He who solidifies the past

Chapter Twenty-One

‘Kit. Stop now.’

Someone is touching his face. Kit blinks. The mirror is blank, flames flickering against its surface, his reflection swallowed up inside it. The room is dark, the fire burned low, the rolling thunder of a storm clattering sharply against the windows. Lazarus is standing close, dressed once more, his dark brows furrowed.

‘You weep.’

Kit sticks out a tongue to catch the salty residue on his upper lip. He takes a step back from the mirror but his legs are as wobbly as the day he was whipped. Lazarus’ arm is there, guiding him to the floor. Kit sits beside the still prone Dee, and watches a rat, gradually pulling a rotted apple core into its hole in the brickwork of the fireplace. He wonders if it is possible that the fresh mourning inside him, the dell of grief he has stumbled into, is inside such small animals too? As sun is to stars, as skin is to breath, so the alchemists say all matter connects but is this sorrow only mine?

‘Drink.’ Lazarus pushes a glass of wine in front of his nose. With a burst of warm cloves and ginger on his tongue, he begins to wonder if he truly saw anything or imagined it, but Lazarus has a notebook in his hand. He sees the scrawled pages of haphazard notes and he is staggeringly relieved for here is proof, here are the words outside of his own mind.

‘Speak.’ His voice is hoarse.

‘You recall being kept by an alchemist, being tested, much torturous assessments that you did not feel.’ Lazarus glances up at the mural of the pelican above them on the chimney breast, feeding its young blood from its beak, the alchemical representation of creation. ‘You do not remember how you were made but you remember the loss of your mother. The woman who did not survive.’

Kit says nothing. The woman who did not survive what? The winter, the birth of him? Something worse? He tries to reach for that chasm of grief inside him that produced these tears but cannot find it; it is a tide receding from him, pulling back like the Thames. He wants to ask Lazarus, is this how pain works? Does it have an ebb and flow that no one has told me of? Sometimes deep enough to drown in and, other times, impossible to imagine it was ever above my head? He opens his mouth but Dee is stirring, moaning softly, and Lazarus is pulling Kit to his feet.

‘We must go,’ he says.

Kit casts one final look at the mirror as they draw on their cloaks. The embers give it a golden hue on its left side and he has the clearest sense from it, words forming inside his mind like remembered lines of poetry; there is more to find. More to see. There is more inside you, still.

*

‘My lady has written.’ Pyncher thrusts a letter, the raven Blackwater seal broken, under Lazarus’ nose when he and Kit are in the nascent stages of creating the Arbor Diana, two days after they return from Manchester College. ‘You are to ride back to London tomorrow and we are to shut up here. She requests me to remove to Hart House also.’

Pyncher shoots Lazarus a thoroughly self-satisfied smile at his own elevation and then pins Kit with a vicious glare.

‘There is much to be done.’

Kit takes that to mean that he best get out of the fucking way before Pyncher has him wrapped in sheets and thrown in a cart with the candlesticks. Whilst Lazarus oversees the packing down of the alchemy chamber, Kit retreats to the orchard for the rest of the afternoon. Apples cover the ground around him, red and shiny, pleasant to hold in a hand, crunchy to bite. Kit tries to commit the taste of it to memory; the crispy flesh, the cold, wet air, fresh and moist. In two days September will be over and he will be in London with a mouth full of city smoke and within arm’s reach of both Twentyman and Isherwood once again. He is surprised by how little the first affects him, unsurprised by how intensely the second still does. Kit has skills he did not have two months ago. He can write in code, he can blend herbs and melt beeswax into healing balms, he knows the course of the planets and has tricks too, tricks worthy of the stage. He still does not know the rhyme or reason of which formulas seem to accelerate under his touch, but it doesn’t matter to him in the same way it frustrates Lazarus. The new skills he has acquired are saleable, a touch of a little power, the knowledge that he can at least live out of his own pockets without selling himself to a fight master, and these are facts that make Twentyman negotiable where before he had been unmovable. Lord Isherwood cannot be negotiated. Even the self-knowledge he gained in Dee’s mirror only lengthens his spectre. Kit recalls the sickening worship in Lazarus’ father’s eyes. How much more would it grow to learn that Kit was once kept by another alchemist, his abilities already tested, that someone else found him fascinating too? It makes Kit shiver.

‘You will catch your death out here without a cloak.’

Lazarus sits beside him, stretching his legs out long, tipping his throat to the weak sun. Then, he pulls from inside his doublet the small notebook he used in Dee’s room. Kit eyes it warily, for they have not yet spoken of all that he said in that room. Kit supposes it is because it is not safe to talk of such things within potential earshot of Pyncher, but just to see those scribbled notes on the page carves a rawness inside him, his mind left open for Lazarus’ inspection.

‘You melted the ice on your fingertips,’ Lazarus says quietly. ‘You did not say how.’

Kit closes his eyes and sees the moment again in his mind; nails turned from greyish blue to stinging pink. The apple under his tongue is chunky and floury, watery suddenly, turning to snow.

‘I thought about how the ice was inside me. I believed it was inside me, that it could be warmed by my blood and… it was.’

‘Hmm.’ Lazarus reaches down for an apple on the ground. He thoughtfully rubs it against his white shirt, suddenly a boy sneaking a treat in the garden. ‘Faith is an essential alchemical component.’

‘You called me an atheist.’

‘I did not say it was necessary to have faith in God. The alchemist must have faith that the potential of the universe is infinite and we have it inside of us to uncover it. It is a unique type of arrogance.’

‘Dee said it was better to be humble.’

‘Humble before the heavens, certainly.’ Lazarus bites his apple. A dribble of juice creeps down his chin, his words are slovenly with fruit. ‘But a student of the celestial arts must petition the angels for the skill to control the elements. You do not need petition for what has already been gifted to your skin and hands.’

‘So you wish me to be more arrogant?’

‘I thought it not possible, but yes.’

Kit snorts on his bite of apple, coughing suddenly where it clogs his windpipe. Lazarus thumps him hard on the back.

‘It is an arrogance, however, that is best kept from Lady Blackwater. When we return to London we will need to curate our findings for her,’ says he. ‘And by extension, her newly minted cousin.’

Kit swallows a lump, raises an eyebrow.

‘I have never kept a secret from Mariner before.’

‘You were not my Initiate before.’ Lazarus speaks the word so easily, but it lifts the hairs behind Kit’s ears. ‘You have seen what I will do to protect your secrets. I will not put them in jeopardy now.’

Twentyman often says it, what I will do for my lads, I’d take the noose for any one of you and expect you to do the same, but Lazarus has proven that he will teach Kit and poison for him and is asking nothing more than he continue to learn about himself. It is a different type of loyalty indeed. The end of September sun is orange and full as it dips down to the orchard wall. The glow of it turns the world a ruddy colour, the dry stone wall made fiery red, the ground glistening with bulbous fruit, and Lazarus’ hair is streaked with auburn, his eyes cloaked in a burnished shine. Kit allows himself to catalogue it all, to stare at the way Lazarus’ bitten nails catch the copper light. Then he remembers that time is passing, and tomorrow they will be riding back to the capital, with all these new secrets to carry with them. A watched sensation returns, a prey animal who knows that somewhere they have been caught in the scent.

‘You did not get the answer you wanted. I did not recall my making. It is possible still that I was born naturally, somewhere, perhaps corrupted after birth.’ He feels the edges of it then, the tide coming back in, waves of ancient misery he has no map to navigate. ‘I feel nothing. I am unnaturally made. Perhaps I was a monstrous mistake.’

‘People have told me all my life that my form dictates my character, that I am a monster born from sin, destined only for tragedy,’ Lazarus says flatly. ‘Being born ordinary or the intentions of your makers do not change how extraordinary you are now. Besides, you do not feel nothing.’

It is unfortunate, how those words catch something inside Kit’s chest; more unfortunate still how when he flicks his eyes up to Lazarus’ face, Lazarus is watching him, so calmly, and he must immediately pick a worm out of his apple to avoid it. Lazarus goes on.

‘However he was made, an alchemist with elemental control would not need to wait forty days to flower an Arbor Diana; with his will alone he could transform base metal into a growing thing. With elemental control, such an alchemist could urge it only with a touch. If he was willing.’

His hand is still on Kit’s back. For the first time since they came to Raven’s Roost, Kit doesn’t feel like he wants to move it. Lazarus Isherwood has lied to him before, has deceived and manipulated him, but here he is, speaking so casually, calling him extraordinary, outlining impossible potentials which, at every turn, have become unreasonably possible. The caul grew, the mirror spoke and here, in the wild and stormy North, in the company of this man who steps so high in the world he has no fear of tripping on the long arm of the law, it is very hard to believe that extraordinary means the same terrible, deadly things it has always meant in Southwark. But it does, whispers a small voice inside him. Unbidden, a noose forms in his mind, then a pyre, then fierce flame, coming as quickly as those flashing memories within the mirror. Kit ignores them.

‘He is willing,’ says he. Lazarus shoots him a small, wry smile; Kit is sure there is approval in it.

‘Then we will work wonders,’ says Lazarus.

Kit nods. He sits with the warmth of Lazarus’ hand on his spine and tries to pretend the safety he feels in this moment is not a fragile, terrible thing.