Alchemy

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.

‘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.

One thing in especial I was glad of in our stay at Wilton in that I might find occasion to visit our old home in Salisbury and that churchyard of St Edmund’s where my father is buried. And now I think as I sit here writing this memorial, that if they should hang me as a witch I shall not lie beside him, my mother and brother in consecrated ground but be flung into a limepit to dissolve without hope of resurrection when the dead shall rise in the flesh. And yet I am innocent of any malicious practice which, if this is not made manifest, then I shall doubt of God himself as the atheists do since he has no power to protect the innocent.