By the end of the second day's labour in the crypt, Alexander had reached the farthest point in his work which he had attained while in Bristol. He now wanted to push forward from there, hopefully inspired by the parallel discoveries of Nizam. But his initial optimism was soon to be confounded.
The next morning, soon after dawn and a frugal meal in the hut above, he came down to his bench. Instructing Jan to heat up the furnace with the leather bellows, Alexander melted the contents of a small crucible half filled with good Devon tin, which had previously been alloyed with mercury. With much murmuring of esoteric spells, he added a variety of powders from small bags of soft doe-skin, then weighed out some copper and silver filings on a small brass balance. The little alchemist sprinkled these into the crucible and added carefully counted drops of various coloured fluids from small flasks. Then he placed the crucible back in the furnace and listened to the sizzling until it subsided. Turning a sand-glass over to time the reheating, he waited for the final part of his process to be completed.
By now, the three Turks had arrived, the two sinister assistants carefully ignoring him. Nizam, bleary eyed and dishevelled, seemed only partly aware of his surroundings and bumped into several stools and the corner of the table before reaching his own workplace. Alexander thought he might be drunk, until he recalled that those of the Mohammedan faith eschewed all alcohol.
Nizam dropped heavily on to a stool and sat staring at his array of apparatus as if he had never seen it before, making no attempt to get started, in spite of Raymond le Blois's repeated exhortations the previous day to get some results. Alexander sighed with annoyance and frustration, but his sand-glass then ran out, so with iron tongs he removed his crucible from the furnace and plunged it into a wooden bucket filled with cloudy water taken from a nearby stream. With a sizzling hiss and a cloud of steam, the small clay dish cooled sufficiently for him to hold. Placing it on the bench before him, he took a flat iron rod and scraped off the layer of blackish encrustation that covered the walnut-sized lump in the bottom. As he expected, this revealed a shiny metallic surface whose colour varied from silvery white to reddish gold, especially when he took a wet rag and some fine white powder and polished the exposed surface. A final dip in the bucket rinsed the cleaning material away and he held out the dish towards the drowsy Saracen sitting near by.
'Ten years it has taken me to get thus far!' he said, with pride. 'I am almost there, so perhaps together we can achieve the final triumph.'
Nizam appeared to make an effort to pull himself together, and with Abdul and Malik squatting behind him, as impassive as usual, he managed to focus his eyes and stare into the crucible.
'Electrum!' he muttered. He spoke only the one word and that with a hint of contempt.
Alexander kept his temper with an effort. 'Yes, electrum! And electrum is an alloy of gold and silver.'
The other man shook his head and clumsily fumbled under his voluminous robe. Bringing out the package he had shown the Scot previously, he unwrapped it and held the small nugget out in his palm. Pointing to it with his other forefinger, he spat out the word 'Gold!', then indicated Alexander's offering and repeated 'Electrum' in dismissive tones.
Bristling with indignation, the Scotsman threw his crucible down on to the bench. 'At least I made mine here and now — and I can do it again under your very nose!' he snapped angrily. 'So let me see you make another of those knobs of gold, then perhaps I will be better impressed!'
Nizam stared at him for a long moment, then his eyelids slowly came down. 'Tomorrow. Not today. Today I must rest.'
He rose from the stool, moved in front of the hearth and lay down, curled up like a dog. His two henchmen crept forward until one was at his head, the other at his feet. Within a minute, he appeared to be sound asleep.
That evening, more than a mile away in the little village of Bigbury, a dozen freemen and villeins congregated as usual in the alehouse. It was a mean place, just a wattle-and-daub cottage of one room, with a lean-to shed built on to the back as a sleeping place for the ale-wife and a separate hut behind, where she brewed her indifferent ale. Only the ragged thorn bush, whose stem was jammed under the eaves of the thatch over the front door, indicated that it was a tavern.
Apart from the church, it was the sole focus of social life in Bigbury, and after dark, the men who had a spare halfpenny to pay their weekly toll for ale came to sit or stand about the fire-pit. Here they could gossip away an hour or two before going home to their straw palliasse or heap of ferns, to sleep the sleep of exhaustion until the daily grind began again at dawn.
As in most villages in feudal England, where the inhabitants were rarely able to stray more than a few miles from home, very little happened to enliven their conversation. Most of the talk was about murrain in the sheep or the probable father of the latest babe of the miller's daughter.
Tonight, however, there was something new to gossip about, a topic that gave rise to some apprehension and furtive looks over shoulders. The atmosphere of superstitious unease was heightened by a thunderstorm, which had threatened all day and now crashed and rolled in the clouds that covered the moon. Occasional flashes of lightning could be seen through the ill-fitting door and the gaps in the ragged thatch overhead.
'I saw them as plain as that big wart on your nose!' declared the sexton, who looked after the tithe barn, as well as the church and its burial yard.
The man with the wart glowered at the unkind remark. 'You'll poison your spleen and your guts if you drink so much — especially this ox-piss!' He held up his misshapen clay pot, slopping the turbid brown fluid over the edge.
The ale-wife, a blowsy widow who had scraped a living selling poor ale ever since her husband was hanged for poaching a hind, threw the core of a withered apple at him, catching him on the side of the head. 'Mind your words, Alfred Smith! Or go find your ale elsewhere, not that there's any as good as mine hereabouts.'
'No, Madge, nor none worse!' retorted the smith amiably. 'But our brave sexton must have been full of someone's ale when he saw three ghosts!'
Another villager, a stocky youngster, a conductor who led one of the eight ox-plough teams, chipped in with a knowing nod of his head.
'There's strange goings-on in that part of the forest. I keep well clear of it myself. It's all down to that old ruin that's in there somewhere. I went in as a child and saw such weird sights as made me shun it ever since.' He said this in a sepulchral voice that was accompanied by a loud peal of thunder.
'Last night, you say this was?' demanded Madge of the sexton. 'You didn't have much to drink then, as you said you had the runs from some rotten pork your wife served you for dinner.'
'That I did. I thought my very bowels were on fire! That's why I was squatting on the edge of the wood on the way back home.'
'We don't want to hear about your guts, Sexton,' grunted the ploughman. 'What about these spirits or whatever you saw?'
'I had my arse towards the track, so I was looking into the wood. I was there for God knows how long, as I was straining fit to burst. Then in the moonlight, I saw three figures gliding through the trees, dressed in long white robes. One behind the other, not a sound from any of them.'
Alfred the smith should have been christened Thomas, as he was always doubting. 'How could you see them in the dark of the forest?'
'Because the bloody moon was up, that's why!' snapped the sexton. 'It was clear last night, before this storm came. I was on the edge of the woods, so I had enough light to glimpse these ghouls that were haunting the trees.'