Alchemist's Apprentice (11 page)

She gazed into the fire and smiled at private memories, then sighed. ‘But I was headstrong. I wouldn't have anyone else making my decisions for me. I ran off with a young tailor who often came to the house to make clothes for my brother, and I became his wife.' She smiled again, a little more wryly this time. ‘He set up shop here in Shipley but for obvious reasons he couldn't do business for my father any more, nor for any of the local gentry, and it was a hard struggle. We survived though we lived in constant fear of discovery.'

‘That's why you talk differently,' said Jack.

Nell laughed. ‘Can you still hear it?'

‘Yes. It's very clear to me. Everybody must know who you are.'

‘A lot do, it's true. But no one ever gave me away and I'm grateful for that. Not that it matters any more. I'm dead and forgotten as far as my brother is concerned. It's all his, now.'

‘What about your children? Do they know?'

‘I only had one child,' said Nell. ‘She died of consumption a few weeks after her father did.'

The information induced no sympathy in Jack. To acknowledge tragedy in the lives of others would have been to acknowledge his own, and that he could not do. Death was common; everyone had experience of it. Why give it power?

Nell, in any case, seemed to expect no response. ‘I was too proud to go back to my family,' she continued, ‘even though I was close to desperation. I struggled on my own for a while, but not for long. Another man came along and I married again. And when he died, I married again and here I am, wearing out a third husband!'

Jack looked around and noticed for the first time the evidence that a man lived there; a large pair of trousers hanging beside the chimney, a flat cap on the nail inside the front door. It made him nervous. This latest husband might not take as kindly to young thieves as his wife did.

‘You needn't worry,' said Nell. ‘He won't be home for a day or two. He's a weaver and he's gone to buy fleeces in the market at Bradford. I'll give you a bed for the night while you forget about Barney, but you'll have to go in the morning.' She lifted the lid of the pot, which was just beginning to steam, and gave the contents a stir. ‘Not that I wouldn't mind keeping you if it was up to me, since I have none of my own.'

Jack reflected that he wouldn't have minded being kept, at least for a while, but Nell's thoughts had moved on. For a moment she looked at the ground with a melancholy expression, then her face cleared and she smiled.

‘I have no regrets,' she said. ‘None at all. I've made my own decisions and I've stood by them, even when times were hard. I believe that we make our own happiness, Jack. In here.' She pointed to her breast as she spoke. ‘We may not be able to control everything that happens outside us, but in here we are our own masters.'

She said no more but busied herself with dusting the pewter which stood on a narrow little dresser beside the door. Jack watched her, thinking about what she had said, but the warmth of the fire was soporific and before long his chin dropped on to his chest and he dozed off.

When Nell shook him awake, the daylight had gone and a pair of tallow candles burned on the mantel above the hearth. The first thing he was aware of was considerable pain around his cut and bruised face, but the smell of the pottage soon overcame it and he sat up eagerly.

‘I made it good and soft for you,' said Nell, handing him a bowl. ‘If you can't eat it you can drink it.'

Even that was not so simple, but the pain wore off as the meal went on, and things were made a lot easier when the loose tooth broke free of its moorings in his gum. He spat it out and threw it into the fire.

Nell said nothing until her bowl was empty. Then she sat back and sighed contentedly.

‘That's why I don't want riches,' she said. ‘When you have everything it all tastes the same. There's nothing left to enjoy. But a bowl of good stew when you're hungry, now that's pleasure.'

Jack did not reply, and after a moment or two, Nell laughed. ‘I don't suppose you'd agree with me, though, would you?'

Jack shrugged. The truth was that he was too intent upon the food to have an opinion either way. But Nell pressed on.

‘You'd like to be rich, wouldn't you?'

Jack couldn't answer. The truth was that he had never considered it. There was a vague dream somewhere deep in the recesses of his unconscious mind, based upon fairy stories his mother had told them all when he was small. Happy ever after. It was nothing to do with real life.

‘What if I could tell you how?'

‘How what?'

‘How to be rich?'

Jack experienced a silent groan in his heart like a nausea of the spirit. Why was it that the world wouldn't seem to leave him alone? Why did it have to keep pumping him up and then letting him down again? All the same, he sat up a little straighter and looked towards Nell with interest. She smiled and refilled his bowl.

‘Not far from here,' she said, ‘to the east of the town, where the best land is, there's a great house where a very wealthy man lives. He's a Duke, actually. His name is Neville Gordon. I'm not part of that world any more and I have no dealings with it, but I still have spies; I know what goes on. And this is what I have heard.'

There was a sudden scrape and flutter of bats in the eaves and Jack jumped, but Nell went on regardless.

‘Gordon is a great breeder of horses. He is famous for his race horses throughout the length and breadth of England. People come from all over the country to bring mares to his stallions or to buy young stock. He is breeding up a strain he calls ‘thoroughbred', which comes from crossing good English hunter mares with fleet, fine boned stallions from the East, across the seas. He has many sons and daughters of a horse called the Byerly Turk which was brought into the country about thirty years ago.'

Jack was frowning with the effort of trying to understand. He loved horses so much that he was willing to put up with a lot, but the string of unfamiliar words was having its usual effect on his mind. Nell seemed to appreciate his difficulties.

‘But you needn't concern yourself with all that,' she said. ‘All you need to know is that a few months ago Gordon went to Arabia himself and brought back a young stallion to breed with his mares. It was the talk of the whole county when it happened. But what isn't so well known, and is being kept very quiet, is that the horse has gone missing.'

‘Gone missing?'

Nell nodded. The candles flickered and threw dim light into the poky corners. In the street outside, men's voices approached and receded again. Nell's eyes were bright, enjoying the effect her story was having on her guest.

‘Gone missing,' she said. ‘The colt was quite mannerly for some time after he arrived. The crossing would have tired him, no doubt, and the Duke took great pains to make sure he recovered his strength. It's possible that he pampered him too much, because he kicked a stable boy and broke his leg, then took off across the country and up on to the moors, jumping everything in his path. The party that set out to bring him back only succeeded in driving him further off, and for a long time there was no word of him at all.'

Jack's eyes were wide with curiosity. He remembered the fine, shining horses at Master Gregory's house, and although he wasn't sure what a moor was, his mind was conjuring up spectacular images of what it might be. Nell was clearly enjoying some private thoughts of her own, because she smiled to herself for a while before she continued.

‘You can imagine the Duke's state of mind. He has lost the most wonderful horse he ever owned; a horse that he crossed the ocean to buy and bring home. But he can't tell anyone, you see?'

‘Why not?'

‘Because if it was widely known that such a valuable horse was roaming free, all the thieves and rogues in the countryside would be out hunting for it, wouldn't they? And who knows where it might end up? No. He has kept very quiet about all this, Jack.'

‘Then how do you know?'

‘As I told you, I have my spies. And one of them has told me something very interesting indeed. The Duke, it seems, has made a quiet offer to a few trusted parties in the area. Anyone who catches the Arabian horse and brings it back safely will have the hand of his youngest daughter in marriage and a fine house with its own estate to go with her.'

Jack waited for more, but Nell was looking at him with shining eyes as though she, too, was waiting. ‘Well?' she said at last.

‘Well, what?'

‘Aren't you interested?'

‘I didn't know you could swap horses for people.'

Nell clucked impatiently. ‘Oh, anything can be bought or sold at the right price,' she said. ‘But you haven't understood, have you?'

‘Understood what?'

‘You could claim the reward, Jack. A fine young bride and a house and lands. You'd be rich, don't you see?'

Jack could see four candle flames reflected in Nell's eyes. He watched them for a while and realised that he was waiting for a sentence that began with ‘but'. When it appeared that Nell had no more to say, he supplied it himself.

‘But they wouldn't give them to me.'

‘Why not? Trusted friend to trusted friend, that's how the message is passed on. A trusted friend gave it to me and I'm giving it to you. Neville won't go back on his word. He couldn't, without losing face. Among trusted friends, that is.'

Jack tried again. ‘But I can't catch a wild Arabian horse. I couldn't even put the tack on old Dobbs properly. Even if I could get near him, he'd probably kill me.'

Nell shrugged indifferently. ‘Then you'd better not try,' she said. ‘Tell someone else who has more courage and let them try. If you don't believe in yourself there's no sense in undertaking anything, is there? But I'll tell you this. Sooner or later someone will do it and it could just be someone like you. Someone with nothing to lose and everything to gain. Someone who can use their wits and think of a different way of doing things.'

Jack wasn't sure whether to feel offended or ashamed. ‘Why are you telling me all this?' he asked.

‘Because I thought you might still be young enough to believe in a dream,' said Nell. ‘But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you're not.'

T
HAT NIGHT, JACK FOUND
it difficult to sleep. His bed was up in the loft, beneath the eaves where bats came and went throughout the night. He could hear the flubber of their leathery wings sometimes so close that he could feel the breeze on his cheeks, but it was not that which kept him awake. Nor was it his jaw which, although stiff, was no longer very painful. He had spent too long dozing in front of the fire and now his mind was fully alert.

Nell was sleeping on the settle in the chimney corner in the room below. As Jack listened to her regular breathing, he couldn't stop thinking about the horse roaming loose on the moors. His imagination created a hundred possibilities for him, some ending in triumph and others in failure. But after each one the same doubts returned. Why should he believe such an unlikely story? He knew nothing about Nell, after all. Perhaps her head was full of all kinds of wild imaginings? It would be absurd to go tearing off into the wilderness with nothing more to go on than her word.

When he did eventually fall asleep, he dreamt that he was outside the alchemist's house, looking for eggs in the bushes and the hidden corners of the sheds where the hens chose to nest. He searched long and hard without success until at last he found a single smooth, white egg. He was jubilant, and ran into the house with his prize. But it wasn't the alchemist's house any longer. It was his mother's house and Matty was curled up in the chimney corner, gazing out with sunken eyes.

Jack approached him, holding out the white egg. But Matty was too sick. He turned his face to the wall. The egg dropped from Jack's fingers and fell towards the ground.

Before it could land and break, Jack woke. He was alone in the dark little roof space above Nell's parlour, and he was sweating, gasping for breath. He pulled his blanket round his head and entreated sleep to return but it would not.

In the morning he slipped quietly down from the loft, taking care not to waken Nell, who was still snoring softly on the settle. The blanket that the alchemist had given him was draped over a wooden clothes-horse beside the fire. For the first time in weeks it was dry.

Jack went out into the yard and stood in the damp morning, looking up at the dark range of hills which loomed above the little town. They were gloomy and forbidding, but at the same time infused with a sense of mystery which sent a tingle through his bones. It was Hermes, he knew, trying to lure him on again, and for a long moment he wished that he had gone back to Tom and taken what was coming to him.

What did it mean, to follow a dream? Jack's dreams were all like the one he'd had a few hours before; night terrors which shocked him awake and left him staring into the darkness. Could there be another kind of dream? A good kind? Perhaps there were other ways of making gold?

Inside the house, Nell woke and coughed. Jack gave her time to get up and dressed, then went back inside. She was yawning, still sitting on the edge of the settle, still in her night clothes.

‘Morning, Jack.'

‘Morning.'

‘You'll be off, then.' It wasn't a question.

‘I suppose I will, yes.'

‘Good lad. I'll give you what's left of Barney's cash. You can do what you like with it.' Her face was tired and lifeless, still puffy with sleep. She lifted her skirt from the stool where it lay and untied a kerchief stitched on to the waistband. ‘There you are. Do what you like with it.'

Jack took the small coins she offered.

‘Not enough?' said Nell, with slight irritation.

‘It's plenty,' said Jack.