Quicksilver

The sun had been rolling along the horizon for hours, like a fat waterfowl making its takeoff run. Well before full daylight, Enoch was inside the apothecary’s shop, brewing up a potion from boiled water and an exotic Eastern herb. “Take an amount that will fill the cup of your palm, and throw it in-”

“The water turns brown already!”

“-remove it from the fire or it will be intolerably bitter. I’ll require a strainer.”

“Do you mean to suggest I’m expected to taste it?”

“Not just taste but drink. Don’t look so condemned. I’ve done it for months with no effect.”

“Other than addiction, t’would seem.”

“You are too suspicious. The Mahrattas drink it to the exclusion of all else.”

“So I’m right about the addiction!”

“It is nothing more than a mild stimulant.”

“Mmm… not all that bad,” Clarke said later, sipping cautiously. “What ailments does it cure?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Ah. That’s different, then… what’s it called?”

“ Cha,or chai, or the, or tay. I know a Dutch merchant who has several tons of it sitting in a warehouse in Amsterdam…”

Clarke chuckled. “Oh, no, Enoch, I’ll not be drawn into some foreign trading scheme. This tay is inoffensive enough, but I don’t think Englishmen will ever take to anything so outlandish.”

“Very well, then-we’ll speak of other commodities.” And, setting down his tay-cup, Enoch reached into his saddle-bags and brought out bags of yellow sulfur he’d collected from a burning mountain in Italy, finger-sized ingots of antimony, heavy flasks of quicksilver, tiny clay crucibles and melting-pots, retorts, spirit-burners, and books with woodcuts showing the design of diverse furnaces. He set them up on the deal tables and counters of the apothecary shop, saying a few words about each one. Clarke stood to one side with his fingers laced together, partly for warmth, and partly just to contain himself from lunging toward the goods. Years had gone by, a Civil War had been prosecuted, and a King’s head had rolled in Charing Cross since Clarke had touched some of these items. He imagined that the Continental adepts had been penetrating the i

Enoch was less a merchant than a messenger. The sulfur and antimony he brought as favors. He accepted money in order to pay for his expenses. The important cargo was in his mind. He and Clarke talked for hours.

Sleepy thumping, footfalls, and piping voices sounded from the attic. The staircase boomed and groaned like a ship in a squall. A maid lit a fire and cooked porridge. Mrs. Clarke roused herself and served it to children-too many of them. “Has it been that long?” Enoch asked, listening to their chatter from the next room, trying to tally the voices.

Clarke said, “They’re not ours.”

“Boarders?”

“Some of the local yeomen send their young ones to my brother’s school. We have room upstairs, and my wife is fond of children.”

“Are you?”

“Some more than others.”

The young boarders dispatched their porridge and mobbed the exit. Enoch drifted over to a window: a lattice of hand-sized, diamond-shaped panes, each pane greenish, warped, and bubbled. Each pane was a prism, so the sun showered the room with rainbows. The children showed as pink mottles, sliding and leaping from one pane to another, sometimes breaking up and recombining like beads of mercury on a tabletop. But this was simply an exaggeration of how children normally looked to Enoch.

One of them, slight and fair-haired, stopped squarely before the window and turned to peer through it. He must have had more acute senses than the others, because he knew that Mr. Clarke had a visitor this morning. Perhaps he’d heard the low murmur of their conversation, or detected an unfamiliar whi

Then another boy called to him and he spun about, too eagerly, and darted away like a sparrow.

“I’d best be going,” Enoch said, not sure why. “Our brethren in Cambridge must know by now that I’ve been in Oxford-they’ll be frantic.” With steely politeness he turned aside Clarke’s amiable delaying-tactics, declining the offer of porridge, postponing the suggestion that they pray together, insisting that he really needed no rest until he reached Cambridge.

His horse had had only a few hours to feed and doze. Enoch had borrowed it from Wilkins with the implicit promise to treat it kindly, and so rather than mounting into the saddle he led it by the reins down Grantham’s high street and in the direction of the school, chatting to it.

He caught sight of the boarders soon enough. They had found stones that needed kicking, dogs that needed fellowship, and a few late apples, still dangling from tree-branches. Enoch lingered in the long shadow of a stone wall and watched the apple project. Some pla

The little fair-haired boy adored the tall boy’s fruitless jumping. But he was working on his own project, the same one Enoch had glimpsed through the window: a stone on the end of a string. Not an easy thing to make. He whirled the stone around and flung it upwards. It whipped around the end of the tree-branch. By pulling it down he was able to bring the apple within easy reach. The tall boy stood aside grudgingly, but the fair boy kept both hands on that string, and insisted that the tall one have it as a present. Enoch almost groaned aloud when he saw the infatuation on the little boy’s face.

The tall boy’s face was less pleasant to look at. He hungered for the apple but suspected a trick. Finally he lashed out and snatched it. Finding the prize in his hand, he looked searchingly at the fair boy, trying to understand his motives, and became unsettled and sullen. He took a bite of the apple as the other watched with almost physical satisfaction. The boy who’d shi

Then the tall boy spat onto the ground, and tossed the rest of the apple over a fence into a yard where a couple of pigs fought over it.

Now it became unbearable for a while, and made Enoch wish he had never followed them.

The two stupid boys dogged the other one down the road, wide eyes traveling up and down his body, seeing him now for the first time-seeing a little of what Enoch saw. Enoch heard snatches of their taunts-“What’s on your hands? What’d you say? Paint!? For what? Pretty pictures? What’d you say? For furniture? I haven’t seen any furniture. Oh, doll furniture!?”

Being a sooty empiric, what was important to Enoch was not these tedious details of specifically how the boy’s heart got broken. He went to the apple tree to have a look at the boy’s handiwork.