P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

***

Peter Cheke had gone to bed after another night of desperate labour against the plague, also ending in failure. He had slept the dreamless headlong sleep of exhaustion and woken very late in full daylight, feeling thirsty and still exhausted. He had even slept through the bells calling him to church. As he went to the window to look out into the street, he saw a tall man in ill-fitting homespun russet jogtrotting purposefully through the crowds, straight to his locked shop door.

The hammering resounded up the stairs and Cheke stood staring down at the statute cap of the man, overwhelmed with helpless misery. Yet another desperate father, begging for something, anything to save his babies, his wife, offering every penny he had for healing Cheke knew he could not give, as if salvation could be bought.

Eventually he put on his gown and hat, went down to open the door and tell the poor fool to begone.

At first he didn’t recognise the man because of the conflicting signals of clothes and bearing and the fact that his hair and face were dirty. By the time he had worked it out, Carey had pushed his way into the shop and shut the door behind him.

‘What…er…what can I do for you, sir?’ he asked nervously.

‘Mr Cheke,’ said Carey. ‘I’ve come to you because I have nowhere else to start. I must know where Dr Jenkins performed his alchemy.’

‘Sir, I gave my word…’

‘I know you did. But what if they were coney-catching? What if the process you saw was not alchemy at all, had nothing whatever to do with the Philosopher’s Stone, but was a well-known goldsmithing mystery called parcel-gilding?’

‘I am sure it was the true art, sir, as sure as my life.’

‘Then let’s prove it. Have you scales?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have any of the angels that were made?’

‘I…I was given a fee, yes.’

‘Excellent. I have here a true angel direct from Mr van Emden on Cheapside.’ He took out a small yellow coin and tossed it, snapped it out of the air and showed it to Cheke, the Archangel Michael, battling the dragon, bright and fine upon it.

Angry at this bland certainty that Carey was right and he was wrong, Cheke led the way silently to the kitchen of the house, and brought out his scales. Then from a loose brick by the oven, he took one of the angels he had seen made and struck and brought it over.

Ten seconds later the last bastion of Cheke’s world had fallen, for the pan with the true angel on it dipped much lower than the one he had been given by the worshipful Dr Jenkins.

He took the others out, checked them against Carey’s coin.

‘Yours is full of lead,’ he said, desperately.

‘No, Mr Cheke,’ said Carey wearily. ‘Lead weighs less than gold. Look how thin mine is, how much it weighs. You were coney-catched, Mr Cheke, like others before you, and like my brother, who was the gentleman investing in the project.’

‘We weighed them at the…the place.’

‘Who supplied the scales?’

‘Dr Jenkins.’ Cheke looked at the flagstones. ‘But…’

‘You know yourself it’s not so very hard to alter the balance arm of a pair of scales so it’s biased one way or the other.’

Cheke put his head in his hands and fought not to weep. Carey paused and then said quite softly, ‘I am not claiming that the transmutation of matter, that the goal of alchemy, is impossible. I am only saying that you yourself have not yet seen it done.’

‘You have no idea,’ said Cheke, his voice muffled. ‘You don’t know how happy I was. I have spent most of my life seeking out the truth of matter, trying to understand God’s mind therein. And to know it had been done, to know that someone had succeeded… It didn’t matter to me that it was not I that did it, only that it had been done. That God had vouchsafed a little of his mystery…’

‘Mr Cheke, I’m sorry. I must know. Where did the process take place? Where were the angels made?’

For a moment Cheke burned with rage and hatred for Carey and then the fire died inside him, to be replaced with a grey hopelessness.

‘In the Blackfriars monastery, in the old kitchen where there is a fireplace we altered to be a furnace. The gentleman had a key.’

‘Of course he did. And with the noise of hemp-beating in the Bridewell prison nobody would hear the sound of the coins being struck.’

‘Yes, sir, that’s right.’

Carey smiled at him. ‘Come on, Mr Cheke. I want to see it.’

He hadn’t the energy to resist any more. He stood and went with Carey. They threaded through the back streets of the city, behind Knightrider Street and St Peter’s, alleys pockmarked with red painted crosses in some places and utterly normal in others.

Getting into the Blackfriars was made a little complicated by the fact that for some reason, Carey did not want to go through the gatehouse and the cloisters. Instead they went down St Andrew’s Hill to Puddle Wharf and round the remains of the monastery walls that way, threading between the newly built houses to a much older, swaybacked stone building separate from the Blackfriar’s hall.

Carey tried the door, but it was locked.

‘The gentleman had a key to it,’ offered Cheke.

Carey nodded. ‘Yes, he would. I think my father owns this part too. Well, let’s see.’

Carey padded restlessly round the whole building, disturbing a goat in its shed, craning his neck to look at the high windows and the massive chimney.

‘Come on, where is it?’ he said to himself.

‘What?’

‘I never saw a kitchen yet that only had one door. Where did the servants collect the food, where’s the hatch?’

‘Hatch?’

Carey looked across a tiny jakes-cluttered yard at the Blackfriar’s hall, jutting above the rooftops with its buttressing, narrowed his eyes as he followed some invisible notional path and came up against the goat shed again.

‘Must be,’ he said, and barged into the shed where the goat bleated in fright. There were a couple of bangs and crashes. ‘Come and give me a hand with this,’ he ordered Cheke.

After sidling past the goat who stared with those unnervingly cold slit-eyes of hers, Cheke saw that Carey had managed to wrench two planks from the back wall of the lean-to shed and had uncovered what was obviously a serving hatch. They both tried to lift it, but it was stuck fast and so Carey simply picked up a stone that must have been used for milking and battered through the old wood. It gave in a shower of musty-smelling dust and Carey tutted.

‘It’s got dry-rot,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to demolish it.’ He climbed up onto the sill and pushed through the hole he’d made; Cheke followed him, borne along by Carey’s certainty. The goat stuck her head through the gap after them, bleating with interest.

Very little daylight was filtering through the high glassed windows. A huge table stood in the middle of the flagged floor, the vast fireplace was empty except for its rusting fire-irons and spit. They had used the chimney from the smaller charcoal fireplace on the other wall because it was narrower than the great fireplace and the airflow was more easily controlled. Where the monks’ food had been sinfully soused with complex spiced sauces, Peter Cheke had built a small closed-in furnace with stones and cement, sealed with clay. His own pair of bellows lay at one of the air-holes.

Carey hunted around until he found what he was looking for, a whole treetrunk made into a block, with a small neat round hole set into it. The mallet lay nearby.

‘Now where are they?’ he muttered to himself and began digging in the cupboards. In one he found a dusty academic gown and what Cheke at first took for a dead cat, until he picked it up and found it was a false beard such as players used at the theatre.