Alchemy

‘Have you decided you really want me to with my obvious disabilities?’

‘I haven’t cancelled the cheque.’

‘And I haven’t paid it in. So we have reached some kind of stalemate.’

‘Stasis equilibrium, you could say.’

What the fuck am I doing with this guy? Do I need all this? ‘I think we should begin again. Your name is really Alastair Galton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you pick the name of Adrian Gilbert?’

‘I regard him as some sort of spiritual ancestor.’

‘Why are you anxious to identify with a long dead necromancer, the friend of John Dee who was both self-deceiving and deceived others and was conned in his turn?’

‘I see you have been doing your homework, Ms Green. That’s good. Gilbert was in many ways a brilliant man. He lived at a time still deficient in information whereas, we’re told, we live in the information society although I’m not ever quite sure what that means, and perhaps we too are deceiving ourselves. You know as well as being a respected physician he was involved in navigation and the quest for the Northwest Passage. He was a fine mathematician, a would-be discoverer who never put to sea.’

‘An astrologer?’

‘So was Sir Isaac Newton, a scientific genius comparable in his own field to Shakespeare, in a time when astrology and true astronomy shaded into each other.’

‘Still, why pick his name?’

‘Because he is part of the story. And also I wanted to give you a clue, an Ariadne’s thread to follow to see whether you could find your way out.’

It may indeed be my way out. You were testing me.’

‘And you have come through splendidly if I may say so.’

‘Dr Galton, there’s something you should understand now before we go any further, if we are to go further. I may be younger than you and female but I will not be patronised. It wouldn’t be the first time either that I turned something down because I refused to be patronised.’

Suddenly I see the counsel room at Settle and Fixit and the senior partner, Henry Radipole, saying to James Chalmers, and only half joking: ‘Can’t you keep your wife under control?’ when she had tried to intervene in the discussion of a case they’d both been working on.

It’s difficult for a man of my generation…’

‘I know you are in your late forties. Young enough to know better. Who is Dr Alastair Galton?’

There’s a pause while he decides what to tell me. I stare him out across the desk.

‘Very well then. I am nobody. I tell you to save you the trouble of looking because you will find nothing on me in any reference book. I once published a monograph on white witches, long out of print. You, I imagine, will have looked me up on that thing,’ he waves a hand at my desktop PC, ‘and the internet where they will know nothing of me either. I still prefer books myself of course. I see that electric gadget not as an instrument for greater knowledge and freedom but as an instrument for censorship, as a spoon-feeder which supplies you with what other people think you should know. You will find my doctorate in the records of the University of London at Senate House, together with a copy of my thesis.’

‘What was it on?’

‘Oh, witchcraft of course.’ He smiles.

‘They gave you a doctorate for that?’

‘It was presented as a revisitation of Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe which a number of people, academics that is, in the seventies had tried to discredit.’

I’m lost. I don’t know where this conversation is going. ‘To get back to your CV.’

‘I followed the usual course, a BA in history, and my doctorate. Then I found a nice little post in a teacher training college.’

‘The original before Wessex, St Walburgha?’

‘Exactly so.’

‘Presumably you weren’t engaged to teach young ladies witchcraft.’

Galton, as I now have to think of him, even gives another little smile. ‘That was my private research. I taught them just the conventional history they would need to pass on to their pupils.’

‘So you stayed when Wessex took over?’

‘I had to apply for the new job in the normal way. When St Walburgha’s amalgamated with the BEd course at the local university I could have applied for a post there. In fact I did but the competition was very fierce. Status you see. And then I saw that Wessex was recruiting.’

‘Can anyone set up as a university? Don’t there have to be standards, regulations?’

‘You have to be registered of course with the appropriate examining authority and inspected. Your qualifications have to be validated. They’ve jumped through all the right hoops. On the surface and for about a foot below they’re bona fide. It’s what lies beneath and behind…’

‘And the Boston memorial? Where did that come from?’

‘I found it in a bookshop specialising in incunabula and early manuscripts. I have quite a collection.’

‘What interested you particularly in this book?’

‘It was leafing through and realising that it was all in cipher, except that on the last blank page someone had written a key to the names represented by numbers in the text and Adrian Gilbert’s name caught my eye.’

‘You knew about him already?’

‘His name had cropped up from time to time.’

‘Dr Galton, what exactly did you give your students to read?’

‘I would prefer you to finish the whole book, or no, not perhaps that, but at least to have decided to represent me before we pursue that any further.’

I let that pass. ‘Were you able to decipher the book yourself?’ I think I know the answer to this from Amyntas’ own words that she had used a cipher of her father’s but two can play this game of testing.

‘I could read it myself. It uses a fairly common, common to the alchemists that is, set of symbols, combined with a simple alphabetical displacement code.’

‘No need for a Ventris then.’ There’s something about Galton that makes me show off in this childish way, as if we’re in some schoolboy competition. ‘I’ve sent for an information pack from Wessex to get more background on them. Maybe I’ll register for a course just to get inside. Would you be willing to pay the fee if I decide it’s the only way in?’

‘Then you’ll take my case?’

‘I still don’t know if you have one. This is just preparatory investigation.’

For the first time the irritating smugness drops away and he looks really gutted. I mustn’t start feeling sorry for the guy and give more than I’m ready to out of pity.