Chapter 2 - wip2 - the sculptor of frog lane

I've been working steadily on The Sculptor of Frog Lane for the last couple of weeks and I'm very happy with how it's been going. Chapter 2 steps further back in time by 12 years and introduces the second narrative character (there will only be two) on her flight from recent disaster in Paris to a new life in Bologna. This chapter also introduces some of the mechanisms of magic to the world, as when we meet Alice Black she is already a skilled magician.

II – July to August 1839
 
Her dress was long, black and plain. It was made of heavy wool, and it had been a great comfort in the Mont Cenis Pass when she crossed the Alps from Lyon to Turin. The Emperor had built the road so that a coach could make the journey reliably in summer, but even Napoleon could not ensure summer would reach into the mountains, and there had been cold wind and rain for the whole of her journey.
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There was nothing she could do about the temperature of an entire mountain range, and nothing she could do about the temperature of a single carriage without becoming the subject of unwanted attention. What was necessary to cross the Alps was endurance. So she huddled in the coach between two elderly Milanese ladies to avoid being groped by the men travelling with them, and mostly succeeded.

By the time they rolled into the town of Susa on the Piedmont side the temperature had started to rise, and it continued to rise as they wound their way down the Susa Valley and into the Monferrato Hills where it seemed every available hillside was covered by vineyards and dotted with an occasional village or farmhouse.

In Paris she had heard artists remark that the Italian masters had the benefit of superior light. France was dull and when it wasn’t dull it was muddy yellow, but Italy was cloudless and enjoyed long hours of bright white. Though she perceived little difference in the colour of the sun they had on the far side of the Alps, she found the scenery to be profoundly beautiful. During a break when the horses were watered and the passengers stretched their legs and eased their behinds, she found wild tulips with a soft lemon scent growing by the road and picked one, along with several less remarkable local plants, for pressing.

The final leg of the carriage journey was the worst. Everyone was unwashed for a week and dressed for cold weather. When they reached Turin, it was hot; as hot as it had ever been in her years in Paris and far warmer than England. The ladies, who had grown fond of her, gave her a blessing in Italian which she barely understood and – because kindness should always be repaid – she gave them a blessing in return, in Gaelic, which they also did not understand but found equally delightful.

“Slàinte mhòr agus a h-uile beannachd dhuibh.”

From Turin she travelled by boat down the Po River and for the first time in a month she felt like she was in charge of her own mind. The boat had the dual advantage of being faster down-river than a carriage and far more comfortable. With nothing else to do for two days, she re-read books and worried proactively. She could not allow herself to worry about the chaos she had left behind in Paris. She knew, with reasonable certainty, that her friends were dead. She was entirely alone in the world for the first time, and she moved towards a dim hope. Bologna meant safety for a time, and perhaps a future.

At Ferrara she swapped back to a carriage for the final day of travel. She wished there had been a minute to spare for the art and architecture. For the food. Or a week to find better clothing. Her dress was ideal for her memories of the short, cold, wet summers in the north-west of Scotland, but was smothering for an August day in Bologna. In the city, she made temporary arrangements for accommodation at a lodging house charging more than it deserved. As the brilliant white light of the day faded to orange and red, she took a cold bath in her room, barricaded the door, and slept heavily and dreamless in a real bed.

Nerves prevented her from eating in the morning. She inspected her dress – still her only dress – and did what she could to repair it. Her mother had been better with material – she could spin sackcloth into silk with enough time – but her mother’s daughter could at best smooth out the ruffles, remove the bobbles, and make the rather drab fabric seem new. It was as much magic as she had permitted herself to use since she left Paris and she felt her knuckles pop with the exertion. Practice made perfect, but before then practice made good enough, and she was out of practice.

From the moment she descended the stairs from her room she was the subject of whispers and stares. She held herself taller and moved more smoothly, and by this artifice she tried to seem older than she was and more confident than she felt. It was her red hair – she told herself – that was all. She was just a girl with red hair. And perhaps they found her pretty, in the way that all young women were, in the way that all distinction had its appeal.

She did not feel pretty. The short walk from her lodging house to the Palazzo Poggi had left her with colour in her cheeks and sweat dripping down her back. She clasped her reticule with both hands and fidgeted, reassuring herself that its contents had not vanished in the minute since she last checked.

The Palazzo Poggi was a building of pink plaster and cream-coloured stone that had been built almost two centuries earlier as a splendid home to the Poggi family in the heart of Bologna. It had since become the central building of the city’s university. Though the university had existed in some form for more than seven hundred years, it was initially just some men in some rooms and over time it had acquired grander rooms and even some buildings to put them in. By 1839 it was a collection of adaptations and donations of various ages and varying suitability for academic instruction of which the Poggi family’s home was the most impressive.

At the high arched door to the entrance, under cover of the arcade that ran the full length of the front of the building, three young Italian men exchanged pleasantries. Their clothes were made from rich silk brocade, and all wore court swords and flamboyant hats – one with a scarlet band that supported several ostrich feathers.

She skirted around them awkwardly and found her way to a hall that was both crowded and quiet. More than a dozen plainly dressed young men, ranging from late-teens to mid-twenties, stood in a queuing system before four older men each behind a small desk. When called on to speak each of the applicants’ voices were hushed, mindful that anything they said could be overheard. The loudest sounds were the scratching of quill pens against paper.

“Excuse me,” she said in Italian to the man closest to her, and she was determined not to notice when all eyes in the room locked onto her. “Which line is for applications?”

He whispered, “They all are.”

“Which one is for medicine?”

He nodded to the line to his left and she smiled and side-stepped into the correct queue behind two others. To avoid making eye contact with anyone else, she deliberately studied the painted ceiling, which was as magnificent as any she had seen in Paris and might as well have been plain white for all the attention it was receiving the prospective scholars. Nine panels depicted key scenes from the Odyssey; directly overhead a cyclops held a boulder the size of a man’s head, poised to crush two figures that cowered before it.

She knew the story of the Odyssey well; it had been one of the primary texts from which she had learned ancient Greek, and it was the first time she had encountered a story that looked a little like real magic.

In the Odyssey, the magician Circe was said to be able to turn men who displeased her into animals. Using herbs and sorcery, she transformed sailors into pigs and kept a menagerie of former humans on her island. If that had ever been true, the magic required to change the shape of a man had long vanished from the world.

But Circe’s enchantment of Odysseus’s crew was not her first lesson on magic. She had been learning all her life.
On her grandmother’s knee she learned the word that iron fears and watched as the old woman lit and extinguished the reed lamp with just a touch of her fingers. Her mother had never learned to read in any language, but she taught her the secret name of the north wind, and how to call back a lamb that was lost. From her aunt she learned Coulomb’s Law – though her aunt had never heard of Charles-Augustin Coulomb and did not know the meaning of the term electromagnetism. Those women knew deep truths about the world which they could only describe in folklore and song, as the truths had been described to them for unnumbered generations.

The magic of her infancy had been poetic and imprecise. Those that spoke the incantations did not think of themselves as sorcerers, as a bird does not think it remarkable to fly through the air. When the soldiers came, it did not occur to them to raise a hand or speak a word in self-defence. A hand that might pull lightning from a clear sky. A word that might turn a bullet in flight.

When they were killed, she found all their wise lessons to be cold comfort; their ancient understanding of the world to be insufficient. The child of the wild women was taken south, where there were no lambs to call home, and the old north wind could no longer hear. But the candle came to light just as the reed once had, and the truth abided.

“Who are you?” asked the man behind the desk. He was leaning to the side to look at her around the two people in front of her. He looked like a shrew, if shrews were notoriously unkind. His eyes were narrowed even though he wore spectacles pinching his nose, and his bushy brown hair was swept back to disguise a large bald patch.

She managed to pull herself up one final half of an inch and replied, “My name is Alice Black.”

“I do not know this name.” He frowned in irritation. “Why are you here?”

“To study medicine,” Alice said. She retrieved the bundle of letters wrapped in black silk ribbon from her reticule and advanced, holding them before her and thrusting them into the man’s hands.

“You are applying to study here? How old are you?” He looked down at the letters as if they were entirely alien and made no move to inspect them further.

“Sixteen,” Alice said.

“You look fourteen.”

“I am sixteen,” she repeated. “To the very best of my knowledge.”

“Sixteen is too young,” he said and shook his head. He waved the bundle of letters at her with terse rejection, but she would not take them back. His frown deepened and he dropped the letters on the very edge of his desk and watched as they tipped towards the floor.

Alice caught them – urgently, as if they were made of porcelain and might shatter upon the tile floor. She snapped, “The university regularly admits students at sixteen.”

“Signorina, please.” He smiled at her and made a shooing motion with his hands. “Go back to your home. Find a husband. Perform as much medicine on him as you like.”

She allowed the chuckles and smirks of the men in the room to peak and ebb before she replied, “Signore, if you are not authorised to approve my admission, I must speak to the person who is.”

“If God wills it, I will admit you,” the man said. He cupped a hand to his ear and looked up for a second, then shrugged with mock sadness. The laughter resumed, louder and bolder than it had been before.

“I have written to the Secretary of Admissions, and I have written to Professor Medici.”

“Did you receive any replies inviting your application?”

He could see the answer before she said it and she replied grudgingly. “I was not able to wait for a reply.” The laughter around her was stinging. “I came from Paris and had to travel immediately to make admissions.”

“Then, mademoiselle, you have had a wasted journey. Perhaps,” he said – and now that he had enjoyed some fun with her there was a note of compassion in his voice, “in a few years.”

“I wish to speak to the Secretary of Admissions.”

“There is no such person at this university. Each department manages its own admissions. I am medicine, this is law—” he indicated the queue to his right “—and so on.”

“Then I wish to speak to Professor Medici.”

“I do not have him in my pocket. If you find him, you can speak to him.”

“I am here, Antonio.”

There was a silence that came as suddenly as an intake of breath. Every prospective scholar rediscovered their serious face. From an adjacent chamber, a short, white-haired and fine-featured Italian man had emerged.

“It is quite impossible to get any work done when there is a commedia dell’arte performance taking place in the next room. Someone was looking for me?”

“This young girl,” indicated Antonio – the clerk responsible for registering medical admissions.

“Alice Black, Professor,” she said. “I wrote to you in advance.”

“Your Italian is bad,” Medici said with simple, easy cruelty.

“It is,” Alice said. She swallowed physically and a measure of her pride went down too. “I speak Gaelic, English, French, Latin and Greek with fluency, but I have had few opportunities to learn Italian.”

“You did not think it necessary to learn Italian to live in the Papal States and study at the University of Bologna? Ah – I see.” It was not difficult to read Medici’s assumption: she had intended to study at the University of Paris, and Paris had closed its doors to her. “You have references?”

Alice pressed the bundle of letters into Medici’s hands. He unwrapped them and began to study each in turn. Progress on all other admissions had come to a halt.

“Your tutor speaks highly of your gift for mathematics. You were educated separately in Greek… but with similar praise. Both of these, of course, we would need to examine here. I do not know these instructors.”

“Of course,” Alice said. She had expected that she would be examined on all the claims made in her references and she was untroubled by the thought, since everything they said was true.

He paused on the third letter in the bundle, read it twice, and considered her with his sharp and penetrating gaze. Medici had been a professor at Bologna for thirty years and must have received endorsements and personal recommendations from every notable person in southern Europe.

He asked, “How did you come to have a personal reference from the Archbishop of Paris? You are a relative? His niece or – daughter?”

“His Grace and I are not related, unless it is through Adam and Eve. I was of assistance to the archdiocese and the nature of that assistance is under confessional seal. I’m sure you understand.”

“I do not, but I am at least intrigued.” Medici continued reading the other letters but spoke of the reference from the Archbishop. “His sponsorship did not persuade Paris to admit you? De Quélen is a traditionalist. Has France descended so far that an Archbishop in good standing with the mother church cannot get a bright girl an education?”

“Local politics,” Alice lied. She might have intended to study in Paris – though the university was less egalitarian than Bologna – but she had never applied. “I think his sponsorship made my admission in Paris less likely.”

In France the July Monarchy managed pressures from still-existing revolutionaries and traditionalists, it promoted Bonapartists, and it was in thrall to a powerful merchant class. Louis-Philippe, in the manner of all French kings for three hundred years, sat upon a throne of temporary economic prosperity. That he styled himself the Citizen King did nothing to stop talk of revolution in every café in Paris. The often-foretold revolution would come when famine returned to France – and that change would likely sweep away kings altogether, as the Americans had, and formally separate the enduring French Catholic church from their basket case state.

All this was true and sufficient as an explanation for anyone who was not French, but it was not her reason for leaving.

Medici folded the letters and returned them to her. Speaking to Antonio, he said, “We will examine her in two weeks.”

“You will admit me?” Alice said, pleased but also surprised.

“We will examine your qualifications,” said Medici, his tone cold. “Here, two weeks, the same time. Everyone else should try to keep the noise down.” Without further remark he left through the same door he had arrived through.

Antonio coughed and took a printed sheet from a small pile. He said, “The examination fee is five scudi, which must be paid in advance. The tuition costs for the study of medicine are sixty scudi this year. This amount must be paid in advance. You will require your own copies of four texts for the first year and you must have your own surgical tools—”

“Where do I—”

“Through the university. The details are here.” He handed her the printed sheet. “You will also require glassware and materials for pharmacology – everything is listed.”

Alice totalled the amounts in her head. It was just over a hundred scudi – the silver currency of the Papal States used in Bologna – or around five hundred Sardinian lire. The exchange rate depended on the quantity of silver in the coins. In any currency it was around half the wages a newly qualified Italian doctor might expect to make in a year; far above the salary of any ordinary Italian craftsman – and this was before she had paid for accommodation and food.

She nodded. To herself she muttered, “Rooms. Glassware. Lead.”

“We will see you in two weeks, mademoiselle.”
 
* * *
 
The most pleasant solution would have been to stay at a lodging house where she could easily obtain meals and where basic cleaning would be done for her. Two large rooms to separate sleep from practical work, near her classes, with good ventilation and a view of something – whatever they had in Bologna that people looked at, she would have liked a view of it.

But what she needed was a basement. Ideally a sub-basement. Something built into the side of a hill with solid rock on all four sides, or soil that was rich in boron. Alice accepted that even the most informed of landlords would not know the chemical composition of the earth surrounding the basements of rental properties, and she did not have time or equipment to check.

After two days she found the best fit. A narrow, four-storey building tucked into an even narrower alley. Having lived in Paris for several years, Alice immediately recognised the utility of the alley as a workplace for prostitutes and robbers, a convenient latrine, and a popular location for murders. Perhaps because of these charming features, the house also had a very solid door, and bars on the small ground-floor windows.

What it lacked in pleasantness, it made up for in basement. Down an L-shaped stair barely wider than her shoulders was a vaulted wine cellar than ran under the alley and the adjacent properties. It was probably as large as the entire rest of the house combined. The walls were made of unglazed red clay bricks without pattern or ornamentation, but they had been well-set without too much mortar and the walls were cold and dry to the touch on all sides. It did smell as if the rats in the street had been using the basement to store their plague dead, but other than that it exceeded her expectations.

She would have her bedroom on the top floor, in the single room whose narrow balcony provided her with a view of the murder alley below and the sloping clay tiles of the opposite building’s rooftop. But she could see the sky and she had sat one evening watching it turn from blue to black with the assistance of a bottle of Pignoletto.

Her laboratory would be in the basement of the property and there would be nothing of any consequence in-between. She would have no salons, no parties, and no social intrigues as there had been in Paris. She would work and she would sleep. Perhaps she would get a cat, but only if the rats became a problem, and if the rats became a problem most likely a cat would show up whether she wanted one or not.

Aside from the evenings, where she read a little by candlelight, her days were filled with preparations.

She had traded all her francs for scudi at a prominent cambisti – a moneychanger – a minute’s walk from the Torre dell’Orologio clocktower in the Piazza Maggiore – the bustling centre of the city. She had made a point of introducing herself, of striking a reasonable bargain, and of assuring the cambista that she would visit again in a few weeks.

There was a skilled glassblower attached to the university who was used to making borax glassware. He had most of what she required in stock and the rest – with the benefit of some technical drawings – he was able to provide within the week. It was similarly easy to source lead and to have sheets hammered into hemispheres.

The potters, by contrast, complained about everything. The job was too small, the job was too unusual, the materials were strange, the pay was too low, the job was too large – “how about two nice fruit bowls instead, mademoiselle?” – the time was too short, the weather was too hot. She found her way to a workshop outside of the city, where a mute old man simply nodded, and arrived with what she had requested three days later, packed with straw, in a small donkey-drawn wagon that he had walked beside.

The mute potter’s payment all but emptied her purse. Whether her process in the basement was successful or not, she would go to bed hungry that night.

Her laboratory was complete – at least, as much as it needed to be – two days before her examination date, and she began work in the early evening by dissolving a quantity of lead in heated nitric acid, guessing the proportions as best as she could without scales – which she could not afford. She had assumed the university’s supply of nitric acid would be pure and strong enough, and she was relieved when it was. She captured the gas that was released, cooled it and dissolved it in water to prevent the process from killing her. That had been a painful lesson which had left her with a rasping sore throat and a wheezing cough that lasted for months.

After a few hours, what remained in the glassware were small cubic crystals, which she scraped out of the vessel and placed into a crucible. It was too small an amount to guess by feel, but by eye Alice estimated she had perhaps sixty grams of crystals, to which she added water and stirred until they disappeared into a completely clear solution. It smelt of nothing. She had no idea how it tasted, because it was certainly poisonous.

In one corner of the basement was the device of her own design. She called it the catalyst chamber – which was a grand title, though its purpose was to do nothing. A hemisphere of clay sat on the floor. It was hollow inside with walls that were three inches thick, made with a heavy mix of boron in the clay, and it had been wrapped on the outside with a tight-fitted sheet of curved lead that was around one sixteenth of an inch thick. A second hemisphere, an exact duplicate, was suspended from a pully so that the two halves might be combined into a sphere.

Alice placed the crucible into the centre of the catalyst chamber and slowly lowered the top half. She had to rotate the top by hand until it ground to a close fit and then she placed a lead band around the join and pulled it closed with leather straps and buckles.

The half of the process that could be done by chemistry alone was complete.

“Appare!” she commanded, and at her will the gossamer wisps of orange-yellow smoke appeared. It was normally invisible, and it drifted over the world shifting through all physical matter, moving through animals and people and lead plates as easily as air. It was present deep under the earth and on top of high mountains. But while a person walking through it would not change its pattern or flow in the least, it could be channelled by a magician, it could be harnessed, drawn and directed.

This was the mutable fluid whose presence made magic possible. Alice called the vapours spiora, a mock-Latin term she derived from the Gaelic word for spirit.

All magical spells were in four parts – or sometimes three. It was possible to perform magic without commanding the spiora to become visible, but anything done this way would be imprecise, like sewing with closed eyes. A properly performed spell required spiora to become visible first, and then to be gathered.

There was a limited about of magical potential energy in any one place. Other types of energy could be substituted for spiora in a pinch – with heat being the most readily available. Alice could draw on general environmental heat or localised heat like a fire to cast a spell, and she had theorised that it would be possible to use chemical potential energy in the same way.

The spell Alice was attempting would draw in all the magic around her for several miles. As a result, performing any other spells would be difficult or impossible for several weeks until the flow of spiora returned. Attempting the same thing with heat energy would be impossible. She had approached the calculations once and given up when she realised the constraining factor was not the availability of heat – she could, in purely theoretical terms, lower the air temperature of northern Italy by twenty degrees centigrade to get her the two hundred quadrillion calories of heat energy she needed.

But well before she could concentrate all that heat energy in one place, the crucible, her body, the room, the house, and Bologna would have exploded.

Her body would fail first. Channelling magical energy at scale was difficult, but unless used the spiora dispersed quickly. It did not seem to interact with physical matter even at high concentrations.

Alice completed the second phase of the spell. The catalyst chamber was swathed in thick yellow light that spun and swirled like a dense fog.

The third phase was formation – this was the purpose of the spell, usually the most complex element and where problems, if any, would arise. The spiora needed to be given a pattern to follow. This could be a pattern held mentally, which required the magician to actively concentrate on the spell for its whole operation. But for more complex spells, it was only possible to use written patterns. In this case, Alice had inscribed the soft lead plating with diagrams and runes learned from ancient sources – and a few she had created herself. The magic flowed into these structures as a river follows a path of least resistance. As the spiora found the arcane carvings, the concentration of energy made it seem as if they were glowing and all the while the fog diminished as more of the energy found its place.

The final phase of the spell was activation. Everything until that point had been relatively safe. Alice could, even then, have released the spiora with few and mild consequences. When the spell was activated, she would learn if she had made any mistakes. Though she wouldn’t be able to do anything about them, because the consequence of any mistake in this endeavour would be dramatic and fatal.

There was no magic word. It was the exercise of will-as-muscle. The spell began.

And she was not dead.

Alice breathed a deep sigh of relief and fatigue, and quickly retreated up the stairs, going through the empty rooms and to her bedroom. It was past midnight. The magic would need hours to run its course, and hours more to become safe to touch. As Alice sat on her bed, she felt all strength leave her and she slept that night in her clothes.
 
* * *
 
“Signor Gualtieri, bon de,” Alice said. The greeting was in Bolognese rather than Italian. She had picked up a few phrases and idioms in the regional dialect, having quickly learned that Italian could feel rigidly formal for everyday commerce and marked its user as being of a certain class. Specifically the class that didn’t know how much things should cost.

“Mademoiselle,” Gualtieri said. The cambista rose from his chair and they kissed each other on the cheeks as if they were old friends. Alice paid no attention to the armed guards that stood only three feet to their left and right – this seemed to be normal; for the people who did not annoy the guards, the guards were invisible.

Alice was pleased that Gualtieri had remembered her as the French girl, even if he had not necessarily remembered her name. He invited her to sit at the table by his strongbox and they exchanged brief pleasantries.

“I am shortly to begin studies at the university,” she said.

“Oh! Congratulations,” he said with a broad smile. “I hope to send one of my sons there. The one who is worst with money.”

She laughed. “Indeed. Unfortunately, I will need to part with a small family treasure to pay for tuition.”

“Ah,” he drew in air over his teeth. “What is it now?”

“Sixty a year.”

“Mother Mary. I am in the wrong line of work. You hear that, Marco? Sixty scudi to study at the university.” The guard Gualtieri had spoken to did not react. “He heard. He hears everything. Well, let me see what we can do about that?”

Alice withdrew a white handkerchief and unwrapped the small trinket, holding it out to the cambista.

“Such a thing,” he said appreciatively, though it was clear he had no idea what it was.

“A triskelion,” Alice supplied. “A spiral knot of Celtic design. It has been in the Black family for generations.”

“Gold?”

She nodded.

“Unusual design—” Gualtieri began with an awkward shrug.

“No, no,” Alice interrupted. “I am only interested in the value of the gold by weight. God willing, may you find it a home with someone who has loved it as much as I have, but I will not take you hostage.”

He wagged his finger at her approvingly. “You are a very pragmatic girl. If you were younger, you would make a fine wife for my Eduardo.”

“Eduardo better be the one who is good with numbers.”

He laughed, slapped his thigh, and replied, “Of course, I will have to test its purity.”

She nodded and said, “You do not mind if I observe? To study your practices?”

Alice was familiar with all the methods of testing gold, and with all the methods of cheating those tests, but Gualtieri was seemingly honest. He rubbed the triskelion along a touchstone and then applied a few drops of nitric acid to the trade residue and watched for a reaction – there was none. He had a fine set of scales and a measuring cup which enabled him to determine the density and weight of the item – the results were consistent with pure gold. A strong magnet was run over the item – it did not react. And finally, with permission, he used a short blade to scratch into the surface and found the colour to be consistent. 

“Good quality gold,” he said. He meant that it was the purest gold he had ever seen, but honesty could be overdone. “Forty-one grams in weight.” Alice was pleased by how close her guess was. “Shall we say one hundred and ten?”

“Shall we say one hundred and twenty scudi and it’ll still be the best day you have all week?”

Gualtieri smiled at her offer and replied, “I’m not going to find out you students at the university are making gold out of lead, am I?” He opened his strongbox and began to count the money.

“Signore,” Alice said, “if I know one thing for certain, it is that a thousand years of alchemical study have proved that it is not possible to transform lead into gold.”

​However, if one were careful, clever and diligent, and if one knew the right spell, then it was perfectly possible to precipitate gold from a solution of lead nitrate. If one contained the transformation within a sphere of boron and lead, it was even possible to do without dying in agony a week later. But next time she would smelt in a little silver, so the final product didn’t look too perfect.