The Alchemist's Daughter (22 page)

“But my words do not soar as yours do, Master Shakespeare. I swear, sir, you turn the basest words to gold. And this play tonight, after so many dark works, was a thing of sheer enchantment.”

“My best, I think. I will not write another like it. Do you not feel, Mistress Aubrey, that all the magic has gone out of the world?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “'Tis true, the world was not so sombre a place when we were young. Yet I'm told that this Tempest was a great success at Kings James's court.”

“Aye, and at his daughter's wedding — another Elizabeth. But the likes of our first Elizabeth, our Gloriana, we shall not see again. Who could forget the morning she went by barge to inspect the army at Tilbury, clad all in white velvet, with a silver breastplate like a warrior queen, pearls and diamonds in her hair, and a silver truncheon in her hand? I play with words, Mistress Sidonie, as you play with numbers. But the game Gloriana played was with the fate of nations, and she transmuted that darkest of years into an Age of Gold.”

“And that, Master Shakespeare, was alchemy indeed,” said Sidonie. She knew he would gladly have kept her there a little longer, sharing memories in the fading light. But here at last was Kit, to take her home.

EILEEN KERNAGHAN lives in New Westminster, British Columbia.
The Alchemist's Daughter
is her sixth book in the fantasy genre.
The Snow Queen
(Thistledown, 2001) won the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, the Aurora, for best long-form work in English, and was short listed by the Canadian Library Association for Best Children's Book of the Year. Her earlier
Grey Isle Trilogy
won a silver medal for original paperback fiction from
The West Coast Review of Books
.
Songs from the Drowned Lands
won the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, while the third book in the series,
The Sarsen Witch,
was short listed for the same award. The experimental
Dance
of the Snow Dragon
, a young adult fantasy novel with a Tibetan Buddhist background, was published in 1995 by Thistledown Press.