Jeri Westerson - Shadow of the Alchemist

“She is trying to tell me something, but I don’t have time to decipher it.” He ran his hand over his face. He had passed quite a pleasant night with her. It cheered his heart and made some of the pain go away, but now the light of day had arrived and the fancies of the night were best forgotten.

Night. He looked at his apprentice, who kept his eyes on the young woman. “Where were you most of the night, Jack?”

“I was at Master Flamel’s, sir. I thought I should await a message from the abductor since the ransom was not taken.”

“And was there a message?”

“No, sir. None. And Master Flamel was having a right fit. I spent most of the night calming him down. I thought to spend the night, as Avelyn had not returned.…’Course, now I see why. But I thought you would want me back, so though it was late, I returned. But Master Crispin, if it was Lord Henry in St. Paul’s to collect the ransom and you caught him at it-”

“I am not convinced he is involved.”

“Oh. Well. Perhaps. But if not him, then who?”

“I don’t know. They want this precious stone. And yet Flamel exchanged the ransom for one of no value. He told me it was to buy time, but that is a very unsatisfactory answer.”

“Wait,” said Jack, eyes pinging back and forth between Avelyn’s still frantic movements and Crispin’s stillness. “Why would Lord Henry have need for a valuable commodity such as that broach? He has his own wealth, almost as rich as the duke.”

“I know. I did wonder that, too. Which makes me all the more convinced that Henry had little to do with it.”

“A coincidence his being there, then?”

“No, not a coincidence. I don’t believe in those.”

“What, then?”

“I haven’t worked it out yet, Jack. What of this Robert Pickthorn? He left about the time the ransom was to be collected.”

“Did you see him at the cathedral, sir?”

He slammed his fist to the table. “I must admit, once I laid eyes upon Henry I did not look anywhere else. He could have been there and I missed it. But once I left, I took the ransom with me. The false ransom, that is.”

“‘Buy him time.’ What could that mean?”

“I don’t know. Best to- Will you stop that, you insufferable woman!”

But of course, Avelyn could not hear him as she continued her strange dramatics. Finally, she threw herself at his feet, hiked up her skirts, and lay on the floor.

Jack backed away. “What is she doing now? Is it a fit?”

But Crispin finally looked. She had positioned herself upside down, head at his feet, with one leg crooked behind the other … just as the dead apprentice had looked. “Jack, she’s showing us Thomas Cornhill.”

“The dead man?”

“Yes.”

Once she saw that Crispin understood, she jerked her head in a nod, jumped to her feet, and began to repeat her wall drawing in the corners.

“Wait. Jack, those drawings. She is trying to show us something of those symbols. I have seen them in several spots throughout London.” Two strides took him across the room. He grabbed her arms and spun her to face him. To her eyes he said carefully, “Avelyn, what is it you wish to show me?”

She made a huffing noise and nodded, satisfied at last. Grabbing her cloak from the peg, she cast open the door, and headed quickly down the stairs.

Crispin looked at Jack, and as one, they both grabbed their cloaks and bolted after her.

She ran through the gently falling snow, her footsteps disappearing as she fled over the whitened streets. They ran after her, and when she stopped at a corner, pointing at the carvings in the wood, Crispin knew he had been right. It was possible she had tried to get him to understand her last night, tried to make him go out to show him, but she had distracted him, as a pretty face was wont to do. Careless, to be so distracted when a woman’s life was at stake.

When the preacher Robert Pickthorn pointed out the sigils as the Devil’s work and looked directly at Crispin and described a man hanging by his heel, that’s when he had made the tenuous leap that the symbols might be related to the apprentice’s death and to Madam Flamel’s disappearance. But was it warranted?

Avelyn kept prodding the carvings with her finger until he drew nearer, examining them. They did not look like any writing he understood. How many of these were there? And what did they mean?

Before he had a chance to speculate, she grabbed his hand and ran with him down the lane, with Jack close on their heels.

Down lane after lane they trotted, until finally she pointed ahead to a stone archway and pulled Crispin up to it. His fingers traced the etchings. Different from the ones before. And someone had tried to scratch these out.

She tried to grab him and pull him again, but Crispin stopped her, turned her to him. “Avelyn, do you know what these mean? Do they have to do with Madam Perenelle?”

She didn’t seem certain but insisted he follow. “Wait, wait, Avelyn. Please.” She stopped and looked at him questioningly, blinking the snow from her pale lashes. “I need a way to decipher these. Can you help me?”

She thought a moment, gnawing on one of her red-chapped knuckles. Her eyes brightened and she grabbed his sleeve again, pulling him along. He took her hand from his sleeve and smiled. “I can follow, you know.”

She laughed that rough, alien laugh and hurried forward, looking back from time to time to make certain that he was there.

Jack came up beside him, eyes on Avelyn. “She’s a ball of fire, isn’t she?”

“Indeed,” he said with more passion than he meant to reveal.

Tucker laughed. “You do find them, don’t you, Master? Or they manage to find you. Ah me. You expend your energies teaching me languages and how to read and write. But surely you can spare the time to tutor me in this, sir.”

“You’re a knave, Tucker. I have no wish to be your whoremaster.”

Jack laughed again. Avelyn frowned when she turned back to look at them. Impatiently, she tapped her foot.

She proceeded on and they grew quiet as they moved through the streets full of citizens at their daily tasks. A man moved his oxcart by tapping the beasts with a stick on the oxen’s rumps. Under an ale stake jutting into the street, servants shouted the praises of their master’s alehouse. A pelt merchant held aloft his wares hanging from racks on poles and he walked up and down the avenue, carrying it like a banner into battle. The food merchants, the water carriers, the servants hauling fuel upon braces on their backs. Through all of that, Crispin still noticed them. The shadowy figures trailing along the edges, slipping into the alleys, standing in the closes. Shadows that followed them no matter what street they turned down. He elbowed Jack and gave a flick of his head. The boy was quick to get his meaning and take notice. Surreptitiously, they both watched the figures follow. Crispin counted three and opened that number of fingers in his hand at his flank on the side facing Jack, tapping them until the boy saw and barely nodded.

Three, then. Crispin allowed Avelyn to lead him. He hoped it wasn’t to a trap.

They wove through the people down a narrow lane, and Avelyn finally stopped before a door. Above the lintel hung a wooden sign covered with snow. A symbol was painted on both sides of its worn surface:

Crispin moved toward the door, but Jack held him back. “Master Crispin,” he whispered. He eyed the sign fearfully, almost afraid to take his eyes from it. “You’re not going in there, are you? That … that’s the Devil’s sign.”

“Don’t be a fool, Tucker. That is the symbol for Mercury, a well-known alchemical sign. She has brought us to another alchemist.”