He who burns up the past

Chapter Thirty-Two

Kit is woken by his teeth jostled inside a bouncing head, his forehead bumping against the wood of a carriage as it rolls over cobblestones.

‘Just in time,’ Elody says. She sits opposite him, resplendent in black and violet, clean and neat. He does not know how many days it has been since he was last fully awake; turbulent dreams of Lazarus and Griffin and choking on black smoke have been interspersed with tisanes, forced between his lips in the darkness. There must be a bleary question on his face, because Elody says, ‘Four days since we left London. We made good time. His legs will still be unsteady. Help him.’

Beside her is Squire Kay, one hand wrapped in bandages stained brown with blood. Her eyes are flickering with nervous energy. She is more alert now, at least, but looks haggard; hair loosening out of her cap, stringy with sweat, a yellow stain on her bodice that smells of vomit. When Elody steps out of the carriage Kit looks into her face as she crouches to help him stagger to standing.

‘Can we run?’ he mutters to her.

‘You cannot run anywhere.’ Her words stink; herbs and sickness and perhaps an undercurrent of sherry. ‘Just wait.’

Together, an uneven clatter of feet and leaning bodies, they slump down from the carriage onto the street into the misting October rain. It is a sudden assault of sounds, horseshoes on stone, the raw caw of wheeling gulls: a recipe for a particular feeling. His insides are turning, organs reshuffling and sliding past one another to reassemble in an old remembered pattern. Staring up at the dark wood of the Antwerp house, its pointed roof and boarded windows, he feels the same apprehension he did when he stood before Doctor Dee’s mirror; a gnawing anxiety that truth is coming to him, however unpalatable, and cannot be stopped.

‘Where are we?’ he asks Squire Kay.

‘We are in Antwerp, Master Skevy, at Vervloekte huit. The Cursed House.’ Elody turns a key in the door and uses her shoulder to push it open. ‘This is where you were made.’

Inside, the house smells musty; spots where furniture once stood dark shadows on the floorboards, fireplaces empty. The floor is littered with rat droppings, illuminated only by the spare cold light of the city’s grey sun piercing through the edges and holes in the boarded-up windows. Kit remembers none of it.

‘Of course he would never sell, kept it like a shrine to you, Kit. Never once thought to change the locks. I am sure Lazarus will burn it to the ground.’ Elody raises her skirts to climb the dusty stairs. ‘Come, let us show Kit where he lived.’

His legs are heavy, one more alive than the other, dragging and bumping on every stair as Squire Kay puts his arm across her shoulders to help him up. Her sweat is a sour musk on his tongue.

‘What am I waiting for?’ he mumbles to her.

‘Just listen to me,’ she whispers. ‘In my pocket, there’s a bottle. When I tell you, you take it, aye?’

Kit does not understand. He has never known a time when he did not trust Squire Kay, but is the woman really in front of him the same woman who has cared for him all these years in London? The same woman who apparently saw Kit born and grew up here in the Cursed House, rather than a brothel, and never told him the truth?

‘Promise me, Young Kit.’ Her breath is heavy from the effort of moving him up three flights of stairs. The stains on her bandaged hand are darkening. ‘Promise me—’

‘In here.’ Elody wrenches open a closed door. ‘You’ll remember soon, Kit, I’m sure, this was your little prison! More luxurious than your friend’s hole at Bridewell.’

It is a wide space, dark and grey, and could very well be in Raven’s Roost or Hart House for all Kit recognises it. Then Elody is opening the shutters, the pale light fills the room with the vision of grey sky over water, and she unlocks the narrow window. It’s the sound of it, the creaking swing, the musical latch, the sudden rush of passing water and city bells: he is filled with ancient longing. As it grows he is shrinking, he is tiny, there is snow drifting through that open window and his hands are cold, so cold.

‘Come and look.’ Kit stumbles over and stares down at the cobbles below, the narrow street, the river Scheldt. He remembers its name, remembers how it felt to stare from here at the tumbling water and wish to be sailing away on it.

‘That is where your shirt was found, flapping like a flag of surrender.’ Elody points to a lantern on a pike by the river. Kit remembers how he would watch them be lit in the evenings, flickering away inside their tiny metal cages. ‘Your little death. I suppose your Griffin climbed up and pulled you down.’

When he asked Griffin if he brought alchemical secrets back from Antwerp he said, only one. If it was truly him, he does not recall it. Kit stares at the water. How strange to recall the cadence of its sound, so different from the Thames.

‘I think my father may even have wept for you. Is that not strange? After everything he did to my mother I do not think he shed one tear for us. But you were his great victory.’

‘Why are we here?’ Kit asks. Elody’s hand grips the edge of the window and she stares out over the river, at the boats passing.

‘God has seen fit to blow back King Philip’s ships. The Armada could not land.’

Kit is unreasonably satisfied to hear this. Not especially for the safety of his countrymen or himself – after all, Catholics have been just as dangerous to him as reformers in the last year – but because it is not what Elody wants. He badly wants her to be disappointed.

‘It is His will,’ Elody continues. ‘The mystery of His will is beyond me, but it becomes even more urgent that you learn. Here will be the best place for you to do so. When you truly know what you are capable of, when you remember, I do not think I will have to spear more of her fingers for your power to flow. Nor will you fight it, when you understand your place.’

Kit can feel Squire Kay trembling against him. He wonders if it is fear or memories. He looks around but nothing more returns to him.

‘Is this where I was born?’ Kit asks.

‘I knew you’d be curious.’ Elody pulls the window closed. ‘Let me show you where it was.’

The silence of the house wraps around them as they move back down the many stairs, wood creaking, dust parting under their feet. When they reach the ground floor Kit watches Elody open a smaller door, reinforced, with metal on the inside.

Elody passes Squire Kay a lit candle. ‘Lead the way.’

The flame sputters as her hand wavers but she steps into the darkness, the candlelight illuminating narrow stone steps down under the house. Kit follows, hearing the sound of Elody locking the door from the inside behind him. He reaches the bottom step and tries to look around through the deep gloaming. The scent in his nostrils is of charcoal and wet stone under the earth and something else too, something metallic, that sits at the back of his tongue and makes his spine stiffen. Elody walks down the stairs behind him with absolute confidence, brushing past him in a waft of floral perfume, to take the candle and set it to a sconce on the wall. The cellar illuminates as the old pitch and tow flames into life. Kit doesn’t know what he expected but it is not this. Painted all over the walls are the scenes from the Rosarium philosophorum, the king and queen of sun and moon, laid together and descended into fire to be reborn, anew. There is a fire pit dug into the floor, almost as wide as the walls. A grill sits atop it, iron bars close enough they can be walked upon and in the centre is the most absurd thing Kit has ever seen. As tall as a man, giant and gleaming, burnished in places and tarnished in others, flashes of gold catching and reflecting the dancing flame. The closest thing Kit imagines it to be like is an egg; but uneven and stained. He sees dark handprints, he thinks burnt by soot, until he moves closer and sees the dark grime of dried blood.

‘Colossal, is it not?’ Elody raps her knuckles against it, ringing hollow and deadly. ‘What did Lazarus teach you such vessels are for?’

‘The philosopher’s stone, the compression stage of the Red Lion elixir.’ Kit doesn’t want to think about Lazarus but the answers are there, he can’t help but speak them. When the right compounds are created; the purest mercury, the living Arbor Diana, when an alchemist has achieved these steps he sets his sight on the vessel.

‘Filius philosophorum means philosopher’s child. Some alchemists believe recipes for it give forth the precious stone or the elixir of life but for a time my father operated on a more literal interpretation. He considered that by putting a vessel for child bearing inside the process for the filius philosophorum could yield the results he wanted. The perfect child. Better at least than his own cursed children, a discarded daughter or a deformed son.’ Elody walks around the hulking beast of it, a look of disgust and adoration on her face. ‘It has been posited by the alchemical fathers that babes could be made outside of the womb, homunculi and such. My father’s first experiments were not successful, seeded in horse dung and then kept in the vessel. It was no good. By the time I arrived here after my mother’s death, he had begun creating his own seeding process. Do not ask me of it, records were all burnt, but he realised the scholars had been wrong. He could not get away from it. In the act of creation at least, a woman was needed.’

Elody strokes its surface but her eyes are distant.

‘Needy whores. He placed his secret seeds inside them. Fed them arcane blood, grew them big on it, kept them in the vessel. Then cooked at the peaks of their labours. It barely worked. Until you.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ He says it because he does not want to believe. He thinks of the lungs of the woman, jarred up in Raven’s Roost. It is one thing to end up pickled, another thing to begin that way. To be born here, brought into distorted life by this grotesque vessel and the torture Elody so casually describes.

‘All alchemy requires sacrifice.’ She draws a finger along a metal seal, cracked, clumsy and silver, as if it has been reformed again and again. ‘The specimens laboured inside with the fire lit beneath them. Whatever lived was cut out.’

He has walked forward, over the grate, the cold coals below, to place a hand against it, this nightmare he was born into. It is chilled, bumpy, rougher than he expected for the glittering, ominous sheen of it. He does not remember ever feeling it, he does not remember the dark inside of it, the slippery mercury to bathe his first breath with his mother’s screams echoing against gold. Lazarus said he recalled his own birth. How Kit wishes he could pull it out of his own skull, cut and dig with Lazarus’ knife until this particular memory could be found, held up to the light for examination, but there is nothing. Naught but a terrible story.

‘Tell him, woman. You saw his birth.’

Kit twists around to stare at Squire Kay. She is standing by the back wall, the head of the faceless King behind her.

‘I did not see her seeded nor put in,’ Squire Kay whispers, staring at the terrible vessel. ‘But I saw you come out.’

Her eyes flicker to Kit.

‘It was so hot down here, so smoky, barely any ventilation.’ She gestures to the small crevice of a blocked window that peeks out onto street level. ‘The screams were the worst. She rattled that thing, how she battled to get out, they used long sticks to hold it in place and I knew she was fighting. They doused the flames, they emptied it, that accursed thing, she was dead inside. I never saw her face but I saw her arm, flopping out. Burned all over and pink. They fished you out of her blood and the mess and they thought you dead, for you did not scream, but there you were, so alive, and burned all over. They gave you to me.’

She cradles her wounded hand to her chest. Her eyes shine, catching the firelight, tears beginning to tremble past her nose.

‘I was so scared to touch you, lad, for fear I’d hurt you.’ When her voice cracks, Kit feels it, a fissure running through him, breaking open dry earth inside. ‘I never could.’

‘They called you infans solaris, the sun child, born of the flame,’ Elody says, and was this not what Lord Isherwood shouted with his last breath? Not calling for his two children, there in the room, but for Kit. ‘You were the painless one. You were the last they tried and the only success.’

Kit doesn’t even turn to hear her, he doesn’t care, all he cares for is Squire Kay. She stretches out her spare, unbloodied hand, fingers flexing desperately for him, grasping his doublet to pull him closer.

‘Where did they bury her?’ he whispers, his hands in her red hair, fisting it close. ‘My mother?’

‘You have no mother,’ Elody says behind him.

‘I wish I knew, I am sorry,’ says Squire Kay, pulling him against her in a clutching hug. Kit can feel her pressing something in the pocket of her dress against his leg. The bottle. Her voice is nothing but a breathy sob in his ear. ‘You are a natural coat maker.’

Kit douses the tears inside him, holds a sharp breath in his mouth. Those words, they can only belong to Lazarus. Instinctively, he surreptitiously slides a hand into her pocket and withdraws the bottle.

‘You have no mother! The seed of man produces a child; a woman is but a vessel!’ Elody slams her hand against the mottled surface of it. How the sound travels, strong enough to make the flames in the sconce flicker. ‘You have no mother, no father, you only have a creator. My father made you!’

Her voice is savage, an almost inhuman wail.

‘He chose you from seed, he watched you grow, he held you in his hands for your first breath, do you know he did not hold me after I was born? Too disappointed was he that I was female. He discarded me, disowned me, called me bastard, fruit of another man’s seed! You were chosen, only you!’

She seizes Kit, yanks him back towards the vessel, their feet clattering so hard on the grate as to shake the entire thing down. She gives the top of the vessel an almighty shove and it cracks open, an egg sliced. The inside of it is ruddy with spilled blood, silver trails and grime dust left at the bottom. The remains of my mother, Kit thinks, the remains of me.

‘You are what he wanted, not a daughter he hated or a crookbacked son he was ashamed of. A miraculous thing that would never feel the pain of his cruelty, nor the ache of his absence. So you do not weep or grieve for your whore’s womb, infans solaris, you know nothing of pain. Let us put you back in and set you aflame, shall we? So you can truly remember what it is to be made?’

She grabs his neck and pushes his face down towards it as if she intends to tip him in then and there. The smell is metallic but still somehow, after all these years, sweet and animal with the lingering scent of decay. Six minutes with a good wind, a much quicker death in a metal egg heated with flames. Kit is a jumble of a hundred different things he cannot organise, but he is sure of one thing. Whoever he is, wherever he came from, he will not get back in the monstrous vessel ever again. He pulls out Lazarus’ bottle and smashes it against the inside, glass splattering into the dust at the bottom, his hand bloody. It begins to spew forth a familiar black smoke and Kit imagines Lazarus bottling the formula, sending it to Griffin with instructions, watching from afar, near the Rose, as they all battled to save him. The thought cannot make him heavier; it cannot make his sorrow wider.

‘What have you done?’ Elody yanks him back, both of them staggering on the shaking metal grate. Kit launches himself forward out of her grip, shoving his bare hands into the vessel and the smoke, trusting what he knows will happen and it does, for Lazarus has never put a true formula in his hands that has not worked. He feels it press into his blood, crush through his veins, a crumpling of power inside of him, a house falling down. All people are this, Kit thinks, we are the same stuff as darkest night, a mere transmutation from oblivion. If he could give form to the endless despair inside of him, of Griffin’s death, of Lazarus’ betrayal, of this unkindness dredged in the deepest part of him that he is a killer with his first breath, stealing away the life of his mother, what might that look like? When he turns his hand upwards, what spills from his pores, from his arms and his skin, is obsidian, is stygian, is the end of creation.

‘What are you doing?’ Elody is coughing, scrabbling at him, nails cutting into his clothes, but he doesn’t care. Lazarus means him to do his worst here, to kill Elody and end his own suffering with it, a final mercy from Instructor to Initiate: I will not let her have you, I will not let her take you back to another cellar that you fear so deeply. So he breathes the smoke in, thinks of his lungs filling with it, breathes it out. Lazarus was right, it was only a matter of belief and how can Kit not believe now? Hearing Squire Kay’s story, standing here on this ugly spot where he was made a monster. The black smoke spins and soars, violent thunderclouds, there is the sound of a tremendous grinding and he thinks perhaps it is burrowing into the foundations but he is lost in it. He cannot see Elody, he cannot hear Squire Kay and he will die here, in the place he was made, and is it not fitting?

No one is waiting for me, Kit thinks; the shadow beyond is not really shadow at all, but a book closed, a curtain dropped, a theatre burned to the ground. All things are blended together, one natural twist away from something else. Flesh to fire, flame to water, bones to earth and memory to air. Everyone I love and have ever loved is here and now and always. I am leaving them.