Dark Aemilia (23 page)

The doctor shakes his head. ‘You always did get the better of me. So be it.’ He takes a bunch of iron keys from a hook by the door, and leads the way out of the consulting room and across the stone-flagged hall. ‘I will show you the secret of my cellar,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘If you wish to interfere with life and death, then you must see what is at stake.’ He unhooks a rush lamp from the wall. ‘There is a reason why such powers are those of gods, not men. Carry this, and light our way.’

I take the light from him.

‘No matter what you see, do not drop this lantern,’ says Forman. ‘Otherwise we will never get out. It’s dark as the pit of Hades down there. And, to my knowledge, there is nothing to match my discovery west of Constantinople.’

He unlocks the cellar door with the largest key. The heavy door swings into blackness and reveals a flight of stone steps, descending into the void.

I follow him down the steps, my bare feet chilled by the damp stone. The torchlight shines on the scuffs and stains on his old doublet, and on the looped cobwebs on the dusty ceiling close above us. At the bottom of the stairs, the cellar opens out. There is space around us on all sides. It is deathly cold. He places the candle on the ground, and opens the chest. I peer inside. To my surprise, it contains yet another flight of steps, hewn out of the earth. There is a soft, cool scent: the smell of turned soil.

‘What! Do you plan to bury me down here?’

‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he says. He climbs over the side of the chest, and begins to descend. ‘Whatever do you take me for? Come along! Follow me.’

I scramble down quickly, slithering on the earth steps. When I reach the bottom, I find myself in a narrow chamber, barely big enough for the two of us to fit inside. It is cramped, and filled with so many glass jars and parchment rolls and brass instruments and all manner of weird objects that I am forced to keep my arms close to my sides. Unlike Forman’s public consulting room, which is neatly furnished and handsomely appointed, this is slip-shod and disordered, as if this is where he lets his mind run free. There are all manner of cups and vessels, made of metal, stone or glass; a round oven, topped with a brass alchemist’s kettle; and next to it, suspended from the ceiling like a great globe, a cow’s swollen bladder, smelling sickly-sweet.

The doctor goes over to a desk crammed against one wall and spreads out a roll of parchment, pushing sundry oddments out
of the way. These include the shrivelled corpse of a half-grown mouldiwarp and what looks like the beak of a little duck. There is also a mirror, of polished black obsidian; a jar of loose teeth; a crystal ball, big as a smith’s fist, and a dismembered thumb resting in a glass. (Quite pink, as if newly severed.) I hold up the torch and try to see what he’s reading.

‘Magicians are earthbound, human, lumps of clay,’ he says. ‘Ordinary beings, for all our talk of necromancy, all our books. Diseases – like the plague – can carry us off, just as easily as any other mortal. We might as well be stool-boys or dairymen. Yet… we can call on some higher state – call upon the planets and the stars – whose sublime powers might influence our sublunary world.’

‘They could cure the plague?’

‘If one were to find the philosopher’s stone, it could cure all diseases, as well as transmute base metal into gold.’

‘But you have not found it.’

‘Not
quite
, no.’

‘But a demon might do the same task? Don’t they say so?’

‘You wish to learn how to summon a demon. I am reluctant to give you the means to accomplish such an end.’

‘I wish to save my son,’ I say, again, dogged and determined. ‘I will do what I must.’

‘For a price, a demon might do anything you ask. But this is dangerous and difficult. You know what happened to Faustus.’

‘Faustus was foolish.’ I look down at the mass of signs and symbols. ‘Show me.’

He covers the numbers with his hands, though he needn’t be so cautious, as none of it makes any sense to me. ‘It is perilous, Aemilia. There is devilment here. This knowledge is not like some simple tincture, applied to a seeping wound. Remember, we are going above our station. Entangle your spirit with an angel in the heavens, and you will be consumed in fire by their burning righteousness. Tamper with the power of demons
and God help you. Or rather, He will not. Such a direct contact would destroy your fragile body, and imperil your immortal soul.’

‘So – all your studies have led to this conclusion? That it’s dangerous to take a single step?’

‘Quite the reverse.’ He shakes his head, fiercely, as if my dullness is too much to bear. He closes his eyes and begins again. ‘A man’s learning is the distillation of the thinking of a great institution, the riches of the libraries of Oxford or Cambridge or Tübingen.’

‘A man! So be it. Perhaps a woman may be more whole-hearted.’

‘Will you
listen
to me, Aemilia? Will you
hear
me?’

‘My son might die this night for all I know. I have no time for lectures on philosophy.’

‘This is no lecture, mistress. This is the stuff of wisdom. Agrippa, that great genius, used the natural elements to tell the future. Earth, fire, water, air. The manufacture of objects – talismans, potions and rings. The summoning of angels and demons to work miracles on his behalf…’

‘So summon me one! Quick! And I will bear it home to serve me.’

He sighs. ‘There you are, you see? Your impatience is proof of your weakness. You grabble after small things, won’t wait to be wise. A woman cannot think as a man can think. She is of her nature ruttish, light-minded, and with one eye on her looking-glass.’ He points to the obsidian mirror, and there I am, staring out at myself, wild and woebegone.

My hand twitches: I would like to strike him. But I keep silent, watching as he rifles inside a wicker basket before producing another clutch of parchment rolls. He unfurls one, flattens it out on top of the other documents on his desk, and proceeds to examine column after column of tiny black calculations, intricate numbers piled one on top of the other, till they sprout more
numbers and still more, like lamp-black frogspawn. Forman touches the numbers lightly, as if they might sting.

‘Theophilis and Cyprian gambled with their immortal souls in the quest for knowledge of this kind,’ he says. ‘As you will know, being a woman of education and much reading. Death is not the worst we have to fear.’

‘Don’t lecture me as if I were an infidel! Hell is as real to me as a garden gate.’

He pulls out another page, and bends close to look at it. ‘The ignorant seek miracles. Priests, in their expedient wisdom, seemed to bestow as much. There’s many a country church with an ass-bone on the altar, said to be the lost rib of a broken saint. Before Good King Henry swept away such falsehood, this land was steeped in lies and incense.’

He seems to have found what he was looking for. He stares at a long calculation, takes two vials of liquid and pours them into a long glass retort, thin as a reed at one end and spherical at the other. The two substances seem to hold back, one from the other, till they mingle with a sullen hiss.

‘There is scarcely a town in the realm that could not offer its good burghers a blood-weeping Virgin or a sweetly nodding martyr. No surprise to anyone that the little fish swam
shorewards
to hear the preaching of St Anthony, or that the Virgin at Saragossa could make half a leg grow whole again.’

He breaks off.

‘Magic, you see, Aemilia.
Magic
. Whereas what I’m about is
science
. If I show you what I have hidden here, you must swear that you will never tell another soul.’

‘I swear.’

‘Good. Because nobody would believe you anyway. This is the last night my discovery will remain here.’

‘Why?’

‘You are asking me to help you summon a demon.’

‘Indeed, I am more than asking you! I am begging you!’

He pulls a stout chest out from underneath the desk and unlocks it. Very carefully, he lifts out a long, narrow object, shrouded in a black velvet cloth, embroidered with a pattern of silver stars. ‘The point is, my dear, that the giving of life is a heavy responsibility. Just as any mother knows.’

‘What’s this?’ I whisper. Something prickles my neck, as if a spirit walked. I glance at his little alchemy oven. ‘Have you turned base metal into gold?’

‘Almost,’ says Forman. ‘Or, you might even say that this achievement is the greater, since there is one thing in this world more precious even than gold.’

He rests his trembling hands on the draped velvet.

‘Diamonds? Rubies?’

‘Life itself.’ He pulls the cloth aside.

My hands fly to my face and all the breath goes out of me. The cloth conceals a tube of glass, about a foot in length, and no wider than my wrist. I strain to see – my mind is chasing its own horrors – I see rats in the roof-thatch, plague-corpses in the street, a young virgin falling into Hell’s pit. My child, running through this Hell towards me. A child. Oh, Lord God! What is the doctor doing? I stumble closer, catch my foot and fall upon the ground, which flames with stars. I come to myself – the doctor is so absorbed by the sight before him that he pays me no attention. I struggle to my feet. My belly is cold. Forman’s body blocks my view. But, in the glass, I can see liquid and a little foot.

‘What foul sorcery is this?’ I whisper.

‘Not sorcery, though fools will think it so. It is the higher magic – the crown of an alchemist’s craft.’

‘You
made
him?’

‘Indeed.’

‘But… I don’t understand how this is possible. You are either God himself, or you are… the father of this manikin.’

‘As you say, I made it.’

I stare at Forman.

‘It’s monstrous – terrible. Who will rear him? Who will suckle him? How can this be the crown of
anything
?’

‘This required great study, let me assure you.’ The doctor is studying the newly mixed liquid as it shivers and shifts at the swollen end of the retort. ‘The creature is the fruit of a mandrake root and the semen of a hanged man’s last ejaculation.’

‘So that’s what you are: Satan’s midwife!’

‘The root was dug up before dawn on a Friday, by a black dog bred for the purpose. I washed it and kept it in a pot of milk and honey. Each day I dripped in the blood of a stillborn and the hanged man’s seed. And the creature grew and grew – to this.’

‘God above! Can he speak, think, pray? Is he a man?’

‘It is a homunculus.’ Forman lowers the retort. ‘I feed it on earthworms and lavender seeds.’

‘May heaven forgive you! This is your science?’

‘I have my natural children, through the pleasures of the flesh, and now I have this, through the power of my thinking.’

I think of my little Henry, when he was newly born, his tiny wrinkled face and elvish hands. I fear that, being so new, he might go back from this earth to wherever he had come from, and stay there for another eternity. And now… now that eternity is perilously close.

‘Oh, most noble and erudite scholar! Most respectable philosopher! The Devil himself could not concoct a more vile experiment than this.’

‘This is my brain-child.’ The doctor frowns, drawing down his ginger brows. ‘My invention.’ He is distancing himself from his creation with cold words.

I press my hands to my mouth, feeling bile rising in my throat. ‘Dear Lord, what are you saying? This is wicked, wicked blasphemy!’

Forman’s face is set into a mask of disapproval. ‘Do not upset yourself, Aemilia, please. This is merely an experiment in knowledge.’

‘An experiment, you say?’ I turn to him, shaking. ‘You call him your “brain-child”. So you are his father, and his mother too.’

‘Only in principle.’

‘But he is your own son!’

‘Who is it, Mistress Lanyer, that wishes to summon demons to do her will? Ah, I forget myself. It is you! You cannot affect such squeamishness as this.’

I swallow acid-tasting puke. ‘I want to call up some power that could aid me, so that I can save a life!’

‘Very modest.’

‘No, sir, not modest, but rooted in maternal love.’

‘There is no link between “maternal love” and my vial-grown manikin,’ says Forman. ‘You see – your female logic is askew.’

‘Jesu, sir! If you made him, then you must take care of him.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I am neither mother, nor father, to this manikin. I am its Creator.’

‘Dr Forman! Hear yourself. Do you put yourself so high? You’ll bring damnation on your head.’

He tears his gaze from the glass and looks at me. His eyes shine with determination. ‘No. I will not be damned. Your theology is even weaker than your logic. What I have made is mine to destroy.’

‘Isn’t our Lord the God of Love?
Amor vincit omnia
– isn’t that what we were taught? Love conquers all. Love, not philosophy. Not science.’

Forman frowns, his face set into stern lines. ‘It’s all very well to speak of love. Latin can be quoted in any cause. I might just as well say –
vita incerta, mors certissima
. Which has the virtue of being beyond dispute.’

‘Oh, brave philosopher! “There is nothing certain in life but death.” What thoughts of genius are these! I believe my cat knows as much.’

‘In this brute world, men die each day upon the street, faces black with plague. Infants die before they learn to speak their mother’s name.’

‘Yes – but you can save him from such uncertainty! You can be a merciful God, not a cruel one!’

‘And risk my own safety, and that of my family? No, Aemilia. Don’t you see? Those who accuse me of necromancy might find this little experiment interesting indeed. Now I know that I can create such a thing, I have no need to preserve it. My work is done.’

‘You truly mean to kill him?’

‘I want to show you that meddling with life and death has consequences. And they are immense and terrible.’

‘If you kill him, you do so because you choose to. You are sick in your soul, sir. Why do such a thing?’

‘If the physicians find out what I have done, they will have their proof that I am not a respectable practitioner of medicine but a cozener, a conjurer of spirits.’ His face twists to a smile. ‘In short, no better than a witch.’

He lifts up the tube.

‘Like Drake, and Ralegh, I am sailing to the furthest reaches of what is known. But I have no craft to bear me; my craft is my cunning. Those brave explorers must contend with pirates, ice-floes, sea monsters and the raging oceans. I must fight with vain physicians, caught in their staircase world of weasel tricks and pompous place-men.’

‘What torments do beset you, sir! This is all vanity, nothing but self-seeking vanity!’

‘They will kill me if they can, do not doubt it.’

My head is spinning with all this. ‘You wouldn’t murder your own child! Listen, Dr Forman – Simon – I implore you! You should feed him buttermilk and sweetmeats, see where his tastes lie! What does he hear? He might make music the like of which has never been heard in all of time, not even in the Court of Solomon… Your discoveries are only just beginning…’