philosopher’s stone, but he lost it.’
‘Because he was drunk and naked?’ the housekeeper asked. She had a dim memory of the story of Noah. ‘Like you?’
The priest lay on his bed, half drunk and fully naked, and he remembered the smoky workrooms of Paris where silver and mercury, lead and sulphur, bronze and iron were melted and twisted and melted again. ‘Calcination,’ he recited, ‘and dissolution, and separation, and conjunction, and putrefaction, and congelation, and cibation, and sublimation, and fermentation, and exaltation, and multiplication, and projection.’
The housekeeper had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Marie Condrot lost her child today,’ she told him. ‘Born the size of a kitten, it was. All bloody and dead. It had hair though. Red hair. She wants you to christen it.’
‘Cupellation,’ he said, ignoring her news, ‘and cementation, and reverberation, and distillation. Always distillation. Per ascendum is the preferred method.’ He hiccupped. ‘Jesus,’ he sighed, then thought again. ‘Phlogiston. If we could just find phlogiston we could all make gold.’
‘And how would we make gold?’
‘I just told you.’ He turned on the bed and stared at her breasts that were white and heavy in the moonlight. ‘You have to be very clever,’ he said, reaching for her, ‘and you discover phlogiston which is a substance that burns hotter than hell’s fires, and with it you make the philosopher’s stone that Noah lost and you place it in the furnace with any metal and after three days and three nights you will have gold. Didn’t Corday say they built a furnace up there?’
‘He said they made the tower into a prison,’ she said.
‘A furnace,’ he insisted, ‘to find the philosopher’s stone.’
The priest’s guess was closer than he knew, and soon the whole neighbourhood was convinced that a great philosopher was locked in the tower where he struggled to make gold. If he was successful, men said, then no one would need to work again for all would be rich. Peasants would eat from gold plate and ride horses caparisoned in silver, but some people noted that it was a strange kind of alchemy for two of the soldiers came to the village one morning and took away three old ox-horns and a pail of cow dung. ‘We’re bound to be rich now,’ the housekeeper said sarcastically, ‘rich in shit,’ but the priest was snoring.
Then, in the autumn which followed the fall of Calais, the Cardinal arrived from Paris. He lodged in Soissons, at the Abbey of St-Jean-de-Vignes which, though wealthier than most monastic houses, could still not cope with all the Cardinal’s entourage and so a dozen of his men took rooms in a tavern where they airily commanded the landlord to send the bill to Paris. ‘The Cardinal will pay,’ they promised, and then they laughed for they knew that Louis Bessières, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno and Papal Legate to the Court of France, would ignore any trivial demands for money.
Though of late His Eminence had been spending it lavishly. It had been the Cardinal who restored the tower, built the new wall and hired the guards, and on the morning after he arrived at Soissons he rode to the tower with an escort of sixty armed men and fourteen priests. Halfway to the tower they were met by Monsieur Charles who was dressed all in black and had a long, narrow-bladed knife at his side. He did not greet the Cardinal respectfully as other men would, but nodded a curt acknowledgement and then turned his horse to ride beside the prelate. The priests and men-at-arms, at a signal from the Cardinal, kept their distance so they could not overhear the conversation.
‘You look well, Charles,’ the Cardinal said in a mocking voice.
‘I’m bored.’ The ugly Charles had a voice like iron dragging through gravel.
‘God’s service can be hard,’ the Cardinal said.
Charles ignored the sarcasm. The scar went from his lip to his cheekbone, his eyes were pouchy, his nose broken. His black clothes hung from him like a scarecrow’s rags and his gaze constantly flicked from side to side of the road as though he feared an ambush. Any travellers, meeting the procession, had they dared raise their eyes to see the Cardinal and his ragged companion, would have taken Charles to be a soldier, for the scar and the sword suggested he had served in the wars, but Charles Bessières had never followed a war banner. He had cut throats and purses instead, he had robbed and murdered, and he had been spared the gallows because he was the Cardinal’s eldest brother.
Charles and Louis Bessières had been born in the Limousin, the eldest sons of a tallow merchant who had given the younger son an education while the elder ran wild. Louis had risen in the Church as Charles had roamed dark alleys, but different though they were, there was a trust between them. A secret was safe between the tallow merchant’s only surviving sons and that was why the priests and the men-at-arms had been ordered to keep their distance.
‘How is our prisoner?’ the Cardinal asked.
‘He grumbles. Whines like a woman.’
‘But he works?’
‘Oh, he works,’ Charles said grimly. ‘Too scared to be idle.’
‘He eats? He is in good health?’
‘He eats, he sleeps and he nails his woman,’ Charles said.
‘He has a woman?’ The Cardinal sounded shocked.
‘He wanted one. Said he couldn’t work properly without one so I fetched him one.’
‘What kind?’
‘One from the stews of Paris.’
‘An old companion of yours, perhaps?’ the Cardinal asked, amused. ‘But not one, I trust, of whom you are too fond?’
‘When it’s all done,’ Charles said, ‘she’ll have her throat cut just like him. Simply tell me when.’
‘When he has worked his miracle, of course,’ the Cardinal said.
They followed a narrow track up the ridge and, once at the tower, the priests and the armed men stayed in the yard while the brothers dismounted and went down a brief winding stair that led to a heavy door barred with three thick bolts. The Cardinal watched his brother draw the bolts back. ‘The guards do not come down here?’ he asked.
‘Only the two who bring food and take away the buckets,’ Charles said, ‘the rest know they’ll get their throats cut if they poke their noses where they’re not wanted.’
‘Do they believe that?’
Charles Bessières looked sourly at his brother. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ he asked, then drew his knife before he shot the last bolt. He stepped back as he opened the door, evidently wary in case someone beyond the door attacked him, but the man inside showed no hostility, instead he looked pathetically pleased to see the Cardinal and dropped to his knees in reverence.
The tower’s cellar was large, its ceiling supported by great brick arches from which a score of lanterns hung. Their smoky light was augmented by daylight that came through three high, small, thickly barred windows. The prisoner who lived in the cellar was a young man with long fair hair, a quick face and clever eyes. His cheeks and high forehead were smeared with dirt, which also marked his long, agile fingers. He stayed on his knees as the Cardinal approached.
‘Young Gaspard,’ the Cardinal said genially and held out his hand so the
