While this young Yeoman was talking, his master came close and listened carefully to everything he said. This Canon, dressed in black, was wary and distrustful of others. Cato has taught us that the guilty man always believes that he is the object of suspicion. That is why the master drew so close to the servant. He wanted to hear everything. Then he interrupted the boy. ‘Shut your mouth,’ he said. ‘Don’t say another word. Otherwise, you will regret it. How dare you slander me in the company of these strangers, and blab all my secrets?’
‘Carry on, young man,’ Harry Bailey said. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him or his threats.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the boy replied, ‘I don’t intend to.’
When the Canon realized that all his threats were useless, he fled in sorrow and in shame.
‘Ah,’ his Yeoman said, ‘now we can have some fun. I will tell you everything I know. He has run away, has he? I hope he goes to the devil. I don’t want to have anything else to do with him, I can promise you that. Not for all the money in the world. He was the one who led me into the false game. Yet I never thought of it as a game. I was deadly serious, believe me, in its pursuit. I laboured. I sweated. I worried. I cried. Yet, for all that, I could never leave it alone. I wish to God that I had the brains to tell you everything there is to know about alchemy. I can only explain a small part of the art. Now that my master has gone, I will do my best. So…’
Heere endeth the Prologe of the Chanounes Yemannes Tale
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale
Heere bigynneth the Chanouns Yeman his Tale
PART ONE
I have lived with this Canon for seven years, but I am nowhere near to understanding the secret. I have lost everything I owned, as have many others. Once upon a time I was clean, cheerful and well dressed. Can you believe it? I now use an old sock as my hat! I used to be plump and ruddy-cheeked. Now I am thin and sallow. I am losing my eyesight through all the hard work. Stay away from alchemy at all costs. Where is the benefit in trying to transmute metals? The sliding science has left me penniless and in despair. Nothing good has come of it. I have borrowed so much gold that I will never be able to repay my debts. Let me stand as a warning to everyone else, like a wolf’s head. If anyone were foolish enough to practise alchemy, it will prove to be his undoing. He will not succeed. He will empty his purse. He will addle his wits. But there is worse. As soon as he has lost all of his money, through his stupidity, he will try to persuade others to follow his example and try their hand at the black art. ‘Misery loves company.’ That is the proverb, is it not? Well, enough said. Now I will tell you all about our work.
When we practise in our laboratory we look very wise and learned; we use high terms and rarefied phrases to explain our mysterious labours. Then I blow upon the coals until there is no breath left in my body. Is there any need to explain the exact proportions of the dark materials that we use? There is always the silver, of course. We would normally put in five or six ounces of it. We compound this with arsenic, with burned bones and iron filings. Then we grind the mixture to a powder, and put it in a little earthenware pot. Add a little salt, and some paper. Place a sheet of glass over the pot, sealing glass and vessel with some clay so that no air will escape from it. We can change and moderate the fire at will. Then begins the hard labour, the watching and the calculating. We are supposed to purify, to blend and to disperse all of the ingredients. We use quicksilver, too, which is the name for unrefined mercury. But for all our tricks and devices we never got anywhere. We used lead and arsenic, ground together with a marble pestle in a marble mortar. It made no difference. There was no result. We boiled volatile spirits – again to no effect. We experimented with the residue left at the bottom of the flask. But it did no good. Our labour was in vain. All the money we spent was lost, too.
There are many other aspects of the art of alchemy. I cannot tell you them in the correct order – I am not that learned – but I will mention them as they come to me. I will not be able to put them in their proper categories, of course. Let me see. There is red clay known as Armenian clay, although it does not come from Armenia. There are green verdigris and white borax. Then there are the various vessels that we use for our distillation and purification, some made of clay and some made of glass. We have flasks and retorts, phials and tubes, crucibles and alembics. There is no need to mention all of them. They were expensive enough, but they were all useless. Have I mentioned the red waters or the gallstones of a bull? Then there is sal ammoniac. And the arsenic. And the brimstone. Do you find it confusing? I could go on all day about the various herbs we use. There is agrimony, which smells so sweet; there is valerian, and there is moonwort.
So we toiled over the coals and crucibles all day and all night, with the lamps burning around us. The furnace was at full blast, and we heated the liquids to their various boiling points. We used unslaked lime as a caustic, as well as chalk and the whites of eggs; we had powder ground out of ashes and dog shit, piss and clay; we made fires out of wood and out of charcoal; we sprinkled purified salt and vitriol, and then mixed in alum and brewer’s yeast, the hairs of men and of horses, the grease of a sow and the sweat of a red-haired child. Sometimes the amalgam turned yellow, and sometimes silver white. We would fuse and ferment, diffuse and distil.
Let me explain to you the nature of the four spirits and the seven bodies, as my master taught them to me. The first spirit is mercury or quicksilver and the second is orpiment of golden hue; the third spirit is sal ammoniac, the moisture of volcanoes, and the fourth is brimstone. The seven bodies are as follows. The sun is gold, and silver is the moon; Mars is iron and Mercury, of course, is quicksilver; Saturn is lead and Jupiter is tin. The seventh, Venus herself, is copper.
Whoever practises this cursed art is doomed to failure and ruin. He will sell all his goods and come to no good. There can be no doubt that he will lose everything. So come forward, budding alchemists, and try your luck. If you have money to burn, then stoke up the chemical fires. Do you think that it is an easy craft to learn? Not so. You can be a priest or canon, monk or friar – I promise that you will not have scholarship enough. You can study all the texts, night and day, and still go nowhere. The mystery is too deep. For a layman, it is impossible to unravel. It makes no difference whether he is learned or not, he will fail in either case. Alchemy is too difficult.
Oh, I forgot to mention the acids we use, with the metals and oils. They help in the hardening or softening of the materials. They can also be used to cleanse and purify – you need more than a book to understand these things. No more words now. I have named things that should not be named. I have said enough to raise a fiend, the ugliest in hell.
The object of our quest is the philosopher’s stone, the magic elixir. If we possessed that, we would be safe from sorrow. But our labours have proved worthless. I swear to God that, for all our craft and care, the stone will not come to us. The loss of time and money has brought us close to madness. But still there is that hope, that yearning, which keeps us searching for the key. If we have that, we have everything. So you see that the craving can never be satisfied. It is a sharp spur, always pressing us onward. We will never let go, we will never slacken. The quest is lifelong. In hope of future glory, we are willing to forsake everything else. We can never turn our backs on the metals and the crucibles. Although we may only have a torn sheet to cover us at night, and a rough coat to wear by day, we will still spend everything we have on the pursuit of the elixir.