We did not debate the truth of things so much as he spoke and I listened, occasionally taking notes in the journal he furnished me with in order to do so.
It was only a full day of this before I lost my patience, railing at Maddie Ruth within the privacy of my bedroom that night. “I have been reading of these things for as long as I’ve known my letters,” I seethed, tossing my journal to the bed where it slid over the edge and vanished. A muffled thud indicated its landing.
It could rot there.
“Don’t you want to learn what he knows?” Maddie Ruth asked me, shaking out my nightshift and wrapper with brisk efficiency. “He’s a good enough teacher.”
“How would you know?” I snapped, irritated beyond all measure.
She did not rise to my ire. “He taught me how to fix the chair lift in the gradient.” When I stooped mid-stride to stare at her, she favored me with an impish smile. “He didn’t realize I was good with my hands.”
I sat on the bed with a heavy sigh. “He was to teach me that.”
“You,” she told me, tossing my night shift at me in a floating swath of white, “are to be learning alchemy.”
“Why aren’t you?” I caught the material out of the air, but only wrung it between my hands. “Aren’t you interested in such things?”
She shrugged. “I dabble a bit in what I know, but I’m not really of a mind to learn all the true secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone and all that rot. I’ll leave it to the lot of you.”
“Immortality not in your agenda, then?”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “Do you believe it?”
“No.” I leaned back in the bed, allowing the bedclothes to enfold me in soft succor. I tucked the nightshift under my chin, as though it were a blanket, and watched the ceiling and its lantern-lit shadows. “Maybe.”
“What changes your mind?”
I shrugged. “I do believe ’tis capable of great feats.”
“Rightly so.” She leaned over me, smiling down into my eyes. Her braids, kept in two as a child’s might, fell over her shoulders. “Are you going to sleep?”
“No.” I still hadn’t mastered more than a few hours at a time, and mostly when I was too fatigued to fight the urge anymore. “I’m going to study.”
“Thought as much. I’ll fetch the tea.” She offered me a hand, which I took, and she utilized that to lift me once more to a seated position. Before letting me go, she turned over my palm. “Your scars are gone.”
“I’ve retained none at all,” I admitted. “Not even from the Ripper’s parting assault.”
“Hmm.” A thoughtful sound, though not one she continued to press as she left me to my studying and a painstaking report, as demanded by Ashmore’s strict tasking.
An essay as to my theories on the nature of aether seemed a step in the right direction. At least it held some link to alchemy, as opposed to simply scientific theory.
Maddie Ruth returned whilst I was ensconced in my assigned reading, and she left the tray beside my bed upon a nightstand. When I remembered it was there and reached for the now cooled teacup, my fingers brushed a leather binding instead.
I looked up.
My mother’s journal rested beside the pot of tea.
Seeing it gave me no surprise, but a sheepish sort of resignation—Maddie Ruth’s machinations no longer shocked me. She must have acquired it from Ishmael Communion’s keeping and thought of no better time to give it than when I began to work upon the art the journal spoke of.
With a wistful smile, I plucked the book from the tray.
A length of glass slid from the pages, bouncing gently upon the coverlet. A bit of a gasp clutched at my throat, quickly gone again when I remembered that the rectangular square was pressed by a smaller bit of glass, sealing the remains of my father’s alchemical serum within.
I remembered all too well the puff of pink air as it slid from the cameo mechanism that once held it, and the consequences I had suffered after breathing it in.
That was the first I’d ever stumbled across Abraham St. Croix’s alchemical efforts.
When I gave the empty cameo to Maddie Ruth, she’d scraped the last bit from the interior and saved it for me. I picked up the glass, studying the faintly pink shimmer smeared atop it.
To think that this was the heart of my father’s skill, and the foundation upon which I’d first fallen to Hawke’s seductions.
Perhaps one day I might know enough of alchemy to deconstruct the serum. Would I learn something from this little bit of pink and gold shine?
Was there even a way to do so?
I tucked the glass between the cover and the page bearing my mother’s dedication, which bequeathed the journal to Almira Louise Compton, Lady Northampton—my sworn enemy, were she to tell it, and unless Ashmore’s solicitors were successful, my mother-in-law.
The relationship between my mother and the marchioness was a complex one I did not have an inclination to sort out. One was long since dead, and the other a harpy. Whatever their relationship, it had nothing to do with me.
The rest of the book was a diary transcribing my mother’s thoughts on the matter of aether and its use in alchemical theory. Much of the pages were bent upon the morality of alchemical experimentation, though there were large portions within that seemed more focused upon this formula or that as the fancy took her.
I recognized more of the symbols than when I’d first opened the pages, but not by much.
In the midst of the book, held flat by the pages, I found Maddie Ruth’s drawing of the cameo parts. The face of my mother remained in profile—another instance of my father’s undying love for Josephine St. Croix.
To think that she had died so young.
Love really could turn a good man mad.
I did not sleep again that night. This time, when I closed my eyes, it was my father’s owlish gray stare I pictured, and the interminable sorrow within. Nothing I could ever do would have eased his sadness; I was not my mother, for all he wished I was.
The following day, tired but eager, I occupied not the library but the smaller study Ashmore had claimed for his own.
“Tell me of perfection,” was his opening gambit.
I raised my eyebrows at him—though I labored for one, I simply could not get the hang of it. “Perfection is impossible.”
“Is it?” He did not stand, but leaned a hip against his desk; the very model of confidence in a teaching role. “What is the goal of science?”
“To learn and explain the cosmos.”
He tipped his head. “Is that not impossible?”
“Of course not, but it might take some time—” I caught myself when he lifted a finger. “Oh,” I added after a moment. “I see. Alchemy is about attaining perfection.”
“’Tis a journey,” he replied, “just as any scientific method is. One begins with a question. In this case, that question is?”
I hesitated. “How…does something become perfect?”
“Fair enough a start.” Ashmore plucked a pouch from the desk beside him, the velvet so worn as to have faded to gray. “Chrysopoeia means transmutation into gold, the perfect metal.”
“And alkahest?”
“A universal solvent, capable of dissolving all things. Perfection in destruction, if you will.”
I was beginning to understand the nature of the art. “What of immortality?”
“Also perfection,” he replied. “Although this is one of the more dangerous aspirations. Material perfection of base metals and even that regarding medicinals is one thing. Immortality is altogether something else.”
What had begun as a lecture ended on such a dismissive note that I sat back in the chair allowed me and studied him in silence.
He noted it. “Why do you stare?”
“You have a furrow just here,” I pointed out, tapping my own brow between my eyebrows. “Do you not believe in attaining immortality through alchemy?”
His eyes narrowed as he rubbed at his own brow, goa
ded into smoothing the furrow away by force. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because ’tis never been achieved,” I said simply. “It is nothing more than a fancy without any evidence to sustain it.
He dropped his hand, but only so that he could open the pouch. “’There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’” he muttered. “Still, let us move on from the details and settle upon a simple truth. Alchemy is the art of achieving perfection, and in so doing, freeing the cosmos from temporal being.”
Lofty, but I’d heard much the same superior turns of phrase by them what considered naturo-philosophy as a greater science than most. I nodded. “Definition duly noted.”
“Good. In order to understand the principles of alchemical theory, you should start with a focus,” Ashmore said, pulling out a deck of cards and laying them into one hand.
I eyed the faded colors painted upon the back of the cards with disbelief. “Playing cards?”
“Not quite.” With a deft flick of his fingers, he turned one over. A single figure looked at me from within the faded remains of a gilded frame. Seven sheaths of grain sprang from his head, and he held a long stick. “This is a tarot card.”
My incredulous stare lifted to Ashmore, who was not smiling as I’d expected of such a jest. “Tarot,” I repeated. “As the gypsies use?”
“Them and more.”
“Am I to fortune-tell, then?” I asked dryly. “I thought this was science.”
He turned his back. “If you’re not serious—”
“I am, I am,” I hastened to say, but I could not wholly tamp down my skepticism. I was already uncertain about the verisimilitude of alchemical theory; tarot stretched my inclinations rather more than I was comfortable with. “I don’t understand, is all.”
“Then pay attention,” he said, reverting to the stern taskmaster he became when teaching. “In these enlightened ages, we call this Trump the Fool. This is where your journey begins.”
“A fool, am I?”
He did not smile. “You have lost everything. You are empty, with neither riches nor memory to your name. Truly, you lack even basic common sense to tell you that what you wish to undertake will be painful and difficult.”
“Come, now,” I protested, but subsided when he fixed me with that severe stare, which I took to mean he would brook no further interruptions. The firelight leaping behind him did not soften his approach.
My rueful smile faded to a strange sort of intellectual dawning. Perhaps in part lulled by the cadence of his voice, I understood what it was he said.
He was too right, and it did not sit well. I had lost everything to my choices. I’d lost my family, blooded and otherwise, and I’d lost much of my memory and freedom to the smoke. I’d even attempted to take my own life.
I was, for all intents and purposes, newly returning to this world.
I was not entirely sure how comfortable I was being likened to a naïve fool without sense, but in light of this lesson, I grudgingly accepted the moniker. “So I am a fool intent on a new journey.”
“What’s more, you intend to pursue a journey most would call folly,” Ashmore said, and held the card up between two long fingers. “Your journey begins now.”
I did not recognize this warning for what it meant. Not until he pointed the edge of the worn card to my ignored daybook.
“The first Trump is called Apis,” Ashmore said briskly. “It corresponds to the letter ‘A’ and the number one.”
I hastily wrote that which I could keep up with, but paused with a frown. “Is the Fool not a zero in tarot’s numbering?”
“What did I tell you?” he returned with sharp impatience. “Forget what you know and all that you have been taught. Become the Fool, or you’re doomed to failure before you’ve begun.” When I said nothing, sealing my lips against a burning rejoinder, he once more held up the card. “Apis’ symbolic meaning is that of the bull.”
He did not wait to see if I transcribed that which he said quick enough, moving to the next card in his deck. This was lifted to reveal a man in crimson robes, a large hat upon his head and a table arrayed before him. Like the first, the gilded edges no longer glinted, worn nearly bald in places by care and time.
“The second Trump is Bacatus-Typhon.”
A bit of my ill-remembered Latin came back to me. “Bacatus means ‘pearl,’ does it not?”
A flicker of a smile. “Good. ‘Pearl’ or ‘strewn with pearls,’ as you like it. Why is that?”
That caught me. “Why is what?”
When his smile vanished, and he returned to his lecture, I grumbled beneath my breath and hastened to keep up. “The second Trump corresponds with the number two, and—”
“The letter ‘B’?” I hazarded.
An inclination of his head. “The symbolic meaning is that of adversity and duality.”
“Why is that?” I repeated back to him, more than a little sardonic about it.
“That will be your assignment,” he replied, unruffled, and drew the third card. A woman upon a throne. “Caeles-Isis.” When I did not volunteer any bits of murky knowledge, the card twitched once, but he did not pause. “You may assume that each card corresponds with the following letter in the alphabet and the following number. Caeles-Isis is associated with the divine.”
I scribbled madly, although in the privacy of my own thoughts, I felt it all a little too occult for my taste. I wanted facts and scientific hypothesis, not this nonsense.
“Diana,” he said, revealing another seated woman holding a shield and what looked to be a sword or stick. “This card’s symbolic meaning is the four elements—” He eyed me. “Are you paying attention?”
I grimaced. “In Greek myth, Diana was the goddess of the moon.”
“Good. I’m delighted to learn some of your lessons remain with you.” He tucked the card beneath the others. “Diana represents the four phases of the lunar moon.” Another card, this one a wizened old man with a flowing beard. “Eon, symbolic of quintessence.”
I looked up at that, my eyebrows climbing my furrowed brow. “The fifth element. Aether?”
“Correct,” he said. “Pay attention, now.” So warned, I poised my pen over the journal I filled with terse listings of Trumps and the occasional scribble of impatience. “Science has marked this fifth element, but they are not wholly understanding of its source. They believe that it simply exists, independent of the others.”
“Is that wrong?” I asked, but slowly. I had always considered aether to be its own element.
In our weekly debates, Teddy had always suggested there might be more to it.
A painful knot gripped my heart.
I did nothing to ease it, allowing it to fill my chest, to tighten my throat and hurt as a wound needed to. If I was to be this fool, to start on a journey, I needed this infection to run its course.
Teddy had made his choices; it was small comfort, and it did nothing to soften the ache, but I had to move on. I accepted the guilt I carried, but I could not fall victim to its poison again.
If I did that, I may as well go back to the tar.
“Cherry?”
I started. “Quintessence, yes?”
Ashmore studied me, lowering the card. “Do you need a rest?”
“No,” I insisted. I straightened. “You were telling me whether aether exists independent of the other elements or not.”
“So I was.” Though I could tell that he watched me carefully for signs of fatigue, he returned to his lecture. “The Greek philosophers believed that there was a fifth element hidden within the four.”
“Hidden?”
“Beneath the elements of earth, air, fire and water, there is aether.” He turned the card over, showing me its back. “It cannot be seen, touched, smelled, or felt. Quintessence forever exists in potentia, but it can not exist without all four of the elements to give it shape. It is what the divine might call spirit.”
I blinked for a mome
nt. “Does this mean that Mr. Horatio’s theory of aether-to-oxygen ratio is incorrect?”
“He posits that aether may be enclosed in a vacuum and still be lit, correct?” When I nodded, he did not mirror the gesture, or give any indication that I was right or wrong. “What do you think?”
“I think,” I said slowly, pen lowering, “that if quintessence requires the other elements, then sealing it in a vacuum would cause it not to exist.”
Ashmore tucked Eon under the rest as he had with the others. “What would happen to your theory were I to inform you that while the other elements are always transitional, aether is constant and everlasting?”
“Wait,” I said, sitting upright, “how can that be? You just said that it does not exist without the other four.”
“Mysterious, is it not?” He allowed me a smile, one that I did not mistake for anything but a challenge. “I will look forward to your eventual hypothesis. We shall continue. Flamen, symbolic of heavenly light.” And so we moved through the deck, one by one listing the Trumps and what they symbolized.
It wasn’t until I heard him say, “Hamaxa,” that I leapt to my feet.
His voice stalled, attention focused entirely on me. I could only stare, open-mouthed.
Across the vestiges of my memory, a searing light blinded all who saw it, and I heard a masculine voice cry out. Hamaxa!
“Miss St. Croix?”
My gaze abruptly re-focused upon his face, and the concern writ there. “You said that once.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“In the Menagerie.” When his features closed down, I knew I had him. Journal clutched in my hand, I lifted the other to point at the card he held. “Hamaxa. You called that word right before a burning light turned the world to fire and pain—” My voice broke on the recounting, though I could not reason why as my skin shivered.
The card lowered. “Sit, Miss St. Croix.”
“I don’t—”
“Sit before you fall over,” he said, sharper now. “Yes, I called upon Hamaxa, but it is too early for that lesson.”
I was ready to argue when the meaning of what he said struck me.
Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles Page 18
