The Alchemist was a rare sight on London Bridge, and tonight would be no exception – for the gates were closed and only the Bridge’s relatively few residents were permitted. Revolving out of his own personal secret door (an art that the Alchemist had yet to entirely master), he tumbled out upon the planks. Crimson of cheek as well as cassock, looking both left, then right, down through tunnels and passages to open spaces bathed in the angled moonlight of early morning, the earlier storm having well washed the sky of clouds, the Alchemist found the thoroughfare, bustling by daytime, now quite pleasingly devoid of life. Tonight, for this moment, the Bridge was his, and his alone! It suited: all humanity would soon be touched by this moment; their immediate witness was not required!
Something scampered in the shadows: he paid it no heed.
No, this was a private moment, between the Alchemist of London Town, and just one man: Phil of the Anbury!
Oh, to be there! To see Anbury’s face when he realised the living could not die, to know that what he was selling would never again be bought! To be redundant, superfluous, his entire existence meaningless before the inevitability of existence itself! To know that he had been bested by a scheme so Machiavellian... it was practically Borgian! And who, pray who? Who had Donne this unDonning of his most dun profession?
“Us!” whispered the Alchemist, full of relish (and radish – for such had he supped)!
With solemnly uneven gait, the Alchemist stepped up to the low rail of Nonsuch. The Tamasa was unusually still tonight, the starling rushes subdued, the moon large upon its surface, the sky above scrubbed clean by the ravishes of the earlier storm. The river, as the world, held its breath–
In the distance, the Alchemist could hear his father’s water mill, creaking and churning within its starling. Truly, his family’s entire steepled history had sharpened to this one moment in time. This one tide. And though tide nor time tarrieth for no man, no one man was waiting, for all were, quite without knowledge.
Of course, few on two legs still drank the water from the Thames, at least without boiling it first. Grandfather’s water wheel had invited competitors, not least of which Myddelton’s thrice-accursed New River, a project that had succeeded despite his family’s most fervent efforts to bankrupt it.177 But the Alchemist’s plan did not rely on so unfeeling a vector as drinking water. The Elixir was formidably potent – the smallest sup was ample, and it was conceivable even skin contact would suffice. No. For humans, actually drinking the water would be quite superfluous.
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There were others that would gladly partake: the capital was teeming with vermin: the rodents and many strays, and, more pertinently, the lice, ticks and fleas that gorged upon them. And, sooner or later, those parasites would find themselves alighting upon human hosts.
‘And in this flea our two bloods mingled be!’
And so would the Elixir be passed, like a most divine contagion, mingling in the blood and saliva of God’s most despised creatures, those who, benefitting not from it, could nonetheless pass its great bounty to all of Londonkind!
A buried memory gnawed at the Alchemist’s heel, arresting his arm for a moment – an ill-conceived and wilfully forgotten experiment that should never have begun, golden-furred beings that should never have existed... but he shrugged it away, for they had perished long ago, and such mistakes would never be repeated!
He raised the flask above the river. A toast, of sorts. The green swirled and marbled within the glass. Beautiful. An end. The end of all ends. Ergo: a beginning!
“Death!” intoned the Alchemist. “Thou shalt DIE!”
The flask, inverted, took but a few glugs to empty.
A smell like old hose. There was no peal of thunder, no flash of lightning (for those tricks are beneath us now) just the jubilant hissing from the shadows, quite indistinguishable from the wash and weft of the river and the creak of the wheel, of a million unseen rodents.
ACT II – It’s Bubonic!
‘I looked, and there in front of me was a pallid, sickly-looking horse. Its rider’s name was Death, and Sh’ol followed behind him. They were given authority to kill one-quarter of the world by war, by famine, by plagues and with the wild animals of the earth.’
Revelations 6:18
‘This is against poison, and this is against the one who flies,
this is against the loathsome one that travels throughout the land…
if any poison come flying from the east,
or any come from the north,
or any from the west over the nations of men,
Christ stood over the disease of every kind.’
The Nine Herbs Charm, Lacnunga
“Roll up! Yes come and get ’em, yes sir!
Roll up! Buy or let ’em!
You ain’t got long until that final dong –
So why not go out in style?”
A commonly heard street refrain,
London, 1665,
attribution unknown