A Golden Fury

to the college with me.
“I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I can help Dominic for a while.”
“Oh.” Vellacott’s face cleared instantly. “I’m sure he would be quite grateful; thank you, Thea.”
Dominic said nothing as my father took his leave. He placed a few more lumps of coal under the brazier and watched them catch the heat of the fire and glow orange.
“So you are Mr. Vellacott’s niece?”
He did not look at me as he asked it. I knew, now, that this was his usual mode of address, but even so it accented the skepticism of his question.
“You heard what he said.” At that moment, I did not feel inclined to lie for my father.
“Is your mother his sister?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“So your father is his brother, then.”
Irked by his sarcasm, I kept what I hoped was a dignified silence. I wandered to the bookshelf to examine my father’s collection more closely. A few minutes revealed that my initial suspicion was correct. I saw nothing of the Jābiran corpus, the works from which we had collected our instructions for the Stone. Of course, this could hardly be the whole of my father’s alchemical library. He would only keep copies here, and the more valuable books were most likely in his office.
“What languages do you have, between the three of you?” I asked.
Dominic, who was crouched next to the fire, sat back on his haunches.
“The usual ones,” he said. “I’m not much use—just enough Latin to keep up. Professore Bentivoglio has German besides Italian, and Mr. Vellacott has good Latin and Greek. And French, of course.”
I suppressed a scornful laugh. Fewer than I had by two, even among all three of them.
“No Spanish or Arabic?” I asked. “What do you do about Jābir’s texts, then?”
“Nothing,” said Dominic. “We don’t have them.”
They were the usual Western alchemists, then. Too certain of their superiority to look to other traditions—especially Islamic ones. My suspicion confirmed, I turned from the bookcase. The White Elixir was a great achievement on its own. It had the power to change any of the base metals into silver. This was the penultimate dream of every alchemist, one that most would never achieve. But it was also the substance from which the Philosopher’s Stone was made. And my father and his friends would not know how to continue—not without Arabic and Jābir. So, not without me.
I had come here intending to replicate my mother’s notes and produce the Stone. But I wanted to do it for myself, take the credit, and return with it to France and heal Mother. I had no intention of handing over the fruit of centuries of labor to my unworthy father and his rude colleague, simply because I had no other recourse but to use his laboratory. It occurred to me that this was why my mother hadn’t wanted to send me to him. She would want him to take credit for our work even less than I did. I thought of the Marquis. It was too late now, of course, to find him and accept his patronage. We had insulted him too thoroughly. But perhaps my mother had been right to prefer him to my father. I pushed the painful thought aside.
I had not thought it all through, it seemed. I hadn’t reckoned on jealous, hovering alchemists marking my every move. For some reason it had not occurred to me that my father would certainly be as unwilling to yield the Stone up to me as I was to yield it up to him or anyone else. My hand went to my pocket again, and the page with my mother’s instructions. Why work for my father’s glory, when I could never benefit from it? His endowed chair, his department of alchemy would never be anything to me. I glanced at Dominic, still hunched over and staring patiently into the fire.
“Why do you work for Vellacott, if you can’t be a student?” I asked Dominic.
Dominic didn’t look up, but I could read his attention from the crease of his brow.
“Beats being a bargeman,” said Dominic. “And he pays me well enough.”
I couldn’t stop myself from scowling at that.
“You work for an hourly wage so that he can have unlimited wealth?”
“Does he pay you better?”
“I’m an alchemist, not a hireling.”
He raised his eyebrows into the fire.
“Then you gave him the White Elixir for nothing, not even my hourly wage.”
I wanted to argue, but this was too much like my own thoughts. I considered leaving, walking back toward High Street. I had money in my pocket, enough for a coach to London. Will might have some kind of workroom.
“I plan to be a medical doctor,” said Dominic with the reticence of someone making a confession. “Mr. Vellacott says he’ll sponsor my studies in another year. Sooner, might be, if the elixir turns out as it ought.”
“You don’t want to be an alchemist?” I asked.
“No, miss,” said Dominic. “I’ve seen enough of it to know I don’t want to spend my life grinding and melting down metals in hopes of turning them into other metals. I’d rather be some use to somebody.”
It occurred to me that I might have said something very like this to my mother in a rebellious fit, but that did not stop me from reacting to Dominic’s dismissive summary with anger.
“Certainly, if that were all there is to it. But the true aim of alchemy is more than just transmuting metals, you must know that. The Philosopher’s Stone brings power over nature herself. You could do more good curing the sick with it than any doctor could.”
“You believe that?” Dominic shook his head. “One thing to say you can turn one metal into another metal. I don’t understand it, but maybe it’s so. But to have power over nature? That’s magic, that is. And if that magic’s real, then it’s dangerous.”
“You sound like a country priest.” I had one in mind, in fact. A nearsighted, half-literate fellow who found out my