Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets

by S. G. MacLean

  From his place slumped against the cold furnace, Middleton had followed the direction of my gaze. ‘It is not as you think.’

  ‘You do not know what I think,’ I said, when I could find my voice.

  ‘Alchemy is what others call science, what I practise here is but another form of what metal-workers, glass-blowers, apothecaries and others do openly, for the common good.’

  ‘Then why do you conduct in secret what they do openly?’

  ‘Because the art which I practise is misunderstood, as you have misunderstood it. What I carry out here is not some form of dark magic, but investigations into the possibilities of natural science. I am a healer, and I seek to understand how better to heal.’

  I drew closer to the bench and bent to examine a book lying open there. ‘You follow the teachings of Paracelsus.’

  ‘To a point. I have limited interest in his more … esoteric speculations.’

  ‘But as you say, it is a distinction that can be difficult for the casual observer to make. One such as Matthew Jack, for instance.’ Then one of Jack’s threats, thrown out as he was being dragged away, came back to me. ‘This is what he spoke of when he said justice may have eluded you in Paris, but that it would not do so here, that he would make you known. You knew him in France?’

  Middleton laughed weakly. ‘Knew him? I knew him as a dog knows a flea or a sheep a tick. You could not be a Scotsman abroad in the same town as Jack and not know him, though, dear God, I tried hard enough. He was of the view that our common nationhood created a bond between us that would see him welcomed into my circle of friends – small as it was.’ He winced and shifted slightly against the furnace. ‘A half-hour in the man’s company would make anyone wish to avoid him, and Heaven knows, we put up with him for longer than that. My friends and I made it clear to him eventually that he was not welcome amongst us: he saw to it that we were hounded from the city.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Accusations, playing on people’s fears. And now he will do it again.’

  ‘What fears exactly are you talking of? Is this something to do with Robert and your fraternity? The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross?’

  I had surprised him.

  ‘Robert told you?’

  ‘Robert told me nothing. That part I have worked out. So there is such a fraternity, here in the burgh?’

  ‘Not now, I do not think there can be now. We hoped … but things were taken too far, and now we have called down evil and retribution on ourselves.’

  His voice was becoming hoarse and he was having difficulty speaking. I brought a beaker of water to his lips.

  ‘I will take you into the house.’

  He shook his head. ‘No. Not yet.’ He had begun to shiver, and his breathing was coming heavily, but he seemed determined to talk. I sat down beside him on the beaten earth floor of the lodge. ‘Take your time, then, and tell me from the beginning.’

  ‘The beginning was – when was it? Ten years ago? No, thirteen perhaps, at Heidelberg.’ He smiled to himself. ‘I cannot believe I was ever so young.’

  ‘You are hardly old now.’

  ‘I am thirty-five, but of late I feel I have lived more years than I have numbered.’ A pause, then, ‘Were you ever at Heidelberg?’

  ‘I have never been to Germany at all.’

  He looked a little surprised, just for a moment. ‘Then I do not know how to begin to describe to you what you will never see. The Elector Palatinate was in his castle, with his princess, our princess, Elizabeth Stuart at his side. Their court was magnificent. Philosophers came, great thinkers from all over Europe, there were plays, pageants, encouragement of all the arts and sciences. The gardens were beyond what you could ever imagine. They were the work of a supreme architect. Every mathematical principle was explored, experimented with, enacted.’

  I began to think his wound and the fever he was evidently at risk of were affecting his mind, and it must have shown in my face, for he grabbed my arm and spoke to me urgently. ‘No, you must see, you must understand. These gardens were the fruit of the application of perspective, proportion, geometry, to the living earth. The principles of mechanics were brought to bear on water, on wood and stone. A man could walk in these gardens and hear music issue from fountains, enter grottoes in which statues moved and sang. It was at the University of Heidelberg, in the shadow of that Eden, that the manifestos of the Rosicrucian brotherhood first came into my hand. It seemed in those days that everything was possible, that scholars and thinkers, artisans and masters of all crafts, might share their skills and knowledge and strive together to better understand and realise God’s plan for His greatest creation.’

  I recalled the sentiments from the pamphlets I had read only a few hours previously in the library. ‘I am familiar with the hopes stirred up by the Fama and the Confessio. You were caught up in the furore?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I and my friends. We longed to join that fabled brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.’ His eyes were bright, living the memory. ‘We searched, we asked all the learned men we knew, but they could not help us. We did as others did – so young we were, so presumptuous – we published pamphlets, proclaiming our support, our urgent desire to join with the brotherhood, to obtain the keys to the lost knowledge of the past, that we might join in the building of a new Eden, an ideal state. And then …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then, nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘There was no further manifesto; there came no response, to us, or to any other who sought the brethren. They remained hidden from the world, cut off, their secrets with them. And then came the horror.’

  I did not need to ask what the horror was: the defeat of Frederick and Elizabeth of Bohemia at the battle of the White Mountain and the vengeance meted out on their Palatinate by the Habsburgs. Imperial forces under Spinola raped, looted and pillaged down the Neckar to Heidelberg itself.

  ‘I was still in Heidelberg when the Spaniards came. I saw then what the alchemists, the Hermeticists, the Paracelsians are all searching for. I saw the Pan within, that essential element that makes us all a part of one another and of everything around us: our utter brutality. And the alchemy required to reveal this was war. So I fled Heidelberg – most of the scholars were already dispersed – but not before I had seen Spinola’s troops stable their horses in the great library of the University, having flung the books out into the courtyard to be trampled and defecated on by the beasts. A fitting end to all that human endeavour.’

  I helped him to another drink of water. ‘I scarcely know how I lived, the next few months, but live I did,’ he continued. ‘In time, I came with some of my friends to Paris, and began to practise there. Then, in the year 1623 – eight years ago – there appeared, in certain places in the town, placards announcing the arrival there in secret of members of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross. Soon afterwards, amongst pamphlets published in response to these placards, was one alleging horrible pacts, secret Sabbaths, between the fraternity and the Devil. A real fear and great suspicion of strangers swept the city. There was talk of witchcraft. Matthew Jack supped it as mother’s milk. One Sunday, after I was leaving the service with some companions, he came up to us and said he knew what we were about. He had seen my name on one of those pamphlets I had written years before, in Germany, entreating acceptance into the fraternity of the Rosy Cross. He said he was going to expose me to the authorities as one of the invisible brotherhood. I did not wait to find out if he made good on his threat. I left Paris that night and headed for home. Eventually I landed back in Scotland, and made my way north to join Rachel and her brother here.’

  ‘You had been away from her a long time,’ I said, carefully.

  ‘I know, too long. I should have sent for her to join me, but I had never managed to settle anywhere properly, to build a practice on which we might build our life.’

  ‘But you have managed to do that here.’

  ‘Oh yes, all was well for a tim
e. And then one day, two or three years ago, I was walking up the street, and there emerged in front of me, like a portent of every bad fortune remaining to me, the form of Matthew Jack. I could not believe it at first, and walked on without acknowledging him. But soon I found the deacons of the kirk session at my door, asking questions about secret societies, diabolic entertainments. Thank God I had made my good name by then, and the minister and session were no more inclined to believe in Jack’s tales than they would have a talking donkey.’

  ‘I certainly have no recollection of having heard anything of those accusations,’ I said. ‘Why has he begun to haunt you again now?’

  ‘Now? He never really gave up. He just bided his time – malicious looks here, snide remarks there – he was just waiting for his opportunity. One day, late last autumn, Robert Sim came to see me. I knew him, but not well. At first I thought he had come for a medical consultation, but I soon realised it was something else. He told me that the library had just come into possession of a document he believed I might be familiar with, and which he was keen to learn more about: it was the Fama of the Rosicrucians. And that was how it began. I was reluctant at first even to look at the document again, but Robert was fascinated with it, and I found that I enjoyed our discussions on the matter, and indeed his company.’

  I wondered if he knew that during this nascent friendship between him and the librarian, something else was being born between the librarian and his wife. I tried to ask but the words would not come, and he continued, un-remarking, with his tale.

  ‘We began to study Hermetic literature together, and, one evening, a debate on a point of theology arose which we found impossible to resolve. That was when Robert suggested we should invite John Innes to join us in our studies, and so we did. I wish to God we had not.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because in John I saw reborn my young self of more than ten years before. The Fama lit a flame in him, and he was not to be dissuaded, either by Robert’s arguments or my experience, that the brotherhood of the Rosy Cross was not real, that it did not, indeed, exist.’ His voice fell. ‘That it had never existed. John was eager that we should add to our number one more, that we might become four, as the original cells of the fraternity were thought to have been. For myself, and for Robert, our meetings had taken on the form of a society where we might discuss ideas, knowledge, questions other than the endless controversies over forms of worship that so exercise our Divines. And so we did invite another to join us, one whose knowledge of mathematics could help fill the gaps in our own.’

  ‘Who was this?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I cannot tell you.’

  ‘But what harm can there be now?’

  ‘Of the four of us involved in our society, one has been murdered, one driven to the brink of madness, and I myself, tonight, have been attacked. I will not endanger the last of our number by naming him, to anyone.’

  ‘Then you are certain that Robert’s death is connected to his involvement in your society, brotherhood, call it what you will. What did your society engage in here that you – and John Innes – believe has called evil down upon you?’

  He said nothing for a moment and then, ‘We used to meet in the house to begin with, but just before winter set in, Rachel decided we should rent out her brother’s old masons’ lodging to some family in need. I persuaded a friend to help me clear the place. It was only once we had done so and begun to sweep the floor that we noticed them.’

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘The markings on the floor.’

  I looked on the floor but in the dim light of my small lantern I could see no markings but the scuff marks from the struggle that had taken place there earlier.

  ‘Light the candles here,’ said Richard Middleton, indicating a large church candle in an iron sconce above the door, ‘and there, by the east door.’ I had not noticed that there was another door to the lodging. I did as he suggested, and looked again at the floor, bringing my lantern closer to the ground as I bent down to examine it. And now indeed I did see something. Just a few inches in from the wall and going around the entire room was a line, formed by a very narrow, shallow trench, and filled in with chalk, perfectly straight where it followed the walls, perfectly angled where it must turn a corner. Apart from the indents at the doorways, the line was broken in only three places, below the windows. The first marking I noticed was on the ground in the north-east corner of the building – a representation of the sun. In the south-western corner was a marking like an arrow. I squinted at it a moment, not quite able to make it out.

  Richard Middleton had somehow got himself to his feet. He shuffled over to me. ‘Compasses,’ he said. ‘It is a set of compasses. And look there,’ he said, pointing to a place on the floor below a window in the east wall. ‘A square.’

  Something had begun to nag in my memory, but still I could not quite see it. He pulled me by the sleeve and I went with him to the west door, by which I had come in. There, just inside the doorway, on either side, and unremarked by me in the face of the terrible sight that had greeted William and me as we’d entered, were two strange stones, almost identical to one another, hewn in octagonal columns. Like two small, squat pillars. The pillars to Solomon’s temple. Jachin and Boaz. I knew it then, I heard it then in Sarah’s voice: the Mason Word.

  It was rumoured that the masons had a word by which they could recognise other initiates of their fraternity, be they working craftsmen or, as was said to be increasingly the case, gentlemen initiates, but Sarah knew that ‘the Mason Word’ was not one, but two words: Jachin in greeting, Boaz in reply. And because these words together had the power to reveal and identify members of this secret brotherhood one to another, regardless of their rank in life or where they came from, they were also the key to unlocking the whole corpus of Masonic learning to those who would be adepts. And so, ‘the Mason Word’ had come to stand for that whole body of esoteric knowledge.

  I looked at Richard Middleton. ‘This is a Masonic temple?’

  ‘We are certain of it.’

  ‘Are there really such places?’

  ‘Come over here,’ he said.

  I followed him to the west wall and he showed me a stone in it which differed from all the rest. It was large, perfectly square and, he told me, went all the way through to the outer side of the wall. ‘And there,’ he said, ‘you see the oval and there,’ pointing to the ground to the left of us, ‘is the square pavement.’ And there was indeed a perfectly square slab of stone set in to the earthen floor. ‘All Masonic lodges have these special stones: they call them “jewels”’.

  ‘But what does this all mean?’ I said.

  ‘That is what we have spent the last few months trying to discover. The masons, like all the other crafts, have their secrets, their rituals. But unlike the other crafts, they claim old knowledge, old secrets going back to ancient times and enshrined in stone and hidden places by the architects and builders who made the great pyramids, the temple of Solomon, founded on the mathematical principles that govern the universe.’

  Again the Hermetic quest, that of the alchemists, of the pretended Rosicrucians.

  ‘And the men of such lodges seek out this knowledge?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. They do not seek out the old knowledge, the secrets of the ancients: they claim to have them. The men who lived here would have had them. Increasingly, we have made the ways of the masons our study, their use of the art of memory and the messages of the lodge itself.’

  John Innes’s interest in the Roman architect Vitruvius made a little more sense to me now. ‘Have you approached the stonemasons themselves?’

  ‘Yes, there was a newly apprenticed mason whom one of us had known when the boy was younger; we asked him if he had any knowledge of the workings of the lodge. The boy almost vomited with fear and told us never to ask such questions. He has avoided the sight of us ever since.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Because, they say, the ma
sons have terrible punishments for those who reveal their secrets. We thought perhaps the boy had been frightened in his initiation by some older men going too far, so we approached one of the older masons who labour in my late brother-in-law’s yard.’

  ‘Did they tell you any more?’

  ‘They laughed at us, and told us to mind our own affairs. But though they laughed, I do not think they were rightly amused that we had asked the question, and we did not repeat our mistake.’

  ‘Richard, tell me, what do you understand by the Mason Word?’

  He looked surprised that my knowledge extended so far. ‘It is the name given to the whole body of secrets revealed to the initiates of the craft who have served their time and gone through the initiation of their lodge. It is, they say, encapsulated in two words given to these initiates when first they are received within the brotherhood.’ He shrugged, then winced at the pain in his arm. ‘We have not been able to discover what these words are. At least, we hadn’t. But Robert had hopes …’ A cautious comprehension spread over his face. ‘That day I saw you at Robert’s lodgings …’

  ‘I think I found what you had gone to look for, what Robert had found: Jachin and Boaz: the Mason Word.’

  He shuffled with difficulty towards the pillars just inside the doorway. ‘How foolish we have been,’ he said quietly. ‘How blind not to see it!’

  ‘I know those were the names given to the pillars at the entrance to Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem, but why should this be of importance to the masons?’