London - Edward Rutherfurd [255]
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