Part 37 (1/2)

Sir Wat studied him in silence before making his way back to the c.o.c.kburn brothers. He jerked his head. ”What'll happen now?.

”Oh. Well, he's at the horn, isn't he? It'll be the Castle then, I dare say, for a week or two; and then a sweet short trial and a swing in New Bigging Street. Nothing surer than that..

And so Richard, after all, escorted his young brother to Edinburgh.

2. One Loss is Made Good

”Quant corn paignons s'en vont juer us n'ont pointe tou dis essou perCras connins ne capons rostisFors le terme qu'ils ont argent .

It was so long since the Dowager had broken into song that Mariotta and her two guests were surprised. Janet grinned, and Agnes Herries, who was hail asleep, blinked and said, ”Is it time yet?.

”Not quite,” said Sybilla. The smallest flush under the white skin was the only sign that she was excited: she was beautifully dressed and not at all frayed in manner as was Mariotta, who showed the effects of the three newsless weeks since Tom Erskine's return from Hexham.At midnight, in their presence, Johunie Bulb was to turn a pound of lead into gold. Of the four women, Janet Buccleuch was deeply interested in Sybilla's experiment. Propping her large green velvet slippers on a footstool, she said, ”Did the gypsy want a lot of gold off you for this? I hope you were careful..

The Dowager raised candid eyes over the rims of her gla.s.ses.

”Of course, dear. But the gold will have reached him only ten minutes before we do, which is just”- glancing at her enormous German clock-”about now. Shall we go?.

Mariotta, leaning over, touched Agnes Herries awake. She opened her eyes with a jerk, followed the others vaguely to the door, and then seized Mariotta in a vicelike grip. ”What if he raises the devil ?.

Mariotta laughed, and withdrawing her arm, put it rea.s.suringly around the bride's shoulders. ”What if he does? Sybilla would simply exchange recipes for sulphur ointment and give him a bone for the dog. Come along . .

Outside it was cool and very dark. A wisp of straw, rolling over the cobbles in the light wind, caught the beam from the doorway and scuttled, spider-fas.h.i.+on, into the night; nothing else moved. Sybilla shut the big doors and in the darkness they walked over to where the small window of Johnnie Bulb's laboratory glowed like a malign and bloodshot eye. The Dowager rapped on the pane; there was a pause; a stealthy rattle of heavy bolts, and the door to the laboratory swung open.

The heat buffeted their faces. The low, square building was lined with scarlet from the glow of the furnace, snoring hoa.r.s.ely as the wind sucked at its funnel.

From floor to cbiling rose vessels and retorts and bottles, jars, pots and crucibles, matra.s.ses and pelicans, balloons, serpents and mortars, aludels, funnels and beakers. The walls bobbed and winked and glimmered with vermilion eyes as if wattled with bloated and striking serpents, swaying with the flames.

There was a wooden bench, littered with tongs and iron ffiings and dirty dishes and knives and heaps of flour and sand for the lutes; an old athanors, unused; sundry pots, chipped and blackened, on the floor; and two different sizes of bellows hanging on nails beside an outburst of chalked inscriptions in some sign language firmly based on triangles. There was an old carpet on the stone floor and two wooden stools, beside which stood Johnnie.

Johnnie's eyeb.a.l.l.s shone like red gla.s.s. His face, swarthy and flushed, was running with perspiration and his short, wiry frame writhed darkly over the bottles and knives, coiling and disappearing in the leaping red light. He bowed without speaking and indicated the stools. The Dowager sat quickly on one and Janet on the other, with the two girls standing behind. Johnnie waited until they were settledand then foliowing his shadow to the door, shot the bolt. The furnace flared up.

”Let us begin,” said Johnnie and stood, in an odd, prayerful att.i.tude by his bench, his brown, long-lashed eyes fiery and grave.

”Tonight we follow where only the greatest have led. Tonight we invoke the aid of those who have allowed us to penetrate to the Chamaman, the Tan, the great mystery. We honour Yeber-AbouMoussah-Djafar-al-Sofi, the Master of Masters; Zosimus and Synesius; Trismegistus the Thrice Great; Olympiodorus, Philosopher to Petasius, King of Armenia; Nagarjuna who discovered distillation; and the blind Abu-Bakr-Muhammad-Ibn-Zakariyya-al-Razi himself.

”We ask them to lend power to our Stone, that the imperfect metal, the crude substance of Saturn, shall fall into corruption and in the flames of its pa.s.sing generate the moisture of mercury and the smoke of sulphur until, refined, purified, perfected, the substance in our crucible will no longer have the attributes, the vices, the weakness of lead, but instead will be trans.m.u.ted to perfect gold..

He touched gently one of the bellied pots at his feet, swathed in cloths and with an iron clamp about its neck. ”The gold is here; the chains and coins given me by Lady Culter, already melted down and ready to begin the reaction which compels the transformation to begin. Here”-he lifted a grey brick from the table-”is a pound of lead. Will you test it for me?.

Janet took it from him and examined it closely. It pa.s.sed from hand to hand and returned to Bulb, who held it so that they could all see quite clearly, and placed it in the retort. ”So. And now the Stone..

He bent over his bench for a moment, and turned. In his tough brown palm lay a box, beautifully made in silver, with Arabic characters on the lid and a small mirror inset in the bottom. He opened it, holding it for them to see.

Inside, on a bed of white velvet, lay a dirty grey stone, flaked and powdery in texture and uneven in shape. Johnnie spoke gently. ”The Stone of the Wise. The Magisterium. The Universal Essence.” He lifted it delicately and, opening another, clean box on his desk, he sc.r.a.ped gently at the soft skin of the stone. A little white dust, flushed in the rosy light, slipped into the box, and Bulb replaced the stone, keeping the box of dust in his hand.

”My lady. What we are doing is not without danger-to me. Youare quite safe. But I must ask you not to speak, and not to move, until the mystery is over.

”For myself, I confide my safety to the alchemists and the philosophers who watch us, and speak the words of the Emerald Table:True it is, without falsehood: certain most true. That which is above is like to that which is below; and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing. And as in all things whereby contemplation of one, so in all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adoption. The father thereof is the Sun; the mother, the Moon. The wind carries it in its womb: the earth is the source thereof. it is the father of all works of wonder throughout the world. The power thereof is perfect. Thus thou wilt possess the brightness of the world, and all obscurity will fly far from thee . .

With steady hands, he lifted the great jar and set it to its resting place over the fire. Next, withdrawing the clamp, he tilted the little box of powder so that its contents drifted within the neck of the crucible to join the metal inside.

For the s.p.a.ce of a heartbeat there was silence.

Then with a waft and a roar, blue smoke lipped like cream from the mouth of the retort, folded, arched and rolled servilely through the hut. It thickened, dropping languid fingers to the floor and flattening itself against the wooden roof; it became dense, black and choking with the stink of sulphur; it yawned blindly in the senses and the fire, leaping as if freed of some monstrous birth, rent its thinnest layers with tongues of yellow and crimson.

Agnes screamed. Mariotta, after a single alarmed cry, held the girl tightly and stood still. Janet, gripping her stool, watched the Dowager until she could barely see her, close as she was, for the swirling fumes. They were enclosed, hot and foul and black as charcoal, they were defying panic when, sweet as a summer dawn, the smoke bloomed, and bright gold rising living from its roots flooded the dark curtain and turned it into the pure yellow of Easter suns.h.i.+ne.

The veil hung, fresh and precious for the s.p.a.ce of ten seconds, and then, breaking like floss, melting, separating, sifting and dwindling through the air, it slowly vanished. Behind it, Johnnie Bulb appeared, a shadow, a monochrome, a flat and coloured impasto, and finally the vivid man, standing beside the furnace. In one hand was the clamp, and he was raising from the fire the heavy, blackened jar.

There was an iron plate on the floor in front of the Dowager. Bulbset the crucible there, and the heat from it made them draw back. They watched in silence as Johnnie stepped up, an iron bar in his hands. He swung it, an~ the neck of the jar broke at its base.

In. silence he proffered the Dowager his tongs. She bent, groping within the crucible. The instrument gripped; she raised it and lowered what it held to the floor. It was a small block of dull metal, unmistakably gold. There was nothing else in the jar at all.

Words could not contain their triumph and amazement. The bottles and jars chattered and clinked and the walls wept tears of strange emotion. Where there had been a block of lead, there was a block of gold. The Stone of the Wise was powerful indeed.

When she could hear herself speak, the Dowager, scarlet with pleasure, was also urgently pressing. ”May we see it again? May we see the Stone again? Now we know it is the true Stone..

She had been less than tactful, and he demurred at first; but both Mariotta and Agnes added their voices, and finally he brought out the silver box. Sybilla opened it lovingly.

”Lilt it,” said Janet. ”Is it heavy?.

The Dowager inserted a delicate finger and thumb. ”Not very. So small, and so powerful. If one sc.r.a.ping does all this, whaL mightn't the whole Stone do?.

The white teeth flashed. Jobnnie, royally confident, was in carefree mood. ”It would burn as the sun in your hand would burn, my lady. But you will wish to use it sparingly and make it last long..

”Not particularly,” said Sybilla. She weighed the precious thing a moment in her hand, a calculating look in the blue eye, and then pitched it wholesale into the heart of the furnace.

Everybody screamed at once, and Johnnie's shout was the loudest of all.

The roar and belch of black smoke this time pounced on them like the black underbelly of the ancient Chaos himself, snarling and surging about them with inhuman venom. It grew dark: far darker than before. Their eyes became blind as the eyes of the dead and the unborn; their senses thickened and stifled beneath the blanket of sulphur and their skins grew heavy and clogged with the rus.h.i.+ng filth. The furnace roared. The last thing Janet saw was Sybilia's head, like eidelweiss on some black, mirrored tarn. She took two strides and, embedding her powerful grasp in Sybilla's long sleeves, hung on. Then they were all lost to each other.

There was no yellow flare. The sightless nightmare engulfed themand the seconds pa.s.sed, and then minutes, of black choler, livid and briefly guttering with the surge of the furnace. Light came reluctantly, clearing the blackness in misty circles, like clean water running white and graining over the blackened face of a drawing.

The floor became visible to them; then the stools; the lower part of the bench, and the five persons in the laboratory, three of them in much altered positions. Instead of commanding the furnace, Johnnie Bulb was standing hard by the door, looking out of the corners of his eyes at Sybilla. The Dowager had reseated herself and with Janet peering beside her, was poking energetically inside a large crucible, the twin of the one which stood shattered on the iron plate still in front of her.

”Such a useful thing, smoke,” said Sybilla. ”Now what have we here? Yes. I thought so..

She plunged her arm inside the jar and lifted something out, displaying it to them all. ”One pound of lead, untouched. From the first crucible, stealthily hidden beneath the bench. Leading us to the second crucible, now broken, and containing one block of lead (at a guess) thinly coated with gold. Leading us to the further matter of my chains and coins which were supposed to be in the first jar but are (at a guess) inside the bench drawer instead. Yes, here they are.

”Dear me. Having supplied me with my coated brick and my Stone, Mr. Bulb meant I suppose to pocket the gold intended for the experiment and to stimulate a small regular income of gold with which to repeat his initial success. I do call that a little grasping, when I seemed to have housed and fed and paid him practically all winter.

I shouldn't try it, my dear man. The door wouldn't open for a very good reason: half my servants are outside with pikestaffs. Didn't you know that Dame Janet dabbled in alchemy too? She has been a most valued adviser..

Standing against the door, Johnnie Bulb showed his teeth; and there was something of the occult still about his smile, although he was unarmed and rather dirty, as they all were, and his hair was curling over his eyes. ”At least, as you say, I had a winter's lodging for it,” he said impudently. The brown eyes were limpid. ”Have I made an error? I was under the impression you were buying my services.

The blue eyes were equally seraphic. ”Your services proved a little expensive..

He shrugged a little. ”I did all I could be expected to do, barringmanufacture fresh time. You feel,” and he jerked his head toward the door, ”you have no further need of me?.