The Alchemist's Daughter Read online

  Bianca brushed the hair from her eyes. The linen cap that usually hid her mussed locks hung on a hook by the door. She didn’t wear the troublesome coif in the privacy of her rent, and John appreciated seeing her hair—as black as the knocker at Newgate—frame her pale face.

  “I’m distilling,” she said, running her hand along the expanse of coils. “I’m trying to separate this mash of barley and throatwort into a liquid.” She pointed to the mixture boiling on a tripod, then swirled a flask at the end of a tube that was shaped like a pig’s snout. “I’ll combine its purified essence with my salves.”

  John stirred the leaves in his own experiment and watched them bleed brown into the water. “Seems like a mountain of effort for a pebble of worth.” He stood back, then looked around the room for two mugs, or anything clean that could hold their drink.

  “These will do,” said Bianca, emptying the ground powders from a couple of bowls, then wiping the insides with a corner of her woolen kirtle. Her skirt was a record of ingredients and chemistries. Hopefully none were combustible—as they certainly were potent, both in staining and devouring the fabric. The smell alone was enough to stop a boar at twenty feet. But Bianca didn’t seem to notice, much less care. She handed over the bowls.

  “People depend on me for remedies to ease their boils and ague. I’m not so quick of hand as when I picked pockets.” She spied a mouse beneath a pile of rush covering the floor and, with some effort, cornered it with her foot, then snatched it up by the tail. “Perhaps I’m more conspicuous than when I was twelve. I haven’t a license to beg. How else am I to survive?” She carried the creature to the door and flung it into the alley.

  John set the bowls on the table and found a thick cloth to handle the pan. “I can think of a way,” he said, simply.

  Bianca’s ears pinked. Her affection for John rivaled her irritation. She knew he wanted to marry her or at least become a greater part of her life. Marriage, with all its demands—not least of which were children—would put an end to her chemistries. To Bianca, it was not a desirable offer. She could no more abandon her love of experimenting than move back home with her parents. So for now she avoided the subject and, instead, posed a matter for John to consider.

  “John, first you must finish your apprenticeship with Boisvert. Then you face years as a journeyman in silversmithing. After that, you must set up shop somewhere, and you know Boisvert will not take kindly to competition. I expect you’ll have to move.”

  “I could move here,” offered John, handing Bianca her bowl of brew.

  “John, this is not a home.”

  “But you live here.”

  Bianca set her tea down, exasperated. “I have no choice. I’ll not move back with my parents. Besides, you could never bear living here. I’d rather not listen to you complain about the smell.”

  John couldn’t argue. The smells did bother him. It would never do for them to live where she practiced her art. As for moving back with her parents, Bianca’s father, Albern Goddard, was an alchemist with a dubious past. He’d been accused of plotting to poison the king in an attempt to subvert Henry’s religious “Reformation.” A devout Catholic, Goddard still ascribed to the authority of the pope even though it was dangerous to do so. Bianca had risked her own life to prove he had been wrongly accused, and for that peril, she had yet to forgive him.

  Though, to be honest, Bianca owed much of her success and present circumstance to what she had learned from her father. From the time she had been able to fetch water without spilling it, she had assisted him in his “noble art.” He was disciplined, if not a bit disorganized, and she followed his methods, having never witnessed a more orderly approach. And, like her father, she was devoted to her science. Sometimes excessively so. Especially to John’s eyes.

  Bianca took a sip and suddenly blew it out, spraying her new still. “Phaa! What is this?”

  John leapt back, patting her spittle from his front. He stuck his finger in his bowl and tasted. “So it was pepper after all.”

  Bianca stalked to the door and threw it open. She cocked her arm to catapult the offensive liquid into the lane, where standing opposite, with her fist poised to knock, stood her friend Jolyn.

  “Another fouled concoction?” she asked, eyeing the bowl in Bianca’s hand.

  “This one is of John’s making.” Bianca tossed the contents.

  “John, I didn’t know anything but metals amused you,” said Jolyn, cautiously stepping into Bianca’s room. One never knew what one might find there. Once, she’d nearly been trampled by a goat wishing to escape. “Boisvert would be disappointed if you switched allegiance and joined the brotherhood of puffers.”

  “I think he was trying to poison me,” said Bianca, shutting the door. She hated to be compared with alchemists, but she ignored her friend’s tease. Instead, she noted Jolyn’s new cloak and doeskin gloves. “What’s this?” she said, touching her friend’s garb. “I should quit my experiments and sweep floors at Barke House.”

  Jolyn smiled. “My wages consist of a roof over my head and board for my belly.”

  John dispensed of his pepper tea more discreetly. He set it by a stack of crockery and covered it with a plate. “More gifts from your suitor then?” he asked.

  “Aye.” Jolyn shrugged off her cloak and draped it on a chair, well away from Bianca’s chemistries, then pulled off her gloves and set them by.

  “For such gloves I can’t say your hands have benefitted.” John added another dung patty to the furnace to ward off the chill. “They look raw and red from the cold.”

  Jolyn stood next to the furnace, stretching her fingers over the heat. “It’s not the cold. Mrs. Beldam has me sweep out the rush and scrub the floors with lye. But my hands look better than when I was picking through the flats.” She examined her blisters, turning her fingers over. “Mrs. Beldam believes in spring cleaning. She doesn’t want the neighbors thinkin’ we’s a clutch of clapperdudgeons.”

  “But you are a bunch of beggar-born,” said John, poking the fire.

  “I’ll have you not speak poor of Barke House. It used to be a stew of ill repute, but not anymore. Women come to Barke House hoping to escape the streets and start a better life.”

  “It’s hard to shake a spider out of its web.” John leaned the poke against the furnace, observing Jolyn’s cheeks beginning to flush. Her skin had been protected by river clay for so long that now, with it scrubbed, her complexion was usually as pale as a baby’s bottom. “I’m simply saying, reputations are difficult to lose,” he said.

  “True, but we must put a good face forward, eh?” said Jolyn. She sat at a bench opposite Bianca and the contraption of copper. “Last week I spent the only warm day toting bed linens to the fields of Horsleydown to wash and spread dry. My hands have yet to recover from the cold and soap.”

  “Mrs. Beldam is getting her use of you,” said Bianca.

  “I earn my keep. But if Mrs. Beldam hadn’t been so caring, I’d still be sloshing through sewage.”

  Bianca checked her mash and gave it a stir. “I don’t know how she affords to run such a place. She must have a charitable heart—or a patron with a bigger one.”

  “Or a bigger purse,” added John.

  “The girls and I give her what we can. You don’t run a place like Barke House hoping to grow wealthy.”

  Bianca agreed, then, settling on her stool, traced the course of a trickle of fluid and tightened a juncture in her apparatus. “So, what does Mrs. Beldam say of your suitor?”

  “She doesn’t like him. But if I should marry him, it is one less mouth for her to feed.” Jolyn sniffed a bowl of rendered suet and rubbed a dab on her cracked hands. “One of the girls suggested that he probably reminds Mrs. Beldam of someone she once loved. The rumor is she was abandoned in her youth and had to raise a daughter alone.”

  “Is it true?”

  Jolyn worked the oil into her skin. “She’s never spoken of a daughter.”

  “So, when will you see him?”
asked Bianca.

  “Soon. His ship is in. He has matters to attend.”

  “He’s a captain?” John pricked up his ears.

  “John should join a crew,” said Bianca. “All those years living in a barrel behind the Tern’s Tempest and being seduced by sailors’ wild stories of adventure and swag.”

  “He’s not a captain,” said Jolyn. “But his business involves ships. He does well by it. He brings me sweetmeats and oranges, stuffed figs . . . all manner of exotical foods.” She pressed her hand to her stomach. “It doesn’t always suit my constitution. I’m used to tavern scraps and ends from market.”

  “Perhaps you might save some for Bianca to try. She doesn’t care for the fare I bring.”

  Jolyn studied her friend’s neglected platter. “You’re as thin as a sparrow. You should eat.”

  “I forget.”

  “To eat?” Jolyn looked over at John and shook her head. “John, remind her there is more to life than this . . .” She waved her hand at the display of coils. “This . . .”

  Bianca watched her friend struggle to find the right words. “This room of Medicinals and Physickes?” she finished, lifting her brow.

  Jolyn rolled her eyes. “It’s frightening, Bianca, how absorbed you become in your chemistries.”

  Bianca shoved an apple wedge in her mouth. “There is nothing else I’d rather do. Discovering medicinals is more worthy than searching for the philosopher’s stone.”

  “So your father’s work is of no merit?” Jolyn thought anyone who worked indoors and was able to support himself must be cleverer than she.

  “None I’ve seen.” Bianca swallowed. “He has spent a lifetime trying to transmute gold from worthless metals and mole brains. He’s nothing to show for it.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “At least what I do benefits the sick and ailing, so it has some purpose.”

  “True. But some would argue that in aiding the shadier side of Southwark, you are in fact perpetuating it.”

  “If someone is in need, I help,” said Bianca. “It is not for me to decide who merits aid.”

  “You sound like a nun,” said Jolyn.

  “I do a respectable business with the gentler side of London. Merchants and earls buy my balms, too. And Meddybemps takes my salves to Smithfield and Newmarket.”

  Jolyn pulled her eyelids back and rolled her eyes around in her best imitation of the storied streetseller. Meddybemps had a roving eye that could make a person seasick just talking to him.

  Bianca couldn’t resist reciting one of Meddybemps’s rhymes—

  “Hey biddle dunny,

  I diddled me honey,

  And fiddled my pizzle did she.

  Now I’m sorry to say

  That we shouldn’t have played.

  Instead of one heir I’ve got three.”

  She bit into the wedge of cheese while her friends snickered.

  But Jolyn’s smile faded, and with a wince, she gripped her side. “Do you have a tonic to settle my stomach? I ate at the Dim Dragon Inn last night.”

  “Was Burke cooking? His food kills more men than the footpads in the alleys around it. I nearly lost my liver from eating his meat pie,” John said.

  “I have some peptic carminative on the shelf. It stimulates the bile and soothes stomach flux.” Bianca fussed over her fire and mash, letting John search through the bottles. “Mind that you don’t grab anything with ‘Capsicum’ on the label.”

  “What’s Capsicum?” asked Jolyn.

  “Pepper.”

  John’s head bobbed up and down as he squinted at the bottles, some labeled with Bianca’s precarious system of identification and some unmarked. He repeatedly pulled out jars, scowling as he tried to decipher what they were.

  “I should stop patronizing the Dim Dragon. Too many muckrakers frequent the place.” Jolyn’s hand went to her neck, and she fingered her scarf. “I don’t fancy rubbing shoulders with them anymore.” She watched Bianca stir her mash. “A mudlark from Falcon Way saw me and accused me of stealing from him.” She sniffed and shook her head. “He thought I’d cave from embarrassment.”

  John found a jar that read “peptic” something and set it before Bianca. “Is this what you wanted?”

  Bianca ran the jar under her nose, then dumped the contents into a pan. “Aye. Can you set this to boil with a measure of water from that bucket?” She ticked her chin in the pail’s direction.

  John dipped a ladle into the bucket and added it to the pan. “So, what did you steal?”

  “I didn’t steal anything!” Jolyn shrugged. “He’s a cozen to trouble me.” She studied her nails. “I know a few rooks who’ll settle a score as a favor.”

  “You’ve made some enemies,” said John, setting the brew on the furnace to boil. He gathered his hat and scarf from a rafter over the furnace.

  “How can one avoid it?” asked Jolyn. “Everyone makes enemies.”

  “Just temper your treatment of them,” advised John. “The alleys are dark at night.”

  Bianca stirred the brew for Jolyn and found an empty flask to pour it in. “Jolyn knows the risks better than anyone.”

  The mixture bubbled and burped. Bianca fetched a square of linen and stretched it over the mouth of the flask, concentrating as she poured the hot tincture. A dribble of liquid scalded her finger, but she endured the pain and finished pouring. “This should soothe your flux. Have you felt this way before?”

  “Not oft, but I have to say, the past week the pain has been worse. Sometimes I cannot stand for the cramping.”

  John wrapped his scarf around his neck and plopped his cap on his head. “I’ve stalled long enough. Boisvert will wonder where I’ve got.” He ducked a row of drying herbs dangling from a beam, sidled between two worktables, one piled with rue and strangely shaped roots that Bianca had started to mince, and the other table littered with retorts and crucibles filched from her father’s alchemy room.

  Bianca squeezed the last bit of liquid from the cloth and swirled the flask. “Let this cool, then drink it down.”

  “You should see him out,” said Jolyn, accepting the remedy and ticking her head toward John fumbling with the latch at the door. Bianca hesitated. Sometimes her friend could be so distracted. “He cares for you so,” she urged.

  Jolyn stretched her legs out on the bench as Bianca’s expression softened. She began to rub her sore legs. “Perhaps I’ve got the Black Death,” she said, calling after Bianca, who was now heading for the door. “I’ve got the aches all over my body.”

  Bianca spoke over her shoulder. “Let’s hope that it is not the plague but the damp and cold that you feel.”

  John bid good-bye to Jolyn, then pulled Bianca into the lane. But Jolyn knew what they were about. She whistled and whooped loud enough for them to hear her teasing and laughed when John slammed the door.

  Jolyn rubbed her upset stomach and eyed the hunk of cheese. She didn’t have much of an appetite, but it might settle her stomach. She snatched the wedge off the plate and munched happily while studying the copper tubes of her friend’s strange contraption. She admired Bianca for forging a life of her own. For being clever enough to have figured out a way to make money. Jolyn had always been envious of the fact that Bianca had a home—an actual place to sleep with a roof over her head. She didn’t blame Bianca for avoiding her father. Still, at least she had a father. Jolyn rubbed under her rib. And Bianca had a mother. She had neither. She sniffed the brew steaming before her. A hint of mint, maybe cinnamon, something else . . . Jolyn lifted it to her lips, blowing into the flask. She tried a sip and found it soothing.

  “You haven’t spoken of your mother in a while,” said Jolyn, as Bianca closed the door.

  The sheepish look on Bianca’s face fell away, replaced by a pang of guilt. Jolyn had lost both her parents, giving her little choice but to delve into the world of muckraking. Scavenging was marginally better than begging, though there were those who’d argue otherwise.

  “She fares well,�
�� said Bianca, “I suppose.” She slid onto the bench opposite Jolyn and rested her chin in her hand. “I haven’t visited in a while.” The truth was, Bianca wanted to be on her own, and returning home, even for a visit, was fraught with feelings of guilt at leaving her mother alone with her father. But her mother had her own interests, herbal remedies being one of them, and the two coexisted under the same roof if only to eat and sleep. “Father came close to hanging, but it seems his brush with death has not humbled him.”

  “Your father misuses everyone for his advantage.”

  Bianca did not disagree. She rubbed her eyes, gritty and sore beneath the lids. She really could use more sleep.

  Jolyn handed the flask back to Bianca. The brew settled in her stomach, and the two continued to talk about John and Barke House. Jolyn’s faith in her friend’s talent was unshakable—even when, after a few minutes, a sharp pain stabbed her gut, causing her to double over.

  Bianca looked up in alarm. “Jolyn?”

  “Most likely it is the warm liquid on an empty stomach. Nothing more.” She straightened and rubbed her side, turning her head toward a guttering candle.

  But Bianca thought Jolyn’s nonchalance was forced. She watched Jolyn through the copper coils. Only a crescent of blue iris showed around Jolyn’s enlarged pupils. A thin line of perspiration glistened on her upper lip and forehead.

  Jolyn mopped her brow with the hem of her skirt, drawing herself up as if nothing was wrong. “Well, it has passed,” she said. She leaned on her fist and grinned.

  Jolyn talked about her suitor, and after a few minutes, Bianca relaxed because it did seem she was showing no further sign of discomfort. Perhaps Bianca had been overly concerned. She turned her attention to some shelving where a stack of glassware hid a pair of tongs.

  “So are you going to marry this man?” asked Bianca over her shoulder. She reached over the flasks into the back of the shelf, upsetting a glass vesicle with her elbow and making it fall. It shattered on the floor, but a louder crash came from where Jolyn sat. Bianca spun around.