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 reassuringly 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-fashion, 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 Bullo’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 hoarsely as the wind sucked at its funnel.
From floor to ceiling rose vessels and retorts and bottles, jars, pots and crucibles, matrasses 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 filings 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 eyeballs shone like red glass. 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 settled and then following his shadow to the door, shot the bolt. The furnace flared up.
“Let us begin,” said Johnnie and stood, in an odd, prayerful attitude 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-Abou-Moussah-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 passing 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 transmuted 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 passed from hand to hand and returned to Bullo, 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 scraped gently at the soft skin of the stone. A little white dust, flushed in the rosy light, slipped into the box, and Bullo replaced the stone, keeping the box of dust in his hand.
“My lady. What we are doing is not without danger—to me. You are 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 space 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 sunshine.
The veil hung, fresh and precious for the space of ten seconds, and then, breaking like floss, melting, separating, sifting and dwindling through the air, it slowly vanished. Behind it, Johnnie Bullo 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. Bullo set 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, and 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.
“Lift it,” said Janet. “Is it heavy?”
The Dowager inserted a delicate finger and thumb. “Not very. So small, and so powerful. If one scraping does all this, what mightn’t the whole Stone do?”
The white teeth flashed. Johnnie, 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 rushing filth. The furnace roared. The last thing Janet saw was Sybilla’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 them and the seconds passed, 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 Bullo 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. Bullo 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 Bullo 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, barring manufacture fresh time. You feel,” and he jerked his head toward the door, “you have no further need of me?”
“On the contrary,” said Sybilla, and gathering her stained clothes carefully, she sat down again on her blackened stool. “On the contrary: I wished it to be very clear to you that you need my good offices much more than I need yours. If these men outside take you to a sheriff with this tale, you’ll hang.”
Romanies, having no use for confessions and excuses, likewise prefer to reach a crooked point quickly. Johnnie Bullo moved away from the door, strolled to the bench, turned, and regarded the Dowager with resignation and some misgiving.
“All right. What must I do?” he inquired.
* * *
On that same evening, as the small, gusty wind blew heather off the fuel stacks and straw from the roofs and goffered the gutter mud in the High Street, Lord Culter left Edinburgh for home.
It was five months since he had seen Midculter; five months since he had ridden around the estate, or seen to his fishings and his warrens and his peats. He had watched his stock coming to market outside the city walls; had met and corresponded with Gilbert over the shipments of wool and hides and the ordering of the farms and the affairs of his dependents; his wright and his mason, his tailor and amourer and falconer and carpenter and smith and gardeners; the men who supplied his oats, meal and barley, herded his pigs and sheep and cattle, grew his peas and beans, brewed his beer and bred his horses and cared for his wealth, infield and outfield.
He had missed the lambing and the finishing of his new barns and outbuildings; the shearing; the new plantings he had decided on for the spring. For five months he had carried a sleepless sword and husbanded other, corrupt intentions.
Now he was going home. Against the red western sky the outline of the Pentland hills, each shape familiar to him, moved and fell behind him on his right. The road, climbing up into Lanarkshire, reached the high moors as the wind freshened. The sky above him, changing from turquoise to Chinese blue, drew over him the inconspicuous film of night. The horizon, lingering apple green before him, breathed out its colour scrupulously after the prostrate sun.
He had said to Buccleuch, and Dandy Hunter, seeing him off, “I’ll be at Midculter before morning”; and Buccleuch had pummelled him briskly on the shoulder and said, “Good lad. I hope it comes right for you. Kittle cattle, women, kittle cattle: but it’s wersh and wae without them.”
Bryony’s hoofs drummed in sympathy. Kittle cattle: kittle cattle. Would it come right? God knew, thought Richard—and closed his thighs like iron on the mare.
Like a wet and turgid emergence from a pool, the night became peopled with figures. Someone spoke harshly; there was a rush of soft feet and a chinking of metal against buckles. Bryony plunged, and trickling, wirelike fingers over nose and bridle secured her and then tugged and twisted at Richard himself.
Culter, kicking with his spurred boot still in the stirrup, freed his right hand and laid it on his sword, cursing himself under his breath. It was always a bad road to travel alone: it meant riding fast and staying alert, and he had been doing neither. Hell. They still had Bryony fast. There were two of them—no, three. He saw the shadow of a cudgel just in time, ducked, cut and heard a scream as he dodged and cut again.
The hands began again, twisted in his belt and pulling his leathers. The saddle became loose and he knew the girth had been slit. He slashed at the dim faces, feeling the numbness of a blow on his arm; fighting to free his sword arm from the clinging hands. The saddle was swinging, bringing him down with it. Below him, the unseen men grunted and swore; then the blade was suddenly wrenched from his grip and they leaped at him, bringing him successfully down, driving with his fists, knees and elbows into the tangle of hard bodies and then on to the road.
There was a gleam of steel: a solitary, agonized, breathless moment in which the irony of the thing struck him like a cannon ball, and then the circle of dark heads above him opened out like girasol to the sun. A brown pony, dark with perspiration, shot into the circle and decanted a thunderbolt: a dark figure which skirled and spat like a being demented.
The men about Lord Culter froze. The newcomer raged, in a language which was not English. The leader of the assassins answered, sullenly, in the same tongue and was treated to another shrivelling outburst. The other two, making an attempt to speak, were cut off by a storm of abuse. Under it, the three moved off sulkily, mounted and, without a word, disappeared as they had come into the darkness.
The owner of the brown pony remounted. Richard, shaking his head, rolled over, gr
oped for and found his sword, and got to his feet. “I trust,” said the rider in clear but sibilant English, “that you are not hurt?” His expression, so far as it could be seen, was one of resignation rather than triumph.
Richard got back his breath. “Not at all. I would be suitably grateful if I didn’t know they were your men.”
“You have the Romany?” asked his rescuer, and there was a dim flash of white teeth. “Or only a little? Then I must explain that they attacked you through no orders of mine. We are a wayward people, my lord.”
Richard flexed his arm thoughtfully, studying the immobile, spare figure. Vivid in his mind was the firelit room at Stirling, and the stained arrows on the table. He had unfastened his jacket and, pulling out one of the points, laced his broken girth with it. “I believe I could put a name to you,” he said.
The white teeth flashed again. “I hope you won’t. My people tell me, when I come home, of the little commissions they are offered. I seldom interfere. If it were not that I am at the mercy of the shrewdest of your relatives …”
Richard straightened suddenly. “My brother?”
The other was already wheeling his pony to the Edinburgh road; he laughed as he went and shook his head. “No, no. Not at all. Devil take it, not at all.” The pony’s hoofs, gently pattering, dropped into rhythm and faded, leaving the echo of wry laughter on the air.
Richard slowly gathered Bryony’s reins and put his left hand on her neck. A half-smile lifted his mouth, so that for a moment he looked astonishingly like the Master.
“Mother! What now?” he said, and lifting himself into the saddle put the mare, fast, along the Midculter road.
* * *
Patrick opened the gates to Lord Culter long past midnight, with incoherent words of welcome. He sent his chamberlain back to bed without rousing the household, and taking a candle, went alone up the main staircase and along the dimly lit corridor to his wife’s room.
There he hesitated. He had removed all traces of his adventure: he had no idea of posing as a brave but battered warrior. Was it equally unfair to take her unaware like this? He wished he had kept Patrick. He could have roused Mariotta’s maid; have sent her in to ask if she would receive him.… And if she refused? What a scene for the women, that.