. See how the wolf springs from him? So the wolf substance is related closely to lead. What substance related to lead devours impurities?”
“Stibnite,” said my father. He and Dominic shared a meaningful glance. “And you tried this, Thea? It worked?”
“It worked.”
My hand went to my pocket involuntarily. My mother’s notes began after this step, taking the White Elixir as a starting place and working from a different text. I scanned the shelves, but didn’t see anything of Jābir’s—nothing in an Arabic script at all. That wasn’t unusual. Jābir was a Persian scholar and alchemist, and the reason my mother had seen to it that I learned Arabic. She’d been convinced that he had achieved the Philosopher’s Stone itself, and that ignorance of his work was the reason no alchemists in Christendom had reproduced it.
I turned back and found Professore Bentivoglio’s eyes on my skirts, where I clutched at my mother’s notes. I released the papers and withdrew my hand from my pocket.
“You do not have much time before it breaks,” I said.
Dominic was at the cabinet already, sorting through glass vials. He brought one out, but before he could bring it to me Professore Bentivoglio crossed the room and snatched it from him. He uncorked the vial and leaned over the brazier, so that his face was wreathed in the thick white smoke. With one last narrow-eyed glance at me, he tipped the stibnite into the brazier.
The result was immediate. The smoke ceased entirely, while the stibnite ate through the compound like wildfire, leaving it momentarily black. Bentivoglio whirled on me with a silent fury that was nonetheless obvious and threatening enough that my father stepped in front of me. I held up my hand.
“Watch,” I said. “It isn’t finished.”
Dominic pushed past Bentivoglio and hovered over the brazier. He exclaimed, and the professor turned back to the hearth.
“It’s kindled again, yes?” I tried not to sound smug. “When it has burned through, it will turn gray.”
All three of the men now stood staring into the brazier. I stood back and took the opportunity to examine them. My father was the tallest of the three, and he looked out of place amid the dark and dust in his well-cut suit. Bentivoglio was broad and almost as tall, though not now, as he was hunched over the brazier with an avid gleam in his eyes. Dominic was the least physically imposing: slight, and not much taller than I. He stared at the composition without the keen, greedy look of the other two. He appeared interested, thoughtful, and serious; no more. He stepped back and turned to me before the others could tear themselves away.
“It’s gray,” he said. “Now what?”
“You keep the temperature constant for two days.” I had stayed up watching it for nearly thirty-six hours before the Comte had come to insist I go to bed. That was the last I had seen of it. After I slept—for almost two entire days—my mother had barred me from the laboratory. “Simple enough, but tiresome.”
“I will do it,” said Professore Bentivoglio. I wondered how long he had been awake already. The shadows under his eyes suggested it was too long.
Bentivoglio seized his talisman again and glared at Dominic. He muttered something in Italian that did not sound complimentary.
“I’ll take care of it, Professore,” said Dominic in a flat tone. Bentivoglio grunted and jerked his head toward me.
“Keep the zocolla away from it.”
And then he left.
The three of us couldn’t quite meet one another’s eyes after that. There could not have been much doubt in any of our minds as to what zocolla meant, but as none of us had revealed a great knowledge of Italian to the others, we could pretend.
“Signore Bentivoglio is really very tired,” said my father, with a tentative look at me. “I think he must have stayed up all night last night.”
“And the night before,” said Dominic.
I did not reply to this. I had gone without sleep for alchemy’s sake many times and never behaved so rudely to those around me. My mother’s patrons may have occasionally come in for a sharp word or two, but Bentivoglio had seemed nearly on the verge of violence.
“Well, well.” Vellacott cleared his throat, covering my disapproving silence. “You certainly did not disappoint, dear Thea. If anything, your mother’s letter may have sold you short!”
I looked up at him sharply. Sold me short? Then it was as I feared, and my mother had complained of my shortcomings to him. She must have mentioned her concerns about my lack of dedication, my occasional rebelliousness. Perhaps she had even told my father about Will …
“Alas, I can’t stay.” Vellacott pulled a watch from his pocket. “I have a tutorial in—oh dear—”
He cast an uncomfortable look in my direction. With another pang of disappointment, weaker this time now that I was becoming accustomed to them, I realized he did not want to be seen walking back to the college with me.
“I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I can help Dominic for a while.”
“Oh.” Vellacott’s face cleared instantly. “I’m sure he would be quite grateful; thank you, Thea.”
Dominic said nothing as my father took his leave. He placed a few more lumps of coal under the brazier and watched them catch the heat of the fire and glow orange.
“So you are Mr. Vellacott’s niece?”
He did not look at me as he asked it. I knew, now, that this was his usual mode of address, but even so it accented the skepticism of his question.
“You heard what he said.” At that moment, I did not feel inclined to lie for my father.
“Is your mother his sister?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“So your father is his brother, then.”
Irked by his sarcasm, I kept what I hoped was a dignified silence. I wandered to the bookshelf to examine my father’s collection more closely. A few minutes revealed that my initial suspicion was correct. I saw nothing of the Jābiran corpus, the works from which we had collected our instructions for the Stone. Of course, this could hardly be the whole of my father’s alchemical library. He would only keep copies here, and the more valuable books were most likely in his office.
“What languages do you have, between the three of you?” I asked.
Dominic, who was crouched next to the fire, sat back on his haunches.
“The usual ones,” he said. “I’m not much use—just enough Latin to keep up. Professore Bentivoglio has German besides Italian, and Mr. Vellacott has good Latin and Greek. And French, of course.”
I suppressed a scornful laugh. Fewer than I had by two, even among all three of them.
“No Spanish or Arabic?” I asked. “What do you do about Jābir’s texts, then?”
“Nothing,” said Dominic. “We don’t have them.”
They were the usual Western alchemists, then. Too certain of their superiority to look to other traditions—especially Islamic ones. My suspicion confirmed, I turned from the bookcase. The White Elixir was a great achievement on its own. It had the power to change any of the base metals into silver. This was the penultimate dream of every alchemist, one that most would never achieve. But it was also the substance from which the Philosopher’s Stone was made. And my father and his friends would not know how to continue—not without Arabic and Jābir. So, not without me.
I had come here intending to replicate my mother’s notes and produce the Stone. But I wanted to do it for myself, take the credit, and return with it to France and heal Mother. I had no intention of handing over the fruit of centuries of labor to my unworthy father and his rude colleague, simply because I had no other recourse but to use his laboratory. It occurred to me that this was why my mother hadn’t wanted to send me to him. She would want him to take credit for our work even less than I did. I thought of the Marquis. It was too late now, of course, to find him and accept his patronage. We had insulted him too thoroughly. But perhaps my mother had been right to prefer him to my father. I pushed the painful thought aside.
I had not thought it all through, it seemed. I hadn’t reckoned on jealous, hovering alchemists marking my every move. For some reason it had not occurred to me that my father would certainly be as unwilling to yield the Stone up to me as I was to yield it up to him or anyone else. My hand went to my pocket again, and the page with my mother’s instructions. Why work for my father’s glory, when I could never benefit from it? His endowed chair, his department of alchemy would never be anything to me. I glanced at Dominic, still hunched over and staring patiently into the fire.
“Why do you work for Vellacott, if you can’t be a student?” I asked Dominic.
Dominic didn’t look up, but I could read his attention from the crease of his brow.
“Beats being a bargeman,” said Dominic. “And he pays me well enough.”
I couldn’t stop myself from scowling at that.
“You work for an hourly wage so that he can have unlimited wealth?”
“Does he pay you better?”
“I’m an alchemist, not a hireling.”
He raised his eyebrows into the fire.
“Then you gave him the White Elixir for nothing, not even my hourly wage.”
I wanted to argue, but this was too much like my own thoughts. I considered leaving, walking back toward High Street. I had money in my pocket, enough for a coach to London. Will might have some kind of workroom.
“I plan to be a medical doctor,” said Dominic with the reticence of someone making a confession. “Mr. Vellacott says he’ll sponsor my studies in another year. Sooner, might be, if the elixir turns out as it ought.”
“You don’t want to be an alchemist?” I asked.
“No, miss,” said Dominic. “I’ve seen enough of it to know I don’t want to spend my life grinding and melting down metals in hopes of turning them into other metals. I’d rather be some use to somebody.”
It occurred to me that I might have said something very like this to my mother in a rebellious fit, but that did not stop me from reacting to Dominic’s dismissive summary with anger.
“Certainly, if that were all there is to it. But the true aim of alchemy is more than just transmuting metals, you must know that. The Philosopher’s Stone brings power over nature herself. You could do more good curing the sick with it than any doctor could.”
“You believe that?” Dominic shook his head. “One thing to say you can turn one metal into another metal. I don’t understand it, but maybe it’s so. But to have power over nature? That’s magic, that is. And if that magic’s real, then it’s dangerous.”
“You sound like a country priest.” I had one in mind, in fact. A nearsighted, half-literate fellow who found out my mother’s work and came around to condemn her for it in shrill preacher’s tones. “Any great power is dangerous, of course it is. Electricity is dangerous, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be explored
and used.”
“You’re talking about the Elixir of Life, not electricity. That’s not science. Mr. Vellacott says—”
“Mr. Vellacott couldn’t read the Kitāb al-Rahma even if he had it,” I snapped, thinking of the months I had spent poring over Jābir’s texts. “He hasn’t bothered to learn Arabic—he knows nothing of the whole Shi’a tradition. Don’t quote him to me like he’s some kind of master sage.”
Dominic raised his brows at me again, and I clenched my jaw, worried I had said too much. He might be tight-lipped, but Dominic seemed loyal to my father, and might very well tell him whatever I said. Little though he could do with the information without Arabic, I didn’t want to give him anything else for free.
I took down a book and flipped it open angrily. Dominic went back to his work. We did not speak for over an hour, until Dominic’s stomach make a loud, discontented noise.
“Go, get something to eat,” I said. “I can watch it.”
Dominic glanced at the door, then at me, then back at the fire. He made no move to get up.
“Fine,” I said, suppressing my irritation. “I will bring you something.”
Out of the laboratory, the chill morning had turned to a damp afternoon. I thought I would wander a bit before going back to the inn for food. I pulled my shawl closer and walked down the narrow alley between the buildings, toward the street. My head buzzed with plans and schemes to make the Stone and abscond with it, none of them very practical. I considered whether I ought to tell my father the truth and make some kind of bargain with him. I could give him the texts with my mother’s notes if he let me have the first Stone.
My mind was not on my surroundings as a man leapt from a shadowed doorway directly into my path. Before I could do more than gasp, he had dragged me into the doorway and pressed me against the wall.
A Golden Fury Page 6