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‘Good God!’ Harry Bailey was astounded. ‘That is a marvel, to be sure. But since your master is such a wise man, and so worthy of honour, can you explain why he is wearing such a tatty old gown? It is dirty and full of holes. It isn’t worth a pe
‘Why are you asking me that, sir? As God is my witness, he will never prosper. Don’t mention this to anyone, by the way. It is a secret between you and me. The problem is that he is too clever for his own good. When you have too much of a good thing, you can overreach yourself. That is his case, I believe. My master has misused his great gifts. It is a cause of grief to me, I can assure you. God help him. That is all I can say.’
‘Never mind that,’ Harry replied. ‘Tell me more about this work of his. Since you know all about him, you must also know his secrets. I assume that he is shrewd as well as wily. So tell me everything. Where do you both live?’
‘We dwell beyond the walls of a town, in an area full of cellars and blind alleys. It is the haunt of thieves and robbers who must conceal themselves. It is a place for those who dare not show their face by day. That is where we live.’
‘Tell me another thing,’ our Host asked him. ‘Why is your face so discoloured?’
‘God has not favoured it, I admit. I am so used to blowing into the fire that the flames have changed my colour, I suppose. I am not one to preen myself in front of a mirror. I get on with my work, and try my hand at alchemy. But we are always making mistakes. We miscalculate the amount of heat, for example. We can never get to the end of the experiment, and fail somewhere along the way. But that’s no problem. There are plenty of gullible people who will give us a pound of gold – or ten pounds, or twelve pounds – on the understanding that we will be able to double the amount. I know that this may be a false promise, but we still have faith in the technique. We still have hope. The trouble is that the science is so difficult to master. Although we have sworn the contrary to our customers – our patrons, I should say – we never get it quite right. I would not be at all surprised if we became beggars.’
While this young Yeoman was talking, his master came close and listened carefully to everything he said. This Canon, dressed in black, was wary and distrustful of others. Cato has taught us that the guilty man always believes that he is the object of suspicion. That is why the master drew so close to the servant. He wanted to hear everything. Then he interrupted the boy. ‘Shut your mouth,’ he said. ‘Don’t say another word. Otherwise, you will regret it. How dare you slander me in the company of these strangers, and blab all my secrets?’
‘Carry on, young man,’ Harry Bailey said. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him or his threats.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the boy replied, ‘I don’t intend to.’
When the Canon realized that all his threats were useless, he fled in sorrow and in shame.
‘Ah,’ his Yeoman said, ‘now we can have some fun. I will tell you everything I know. He has run away, has he? I hope he goes to the devil. I don’t want to have anything else to do with him, I can promise you that. Not for all the money in the world. He was the one who led me into the false game. Yet I never thought of it as a game. I was deadly serious, believe me, in its pursuit. I laboured. I sweated. I worried. I cried. Yet, for all that, I could never leave it alone. I wish to God that I had the brains to tell you everything there is to know about alchemy. I can only explain a small part of the art. Now that my master has gone, I will do my best. So…’
Heere endeth the Prologe of the Chanounes Yema
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale
Heere bigy
PART ONE
I have lived with this Canon for seven years, but I am nowhere near to understanding the secret. I have lost everything I owned, as have many others. Once upon a time I was clean, cheerful and well dressed. Can you believe it? I now use an old sock as my hat! I used to be plump and ruddy-cheeked. Now I am thin and sallow. I am losing my eyesight through all the hard work. Stay away from alchemy at all costs. Where is the benefit in trying to transmute metals? The sliding science has left me pe
When we practise in our laboratory we look very wise and learned; we use high terms and rarefied phrases to explain our mysterious labours. Then I blow upon the coals until there is no breath left in my body. Is there any need to explain the exact proportions of the dark materials that we use? There is always the silver, of course. We would normally put in five or six ounces of it. We compound this with arsenic, with burned bones and iron filings. Then we grind the mixture to a powder, and put it in a little earthenware pot. Add a little salt, and some paper. Place a sheet of glass over the pot, sealing glass and vessel with some clay so that no air will escape from it. We can change and moderate the fire at will. Then begins the hard labour, the watching and the calculating. We are supposed to purify, to blend and to disperse all of the ingredients. We use quicksilver, too, which is the name for unrefined mercury. But for all our tricks and devices we never got anywhere. We used lead and arsenic, ground together with a marble pestle in a marble mortar. It made no difference. There was no result. We boiled volatile spirits – again to no effect. We experimented with the residue left at the bottom of the flask. But it did no good. Our labour was in vain. All the money we spent was lost, too.
There are many other aspects of the art of alchemy. I ca
So we toiled over the coals and crucibles all day and all night, with the lamps burning around us. The furnace was at full blast, and we heated the liquids to their various boiling points. We used unslaked lime as a caustic, as well as chalk and the whites of eggs; we had powder ground out of ashes and dog shit, piss and clay; we made fires out of wood and out of charcoal; we sprinkled purified salt and vitriol, and then mixed in alum and brewer’s yeast, the hairs of men and of horses, the grease of a sow and the sweat of a red-haired child. Sometimes the amalgam turned yellow, and sometimes silver white. We would fuse and ferment, diffuse and distil.