Alchemy and Argent

1 ‘Cordelia Vesper,’ said Valerie, in the resonant tone of a disapproving headmistress. ‘You are bored.’ ‘I deny it,’ I said instantly. Val looked pointedly at my desk, and all the evidence to the contrary strewn across it. I’d adopted an out-of-the-way nook in the library at Home, tucked under one of the big, bright windows overlooking the sun-baked grounds. The window was wide open, letting in all the intense heat of mid-August and an occasional, desultory stir of air. Not enough of a breeze to cool me down. More than enough to cause havoc among the thousand or so sweet wrappers littering my desk top. ‘I got hungry,’ I said, as a faint puff of wind whisked a few more onto the floor. Val folded her arms. Ordinarily stationed at her enormous desk at the entrance to the library — where she was on guard as much as on duty, nobody touched Val’s books without permission and expected to get away with it — she had floated through in her imposing green velvet chair to come check on me. If only she could have done so back when I’d still been industriously employed. Like, about three days ago. I gazed back at her innocently, and thumped the top of my respectable-looking stack of books. ‘Lots of good stuff happening.’ ‘Excess of sweets,’ said Val, pointing. ‘Dearth of notes. Phone. Far too much staring out of the window. Need I go on?’ She was right on all points. My notebook, optimistically opened at a clean page, had exactly three words written in it (“Nicolas Flamel sucks”). My phone lay on top, screen on, currently displaying an ongoing text conversation between me and Alban that had not, to my regret, received any new instalments since Monday. And I had been staring out of the window. It was the heat that did it, I swear. I wore the airiest summer dress I possessed (pale blue silk), and my hair (silver this week) was scraped up off my neck, but nothing could keep me cool in thirty-four degree heat. Not even in the great stone pile that is Home. I drooped in my chair. Busted. ‘All right, all right. I’m bored out of my skull. It’s been two and a half weeks, Val.’ Her brows rose. She looked cool as a proverbial cucumber, her dark skin free of the perspiration so unbecomingly glimmering upon my own, her black hair elegantly swept up and frizz-free. Is there a charm to keep cool in summer? Why hasn’t anyone ever told me? ‘Whatever happened to Library Fiend Ves?’ said she. She had a point. The old me would never have got bored in a library like this. What was wrong with me. I opened my mouth to defend myself, came up with nothing, and shut it again. ‘I’m the worst person alive,’ I said instead. ‘All that time complaining that I wanted to come Home, and now look at me. Bored.’ Val softened. ‘It is understandable. After weeks on end of wild adventures and daring deeds, the change of pace has been abrupt.’ Maybe that was it. Out on the Fifth Britain, chasing down the clues we need to halt the decline of magick, I’d felt like I was really doing something. Something important. It was harder to feel the same way about combing through dusty old books, considering that the vast majority proved to have nothing useful in them at all. ‘I’m addicted to danger,’ I sighed. ‘Hooked on adventure. The new Ves needs peril and adversity to thrive.’ ‘I think you were getting tired of that, too,’ Val justly observed. ‘You’re right. Nothing pleases me. I’ve become a monster.’ She grinned. ‘Why don’t you take a break?’ ‘Nooooo.’ I sat up, wielding my pen with intent. ‘Why not?’ ‘This is an important job, and we haven’t made much progress on it. I just need to focus.’ All this started a few weeks back, when Val uncovered no fewer than two ancient alchemists — self-professed — who claimed to have performed wonders regarding ordinarie metals such as sylver or gould given magycke beyond their common bounds. Sounds promising, no? But one turned out to be about as magickal as a lump of plastic; his books were essentially fiction. The other had been a trail that simply dried up. Only the one reference to magycke sylver was ever made in Valentine Argentein’s book, and Val had drawn a total blank on finding out anything else about him at all. It was as though he had existed only to produce one weedy little pamphlet and then vanished into thin air. That and the improbably pertinent surname meant that the name Valentine Argentein was probably a pseudonym of some kind, but for whom? Nobody knew. ‘No progress?’ Val sniffed. ‘Speak for yourself.’ I dropped the pen again. ‘What? What did you find out?’ Val’s chair drifted nearer. ‘Nicolas Flamel,’ she began. ‘Argh,’ I said. ‘Nicolas Flamel,’ Val repeated, ‘May be of some use after all. Yes, I know he’s credited with far more than he probably achieved, almost certainly did not create any “philosopher’s stone”, and is highly unlikely to have discovered an elixir of immortality.’ ‘I wish people would stop obsessing about him,’ I grumped, sourly eyeing my book stack. You read about alchemy, you’re going to read about Flamel. Every. Single. Time. And no one can even agree about whether or not he had any magick. He was most likely irrelevant to our entire investigation, but continued to obtrude, like a fourteenth-century French wall I couldn’t see around. ‘He is insufferably boring and cannot be defended for his omnipresence,’ Val agreed, possibly with a shade of sarcasm. ‘But, his connections are beginning to interest me. For example, did you know he was acquainted with Mary Werewode?’ ‘Mary Werewode— hang on—’ I groped for my notebook, and flipped feverishly through its pages. I’d come across that name before, buried in an otherwise underwhelming book called The Principles of Alchymistry. ‘Right. The lady laughing stock.’ She’d been a low-ranking noblewoman in the late 1300s with an interest in natural philosophy. Society at the time wasn’t so forgiving of women taking an interest in anything but home and hearth, so that might have been reason enough for her reputation. But what I’d read of her did sound pretty bizarre. For example, she believed that bathing naked under the full moon would restore her youth — something about absorbing the gentle radiance through her bare skin. I can tell you, there’s nothing in either science or magick that would allow for that. More’s the pity. Val, though, was grinning, a rather devilish expression. ‘You should know, Ves. The shining lights of history were often considered cranks in their own time.’ ‘So Mary Werewode wasn’t a crank?’ I perked up. If there was the smallest possibility that a spot of naked moonbathing would take a few years off me, I was up for it. ‘I don’t know yet,’ Val cautioned. ‘But Flamel is said to have corresponded with her, which means maybe she wasn’t just spouting hot air. None of those letters seem to have survived, but there is one point of possible interest.’ She set before me a slim volume, leather-bound and crusty with age. It had the delicate, feminine look of a ladies’ journal. ‘This is nowhere near old enough to be Mary Werewode’s,’ I said. ‘It actually belonged to Cicily Werewode, who identifies herself as Mary’s descendant. She appears to have been a great admirer of her great-great-grandmother’s work, and expressed a strong desire to reproduce it.’ I eyed the book, sceptical. ‘And Mary Werewode corresponded with Flamel. Are we talking more elixir-of-immortality nonsense?’ Alchemists of the past seem to have come in two kinds, according to my reading. The kind that chased after elixirs and philosopher’s stones — Flamel-style — and who possessed no actual magick with which to do it; and the kind we were more interested in, the witches and magicians of the past who had some magickal talent to bring to bear. It was the latter kind I’d been chasing, and failing to uncover. The lead-into-gold crowd had completely co-opted the term Alchemy, and even hundreds of years later that’s all anyone talks about. I suppose the big question is: was there any overlap between the two? I couldn’t answer that one either. ‘According to what she says,’ insisted Val, perhaps noticing my slight abstraction. The heat, I tell you. It turns my brains to cotton-wool. ‘Mary had no interest in the elixir of life, or any of that guff.’ ‘I find that hard to believe. She was known for trying to spin youth from moonlight.’ ‘Yes, but Cicily claims she deliberately spread these absurd notions about, in order to conceal what she was really doing.’ ‘You mean she wanted to be known as a crank?’ ‘The practice of alchemy didn’t always make a person popular,’ Val said. ‘That might be one motive. And then, she may not have wanted to run the risk of someone else taking credit for her work.’ ‘You mean like somebody male.’ ‘It was a thing that happened.’ ‘Tell me about it.’ ‘Anyway, if Cicily is to be believed, nothing we’ve read about Mary Werewode had any basis in reality. Cicily was certainly a practitioner of magick, and she says Mary was, too. She claims her great-grandmother was a pioneer of magickal alchemy, preceding James Fryelond and Florian van der Linden by almost fifty years. And her speciality?’ Val paused for effect. ‘Yeeeees?’ I said. ‘Silver,’ said Val. ‘Which, according to Cicily, was another reason why Mary was laughed at. What kind of an alchemist wants to make silver when you could be making gold, or better yet diamonds?’ ‘The kind who knew about moonsilver!’ I grabbed for the little book. Carefully. ‘Hey, I wonder if her moonbathing had some kernel of truth to it, too. Maybe she wasn’t spreading absurd stories about herself. Maybe they were the truth, but they sounded so insane nobody believed them.’ ‘The word moonsilver seems to be specific to the Yllanfalen,’ Val said, shaking her head. ‘Cicily never uses it, and we have no reason to think Mary did either. So, probably not.’ ‘Damn.’ Something about the very craziness of the idea appealed to me. ‘Val, I swear you’re a marvel. Where did you dig up this gem?’ The two men she’d named, Fryelond and van der Linden, were legends in magickal alchemy (as far as that ever went) and as such had been our starting points. We’d both read their books from cover to cover, forwards and backwards, hoping to find something about magickal silver. But neither of them had even touched upon the subject, preferring only marginally successful attempts to turn pebbles into the kinds of imbued jewels Wands are made out of. We’d hit a wall. Again. Had Val found a way forward? ‘An obscure mention of an obscure mention,’ said Val, shrugging. ‘You know how that goes. I followed a trail through some journals and treatises, tracked down a surviving copy of this book in the catalogue of the Magickal Archives of the City of York, and requested a loan. It arrived this morning.’ And there you have it. Val is the best historical detective in the known world. ‘Can I read it?’ I asked, tenderly stroking the cover. ‘You can, but I’ve already compiled notes about the salient parts. And I really think you should take a break.’ I looked sadly at the little book. I still wanted to read it, but Val was right. With cotton-wool for brains, I probably wouldn’t achieve much by doing so. ‘I take it the answers we want aren’t in here,’ I said. ‘That would be far too easy.’ ‘No, that’s the frustrating part. We know from Cicily that Mary Werewode devoted many years to the alchemical study of silver in some fashion, but Cicily is vague on the details.’ ‘Damn.’ ‘But.’ I held my breath. I love it when Val says something fabulously erudite, if disappointing, followed by a qualifying but. Some marvellous twist is always coming. ‘This journal was written when she was a very young woman,’ said Val. ‘Scarcely twenty. She’d been investigating Mary’s work for less than a year, and as yet I have no idea what became of her afterwards.’ ‘Ooooh.’ My imagination raced away, picturing all the fabulous things Cicily Werewode might have gone on to do in the 1600s or whenever it was she’d lived. Perfected her ancestor’s moonbathing technique. Created reams upon reams of magickal silver, and helpfully left the recipe lying around somewhere for us to find. Discovered the elixir of immortality, and used it. Regretfully, I discarded all my ideas. If she had done any such things, she would be a legend. Unless… unless she, too, had kept her endeavours a secret. Never mind. We had a trail to follow, and Library Detectives Val and Ves were on the case. I perked up. ‘Why was it in York?’ I said. ‘Is that where the Werewodes lived?’ ‘Pertinent question, Ves,’ said Val. ‘I wondered that, too, and I’m looking into it.’ ‘I could look into it!’ I beamed hopefully. ‘You could, if you weren’t just about to take a break.’ ‘But—’ ‘Go get some air, Ves. You look like a wrung-out dishcloth.’ ‘Ouch.’ ‘Harsh, but fair.’ Val retrieved Cicily’s journal, smoothly rotated her chair, and floated off back to her desk. I hauled myself up from my chair, paused while my overheated head swam and my vision blurred, and finally stumbled my way towards the door. If I had to take a break, well then Jay was going to take a break with me.