Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  “You are right, Mrs. Aylesbury. As usual.” Before she could reply he said, “But I have two questions.”

  “Well, what’s to stop you asking them?”

  “The first is this: you said some of the prayers were Father’s. Do you mean Father Garnet?”

  “I do.”

  “And so he stays nearby?”

  “Just across the hall is how near. Now as you’re back in the fold, there’s no harm in saying it.”

  “So he stays with Owen.”

  “He does. Though Owen comes and goes.”

  “The second question is about this optic . . . this magic glass the Earl has set up for you.”

  “Father says it’s not magic at all, but I know better, now, don’t I. ‘If it’s no magic, then you’re not looking through it proper,’ I says to him. So he gives me one of his looks—you know his looks, Master Donne—and he says, ‘Then you may be assured it is good magic, acceptable to the Lord.’ ‘Well, if it’s good magic,’ I say to him, ‘why did you not tell me so at the first?’ And he gives me his look again. Well, bless him for a Jesuit entirely, head to toe.”

  “I see. You said the Earl wants you to look through the glass. To what end?”

  “Why, to the small end. The large one faces out to the yard.”

  “Yes. But why does he want you to look through the glass?”

  “To spy out those we suspect. Did I not say so before, clear as day?”

  “Ah. Then tell me again, Mrs. Aylesbury: whom do you and the Earl suspect, and of what do you suspect them?”

  “Why, mischief, of course. The Earl’s cousin Thomas Percy for one. There’s a man I could see was up to no good the first time ever I saw him. Guido for another, Catesby—”

  “Guido? You’ve found Guido?”

  “Found him? I didn’t know he was lost. And don’t I see him every day through the glass?”

  Jack stared at her, then rose, took her head in his hands, and kissed her wrinkled brow.

  “Well,” she replied, “I’m glad to see you too, same as I said before.”

  With some difficulty Jack extracted from her that Guido, Catesby, the Wizard Earl’s cousin Thomas Percy, and a few others must be planning some mischief, for the Earl had asked her to spy out the men’s doings. She watched them through the glass and from time to time made the labored descent to the palace yard to inquire about them. She told Jack that Guido posed as Percy’s servant, styling himself John Johnson. There was not much to recommend the name, she said; if one were going to the trouble to counterfeit a name, it should fadge better than John Johnson. But, she said, that was not to the point. The point was that this Guido or this Johnson had loaded a deal of firewood and coal into an undercroft Percy had rented in the cellars of the old palace, a huge deal of firewood, as if they meant to sell it. But they never removed any. There were doings around the undercroft at night, too, but she could not make them out. “Catesby I would trust not a whit,” she said, “and Tom Percy even less. As for that fox, I’ll warrant he’s up to some unholy trick.”

  “Guido, do you mean?”

  “Aye, Guido: same as I said.”

  Jack asked her to point out this undercroft. She used the optic glass to show him.

  “Do you think they mean to start a fire in the palace?” he asked.

  “Lord only knows.”

  “I’m going to have a look in that undercroft.”

  “Oh, do be careful, Master Donne. After the good Lord took the pains to set you free because we prayed for you, I were loath to put him to the trouble again.”

  “I’ll be careful. Have you a lantern hereabout?”

  “Why, Master Donne, are you addled? It’s broad day.”

  “But it will not be broad day in the undercroft, will it?”

  “Well, there is that. But the chamber will be locked. They always use a key to enter it, and lock it again when they go. But yes, the Earl’s man left me a lantern in the larder there. And help yourself to some salted ham before you go. Eggs, too; the Earl’s man brings me eggs.”

  “When I return. Use the magic glass, Mrs. Aylesbury, to watch for Guido and the rest. If you see any of them, hang your mantle from the window.” She looked about the room as if to find her mantle. Jack said, “The one you’re wearing: it’s red, so I can see it from a distance. If you see Guido, Catesby, or any of the others, hang it from the window.” She fingered the mantle’s woven wool. Jack asked, “Have you another to wrap about you if you put this one out the window?”

  “Have I another. . . . Aye, but it’s not red.”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Aylesbury. Only hang the red one out if you see the men, and use the other, whatever its color, to keep you warm.”

  “Oh, I see. Why didn’t you say so?”

  Jack smiled. “I must have been confused.”

  “Well, no wonder to that, what with the deal of trouble you’ve seen. But never fear it, I’ll take care of you now.”

  Jack thanked her, put the lantern in his leather satchel, descended the stairs, and crossed the palace yard. No one appeared to be watching the door to the undercroft, which had been fitted with a new-looking lock, a sturdy work of brass and steel. He looked around. People milled about the yard, none of them paying him any mind. No mantle hung from Mrs. Aylesbury’s window.

  A blacksmith’s hammer sounded from somewhere nearby. Jack followed the sound around a corner and down a side street to a shop where an apprentice worked the bellows of a forge while the smith hammered a red-hot horseshoe he held with a pair of tongs. Jack picked up a stick from the streetside gutter and laid its end in the glowing coals. He took the lantern from his satchel, raised the sheet of translucent horn on the face, and used the burning stick to light the wick. The smith glanced at him and nodded, apparently uninterested in a stranger’s lighting a lantern while the day was yet full. The hammer’s rhythm held steady.

  Jack looked around the shop. On a workbench he found several thin strips of hammered steel: trimmings, perhaps, chiseled hot from some larger implement, shards to be re-melted for another use. After picking out three, he waited until the smith stopped hammering to temper the horseshoe in a vat of water. As the iron hissed and the steam rose, Jack asked, “Might I buy these?”

  The smith glanced at them and shrugged. “Half a groat.”

  “Good. And might I use your tools to bend them?”

  “That were hard steel,” the blacksmith said, “and too brittle to hold the bending cold. Ye’ll want to fire it.”

  The smith went back to work, and Jack laid the ends of the strips in the hot coals. It did not take long for them to glow red. He drew one from the forge with a small pair of pliers, fixed the cooler end in a vise, and used the pliers to bend the tip at a right angle to the shaft. He tempered the rod in the water, then pulled the second from the fire and bent it at a different angle. And so with the third. He left a full groat on the bench, thanked the smith, and walked back around the corner to the undercroft door. He looked down the street to Mrs. Aylesbury’s window above the chandler’s shop. No mantle. Trying not to attract attention, he set to work with his new tools. If anyone glanced his way, Jack might seem to be merely plying a stubborn lock with a key. The lock did not seem to be as simply made, though, as the ones he had opened before.

  There had not been many; what he knew came mainly from his early childhood. When he was very young his father had sometimes brought home broken or keyless locks from his ironmongery. From time to time, both before his father’s death and after, Jack had amused himself by taking the locks apart. And once, years later, when a girl’s jealous father had locked the front door to her house, Jack picked the lock by moonlight and spent half the night with the girl not a dozen paces from the old man’s room.

  But for what seemed a long time the lock to the undercroft door did not yield to his makeshift tools. He was at the task, he guessed, over a minute before he heard the tumbler click into place. The door swung into the room on well-oiled hinges. He glanc
ed back at Mrs. Aylesbury’s window again. Still no mantle. Jack picked up the lantern, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.

  The room looked unremarkable except for its high ceiling and the size of the pile of wood against the back wall. Fireplace-length staves of quartered hardwood had been heaped from floor to rafters, the bottom of the pile reaching halfway across the floor. Pieces of coal lay intermixed with the wood: an odd thing. Why would anyone who unloaded the carts of firewood and the carts of coal not have kept the two separate? Jack set down the lantern, scrambled a few feet up the pile until his head nearly brushed the cobwebs descending from the ceiling, and began to pull away pieces of wood. It was not long before he uncovered the smooth, rounded face of a large barrel. He moved more firewood. Beneath the barrel was another, and beneath that still another. He picked up the lantern and held it close enough to see that there were yet more barrels behind these, stacked three deep against the back wall. They stood three high and four abreast. He quickly made the calculation: thirty-six. Thirty-six large barrels had been hidden under all this firewood.

  He pulled the stopper out of the cask nearest him. Black powder spilled onto his hand. He sniffed it, then realized that from his other hand hung a flame just a few inches from a barrel of gunpowder. Thirty-six barrels of powder would easily reduce Westminster Palace to rubble, would probably kill hundreds of people nearby. Thousands, maybe.

  Jack stumbled back down the woodpile and looked up. What room, he wondered, stood atop this one? Then he remembered from his brief time in Parliament; he now stood directly beneath the House of Lords. Commons Chamber lay nearby. Jack grew queasy at the thought. Every soul in Parliament would be blown to the heavens in a single blast the moment anyone touched off all this gunpowder. And the new session was to begin in a few days. Also the King: the King would be there to inaugurate the term. Probably both princes, too. Jack picked up the lantern and began to back away. Bloody war would follow, with nobody left to put it down. Then Spain would invade: that must be the conspirators’ aim. England would be Catholic again, at a cost of thousands of lives. Tens of thousands, most like. Spain would have little trouble after an initial slaughter of the remaining Protestant nobility.

  Jack half-registered a change of light in the room. Before he had a chance to think what this might mean, a faint noise sounded behind him. He spun around. For an instant he saw Timothy Burr’s face. The old man was swinging something at him. Before Jack could react, the brick slammed against the side of his head.

  As Jack began to come to his senses he could not see clearly. Something was moving beneath him, and he felt a tugging at his arms. Gradually his eyes found their focus. He was looking down at the toes of his boots as they carved shallow, uncertain trenches in the dust. Half dragging and half carrying him, two strong men, one a little taller than the other, had draped his arms around their shoulders. One of them was saying something in a deep, resonant voice, but Jack could not make out the words for the ringing in his head. He tried to gather his thoughts, to remember where he had been and what had happened. At one point his head lolled to the side, and he found himself looking at a distant red mantle hanging from a windowsill. People milled about. A hard-faced woman and two dirty children stared at him. All went dark again.

  He woke on a straw-filled mattress against a wall of bare planks. His head felt about to split. Perhaps it had split already. He lifted his left hand to feel whether his brains lay exposed. The hand rose heavily. A chain. A shackle about the wrist. His right hand, he thought vaguely, remained unfettered. But it felt like someone else’s hand, a fleshy weight at his side. The fingers moved thickly, without sensation. He shifted his weight a little. The prickling burn of renewed feeling began to radiate along his right arm and into his fingers.

  After a while he heard a door open. Footsteps. A bolt of fire shot along his neck as someone lifted the back of his head and put a bowl to his lips. Ah, water: he hadn’t realized his thirst until he began to drink. He finished the bowl and said, “More.”

  “Wait a little, Master Jack. You’ll want to be sure you can keep that much down.”

  Jack knew the voice. “Burr,” he croaked out.

  “Rest a little.”

  “You betrayed me.” His voice was hoarse, a rasp along the throat.

  “No, you betrayed us. Or you would have if we’d left you to your will.”

  “I don’t under—” Then it came to him. “Gunpowder. Gunpowder under the wood. Parliament. You’re going to blow Parliament to the heavens.”

  “No, Master Jack. To hell. We’re going to blow these bloodsucking Protestants back where they were spawned. You would have stopped us. I’m sorry about your head, but it was the best I could do. Guido wanted to kill you. So did Catesby.”

  Jack groaned. “I’d feel better if they had.”

  Burr chuckled. “That’s my old Master Jack. You’ll mend. It was but a tap with a brick.”

  Jack coughed, and the action made him wince. “By God’s bodikins, if that was a tap I’d hate to see a clout.”

  “Well, I’m the one has kept you alive, with your thanks or without them. If Catesby and the rest had their way, your head would stand so tickle on your shoulders a milkmaid could sigh it off. And it’s the same head that broke in twain a good English brick.”

  “Hm. Sorry about your brick, Tim. I trust you’ll find another if you fetch a fancy to batter my skull again.” He took a labored breath. “But you said Catesby wanted me dead. Robin Catesby is my friend.”

  Burr’s eyebrows peaked. “Friend? If that man is your friend, then might I suggest you never make an enemy?”

  The pain flared behind Jack’s left eye, then settled into a throb. He tried to ignore it. “Burr, already twice this half-year past I’ve had my headpiece cracked. First it was an addle-brained Protestant pursuivant; then it was you, a bloody-minded Catholic, as it would seem. I tell you I want no more of this spying, for knaves on every side desire to break my pate.”

  Burr smiled. “You’re right that a brick does little credit to a studious mind. Here, take some more water.”

  Jack drank. “Well, Tim, you may be sure of this: your hatred of Robert Cecil can be no more rooted than my own. I am resolved to kill him, come what may. So if you’ll but unlock these chains, I’ll set about the task.”

  “Ah. Much as it pains me to deny you that pleasure, we will see to it for you: Cecil will be blasted into particles with the King and the rest of the nobility. And think, Master Jack, how edifying you’ll find it to be rained upon by such exalted personages.”

  Jack closed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply, evenly. Burr’s deceitful performance, he had to admit, had in a way been admirable. For months Jack had travelled with the old scoundrel without once suspecting him to be a bloodthirsty Catholic.

  “So, you have bested even Robertus Diabolus.”

  “I suppose so,” the old man said. “The arrangement had a certain beauty to it. Cecil hired me to pose as a Catholic, never suspecting I had been one all my life.”

  Burr gave Jack another drink of water, then set the bowl on the floor. Jack rested his head. A wave of dizziness washed over him, then retreated. After two long, slow breaths he asked, “What of Lady Bedford? Is she part of your confederacy?”

  Burr raised his heavy brows again, multiplying the folds on his forehead. “The Lady Bedford? Never think it. No, no, a lifelong Protestant, she, insofar as she is anything.”

  “In league with Cecil?”

  “Despises him. And yet she wants something from him, has wanted it for years. A divorce from Lord Bedford, I think, or an annulment. I know not the whole tale. Still, I would hazard a good piece of gold on this much: she traded me as part of some bargain, handed me over to Cecil to use as he would, in exchange for his support in procuring this divorce. She wants not to be Lady Bedford but some other. I cannot say I blame her. But the King opposes it, and so her hope lies with Cecil. Yet all this I have pieced together guessingly.”

 
Jack narrowed his eyes. A divorce. So when she said not yet could she and Jack live as man and wife. . . . No. She must have been toying with him. Lady Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford, could hardly aspire to become Lucy Donne. What woman on God’s earth would divorce an earl to marry a commoner? Yet the Countess of Bedford was unlike any other woman Jack had known. . . .

  The pain behind his eye sharpened to a white-hot point. In the very instant he let out an inarticulate little cry, he knew the flash of pain was not only suffering but also an admonition, a reminder that whatever the Countess wanted, it was not what Jack Donne wanted, or wanted when the Devil wasn’t riding him. Jack Donne wanted Anne Donne. He had just asked himself who would give up the life of a noblewoman to marry a commoner, and his own wife had already done so. Why was he even thinking about Lady Bedford?

  The door opened again. More men entered—two of them, Jack guessed from the sound of their boots on the floor. He tried to turn toward them, but moving his head even an inch to the left sent a searing jolt of pain through his eyes.

  One of the men pulled a three-legged stool to the low mattress, sat, and leaned forward so that his face hovered directly over Jack’s. Broad-shouldered and with a face to make women swoon, he wore a tall hat and a neatly trimmed beard. His almost-black eyes seemed to pierce to the marrow. The man said nothing. Jack’s vision blurred again, but he knew the other man by his voice soon enough. From somewhere in the room it was Robin Catesby who said, “You’re right, Burr. Garnet says we’re to let him live.”

  “Catholic,” Jack lied. “I’m a true Catholic.”