Alchemy (46 page)

Why haven’t I told them everything I know or think I know instead of just the bits I agreed with Charlie? Because it’s complicated. Because they wouldn’t believe me and I would have to explain endlessly, involving Galton who couldn’t be relied on not to feed them some garbled tale of witchcraft and persecution. Because they might suspect that Charlie, Omi and I had something to do with the fire and they haven’t ruled out arson.

I take the bus to the gates of Wessex. They’re closed with a policeman on duty in front. I produce my authorisation and he swings open the gate. Not locked then. He wanted to know exactly where I was going and cautioned me for my own safety to stick to the paths. But I have to see the chapel. The smell of smoke and burning stains the air all over the campus. I take a chance that the electricity is still off and the CCTV not working and duck round the back of the bike shed. But I don’t get far. The area leading to the chapel is cordoned off. The corridor that runs past it has gone too. Smoke is still filtering out of the blackened stubs of walls and from the piles of debris on the ground. Men in uniform pick through the charnel heaps. I turn away, hoping at least the three students had lost consciousness before they died and that Daniel Davidson’s beliefs had somehow anaesthetised him against a horribly painful death.

Bishop and Molders, if those were their names, must be out of the country by now. Were they lovers or just partners in greed? And then there was the Apostle Joachim if he existed and wasn’t just a phantom conjured up by the new alchemy, virtual reality, part of the trappings of the scam. I am glad of the throb of the Crusader, its solid metal and leather, and the rush of air over my helmet. I know I have to make contact with Galton but as I near the point where I could turn off for his road I notch up the engine and roar on.

There is a message from Charlie waiting for me. The police
have merely told him to keep himself available but haven’t called him in. Omi is staying with him at the Gaos. He has rung some of his Wessex friends on their mobile phones. They had seen the chapel burning from the hall windows but couldn’t break the locking circuit until suddenly it went, presumably with the rest of the electrical system. They’d been evacuated by the police to a church hall in the town. Now they were making arrangements to go home.

Some of those who’d been in the chapel are still in hospital. Their families have been notified. The staff are being interviewed in turn but since they all live away from the college they know nothing, except that they no longer have an employer or a job. Wessex University has simply melted in the flames, dissolved into an airy nothingness.

I feel I should be doing something but I don’t know what. Presumably the police will get round to setting Interpol on to the supposed owners of Wessex, to trying to trace Bishop and Molders. Unfinished business. To pass the time and deal with my own restlessness and frustration, I decide to read the last few pages of Amyntas’ memorial though what reference it has to recent events I can’t really see. Still it’s something to do and it may give me the impetus to ring Galton.

Thus I contemplated my fate and the remedies I had in my hands which could offer me only the comfort of death. And so the night came and I fell into a sleep with the help of a little of the poppy the gaoler’s wife had procured for me. Then in the morning when I was ready to despair at the emptiness, except of fear, of the days ahead, for I had brought my memorials up to the present and no more was likely to befall me in that place except that I should not live to record, I heard the gaoler at the door of my cell.

‘You have a visitor mistress.’

I could not descry the figure that stood behind him in the darkness of the passage but terror seized me that it might already have the face of death. Great was my relief then when the duenna came forward into the poor light of my cell. ‘I will leave you,’ the gaoler said. ‘Knock when you are ready to go.’

‘Our lady hearing of the decision against you has sent me. I am sorry to see you in such a place for all you have put her in some jeopardy.’

‘How could she hear in so short a time since she is gone to London?’

‘She removed only to Ivychurch but let it be thought that she had gone away. She was brought word of the Grand Jury its judgement that you were not to be tried but also of Justice Ludlow’s confining you at Dr Gilbert’s insistence.’

‘I cannot endure this place for so many months together. I would rather die.’

‘Do not be so passionate child. The countess knows this well enough. She sends you this letter and purse and your own little chest from the laboratory at the great house. She has made provision for your safety. You must leave here as soon as it is dark. Ask no more and speak to no one of it. Now I must go. No one must know that I have been here, except the gaoler. But you must not speak even to him of it.’

Then she knocked upon the door. It was opened, she passed through and I heard it bolted behind. I went to stand beneath the window and opened the letter from my lady.

‘Child, I know your distress and will not abandon you. Yet my hands are tied. Do as you have been bid and God go with you. Think of me sometimes with kindness.’

It was signed MH with the Sidney pheon as was her custom. I opened the purse and discovered more than sufficient money to effect my escape and sustain me for a while. In my own little chest I found as well as several of the things necessary to a physician, a little ivory-handled dagger, with her symbol engraved on it, to cut
up meat, sharpen my quill and defend myself. Yet I wept, half in gratitude but most because this was a last farewell. I knew I must vanish from her presence and never attempt to be near her again. I have waited out the day in fear that some harm should come to me before the night. When the gaoler came to bring me meat and drink he would not look into my face. At the last when he returned with a taper to light my candle he looked back at the door and said: ‘A good night to you mistress from me and my wife.’ Then he left. I heard the latch fall but no bolt being shot. Now I am dressed in my clothes as Amyntas with my other few possessions bundled into my gown. I must put out my candle before I see if the door will open. Then I must make my way feeling along the wall, silently past the cell where the felons lie, trusting that the door at the end and the postern beyond are open and unguarded. I have put down a crust of bread for the mouse and am ready to take my leave.

I close the page. I hope she made it but I’ll never know. I feel as if someone has gone out of my own life. Time to ring Galton.

‘Ah, Ms Green. I thought I might have a call from you soon.’

‘I’m not sure how much you’ve heard. It’s all been rather hairy.’

‘I saw the reports of the fire but they didn’t give a great deal of information. Can you tell me any more?’

‘I was there.’

‘Where?’

‘In the chapel when it caught fire. Up in one of the galleries.’ ‘Indeed. I believe they found four bodies.’

‘Yes. There would have been more killed but most of them managed to climb out.’

‘So what is happening now?’

‘Wessex has ceased to exist. As far as anyone knows Bishop and Molders have left the country. That’s my guess anyway.’

‘Almost a kind of justice. Retribution.’

‘Except that four relatively innocent people died.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. What do we do now, Ms Green?’

‘We do nothing. There’s nothing to be done. You can’t take a chimera to an employment tribunal.’

‘The Temple of the Latent Christ? The putative owners?’

‘Vanished. If they ever existed. How much did you really know, Dr Galton? I believe it was all set up to get gullible young people to make over their money to the organisers. That it was meant to look like a mass suicide. If you suspected this and you could have told me right in the beginning we might have prevented even those four deaths.’

‘I didn’t know the details. I only knew something was wrong. I’d felt it, a miasma of evil from the time they took over. I came to you because I hoped that in looking into my dismissal you would find out. If I’d tried to tell you, or anyone else for that matter, that I felt that something was wrong you would have said, quite rightly, “where’s your evidence?”’

‘Why me?’

‘I needed someone independent. The name attracted me of course. I hoped you would be young. Willing to delve more deeply into rather strange waters than a conventional firm.’

‘Why exactly did they sack you? How did the Amyntas memorial come into it?’

‘I used it to teach the students about alternative philosophies, ways of looking at things, ways of being. And about the evolution of knowledge; how we’ve stumbled down the centuries looking for answers. I handed out extracts from some of Amyntas’ recipes; prescriptions I suppose we would call them now. I took in some of the ingredients and one of those little gas stoves campers have and that we sometimes use in our rituals so that we could try the recipes out.’

‘Were they ones that included opiates?’

‘Just a mild sedative. The garden poppy. Such a handsome
flower,
Papaver somniferum,
double frilled lilac petals and silvery leaves. They pop up everywhere in my vegetable garden. A gentle calming herb. But some of the students thought they were hallucinating. Word got to the dean. It was all the excuse they needed to get rid of me.’

‘Did they think you knew something about what was really going on? Is that why they wanted to get you out of Wessex?’

‘Perhaps. But more I think they were afraid I would undermine their influence with the students. I see now that would have spoilt their plans. At the time I thought it was just jealousy and fear of any alternative system of belief.

‘There’s one thing I have to tell you, Ms Green, one thing I embroidered a little. I said my copy was stolen. That was a little fiction, a white lie to make my story more convincing. No one apart from you has ever seen the whole thing.’

‘I warned you not to lie to your lawyer. What else have you been keeping from me? How was I supposed to do my job on such flawed information? How much did you know about the Temple setup?’

‘I know it encouraged people to join their absurd sect. I didn’t know why.’

‘Absurd?’

‘Manufactured from quasi-scriptural bits and pieces with no real foundation.’

‘Couldn’t the same be said of your beliefs?’

‘We have a distinct ancestry, an historical basis. Ours is a belief system that encourages the personal development of the individual. That’s why we appeal to many people today.’

I realise I’m getting nowhere in this conversation. It’s time to go. ‘What will you do now? I think you might find it difficult to get another educational post.’ Maybe it’s a mean thing to say but I’m trying to inject a little reality into his thinking.

‘I’ve decided to realise some of the equity in my house. The high priestess and I would like to travel. So I suppose this is
goodbye, Ms Green. You’ll send me your final bill. After all you’re not responsible for how things turned out.’

‘And the manuscript?’

‘Keep it. I don’t need it any more. I’m not at all sure it isn’t a complete forgery anyway. But it’s served its purpose.’

The line’s gone dead. I feel completely defeated but I’m not sure why. Galton and his high priestess are going off to dance naked hand in hand around the world. He’s even cast doubt on Amyntas, someone I feel I’ve been living with all these weeks but who he says might never have existed. I look at the pile of mail on my desk. The computer is showing thirty-two emails demanding to be opened.

The future seems empty. Helen’s gone and fading even from my dreams. Is that what the countess is saying in her last aria or what Donne meant with his ‘I am every dead thing’? This absence, nothingness we fall into and that we try to climb out of on the silken ladder of love or the gossamer of faith, the old transforming alchemies that are still as potent as ever.

The phone is ringing. I pick it up.

‘Yes?’

‘Lost Causes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I asylum seeker. Please help.’