The Book of Secrets

XXII

Paris, 1433

Tristan’s house was an enormous hôtel: a square stone-built mansion near the church of St Germain. It could have been anywhere. The moment you passed its gate the city was relegated to a distant smudge of smoke and spires behind the wall. Tristan’s father had a role at the court of King Charles, from where he had been dispatched on some diplomatic errand to Constantinople. He had been gone some months and would be away for many more. He had taken his wife, his two daughters and most of his household, leaving Tristan with an almost-empty house and stern instructions to behave himself.

If Tristan’s father feared that his son might consort with prostitutes, idlers and gamblers then he had every reason to worry. If the secret of the Stone could have been discovered through fornication, or won at cards, Tristan would have had it within a month. But the whores and drinking and gambling were merely diversions from his true aim. With three older brothers and two sisters who would soon need dowries, he knew his days of living in the grand house – all he had ever known – were drawing to their end. The knowledge seemed to tear him apart, pitting the two halves of his soul in war against each other. He squandered his inheritance ever more savagely in couplings and wagers whose only pleasure was defiance, but he also pursued the Art with the obsessive conviction that it would free him from his father’s legacy.

Tristan had made his laboratory in a tower that had been added to the east wing some years earlier. The first time he brought me there it took my breath away. With the sort of architectural absent-mindedness that only the nobility can afford, the inside of the tower had never been finished: you could stand on the ground and stare all the way up to the coned roof, so high it seemed to funnel into eternity. Broad windows for chambers that were never built pierced the stone walls above, while at our level the whole surround was painted with perfect copies of Flamel’s panels in St Innocent’s. Only a brick furnace set into the far wall, and the door opposite, broke its sweep.

Tristan pointed up into the giddy darkness. ‘Truly a place to dream of grasping the secrets of heaven.’

I thought of Nicholas and the tower of Babel. The sin God punished was not ambition but overambition.

Tristan was a humourless and petulant collaborator, neither master nor friend. I did not care. I was back in my element. All I thought of was unravelling Flamel’s riddles. The fever I had felt in Cologne was returning – and with it came other feelings, harder to resist. I disliked Tristan; sometimes I hated him. But on sweaty nights when we worked the furnace half-naked together, or when his hand brushed mine as I held the pestle for him to grind our powders, the worm inside me thrilled with perverse lust. The tower became my prison, then my world. Flamel’s paintings were my horizons, the dark roof my heaven, the bats and swallows who nested in the rafters its angels.

One day, very excited, Tristan brought a stooped old man back to our workshop. He had white hair down to his shoulders and a white beard that touched his chest; he hobbled on a stick, poling himself like a barge. Blindness clouded his eyes, yet still there was something vigorous and watchful in his bearing.

Tristan sat him on a bench amid our apparatus and fetched him wine.

‘This is Master Anselme,’ he said. ‘How old are you?’

‘Seventy-eight.’ His voice was thin, but he smiled when he spoke.

‘Tell my friend what you told me in the churchyard at St Innocent’s.’

‘Many years ago – before my father died, God rest his soul – when I was young and eager, I delved into the secrets of the Art. As you yourselves do. And so it pleased God that I met the greatest adept of this age – of any age – a man who blazed over the rest of us as the sun vanquishes the moon. Nicholas Flamel.’

I sat bolt upright. Even the figures in the paintings seemed to straighten. ‘You knew Flamel?’

‘I sat in his workshop as I sit with you now.’

‘For how long?’

‘Many years. He died, God rest him, fifteen winters ago.’

‘And were you there when he produced the gold?’

The old man shook his head. Wine stained the hairs around his mouth like a gash. ‘Perenella, his beloved wife. She was the only one.’

‘But afterwards,’ Tristan prompted him, ‘he told you his secret?’

Master Anselme held out his glass for more wine. Tristan waited.

‘The Art is not magic. Do you know what the Stone really is? It is medicine, a tonic for all the diseased matter of this world.’

He lifted his left arm, which I saw was stunted and withered, quite useless. ‘This limb is still a part of me, however frail it becomes. The soul that unites my being runs through it as much as anywhere else. So with metal. What you call lead or tin are no different from gold and silver, except in the degree of their perfection.

‘There is one perfect substance in this universe – ether, quintessence, first matter, call it what you like. In its truest state it is without form. Only when it allies with the material of this world does it take shape. It is a principle, an idea that animates. It runs purest in the noble metals, and weakest in the base. You do not transmute lead into gold like a street magician changing an egg into a kitten. You purify it. You alloy it with the Stone, so that the seeds imprisoned in the metal blossom, until in the unity of perfection it can take any shape you command. Not for wealth or riches, but to perfect the universe.’

Tristan, whose interest could blaze and cool like air over coals, looked suspiciously at Anselme’s limp arm. ‘I heard that the Stone could also cure men. If you knew Flamel so well, why did you not heal yourself?’

The old man coughed. ‘I am a feeble vessel. The Stone is valuable beyond measure. I would not waste it on such humble flesh. Flamel himself believed that – used correctly – the Stone might work on our human forms so profoundly as to render us immortal. But he never discovered that art.’

‘Obviously,’ said Tristan. ‘But how did he find the Stone?’ I rubbed the blisters on my hands where I had been too eager to pick up vessels fresh from the fire. ‘I have read that it can be extracted from gold.’

‘Yes. Yes, precisely.’ Spittle flew from his mouth. He regathered some of it by licking his lips prodigiously. His tongue was truly enormous. ‘Gold is where it is most abundant. But even gold is filthy as mud when set against the Stone. It must be purified in the three furnaces. You must extract the seeds of sulphur and mercury, then combine them in the Hermetic Stream. That is what Flamel did.’

‘But how-’

‘You must watch the colour. In the fire it will change seven times, until in the moment of perfection it casts a light like a rainbow. That is the sign.’

Tristan leaped to his feet. Master Anselme glanced around fearfully.

‘You are a liar. Get out.’ Tristan kicked the table; the jars, bottles and flasks arrayed on it shivered and chattered. ‘Did you think you could come here and recite half-remembered lies you picked up from Flamel’s gutter – if you ever knew him? Get out of my house.’

He grabbed the old man by his shoulder and flung him halfway to the door. If I had not been standing there to catch him he might have broken his neck.

The incident with Master Anselme put Tristan in a strange mood for the next fortnight. Once when I came back into the tower I found him standing over shards of a broken bottle. Blood was beading around his wrist, and when I tried to bind it he shook me off angrily. His nights with the whores became more frequent. Sometimes he invited me to join them – at first half-heartedly, when he thought I might accept, then with malicious pleasure when he realised I would not. He called me ‘monk’ when he was kind or ‘eunuch’ when he was not, though he never guessed the real reason for my abstinence.

Perhaps Master Anselme was a fraud, haunting St Innocent’s churchyard and preying on the dreams of those who came to study Flamel’s figures. But something in his babble had struck home, a thread through the labyrinth. I followed it day after day, sometimes stretching it almost to breaking, sometimes tangling my mind in knots. And I began to understand.

All my life I had been captivated by gold. In the depths of my fall I had scrabbled to claw a few precious grains out of the river mud; even in Basle I had defined myself by the renunciation of my obsession. Yet now I saw it was not its glitter that bewitched me, as it did other men. Even in my ignorance I had seen through its surface, had sensed something of the divine universal housed within. I had felt it in the perfection of the gulden, in the gold leaf we hammered out in Konrad Schmidt’s workshop and in the wisdom of Nicholas Cusanus.

I knew why these things had obsessed me. It was because I could imagine perfection, as real as a dream, and the world would not be whole until I had grasped it.

I redoubled my efforts. While Tristan gave himself over to his dubious pleasures, I took Flamel’s book back to St Innocent’s. ‘In the churchyard in which I put these Hieroglyphical Figures,’ wrote Flamel, ‘I have also set on the wall a Procession, in which are represented by order all the colours of the Stone as they come and go.’ The wall paintings in Tristan’s tower showed the seven panels from the arch, the same seven pictures as were drawn in the book. But there were others he had not bothered to have copied, the women on either side of the arch processing towards the centre.

I studied them in the light of what Master Anselme had said. ‘You must extract the seeds of sulphur and mercury.’ By then I knew that sulphur and mercury were not the substances commonly called such, but wise names for mystic elements, the two opposing principles of heat and cold.

‘You must watch the colour. In the fire it will change seven times.’ I counted the women in the processions: seven on each side. As I looked at them, I began to realise they were all the same. Artfully painted so that no two seemed exactly alike – some turned to face the churchyard, others looking away or staring straight ahead, smiling, frowning, laughing, desolate – but all incarnations of the same woman, differing only in the colour and length of their hair. Sometimes it was white as the moon, sometimes black as night; brown, bronze, amber, honey-yellow or steel-grey. And at the front of each procession, where two identical women with knowing smiles faced each other across the open arch, red like cedar bark. The colour of the Stone.

And so I scoured the apothecaries’ shops and tapped their lore. I sought learned men and wise women. I pored over Flamel’s book until I could recite it word perfect and draw the figures in my sleep. I teased meanings from his riddles, mined the pictures until I struck new seams of understanding. I melted, alloyed, quenched and boiled. I learned more of the ways of metals than I would have in seven years in Konrad Schmidt’s shop. With many errors and missteps, I followed Flamel’s progress.

Along the way I made some curious discoveries. I burned copper oxide, reduced it with litharge and produced a liquid that was black as sin, yet dry to the touch in a very short time. Another time I alloyed lead, antimony and tin to create a wondrous new metal that melted easily over a flame, yet hardened like steel as soon as it cooled. When I showed it to Tristan he only grunted and asked if it brought us closer to the Stone.

It was not a happy time. When fatigue or Tristan’s petty cruelties drove me close to tears, I cursed my fate and despaired. What evil drove me on? I had spent ten years curing myself of my immoderate desires, years of agonies and mortification that drove me at last to the river ooze. In Basle I had been happy with a cell and a pen, a faithful servant to the ambitions of worthier men. A chance encounter and a single sentence in a book had undone it all. I felt as if I was stumbling through a dark tunnel, with an enormous burden crushing my back and chains dragging around my ankles.

But I was making progress. Gold turned black, then bronze, then a cloudy grey, then wine-red as I found ways to tinge it according to Flamel’s scheme. Silver resisted me longer, but after weeks of frustration it too yielded. At last, one night deep in November, I lifted my grinding mortar and, trembling, beheld a reddish powder the colour of cedar bark.

I dabbed a few grains on my fingertip and held them up to the lamp. It was very fine, like dust, sweet-smelling but dry as salt to the touch. There was terrifyingly little. All my weeks of labour had reduced to not much more than a thimbleful of the stuff.

I covered the bowl with an upturned jar, took the lamp and went to fetch Tristan. The house was dark, its filth disguised. As the costs of our experiments mounted, Tristan had dismissed the servants one by one until we were alone in our squalor. It made the cavernous house even more frightening. Rats played among the cobwebs just beyond the reach of my lamp; terrible creatures stalked me from the tapestries hanging on the walls. Once I knocked over a wooden stool and almost died of terror. My whole body was sunk in grim exhaustion, yet at the same time I thrilled to the wonder of the moment.

I found Tristan in his bed. A scrawny prostitute lay sprawled over him. Both were naked and half-asleep; I could see the scabs of flea bites down the backs of her legs, and something moving in her hair that looked like lice. Evidently the servants were not the only economy Tristan had made.

He propped himself up on his elbow. The prostitute rolled off him, revealing a meagre pair of breasts and a great deal of hair.

‘Have you come to join us after all?’ leered Tristan. ‘I have it.’

He pushed the whore aside and leaped out of bed, kicking over a glass of wine on the floor. He grabbed his father’s sword, which rested on a shelf in its scabbard. ‘Are you sure?’

‘There is one way to prove it.’

We returned to the tower, under the gaze of Flamel’s inscrutable figures. Black infinity yawned above us. Working in silence, I heaped up the powder on a fold of paper. I had wanted to hold some back in case the first projection did not work, but there was so little I did not dare spare a grain. I twisted it shut and sealed it with wax. A silver mirror lay on the bench from when I had tried to trap the sun’s rays: I glimpsed my reflection in it and trembled. My skin was grey, my hair thin and my eyes sunk beyond sight. The skin on my hands was pink and shiny, smooth as a baby’s from all the burns I had suffered in my haste. A splash of vitriol had seared a crescent scar into my cheek.

Tristan brought out an egg-shaped vase made of blown glass. He filled it with powdered lead which he measured in a balance, then sprinkled it with a few drops of quicksilver. Then he fitted a crystal plug to its end and burned the edges with a taper. While he did that, I shovelled coals into the furnace and worked the bellows. I watched the colours of the fire change, from red to orange to a brilliant white too painful to behold. When I saw that, I knew we were ready.

I grasped the glass egg with a pair of iron tongs and thrust it into the centre of the fire. Tristan rested his arm on my shoulder and leaned forward to look. Though the night was cold, we were both soaked in sweat.

‘How long will it take?’

‘We will know when the moment comes,’ I told him.

We stood there and watched, our bodies pressed together so close our sweat mingled into one. I hardly noticed. Steam began to curl out of the metal in the vase. The lead softened, melted and bubbled, drinking up the quicksilver.

I pulled away from Tristan and squeezed the bellows, building up the fire to new fury. The heat seared my face; smoke billowed into the tower. Tristan stumbled away with his hands over his eyes, but I stayed rooted in front of the furnace.

Something flashed in the glass and I knew the time had come. I reached in and knocked out the crystal plug with a poker, then lifted the paper twist in the tongs and flung it in. It dropped through the opening, fell onto the boiling metal in the base and burst into flame. It was the purest, whitest flame I ever saw, like sunlight on snow. And as it burned I saw an aura, an iridescent halo that filled the vase with colours. The rainbow.

I cried out to Tristan. He must have seen it too for he ran to my side. Together, we dragged the vase out of the fire and stood it upright on the floor. Tristan drew his sword, raised it and struck. The glass egg cracked in two and fell apart. Through the smoke and sweat that stung our eyes, we stared down at what we had created.