Alchemy (3 page)

Then one day she sent two of her ladies to fetch me from the laboratory when I was alone, Mistress Marchmont an old duenna, and the young Mistress Griffiths, the countess had fetched from Cardiff at her mother’s request that she might be polished for marriage and found a husband.

‘Why Master Boston,’ the old one said, ‘you must leave your potions and devil’s cookery and come to our lady the countess.’

‘Can you make love philtres Master Boston?’ the young one asked, ‘for they say you have bewitched our lady. Make me a potion that will do the same for the young earl and when I am married I will reward you handsomely.’

I saw that I must be cautious. ‘Alas madam, there is no such thing or all physicians would be rich men.’

‘They say your father was a great necromancer seeking the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. Is that what you and my lady do here together?’ She began to open the many little drawers of the cabinet and put in a delicate finger.

‘Be careful madam for many of those substances, tasted by those who do not know their properties, are strong poisons that will harm you.’

‘But they are safe in your hands Master Boston. You understand them. They say that when your father’s house was cleared after his death there was found a great quantity of eggshells used in transmutation.’

‘I have never seen my father use such.’

‘What is this transmutation you all seek? Is it not against God’s will that things should become what he has not made them, as gold from base metal, or that men should live for ever?’

‘Nothing can be done without it is God’s will. He has made all things, even the earth itself as the poet Spenser has it, subject to mutability in some degree. We must therefore call it a divine principle.’

‘Unless it be of the devil and witchcraft. Are you a priest, Master Boston, to decide such matters? When were you at the university? Or perhaps you learnt such supernatural counsels from your father’s divinations.’

‘My father was a physician and chymist madam, and no magician.’

‘And have you never seen things change their nature or spirits arise?’

‘Both those things are possible, but by the workings of nature not the charms of magicians. Look I will show you.’ I placed a little heap of salts of mercury in a clay dish and put it over a small fire we kept always burning to heat water for cordials. ‘Now watch.’

They both drew near. ‘It is liquefying.’ The duenna, who had not spoken since her first words summoning me to my lady, stared into the dish. ‘It is becoming silver.’

‘No madam, only quicksilver by the agency of the fire. Think how cold changes water to solid ice that men may walk upon or snow that drops from the sky and when it melts there is just a little, little water on the ground from a whole hill of snow, which is bound together into crystals and thence into ice rocks, only from a drift of cloud feathers.’

‘You are poet as well as chymist, Master Boston, or rather magician truly for there is witchcraft in words which can steal into the heart and head just as potently as poppy closes the eyes. Our lady will wonder that we stay so long. Come. Can you arise
spirits in a bottle as Master Forman does? He is a great distiller of love philtres and the ladies flock to him now he is gone to London.’

I had heard my father speak of this Simon Forman who was born at Quidhampton in our own country, but a half mile from Wilton. ‘He grows rich then at the expense of the credulous. There is nothing to love philtres but the longing, and the belief of them that take them. So my father taught me. Love comes from the heart not the stomach.’

‘Some say it springs rather from the loins.’

‘Lust is of the loins.’

‘And some young men would say the better for it. Ask Mistress Fitton where love and lust are joined. You must be still a virgin Master Boston.’

I felt my cheeks redden under this assault so that I feared for my disguise and answered rashly, ‘As I trust you are and as your husband will surely discover on your wedding night.’

‘You are impertinent. You at least shan’t have the discovery. Others should hear of your speaking above your station.’

Then I remembered that she claimed to come from a sometime line of Welsh princes and knew she would complain of me to my lady. But she would do it privately, behind my back.

The duenna laughed at our jousting. ‘Green children you spit like cats in autumn. We have kept our mistress waiting too long.’ And she led the way out of the laboratory.

As the days passed I came to understand that Mistress Griffiths was half inclined to make trial of me herself and when I read to them from Sir Philip’s
Arcadia
of the beauties of the naked and shipwrecked youth, Musidorus, then I found her eyes upon me in speculation if I should raise mine from the page. But I did so only to look upon my mistress, the countess, her face.

Last night, under the spell of Amyntas Boston’s memorial I suppose, or the weird case I might be embarking on, I dreamt I was that gladiator girl they dug up in Southwark in Great Dover Street. Outside the city wall, beside the highway and about my age. They think she was a rich pagan buried with eight lamps to light her on her way. Anubis lamps, that may just mean she was a devotee of Isis some academics claim, wanting to take away her status as gladiator, to deny the existence of fighting women. When they first dug her up there was a fierce battle of words, articles, letters, interviews flying back and forth, ‘She was: she wasn’t. They did, they didn’t.’ The archaeologists found a piece of pelvic bone in the grave, female, and then lost it. Was it really lost, suppressed, stolen? Talisman or uncomfortable evidence? Someone said Petronius had written of women gladiators so I looked up his
Satyricon
and there it was: a girl at the games fighting in a chariot like Boadicea. But weren’t most of the male gladiators criminals, who’d been given a last chance to fight to their deaths? Where did the women come from? Were they criminals too or just captives from some war, offered the choice of slavery and prostitution or the sword? I can’t find out. Those are the kind of references the early Christian copyists would have silently let drop, along with most of Sappho.

How much truth was there in the stories of the Amazons, cutting off a breast so they could swing their swords more easily, exposing their boy babies to death in the jaws of wild beasts on the rocky hillsides of Turkey? They don’t put that in the tourist brochures. At Halicarnassus they’re still fighting in stone on the wall, brave as lionesses behind their shields. Queen Penthesilea fell at Troy after leading her troops successfully against the Greeks. The brute Achilles killed her and then fell for her corpse.

I start up the bike and head off for the China Kitchen. Tonight I have Gilbert’s money and don’t need to work but I can’t let the Gaos down. I find them anxious and depressed. A
shop next to theirs that has been empty for months has suddenly been let. Rumour has it it’s to be a rival Chinese takeaway but bigger. Already workmen are hacking the heart out of it, and Mr Gao has seen stoves and hobs being ferried into the newly plastered shell.

I try to reassure them. No one can compete with Mrs Gao’s chicken chow mein, her sweet and sour pork, her crispy aromatic duck, her sauced king prawns. They have their regulars for home delivery, some as I know from a longish way off, and the locals who’ve come there since the seventies when the Gaos first opened up. I wonder silently whether Mary herself sees a little light in this sudden darkness, that life might be different, Streatham Hill left behind at last and Bruce Lee’s successor kicking down first the door and then the counter to carry her off. If she does she doesn’t voice any such rebellion but shares her parents’ worried expressions.

Tonight my saddlebox is packed full for a dinner party in Clapham Old Town’s elegant heart where the tele presenter and his architect wife will boast over the steaming dishes, transferred daintily to the blue and white bowls and salvers, of ‘this little place we always go to, so authentic’.

‘Hi, Jade,’ Diana Bosco says as she opens the door. ‘How’s it going?’ She takes the thick brown paper carrier bags I hand her, without waiting for an answer. The first time she saw me helmeted in the dazzling burst of security light, she stepped back quickly, half closing the door on its chain. I took off my helmet.

‘Oh my God, I was really afraid back there but you’re a girl. I get so nervous opening up after dark. Will you always bring our order? I’ll feel much safer if you do. In future I’m going to ask if you’re on that night before I get in the food.’

‘I don’t work at weekends unless there’s an emergency.’

‘What about Friday?’ She flashes out the question.

‘I’m there on Fridays as a rule.’

‘Then that’s when we’ll have our dinner parties.’

So I bring her comfort food and she makes the gesture of concern that salves her conscience, and doesn’t ask whether I like to ride around in the dark and cold, and often wet, or skidding on the mush of fallen plane leaves big as saucers, like the dog’s eyes in the fairy tale, with rain slashing at my face through the visor and the other traffic trying to crush or shoulder me into the gutter.

Tonight it’s clear and moonlit. The rest of my drops are in a tight radius from the kitchen, out and back, out and back, out and back. This is the boring bit when you begin to lose concentration, cut familiar corners. At last I drop off the final order and am free to head home with my own supper in the box behind. Coming out I had to weave through cars, buses and vans fleeing the city. Now the road’s almost deserted. I ride by the lit pub windows of Brixton with their customers aswim inside like koi or darker mullet, and jostling queues for clubs held back by brawny bouncers: thin-clothed kids shivering in the damp air. I zoom on past the drowsing Oval and into the theatreland of Old and New Vics where the Thai and Italian restaurants are still packed and noisy. Their doors open to let in the post-play crowd and let out the wafts of garlic, olive oil, wine and coffee to sting the palates of passers-by. Then it’s into the grim underpass beside the glass canopy and grandiose steps of Waterloo Station, the automatic gunfire of my engine bouncing back off walls and roof, and down to my own train-shaken pad. I haul the bike into its ground-floor garage and climb up to my familiar shell, wondering again what was warehoused inside these walls to be trained down to Dover or what exotics could have waited here to be carried off. One day I mean to look it all up and know for sure. I peel off my leathers and run my hand through my hair flattened by the helmet.

In the back kitchen I get an open bottle of Pinot Grigio out of the fridge, pour myself a big glass while a plate is warming, lay out my silvery dishes, spoon and chopsticks, and switch on
the late review to watch while I eat. The interviewer is nagging and prodding, pulling on a hangnail of dispute in the hope of drawing blood. With half my mind I’m turning over Gilbert’s case and what I’ve had time to read of Amyntas Boston’s memorial. So far it’s hard to see the harm in it. But then it’s all a matter of viewpoint and selection. What exactly did Gilbert distribute to his students and what commentary did he give them on the material? I pull a sheet of paper towards me and start to put down questions I should ask him. And suddenly I realise that I’m already hooked. In my head I’ve taken on this case I don’t really understand or see the shape of. I want more background.

I’ll run another check on the website for Wessex Uni but I think I need more than they may decide to tell me, more than the acceptable face of the college in competition with all its rivals. I need to go there, see for myself, get the feel. I finish my plateful, put the cardboard lids over the remains to be heated up for lunch tomorrow, pressing down the frilled soft metal rims, and stack the little dishes in the fridge. Then I go through to my office to surf for Wessex and input my thinking so far.

Is it Amyntas Boston’s memorial that’s turning this, that ought to be just case notes, into a diary, a commonplace book of my own? I must watch myself. I’m in danger of becoming one of those dreary, pitiful loners whose only relationships are on screen, pseudonymous trawlings. ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ That was in our GCE set-book anthology. The last lines had a bleakness I still remember in moments when they might be best forgotten.

And how the silence surged softly backward

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

There were ghostly listeners in that otherwise empty house, like the silent observers of messages we send out into cyberspace,
that can log on to you, track you down and even offer you stuff you haven’t asked for, porn sites and cheap fags, enticements to fly away or join a cult.

Tomorrow I’ll pay Wessex a visit. It can’t take more than an hour from London. What excuse can I give to get on to the campus if they’re very security minded? I could be considering enrolling for a course, needing application forms and a full brochure, more than I can download from their website. Or I could be delivering something. A letter to the principal. Make a note of his name: the Revd Luther Bishop. Or I could just ring for an interview with him. Tell the truth. Say I’ve been asked to represent Dr Gilbert and I want to hear his, the college’s, side of the case. Tell the truth until you’re forced to lie.

He might refuse to see me or it might take time to get an appointment. I need to be doing something. After all this is potentially the most interesting case I’ve had since I set up on my own. True it’s only a tribunal not a full court or even magistrates’ but compared with the messy divorce settlements, hedge and right of way claims, conveyancing and inheritance squabbles that have come my way it is High Court stuff. I can see me as a legal Lara Croft slaying ghostly monsters or Buffy slapping down vampires, except that I’m not sure Gilbert isn’t himself some kind of shapechanger or at least charlatan.

Already I’m empathising with that dead girl, Amyntas Boston. If she was tried for witchcraft who did she have to defend her? What would I plead if I could go back to her time and her trial? I wouldn’t be allowed of course. In spite of Portia, who anyway had to dress up as a young man, not many women would have had the knowledge, let alone the chance, to stand up in court except as witnesses or defendants.