The Accidental Alchemist (22 page)

“I’m not on the case, remember?” Max’s jaw was set so tightly that it affected his speech.

“Max,” I said. “What’s going on? What aren’t you telling us?”

“You really think I had something to do with these tragedies?” Ivan asked.
He gripped the edge of the table. Sweat coated on his forehead.

“Well this
is
interesting,” Olivia said. “Pray, do tell, Max. What
are
you keeping from us?”

“Are you all right, Ivan?” I asked.

“The excitement …” He wheezed as he spoke.

“Maybe you’d better—” I began, but it was too late. Ivan slumped over, dead to the world. I only hoped he wasn’t truly dead.

thirty-one

The tincture I’d given
to Blue was in the pocket of my raincoat, hanging on the back of the door. Was it possible there might be a few drops left?

“Call 9-1-1!” Max shouted as he loosened Ivan’s collar.

Before anyone had time do so, I pressed the liquid to Ivan’s lips. At that moment I didn’t care about what my guests might think. I had to try and save Ivan. I knelt down next to him, feeling relief as I felt him breathing. Confusion quickly followed. I hadn’t detected any poison. How could I have missed something?

Ivan awoke with a gasp, causing Max to stumble backward.

“What the hell?” Max said. “Ivan, are you all right?”

Ivan groaned. “Did I faint? Please, everyone, put your phones away. This is nothing to worry about.”

My attention had been focused on Ivan, but now I noticed that everyone except for Max, who’d been attending to Ivan, had their phones out to call the paramedics. They stood staring for a few moments; then everyone began to speak at once.

“We should still call—” Max said.

“It had to be that liquor—” Olivia whispered to Sam.

“Brix, honey, go see if he needs help,” Heather said.

“You want help standing up?” Sam asked.

“Enough!” I said. “Party’s over. Ivan says he’s all right. It’s his decision if he goes to a hospital. Ivan?”

“Thank you, Zoe. I’ll be fine. This happens to me sometimes.”

“Rest here for a bit, Ivan,” I said as I picked up my guests’ jackets. “Thank you all for coming.”

“You can’t kick us out,” Brixton said. “I haven’t even served tea and coffee yet!”

“Come on, folks,” Max said. “Zoe’s right. Let’s give Ivan some space.”

Olivia pursed her lips. While throwing her shawl over her shoulder, the tassels hit Max in the face. I didn’t think it was an accident.

I felt safe with Max, no matter how suspicious he was acting. My instincts had served me well over the years, but I hadn’t encountered many murders either. I put my hand on Max’s elbow, holding him back before I showed Sam, Olivia, Heather, and Brixton to the door. Brixton didn’t want to leave. His mom seemed disinclined to force him, so I insisted. I didn’t want him there for what was going to follow either.

“What the hell did you give him?” Max asked as soon as I closed the door. “I can’t just pretend I didn’t see that.”

“You think I gave him an illegal drug?” That was too much.

“Ivan,” Max said, “how do you feel?”

“It’s a simple herbal remedy,” I snapped.

“Then why did it work so quickly? That’s not how things work.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, I’m good at working with herbs.”

“Then you won’t mind if I see what you gave him.”

“This is ridiculous!” I said.

“Leave it be,” Ivan said. “My recovering quickly has nothing to do with anything Zoe gave me. This happens to me sometimes. I’m fine. I want to know what you were all talking about before I fainted.”

Max shook his head and looked up at the cracked ceiling. “You, my friend, have been a person of interest in this investigation. Personal feelings aside, I had no choice but to look into your movements while I was the investigating officer.”

“Me?” Ivan said. “Even if you think this of me, how could I? These past weeks, my health has been worse, as you can see evidence of tonight. That’s why I haven’t been at Blue Sky Teas as much as usual. I can barely hold a cup of tea these days. My doctor will confirm this.”

“Why didn’t you say anything when I saw you?” Max asked.

“I didn’t know it was an interrogation! It’s embarrassing, Max. I’m only in my fifties, but my body has other ideas. It thinks I’m an old man.”

“I put a call in to your doctor,” Max said. “He was out of town and we couldn’t reach him to—” He broke off with a start.

“What are you staring at?” I asked. “Find something else you think is illegal and you want to report?”

He rubbed his eyes. “I could have sworn I saw the gargoyle statue move. That Becherovka must be some strong stuff.”

“Why don’t you two come into the kitchen.” I gave a sharp glance at Dorian as I held open the swinging door for Max and Ivan. “I’ll put the kettle on and make us all some tea.”

“Zoe,” Max said softly as he stepped through the doorway, “I’m sorry I reacted automatically when I saw you give something to
Ivan. I’m trained to notice these things.”

He was so close to me that I smelled the subtle scents surrounding him. He must have gardened in his yard earlier that day. His large brown eyes were downcast. I believed he was truly sorry, but that didn’t mean I trusted him. Or that I trusted myself around him.

“How about I make the tea you brought, Max.” I busied myself filling the kettle.

“Ah,” Ivan said, “that’ll make me good as new. In the meantime, Max can continue explaining why he thought I was involved in this madness.”

“I was afraid,” Max said, “when Zoe told me that one of the valuable books of hers that was stolen was an alchemy book, that you might have been involved.”

“That’s why you’ve been acting so odd this whole time?” I asked.

“I hated that I had to investigate a friend, but it goes with the job.” He paused, looking at the espresso maker Dorian had purchased. “I thought you said you didn’t drink coffee.”

“It’s for entertaining.”

He nodded, but his eyes lingered on the open bag of coffee beans and the folded copy of
Le Monde
underneath it. He was a detective. It was natural he’d be observant. He could tell someone had made coffee recently and that someone who wanted to read a French newspaper was comfortable around my house. My lie about a French “friend” to cover up for Brixton was building on itself. Max now suspected my “friend” stayed over. My attempt at a simple life was nowhere in sight.

Max remained curt for the rest of our short conversation, clearing up that neither Ivan nor Max had any reason to want Dorian’s stolen alchemy book. By the time I saw the two of them to the door, I wondered why I thought I could ever have a normal life.

———

It took longer than I would have liked to awaken Dorian from his stone pose. I had to shake his shoulders so vigorously that I was afraid I might break off a chunk of stone. Finally, he stirred.

“
Mon dieu.
I cannot believe we were wrong about the Czech professor! It was a perfect theory. Perfect!” He tried to flap his wings. It took a few seconds for his wings to respond to the flexing of his shoulders.

“Not exactly perfect,” I said. “We were desperate, which blinded our better sense. We convinced ourselves about a far-fetched theory because we desperately wanted to find your book.”

Dorian wriggled his toes and fingers. He continued to have difficulty moving his left foot, but the reversal of his life force hadn’t yet progressed further. He looked from his claws to me. “Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know, Dorian. I wish I knew.”

“I will clean up,” he said, not meeting my eyes.

“You don’t have to—”

“I am stiff from standing still. Washing dishes will be good for me. You will work on the book pages?”

Though I had come to the conclusion that I would need the full book to unlock
Not Untrue Alchemy
’s secrets, what the gargoyle needed was hope. Even if there wasn’t anything else I could do, at least I could give him hope.

“I’ll study the pages,” I said. “Maybe if I read them right before bed, my subconscious can work something out that has eluded me so far.”

I brought the printed pages with me to bed, along with a glass of water with lemon. I couldn’t concentrate, but it wasn’t because of my fatigue. Knowing Ivan was most likely not a killer or thief, I now wondered if I could ask him for his help. Though I’d studied alchemy for a longer period of time than Ivan, my focus was less academic and more specialized. His interest in alchemy was the exact opposite. I had no doubt I was better at turning plants into tinctures, salves, and balms than Ivan, but there was a good chance he was better at understanding alchemical texts.

Once I’d made the decision to contact Ivan the next day, I fell into a restless sleep. I dreamt of alchemists in Prague.

A man with a long, pointed white beard appeared before me in the dream. I recognized him as the great scholar John Dee. The man had lived before me but was a legend to alchemists. We stood on the Charles Bridge in Prague, which in my dream was crowded with merchants from an earlier century in place of the hordes of tourists of today.

Dee beckoned to me. I followed him across the stone bridge. The fog became thick, swarming around us. I called out, but no sound came from my throat. I tried to run, but although my feet moved, I made no progress crossing the bridge. The fog overtook me. I could no longer see Dee or anything else. Fog had never frightened me, but in my dream, I had the strongest sense that I should be very afraid. Something dangerous lurked in the fog.

Almost as suddenly as the fog had swallowed me, the cloud lifted. But instead of scholar John Dee, charlatan Edward Kelley stood before me, balancing on the edge of the bridge. Kelley held a vial of mercury in one hand and wore a smirk on his face. As he steadied himself, the liquid metal bounced from side to side in its glass prison. Kelley caught my eye and winked. The man had fooled many people, including John Dee.

In his hubris at taking his eyes off the ledge, Kelley lost his balance. His shout pierced my ears, as if echoing against invisible
walls that held me in place. He splashed into the water below.

My feet were my own again. I ran to the edge of the bridge and looked into the black water below. Instead of Kelley below me, the figure drowning in the water was Isaac Newton. He held the figurine of a dragon in his hand. His head sank beneath the water, yet he held the dragon tightly in his hand, keeping it above the dark waters.

As I reached out to him, I lost my footing. I would have fallen in myself had it not been for a hand steadying my shoulder. Without turning, I knew his touch. It was Ambrose.

As I turned to face him, Ambrose swallowed the substance of a glass vial. It was the vial of mercury Kelley had held in his hands. I tried to stop him, but he was now far away from me. His face contorted, as if feeling the effects of the mercury, then suddenly relaxed. He hadn’t been poisoned after all. He smiled. It was the loving smile I remembered. I reached out to him, but a thick fog swooped in between us. There was nothing I could do to reach him. I reached for my locket, but it wasn’t around my neck as it always was. Panic rose within me. The fog that carried Ambrose away was coming for me.

My arms fought to escape the confinement—until I realized they were fighting against tangled sheets, not ropes of fog.

I was awake.

I felt for my locket, damp with the sweat that covered my body. My heart was racing, but I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t usually dream so vividly, yet I had done so multiple times that week. Perhaps I hadn’t been ready to return to alchemy after all.

I took a sip of water from the glass on my bedside table, thinking over the dream.

Prague achieved a pinnacle of alchemical enlightenment a century before I was born. I had visited the city many times, but not while its most famous residents had lived there. My hazy dream world had melded memories of my own with legends I had heard o
f in its alchemical heyday.

The city of Prague holds an important alchemical legacy because it straddled the old ways of “magic” and new scientific methods. At the cusp of the Scientific Revolution, Rudolph II—a.k.a the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Bohemia, and more—became a contro
versial leader because of his fascination with alchemy. Rudolph II’s Court in the late 1500s to early 1600s hosted hundreds of alchemists, including John Dee—but not Edward Kelley. In an ironic twist of fate, Rudolph imprisoned Kelley not for being the charlatan that he was, but for failing to share his secrets for creating gold. The king never doubted Kelley’s gold transformations were real.

Rulers like Rudolph wanted to control alchemists because they believed the alchemists could truly turn lead into gold, which would wreak havoc on currency values—unless the rulers controlled the gold themselves. It came to be commonplace for rulers to grant licenses to alchemists to practice. They couldn’t have “just anyone” turning
lead into gold.

Alchemists also needed patrons to have the resources they needed to pursue their intellectual curiosity. It wasn’t gold or immortality that most alchemists were interested in—it was science. They were trying to understand the world around them, and they did make many breakthroughs that led to modern chemistry. Only long after his death was Isaac Newton publicly revealed to be an alchemist. He practiced alchemy in secret, and for years after his death the scientific community hushed up the secret that he had practiced alchemy, fearing of the impact of his scientific discoveries would be lessened. Newton’s favorite substance was antimony: the Black Dragon. That’s what he’d been holding in his hand in my dream.

I pushed the damp sheets aside and found the photographed pages of Dorian’s book. I picked up a page that had an image of the Black Dragon, which symbolizes death and decay. Death and decay were a natural part of alchemy and of life in general, so I wasn’t disturbed by the existence of such an image. What I had found fascinating and disturbing about the image was the rendering of the flames coming out of the dragon’s mouth, which is why I had photographed it. I hadn’t, however, photographed the opposite page, which would have held an explanation of the woodcut.

I shoved the troubling image into the drawer of the bedside table and finished the glass of water. Shedding so much sweat during my dream had left me parched.

The dream had pulled me in opposing directions: past and present, scholar and charlatan, mercury and antimony, poison and healing.

I don’t believe dreams are magic any more than I believe alchemy is magic. But I do believe my subconscious was trying to tell me two things.

First, the mercury and other elements used by alchemists was for a purpose, unlike the poisonous mixture that had been used on Charles and Blue.
It wasn’t gold or immortality that most alchemists were interested in—it was science.
The experiments of alchemists were dangerous
but pure
. The poison I was dealing with here in Portland was impure.