Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  “I’m not asking you to do that, Francis. If you can do nothing more, at least keep your eyes open, and your ears. Some pathway will present itself.”

  “Hmph. You and your faith. Well, Providence may seem to show you a path, but Prudence tells you to leave well enough alone. . . . Oh, don’t give me that look. I know that look. You could use it to curdle cheese.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Anne kept the Wizard Earl’s brisk pace along one of the labyrinthine corridors of Syon House. A plump, matronly servant followed, limping and wheezing. As the Earl chatted away—something about clocks, pendulums, pinions, and gears—Anne turned two or three times to offer the poor woman a sympathetic look. But the servant kept her head down, arms pumping as she plodded along. Finally the woman gave up the chase, stopping and puffing, her hand on her chest. She called, “Milord! Whither run ye?”

  The Earl was saying, “And Anne, just as you arrived—clock room!—and just as you arrived, a remedy. That very moment, a remedy. Timely, no?”

  “Timely. After all, the remedy is for a clock, is it not?”

  “A new kind of—for a clock, yes. Oh, timely! For a clock, I see. Yes, very good, Anne. You have some of Jack’s. . . . A new kind of pivot, this would be, with a weighted—one end weighted, the other notched. A notched sort of latchet, you see, that links with a pinion. That way, when—but here we are!” He turned into a room overlooking the courtyard, a noisy chamber cluttered with timepieces of every sort, on every surface: tables, walls, floors, even depending from the ceiling. It was a room busy with machines vying to outdo one another with their clatter. The Earl glanced around, bemused, as if he had lost his way. “Where did I . . . ? Haven’t fashioned it yet, only drawn it. But the very moment you. . . . Where did . . . ? The paper: I laid the paper. . . . Well, no matter. Ah! That’s it: I wasn’t here. Schoolroom, must have been, where Jack and I. . . . With Harriot’s glass. But no matter. I wanted you to see my clocks.” He made a sweeping gesture as if Anne might not have noticed them.

  There were table clocks, bracket clocks, and hooded clocks run with wound springs that turned gears, clicking with the linking and unlinking of metal parts. On the floor stood long-cased clocks powered by weights and governed by pendulums with pear-shaped bobs. Even the lamps were clocks, with markings on the glass to tell the hours as the oil burned. Most of one wall was taken up by a huge chamber-clock, ancient-looking with its cast-iron mechanism. “Two centuries old,” said the Earl as he saw Anne looking at it. “From a castle in Lombardy. See? The hand that marks the hour is fixed; the dial turns behind.” Anne told him she liked the craftsmanship of the brass dial with its engraved figures of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. She could hear the piece’s works clattering but couldn’t help noticing the clock was several hours off, reading just after nine in the morning when it must be nearly mid-afternoon. She glanced around the room: no two clocks, in fact, seemed to agree on the time.

  The maidservant appeared in the doorway. His back to the door, the Earl somehow knew she was there: perhaps he heard her above the din as she tried to catch her breath. “Two centuries,” he said. “More, it may be. Betsy, you missed three this morning that still want winding: the tall one by the door, the bronze drum on the low table, and—what was the third?—well, no matter. Ah! The little one in the maplewood case.” The servant gave him a put-upon look and moved to adjust the weights in the tall case by the door. The Earl led Anne to a table beneath a window. “But this: this is more ancient still. Or the type is. Water. Far more ancient. Made it myself, but the type is old. You see? It drips, here. Steady drip. A clepsydra, the Greeks called it.”

  “Clepsydra. Oh, I see: a water-thief.”

  “One drop at a time, yes. The water’s height in the bowl here marks the hour on this board. But I added this: a dial, moved by the weight of the bowl, as it gets heavier through the day.”

  “Were it outdoors,” Anne said, “you could use a stream to supply the water and never have to fill the cistern at the top.”

  Betsy said, “I would thank you for that, milord.”

  The Earl smiled in his eager, childlike way and said, “Yes, just so.”

  Next to the water clock a large, cone-shaped armature of steel rods with a brass chute spiraling down the outside rose above a tray containing wheels, gears, and two clock-hands of differing lengths. “What’s this?” Anne asked. “It reminds me of the Tower of Babel.”

  The Earl laughed. “Yes. Mayhap the talk of Semiramis of Babylon put you in mind of it. But it is a clock. Runs for just two or three hours. My favorite nonetheless. This one’s flaws I know, I think; I am perfecting the design. Twenty-four hours, at least, the next one. But look.” He reached under the base of the cone, and she could hear him turning a crank or key. “Now,” he said. “The weights inside are at the top. They supply the force.” He touched a lever at the base, and a chain began to turn, conveying to the top of the cone little hinged cups, each containing a steel ball. When a cup reached the top it struck a platform and tilted, releasing the ball. One by one the balls aligned themselves at a gate, which opened to let a single ball pass. It rolled down the chute, slowly winding its way around the cone, until it triggered a mechanism as it dropped through a hole at the bottom. At that moment the gate opened at the top, and another ball began to descend. The first ball rolled to the chain, where the next empty cup scooped it up. “The eighth part of a minute from top to bottom,” the Earl said. “Each ball. This spindle moves, turning these two gears, and they turn the hands. This one marks the hour; this, the very minute!”

  “Astounding,” said Anne, at once captivated by the machinery and eager to get on with what had brought her to see the Earl in the first place.

  “And this,” the Earl said as he moved to a table near the fireplace. He returned cradling a small clock in his hands.

  Anne watched one more ball descend before turning to the Earl. “Oh!” she said, drawing back a step. “It’s. . . .”

  “Yes. A skull. Keep it in sight, good for the soul. Memento mori.”

  Anne leaned a bit closer. She could hear the thing ticking. “It’s. . . . How do you . . . ?”

  “Ah, the best part: turn death on its head!” He rotated the skull bottom-up and lifted the jaw, revealing a dial. “Control time,” he said, “and you control death. No? You look . . . how? Unconvinced.”

  “It’s just that . . . death is already controlled. And so is time.”

  “Yes, yes, Providence. Be sure: I but cooperate with the Providence. Perfectly pious, this activity.” He watched her as she turned her head slightly away. “Anne. What, doubtful still?”

  “Yes, somehow.” She looked at him. He had the eyes of an innocent, overanxious boy. “Lord Henry, a thing can be pious but not prudent.”

  “How is this imprudent? Any of it.”

  “Yours is the church, remember, that put Giordano Bruno to death.”

  “Yes. Dark day. Friend. But stubborn, Giordano. Heresy, they said. And a spy for Walsingham. But I don’t believe that.”

  “Nor do I. But Bruno was condemned by his own countrymen to burn at the stake.”

  “Published things he shouldn’t.”

  “And in this country you don’t have to publish anything. You are already a heretic for merely remaining a Catholic.” Anne noticed that Betsy was beginning to take an interest in the conversation, so she lowered her voice. “You must be prudent: this talk of controlling time—”

  “Yes, though it is but the first step.” The Wizard Earl seemed unaware of the maidservant’s eavesdropping, but he lowered his voice to match Anne’s. “The first step is understanding time: marking it, measuring it. Clocks: prudent, perfectly.”

  “But you think marking it will lead to the control of it.”

  “The first step, yes. Control it.” He lowered his voice still more. “Reverse it, perhaps.” Before Anne could protest, he hurried on: “The whole course of it will take learning, craftsmanship, alchemy, philosophy, prayer. . . . Plent
y of prayer, be sure.”

  She folded her arms. “Theurgy?”

  “Mayhap, yes.” He added in a whisper, “But not . . . what’s the word?”

  “Goety.”

  “Even so. Yes, goety.”

  Anne said in a low whisper, “But whether white or black, you talk of magic. Some of the learned say all of it proceeds from the Devil.”

  “And some say wrongly.”

  She let out a little puff of exasperation. “You miss the point. Even if God allows theurgy, King James does not. You put yourself—and your friends—in danger.”

  “Years, Anne. It will take years. Lifetimes, maybe. Others will complete it. But I have well begun. Measurement is only the first step.”

  “Measurement. Then tell me this, Lord Henry: What is the time of day?”

  The Earl seemed momentarily confused, then resolved to answer. He looked from one clock to another, lifted a hand in a gesture of explanation, scratched the back of his neck, and at last turned to his servant. “Betsy, what is the time of day?”

  She moved to the window and glanced at the sun. “Ha’ past two, milord.”

  Jack sat upright on his makeshift bed, his brow moist despite the cold. Troubled by a deep sense of dread, he recalled parts of the dream. A groaning and splintering of wood, a spray of sea, the massive prow of a ship looming out of the fog, the strange, forsaken cry of sea-bird or woman. . . . The images began to fall into place: through some queasy ill-doing of his own—he could not recall just what—sea-waves raged around him as he stood alone on a stone promontory jutting from a craggy peninsula. The waves crashed at his feet, covering him with their spume, but somehow he did not get wet. Then above the roar of the sea rose a great noise of the wrenching and shivering of wood. A moment later he saw through the mist and spray the cause: a ship had run aground, breaking apart before his eyes. In the bow stood his mother, who cast on him a mournful gaze, then extended both arms—too far to reach—as the splintered ship retreated. Then somehow it was not his mother but Anne, with the same look of woe, clutching to her breast a bundle of rags containing perhaps a child. With her free arm she reached toward him. He leaned as far as he could, and the ship surged ahead. His hand brushed against Anne’s, then caught a corner of the infant’s swaddling as he fell from the crag, wresting the bundle from her grasp. He tried to call out to his wife, give her some parting assurance of his love. No sound emerged. He stretched to reach the child spinning above him, but the infant tumbled just beyond his grasp. He spun and plummeted through the mist, then jerked awake.

  Now he held his head in his hands, rubbed his eyes with the heels of them, let out a great breath as if he had held it in a long time. A dream. Only a dream, perhaps, signifying but an uneasy sleep, no more. Or was it the bearer of some message, some truth, some course marked out by which he might spare harm to mother, wife, and child? Or did it presage a bitter, unavoidable end?

  He heard someone stirring overhead, then slow, unshod footfalls on the stairs. It was Burr. The old man carried his boots in one hand while the other worked along the rail. “Ah, Master Jack, I did not want to wake you.”

  “I am full awake, Tim.”

  “You look something taken aback, if I may say.”

  “You may. I am. It was a dream.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you think they mean anything, Tim, our dreams?”

  Burr sat on a stool Jack’s mother apparently used to reach books on the highest shelves. It was his mother, not the father he could hardly remember, nor his stepfather Dr. Syminges, good man though he was, who had first taught Jack to read, had fostered his love of books.

  Old Burr began to pull on his boots. “Oh, yes, I should think so. But we may come as near construing our dreams as we may parse verbs in . . . are there languages you do not speak, Master Donne?”

  Jack smiled. “Yes, Tim.” He thought a moment. “The Jesuits in the Far East write of sacred scriptures of the Brahmins of India penned in a tongue called Sanskritan. I know nothing of this Sanskritan.”

  “As we may parse verbs in the Sanskritan tongue, then.”

  “And there are many other tongues whereof I comprehend not a word. As you well know.” He paused. “So you think we may not read our dreams.”

  “Oh,” said Burr, “I think they are legible. But we have lost the wit to read the book of the world, of which our dreams compose a chapter. Or it may hap a few still remember, darkly.”

  “You have some learning, Tim. Where did you get it?”

  “Westminster. Before the time of the Queen’s Scholars. Some six or eight of us with one schoolmaster. Our fathers paid him. Or mine paid his part, at least, until I reached some eleven or twelve years.”

  “What happened then?”

  Burr considered the matter. “Master Jack, you and I like a cup or two of wine. My father liked many cups of wine.”

  “Ah. I see. And so your schooling ended.”

  “And so my schooling ended. As did much else.”

  While Betsy gathered a few books and papers from a pile by the door, where the Wizard Earl had apparently left them, Anne leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Could we talk privily?”

  The Earl gave her a puzzled look and whispered back, “But we are talking privily.”

  “I mean without Betsy in the room. I have a thing to ask that is for no ear but yours.”

  “Oh, of course,” he said. “She is here but for your . . . what do you call it?”

  “My assurance of your honorable intent.”

  “Just so.”

  “I do not question your intent, and she may remain in the passage without the door, so that no one will question it.”

  The Earl told Betsy to close the door, pull up a chair, and wait outside. The servant glared at him, then seemed to consider that sitting for a while might not be a bad thing. She bustled out and shut the door—a bit louder, Anne thought, than needful.

  It was just two or three days before he left that Jack had visited Syon House, but at the time Anne’s thoughts had been all on his longer journey. She wished she had pressed him for more details about how much he had confided to the Earl. “You know,” she said, “Jack is gone to the Low Countries?”

  The Earl thought a moment, then said, “I knew he was about to set out for. . . . The Low Countries, is it? Maybe he told me so. Ah! His mother: his mother lives in Antwerp, does she not?”

  “Yes. I think he is there now, but not only to see his mother. He has—” and here she let her voice carry the weight of the implication—“other business.”

  The Earl’s face turned thoughtful, then grave. “It won’t work,” he said.

  Anne felt her breath give way. She squeezed out barely audible words: “Are you certain?”

  “Oh, quite.”

  “But how do you know? Is he in danger?”

  The Earl looked puzzled. “Who?”

  “Who? Jack, of course. It won’t work, you said. Is he in danger?”

  “Why should he be in danger? Oh: you’re worried about his conversion.” The Earl’s face betrayed his sudden awareness he had said more than he should. “I mean to say, you know about that, do you not? Or no. Forget what I just said. Or didn’t say.”

  Anne felt a little dizzy, the way she did as a child when she spun herself in circles, then abruptly stopped. She gripped the arms of her chair and said, “His conversion? Yes, I know about that.” So Jack had told the Earl the story of his rejoining the Church of Rome but not the story behind it: that the conversion was feigned. Why then did the Earl say Jack’s other business would fail?

  “Oh, good,” the Earl said. “I revealed too much, I thought. Perhaps. But why are you worried? Jack travels in Catholic lands. He’ll be safe enough.”

  “Then why then did you say it won’t work? What won’t work?”

  “Why, the weighted pivot, of course, with the notched end. It won’t work because the rod that fits into the notch would interfere with—”

  Anne’s burst
of laughter startled the Earl into silence. It was the first time she could remember laughing since Jack’s departure—for some time, even, before that. She allowed the laughter full reign, and the Earl’s bemused look only spurred it on, as did his sudden realization, some moments later, what she thought so funny. The Earl began to chuckle too, and by the time it was over, Anne was wiping the tears from her face.

  Finally the Earl asked, “But what of this other business of Jack’s? You said he had other business.”

  Anne tried to keep her tone light. “Yes, an Englishman called Guido. Do you know him? A Catholic.”

  “Guido. Someone else was asking. . . . Who was it? Someone. . . . Well, I know not. But I have heard of the man. It is important that you find him?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “Let me. . . . One or two of the Jesuits, I think, are in London. Let me find them and make some inquiries. If they know his whereabouts, I will send word to you.”

  The travellers had stayed in Antwerp almost a week when word came back from Lord Stanley: he would be most pleased to dine with Jack’s mother and three converts to the Old Faith. He had business in the city in four days’ time and would be honored to visit on Saturday night.

  On Friday Chute went out on his own to buy Jack’s mother a gift. After three or four hours he hadn’t returned. Burr said, “Lost, no doubt. Wandering these labyrinthine streets in search of this house, a stranger to the Dutch tongue, the Spanish, and the French.”

  “But his Italian—” said Jack.

  Burr rolled his eyes. “Is excellent. Must we go and look for him, Master Jack?”

  “I suppose so. But it’s just as well; my mother could do with some respite.” Elizabeth started to protest, but Jack could see he was right.

  The two men walked for perhaps half an hour, encompassing several blocks. They saw no sign of Chute—only cloth-merchants, carters, fishmongers, a trio of chattering, jostling apprentices just out after their day’s work, a cluster of boys bolting from a schoolhouse, a street-quean who traced her fingers along her neck as she looked longingly at Jack. When Burr lingered a moment outside a tavern, Jack said, “How about somewhat to drink?”