The Alchemist's Daughter (3 page)

But behind those sharper images lay something else: a vague, rounded shape half-glimpsed through curdled mist in the crystal's depths. More sensed than seen, it made Sidonie's throat tighten with an inexplicable dread. She turned the glass this way and that, trying to make the elusive shape come clear, but almost at once the mist closed over it.

Sidonie drew a long breath. Looking away, finally, she picked up the piece of muslin and carefully wrapped it around the glass.

“Yes? Yes?” The Queen's voice was edged with impatience. “What is it you see?”

“I see what could be church-spires, Your Majesty. Or trees. Or flagpoles, perhaps?” Her glance fell away.

“Could be . . . could be . . . ” the Queen said sharply. “Why do you fear to tell me what you see, Sidonie Quince?”

“Because I fear it bodes ill for yourself and for England, Ma'am.”

“What I ask most of my subjects is to be honest. You do me no service at all, to tell me only what you imagine I wish to hear. Whatever you say to me now, Sidonie, will be privy to the two of us. Do you understand?”

Sidonie looked up and met that level gold-brown gaze. “I do, Your Majesty.”

“Dr. Quince, will you be so kind as to wait without?”

Sidonie's father, looking slightly taken aback, retreated to the corridor.

“So then, Sidonie Quince. What see you in the crystal?”

Sidonie swallowed hard. “Masts, Your Majesty. The masts of a great many warships, advancing on the coast of England.”

“Ah,” said the Queen, without surprise. “And are they flying the Spanish flag?”

“That may be, Your Majesty. I cannot make out the colours.”
Neither the colours
, Sidonie thought,
nor the phantom
shape that lies behind them
. Of that mystery, she was not yet ready to speak.

“No matter,” said the Queen. She spoke with weary resignation. “You have scried well, Sidonie Quince. If Dr. Dee persists in travelling abroad, I may need your services again. But leave me now — my steward will have a purse for you.”

“Master Quince, Mistress Sidonie, may I detain you a moment?”

Sidonie looked up in surprise at the tall gentleman who waited in the Long Gallery. He wore a cameo of the Queen's head on a heavy chain around his neck and was clearly a person of authority.

“If you would be so kind as to step this way . . . ” and with a courtier's easy gallantry he waved them into a small presence chamber off the gallery.

“Lord Burleigh, Sir Francis, let me present the Queen's new prognosticator, Mistress Quince, and her father, Dr.

Quince.”

Sidonie collected her wits enough to curtsy. Who would have imagined that all in one hour plain Sidonie Quince would meet the Queen of England, and two of the most powerful men in the kingdom?

She knew them well enough by reputation. Even in the Quince's quiet village, folk kept a keen eye on doings at court. The kindlier looking of the two was Sir William Cecil, now Lord Burleigh, Lord Treasurer of England. And the other, with the cold eyes and humourless mouth, was Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State and the Queen's spymaster — master too, by all accounts, of subtlety and subterfuge.

“Do you understand why you are here?” asked Walsingham, with an abruptness that startled Sidonie and clearly flustered Simon Quince.

“Why, to advise Her Majesty of what may lie in store for her, and for England,” her father said.

“It needs no clairvoyance,” Walsingham told him, “to know that what lies in store for all of us is the Spanish fleet. One of our shipmasters has reported seeing with his own eyes twenty-seven galleons in Lisbon harbour — ‘floating fortresses', he called them.”

“And,” said Lord Burleigh, with a hint of malice, “so annoyed was the Queen that she threw her slipper straight in Sir Francis's face.”

Sidonie hazarded a sly glance at her father.

“Then with respect, Sir Francis,” said Simon Quince, carefully ignoring that I-told-you-so look, “if not for my daughter's gift of sight, why have you summoned us?”

“Not so much for her occult powers,” Walsingham told him, “as for her powers of persuasion. The Queen remains insensible of the grave dangers that surround her. I give away no secrets, when I say that she refuses an armed bodyguard, in spite of repeated threats to her person.”

“Moreover, the Queen abhors the idea of war,” said Burleigh, “and she will not accept the fact that war with Spain is inevitable. She has agreed to lend aid to the Netherlanders to hold back the Spanish; but as you may know, when the Prince of Orange asked her to accept sovereignty of the Netherlands she refused, because it would mean an open declaration of war with Spain.”

Sidonie silently added something that Lord Burleigh had left unsaid.
And she was reluctant to sign the death warrant
for the Scottish Queen, who openly conspired with Spain against
her.

“Perhaps,” said Burleigh, “Her Majesty will believe what your daughter scries in the crystal, though she will not believe what her advisors tell her . . . ”

“Which,” cut in Walsingham, “brings us to the second reason for this meeting. What my Lord Burleigh has not mentioned, is that going to war costs an inordinate amount of money. On everything I am about to say now, you must swear to keep silent, on pain of both your deaths.”

“We swear,” replied Simon Quince — seeming not to notice Sidonie's stricken look.

“Then let us come to the point. Sending armed assistance to the Netherlands under Lord Leicester has severely strained our resources; an all-out war with Spain will bleed the treasury dry. England needs more gold, if she is to defend herself against Spain. Leicester's men are starving, yet the Queen is loathe to take bread from the mouths of English children, even in so necessary a cause. We have given the matter much thought, and it occurs to us there could be another way.”

Sidonie turned to her father, saw his face light up with sudden understanding. She held her breath. So much depended on what he said next.

“You understand, my lords, that I have laboured a lifetime to create alchemical gold, and have not yet achieved my goal.”

“Yet you believe you are close to achieving it?”

Sidonie's mouth went dry; her heart drummed.
Father,
Father, go carefully, this is dangerous ground you tread.
She tried to catch her father's eye, tried by sheer force of will to keep him from uttering the words that might condemn them both. But it was no use. In this, as in every other undertaking, Simon Quince would admit no impediment to success — though that success forever eluded him.

“As close as this, my lord,” said Simon Quince, and he held up thumb and index forefinger with a hairsbreadth gap between them.

The words were spoken, there was no way to take them back. Sidonie was filled with a terrible foreboding. She understood too well the message in Walsingham's thin, calculating smile.

“Father, what have you done? “ Sidonie, making supper, sliced angrily through a turnip. “You are no closer to turning base metal into gold, than you were when you began.”

“Daughter, how can you say that, when every failed experiment takes me closer to success? It is only lack of money that has held me back — money to buy new flasks and retorts, to afford the purest materials and the best grade of charcoal for my furnace. Now I will have the finest equipment that the Queen's money will buy, and I will return her investment a thousand fold.”

“And if you do not succeed, Father? You would not be the first alchemist hanged, for promises he could not keep.”

“Frauds and charlatans have been hanged, Sidonie, not honest men of science.”

How simple he was, for all his arcane knowledge; how childlike in his faith — in himself, and in the world. At times Sidonie felt that he was the child, and she the adult, for she alone in their household had some sense of how truly dangerous the world was, how the smallest of misjudgments, the wrong words overheard, the wrong company kept, could send an honest man or woman to Bridewell prison, or the Tower, according to their station in life.

“Father, can you not see it was all a ruse? The Queen needs no scrying glass to tell her what Spain intends.”

“Not a ruse, daughter — a test of your skill, and of your honesty. When next you look into the glass, she will pay heed to what you see there.”

“That may be so, but what of Walsingham? He is devious, Father. He says that he wishes you to make gold, and yet he has no faith in the occult arts.”

“Because,” said Simon Quince, “he recognizes that alchemy is not magic, but science.”

Sidonie knew from long experience that it was useless to argue. “If you say so, Father.” She set the pot of turnips on the fire to boil. “It is all too metaphysical for my poor understanding.”

So many learned men had striven without success to transmute base metal into nuggets of pure gold. It was not for lack of money, she thought, nor from lack of diligence, but because at the heart of the process there must lie some unknown ingredient, some undiscovered secret. It was said that no one could make gold unless he had an honest and upright soul; that much, surely, Simon Quince possessed. But to discover the hidden key, when so many had failed?

She gave the turnips a stir, and picked up her book.

“What is it you are reading, daughter?”

“Mathematics, Father. Euclid.”

“May I see?”

Sidonie held out the open book. She found the pure, abstract world of numbers safe and reassuring. One needed no magical talismans, no esoteric wisdom to unlock its secrets, only the application of a logical and exacting mind. But her father had never truly shared her love of mathematics. Its laws interested him only as a reflection of some vast, mysterious cosmic dance. “It's the new edition,” she told him, “with the preface written by Dr. John Dee.”

“Indeed!” At the mention of Dee's name, she had her father's full attention. “And how well are you able to follow it, my child?”

“Not easily,” she admitted, “but I mean to study it until I master it.”

“How like your mother you are,” said Quince. “She would never leave off any task until she had finished it, whether it was darning a stocking or copying out some antique parchment . . . Now you must help me, Sidonie, in this most difficult of all tasks that lies before me.”

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

. . . gardens . . . furnished with many rare Simples, do
singularly delight . . .

— John Gerard,
Herball or General Historie of Plantes

The summer morning was too lovely to bide long indoors. Sidonie collected her copy of Euclid and settled herself on a bench under the apple tree. The air was fragrant with rosemary, the marigolds in bloom, the larkspurs and hollyhocks making a fine show against the sun-drenched brick wall. Then Mistress Platt, the tailor's wife, shattered Sidonie's contemplative mood, peering over the garden gate to remark, “Your beds want weeding, my girl.”

“Our servant has left,” muttered Sidonie, caught betwixt annoyance and guilt.

“And have you not a strong young back and a pair of hands at the end of your arms?” asked Mistress Platt. “My advice is to take your nose out of that book, and tend to what needs doing. It quite escapes me, how you young flibbertigibbets ever hope to get husbands.”

“And what business is it of yours, you meddlesome old biddy?” inquired Sidonie, not quite audibly, as Mrs. Platt continued down the lane. But it was true the garden needed her attention. Quickgrass and chickweed were invading the once tidy plots of salad herbs. Green scum covered the fishpond, from which the fish had long since vanished, Bindweed was strangling the gooseberry bushes and the roses were sadly in need of pruning. Sighing, she put aside her book and went to the garden shed to fetch a hoe.

Whatever else might suffer from neglect, Sidonie meant to keep the physic garden in good order, for it had been her mother's special pride. The fennel and camomile, the sweet basil and valerian and feverfew, still grew as vigorously as when her mother was alive to tend them. But the deadly witch-herbs — nightshade, wolfsbane, monkshood — no longer grew in Sidonie's garden. The week that her mother died, Sidonie had torn them out by the roots and burned them.