London (74 page)

It was here, between the Holborn and Temple Bars, that the most learned men in London were gathered together, in the lawyers’ quarter. There had been hostels, known as Inns, for lawyers in the vicinity for a long time. But in recent decades, the ever-increasing number of legal men had been flocking to the area like gathering starlings. Already some of their communal lodgings and schools were acquiring permanent names: Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn; even the Temple precincts too, their crusading order having been disbanded, were now leased to these sharp-eyed and chattering fellows. Down the centre of this quarter, running from Holborn southwards to Fleet Street, was the narrow thoroughfare known as Chancery Lane. And it was by Chancery Lane, in a small lodging on the upper floor whose windows, had they not been shuttered, would have given out on a tiny, enclosed courtyard, that the secret of the universe, like some subtle legal contract, was being minutely investigated to see what it could yield.

Fleming watched spellbound, his concave face turned towards the glowing coals in the fire, as the dark figure before him went about his work. The Sorcerer wore a black robe on which were sewn, in golden thread, images of the sun, moon and planets. On a table in the centre of the room was a score or so of bowls, jars, phials, beakers and retorts. As the Sorcerer moved about, at one moment he seemed like some strange and dangerous bird, at another like a priest at his devotions; but always his ministrations were awesome and hypnotic.

“You have the mercury?”

Trembling, the grocer handed over a little phial which contained two ounces of the liquid metal.

“That is good.” The Sorcerer nodded his approval. Then, very carefully, he measured out one ounce, which he transferred to a small earthenware crucible. “See to the fire,” he ordered.

Obediently taking the bellows, Fleming stoked the fire while the other hovered over the table.

With what care the Sorcerer went about his work. From one bowl he took iron filings, from another, quicklime; to these he added saltpetre, tartar, alum; brimstone, burnt bones, and moonwort from a jar. Then a miraculous powder, hugely costly, whose ingredients he would never divulge; and lastly, as though in kindly recognition of his visitor’s calling, he ground up one of the precious peppercorns the grocer had brought him the week before, and added that too. For another five minutes, his face half in shadow, he mixed and warmed this magical brew until, finally satisfied, he reverently poured a little of it into a phial and, turning, allowed his eyes solemnly to rest on the concave face of his pupil.

“It is ready,” he softly intoned. Little Fleming felt his breath grow short.

“You are sure?” he ventured.

The alchemist nodded.

“It is the Elixir,” he whispered.

No wonder Fleming trembled. In the Elixir was the secret of the universe. And now, oh dear heavens, they were going to make gold.

The art or science of alchemy in the medieval world was based upon a very simple principle. Just as the celestial spheres rose in order towards the vault of heaven, just as there were orders of angels from the mere winged messengers to the radiant seraphim who dwelt beside the Godhead, so every element in the natural world was arranged in a divine order, ascending from the grossest to the most pure.

Thus with metals too. The philosophers recognized seven metals, each corresponding with a planet: lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter; for copper, Venus, for iron, Mars, Mercury and its planet shared a name, silver for the Moon and gold, purest of all, for the effulgent Sun.

But here was the wonderful mystery: with the passing of time, no man knew how long, the warmth of the Earth would gradually refine each of these metals, stage by stage, into a purer form: iron into mercury, mercury into silver until at last, at the very end of time, all should finally have passed into purest gold, their ultimate and perfect state.

“But what,” the philosophers asked, “if a way could be found to hasten the process, to sublimate a base metal from its gross condition into its purest golden form?” And so it was not surprising that, just as men sought cures by making pilgrimages to shrines, or knights in stories sought the Holy Grail, so the men of science known as alchemists sought some substance that would cause metals to transform themselves from their base to their purest state. This magical stuff, whatever it might be, must surely contain the secret of the universe. It was known as the Elixir or the Philosophers’ Stone.

And Silversleeves had found it.

It was five years since Benedict Silversleeves had become a practitioner of the magic art of alchemy, and Fleming was only one of a number of clients – each of whom believed that he alone shared the secret – who were greatly in awe of him. For he was very good at it. Not only could he astonish even learned men with his knowledge, but he really could transform base metals into precious. At least, all his clients thought he did, for they had seen him do it.

The actual performance of the miracle was very simple; and though he had devised many cunning variants of the trick, Silversleeves always favoured the easiest of all. This was what he did now.

Pouring a few drops of the Elixir into the crucible, he placed the latter on the fire. Watching it earnestly he began to stir it with a long, thin stick. As a special concession, for a moment or two he even allowed the grocer to stir as well. What Fleming did not know was that inside the stick, before he arrived, Silversleeves had inserted granules of purest silver, held in with a little wax filling at the tip of the stick. As the crucible was stirred, the wax melted and the granules of silver ran out. It was a trick that could be performed with any metal.

And so it was, time after time, that his clients had seen iron appear in molten lead, or silver apparently made from iron, tin or mercury. Only one thing they had never seen. The production of gold.

For this was the Sorcerer’s cleverness. If he could transform base metal into silver, then surely, one day, he would succeed in achieving that last step, and make gold. Their faith was strong, and their greed was even stronger. Like men drunk with gambling, they came back to him again and again. With money.

“It’s not the iron or the mercury,” he would explain. “Besides, you can bring that. But it’s the powder for making the Elixir. It costs a fortune. For that I need your help.” Indeed, he could not make so much as a grain of it for less than five marks.

The Elixir was composed mostly of chalk and dried dung, and so Benedict Silversleeves, until he found preferment in his profession, made a very good living indeed.

Why did he do it? When he informed Bull that his fortune was modest, he had made a huge understatement of his real position: in fact, a downright lie. For by the time his widowed mother died, so shrunken were the family’s resources that he was practically penniless.

It did not do for a young man to be penniless. A rich merchant might welcome a younger son of a gentry family into his house: the family’s wealth gave the boy some standing, and there was usually some financial help to get him started. He might accept an ambitious fellow from an old London family like Silversleeves, and with good prospects, on the assumption that he had some means behind him. But take that same young man and make him penniless, and he became an adventurer, an object of suspicion and of scorn. And so it was that Silversleeves had invented his modest fortune; his fine horse and rich clothes all paid for by his secret gulling of poor fools like Fleming. He must keep this up, moreover, all through the long and delicate courtship of a wealthy bride. If nothing else, his patience and his nerve were exemplary.

Fleming had been easily caught from the first moment he had begun to converse with this scholarly young man in the George. Month after month he had bought more of the powder, watched metals sublimate themselves to silver, secretly eroded his savings until he could not even pay the poll tax. And still he had dreamed. For when at last the gold came through, they would live a life of such ease. Why, he could buy the George, the Tabard, every inn from Southwark to Rochester and on to Canterbury too. Dame Barnikel could do as she pleased. He would give her all the furs and gorgeous clothes that she wanted. How she would bless him, love him, even respect him as other wives did their husbands. And Amy should marry a gentleman. Or, if she preferred, Carpenter. What happiness would be theirs. His heart in his thin frame swelled; his concave face glowed. And perhaps, this very night, it would all come to pass.

Most of the charlatans who practised this criminal activity would explain their failure by some defect in the equipment, or in the ingredients supplied. Silversleeves, however, had a more elegant solution.

“The Elixir is perfect,” he would say. “You’ve taken the silver we made and had it tested. You know it’s pure. But the final transition to purest gold – that’s hard. Even the Elixir must operate with the benefit of the planets and the stars. When all are in the right conjunction, we shall succeed, I promise you.” It was for this reason – and the fact that he had decided to buy Tiffany a new hood that afternoon – that as dusk had fallen on that dark day at the midnight of the year, he had sent a fellow to the grocer with an urgent message.

“Mercury is in the ascendant. Come tonight.”

The great cataclysm of 1381 took Geoffrey Ducket by surprise. But then very few people in England saw it coming either. The spring of that year had passed rather quietly. If Fleming had seemed subdued, the youth, knowing nothing of his master’s addiction to alchemy, thought little of it. He visited Tiffany once or twice, and heard in the Bull household that Silversleeves was seen by the whole family with ever-increasing favour.

True, he heard the stories of discontent in the countryside. The new and outrageous poll tax was causing problems. The peasants were furious; there was widespread evasion, especially in the eastern counties. But this did not affect him much.

In March the poll tax returns were inadequate. And this time, the boy king’s council was determined to act. Ducket heard the news one morning. “They’re sending the tax collectors back into Kent and East Anglia.” Rich and sturdy Kent, close to the capital, shared much of the robust London spirit. But East Anglia, besides its ancient independence, had a particular problem with the poll tax. For whereas in the more feudal counties, most villages had a lord of the manor who might, out of kindness or self-interest, help the poorer peasants with the tax, in East Anglia, with its pattern of small independent homesteads, there were fewer manorial lords and the peasants were hit hard.

During April and May, reports of the collectors’ activities came frequently. The city of Norwich had been hit: six hundred furious tax evaders had been found within the walls of this one town. Out in the East Anglian countryside, over twenty thousand had been caught and forced to pay – more than one adult in ten!

At the start of June, the reports became more ominous. “They’ve killed three tax collectors in Essex.” A day later: “There are five thousand peasants on the move. They’re sending messengers across to Kent.” And sure enough, before sundown the rumour ran along the stalls in the Cheap: “Kent is rising.” On the morning of 7 June, Ducket heard a report that the rebels had attacked Rochester Castle. He did not believe it; but seeing Bull in the street later on, he asked him. “True, I’m afraid,” the merchant grimly confirmed. “I’ve just heard that half the peasants from around Bocton have gone down there. They’ve elected a leader too,” he grunted. “Some fellow called Wat Tyler.”

England’s great Peasant Revolt had begun.

While the men of Essex were massing, and the rest of East Anglia preparing to rise, Wat Tyler led his men swiftly down the old road to Canterbury. The archbishop, whom they blamed for the poll tax, was not there, so they sacked his palace and broke open his prison. Then Tyler turned them round. It was time to go to the boy king.

Besides giving Tyler a chance to organize his men, the march to Canterbury had had one other important effect. At the archbishop’s prison they had liberated a preacher named John Ball, who had long been in trouble with the Church for his inflammatory and unorthodox preaching in the countryside. No scholar like Wyclif, who would have abhorred him, he agitated for radical reform of the whole kingdom and to many of Tyler’s followers he was a folk hero. With Tyler as general and Ball as prophet, the enterprise was becoming a peasant crusade.

And now London began to tremble, for the twin forces approaching from the east were formidable: from the north side of the Thames Estuary came the men of Essex; up the south side, Tyler’s men. Each horde numbered tens of thousands. The boy king and his council joined the frightened archbishop in the safety of the Tower; but they had no troops that could handle such huge numbers of rebels. The archbishop, hopelessly out of his depth, begged to resign the chancellorship, and no one else knew what to do.

Ducket and Fleming were just closing the stall on Wednesday afternoon when the word came. “They’ve arrived. The Essex men are going to camp at Mile End.” This was only two miles outside the Aldgate entrance to the city. “Tyler’s at Blackheath.” About the same distance on the Thames’s southern side. All down the Cheap, the traders were hurrying home, and the grocer did likewise. As they crossed London Bridge they were told: “The mayor’s giving orders to raise the drawbridge here tonight.” All down Southwark High Street, people were boarding up their houses, and at the George, Dame Barnikel met them with a grim expression. In her hand she was carrying a huge club. They stored the goods, locked up, and barred the gate to the courtyard. It was all they could do. Dame Barnikel, having inspected the premises, nodded her approval.

“Where’s that girl?” she asked impatiently. Amy, it seemed, had slipped out somewhere. A few minutes later, however, she reappeared and went quietly indoors, and her mother, after a satisfied grunt, took no more notice of her. But when Ducket entered the kitchen he suddenly felt his arm caught, and pulled, and found himself in a corner, face to face with Amy. He realized that she was unusually pale.