Lady Changeling

by Ken Altabef

  Just what was he supposed to do about Theodora? He’d known her just as long as Eric had known her. Ten years. And in all that time he’d never caught so much as a whiff of trouble. She was a thoughtful, caring woman, a good mother, a loyal wife. A spy? He wouldn’t have believed it either, except for seeing it with his own eyes. And it had been Eric that sent him to follow the caravan. He must have suspected something. March noted with some bitterness that Eric hadn’t come to him with the information. Hadn’t trusted him enough to share his reservations about Theodora. But Eric had known something.

  What was she? A faery? A mortal woman in league with their enemies?

  Dancing naked in the woods!

  How she’s fooled us all! Eric’s parents would have been cautious, they would have researched her family. But they were already gone when Theodora came on the scene. March had simply accepted her as a pleasant girl from town. He’d advised that rural innocence, while all very well in a maid, could prove to be a serious negative in the bride of a man of parts whose wife was expected to handle the complexities of running the household and carrying the Lord’s campaigns on the domestic front. Yes, he had advised caution but there was a smile behind his eyes as he’d said it, a smile that seemed to recall lost loves of his own desperate youth. He had simply accepted her story. Eric had no qualms about Theodora’s capabilities. She carried herself as well as any matron of age. Older even. That particular quality had attracted him more than anything else. Older than her years.

  March’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a startling sight. At the end of the hall, a stool had toppled over. A man lay face down on the floor.

  He ran forward as fast as his screaming leg would allow. He rolled the guard over, noting a round bruise on his left temple, still oozing blood.

  “What the hell?”

  The man groaned softly. Still alive. I’ll get him help in a minute. But first…

  The door to the prison cell was slightly ajar. March paused in the doorway to gather his wits, but already knew what he would find. He pushed the door open. The cell was empty. The manacles, their lock released, lay cast upon the floor.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Chapter 20

  Another shooting star.

  The alchemist watched the blazing silver arrow etch its way across the dusky sky. That made three shooting stars in one evening. They were so distant he could only observe them through the Pritzkin lens, but something was definitely happening in the heavens. Something he didn’t fully understand.

  Meteors were problematic even in normal times. They weren’t bound by the same set of rules that fixed the orbits of the planets and stars. They were aberrations, monsters if you will, harbingers of chaos and destruction.

  The alchemist turned away from his telescope and picked up an astrolabe from the work bench. The heavy brass disc filled the palm of his hand. Its many gears were engraved with representations of the positions of the sun, moon and stars. He rotated the gear that spoke for the planet Venus one notch. It clicked into place with a gentle tink. He raised it closer to the candlelight.

  “Trask!”

  The alchemist’s stomach soured immediately. The astrolabe nearly flew from his hands. Amalric had a penchant for calling his name, even as he was just walking up the path to the guest cottage. What did he expect? For Trask to run outside to meet him, to wipe his boots for him before he entered the house? Or perhaps to lick his boots clean?

  He had not been born Trask. His real name was Leopold George Rákóczi, born in the winter of 1691, a momentous year for signs and portents according to the prophecies of Nostradamus. The third son of Francis II Rákóczi, the Prince of Transylvania. Trask remembered very little of Transylvania. He recalled the rich smell of fresh cloves and cinnamon, the pungent flavor of cardamom and chilies, and a shrill flute playing somewhere in the palace. At the age of twelve his father had sent him abroad to complete his education. He’d never returned.

  He excelled in science and the arts and navigated the pinnacles of European erudition like a shark cutting through clear water. The University of Göttingen, the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Modena, Stuttgart, Bonn. He’d studied philosophy with Burke, Voltaire and Montesquieu.

  As a cultured and well-educated nobleman, he was welcomed into European high society on a swell of aristocratic enthusiasm lubricated with a steady stream of his father’s money. He toured Berlin, Amsterdam and Cannes but his greatest love had always been London. He acquired some small fame as a composer, at least until the death of his muse during the bloody atrocity he’d committed in Brussels, after which he never composed again. But in his glory days, amidst the swirl of European high society, one of his operas had been performed at the Haymarket Theatre in London. It was a good time then, not as now. Leopold Rákóczi had been a gentleman. Trask was a rat, hunted and reviled.

  “Trask!” shouted Amalric as he burst through the cottage door. Trask found the name even more annoying when pronounced with the alchemist’s sharp lisp.

  Yes. Trask, Trask.

  Trask nodded acknowledgement of his patron. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything more than that. Amalric jerked the astrolabe from his hand, regarded it with a dissatisfied sneer and tossed it onto the workbench.

  “Anything new?” he demanded. “The telescope. I told you to watch the telescope.”

  “I have been, I assure you. I’ve seen three new meteors in the past—”

  “I don’t care about the meteors. Do you understand? I don’t care about the meteors. I told you to keep an eye out for the red flash. The red flash in the sky near Orion’s belt. Have you seen that?”

  Trask fought to stay calm. “There has been no red flash.”

  Amalric tore off his big white wig and arranged it carefully on a wooden form atop the divan. He opened the cabinet beneath and drew out a small keg. He poured a few ounces of beer into a beaker, then stopped suddenly. “Have you been drinking my beer?”

  “You know I don’t,” said Trask. “Alcohol interferes with the hawthorne root.”

  Amalric snickered. “Are you still playing at those silly little herbs? Hawthorne root is shit. It clogs your veins and dulls your thinking. The Philosophic Mercury is the key! How many times must I tell you? You’ll leave all those useless provincial tinctures behind when we make our real discovery.”

  With that last statement at least, Trask was in agreement. The Philosophic Mercury, or the Universal Medicine as it was otherwise called, would render all his other attempts at longevity obsolete. But in the meantime he would continue quaffing distillations of hawthorne root and gotu kola. Amalric could scoff all he liked at what he perceived to be their lack of effectiveness. In some matters Amalric wore his astounding ignorance as garishly as his ridiculously frilly shirtsleeves. Trask was now sixty years old and appeared at least as young as Amalric, who was half his age. Amalric would probably have snatched the tinctures from his lips and drank them down himself if he ever stopped deriding them long enough to notice they actually worked.

  Amalric set the beaker to a slow boil then retreated into his bedchamber.

  Trask resumed his position at the window and lowered his eye to the eyepiece of the telescope. He could hardly concentrate. Amalric had exited the room but his perfume had left an annoyingly pungent trail behind.

  Sometimes he thought he couldn’t stand living here one minute longer. He had met Amalric in the course of their mutual membership in several secret British philosophical societies. Seeking the Universal Medicine, Amalric had performed his experiments in an abandoned rat-infested factory he’d acquired especially for the project in Bromley. The two met frequently in the following years, and Trask made use of the Rákóczi fortune to outfit a laboratory for alchemical experiments in his family’s nearby summer residence at Camden, where the two alchemists, among other things, cooperated in distilling essential spirits from various gemstones.

  During that time Trask kept a young man in Brussels, a dangerously handsome forger a
nd swindler who drank too much, had a penchant for gambling away every penny Trask lent him and had the most marvelous tongue. Trask had no pretense to owning the young man’s affection, but nonetheless went into a red rage one summer afternoon when he caught another man in his partner’s feather bed. After he chased away the interloper, a hideously fat banker from Elsene, Trask settled matters with his former lover. He wound up stabbing the young man to death, surprising them both. Up to that point in his life Trask had never attacked another human being with anything more dangerous than a snide comment. Violence was completely against his nature. He hadn’t even considered it possible. Even now he couldn’t bear to think about it. He had loved his little Belgian scoundrel. Remembering how it felt to be inside him, and how it felt to stick the knife in, two vastly different acts that seemed much too similar in the haze of his memories, one with the intent of giving life, the other for taking it. Both memories nauseated him now.

  Amalric emerged from his bedchamber wearing a luxurious velvet and samite robe. He added a pinch of molasses to his warm beer, added a generous portion of Jamaican rum and topped it with a dollop of cream. He whipped the mixture with an addict’s frenzy, then piloted his jutting, powdered nose above the concoction and took a barbarically huge sniff.

  Amalric didn’t know about the murder. No one did. Trask had walked out of the swindler’s apartment as if nothing had happened, the red blood still on his hands, and simply slipped away. By the time he’d returned to London he had gone completely mad. They kept him pent up in Blackthorn Asylum for a year and a half. Amalric eventually arranged for his release but Trask was never welcomed back into European society again. He did not feel its loss, not in the least. He abandoned music and opera and fancy dress and ballroom soirées. All of it. He was concerned only for alchemy. For pursuit of the Universal Medicine. Seeking the element. He continued taking his herbal remedies to belay the effects of aging, and various other drugs to liberate the mind and free the spirit, but his spirit could never be truly free, not since the murder of his lover. That deed had warped his soul, a condition which very well might prove irredeemable. Although perhaps, he wondered, the Universal Medicine might in time provide the cure?

  Amalric quaffed noisily from his beaker, smacking his lips with great satisfaction. He went cross-eyed for a moment. “Now that’s one far better for you than hawthorne root,” he said.

  Trask nearly gagged. If there were any other place—but there was nowhere else he could continue his work. He depended entirely on Amalric.

  Their need for certain expensive ingredients had made continued demands upon the Rákóczi fortune. To procure these, Trask had been forced to cultivate shady contacts in faraway places. His assumed name of Trask became known to certain unsavory individuals on the occult black market. These included philosophers and alchemists connected to the exiled House of Stewart. When Bonny Prince Charlie and the Jacobites fostered their rebellion at Carlisle, ‘Trask’ found himself accused of treason. Treason? This for a man who cared absolutely nothing for politics, righteous causes, religious disputations or aristocratic land-grabs. Nonetheless Trask was arrested in London on suspicion of espionage, convicted and sentenced to hang. The fact that he was completely innocent of the charges was lost amid the panic of the Rebellion. The rotting corpses of suspected traitors lined the streets of Highgate like a string of grisly Christmas ornaments. Trask could not even muster honest outrage at his fate. He was innocent of high treason but might just as well have hung for the murder of his Belgian lover.

  In the end it was only the interventions of Amalric Signi de Francavalla that saved his neck, through acts of monumental bribery that exhausted the last resources of the Rákóczis in Britain. Trask was forced to hide away from the vengeful George II. In addition to being Amalric’s whipping boy, Trask had foregone all credit for his scientific papers, allowing Amalric to publish them under his own name. But even with Amalric abusing him and pilfering his research, Trask continued his work toward uncovering the Universal Medicine. He kept a private journal hidden away, a document written in his own hand, that would someday prove him as the true innovator just as Newton did against Leibnitz.

  “All right,” said Amalric. “What shall it be tonight?”

  As if searching for inspiration, Amalric glanced at the manikin slumped on the divan. This was a life-size wooden figure with jointed limbs, wrapped in a flimsy white night-gown. The manikin’s flat oval of a face was painted white with rosy cheeks and puckered ruby lips. One leg hung off the side of the couch, the other tucked awkwardly beneath the torso.

  “What’s this?” asked Amalric. “Her knees weren’t bent that way when I left here this afternoon. I’m certain of it.”

  He strutted over to the divan, the black silk robe fluttering along behind him.

  “You’ve been alone with her all day, Trask. Did you look at her? Did you touch her?”

  Trask did his best to ignore Amalric’s fevered rantings. Clearly the syphilis had eaten his brain. He considered making a hasty exit and leaving the madman to his own devices but he rarely risked going outside. No one on the estate knew he had taken up residence with Amalric. He did not wish to be found out.

  Unfortunately, in the narrow confines of the apartment it was impossible to avoid Amalric. Trask had no bedroom of his own, just a filthy mat of rags in the corner of the main room.

  “I took pity on you,” said Amalric. “This is how you repay me? If they knew I was sheltering you here it wouldn’t go well for me, you know.”

  “Incroyable,” muttered Trask. He sensed Amalric might grow violent, and he abhorred violence. Not even to defend himself.

  “Answer me!” demanded Trask. “Did you fondle my wife?”

  Trask looked his accuser straight in the eye. He had no choice but to respond seriously to the man’s insane jealously over his doll wife. “I did not.”

  “Very well, then,” said Amalric. “I shall take you at your word. This time.” He carefully repositioned the wooden leg atop the divan, and addressed the wooden figure as if she might hear. “What shall you be tonight, dear?”

  Her painted doll face did not answer. Amalric licked his lips. “I haven’t much gold left… but I think, tonight, it must be gold.”

  He raced to the workbench as if he were a man on a mission, threw back the last of the rum flip and adjusted the burner flame. He spooned a rusty brown powder onto the cooking plate. The pungent stink of the liver and lungs of a viper permeated the room as they roasted. Amalric added yellow Sulphur and phosphorus to the vile, bubbling poison. Trask watched him spoon a small amount of gold ore onto the little brass plate.

  “We already know it’s not gold,” Trask said.

  “Ah yes, my friend, but I do so enjoy fucking the gold.” Amalric winked at him.

  Amalric hung a circular lodestone above the simmering pot, consulted a chart of alchemical diagrams on the desk, and adjusted the angle of the magnet accordingly. He hung a clear glass bottle filled with spirit vapor above the burner and waited. He grew increasingly impatient, pumping the bellows like a demon while glancing from the wooden manikin to the burner plate. Thankfully, he didn’t say anything more.

  With the fire well-stoked, he went several times to the manikin and made tiny adjustments to her position. Trask was nauseated by these little attentions which had nothing to do with the experiment at hand. He returned his eye to the telescope and the heavens above. Orion’s jeweled belt glittered faintly. No red flash could be seen.

  Amalric darted back to the work table just in time to see the elemental vapor of the gold boil upward from the brass plate and taint the spirit vapor with a lustrous amber color.

  “Got it!” he sang. He held the flask up in triumph. The mixture on the brass plate had been almost entirely consumed, the ore reduced to a greasy film of gray ash.

  He brought the flask to the manikin, unscrewed a cap at the back of the figure’s head. He tilted the flask and, the spirit ether being somewhat heavier than air, the
amber vapor slid slowly down into the manikin’s head.

  The doll’s head moved slightly. Its sightless eyes rolled in their sockets. The entire figure trembled with a pathetic semblance of life.

  But not the life. Not the one. The essence of gold was not the Universal Medicine. They already knew that. The gold vapor provided only a semblance of life which lasted an hour at most.

  “We should try a combination of the gold and amethyst,” suggested Trask dryly, his gaze still fixed on the telescope. “If we have any gold left after tonight, that is.”

  “Our sojourn into the hidden laws of god’s creation will have to wait,” said Amalric pleasantly. He screwed the cap back onto the manikin’s head.

  “Who?” the doll said. Its voice was a pathetic whisper through painted lips. “Who?”

  “Your loving husband, my dear.” Amalric bent over her with a ghastly smile on his face.

  The manikin moved one hand feebly as if to wipe away a disturbing dream fog.

  “Come now,” said Amalric. “To bed.”

  He tried to pull her up. The doll made an insensate whimper. Though Amalric tugged at her, she could not stand on her own.

  “We haven’t much time. I’ll carry you, my dear.”

  He snatched up the limp doll and carried her into the next room. On the way, her head banged the door frame with a dull thump but she didn’t cry out.

  The door slammed shut.

  Trask pushed the telescope away. He didn’t really understand what Amalric was looking for in the skies, whether it was a true portent of disaster or some other useless, maddened idea. Amalric hadn’t seen fit to lower himself to confide in him about the matter. Trask, tired and hungry, shuffled across the room to his little mat of stinking rags. He was very hungry. Amalric had forgotten to bring him any dinner at all.

  He tried to ignore the noises coming through the wall from the bedroom. Amalric’s grunts and groans, the helpless whimpering of the other. It would all be over in a few minutes more, when the gold vapor lost its potency or Amalric had satisfied his twisted urges, whichever came first.