Raisins and almonds - Poisoned Pen Press (UK)

Raisins and Almonds
ened; and on the Saturday following, which was the daye
she dyed on, I extracted it by former practice.
And how his wife felt about it, left to die without her husband,
was another matter of course. Phryne resisted the urge to
fling the books out of the window and began again.
What was alchemy? An attempt, the difficult rabbi had said,
to raise matter to its perfect state. Good. That meant base metal
into gold and men into immortal bodies. And how did one go
about this task?
One first acquired a patron with a lot of money, and purchased
or made a lot of equipment. Phryne wondered whether
to tell Mrs. Butler that her bain marie which kept the soup
warm was an alchemical vessel invented by Miriam, sister of
Moses—later called Maria Prophetissa in case Miriam seemed
too Jewish—who had founded alchimia practica. Previously it
had been a theory. Miriam seems to have actually tried to do it,
thought Phryne, wondering if she had succeeded. The first principle
was solve et coagula, that is, to dissolve and to recombine.
Thomas Vaughan told her ‘in this matter is all the essential principles,
or ingredients of the elixir, are already shut up in Nature
and wee must not presume to add anything to this matter…for
the stone excludes all extractions, but what distill immediately
from their own chrystalline universal Minera’. Keeping that in
mind, one began to make the first mixture, the so-called gold
yeast. Everyone was vague on what else went into it except for
gold in fine powder and a lot of mercury metal. Then, knowing
that there are three elements—salt, sulphur and mercury—one
cooked this gold yeast with some other ingredient, called Terra
Adamae—Adam’s earth, the material of the first creation. Phryne
noted that since one could not just send down to the grocer’s
for half a pound of Adam’s earth, that there must be a recipe for
that also, but could not find one.
The first stage was reached when the material turned black.
The illumination from Simon Michaels’ books showed it:
the head of a crow, beak open. This melanosis was also, in the