Losing the bishop’s men in the narrow, crowded streets of West Sarum was nothing, the work of moments, but afterward Hugh felt guilty. He wished he had not gagged Joanna with his glove, nor handled her so roughly. She was half his weight, an unarmed, untrained girl.

Very brave, man, to take on such an enemy. Why not terrorize the little dogs, too?

David would be ashamed of him, and he would be right. He should not have done it. He ought not to have pushed that old woolly mitten into her mouth. A mouth made for talk and laughter and kisses—

“He let you go,” said Bishop Thomas. He and a guard Joanna did not know, a new one, had climbed the donjon steps with her to her chamber in the tower. Between scratching his stubble and acne, the skinny young guard kept peering at her star charts and distillation vessels and crossing himself. Joanna longed to tell him to stop, but she dared say nothing. The bishop was already in a foul mood.

“He released you,” Thomas repeated. He stripped off a glove and stirred a finger in the cooled rose water, his neat face as impassive as on those rare times when he read scripture. “Why should he do that?”

Joanna felt a rush of inner heat singe her cheeks and ears. To admit the likely truth—that she was too much trouble and too worthless for a man like Manhill to drag off with him—was too mortifying and too revealing.

“No, my lord. I escaped him,” she lied, her voice firm enough to disguise her inward trembling. Accustomed to respect from alchemists and scholars, she was still shocked by the ease with which she had been taken by Manhill. Truly in matters of brute strength, it was a man’s world. “When your guards came, he fled,” she added. “And he is returning tomorrow.”

“So he claims. With gold.” Bishop Thomas flicked one of her glass flasks, making it ring. “Gold. Which I do not see here.”

“On your instruction, I am working on other elixirs, my lord,” Joanna swiftly reminded him. “I have great hopes for several, and my father agrees. If he could rejoin me, my work here would be done in twice the time.”

The bishop smiled and shook his head. “Solomon has his uses where he is.”

Joanna bit her lip to stop herself from crying out, What uses in prison? For that was where her father was: in the donjon, with David Manhill and the mysterious Mercury, whom she herself had named for his quicksilver charm and dazzling smile. “Should I see Mercury again today? If I can help his headaches, he may recover his memory more quickly.”

Thomas gave a snort of laughter. “And you see your father also, and that blasphemer Manhill. What do you find to talk about with him? I know you do so. The guards tell me you always have your heads together.”

“Of learning from the Arabs,” Joanna said, and left it at that. She was too seasoned in dealing with the bishop to question his assessment of David, whom in truth she admired and who was easy to talk to. Trying to help him, she did venture, “Tomorrow, though, if his unruly brother brings a fine ransom—”

“It will make no difference. That Templar is mine and he has things of mine, things I want.”

“But what if it is as David claims? What if he has nothing from Outremer but a few more battle scars? Would it not be a mercy, or prudent, to release him? The Templars are a mighty order.”

Bishop Thomas slammed both hands on her workbench, causing the glasses to ring out afresh in shrill protest. “Manhill has my relics! He carried them back from the Holy Land, relics and treasure, and he has stubbornly hidden them! You should look to your own concerns, girl, before you take his side!” A leer glinted across the man’s pallid face like a flash of lightning. “Or are you now in league with that big brute, Manhill’s brother? If so, you have lost your way! Hugh Manhill has no lord or lands: he is a tourney knight, intent on winning prizes, jousting from tournament to tournament. I know his type, the kind who brings a killing knife to a sacred negotiation!”

“My sole interest, my lord, is with the red work and your well-being,” replied Joanna, hating to refer to the search for gold, the “red work” of all serious alchemists, but desperate to remind the man that she was still useful to him. “Both my father and I—”

“Will be together, in the lowest part of the donjon unless I see some results before the end of this month! Before the rising of the next new moon, Joanna!”

Bishop Thomas turned on his heel, knocking an earthenware bowl of sulphur onto the floor timbers with a trailing sleeve. On her hands and knees, urgently sweeping up the precious material before the slouching guard could tread in everything or it was further corrupted, Joanna heard the lord of the church leave. The door slammed after him and she was alone again, with her father, Solomon, still a prisoner, David still unfree, and Mercury still a living mystery.

And now she had less than eight and twenty days to find the secret of producing gold.

After that, she tried to work but her hands shook too much for the exacting measurements required. As the day drew on she pottered about her workshop, cleaning, recording, and desperately thinking. When the bells of West Sarum cathedral pealed out and she knew her lord would soon be at his lunch table, she ran to the kitchens. In the hubbub of preparations she was able to gather a basket of fresh manchet bread, cheese, green salad and verjuice, beer, and a whole baked trout on a platter for Mercury, keeping fish and cheese separated by the jug of ale. The chief cook saw and nodded to her—they had an understanding, she and Walter. Last winter, Joanna had nursed Walter’s wife and twins through the greater pox when no one else had dared go near lest it was the smallpox. Now all were thriving, but the cook had never forgotten. He even sent a spit boy with her, with a second basket for food for the guards, to clear a passage through the kitchen smoke and crowds and, later, to announce, “Victuals for the prisoners!” within the donjon.

Crossing the trapdoor on the ground floor of the tower, Joanna paused and, when the guards were marching elsewhere, she pushed some of the bread through a small gap. It was not much, but it was all she could do for the poor wretches beneath her feet, whose names and crimes were unknown to her. She thought she heard a wild scrabbling somewhere in that fetid dark, but now the guards were marching back and she sped swiftly up the staircase, following the spit boy.

Within the first-floor chamber, Mercury was playing dice on his bed, but he came quickly, seeing the platter of fish. Sweeping it from her with a grin of thanks, he returned to his bed to eat.

While the guards crouched and rummaged in their own basket, Joanna and Solomon had a moment in private. David tactfully hung back as Solomon approached the table where she was setting out the food.

“Shalom, daughter,” he said softly in Hebrew. Neither of them knew much of the tongue of their forebears, but what they knew they kept alive.

“Are you well?” Joanna whispered, passing him a chunk of bread and clasping his hand—the only contact they could smuggle for themselves without the guards manhandling them apart.

“I could be far worse, my daughter.” To prove his point, Solomon took a healthy bite of the bread, his dark brown eyes lively and twinkling at her. Starry eyes, Joanna had always thought them. She could stare at his tanned, mobile, jaunty face all day.

“How goes the work?” he asked, prodding the dish of salad toward her.

“I will eat later,” Joanna lied. She wanted Solomon to eat as much as possible. She wanted to be hopeful, to give her father respite from care, but she could not lie about alchemy: it was a sacred task. “It goes slowly,” she admitted.

“Our lord still desires gold?”

“Amongst other things.” Joanna glanced at David, who was standing with his back to them, slowly pouring himself a beaker of ale.

“You fear for David against our own Goliath?” Solomon asked. “David and Solomon. It is apt we are together, is it not?”

Joanna nodded, trying not to smile. Her father said this at least once each time she was with him. But then he was very old: at least sixty.

“We spoke of the temple today. He has seen it, Joanna! He has touched its living walls! But something has happened.” Solomon scanned her face and sighed, the straight set of his wiry shoulders drooping for an instant. “You are in greater fear than yesterday.”

“No, Father.”

“I say you are. You are as taut now as wise King David’s lyre string.”

She would not tell him of the terrible deadline. To speak instead of the Goliath of Manhill, of Hugh, who had bested lord Thomas’s alaunts and stood against the bishop like a living tower of stone, was a strange relief. She liked talking about him, Joanna discovered. She wanted to talk about him—without mentioning the matter of the glove.

He will apologize for that, she vowed.

As if sensing the content of their conversation, David turned and beckoned to her. “A beaker of beer for your father?” he asked.

The question was nothing the guards could object to, and it was natural for Joanna and her father to join David. Leaning over the table as he poured two beers gave them all a chance to put their heads together.

“You are in good health?” he asked Joanna.

“I know all about my daughter’s abduction, my boy,” murmured Solomon, wiping his long black mustache with his fingers, a habit of his when nervous. “There is no requirement to dissemble.”

“I am in perfect health.” Joanna smiled at both men, thinking how bright and fair David was beside his dark, looming brother. Aware that David might report this to Hugh, she was gratified to add, “I have known worse roughhousing from Giles the spit boy.”

Solomon raised his fine dark eyebrows and took a long drink of beer. David gave her a measuring glance, then nodded.

“Hugh is the very best of brothers. I know he has a temper worse than fire, but I swear on my soul that he would never harm a woman.”

“Amen,” said Joanna, thinking of the glove. Aside from her pride she was unhurt, but what is injured pride but a blow to the spirit? Would Hugh or David have liked a gauge thrust into their mouths to silence them?

“But the hounds this morning?” Solomon asked. “I know those alaunts of old, and they are not cheerful beasts. Big as donkeys, too. Large, white donkeys with huge teeth.”

“How did he persuade them to obey him? That I do not know. It is Hugh’s peculiar skill, and he has had that uncanny gift since boyhood. He is the same with horses. In the Arab kingdoms he would be much sought after, I warrant, as a keeper of hawks.”

“Or women,” remarked Solomon unexpectedly, an interjection which Joanna found less than amusing. She raised a hand, wanting to distract her father, but David was already answering.

“Ah, not women, my friend! My younger brother is a confirmed bachelor. Or, I should say, no woman has caught his heart yet.”

Listening, Joanna found her own heart beating faster, although she told herself it was because of Bishop Thomas’s earlier threat. “You think he will return tomorrow?”

“As certain as the rising sun. His word is as strong as Saladin’s.”

Even in West Sarum they had heard of the famous, chivalrous Saladin, scourge of King Richard while that great warrior king was on crusade. Another time and Joanna might have prompted David for a tale of Saladin, or of the wise men of Saladin’s court, for David knew many such stories and was well versed besides in the learning of the Arabs. He knew a little of her work and they had spoken together of it. He had read the famous texts of Jabir and had even heard of Joanna’s own heroine of alchemy, Maria the Jewess. Today, though, her interest was in the Templar’s younger brother.

“Is he learned? Cultured?”

“My brother? I doubt it. He cannot read and his signature sprawls like a spider’s web. He knows nothing of music and less of mathematics.”

“You cannot pick his brains for the red work, then,” said Solomon, chewing now on a lump of cheese.

“As if I would!” Joanna told herself it did not matter. She already knew that Hugh Manhill was a scoundrel, so why should his lack of refinement disappoint her?

“He is no fool, my brother,” David added quietly. “Unlike some.” He half turned to admit the smiling, sated Mercury into their midst.

“If Mercury is slow-witted, then I am a bear,” Joanna whispered back.

“Surely a bear cub?”

“Hush!” She was never comfortable when the Templar knight flirted with her. A donjon was no place for courtly games, least of all when she and her father had been threatened with the underground prison and David himself held as a blasphemer. “This is not the time!”

“Nor the place,” David agreed. “Good meal?” he asked Mercury in the tongue of the Languedoc. “I notice you ate all the fish.”

“But yes, it was so delicious and I was so hungry,” Mercury replied, bowing over Joanna’s hand as if she were the lady of the bishop’s palace. “Do not look so troubled, Joanna, my heart! My memory will return”—he tapped the side of his head and snapped his fingers—“and I will bear you off to my manors and farms, to eat more fine things and dress in cloth of gold.”

“You have seen cloth of gold, then?” Joanna countered. “You remember it?”

“But yes! Though when you smile I forget again. It is a shimmer of a thought, no more.”

“Still, that is progress if you can recall anything, and know you have manors,” Joanna remarked, charmed but not convinced by Mercury’s boyish smile. “How is your head today?”

“It aches,” came the predictable response, while he bethought himself to pat one side of his perfectly shaven cheek. “I think it aches a little less. But perhaps not. Who knows? Not I! I do not remember my own name!”

Joanna avoided David’s quizzical eye. Over these last few days she had often wondered how much of Mercury’s memory loss was real. He had been brought in a few days earlier, with the rabble of prisoners now caged in the yard. Those men were notorious brigands, well known in the district for mayhem and kidnapping, and although Mercury appeared to be of their party, he had been brought in unconscious and when he stirred, he swiftly denied being one of their “gang.” He had denied everything: who he was, where he was, and what he was doing in woods close to West Sarum. His fine dress had attracted Thomas’s greed and interest and the bishop had ordered him brought up here, to be kept safe with the other “special” prisoners.

Since then, Mercury had rapidly recovered his appetite while at the same time he continued to assert that he had no idea who he was. If that was true, Joanna wondered how he could be so carefree. But Mercury was clearly of a sanguine humor.

“Do you ever wonder what will happen if you never remember?” David asked, but Mercury merely shrugged.

“Someone will know who I am.”

“Suppose no one comes?” David persisted.

“Like your order?” Mercury replied, with that quickness—slipperiness—that Joanna had named him for.

“That is enough,” one of the guards warned, with uncanny timing, saving the young Frenchman the trouble of adding more. “The prisoners have eaten now and Joanna must go back to her studies.” The guard spoke gently: Joanna had given him a tincture last summer that had eased the aches and pains of his grandmother.

There was nothing else for Joanna to say or do but gather up the baskets and leave. This guard at least allowed her to embrace her father, and as she did so Solomon whispered the ancient alchemical wisdom: “One becomes two, two becomes three. Mark it well, my daughter!”

“Out of the egg comes gold,” Joanna replied, speaking this secret of “red work” to give him heart and to encourage herself.

But how would she find gold in less than a month? And if she did not, what would happen to Solomon?

Leaving the baskets with the spit boy, she climbed the stairs back to her chamber workshop with an uneasy mind and an aching heart.