Other times though we were all merry enough: the ladies at their cushions and tapestries according to her pattern, for she is the finest needlewoman in England at making hangings of her own devising to adorn the walls and beds of Wilton, and other her houses. As they worked I would read aloud or Signor Ferrabosco, the younger, as he was known still even though his father had long returned to his native Italy, would play upon his lute and sing of his own composing. But best of all I came to like those times when we were alone together and I read to her from the Arcadia or she opened her heart to me and talked of past, present or future cares. Then some about her began to be envious that she should spend so much time on her page and labourant who was not of noble birth. I thought I heard whisperings, words that broke off at my appearance, small acts of spite, as drink spilled by my elbow jogged when I had fresh clothes on, the toughest cuts of meat and smallest portions, and sometimes rough teasing from her ladies when she was absent. Once I heard one say that she had loved her brother too well and was like to make the same mistake again.
Then one day she sent two of her ladies to fetch me from the laboratory when I was alone, Mistress Marchmont an old duenna, and the young Mistress Griffiths, the countess had fetched from Cardiff at her mother’s request that she might be polished for marriage and found a husband.
‘Why Master Boston,’ the old one said, ‘you must leave your potions and devil’s cookery and come to our lady the countess.’
‘Can you make love philtres Master Boston?’ the young one asked, ‘for they say you have bewitched our lady. Make me a potion that will do the same for the young earl and when I am married I will reward you handsomely.’
I saw that I must be cautious. ‘Alas madam, there is no such thing or all physicians would be rich men.’
‘They say your father was a great necromancer seeking the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. Is that what you and my lady do here together?’ She began to open the many little drawers of the cabinet and put in a delicate finger.
‘Be careful madam for many of those substances, tasted by those who do not know their properties, are strong poisons that will harm you.’
‘But they are safe in your hands Master Boston. You understand them. They say that when your father’s house was cleared after his death there was found a great quantity of eggshells used in transmutation.’
‘I have never seen my father use such.’
‘What is this transmutation you all seek? Is it not against God’s will that things should become what he has not made them, as gold from base metal, or that men should live for ever?’
‘Nothing can be done without it is God’s will. He has made all things, even the earth itself as the poet Spenser has it, subject to mutability in some degree. We must therefore call it a divine principle.’
‘Unless it be of the devil and witchcraft. Are you a priest, Master Boston, to decide such matters? When were you at the university? Or perhaps you learnt such supernatural counsels from your father’s divinations.’
‘My father was a physician and chymist madam, and no magician.’
‘And have you never seen things change their nature or spirits arise?’
‘Both those things are possible, but by the workings of nature not the charms of magicians. Look I will show you.’ I placed a little heap of salts of mercury in a clay dish and put it over a small fire we kept always burning to heat water for cordials. ‘Now watch.’
They both drew near. ‘It is liquefying.’ The duenna, who had not spoken since her first words summoning me to my lady, stared into the dish. ‘It is becoming silver.’
‘No madam, only quicksilver by the agency of the fire. Think how cold changes water to solid ice that men may walk upon or snow that drops from the sky and when it melts there is just a little, little water on the ground from a whole hill of snow, which is bound together into crystals and thence into ice rocks, only from a drift of cloud feathers.’
‘You are poet as well as chymist, Master Boston, or rather magician truly for there is witchcraft in words which can steal into the heart and head just as potently as poppy closes the eyes. Our lady will wonder that we stay so long. Come. Can you arise spirits in a bottle as Master Forman does? He is a great distiller of love philtres and the ladies flock to him now he is gone to London.’
I had heard my father speak of this Simon Forman who was born at Quidhampton in our own country, but a half mile from Wilton. ‘He grows rich then at the expense of the credulous. There is nothing to love philtres but the longing, and the belief of them that take them. So my father taught me. Love comes from the heart not the stomach.’
‘Some say it springs rather from the loins.’
‘Lust is of the loins.’
‘And some young men would say the better for it. Ask Mistress Fitton where love and lust are joined. You must be still a virgin Master Boston.’
I felt my cheeks redden under this assault so that I feared for my disguise and answered rashly, ‘As I trust you are and as your husband will surely discover on your wedding night.’
‘You are impertinent. You at least shan’t have the discovery. Others should hear of your speaking above your station.’
Then I remembered that she claimed to come from a sometime line of Welsh princes and knew she would complain of me to my lady. But she would do it privately, behind my back.
The duenna laughed at our jousting. ‘Green children you spit like cats in autumn. We have kept our mistress waiting too long.’ And she led the way out of the laboratory.
As the days passed I came to understand that Mistress Griffiths was half inclined to make trial of me herself and when I read to them from Sir Philip’s Arcadia of the beauties of the naked and shipwrecked youth, Musidorus, then I found her eyes upon me in speculation if I should raise mine from the page. But I did so only to look upon my mistress, the countess, her face.
Last night, under the spell of Amyntas Boston’s memorial I suppose, or the weird case I might be embarking on, I dreamt I was that gladiator girl they dug up in Southwark in Great Dover Street. Outside the city wall, beside the highway and about my age. They think she was a rich pagan buried with eight lamps to light her on her way. Anubis lamps, that may just mean she was a devotee of Isis some academics claim, wanting to take away her status as gladiator, to deny the existence of fighting women. When they first dug her up there was a fierce battle of words, articles, letters, interviews flying back and forth, ‘She was: she wasn’t. They did, they didn’t.’ The archaeologists found a piece of pelvic bone in the grave, female, and then lost it. Was it really lost, suppressed, stolen? Talisman or uncomfortable evidence? Someone said Petronius had written of women gladiators so I looked up his Satyricon and there it was: a girl at the games fighting in a chariot like Boadicea. But weren’t most of the male gladiators criminals, who’d been given a last chance to fight to their deaths? Where did the women come from? Were they criminals too or just captives from some war, offered the choice of slavery and prostitution or the sword? I can’t find out. Those are the kind of references the early Christian copyists would have silently let drop, along with most of Sappho.
How much truth was there in the stories of the Amazons, cutting off a breast so they could swing their swords more easily, exposing their boy babies to death in the jaws of wild beasts on the rocky hillsides of Turkey? They don’t put that in the tourist brochures. At Halicarnassus they’re still fighting in stone on the wall, brave as lionesses behind their shields. Queen Penthesilea fell at Troy after leading her troops successfully against the Greeks. The brute Achilles killed her and then fell for her corpse.
I start up the bike and head off for the China Kitchen. Tonight I have Gilbert’s money and don’t need to work but I can’t let the Gaos down. I find them anxious and depressed. A shop next to theirs that has been empty for months has suddenly been let. Rumour has it it’s to be a rival Chinese takeaway but bigger. Already workmen are hacking the heart out of it, and