Alchemy and Meggy Swann

by Karen Cushman

  "I grew up in an alehouse, you wart-necked mammering clap dish."

  They walked in silence for a moment through a river of garbage. Not everyone would have laughed at her insults, Meggy thought. "You be ever merry and good tempered, Oldmeat," she said, "no matter if I am calling you names or Mistress Grimm is commanding you. How is that?"

  Roger lifted his cap and scratched his head. "My father died when I was but twelve, and I was plucked from school and made clerk to a lawyer, who beat me fiercely on cold mornings to warm himself." He grasped Meggy's elbow and steered her clear of a mud hole one could sail a ship in. "A twelve-month of that and I ran to London. Now I do what I will and have what I will and no one beats me. Why would I not be merry?"

  "Well, your sweet disposition aches my teeth, you canker blossom." Meggy stumbled over a dead dog left to rot in the street. "Fie upon this dirty city," she shouted, "home to every kind of dirt, muck, and slime God ever created."

  "That may be so, but you will come to love her as I do," Roger said. "London is a fair that lasts all year. Around every corner is something wondrous—here a man with a dancing monkey, yon our good Queen Bess in silks and satins on a fine white horse. This way there's a hanging at Tyburn, that way fire eaters and rope dancers and the puppeteers in Fleet Street." Gesturing grandly, he nearly knocked Meggy into the teeming gutter.

  "'Tis all here," he continued, "the fine and the ragged, the rotten and the pure. London may reek with old dirt, but her streets are filled with new hopes, new dreams, and new ideas. You are fortunate to be here, Margret Swann."

  Fortunate? Meggy was unconvinced. She had ever found fortune to be fickle, false, and harsh, and belike it would be no different here in this London.

  Meggy was weary and trembling with pain by the time they reached the little house on Crooked Lane. As they stopped before the door, Roger motioned toward her walking sticks. "How did it happen that you ... that your legs..." He blushed. "Or am I too bold?"

  "You are." He turned to walk away. "I was born so," she said to his back. "I be the most luckless person God ever did make. Or curse."

  "Not so luckless," Roger said, turning toward her again. "You could also have gut griping, ruptures, catarrhs, and gravel in the back, lethargies, cold palsies, and sciatica. You might suffer from the wheezing lung or a bladder full of impost-hume or a dirt-ridden liver."

  "Go to! I do not—"

  "Or pustules and pimples and pocks, cankers and rashes and St. Vitus' dance."

  Meggy leaned on her sticks and kicked out at him. "You are being waggish, Oldmeat," she said, "but I cannot share the humor. I cannot walk without pain, nor run, nor dance. I am called names in the street and spat upon. My mother sent me away and my father does not want me. I have nothing and no one."

  "Nay, you have a friend."

  "Aye, Louise, but she dwells elsewhere now."

  "Not the goose. Me," he said. "Roger Oldham, at your service." With a little bow, he turned and strode away.

  Meggy was struck right speechless. She opened the door to the house at the Sign of the Sun with the sense that she had left something unfinished. Something important. "Good thanks to you, Oldmeat, for seeing me home," she called after him. He lifted his cap in salute but did not turn around. "And for the coins." He lifted his cap again. "You may call me Meggy, if you will." And he lifted his cap once more.

  Meggy watched him go. She had faced him with her fists up as always, but Roger had stood firm. 'Twas like poking a porridge, she thought. It did no harm to the porridge but only made her feel sticky.

  As the room grew dark, Meggy wrapped herself in her cloak and lay down on her pallet. She faced a night alone, without Louise. The girl missed the warmth of the goose's body, the soft huffing of her breath, even the furious scritching and scratching after bugs in her feathers. What did Louise right now? Was she nestling with someone else? Meggy's belly prickled with loneliness, envy, and regret.

  Early on the morrow, Meggy bought a roast chicken and an apple cake from a cookshop on Thames Street, hoping that Master Peevish would fail to notice that he was not eating Louise. As she returned, she saw Old Cloaks opening the stall at the front of his shop. "Damnable crookleg!" he growled, and he spat at Meggy. She thought to fling an insult at him, but then she saw a man leaving the house at the Sign of the Sun, his cloak pulled high and his hat pulled low. Not Master Peevish. A visitor? Curiosity hurried her on.

  Inside, Master Peevish was sitting at the table, his head in his hands. She had seen him only three times since her arrival three days before—once he had called her a beggar, once he had paid her no heed at all, and once he had sent her from his laboratorium to the butcher's. She would speak with him now, if only she could reason out how to begin.

  He looked up as the girl wabbled over to him. His peevish face was gray with fatigue, and his eyes dark shadowed. She offered him the chicken, but he waved it away.

  Meggy said, "Sir, I have spent nearly all the coins that Roger gave me, and there be no food here. I will have to have money to buy more."

  He gestured to the food on the table. "You have chicken."

  So he knew it was not Louise, but he said naught about the goose, so neither did Meggy. "I will be hungry again tomorrow," she told him, "and every day. 'Tis how most people are."

  "As fortune would have it, I have just been paid for a piece of work." Ah, Meggy wondered, did that explain the visitor? Master Peevish took a coin from a small pile on the table, gave it to Meggy, and swept the rest into his hand.

  She looked at the coin on her palm. A ha'penny. "Sir," she said, "'tis but half a penny and not worth very much. It will take more to buy bread and cheese and mayhap apples. And candles, for 'tis monstrous dark in here. And—"

  Frowning, he dropped more coins onto the table, stood up, and headed for the stairs.

  "Sir," Meggy called after him, "what do I here? Why did you send for me? What shall I be about?"

  He turned and looked at her. "Might your legs withstand a trip to the inn at the top of the lane? I would have a pail of ale ... err, mistress."

  "Margret," Meggy said, but he was gone up the stairs. She bit her lip in disappointment. It appeared that her speech with him would have to wait.

  She wabbled up the lane and back down with a pail of ale over her arm, walking very, very slowly lest she spill and tipsify the ground and not Master Peevish. Who was the visitor? What work had Master Peevish done? Was he near to finding what he sought? Might he truly transform things and make them perfect, as Roger had said? She was doubtful. More likely 'twas but the foolish fancy of the peevish man in the faded black gown.

  Her legs ached from walking and her head from wondering by the time she returned to the house at the Sign of the Sun. The window and door of the cooper's shop were thrown open, revealing inside a tangle of wood planks, tools, and barrel staves. The cooper's boy sat in a drift of sawdust and wood chips, playing with his horse, while the cooper smoothed the sides of a barrel. Sawdust flew around their heads.

  Meggy laughed. "It appears to be snowing wood, Master Cooper," she said. The cooper grinned and saluted her with his smoothing tool.

  Had she made a friend? In truth, another friend—for Roger called himself such. Two friends who were not geese. She had ne'er bethought her that such a thing would happen. I know I did swear I needed no friend but Louise, she said to herself, but I feel like the sun is shining inside me.

  Of a sudden there was a loud crack from inside the house at the Sign of the Sun. Ye toads and vipers! Meggy hastened in, the pail of ale strewing golden drops as she let it fall to the floor. Up the stairs she went as fast as she was able.

  The laboratorium was filled with smoke, out of which appeared Master Peevish, his face all sooty and black except for where the caterpillars were burned clear off his brow.

  "Sir," she began, "are you—" But he waved her silent.

  "I have unfortunately discovered three elements one should not heat together," he said. "I must make note of this." Fro
m the shelf he took a large book marked with sooty fingerprints and globs of candle wax, opened it, and began to write.

  Meggy lumbered back downstairs and mopped up what ale had spilled with the hem of her kirtle. She sat down at the table and feasted on chicken and apple cake. The bemadding man, she thought. Next time it might be his head he loses and not just his eyebrows.

  She finished eating and threw the chicken bones into the street. She sat again. And stood again. She was wearied with looking at the walls of the poky, cramped, little house. How small was it? She measured steps from side to side—but six paces across. A house this tiny belike was better suited to an elf, she thought, and she sang:

  And a little elf man, elf man, elf man,

  And a little elf man said unto me,

  Come and nurse an elf child, elf child, elf child,

  Come and nurse an elf child down beneath the sea.

  An elf child, yes, an elf child would be at home in this bawbling little house. She would need a wee cradle, a drinking cup, and a plate. Made of a leaf and an acorn, belike, and a piece of spider web for a coverlet ... Ye toads and vipers, Meggy thought, mark me. I sound right daft.

  She was lonely, she realized, and weary of singing and pretending and worrying in the little room downstairs. All that happens in this house happens up in that smoky chamber, she thought. Vexed, restless, and curious as a cat at a mousehole, she climbed upstairs, dragging the pail of ale up stair by stair behind her.

  The alchemist was unstopping a large vial of a green liquid when she entered the laboratorium. "Sir," she said, "prithee, Master Peev—err, Ambrose, I would speak with you."

  He kept his eyes on the liquid bubbling in a long-necked vessel and said naught.

  She went closer to him. He did not look up. "Sir!" she said loudly.

  He jumped like a frog in a thunderstorm.

  "Sir," she said again, "pray pardon my interruption, but I am grown sore tired of sitting downstairs. You sent for me and here I am. I beg you give me some task to do."

  Master Ambrose looked at Meggy as if a fish had spoken to him, but she went on. "I am not a son, but I am able and willing to learn. Mayhap I could assist you in your laboratorium? I might wash vessels and scrub pots and"—she looked around the room—"work the bellows to make the fire hot. I have grown more knowing about the streets of London now, so I can find what you require for your work and carry it back in my sack, if it is not too heavy or cumbersome, if I do not have to walk too far, if you do not need it straightway, for I am not swift—"

  The man held up his hand to silence her. He looked at her closely, and his brow, where the caterpillars had once capered, furled. "Mayhap you could be somewhat useful ... err, mistress..."

  "Margret," Meggy said.

  NINE

  Roger had not come again to the house at the Sign of the Sun. Although Meggy missed his company and his teasing, she had no good reason to seek him out at his lodgings at the house of Cuthbert Grimm. Sometimes she thought she saw him in the street, and she smiled, but so far her sightings were not Roger but some peddler or wherryman or tall young fellow with fine shoulders.

  So, as the summer days passed, Meggy lessened her loneliness by assisting the alchemist in the laboratorium. She polished the tongs and pumped the bellows, washed vessels of glass and earthenware, arranged shelves of long-handled spoons and short-necked bottles. She puzzled out how to carry the buckets of water upstairs—bucket up one step, Meggy and her sticks up, bucket up another step, over and over. Step by step, the same way, she took the empty buckets back down for the water bearer.

  Master Peevish worked in a silence broken only by bubbling and dripping. Meggy watched him closely, and her curiosity grew until one day it burbled out of her: "Be there gold yet in that cup? I see nothing but black powder. How will—"

  "The Devil take you!" the alchemist shouted. "I cannot work with you buzzing like a gnat in my ear."

  Meggy's knees trembled a little, but she made certain her voice did not as she challenged him. "Were you to tell me what you are doing and why, belike I would not have so very many questions."

  He glared at her. "Roger did not ask to know the why or wherefore."

  "Roger cares only for playing," she said, "but I would know." Meggy waited in fearful silence for the man's reaction to her boldness.

  Master Ambrose pulled on his earlobe, once, twice, three times, and finally said, "In words even you might comprehend, I seek to break apart by art things combined by nature, to transform and purify them until I have a substance so pure, it can purify other matter." He paced in his enthusiasm from wall to window and back. "This substance, called the elixir of life or the fifth essence or the philosopher's stone, when cast upon the imperfect will perfect it. 'Tis this elixir I seek."

  "Go to! This is true? And it will make gold?"

  "Making gold is but a step in the process of transformation," he said, and he pulled a book down off the shelf. "Base metal is an imperfect or diseased state of gold, the perfect metal. When I discover the means of transforming base metal into gold, I can apply that method to other substances, even living things, and perfect them in their nature."

  Master Ambrose consulted his book and nodded. He then poured gray crystals into a crucible and set Meggy to stirring them with a long-handled spoon.

  "Can you now transform things?" she asked him.

  "Oh, aye, solids into liquids, liquids into vapors. But in time all the secrets of transformation will be known to me."

  "And then you will make gold?"

  "More than that. The Arab Jabir says that one thousand fusions will change gold into the elixir of life. Once I have that, I will have the means of transforming humans into perfect, immortal beings. Eternal youth. Immortality. That is my Great Work. The man who has the secret of immortality will have riches and power beyond dreams." He began to work the bellows to make the fire hotter as Meggy continued her stirring. "Great men throughout time have said it can be done," he said, breathless from pumping. "Aristotle, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon..."

  And you? Meggy wondered. Great men, perhaps, but likely not tall, peevish, shabby men with burnt eyebrows. She shook her head.

  The alchemist lifted the bellows like a sword. "Think of it, err, mistress," he said. "Immortality. Eternal life."

  Meggy stopped her stirring. "I have found that living can be most toilsome and cruel. Why would any someone wish to be immortal?"

  "The queen herself, it is said, will reward handsomely the man who brings her the secret." He took the spoon from Meggy and handed her the bellows. "Enough of your prattle. Cease your drumbling, take these bellows, and encourage these flames."

  For many days Meggy pumped the bellows, added coal to the fire, and tended the alembic, the glass instrument that turned liquid into vapor and back again. This Great Work of his takes a goodly long time, she thought as she ground sal ammoniac in a mortar and heated sulfur and alum in a crucible until it was reduced to a powder. When the man's work did not go well, he threw pots against the wall or swept objects off the shelves with his long arms, and Meggy spent a fair amount of time straightening bottles and jars and righting candles. He called her "err, mistress," although she always replied, "I am Margret, sir."

  Slowly the alchemist and the girl grew accustomed to one another, and she once again dared to interrupt with questions she had been pondering. "How, sir," she asked him, "can one make one metal into another? Is not a thing what it is and it cannot be another thing? Is it not as God made it and none other?"

  He sighed and marked a place in his book with his finger. "All substances are composed of the same matter," he said. "Their differences are due to the presence of different qualities imposed upon them, such as redness or hardness or coldness. By taking away those qualities, I hope to isolate the prime material of a substance, and then, by adding other qualities, to transform its very essence."

  Meggy's brain swirled. "Just what is that you say?"

  He pul
led at his earlobe once, twice, three times before continuing, "It is simple. Add cold, and water turns to ice. Heat it, and it becomes water again. In the kitchen raw dough turns to bread when heat is applied." He gestured to a bottle of red powder. "So too does cinnabar change. Heated, it turns to mercury, a silver liquid. If I could discover how to remove the liquidity from the mercury, it would harden and become silver."

  "And how would that make a person immortal?"

  "It would be a step, err, mistress. Silver could then be transformed to gold, and gold is the perfection of metal. So too is immortality the perfection of life. With every experiment, I make progress and am closer to what I seek."

  Meggy remained unpersuaded, but over the days she saw small transformations. Dark, brittle flakes of metal were turned into vapor by heating and were made solid again by cooling. She boiled water until naught remained but a fine grit; the water had turned into earth, the master said. She watched as heat applied to the red powdered cinnabar produced silver mercury, just as he had told her, and yellow powdered sulfur turned black. Master Peevish looked less peevish when his mixing and measuring gave him the results he wanted. "Now, by my faith, this is a most welcome surprise," he said as a heated metal released white solids and red smoke. And "'Tis wondrous, is't not?" when a powdered gray substance began to glow.

  Meggy saw naught she thought perfect or immortal or gold, but she continued to help in the laboratorium, where at least she was warm and occupied and not alone.

  Each day the master sent Meggy for salt, for sulfur, for something. She was most slow at these errands and often had to stop and rest, but he did not remark, nor perhaps even notice, her lagging. If he remembered to give the girl coins to pay for provisions, she used a penny or two to buy bread or sausage or apples, for he gave little thought to food, so engaged was he in his Great Work. The food she took him often dried and spoiled in the heat of the laboratorium, and Meggy added it to the river of refuse in the street.

  To her surprise, mighty London proved small and cramped. Hither to yon, wall to wall, was but a short distance, shorter than the distance from her mother's alehouse to the river. Even so, her hands grew rough and sore from holding the sticks. Her arms ached, and her legs, but the busy and colorful London streets often diverted her. The city was a minglement of great houses next to small, shops next to gardens, churches by stables and kennels by inns. Ballad sellers sang, hawkers hawked, horses and carts and coaches hurried by. A hodgepodge it was, a hurly-burly, but she began to grow accustomed to the crowds and the refuse and the reeky gutters.