Alchemy (4 page)

‘A Daniel come to judgement. O wise young judge.’ What was Shakespeare getting at with his boy, girl, boy impersonations, especially there in
The Merchant?
That it was all right
to pretend, to lie, to turn nature and society upside down in the interest of justice? Or was it just about what women will do for love? None of the guys in the play are worthy of her. Won’t she get bored with Bassanio after a few years of marriage and children? So many of the plays call out for a sequel, a what happens next to his Olivia, Rosalind, Kate, Beatrice. Maybe they’ll be widowed and take over the running of vast estates like Amyntas Boston’s countess. It’s the soft ones he provides an endstop to with death: Cordelia, Ophelia, Desdemona.

Then there’s the female physician in what’s it called, who cures the king and gets her man as reward. Maybe he based cool women like that on the Mistress Fittons he saw around the court, flouting convention in a flurry of cloak and feathered bonnet.

Amyntas Boston’s final sentences I read last night sound as if s/he was falling in love with the countess, a Cherubino or Rose Cavalier situation, the kind of admission you’d pounce on in court. ‘Please turn to File E, item 29. Have you got it? Please read it carefully. Do you recognise those words? Do you remember writing them? What precisely did you mean by them?’ Is this the witchcraft Amyntas was accused of, where the beloved becomes pure gold and everything else is dross? Until you find only food’s gold and a heart turned to stone.

I shut down the file. Tomorrow, I’ll have an expedition to Wessex. There’s a bus from the station and to the campus if I don’t want to bike it and risk frightening the horses in my helmet and leathers. On the other hand it would be good to roar up like Nemesis or the US cavalry. Or a witch on a motorised broomstick if that’s what they want to see.

In the end I’ve decided for the full frontal and I’m on my way this morning, a dark wedge parting the air, at one with my bike, like any centaur, except that I have to feel she’s both metal and flesh. On a bike you ride astride. With a scooter you’ve got your legs together. Next stop sidesaddle. Did witches straddle
or sidesit on their broomsticks? I’m in danger of falling into verse, a kind of incantation, as I zoom down the M3 leaving the saloons almost standing still. On past, zip between and away. ‘Poop-poop, poop-poop,’ translated into modernish as ‘zoom zoom, zoom zoom’. We’re the incarnate sound the rap car drivers try to conjure from their stereos: ‘boom boom, boom boom,’ while they wait in traffic snarls. We divide the airwaves, the bike and me. If we could go fast enough we’d hear the sound barrier crash open behind us. As it is we hardly dare hit a ton in case the fuzz is lurking somewhere behind a camera. Still it’s great hacking and yawing between the dawdling cars, the dinosaur container lorries, and their pot-bellied liquid carrier cousins. In no time there’s the junction six sliproad and I must sidle across the lanes and settle down to a respectable thirty. I pull in to a layby and study the map I downloaded from the Wessex website. Then I’m off again, weaving a leisurely route round the outskirts of the town that boasts on a hoarding that it’s home to the international pharmaceutical making pills for ills, and on the hit list I remember, of animal rights activists.

Down Wessex Road now towards the campus. Which came first, the name of the road or the uni? It was St Walburgha before, so someone must have taken inspiration from the location or nobbled the council to change the name. I cruise towards the first cluster of buildings and I’m stopped dead by a high gated iron fence. Fuck! No storming arrival then with a spectacular purring of the engine in low gear, and skirl of tyres to wake the dead. Drifting right up to the gate I cut the juice and prop the old girl up on her stand. I swing my leg over, take off my helmet and go up to the gate.

It’s the right place. A neat brass plate says so. There’s an entry phone and a numeric pad to open the side panel of the gate to let pedestrians in. But you have to know the code. That’s very clear. I stare at it, willing it to open, for someone to come through and hold it conveniently ajar for me. Beyond I can see
grounds with grass, shrubs and winding gravel paths. Way back are buildings, some old brick, others new, glass, steel and what must be concrete under the pale recon stone cladding. I can just make out the octagonal chapel of St Walburgha almost hidden by dark azaleas, where Anglican nuns once taught aspirant scholarship girls to teach.

I go back to the bike and get out my mobile. Gilbert must give me the entry code.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m outside the fence like
Love Locked Out.’

‘In my day the gate was always open.’

‘Well it isn’t now. And no one seems to be going in and out. No students I mean.’

‘They wouldn’t be.’

‘Why not?’

‘Term hasn’t begun. Not until next week.’

I feel a complete Wally. Why didn’t I check my facts, instead of zooming off into the sunrise?

‘Maybe I’ll just ring the bell and see what happens.’

‘There won’t be anyone there, except maintenance staff, porters and so on.’

I’ve just put myself at a disadvantage with Gilbert, given him the chance to feel superior. Somehow I have to reclaim the high ground.

‘Can’t you think of anyone who supported you, who might help? I need to get inside, to get the feel of things, when the place is back in business of course. I need to see someone, talk to them, sniff out the background. You’re going to want help. There must be someone who at least knows the entry code.’

‘You must realise they would be putting their own job at risk. These new security arrangements aren’t for general safety purposes, keeping out voyeurs or even would-be rapists. They are designed to keep me out and the students in. Their comings and goings will be monitored by closed-circuit video.’

‘Then we have to find someone now, before term begins, before they’re banged up inside.’

He’s gone. I peer through the bars again and think I see a blue-overalled figure moving about among the far trees with a wheelbarrow. Is Gilbert telling the truth or lying to me in spite of my warning? Did he know about the new security? Suddenly all the excitement that rode behind me on the way down like a following wind has gone out of the case and I’m stranded, gasping for air, with only an empty ride back ahead of me.

That Christmas was the first that I went to the great house but still in my guise of Amyntas, for my lady said that I was too known already in that form to pass now as another. She must have her ladies about her at Wilton which should include Mistress Griffiths who could not be sworn to secrecy. To tell truth I was glad of this for I had become so used to see myself as Amyntas as green summer turned to autumn and thence to foul winter, when all the ways were muddied to the axle and fever ran through our company at Ramsbury and the ladies took to their beds with streaming eyes and noses, and vomiting. The countess and I were kept busy with cordials and balms, boiling pimpernel in wine for healing draughts, hot and cold, and then mixing onion and honey mustard hot for unguents against sores and blains, and for purging the head. I felt a little jealousy stir in me to see how our lady tended them, holding their heads while they drew up the smell of the honey mustard to cleanse the rheum or sitting them up with an arm about their shoulders to drink down the vinum pimpernel.

For ourselves as a prophylactic, the countess and I drank every morning a draught of rosemary-flower wine. Whether that strengthened our bodies to resist the infection or drove it out once in I cannot say, only that we ourselves stayed free of rheum and fever. Then she commended me for this was a receipt
of my father’s that I learned of him, and served him well for many years until that death that no man can escape.

In December came a week of sharp frosts. Suddenly all were well again and busy with preparations to remove to the great house. There was laughter and bustle and talk of who might come to Wilton. Mistress Griffiths was disappointed that the young earl would not come, being still in disgrace, but would keep the feast with his uncle Sidney, if her majesty would let my lady’s brother home to Penshurst from his employment in Flushing as governor there, or if not Earl William would pass the season with other friends, for the countess would not receive him, he showing no sign of remorse now that his lover had been delivered of a dead child, but was gone to London to attend at the Parliament and petition her majesty to let him travel abroad to wipe out his disgrace in her service.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘the other young lord, Mr Philip, will come.’ But she would have none of that saying he was but a schoolboy still.

‘Many are married younger than seventeen,’ said the duenna, and she began to sing in a low cracked voice:

O daughter, o daughter I’ve done to you no wrong, I’ve married you to a bonny boy, his age it is but young, And a lady he will make you, that’s if you will be made Saying your bonny boy is young but a-growing.

So we took our journey from Ramsbury to Wilton, my lady in her coach with Mistress Griffiths and the duenna, and the other ladies following in their coach, and the rest of the household train behind them. I rode with the steward and other gentlemen through Marlborough where we stayed only for dinner at the Bear Inn and thence to Upavon, a pretty village by the river where we were received for the night at the manor house to lie there as the countess was accustomed to do to break her journey, though some of the household were obliged to lie at
the Antelope, it being but a small house for such a company. Often my lady would rest there two or more nights but this time she was eager to be at Wilton. So we resumed our way early in the morning as soon as it was light which being December and St Lucy’s Day was late enough if we were to reach the great house before nightfall.

‘Dearest Wilton, where I first came as a bride, how soon shall we be sundered,’ the countess said as the great gateway and the lofty walls came towards us out of the down-setting sun that turned all the sky behind to a furnace of red and gold where the clouds were puffs of pink smoke as from a giant bellows. Beside its walls runs the river whose name of ‘Nadder’ signified in the British language ‘birds’, as my father told me, and to this day the waterfowl swim there in great numbers, in especial the painted mallards in blue and green livery with their dun wives and the silver swans who sing only at their dying.

When the gate was flung open we saw the whole household assembled in the courtyard to greet their lady, all bowing deep, with music playing and the children from the cathedral to sing one of her own psalms in greeting.

When long absent from lovely Zion By the lord’s conduct home we returned We our senses scarcely believing Thought mere visions moved our fancy.

Then in our merry mouths laughter abounded Tongues with gladness loudly resounded While thus wond’ring nations whispered, ‘God with them most royally dealeth.’

My lady took up her own chamber again where she used always to lie. The steward would have had me lie with one of the grooms of the late earl’s chamber but I said I was accustomed to lie near my lady to fetch and carry, and he let me put
a pallet in an alcove of the passage that led from her anteroom, where Mistress Griffiths lay, to the great staircase. Then I saw that my sex might be the more hard of concealing among such a press of people for we were like a little town in ourselves or a country echo of the queen her court.

Every day more company resorted to us, as all the nobility and gentry of the county bringing rich presents and petitions for my lady’s word in high places, for the earl being but a minor, and besides out of favour, the world still made suit to the countess though but the dowager. There came too some of her people out of Wales from her castle of Cardiff and other her properties so that Mistress Griffiths spoke with many in her own tongue which seemed to me truly like the language of the adepts or necromancers.

She made great play to tease me with my ignorance of it, laughing and nodding towards me as the words poured from her to one of her kinswomen. ‘Ah,’ she said in English, ‘if you had been bred up by the old earl you would understand us for our language came easier to his tongue than the English.’ And indeed I have heard it said that the old earl writ English but poorly.

At her other houses as Ramsbury and Ivychurch the countess ate modestly but at the great house we dined and supped in state with many dishes of meat of birds, and beasts, as beef and mutton, coney pies, herons, larks baked, bitterns, plovers and teals with chickens, pheasant and partridge. Cheat and manchet, both coarse and fine wheaten bread we had with butter and eggs and sallets in season, for drink ale and beer and Rhenish wine, and for sweetness tarts, fritters, custards and doucets. The ladies’ skins glistened and plumped, and there was much laughter behind hands and whispering in dark passages when there was no dancing or the play to be had.

All this time the duenna became more kindly to me, telling me many things of my lady’s childhood, she having been with
her since her birth when her mother was my lady’s wet nurse. ‘Which if I should lean upon it would give me the right to call her foster sister but I would not. Yet I am privy to many things known to none else.’ And here she looked at me straightly as if some of them might pertain to me so that I kept very still.

‘My mother brought me into her service when I was a girl and charged me to watch over her and keep her from harm. And this I do as best I may. I think there is no harm in you, child Boston, but as for the others I do not trust them. They use her to gain their own ends and not out of love. But any that harm her I will find ways to bring down. There is more than one power that may be called on and the angels, as the old ways say, have care for the innocent.’

From this I understood that she had been brought up a papist and might be one still but this she would keep from my lady, being with her brother, Sir Philip, and my Lord of Leicester their uncle among the foremost in the work of reformation, and the preservation of the Protestant faith, as her psalms do attest.