The Alchemist's Daughter (19 page)
Safe home.
But still half caught up in her dream, Sidonie was filled with a terrible unease. She wondered,
After all
that has happened, and is still to happen, how can any of us in
England think ourselves safe?
Sidonie opened the cottage door to a fusty closeness. Clearly, no one had thought to throw back the shutters and air the rooms. Emma, to her credit, had done her best to clean and tidy. The hearth was swept, the floor rushes tolerably fresh, the dishes set out neatly on the cupboard. Still, cobwebs clung to the beams and there was a film of dust on every surface.
“Father!” Sidonie called out. “Father, I have come home!”
There was a clink of glassware, the scrape of a bench pushed back, and Simon Quince emerged from his laboratory, spectacles in hand, wearing a look of surprised delight.
“Sidonie, my child, at long last! How worried I was!” He returned Sidonie's embrace â a little awkwardly, for he was not a demonstrative man; then held her at arms length and looked anxiously into her face. “Are you quite well, my child? When the message came that you were ill, I feared the worst.”
Sidonie smiled and kissed his cheek. “Neither pox nor plague, Father, only a fever. I am quite recovered.”
“And how fares the Countess? Is Wilton House as splendid as they say? How came Lady Mary to send for you?”
“Mercy, one question at a time! Lady Mary is well, she sends you greetings. Wilton House is surpassingly splendid. And as to the last, it is a long story. But you, Father, you are looking thinner, has Emma not been feeding you?”
“Oh indeed, she has looked after me well enough â though I must say you have a defter hand with the cooking. Nay, with the completion of the Great Work so near at hand, I could not afford to spend much time at table.”
“Indeed, Father? You are as close as that to making gold?”
“One step more, albeit the most delicate part of the process . . . this time there is no doubt I will succeed.”
Sidonie's heart contracted with love and pity. She saw, as though for the first time, the strands of grey in his hair, the deep lines that furrowed his brow. His back was not as straight as it had once been, nor his movements as sure. All those years of painstaking, futile effort had left their mark. Suppose that handful of red Glastonbury soil was in truth the secret elixir? Had she held in her palm the missing element, the end to all his labours, only to lose it?
What had been found once, could be found again. But that thought could surely wait for another day.
She took his hand, noticing how stained his fingers were, how the pads were calloused from decades of using mortar and pestle. “But if you do not succeed, Father, it is no matter.”
He gazed at her in bewilderment. “How so, daughter? I promised the Queen on my honour that she should have gold.”
“And so she has. Your promise is kept.”
“What mean you, Sidonie? What gold?”
Smiling, she pulled out a bench from the table. “Is that mutton stew I smell on the fire? I am famished after my journey. Sit you down, let us eat, and I will tell you of my adventures. And after that, I needs must have a word with you on the subject of apprentices.”
Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
of masks and revels
. . .
â Thomas Campion, “When Thou Must Home”
The autumn wore on. As she pickled and preserved for winter, sorted apples in the garret, dried the last of the fresh herbs, Sidonie gave little thought to invitations from the Queen. But then November came, and before long it was the seventeenth, when all England celebrated the anniversary of Elizabeth's accession to the throne. Bells rang out across the country, bonfires were lit in every town and village. And still there had been no message from the court.
One December evening when her day's tasks were finished and her father had withdrawn into his library, Sidonie set aside her book and instead unwrapped her scrying crystal. To look into the glass no longer frightened her â she had come to see it as a device, no more â but she could not have explained what odd impulse now drew her to it.
In the heart of the glass there was, as always, a swirl of mist, a captured glint of candlelight. And for some moments, nothing more. Then, just as Sidonie, smiling at her own foolishness, was about to put away the crystal, a blurred image took form: not the letter that she had half-hoped for, but a vessel of some sort, a cauldron or a bowl. And she wondered what there could be about that familiar round-bellied shape that made her throat tighten, gooseflesh rise on her arms, so that she thrust the crystal away in alarm.
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve Emma rushed into the back garden where Sidonie was cutting holly to decorate the hearth. “Come quickly, Mistress Sidonie, the master has gone out, and there is a fellow at the door, who says he is sent by the Queen.”
Startled, Sidonie set down her holly cuttings. “Mercy, Emma!” She had spent all morning cooking, in an old pair of house slippers and her shabbiest gown. She glanced down and saw a large smear of cherry preserves across her apron front. “I am in disarray, go ask him to sit in the parlour while I put myself to rights.”
She smoothed her hair as best she could, straightened her cap, put on a clean apron, gave a quick stir to the wheat she was boiling for frumenty. Then, flustered and breathless, she hurried through to the parlour. If the messenger who waited in his scarlet livery was surprised by Sidonie's humble circumstances, his solemn young face gave no sign. With a bow and a flourish, he handed her a letter from the Queen.
As soon as she had seen the messenger out, Sidonie retreated to her bedchamber and shut the door. Her mouth had gone quite dry, and her heart was racing. She broke the royal seal, and unfolded the parchment.
It was an invitation, signed by Lord Burleigh on the Queen's behalf, to the Twelfth Night revels at Greenwich Palace.
She had scarcely time to read as far as Lord Burleigh's signature when Emma shouted up the stairs to announce another visitor. Sidonie folded the letter carefully and put it in her pocket. When she came downstairs and looked out she found Kit by the front walk stamping mud from his boots.
He called out, “The invitation has come, has it not? I met the messenger in the road.”
Sidonie nodded. Her heart was still beating hard. “To Twelfth Night at Greenwich, Kit. And you are invited as well.”
“What, I?”
“Yes, truly, Kit. Do you come in, I will show you the letter. It is addressed to the both of us.” She reminded him, half-teasing, “Have you forgotten we are brother and sister?
It would be unseemly to invite one without the other . . . ”
“Then for your sake I must keep up the pretence a little longer.” Kit finished scraping his boots and stepped over the doorsill. “But sister, have you thought how we are to travel to Greenwich?”
“It is all in the letter. Lord Burleigh will send a boat to fetch us. But Kit . . . ” She stopped short and gazed at him in sudden dismay. “The Court at yuletide, the palace revels â everything will be so splendid. What can I wear?”
Kit glanced with amusement at the faded bodice and mended skirt that Sidonie wore for housework. “Perhaps not that,” he said, smiling. “But what of the gown that Lady Mary gave you, that you wore home in the coach?”
Sidonie thought about the dress â a heavy mulberry silk embroidered all over in a silver leaf-pattern, with flowing ivory sleeves. Though it was a finer garment than she had ever thought to own, was it grand enough for Greenwich Palace? Undoubtedly not. But then, what pretensions had Sidonie Quince to grandeur? “I warrant it will do well enough,” she said.
“Marry, it will indeed,” Kit said, and added gallantly, “I will be as proud to have you on my arm, as if you were wearing cloth of gold.”
When she went to her bedchamber to fetch Lord Burleigh's letter, she saw that she had left the crystal on her writing table. She picked it up, intending to hide it away, then stood with it cradled in her palm, considering. Surely her work was finished now? Or might the Queen still have need of her? She hesitated for a moment, then put the crystal in her purse along with her invitation.
Another river journey.
Of a sudden, how adventuresome my life
has become
, thought Sidonie, as the Queen's boatman rowed them downstream through the still, frosty night. She shivered a little under her heavy cloak, as much from nervousness as from the cold.
When she looked down into the dark water she could see glints and spangles of light from the windows of the great palaces along the northern bank. They glided past the Palace of the Savoy and the Temple. The boatman pointed out the Rose Theatre, newly built across the river in Southwark, though in the early evening darkness they could only guess at where it stood. Perhaps for Sidonie's sake he made no mention of the bear gardens, nor the ill-reputed taverns that lined the southern bank.
Then came the Tower and the grim red walls of Bridewell Prison. Ahead lay London Bridge, so weighted down with shops and houses projecting out over the water, that Sidonie wondered it did not collapse. Just before the bridge at Old Swan Stairs the waterman turned the boat into the bank and bade them alight while he shot through the piers. Too many boats had capsized with all their passengers, he told them, in the torrent of water rushing through the nineteen arches. They went by foot along Thames Street past the bridge to Billingsgate, where the boat was waiting for them at the bottom of the steps.
And there at last on the south bank was Greenwich Palace with all its windows ablaze, overlooking the Thames from a rise of land.
Sidonie clung to Kit's arm as they made their way up the waterstairs and into the glare of torchlight. Kit elbowed his way determinedly through the crowd milling round the palace gates â acquaintances and minor relations of noblemen, many of them in elaborate costume, all hoping to brazen their way past the royal guards, or slip in unnoticed with an invited group.