Alchemy (9 page)

I turn to the index. There’s no mention of Boston. I try Gilbert. And there he is: Adrian; I look up his entry. It’s in a section where the writer says: ‘I shall now pass to the illustrious Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke’ under the heading: ‘Of Learned Men that had Pensions Granted to them by the Earls of
Pembroke’. First comes the bit about Gilbert, confirming Amyntas’ story in the memorial, and then pay dirt.

There lived in Wilton, in those days, one Mr Boston, a Salisbury man (his father was a brewer there) who was a great chymist, and did great cures by his art. The Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke did much esteem him for his skill, and would have had him to be her operator, and live with her, but he would not accept of her Ladyship’s kind offer. But after long search after the philosopher’s stone, he died at Wilton, having spent his estate. After his death they found in his laboratory two or three baskets of egg shells, which I remember Geber saith, is a principal ingredient of that stone.

I head for the photocopying department. My find lies like the philosopher’s stone itself faintly glowing in my briefcase as I make my way home again.

Geber, Geber, who was Geber? Google tracks him down: ‘Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to the Western world as Geber, Muslim alchemist of the eighth century. Put forward the Sulphur Mercury theory of the origin of metals based on abstraction from experiments with naturally occurring red ore or cinnabar, a form of mercury oxide which when heated produces quicksilver and sulphurous fumes. According to this theory fire was sulphur or brimstone; mercury was water. Not however the substances themselves but the abstractions: combustibility and fusibility.’ Wow!

That’s Amyntas’ experiment before the countess’ ladies. You can see how those old alchemists were trying to feel their way to some universal theory that would explain everything. Wasn’t that what Einstein was after towards the end of his life? Every so often along comes someone with a discovery or a theory that seems to have the answer: particle physics, relativity, static state cosmology, DNA and the genome. But there’s always another
question unanswered beyond it, even if the theory itself stands up. A new dimension, a micro universe we can’t see into or space we can’t penetrate. Will we ever? Or will we destroy ourselves or be smashed into our elements by an asteroid before we can find out? Every new thing we discover only seems to make the universe bigger and us smaller. Shrinking man. There ought to be pride in what we know but mostly there’s only fear. Is that why so many attempts at an alternative answer are popular now? Because we can’t face it. It’s too big for us. Like the Temple of the Latent Christ offers its believers. Do what we tell you and you’ll be all right, saved when the universe blows apart.

Maybe I’m wrong to be digging into all this. What seemed a simple case to make some bread is leading me into a cross between
Star Wars
and
The Moral Maze.
Heavy bananas, Jade. Cool it. Get back to the kitchen and cook up something solid. Get real.

An evening with the Gaos pushing out the noodles and chop suey will bring me down to earth.

‘Mary,’ I say as she hands me the small brown carrier bags to pack into my vacuum box, ‘I hope your cousin is careful to have all his papers in order. The police are very hard on illegals these days.’

Mary often interprets for her parents when a precise meaning is important. That’s why I’m telling this to her. ‘Oh he is very careful, Jade. He has his attendance sheet signed regularly at the college to show he is real student.’

‘Well if there’s ever anything I can do to help…’

‘That is kind of you, Jade.’

I realise she doesn’t know what I do when I’m not riding delivery for them. ‘It’s just that I studied law…’ I trail off, not wanting to put myself forward, not wanting them to think they’ve been deceived and I’m not what I’ve seemed these past few months.

‘I will remember, Jade, if there is any trouble, thank you.’

In the morning I’m up betimes as old Pepys had it, determined to get some answers out of Gilbert. His cheque has been lying in my desk drawer since he gave it to me while I make up my mind whether I’m taking his case or not. Now I think I’ll have a look at his writing and see if I can tell anything from it. I take out the cheque, still folded neatly in half as he passed it across the desk. I never look at clients’ cheques in front of them, out of some deep-seated embarrassment about money learnt from Linda and Rob. First it would be rude, as if you doubted their honesty. Second, it would infringe one of the sacred tenets such as: never flash your cash in public or even count it; never inspect cheques or query bills. The financial delicacies of a vanished age when a gentleman’s word was his bond and to show an interest in lucre, your own or someone else’s, was vulgar and bourgeois. Now we reel from fraud to scandal with our creative accounting and ethos of grab-all-you-can in this free-market free-for-all where the Darwinian survival of the fittest is jungle law.

I flatten the cheque and study the writing. Very small and neat like a monastic script. The date, my own name, the amount. Hang about. It isn’t Gilbert’s signature. The name on the cheque is Alastair Galton. I can’t wait for his buzz on the entry phone to confront him. I’m trying out opening questions in my head such as ‘Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you playing at?’ But while I’m waiting I run a quick search on this new name and get a complete blank. At least Adrian Gilbert existed, once upon a time. This guy is totally unknown. The buzzer sounds; punctual as usual. I let him in. I say good morning, shake hands and sit him down. I’m careful not to address him by name.

‘You haven’t paid in my cheque, Ms Green.’

The breath is almost knocked out of me by his audacity. ‘That’s because I didn’t recognise the name on the cheque,’ I lie.

‘I rather expected you to query it on the telephone.’

‘You told me when we first met that you were Dr Adrian Gilbert.’

‘The “Dr” is correct.’

‘Why did you give me a false name? I warned you about trying to deceive your own lawyer.’

‘Yes, you did. Quite properly. But you see when I first came to you, you weren’t my lawyer. I knew nothing about you. I wanted to see how suitable you were before I entrusted my case to you. You are, after all, very young and…’

‘And a woman?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Dr Galton, if that is your name, there’s enough gender discrimination in the legal profession already without you adding to it.’

‘Have you decided to represent me?’

‘Have you decided you really want me to with my obvious disabilities?’

‘I haven’t cancelled the cheque.’

‘And I haven’t paid it in. So we have reached some kind of stalemate.’

‘Stasis equilibrium, you could say.’

What the fuck am I doing with this guy? Do I need all this? ‘I think we should begin again. Your name is really Alastair Galton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you pick the name of Adrian Gilbert?’

‘I regard him as some sort of spiritual ancestor.’

‘Why are you anxious to identify with a long dead necromancer, the friend of John Dee who was both self-deceiving and deceived others and was conned in his turn?’

‘I see you have been doing your homework, Ms Green. That’s good. Gilbert was in many ways a brilliant man. He lived at a time still deficient in information whereas, we’re told, we live in the information society although I’m not ever quite sure what
that means, and perhaps we too are deceiving ourselves. You know as well as being a respected physician he was involved in navigation and the quest for the Northwest Passage. He was a fine mathematician, a would-be discoverer who never put to sea.’

‘An astrologer?’

‘So was Sir Isaac Newton, a scientific genius comparable in his own field to Shakespeare, in a time when astrology and true astronomy shaded into each other.’

‘Still, why pick his name?’

‘Because he is part of the story. And also I wanted to give you a clue, an Ariadne’s thread to follow to see whether you could find your way out.’

It may indeed be my way out. You were testing me.’

‘And you have come through splendidly if I may say so.’

‘Dr Galton, there’s something you should understand now before we go any further, if we are to go further. I may be younger than you and female but I will not be patronised. It wouldn’t be the first time either that I turned something down because I refused to be patronised.’

Suddenly I see the counsel room at Settle and Fixit and the senior partner, Henry Radipole, saying to James Chalmers, and only half joking: ‘Can’t you keep your wife under control?’ when she had tried to intervene in the discussion of a case they’d both been working on.

It’s difficult for a man of my generation…’

‘I know you are in your late forties. Young enough to know better. Who is Dr Alastair Galton?’

There’s a pause while he decides what to tell me. I stare him out across the desk.

‘Very well then. I am nobody. I tell you to save you the trouble of looking because you will find nothing on me in any reference book. I once published a monograph on white witches, long out of print. You, I imagine, will have looked me up on that thing,’ he waves a hand at my desktop PC, ‘and the internet
where they will know nothing of me either. I still prefer books myself of course. I see that electric gadget not as an instrument for greater knowledge and freedom but as an instrument for censorship, as a spoon-feeder which supplies you with what other people think you should know. You will find my doctorate in the records of the University of London at Senate House, together with a copy of my thesis.’

‘What was it on?’

‘Oh, witchcraft of course.’ He smiles.

‘They gave you a doctorate for that?’

‘It was presented as a revisitation of Margaret Murray’s
The Witch Cult in Western Europe
which a number of people, academics that is, in the seventies had tried to discredit.’

I’m lost. I don’t know where this conversation is going. ‘To get back to your CV.’

‘I followed the usual course, a BA in history, and my doctorate. Then I found a nice little post in a teacher training college.’

‘The original before Wessex, St Walburgha?’

‘Exactly so.’

‘Presumably you weren’t engaged to teach young ladies witchcraft.’

Galton, as I now have to think of him, even gives another little smile. ‘That was my private research. I taught them just the conventional history they would need to pass on to their pupils.’

‘So you stayed when Wessex took over?’

‘I had to apply for the new job in the normal way. When St Walburgha’s amalgamated with the BEd course at the local university I could have applied for a post there. In fact I did but the competition was very fierce. Status you see. And then I saw that Wessex was recruiting.’

‘Can anyone set up as a university? Don’t there have to be standards, regulations?’

‘You have to be registered of course with the appropriate examining authority and inspected. Your qualifications have to
be validated. They’ve jumped through all the right hoops. On the surface and for about a foot below they’re bona fide. It’s what lies beneath and behind…’

‘And the Boston memorial? Where did that come from?’

‘I found it in a bookshop specialising in incunabula and early manuscripts. I have quite a collection.’

‘What interested you particularly in this book?’

‘It was leafing through and realising that it was all in cipher, except that on the last blank page someone had written a key to the names represented by numbers in the text and Adrian Gilbert’s name caught my eye.’

‘You knew about him already?’

‘His name had cropped up from time to time.’

‘Dr Galton, what exactly did you give your students to read?’

‘I would prefer you to finish the whole book, or no, not perhaps that, but at least to have decided to represent me before we pursue that any further.’

I let that pass. ‘Were you able to decipher the book yourself?’ I think I know the answer to this from Amyntas’ own words that she had used a cipher of her father’s but two can play this game of testing.

‘I could read it myself. It uses a fairly common, common to the alchemists that is, set of symbols, combined with a simple alphabetical displacement code.’

‘No need for a Ventris then.’ There’s something about Galton that makes me show off in this childish way, as if we’re in some schoolboy competition. ‘I’ve sent for an information pack from Wessex to get more background on them. Maybe I’ll register for a course just to get inside. Would you be willing to pay the fee if I decide it’s the only way in?’

‘Then you’ll take my case?’

‘I still don’t know if you have one. This is just preparatory investigation.’

For the first time the irritating smugness drops away and he
looks really gutted. I mustn’t start feeling sorry for the guy and give more than I’m ready to out of pity.

‘When will you make up your mind?’

‘I’ll call you,’ I say, ‘when I’ve come to some decision.’

‘Please at least pay in my cheque for what you’ve already done. Expenses must have been incurred…’

‘As long as it isn’t regarded by you as a contract.’ I type out a receipt with disclaimer and print it off. Galton signs it meekly. We shake hands. And yet I know I’ll take the case and not just because I need the bread. I’m hooked, like falling in love. You don’t feel the gaff go in that flips you gasping on to the bank, however much you twist and turn. You ignore the stab of the knives you’re suddenly walking on like the Little Mermaid, out of your rational element, in thin air that’s heady with the ecstasy of lust or power or the thrill of the chase.

I think those words of my lady’s contriving will never leave me that I learned the next day and rehearsed with Secretary Samford in the forenoon. They are here with me now in my cell and I repeat them like some old receipt against the madness that threatens, for if I should lose my reason I should indeed lose all.

The secretary began with the words of old Thenot:

I sing divine Astrea’s praise,

O Muses! Help my wittes to raise

And heave my verses higher.