Bernard Knight - The Elixir of Death

'I don't want to hear about your dissolute friends,' she raved. 'I have been humiliated by you before all the city. Even if you can shamelessly hold up your head, what about me? I have had to seek the shelter of my brother and his wife again this past week.'

'Ha! Your brother! There's a pillar of righteousness indeed! I rescued him from a brothel earlier this year and have more than once caught him with a whore in his bedroom!'

Suddenly, he felt tired and sick of this endless bickering. He pointed to his oaken chest which stood against the wall.

'I have taken my garments away. I will see to it that there will always be money in the purse that sits in that box. I will continue to pay Mary and your maid for their services and anything else you need will readily be forthcoming. Life will go on just the same for you, except that I shall not remain in your sight to offend you.'

He turned to the door. 'The Church bound us together in a way that cannot be broken asunder. But that does not mean that we have to endure each other's company, when you have made it clear over many years that all you feel for me is contempt.'

Such a long and eloquent speech was so out of character for her dour husband that Matilda was temporarily bereft of speech, but as he went out of the solar she found her tongue again.

'Yes, husband, contempt for the way you hounded my brother and trapped him into disrepute! He has explained to me how you tricked and manoeuvred him over that treasure. I hate you for it! Do you hear, I hate your persecution of that good man!'

Knowing the truth about Richard de Revelle, this was too much for John, and he clattered down the stairs and hurried out into the street, determined to put as much distance between himself and his wife as possible.

Mary heard some of the heated exchange up above and saw the wrathful departure of her master. As she sat in her kitchen and fondled the soft ears of the old hound, she murmured, 'What's to become of us, Brutus?'

Alexander of Leith had more or less given up hope of gaining any knowledge or cooperation from the Mohammedan Nizam. The Moors were rarely to be seen in the old crypt and, when they were there, the Scot strongly suspected that the alleged alchemist was merely going through the motions of experimenting, to buy time for his other suspicious activities. Only once did he achieve any results, when he again produced a tiny globule of what appeared to be gold, embedded in a mass of dirty tin and silver. Alexander strongly suspected him of some sleight of hand in introducing the yellow metal into the crucible, and felt that the whole procedure was merely a sham to convince him that the Turk was a genuine alchemist. Raymond de Blois seemed more impressed and used the event to persuade Alexander to stay at Bigbury a little longer and not return to Bristol as he had threatened.

Now the Moors had vanished again for several days and the French knight was seething with impatience, as he wished them to be here for the visit of Richard de Revelle, for him to impress upon them the importance of achieving some results for the Count of Mortain.

With the others away, the little Scotsman repeated his own work, but once more failed to make the last vital transition from an alloy to gold. Disillusioned with the situation and the inferior facilities in the old priory compared with those he had at Bristol, Alexander turned to his other research, the preparation of the Elixir of Life. Claimed by other alchemists as a liquid version of the stone that would transmute other metals into gold, the magic fluid was supposed to cure every illness and prolong life almost indefinitely. In his view, this was a more worthwhile project than the Philosopher's Stone itself. If necessary, real gold could be dug from the earth, but a potion to prolong life and banish disease would be the greatest boon the world had ever seen.

In the quiet of the crypt, with no one else to distract him, he laboured to dissolve his almost-gold with strong spirits of salt, then neutralised it with soda. Two days of filtering and distillation produced a small quantity of murky liquid, similar to many he had manufactured before, though this time he used Dartmoor tin and Tavistock copper.

The problem was testing the elixir — if it prolonged life, how long would he have to wait to know that it was effective? He had tried previous batches on a few small animals, such as mice, rats and cats, but they either died straight away or after a few days — or there was no effect at all. Maybe, he thought, the latter group were signs of success, but none of them seemed to achieve longevity beyond what one normally expected for that type of beast. With a sigh, he filled a small phial with his latest creation and hid it away inside his shapeless tunic, hoping that some inspiration about a method of testing would occur to him.

The next morning, the Moors were back, as impassive as ever and equally uncommunicative. After the early morning meal in the hut at the old castle, Alexander expected them to be harried back to work in the crypt by an increasingly exasperated Raymond. Instead, they all saddled up and, dressed in their monkish robes, rode off again to some unknown destination. Nizam refused to answer Raymond's demand to know where they were going, just saying that they would be back before nightfall.

Later that day, sitting in the hut where they ate their meals, Alexander confided in Jan, a rather one-sided conversation, though the Fleming seemed attentive enough.

'We'll give them a few more days, Jan, then abandon this and set off home.' Tugging a bone from the rabbit stew that the serf Alfred had made, he brandished it at his servant to emphasise his determination. 'If this de Revelle fellow cannot instil some urgency into these damned Turks, the whole venture is a waste of my time,' he exclaimed. 'I'm not cowed by John Lackland, even if he is the King's brother. I'll tell him to his face that the French king is either mocking him or has been hoodwinked himself by these Arabic charlatans.'

The Fleming nodded and made some gargling noises in his mutilated throat which indicated agreement. He had been bored out of his mind by the enforced isolation, with only two Saxon simpletons for company. As for his Scottish master, he too was at the end of his tether, working with insufficient equipment in a dank subterranean chamber with a trio of uncaring Saracens for occasional company. In spite of his strange appearance and clothing, which in truth Alexander cultivated to enhance his reputation as an eccentric alchemist, he had a sharp and practical mind and felt that he would be far better employed back in Bristol.

And if he was honest, he was uneasy to the point of fear when alone with the three Mohammedans, as he sensed an evil aura about them all.

The last of the evening light was fading from the western sky when the stout wooden doors at Exeter's five gates were pushed shut by the porters and the great bars dropped into their sockets behind them. The two city constables began their patrol of the streets to make their token inspection, ensuring that all fires were extinguished or damped down for the night. The fear of a conflagration in a town whose houses were still largely built of wood was real, and the curfew or ' couvre-feu ' was in tended to protect the citizens as they slept. In fact, many fires were kept going overnight to save relighting them for the early morning cooking, but as long as no obvious flames or glow were visible, the constables turned a blind eye.

When they left their hut behind the Guildhall, the fatter of the pair, Theobald, turned up High Street to tramp the lanes in the eastern part of the city. His skinny Saxon colleague, Osric, made his leisurely way in the opposite direction down Fore Street, his dim horn lantern in one hand, his staff in the other.