A Golden Fury

helped her make it, you know.” Of course he didn’t know. His eyebrows lifted. I had his attention. “You said you were on the verge of some success. I assume you meant in your laboratory.” Think of him as a patron, I told myself. You do not have to like him. Indeed, when have you ever liked any of them, other than Adrien? “My mother and I were also on the verge of a great success when the madness took her. I think you would find me useful.”
“You—you helped her with her work?”
“Do you think my mother could have tolerated me for seventeen years if I did not?”
Vellacott gave a short, surprised laugh, and for the first time he looked at me with interest and not merely with fear.
“I can’t picture her as a mother at all,” he admitted. “But of course, she would train you, wouldn’t she? And are you an adept?”
There was no way to answer this modestly. And anyway, this was no time for modesty.
“I am as good as she ever was, and with time I will be better.”
He raised his eyebrows, and a small smile pulled at his mouth. “You are more like her than you look, I think.”
I didn’t smile back, though he clearly expected me to. Vellacott wasn’t the first to think that likening me to my mother was the highest compliment he could give me. In fact, it had never occurred to anyone but Will to give me any other kind.
“You could say I am your niece,” I said. “If you are unwilling to acknowledge me.”
Vellacott’s smile vanished.
“What must you think of me,” he said quietly.
If I had been less tired, less heartsick, I might have managed to restrain myself.
“It’s quite all right, sir. You are just as I was led to expect,” I said. “You’ve spared me the inconvenience of revising my opinion.”
The effect was immediate. His face crumpled and his head drooped. He looked as crushed as I could have hoped, though it gave me no satisfaction.
“I am rather tired,” I said. “Do you have a place for me to sleep for the night? I would take my own rooms, but I don’t have very much money.”
“Yes, of course,” said the professor, still downcast. There was an unmade bed in the spare room. He produced sheets and took the quilt from his own bed. I thanked him, excused myself, and shut the door of the room. The wrung-out, hollow feeling in my chest betrayed me. Despite what I told my father, I had hoped for a better day than this turned out to be.

5
I slept badly on a hard little bed in the cramped spare room. Morning light from the single window illuminated the peeling, water-stained wallpaper. As a patron, Vellacott left something to be desired. I spread out the papers I had brought on the bed. There was my mother’s still-sealed letter to my father. I couldn’t be certain what she had said about me in it. Her opinion of me always seemed to vary so much from day to day. I once more considered sneaking a look at its contents, but decided against it. The thought of my father knowing I had invaded my mother’s confidences was more uncomfortable than not knowing what they were. I set it aside and picked up Will’s last letter. I stared at the London address for several minutes. Only a day away by coach. I tried to imagine what he would say if I came to him. It would be some joke, probably, to put me at ease.
Fleeing war and revolution, are you, Bee? I knew you’d come find me once you had a good enough excuse.
Cleverer than that, of course, but something of the kind. I smiled and slipped the letter back into my dress. I wore my simple gray round dress today, without all the awkward padding of fashionable gowns. It had seen me through many hours of work. As a concession to respectability, I wore my stays, which I usually did not bother with in the laboratory. I did not want to give the Oxonians another reason to stare, or my father another reason to find me an embarrassment.
I smoothed the last set of papers, crumpled from being crushed in my pocket while I was held down and strangled. The memory sent my heart racing, and I put the papers down for a moment while I closed my eyes and waited for the sudden panic to pass. When it had, I forced myself to read my mother’s cramped, hasty handwriting once more. These were the last steps she had taken to prepare the Stone, after she had evicted me from our laboratory. These were the steps that had worked, and that made these papers a treasure map—a map to a treasure greater than any pirate’s. I had memorized them, of course, but I could not risk forgetting even the smallest step. I turned the first page over, almost against my will, and forced myself to look at the drawing on the back. The naked king stared at me with wild eyes. My mother wasn’t much of an artist, but she had copied this image faithfully, along with the heading. A cold shiver of fear crawled up my back again, just as it had when I saw the picture in our laboratory.
“Cave Maledictionem Alchemistae,” I murmured. Beware the Alchemist’s Curse. The warning could mean many things, and there were many theories. I had read and translated stories of adepts selling their souls to demons for the secret knowledge necessary to make the Stone. There were other stories, sometimes overlapping, of adepts who produced the Stone and found that unlimited gold and immortality proved a burden they could not bear—a curse. Some went mad from their endless striving and countless failures to produce the Stone. But my mother had succeeded. That, at least, was not what had driven her mad.
I looked closer. There was more Latin scribbled in