Alchemy

by Maureen Duffy

  I head for my tutor’s room and knock on the door, not expecting any result. To my surprise the door opens and Dr Davidson is peering out at me. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Lucy Cowell, Dr Davidson. I wonder if you could spare a few minutes.’

  He smiles in recognition. ‘Ah yes, of course. How are you getting on, Ms Cowell? Do come in. As a matter of fact I have an envelope for you here. Ms Molders, the dean’s secretary, asked me to pass it on to you if you should be in touch. Now where did I put it? Do sit down.’

  I take the chair on the opposite side of his desk, while he opens drawers and fumbles about in them. There’s a newspaper upside down on his desk that he must have been reading when I knocked. I see it’s the same page of the local rag that I’m carrying among my own papers. He looks up shutting the drawer and pushes a manila A4 envelope across the desktop towards me. I point towards the piece of newsprint.

  ‘A nasty business,’ I say. ‘I understand he was sacked from Wessex.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I read it in the same local paper. And there was something about him on the news last night. Did you know him, Dr Davidson? Perhaps you didn’t overlap here. That was a strange thing: for the crowd to attack his house. I mean it was a very extreme response to just a paragraph of newsprint.’

  ‘“Though shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Isaiah.’

  ‘A witch? I thought they died out long ago apart from children’s fiction.’

  ‘Children’s fiction deals in wizards, I believe. Think of The Wizard of Oz among others. A witch is a quite different matter. They don’t wear pointed hats and jet about on broomsticks of course. The witch is a very real figure.’

  ‘But the accounts of witch trials…’

  ‘Can be read either way. You can take Reginald Scott’s view that they were deluded and mostly old, women. Or you can read the accounts of the trials as very often showing malevolent intentions to harm, even kill, their victims and of evil familiars who did their bidding or pacts with the forces of darkness. After all many of them confessed to all these things. And if you believe there is a force for good operating in the world then you must also envisage a force for evil. Otherwise how can you account for all the violence and immorality in the world?’

  ‘Human folly?’ I know from our last meeting that it’s no good putting forward the view that, being just very clever apes, Homo habilis, not very sapiens and not genetically far removed from Pan troglodytes, our cousin, who also commits rape and murder on occasion, so-called evil is only what’s to be expected of us.

  ‘Led into temptation by someone or something.’

  Again I want to say: by territorialism and competition for status and the food supply, and the chance to pass on your genes through the best combination for survival, beauty and brains.

  ‘Good and evil: a constant struggle but in the end good must prevail and we must make sure we are there among the elect.’

  I realise now that Dr Davidson isn’t just a lecturer at Wessex. He’s one of the chosen, the inner elite. It isn’t only the theology students who are the Temple of the Latent Christ. There must be others like Davidson scattered through the faculty. And there’s nothing to stop them spreading their nutty beliefs except common sense. Just sometimes a judge will rule that a child must be given a blood transfusion against the parents’ wishes and beliefs or parents be forced to send their children to school, but on the whole we don’t interfere. A child’s body is found half burnt with strange signs cut into the soft skin or another is beaten to drive out the evil spirits, and then the social services are blamed for not doing a proper job, a job we make sometimes impossible with our tolerance of individuality to the point of negligence. You mustn’t interfere. Live and let live. Freedom of expression. The fifth amendment or is it the first? You’re wandering, Jade. Davidson is looking at me curiously.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Davidson. What you were saying was so interesting, even inspiring, that my mind was carried away. Would you say those ideas are close to the beliefs of the Manichaeans?’

  ‘The Manichaeans were called heretics, Ms Cowell. I don’t know how much church history you’ve studied. I find that students these days rather wish to concentrate on the twentieth century to the neglect of the more distant past, the origins of our faith. What interests them is the rise of fascism. That sort of thing. But in the history of the last two thousand years that’s just a blip.’

  Suddenly I have a vision of our sorry human past where two world wars and the Holocaust are just a hiccup in the depressing vertical panorama of malfeasance with only an occasional upland lit by hope. I dig around for something to say that will keep this insane, yet illuminating, conversation going.

  ‘I seem to remember the Albigenses were Manichaeans too. Didn’t they come to a bad end?’

  ‘They were wiped out by a crusade against them by the Christian church: that is the institution that managed to gain power over The Word at the end of the first century of Our Lord and that has decreed ever since what is God’s Word, the true way of life and how he should be worshipped. But there have always been those who resisted, often in secret, and who kept the temple of their bodies and hearts. The first were the Essenes into whose embrace the Lord came when he was baptised by John in the desert and fought the spirit of darkness, fasting on the mountain top.’

  I recognise the cadences of this speech from the internet sermon by Apostle Joachim. ‘After our discussion, Dr Davidson, my thesis seems irrelevant.’

  ‘Who can say, Ms Cowell, where any piece of research will lead? It may be you will be guided to some revelation for yourself or others that will change your view of the world for ever.’

  I can’t quite see Tudor stage cross-dressing fitting into this scenario but then, as the man says, who can tell? I stand up.

  ‘I’m sorry; I’ve taken up far more than I should of your time. It has been most enlightening.’

  ‘Study the material Ms Molders has given you, Ms Cowell, and then we can talk again.’ He stretches out a hand to shake mine and I realise that the flesh I had thought dry and papery before is now hot and moist. Davidson is really hooked on all this stuff and he thinks he has a chance of making a convert.

  I’m outside his door clutching my notes for my supposed thesis which we haven’t even discussed, and the manila envelope that I guess is meant to show me the way, set me on the path for enlightenment or whatever word they use. I wander off into the quadrangle. The rain has stopped. The sun comes out and the grass smells fresh and damp with spangles of diamond light catching on every blade. O brave new world that can be renewed by this fall of natural spray. I need to think. A pity I hadn’t got a mini recorder wired up in my pocket so that I could run the interview by again and tease out its implications. Instead I shall have to remember all I can, hoping that not too much has slipped my mind.

  I wander on through the arch at the other side of the quadrangle and realise I’m on the edge of a part of the grounds I haven’t visited before. Away beyond a stretch of grass with a path running through there’s a modern red-brick building partly sunk below a sloping mound that’s like the defence for a medieval castle. The red brick will be a cosmetic skin over steel and concrete. The lower windows and doors look out into a grassy well. A way of having another storey without going too high, typical of late twentieth-century public buildings, uni campuses and hospitals.

  Following the path I’m led down to a glass door. No one seems to be about. The windows are blankly shut with no sound of music or voices coming through them. There are no trees nearby so no birdsong, and no insects zooming busily over the grass that looks tired because it’s been shaved too close. Scorch marks show through the greenish bristle that the rain hasn’t refreshed. There’s a nameplate on the door. The Temple of John. John who? Baptist or Evangelist?

  ‘This building is protected. Back off or an alarm will sound!’ I reel back a couple of steps, out of range as I hope of a security system that sounds more like the most extreme
of car alarms with its aggressive transatlantic vocals. I can see an entry phone like the one on the main gate. I get out my pass card and approach the door quickly hoping to beat what must be an outer beam and stick my card in the slot.

  ‘This card is not valid for these premises. Insert the right card or return to the main building.’

  I extract my card and hastily back away. I don’t want to be caught seeming a snoop. People might begin to wonder why Lucy Cowell is so often in the wrong place at the right time. As directed by the disembodied voice I head back for the central block. Passing the chapel I hear singing and rhythmic clapping and scurry away to the bike shed before the elect come out and find me there again where I shouldn’t be.

  Is it fear that is so enervating that when I get home I can hardly climb the stairs and fall asleep on my bed without bothering to check my messages? When I wake it’s dark and I’m hungry. I think with nostalgia of Mary Gao’s takeaway suppers steaming in their little foil dishes. Opening the fridge I settle for some Camembert from the French cheese stall in the market. The bread in the bin has spots of leprous mould. I find an unopened packet of water biscuits that might not be quite stale, ignore the use-by date, and pour myself a glass of wine. Then I set the computer to search for Manichaeans and Albigenses.

  My take on them both was rusty but as it turns out when the machine finishes its search, quite close to the facts, given that I hadn’t considered either of them since my student days when I’d briefly had to think about how other value systems might affect a society’s laws.

  ‘What is the possible effect on the perception of crime and its treatment in legislation of a belief system that sees the world and society as an eternal battleground between darkness and light? Discuss.’

  Manichaeanr: system based on old Babylonian religion modified by Christian and Persian influences. Founded by Mani circa 200 AD who taught that Christ had come into the world to restore light and banish darkness but that his apostles had prevented his doctrine and Mani was sent as the Paraclete to put it right.

  Albigenses: Manichaean sect twelfth to fourteenth century in southern France and northern Italy. Called after the city of Albi in Languedoc where they were first persecuted. Finally exterminated by church and inquisition at the end of the fourteenth century. Also called Cathars and Bulgarians. Many of the aristocratic troubadours were members of the sect.

  Were they accused of buggery, ‘unnatural’ practices? Is that where The Word comes from?

  Paraclete: the Holy Ghost, the Comforter. See Abelard and Heloise.

  There’s no end to this but I don’t follow up on the two star-crossed lovers. Their story is still poignant, an open wound that searched, leads to too much related pain, a wound that you hoped had scarred over. And how much suffering lies behind that phrase ‘finally exterminated’; one of the constantly recurring genocides only, like the Bosnians and Croats, ethnically the same people divided by history and religion.

  So the Manichaeans and the Albigenses all perished, did they? Well, I have news for the encyclopedists: they are alive and well, and living in modern Wessex, as well as the many other parts of the world wherever the internet spreads its mesh. Old beliefs die hard or perhaps they never do. Maybe they’re embedded deep in the human psyche just waiting for the right button to be pushed to pop out again with all their bizarre compulsion.

  What does it all mean for Galton? You might think his lot and all the Latent Christ lot would have lots and lots in common. Except that the latter-day Albigenses would probably think witches are Satanists, worshipping darkness, just like the popular image of them in the tabloids. Abusing children with unspeakable obscenities. And now the internet itself has become a trawling ground for real paedophiles and their porno pics that somewhere must involve the abuse of real children. You can see why the Manichaeans might have had something going for them with their doctrine of the perversion of Christianity and setting themselves against the triumph of darkness, when the established church was at its most repressive and venal. They were the pre-Reformation Puritans. All those religious taking backhanders for pardons to support their lovers just as Chaucer tells it.

  But that’s history as they say. Here and now it’s the televan-gelists conning people, going on their knees on screen for their sins while salting away the dosh. Then there’s the leaflets that come through the letter box with the rest of the junk mail. Madame Sosostris, Eliot’s clairvoyant, had nothing on the palm, crystal ball and tarot readers preying on mostly migrant people, uprooted, disenfranchised of their own language and culture.

  Ever since I started on this case I’ve been making a collection of them, instead of binning the mostly A3 leaflets with their seductive offerings of problem-solving and hope.

  ‘Do you feel your life is being controlled by evil spirits and darkness? Are you a victim of witchcraft or black magic?’ Sister Sabera has the answer. ‘My work is powerful and accurate. Suffer no more for I will cure you and set you free.’

  Then there’s the Rasta guy in the market who gives out advice off the cuff. His clients must pay him something but I’ve never actually seen money change hands. I wonder if they go home and follow the advice, comforted. ‘Do you need your home blessed, Aura cleansed, Spirit Enlightened? Mrs Telrala is the one for you.’ Kala, Jaada, Obeah, Ju-Ju curses.

  How contemptuous Galton must be of this lot and yet his is only the upmarket version of what they’re offering. Peace, hope, the longed-for love. Suddenly I’m remembering a part of my conversation with Davidson. He knew Galton was a witch, and if he does then so do other people at Wessex. The likelihood that he was set up with the police by them or some of them is almost irresistible.

  It wasn’t enough to sack him. He has to be destroyed because his beliefs contradict theirs or rather he is the enemy, darkness, the evil one, the great beast, and his high priestess, no doubt, the whore of Babylon.

  My lady called me to her. ‘My brother’s secretary Mr Roland Whyte, writes at his command to tell me my younger son is secretly contracted to Lady Susan de Vere for love, neither his friends or hers knowing of it, except my son, the earl, who was it seems acquainted with his brother’s intention even before his own wedding. It appears that at first her uncle, her guardian, was very troubled at it, my younger son not standing to inherit his father’s lands and title, but his majesty has given them his blessing and makes all friends. The marriage will be at court on St John’s Day so I must go to London again and the Lady Anne also for she is to take part in a masque to be presented on Twelfth Night. Therefore you must come with me to oversee her physick.’

  I was glad to be part of all this. It would give me the chance to make further provision for my future, for my lady went on, ‘While I am there I must seek out some convenient lodging to lie in for all now must be ceded to my son, the earl, once this second match is concluded. So I shall make close enquiry among my friends and those of my sons. God grant I have enough remaining for me to pay for my decent lodging but his will be done.’

  So again I prepared myself, my instruments and medicines, for London but this time not knowing whether I should ever return to my home country. And again I rode under the gloomy walls of Baynard’s but not to lie there, for the castle was filled to overflowing with many come as well for the marriage as for Christmas and although some lay at Whitehall at the court, as my lady’s brother Robert, Baron of Penshurst, now chamberlain to her majesty Queen Anne, yet his family lay at the castle for his daughter was also to bear a part in the masque for Twelfth Night. Therefore I found myself lodging at the house of a good woman nearby, rather than be forced to lie in the stable or under the stairs. She was the readier to take me on hearing I was physician to the countess, begging me to prescribe something to relieve her husband’s gout, which affected his humour to anger so that he would often strike her in his pain, and when I was able to do this and gave him back his accustomed kindness, she let me lie without payment.

  From her house I was the more able to go about wit
hout notice when not expressly sent for by the countess. I began to make myself acquainted with all the branches of my profession, as apothecaries, physicians, barber surgeons, their halls and favoured taverns so that I might rub shoulders with them. I found that there were many that had been in like case with myself, unlicensed practitioners who had no degree of learning from either university nor any licence of a bishop but had set themselves up, sometimes beyond the city walls or across the river where the Barber Surgeons Company could not reach them. Yet I feared to be on my own in the world with none to turn to, still considering how I might become assistant or apprenticed to some master, and how that in those days which the duenna remembers, sometimes lamenting their passing, I might have found refuge in a nunnery where I could practise my cunning.

  On the day before the eve of Christmas I made my way to Bread Street Hill close to the College of Physicians in Knightriders Street and therefore but a short distance from Baynard’s and the house where I lodged, to the sign of the Star where the printer Peter Short, who had put out that book of De Magnete by Dr Gilbard, had his shop. In the pocket of my slops lay a fair copy of my book of receipts. Master Short’s apprentice, as I thought him, received me, asking if I would buy or sell and if the former I must go to the bookseller’s in Paul’s churchyard or Paternoster Row.

  ‘Had there been one here for sale I would have bought a copy of De Magnete even though I have come here principally to sell. And if you will fetch your master I will show him my wares.’

  ‘You may show me first,’ said the lad who was about my age or younger. ‘I will tell you if what you have is worth anything which I doubt if it is a work of your own.’

  ‘It is a work principally of my father’s and therefore far above your understanding. If your master is not to be spoken with I will take the book elsewhere. There are many printers in London so I am told,’ then I made as if to turn away.