Four men stood around the table. My master, with his back to me; a hook-nosed man I recognised as an apothecary from the neighbouring street; a deacon from the cathedral whose name I did not know; and a fourth I had never seen before. He was a dwarf, or short enough for one, with a bristling black beard and a slanted cap. As I watched, he dragged a stool across from the hearth and jumped up on it so that he could look the others in the eye. He unhooked a small bag from his belt and laid it on the table.
‘The apothecary told me you have suffered many setbacks. Perhaps I can supply what you lack.’
His voice was harsh and screeching, like an owl. He pulled back the cloth. His hands blocked my view, but between his fingers I made out the shape of a small box.
‘I bought this in Paris, in the shadow of the Church of the Innocents.’ A nasty chuckle. ‘The man who sold it to me did not know what it was worth. But I do – and you will, if you can persuade me to part with it.’
‘Can we see?’ The deacon reached across the table. As his hand passed the lamp it cast a monstrous shadow over the far wall, trembling in a way I did not think was caused by the light.
‘Any man can look,’ said the dwarf dismissively. He handed the box to the deacon. Only when the cleric opened it did I see it was not a box but a book. Bronze straps across the cover gleamed in the lamplight.
The deacon turned a few pages and passed it wordlessly to the apothecary, who examined it more closely.
‘This was all Flamel used?’ he asked cryptically.
‘All his secrets from the Book of Abraham,’ was the dwarf’s equally mysterious answer.
The apothecary gave the book to Schmidt. ‘What do you think?’
Konrad waited a long time. I could not see his face, but I saw the way he hunched over the book, the knots in his hands as he gripped the table. My knees ached; my thigh began to spasm from my awkward posture.
At last Konrad spoke. ‘If everything you say is true, why are you offering the book to us?’
The dwarf laughed – a harsh, braying noise. ‘Why do men sell you raw gold when they could sell you a goblet for a higher price? Because I do not have the craft or the ingenuity, nor the tools nor indeed the materials. All I have is this book. And that is all you need to perfect your art.’
He fixed Konrad with a wicked smile and reached across the table to slide the book away. Konrad slapped his hand down heavily to stop him.
‘We will take it.’
He pulled the key from around his neck and unlocked the cabinet. The dwarf hopped off his stool and followed, staring up at the chalices, cups, plates and bowls displayed on its shelves. He licked his lips. He pulled one piece down and examined it, then another. Sometimes he had to point to something on the upper shelves for Konrad to reach. There was something in the way he touched the precious objects that I recognised: a jealousy, a kindred spirit.
‘This one. This one for the book.’
He held up a richly enamelled chalice. The base was embossed with scenes from the life of St John, the cup supported by arms of intricately braided wire. An abbot had commissioned it and then died; his successor, a more ascetic monk, had refused to honour the contract. Konrad had been furious, but I think a part of him was relieved to keep hold of it, for it was a rare piece of work. The one I would have chosen.
Konrad swallowed, then nodded. The lamp flame flickered, darting around the bowl like a serpent’s tongue. The dwarf stuffed the cup into a sack.
‘You have made a fine bargain.’
The others did not linger long after he had gone. The deacon and the apothecary excused themselves; Konrad sat at the table for some minutes staring at the book, then reluctantly closed it and locked it in the cabinet. I waited. When he left, I listened to the sound of his footsteps mounting the outside stairs and crossing the ceiling, the squeaky board at the threshold to the bedroom, the creak as the bed took his weight. I counted to one hundred. Then I crept out from behind the barrels, lit the lamp and opened the cabinet.
The book was small and worn, the edges of the binding frayed and the pages shrivelled. A brass clasp kept it shut, but otherwise there was nothing to suggest why Konrad should have paid so much for it. I unhooked the clasp.
It was written in Latin in a small, hurried hand, with many corrections and notes in brown ink in the margins. Seven of the pages were given over to drawings: a snake curled around a cross, a garden sprouting a forked tree, a king with a giant sword watching his soldiers dismember children into buckets. I shuddered and wondered what story they could possibly tell.
As I turned the pages, phrases leaped out at me from the text. ‘I have opened the Books of the Philosophers, and in them learned their hidden secrets.’ Then: ‘The first time that I made projection was upon Mercury, whereof I turned half-a-pound, or thereabouts, into pure Silver, better than if it had come straight from the Mine.’ And eventually: ‘In the year of the restoring of mankind 1382, on the five and twentieth day of April, in the presence of my wife, I made projection of the Red Stone upon the like quantity of Mercury, which I transmuted truly into almost half a pound of wondrous, soft, perfect Gold.’
I spent the next day in a dream, my head dizzy with possibilities. I was a virgin with a new lover: I could not wait for night to come again. Gerhard thrashed me for spilling too much gold when I poured it out of the crucible, and thrashed me again when a careless slip of my burin left an ugly scar on a brooch I had been engraving. Konrad was little better. His face had aged ten years overnight; he wandered around his shop like a ghost, fingering the key around his neck and checking the cabinet three times an hour.
Konrad went to bed late that night. The cathedral bell sounded out the hours, and I counted every one. At last I heard the creak of the stairs, the muffled squeak of the bedroom floor and a sleepy murmur from his wife. Still I waited, until the loudest sound in the house was Pieter’s soft breathing beside me.
At last I crept downstairs. By then, I knew every inch of the way in darkness. The fifth and eighth stairs which creaked too loudly, the way to lift the bolt so it did not rasp, the precise amount of pressure to use on the lock of the cabinet to prevent it making a noise when it opened. I felt inside. My fingers brushed across the shelf, tracing familiar contours of plate, until they felt the leather binding.
There was a sound behind me and I froze. I listened to the night, unconsoled by silence. It was probably just coals settling in the grate, or Konrad turning over in his bed – but I needed to concentrate. I also needed light, and I did not want a zealous watchman peering through the windows that night.
I climbed back to my attic. It was only when I reached the top of the stairs that I realised I had left the cabinet open. I cursed, but it did not matter. I would have to replace the book before morning anyway. I lit the lamp by my bedside and trimmed the wick low. Pieter turned and murmured something in his sleep; he thrust out an arm as if falling. It settled on my thigh and I did not remove it. It only added to the perfection of the moment.
I do not know how long I lay there, puzzling over that mysterious book. It made no sense to me. It told the miraculous story of how the author, a Frenchman, had toiled for decades to unlock the secret of the Stone, which seemed to be not a rock but an element by which quicksilver was turned to silver and gold. But how he had done it, despite the dwarf’s assurances, was a mystery. He spoke of snakes and herbs; the moon and sun and Mercury; red and white powders and even the blood of infants. But what he meant by it all I could not fathom.
‘The Jew who painted the book figured it with very great cunning and workmanship: for although it was well and intelligibly painted, yet no man could ever have been able to understand it without being well skilled in their Cabala.’ I stared at the pictures until my eyes ached, but I knew nothing of the Jewish Cabala. The secrets buried in plain sight remained hidden.