Alchemist's Apprentice (20 page)

Whistling cheerfully, he measured out random quantities of sulphur and white lead, of arsenic and sal ammoniac and, with a little more solemnity, mercury. He had fitted the stopper and was about to begin the long process of sealing the neck when he suddenly found his hand reaching towards his waistcoat pocket. He had forgotten it again. The
prima materia
.

Slowly, carefully, Jack took it out and laid it on his palm. It looked so ordinary, just a small, dark stone, primitive among the highly refined elements on the table. His confusion returned, redoubled. The trouble was that references to the
prima materia
in the texts were always vague and elusive. Some of them suggested that the stone, ground to a fine powder, was all that should be contained within the vessel, and that the other elements would arise from it in the alchemical process. Others were more vague, giving nothing more than hints about the nature of the stone, the impurities which resided in it and the gold which would result from its incubation.

Jack found himself stuck. His knowledge of chemistry was by no means profound, but it was sufficient for him to know that a piece of common stone was unlikely to contribute to a fusion of highly refined elements in any significant way. On the contrary, it seemed likely to pollute the whole process. Yet it had to be important. If it wasn't, why had he been sent through such an ordeal to find it and fetch it back? He was on the point of going out and asking for help when the alchemist's words came back to him.

‘You have read all you need to read and learned all you need to learn.'

With a sudden, profound chill, Jack knew that he was looking for the wrong kind of help. It wasn't the alchemist who was required to oversee the experiment, but someone else. Slowly he approached the curtain at the darker end of the room and drew it away from the picture beneath. Hermes looked out across the workshop and immediately the atmosphere was augmented by his presence: it was brightened and purified, as though new life had been born out of drabness and doubt.

Jack looked again at the stone in his hand. It was, once again, much more than a stone and he now had no doubt that it must go into the vessel. He reached for a mortar, the largest and strongest of them and, with a satisfying sense of conviction, he dropped the little stone into it.

But the process of reducing the
prima materia
proved more difficult than Jack had anticipated. It would not crack under pressure from the pestle, and when he tried to pound it a sharp pain shot up his arm and landed like a blow in his solar plexus. He stepped back and observed the stone, still lying intact in the bottom of the mortar. It had been with him so long it was like a part of him, and it seemed to emanate some quality of being, his own being, apart from him yet still somehow connected. To destroy it would be to destroy himself.

He looked up at Hermes on the wall. There was still no doubt about what he had to do. He took up the pestle again and began to hammer at the stone, gently at first and then with more force. It cracked, and a shudder went through him, but still he went on, pounding it into smaller and smaller pieces, every fracture like a dismantling of his own being, at his own hand. The realisation terrified him, but instead of stopping he fell into a frenzy, hammering and grinding until his arm ached and there was nothing but gritty sand in the bottom of the mortar. Then he stopped, his heart thumping, his breath ragged in his throat. With hands that shook from muscle fatigue, he tipped the contents into the neck of the vessel and replaced the stopper again. And as he began the long, painstaking process of making an impermeable seal, he knew beyond any doubt what had happened. In crushing the stone, the
prima materia
, he had crushed himself, disintegrated his being and sealed it into the womblike darkness of the egg. All that remained within him was a painful vacuum. Only time would tell whether the work of reconstitution would meet with success.

J
ACK SETTLED THE PHILOSOPHER'S
egg into the inner chamber of the athanor, packing it around with fine, crumbly earth as an insulator. “When he had finished, and tended to the fire and the dampers, he became infected by a strange restlessness, a certainty that there was something wrong; something he had forgotten. It was quite some time before he realised what it was. The shutters were open and the grey afternoon light was leaking in through the misty window. Neither the alchemist nor any of his books had mentioned the need for darkness, but Jack felt it. Since his correlate, the
prima materia
, was enshrined in darkness, it was only correct that he should be, as well. He closed the shutters and barred them, and hung the thick blanket that Barnstable had left for him over them, shutting out the daylight entirely. Then he settled himself on a stool beside the athanor and waited.

Time passed, but Jack had no perception of it. His mind was as empty as the darkness which surrounded him and he was aware of nothing beyond an acute anxiety which hung like a loom weight beneath his ribcage. He flattened his hands on the clay of the range beside the athanor and laid his head upon them. The clay was warm. Inside the great oven, his egg was warm as well, beginning to incubate. A pressure began to exert itself around the edges of Jack's inner darkness and he sat up, fearful of the images which were trying to invade. He reached for a candle and the tinder box, but before he had time to strike a light, the door of the workshop opened and something was placed on the floor inside it. Jack opened his mouth to call, but the door was already closed again. There was to be no reprieve, not yet.

He lit the candle and ate the supper that the alchemist had left for him, then tended the fire in the athanor and returned to his seat beside it. The meal meant that it was evening and Jack was about to enter his first night in the workshop. He dreaded it, knowing that he could not allow himself to sleep, for fear that the fire would burn down and the work would spoil. How many nights would there be? How many could he survive? He sat vacantly until the candle burned down and died. Feeling his way in the dark, he tended the fire and then, trusting his hands to warn him of any change in the temperature, he dropped his head onto them again.

To his surprise, he could hear sound coming through them. It did not come from the athanor or he would surely have heard it before. Since there was no other source of it, it had to be coming from the vessel, the egg itself. It was a sorrowful sound; a sighing or keening; the whimpering of a lost hound or an abandoned child. As Jack listened, his attention falling towards it, it began to take form. He had heard it before.

Without warning, the memories assailed him. He was standing in the graveyard surrounded by mourners, all of them gathered like crows around a yawning hole. A priest stood at the head of the grave, droning on with words that Jack could not understand. A small coffin was being lowered into the hole. The sound he was hearing seemed to come from his own constricted throat.

Jack turned his head on his hands, but the vision remained, playing itself out relentlessly. Before it was finished it was replaced by another; a similar, but different funeral, a different coffin. One by one he watched his brothers and sisters as they were lowered into the ground but now, engulfed in lonely darkness as he was, he felt the grief of it as he had not felt it at the time. Then, it had been too much to bear. He remembered running, running through the streets, crossing his neighbourhood again and again, backwards and forwards, wearing himself down to exhaustion, falling asleep beside the fire.

His mother's haggard face appeared. ‘Another one,' she said. ‘Where will I find the money for the coffin?' She held an egg in her hand. It dropped.

It would be rotten, it would smash and spread its foul green corruption throughout his life. Jack gasped and sat up, staring into the darkness, wiping the terrifying impression from his mind. His hands were full of pins and needles, but beneath them the clay was still warm. He shook the blood back into them and groped numbly for the flint and a pinch of tinder. Shadows reared behind the clean, young light of the new candle. He lit a second one, and a third, his hands shaking as he sought to banish the darkness. From the end wall, Hermes stared out at him, hovering on his winged heels, cold and indifferent.

Jack was amazed to discover, by the state of the fire, how long he had been lost in dreams. Had it been allowed to go untended for much longer it would have gone out, and it took Jack a good deal of the skills the alchemist had taught him to coax it back into health. He succeeded, though, and he was confident enough in the athanor's insulating properties to know that the work would not have suffered. When he put an ear to it again, it was still singing, though with a different voice this time. It was higher than before, like a wind that sighed around a house at night, rising and falling, carrying him with it into a bare landscape where the Red King, Jack himself, wandered with a pale mist at his side that should have been the White Queen. Above him, in some indeterminate place on a hill or in the sky, Hermes was loitering, up to no good as usual. The rotten egg that had haunted Jack's entire life was in his hand. Otherwise there was nothing but the song, soft and persistent and unutterably lonely.

How long he remained there, Jack could not tell, but when he next raised his head and lighted new candles, his breakfast was waiting inside the door and it was quite cold. He ate it in the same way that he tended the fire, dutifully, without enthusiasm. Afterwards it sat like a stone in his innards, as though the despair which gripped him resented anything which served the purpose of keeping him alive. He paced restlessly for a while and visited the tiny latrine in the corner of the room, but there was no escaping from the work. Soon he was back on his stool again, his head on his hands, listening to the sound of the vessel in the athanor.

Throughout the days and nights which followed, it sang its alchemical songs of fermentations and putrifactions, of separations and conjunctions, and Jack lived through them all. He dreamed of his father in Davy Jones' Locker, and in Portsmouth, feeding a new family like cuckoos in a stolen nest. He saw his mother die again and again, watched the final coffin enter the cold earth while another priest murmured over it. He was taken in by Tom and beaten by him, over and over again. He found the beautiful Arab colt and loved him and lost him.

And then there was Eleanor. Jack had loved her, but she hadn't given him a chance. He had meant nothing to her, as if he really had been a frog. He found that he could forgive everyone for what they had done to him, even Tom, even the Duke. But when he thought of Eleanor he felt nothing but humiliation. His soul was filled with bitterness as he remembered how hard he had tried to become what she wanted, and how she had rejected him despite everything. How could he ever forgive her for what she had done?

Jack endured as he imagined the contents of the vessel to be enduring, trapped as he was in the warm darkness. Sleep and waking merged into one another, and he lost track of the number of bowls which appeared inside the door and were taken away again. Like a tapped spring, the painful memories ran through his mind, hour after hour. He shed no tears, as though they were denied exit by the hermetic seal of his endurance, but he felt every loss all the more acutely because of it. He moved through the darkness in slow misery, emptying ashes, groping among the dusty coals, blowing on dim embers with breath as faint as his heart. He feared for the work, for himself, for the lonely Red King fading away into mist like his White Queen.

Then the voice of the sacred vessel changed again. Its tone lowered in pitch and seemed to Jack to be filled with menace. In his bleak inner landscape, Hermes lifted his hand. The egg was poised to fall. Jack braced himself.

Hermes opened his hand. It was all over. But in the strange, suspended instants that followed, Jack became aware of another presence. He looked around. He was not alone. Eleanor was there. Not the White Queen. Eleanor. Jack understood now that he had made her into something that she never was and could never be. She was just herself, a young woman, tall and confident, doing her best to make her own way in a world full of contradictions and obstacles, just as he was. Like him, she had made choices in life, and she had found the courage to stick to them, despite the odds. And if her choices didn't correspond with his, was she to be blamed? The moment of illumination was still with him. The egg, somehow, was still falling. There was still time. Time to realise that Eleanor was not to blame for his feelings. She could not have acted other than she did. The only things that were to blame for his disappointment were his own desires and expectations.

The alchemist spoke, or was it Hermes?

‘Tell me about delusion.'

That was where the delusion lay. He could do nothing about those early years; his birth and his upbringing were beyond his powers to influence. But his subsequent choices had been his own responsibility. Wealth had not brought him happiness. Marrying Eleanor would not have brought him happiness, either. He would have found new things to desire, even to need. The alchemist knew that. Nell had known it as well. But Jack had needed this time; this long, painful darkness, to come to the realisation himself.

His anger and hurt melted away. The Red King and the White Queen were as much a part of his inner world as the red sulphur and white lead were a part of the alchemy happening inside the sealed vessel. They could never exist in the real world outside, where people were people with all their idiosyncrasies and imperfections. Only in here, in his mind, could a total union between them exist. And in the vessel, perhaps. Red sulphur and white lead.

He reached out and took Eleanor into his arms. As they embraced he felt himself becoming complete.

The egg was still falling, still in timeless suspension. Jack watched it, seeing in it the relic that he had found floating in the Thames and that he had never dared to open. It was Barnstable's egg, and his own egg as well; the one which was still cooking inside the athanor. He could stop it, he knew. He could stop the work and he could step out of the workshop and return to his old way of being. But he was ready now. Ready to know.