The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  Connie sat, listening, breath stoppered in the top of her lungs. Under the timer of her aisle she heard a faint ticking, followed by one loud click. She let her breath out. It was just the timer shutting itself off in the first aisle. No one else could possibly want to come into this archive, especially not in the middle of the summer. She nosed past the remaining front matter of the book to find herself faced with an engraving of a dead body, sliced open in front, with different organs removed and labeled in Latin. This must be the British medical textbook, she thought, disappointed. She ran her fingertips over the raised etching, slightly appalled at the flayed, dead face of the cadaver in the illustration, his lips pulled back in a silent grimace. Dissection was hardly a mainstream practice in the 1680s, when the book was written. She shuddered, paging further into the book. It was entirely in Latin, and without Liz to translate she had no way of really understanding what she was reading, but it certainly did not seem to be a vernacular book. Also, she could not detect more than one hand at work; the text was all printed, and seemed to be organized in a scholarly way.

  As this thought passed through her mind she heard another click, louder, and in the same instant that she registered the sound, the aisle was plunged into total darkness.

  “Dammit,” she muttered. The timer must have run out. She closed the book, groping in the blackness for the gap on the shelf that signaled the book’s proper location, and struggled to her feet. She felt along the shelves until her hand plunged into blank space, indicating that she was back in the main central walkway. Her next possibility, the anonymous almanac, was only one aisle over, and Connie pawed through the darkness until her fingers landed on the timer for the next aisle. She twisted the little knob, and when the ticking timer burst into light she started to find the smiling figure of Manning Chilton.

  “Oh!” Connie gasped, bringing an involuntary hand to her chest.

  “Connie, my girl,” he said, folding his arms and leaning, jovial, against one of the shelves. “What a pleasant surprise. Researching, are we?”

  He arched a wiry eyebrow at her, and Connie reflected that only her advisor would wear a silk club bow tie and loafers to do research in an archive as filthy as this one. He was standing near enough to her that she could see that the tie was covered in tiny snarling boars’ heads: the Porcellian, one of Harvard’s more select men’s societies. The club was known to serve as a clearinghouse for Brahmin Boston men, to ensure that those not already connected by blood or marriage would nevertheless be assured the right professional and political contacts. It was a world in which wealth was assumed, class prerogatives unapologetically reinforced, and women…well, there were rumors about how the men of the “Porc” regarded women.

  Connie swallowed and blinked. “I didn’t realize anyone else was here,” she said.

  He smiled, bloodless and taut, in response.

  “I’ve only just arrived,” Chilton said. “Come to work on a few more sources for that conference presentation that we discussed,” he said after a moment. She tried to smile back at him, but it came out looking more like a cringe. “Which reminds me,” he said, edging nearer to her, “where do we stand on that research that you were going to show me? I am most eager to see that book.”

  Connie suddenly saw that she was trapped. Perhaps it was a coincidence, his appearing when she was so near to finding Deliverance’s book, but she realized that there was the possibility, however slim, that it was not. As she gazed at her advisor’s patrician face, his eyes a watery blue and bloodshot, his teeth yellowed by pipe tobacco, she suspected her fear was true. He must have searched for the book himself and been unable to find it—that was what he had meant when he said he was doing some checking of his own. Now he had followed her here so that she could not conceal her discovery from him. But there was no escape. She had reached the last possibility on the list, and he was here, waiting.

  Connie still had not explained to herself why she wished to protect her research from him; she knew that he was relying on the success of her work to bolster his own reputation. And she had overheard him promise results—results for what, she did not know—at the Colonial Association conference. At their last meeting, Chilton had even dangled prestige before her, as a carrot to make her work faster. But if he was here, poised to swoop down upon her primary source, then his desperation must be even more acute than Janine had implied.

  “As a matter of fact,” she wavered, “I think there’s a good chance I am about to find it. Today.” She swallowed again, willing the saliva back into her mouth. A smile broke across his face, like a crack wending its way through a stained china plate.

  “What excellent news,” he said. “I knew that you could do it. By all means, carry on.” He waved a knotty hand at her in a beneficent gesture.

  Under his hungry gaze she pulled the slip of scrap paper out of her pocket and turned her attention to the tattered book spines, scanning for the proper call number.

  “My girl,” he began as she hunted through the books. “Do you know why I have devoted so much of my work to the history of alchemy?”

  She continued working, not looking at him. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I don’t believe we have ever discussed it.”

  He laughed a dry, acerbic little laugh. “Rather unusually so for a man of my background,” he began, and Connie was distracted as usual by his accent. Rathah. “I believe in hard work above innate talent. Technique, Connie. You know,” he continued, warming to his topic, “on some level I don’t believe that innate talent exists. No. I have always been a bit of a meritocrat in that regard. Take sufficient study, technique, and attention to detail, and one can transcend whatever one’s former circumstances. Such are the ingredients necessary for intellectual triumph.”

  She sensed him eyeing her, waiting for her to express her approval. In his voice resonated the timbre of a man who thinks he has convinced himself of an idea, but masks his own doubt by laboring to persuade others. Connie said nothing, making a show of concentrating on her task. She suspected that the narrative that he told himself about his interest in alchemical research differed rather drastically from the narrative that others might deduce from his actions. When she did not respond, he continued.

  “On this score, the ancient alchemists and I see the world in strikingly similar terms. These men—straddling the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment! Standing on the very cusp between rank superstition and the scientific method! They believed in the power of science to unmask the divine. Through manipulation of the physical world, they intended to touch the very nature of truth.” His eyes gleamed, and she slowed her pace along the book spines, walking along them one finger at a time, saying nothing.

  “Truth,” he repeated, pausing with significance. “In this age of relativism and shoddy humanitarian nonsense. The hermeneutics of this, the gendering of that, discourses of the other thing.” He emitted a derisive snigger, edging nearer to her. “What price would you pay to be able to stand before your colleagues and say, Within my very hand I hold the key to the deeper structures of reality and perception?” He breathed, and she smelled the pipe tobacco on his breath.

  “I would think that particle physics has the lock on the true nature of reality,” Connie hazarded, peering at him out of the corner of her eye. She saw Chilton’s eyebrows sweep together in a storm cloud over his face.

  “Ah, but that is where you are wrong,” Chilton said, voice slightly too loud for the narrow confines of the stacks. “Science still knows how to doubt, but it has lost the ability to believe. Faith is what distinguishes the alchemical mind from the purely scientific one. And this is where the real value of alchemical knowledge lies.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Connie said. “What sort of value?” She had found the call number that she was looking for but hesitated to rest her hand on the telltale spine. Her nerves vibrated with tension and anxiety. In the back of her mind hung the specter of Sam, and the torments that were wracking his body. Every couple of hour
s, she repeated to herself, hating that her advisor was still loitering over her, grasping, demanding, waiting.

  “But don’t you know yet?” he asked, bemused.

  “No!” Connie exclaimed. “Colonial almanacs. Shadow books. What does that have to do with anything?” she demanded, emboldened by the sight of the exact book that she wanted. If she could distract him, perhaps she could come up with a way to get him to leave. But then, if he had followed her here, he would already know what call numbers had attracted her attention. She could not merely lie. Connie sorted through different strategies for diverting Chilton’s attention from the book but rejected each one as impossible.

  “Why, Connie,” he said, in a bantering tone that caused her to flinch, “I am no sexist.” He snickered, and she cast a confused look in his direction. He observed her bafflement and smiled wider. “Countless men—some of the greatest scientific minds in human history—turned their considerable powers to the quest for the philosopher’s stone. Like the Puritan elect, those people singled out by God for a higher purpose, the alchemical adepts were men of the highest order, worthy of practicing the Great Work. This wondrous substance could transform base materials into pure ones at a touch, and at the same time could effect profound changes in the human body,” he added. “Though its color, content, and structure have long been subject to debate, there is no doubt that it was real. The philosopher’s stone is the single most rare and spectacular product of human intellect and effort: a conduit for God’s power, acting on the stuff of life on earth.”

  As Chilton spoke, a tremble traveled up Connie’s spine. She saw that her hand, ever so slightly, was shaking.

  “All of them,” Chilton continued, “despite their prodigious learning and scholarship, despite being the greatest minds of their time, in the end, stopped short of success. And why do you think that was?”

  Connie glanced at him from under her lashes and saw that he actually expected her to answer. “Because it is a myth,” she whispered. “The philosopher’s stone is just an allegory. It represents everything that man wants and can never have.”

  Chilton threw back his head and laughed.

  “Ah! How spirited you are,” he exclaimed. “Of course you would think that. But consider this. None of them”—he paused significantly, one long finger raised in emphasis—“none of them bothered to consider the textual insights that might be offered by practitioners of vernacular magic. The alchemists had the materials, and they had the knowledge, but they were missing a crucial element of technique. And they did not know to look for it! Because most of the practitioners of vernacular magic were women, of course. Learned men in the early modern period would never have consulted with a cunning woman, no matter how well regarded, because her social rank and knowledge level would have been so drastically inferior to theirs. The alchemists were brilliant but shortsighted in that regard. I, however, as a man of my own time, have no such prejudiced illusions. Now—have we found what we were looking for?”

  Surprise and fear gripped Connie, tightening the muscles around her neck. Her mind was reeling, astonished that Chilton actually believed that what he was saying was true. I would like you to see what I have to offer, he had said on the telephone. He was looking for the formula for the philosopher’s stone—and he thought he was on the point of finding it. The idea struck her as preposterous, and yet Chilton’s fevered smile told her that it must be true.

  Further delay was futile. Kneeling, she placed a hand on the waiting book, edging it out of its hiding place on the shelf and supporting it with one protective arm. She glanced up at her advisor to see if he expected her to give him the book directly, but he was looking down, eyes eager, and she read in his face the real passion and curiosity underlying his prodigious self-aggrandizement. Deep within himself, Manning Chilton was still at heart a scholar. Whatever wealth and influence he may be clutching for, Chilton hungered even more for the discovery. Flexing her fingers, she caught the corner of the unmarked cover and edged it open. One page flipped by, then another, and another, and Connie felt a little smile of triumph pull at the corners of her mouth.

  “Do you want to see?” she said, looking up at Chilton. He nodded, gesturing for her to hand him the volume, so she stood and passed the book to him. He grabbed it eagerly, a thin strip of fragile leather binding ripping off the spine and falling to the floor in his haste. He licked a thumb and then turned over the frontispiece. Connie recoiled to contemplate the damage that this would cause but let the feeling go as she watched his reaction.

  “But what…,” he began, voice trailing off as the excitement melted off his face in great tallow sheets. “This is just a tide table!” he exclaimed, turning a leaf over. “‘Weather predictions for January of 1672,’” he read aloud, then flipped another page. “‘Hints for the Cultivation of Maize.’” He looked up at her, face contorted in a tense mask of anger. “What is this!” he demanded.

  “It’s an almanac,” she replied, simply. Peeking at the notes she had made on her scratch paper, she clarified. “Privately published in Boston in the 1670s, no author listed.”

  “This isn’t the shadow book?” he said, voice boiling.

  “I guess not.” She shrugged. “I thought it might be. But it looks like it’s just a regular old farmers’ guide.”

  An oily sheen washed over his eyes as he thrust the book back into her arms, scattering more figments of binding across the archive floor. “This is most disappointing, Connie,” he hissed through a tightening jaw. He turned away from her, striding briskly back to the central passage in the stacks. When he reached it, he turned to face her again.

  “I must warn you,” he said, one index finger extended. “You have every reason to want to find that book. I am sure you know what I mean.”

  She stared at him, saying nothing. “And,” he continued, pointing to the ticking light switch, “you are almost out of time.”

  As he said this the timer emitted a loud click, and Connie was swallowed up in darkness.

  OVERHEAD, THE ELM TREES DOTTING HARVARD YARD BRUSHED THEIR leafy branches together, filling the air with a shushing murmur that announced an evening rainstorm in the offing. Connie walked, arms folded, head down, shoulder bag thumping against her hip. A chill breeze circulated around the trunks of the trees, swirling up her bare legs, sprinkling them with goose bumps. The change of seasons always took her by surprise, even after a lifetime in New England. She rubbed her hands briskly over her upper arms, bringing warmth to them. Soon enough the campus would be crawling with students again, tossing Frisbees, heads nodding to headphones, leaves rustling around their feet. When the seasons started to change Connie always felt that time was slipping away from her, like earth crumbling through her fingers. She disliked the sensation, for it filled her with a vague sense of fear. The onward crush of time reinforced how small she was, how powerless.

  Connie glanced over her shoulder; no one was following her. She assumed that Chilton had gone back to the history building but could not be sure. The threat that he had uttered when he left her in the library now hovered in her mind, ominous yet imprecise. The Colonial Association conference clearly posed some sort of deadline for Chilton’s research. But the darkness in his eyes alluded to still more menacing threats. After he left her sitting in the dark in the special collections archive, a few minutes passed as she tried to ascertain what further steps to take. As he rambled on about alchemy, the philosopher’s stone, and the promises that its discovery seemed to hold, an idea had begun to glimmer in the back of Connie’s mind.

  I’m no sexist, he had said, with some sarcasm. Now as she strode across Harvard Yard, shoulders hunched, the idea took root and grew, branching into her consciousness. She walked past the oldest edifices on campus, squat brick buildings covered in webbed clinging vines, and paused before the dense traffic careening through Harvard Square.

  Striding in fits and spurts across the car-clogged breadth of Massachusetts Avenue, Connie again turned her thoughts to Sam.
Since her experiment with the sieve and scissors her all-encompassing worry had folded back on itself, creating a screaming feedback loop that followed her everywhere she went, for she knew that only Deliverance’s book could free Sam from the new horror in which he found himself. Her understanding of the book had shifted yet again; it had gone from being an exquisite primary source to being the only thing that could restore Sam’s life. The text still held its intellectual value, of course, but she had stopped caring about it in that way. Connie glanced up as she passed the old Cambridge Burying Ground, its headstones leaning at dangerous angles, its rusted gate chained shut against the incursions of the morbidly curious and the vandalism prone, and thought only about Sam.

  Connie felt her jaw tighten. The research didn’t matter. Chilton didn’t matter either.

  The idea that had formed in the solitary darkness of the Widener stacks was beating against the backs of Connie’s eyes, and she knew with an aching certainty that she was finally correct. A book considered a mere women’s text by Harvard in 1925 would have been banished to the humble library of Harvard’s underfunded sister college, Radcliffe, now an all-but-defunct collection of ill-maintained buildings housing only forgotten relics and visiting feminist scholars on grants. She turned left at the corner of the Cambridge Common, breaking into a trot as she headed through the humming streets toward the Radcliffe Quadrangle.

  THE VOLVO ROCKED TO A STOP AT THE WEEDY END OF MILK STREET, struts groaning in protest, and Connie tumbled out of the car. Pushing through the creaking iron gate into Granna’s yard, she nearly stumbled over Arlo, who was lying in wait under a dense rosemary hedge along the flagstone path. He galloped after her as she sprinted into the house, hardly noticing the glimmering sheen that washed over the burned circle on the front door, and on the horseshoe nailed overhead. She banged through the door and grabbed immediately at the telephone, fingertip hurrying through the progression of numbers that would connect her with Grace Goodwin in Santa Fe.