Death of an Alchemist (12 page)

C
HAPTER
15

Sweltering heat makes for a terrible bedfellow. Bianca was not the only one stirring in the darkest hours of that night. On the opposite side of the river, Barnabas Hughes sat by his window staring up at the sky. A celestial river spilled across the black. A few stars winked seductively. He wished he could be so easily enticed to forget his distress.

Like Bianca, he sat in vigil over the one he loved. Her decline had come in small, almost imperceptible signs. Signs so subtle that at first he had dismissed them. He'd convinced himself his imagination was raving. Such was the fate of a man constantly asked to piece together symptoms into a named disease so that he might cure it.

Such was the fate of a man refusing to accept that his daughter might die.

It is a monstrous injustice to make a man endure the loss of his wife, then watch as his only child grows weak. Had he not suffered enough? Barnabas Hughes silently cursed his God. He could not see the purpose in being put to such trials. Was he not God's faithful servant, tending the sick in times of plague and outbreak? He was not like some who refused their duty when circumstances were uncertain or even perilous.

And for what reward? More pain and heartbreak? A merciful God should not allow his most principled disciples to be constantly cast into a hellfire of grief with no hope. Did God not want him to attend the sick and suffering?

The physician pondered the ethos of such a God and could think of no reasonable explanation. He believed himself a compassionate caregiver. An educated man. A thoughtful man. A man who worked tirelessly for the sick.

He rose from his chair and went to his daughter, asleep on his bed. Verity would be five next week. Her perfect skin appeared alabaster in the blue shadows. Every time he looked at her he saw remembrances of his lost wife. His wife was in his daughter's face, in her gait, her carriage.

His concern had begun when his daughter lost balance as she rose from the table one day. He thought she had caught her foot on a chair leg, and in the endearing logic of a young child, she scolded the chair for tripping her. A child's balance is never so assured as an adult's. Children had to grow into their sometimes awkward-fitting body. What parents didn't hold their breath and nervously watch their child navigate the top of a stone wall?

But the stumble was accompanied by dizziness, and Barnabas saw the skittering eye of one whose balance was impaired. And when her falls became more frequent and difficult to excuse, he became worried.

He left her in the care of neighbor Ann, the wife of a bread maker, who often put Verity to good use kneading dough and doing simple chores. She enjoyed the girl's sweet nature and never saw her as an inconvenience. His heart sank when he returned from tending a man with a broken leg to find Verity not at the bread maker's, where he had left her, but passed over to a second neighbor. “Verity lost her stomach a couple of times,” complained Ann. “I couldn't have her in the shop like that. No customer is going to buy from a place that smells of sick.”

Barnabas Hughes carried his daughter home, gave her a simple beef broth, and put her to bed. She recovered from her upset and the physician tried to remember what he had fed her. He suspiciously threw out their staples of barley flour and oats and bought new. However, he wondered, could he have unknowingly exposed her to the contagions he regularly came in contact with? Had he carried disease on his breath so that when he kissed Verity good night, he unwittingly contaminated her? He refused to give weight to these thoughts. How could he be the cause of his daughter's illness? God could not be so unmerciful. A father is a daughter's greatest protector. But Barnabas Hughes privately feared that he might have been her greatest betrayer.

However, Verity showed great strength of spirit. She improved to the point of tame routine. The falls and upset stomachs were committed to the past and to memory. All was forgotten. All was well.

When Verity took ill again, Barnabas believed that with his loving help she would again respond to his care and recover. But her strength waned. She stayed in bed, not having the strength even to sit up. Hughes bled her, covered her torso in every healing poultice he could think of. He sought syrups from the apothecary and forced them down her throat. Still, each day she grew increasingly weak.

Lamenting the death of his friend Ferris Stannum, the physician gazed at the boundless heavens and thought about the elixir Ferris claimed to have projected. Had the old alchemist truly discovered the nectar of immortality? The clop of hooves on cobblestones broke his rumination. Barnabas returned to his chair by the window. Unfortunately, no one would ever know.

Even if he had possession of the journal, how would he interpret Stannum's findings? How could anyone interpret those findings? Alchemists wrote in a convoluted language all their own. Sometimes only they understood their own scribbling.

Barnabas admonished himself for even thinking of the elusive philter. Its potential tortured him as much as the thought of his daughter dying. Still, what father could not imagine preventing his daughter's death when faced with its possibility? A silky breeze touched his cheek and its gentle nudge briefly distracted the physician from his sinking despair. But the interruption was short-lived. Barnabas Hughes buried his face in his hands and wept.

 

His mind in a muddle, Thomas Plumbum escaped the stifling heat of London for its more crooked counterpart to the south. Wishing to avoid Jack Blade and his coven of cheats, he headed in the opposite direction. Though Southwark teemed with decadent options and was an invitation for its own kind of trouble, Plumbum knew he could not sleep and he sought a distraction to soothe his frenetic mind.

Unwilling to part with his second most precious possession, he strapped it against his chest and buttoned his doublet. He left his rent unlocked, preferring a thief to enter without fracturing his door—doors being irksome to replace. If a clipper were to ransack his rent while he was gone, he would find nothing of value for his effort.

Thomas Plumbum's face and kidney still ached from his previous misadventure with Jack Blade, but with enough spiced ale he would sufficiently forget his discomfort. Besides, he needed to gather his wits and he could not do so at home.

He crossed the bridge, keeping to the center between the handsome homes and businesses of the wealthy. Every dark alcove harbored possible danger, so that even after he passed, he kept glancing over his shoulder, his head swiveling as if it were on a pike. He could not shake the feeling he was being followed. Relieved to be nearly halfway across, Plumbum approached the drawbridge and was glad it was level so he would not have to wait. He stepped onto its iron and timber cross members, careful not to catch his shoe in a gap. Below, the murky Thames flowed, creating the sensation that the bridge moved beneath his feet. Thomas Plumbum did not like being exposed to such height. Why had he taken the bridge? To save a mere sixpence in fare? Fool—he would take a ferry home later.

Thomas Plumbum
was
being followed. But his pursuer did not creep along behind the apprehensive alchemist as he crossed London Bridge. His stalker followed him from below.

In a cavern beneath the bridge a wherry clung to a support. For most, this would have been impossible with the water rushing by, squeezing past the constricting starlings, of which there numbered twenty. The water churned and boiled, but for this ferrier, the river's capricious nature offered no hazard. Nor did it garner even a second thought.

What caught this ferrier's attention was the unmistakable smell of alchemy.

As old as the river itself, this ferrier was not mortal. But, he
was
made from the stuff of mortal men. He was the vessel for thousands of souls; souls that had died of the plague, unwilling, and too young. He embodied their anguished pleas, their forgotten potential. The tears of a thousand mothers and fathers filled his psyche. Born from the plague but not of it, he had watched London for more than four hundred years, though time, for him, was inconsequential.

He had watched London endure bouts of epidemic and disease. He had seen fire rage through her streets, leveling homes and cathedrals. He had witnessed the destructive reign of brutal kings. But he did not choose this semi-existence, this purgatory, this limbus between the living and the dead.

He had gotten there by accident.

Every alchemist sought to understand the world around him. It was that curiosity that drove the inquisitive to experiment. While most alchemists sought the philosopher's stone, there were others who understood that small discoveries could be just as useful. He had been such an alchemist—once.

He had also been more successful than most. Basic understandings regarding the noble art came naturally to him, and he had laid the foundation for discoveries that would come later. Until Ferris Stannum, no one had delved deeper into the dark science than he.

Rarely does nature allow her secrets to be broached without a cost.

The Rat Man lifted his nose, catching the essence of alchemy, and tasted it on his tongue. Someone had discovered something of import. Someone had come as close as he had once done. Perhaps even closer. He moved his skiff without concern, for the river was void of wherriers for the moment. No one saw his boat glide out from beneath the span and disappear again under the drawbridge. The boat moved with such efficiency that it would have disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Such a passerby would have missed seeing a hooded figure whose eyes glowed green like a cat's. The creature's skeletal body had not seen the light of day in so long that his skin was gray and nearly transparent beneath a black woolen cape. Known as the “wraith of the Thames” to some, the Rat Man to others, he had existed in the imaginations of those who swore they had seen him and who believed in such entities.

What drew the wraith under the drawbridge to watch a skittish man hurry across it? Resolution. The Rat Man sought a solution to the one law he never mastered. A law that had punished him for even trying. He could not live and he could not die. He was the abomination of an experiment gone badly wrong.

And as he watched the steps of an alchemist tread across the drawbridge above, he smelled on that alchemist the solution to that depravity.

 

Thomas Plumbum cradled the ale to his lips, pondering what to do.

A steady stream of muckrakers and swindlers flowed in and out of the Dim Dragon Inn—mostly in, though it was growing rapidly late and more should have been flowing out. He studied their wizened faces coated in mud from the flats. Their entire persons from head to toe were encased in gray muck. Only the whites of their eyes, and if they were young, the whites of their teeth, offered any contrast in their dismal costume.

He should not have liked being a muckraker. He straightened his doublet, realizing his attire set him apart from the denizens of the Dim Dragon. Even though he had gotten the smell of Jack Blade's piss out of the worn garment and mended its tear, it was still a sad thing that he did not have a second one to wear instead. Such was the lot of a failed alchemist.

Spiced ale should have dulled his overactive imagination. His intent was to sooth his rattled wits and come to a solid decision. But as he quaffed one tankard after another, his mind grew more fearful.

He felt the appraising stare of three sets of eyes. Setting his drink on the board, he concentrated on reducing the number of sinister pairs to one and had almost succeeded when he felt the overwhelming urge to relieve himself of the abundance of brew sloshing in his bladder. Plumbum staggered to his feet and pitched himself in the direction of the door.

Fumbling with his codpiece, he momentarily forgot the strange sensation as he wended through the tables on his way to the back alley. He held his breath so his fingers could loosen the leather strings snug against his gut. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought he noticed someone cupping his hand to a fellow's ear while keeping his eyes on him. Plumbum freed himself of the leather pouch that constricted but accentuated his most precious possession and gave over to the torrent of relief that followed. Emptying one's bladder after waiting overlong to do so was a kind of ecstasy. He could think of only one other act that was akin to such bliss.

But his felicity was short-lived, for as the alchemist's last few spurts fell into the dirt beyond his shoe, the point of a dagger found the attention of his cheek. He froze for just a split second as his survival instinct primed his already scatty nerves. Unwilling to give over to any request or demand, Thomas Plumbum summoned his inner badger. With a sudden burst of grit he drove his shoulder into his assailant.

The man stumbled, putting out a hand to catch himself against the stone of the tavern. His eyes locked on Plumbum's and the alchemist got a look at his face. In the instant it took for the man to draw back his arm, Plumbum connected the rogue to the man receiving the whisper inside the tavern. No doubt an angler looking for an opportunity to rob a man of his money. Perhaps the alchemist would have been relieved that the man had no further ulterior motive, but this did not occur to him. The man sprang with the force of a catapult and plunged the dagger into Thomas Plumbum's chest.