Chantress Alchemy (14 page)

I sat back in my chair. What a peculiar question.

“What else is there to try?” I asked slowly.

“Some Chantresses have a talent for other kinds of magic,” Sybil said. “Didn’t you know that?”

I hadn’t. But the idea alone was encouraging. If spell-singing was barred to me, perhaps I could find some more magic elsewhere.

“Have you ever tried anything but singing?” Sybil asked.

“No. Never.”

Her face lit up. “You’re a novice, then? Oh, this
is
exciting. We could experiment, you and I, and see if there’s anything else there.”

“Experiment how?” Though I longed to hear more, I kept my voice neutral. I didn’t want Sybil to guess how important her answer might be.

“Oh, I know all kinds of tricks, believe me. Most of Mama’s friends were charlatans, but a few had the genuine spark, and they taught me a great deal. Nothing I could do myself, more’s the pity. But I daresay I know enough to guide you.” She looked about the
room eagerly, as if searching for a place to start. “Here, why don’t we try—”

A knock at the door cut off her suggestion.

“Oh dear.” Sybil rose with a disappointed air. “That will be Joan. We’ll have to stop for now.”

“You don’t want her to know?”

Sybil shook her head. “Joan wouldn’t approve at all. She thinks it’s dangerous to mess about with such things.”

“
Is
it dangerous?”

“Oh, she exaggerates. It’s not dangerous at all. At least, not often.”

“Not often?” I echoed in concern.

Sybil was already in the vestibule, however, and didn’t answer. From where I sat, I couldn’t even see her—or the door.

“Oh, do let me in,” I heard a man say.

“It’s not a good time,” Sybil murmured.

“It’s always a good time. You’re my valentine, remember?”

“Am I, indeed?” Sybil sounded exasperated. “Oh, come in, then. I can see I’m not going to get rid of you.”

“How very kind.” A young man strode in, all velvet and smiles: Lord Gabriel.

When he saw me, his smile slipped away. “Oh, er . . . I didn’t realize you were here. . . .”

“No, I suppose you didn’t,” I said. “Not with all that talk about valentines.” I spoke without rancor; I was pleased to have proof that his pursuit of me this morning had not been entirely serious.

Sybil looked at me with raised eyebrows. “You had one from him too?” was all she said, but when I nodded, she started to laugh.

Lord Gabriel looked at us both with some chagrin, and then—to my surprise—he laughed too. “Caught red-handed,” he admitted. “But can you blame me? After all, who wouldn’t want to claim you both, if he could?”

He gave us a slightly sheepish but admiring grin. I caught myself grinning back. Overambitious he might be, and a tad conceited, but he could laugh even when the joke was on him, and I liked that.

“So tell me, then, what have you two ladies been talking about?” He advanced into the room. “Not valentines, I hope.”

“Never,” I said crisply as Sybil and I sat back down by the fire.

“Or beaux, or dancing?”

“As a matter of fact,” Sybil said, “we were talking about alchemists.”

“Were you, indeed?” He looked at us, one to another. “And what did you have to say about them? Or should I say—
us
?”

“Oh, we weren’t talking about you,” I said. “I was asking Sybil some questions about alchemy, that’s all.”

Lord Gabriel drew up a chair. “What do you want to know?”

“Oh, anything and everything. I know so little—only what was mentioned in the Council meeting.” I’d meant to learn more about it from Penebrygg, but I figured I could do worse than glean some facts here, especially if it taught me a bit more about Lord Gabriel, too.

“Be careful what you wish for, my friend,” Sybil warned. “Gabriel can talk about the subject till the stars fall from the sky. The trouble is getting him to stop.”

“Dear lady, you cut me to the heart.” Lord Gabriel grinned at Sybil, evidently enjoying the banter. “I spent nine years studying alchemy, and now you would forbid me from so much as mentioning the subject?”

“Out of sheer self-defense, yes,” Sybil said.

“Nine years?” I was surprised. “How old were you when you started, Lord Gabriel?”

“Oh, leave off the Lord bit, if you please, Chantress. Gabriel will do nicely.” Still grinning, he sat back to consider. “Let’s see. . . . I suppose I was not quite ten.”

“And your parents didn’t mind?”

“They weren’t there. When Scargrave came to power, they sent me to live with family friends in Sweden; it was hoped I would be safer there. It was a strange sort of household, though. The first tutor hired for me turned out to be a closet alchemist. It took me a few months to ferret out what he was doing, but once I did, he agreed to share some of his secrets.”

“There was more to it than that, I seem to recall,” Sybil said.

“Well, there was a spot of blackmail involved, if that’s what you’re referring to,” said Gabriel. “He’d never have told me anything if he hadn’t been afraid of exposure.”

“You were blackmailing people at nine?” I said.

“Ten, by then,” said Gabriel, unruffled. “Anyway, from then on I was hooked. I didn’t want to do anything else.”

“Surely they made you study other subjects too?”

“Oh yes. But none of them ever interested me half as much as alchemy. After all, you don’t get rich studying mathematics, do
you? Or Latin, or logic, or astronomy—or any of the other things tutors tried to cram down my throat. Only alchemy can give you wealth, give you power.”

“If you’re lucky,” I said.

“But I
am
lucky.” Gabriel stretched out his booted legs with a confidence that bordered on cockiness. “I’m here in Greenwich Palace, and Sir Isaac has selected me to help him create the Philosopher’s Stone. Talk about good fortune.” He grinned. “Though I can’t say I was overly impressed with Sir Isaac at first. He’s so clumsy.”

“Clumsy?” It was the first I’d heard of it.

“Oh, not in everyday things, not so you’d notice. But it’s his brain that’s brilliant, not the rest of him. Ask him to distill a liquid, and before you know it, he’s burnt his fingers or broken an alembic.” He crossed his arms with self-satisfaction. “That’s where I come in, you see, with my steady hands and keen eyesight. He’d never manage to do the work by himself.”

“You make it sound as if you have to do everything single-handed,” Sybil chided.

“Not exactly. But I’m in the inner circle, if I do say so myself.”

“The inner circle, is it?” Sybil pretended to fan herself. “Oh my!”

Afraid her teasing would make the conversation veer before I’d learned all I could, I said to Gabriel, “I have a question: What’s an alembic?”

Sybil was right: it was like opening the floodgates. He launched into the answer with gusto, talking about vessels and tubes and
vapor, and sketching shapes in the air with his hands. If I’d had any doubts about his enthusiasm for alchemy, they were dispelled.

The only trouble was that I couldn’t quite follow what he was saying. “And a curcurbit is . . . ?”

“A
cu
curbit,” he corrected. “You use it in distillation.” Seeing my confusion, he rose from his chair. “Why don’t we go down to the laboratory? Then I can show you everything.”

I wanted to say yes. Seeing the laboratory might give me some insight into how and why the crucible had been stolen. But I wasn’t sure I should embark on an expedition with only Gabriel for an escort.

“Will you come too?” I asked Sybil.

“Of course I will.” She turned to Gabriel in reproach. “That is, if the invitation includes me. You never offered before.”

“That’s because you never showed a proper interest.”

“Now there’s gratitude. I listened for
hours
the night I met you.”

Again that wide, devilish grin. “Was it hours? I don’t remember.”

“I do,” Sybil said with feeling.

“Well, if I didn’t invite you, that was probably because the laboratory is generally off-limits to anyone except us alchemists. But hardly anyone’s around this morning. The one person who might be there is old Penebrygg, and he won’t mind our coming in.”

A tour of the off-limits laboratory
and
another chance to see Penebrygg?

“Shall we go now?” I said.

“Are you certain about this?” Sybil murmured to me as we departed her room.

“Yes.” My only misgiving was what Nat would think. Going to the alchemy laboratory with Sybil and Gabriel was a far cry from staying put in my room. But if I found out something useful, it would be worth it.

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Sybil whispered back.

With a dashing bow, Gabriel held the door, then offered his arms to both of us. “One for each of my valentines.”

Sybil and I looked at each other and laughed.

“And what arms will you offer your other valentines?” I asked.

“Who said there were others?” Gabriel protested, but he let his arms drop.

“Anyway, there isn’t enough room to walk three abreast where we’re going,” Sybil said. “I doubt you could even fit two.”

“How did you know?” Gabriel asked.

“People talk,” Sybil said.

She was right: the stairs that led down to the laboratory were narrow and winding, a slender spiral in stone. We had to go single file. Gabriel led the way, talking all the while.

“It wasn’t built as a laboratory, you understand. It used to be the King’s own kitchen. That was before they tripled the size of the palace, of course.” He glanced back to make sure we were following. “No one quite knew what to do with the room after that, until Sir Isaac came along. He saw right away what a good room it would be for alchemy, with the big old fireplaces and the oven and the row of windows for ventilation. And it’s right by the Thames, which is handy when the fires get out of control.”

I thought of the moonbriar fire and winced.

We reached a door in the wall. Gabriel pulled out a key and opened it, revealing yet another door, this one with a strapping guard in front of it.

“Just bringing some guests through, Potts,” Gabriel said to him.

Potts looked doubtful. “I didn’t hear nothing said about that, my lord.”

“No?” said Gabriel cheerfully. “Well, this is the Lady Chantress. And her friend.”

“You don’t say.” Potts gazed at me, thunderstruck.

“She’s going to work her magic and get our crucible back,” Gabriel said. “But first she needs to see the room, so if you could just open the door. . . . Yes, there’s a good man.”

It was Gabriel at his most lofty, and he made it sound as if I were about to sing a song-spell at any moment. But I swallowed
any impulse to protest. After all, what he’d said was fairly close to the truth—and it had gotten us past the guard.

The door swung shut, leaving us together in the laboratory, a cavernous space with high windows and walls stripped back to bare stone. The windows were closed now, and a pervasive stink, metallic and pungent, assaulted my nose.

Beside me, Sybil made a face. “It smells like a tannery. Or a dyeworks.”

Gabriel, however, didn’t seem bothered by the smell. “Doesn’t look like Penebrygg’s here right now,” was all he said before walking us around the place. He pointed out the various fires and furnaces, then took us over to see a configuration of glass tubes and bottles used for distilling.

Finally, he guided us over to a rack of peachy-brown clay pots with triangular rims. The smallest pot was the size of an ale mug, the largest the size of a cauldron. “And these are the crucibles, of course.”

“What exactly
is
a crucible?” By now I’d gotten used to the smell of the place and could talk without feeling sick. “I mean—what’s it used for?”

“You don’t know?” he asked.

“Have a heart,” Sybil said. “She’s new to alchemy.”

“True enough.” Gabriel gave me an ever-so-slightly patronizing smile. “A crucible, my dear Chantress, is an open vessel—one without a top—that can be heated to very high temperatures.”

“How high?” I asked.

“Oh, far beyond boiling point, in some cases. Some crucibles
can be cast into a veritable inferno, and yet never melt or crack. Like these.” He pointed to the rack of pots. “These crucibles come from Hesse, in Europe. They’re the best of their kind, barring the Golden Crucible, of course.”

“And how big is the Golden Crucible?” The crucial fact hadn’t been mentioned in the Council meeting.

“About the size of that one there.” Gabriel pointed to one in the middle of the rack. “The Golden Crucible is very much like it, except that it’s reddish-gold and it has a somewhat wider mouth.”

“So you’ve seen it?” Sybil asked.

“Of course. I went to the Treasury with Sir Isaac himself, at his request.”

I touched the crucible. “Could I hold it?”

“If you want to. But take care: if it slips from your hands, it will break as easily as any other pot. It’s only in the fire that it’s strong.”

I picked up the crucible, hefting its weight in both my hands.

“To really appreciate it, you should see it in action.” Gabriel opened a cupboard and pulled out a glass vial that looked to be almost full of water. He pried at the stopper.

“Gabriel.” There was a warning in Sybil’s voice. “Are you sure—?”

Pop!

Off came the stopper. In a motion so quick I hardly realized what was happening, Gabriel dropped a penny into the crucible I was holding and poured some of the liquid over it.

“Ugh.” Behind me, Sybil clapped her hand to her face. “Lucy, put it down!”

I shoved the crucible onto the nearest table as the liquid inside it fizzed and frothed and turned bright green. Even Gabriel now looked alarmed.

“Keep away!” He waved us back.

A plume of red-brown smoke shot up from the crucible.

I buried my head in my sleeve to ward off the acrid air. My lungs burned, and my eyes watered. Sybil gagged and coughed.

“This way!” Gabriel herded us into a smaller, adjacent room, where the air was still sweet. The moment he shut the door behind us, Sybil gasped, “What possessed you to do that?”