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his fingers laced together, partly for warmth, and partly just to contain himself from lunging toward the goods. Years had gone by, a Civil War had been prosecuted, and a King’s head had rolled in Charing Cross since Clarke had touched some of these items. He imagined that the Continental adepts had been penetrating the innermost secrets of God’s creation the entire time. But Enoch knew that the alchemists of Europe were men just like Clarke—hoping, and dreading, that Enoch would return with the news that some English savant, working in isolation, had found the trick of refining, from the base, dark, cold, essentially fœcal matter of which the World was made, the Philosophick Mercury—the pure living essence of God’s power and presence in the world—the key to the transmutation of metals, the attainment of immortal life and perfect wisdom.
    Enoch was less a merchant than a messenger. The sulfur and antimony he brought as favors. He accepted money in order to pay for his expenses. The important cargo was in his mind. He and Clarke talked for hours.
    Sleepy thumping, footfalls, and piping voices sounded from the attic. The staircase boomed and groaned like a ship in a squall. A maid lit a fire and cooked porridge. Mrs. Clarke roused herself and served it to children—too many of them. “Has it been that long?” Enoch asked, listening to their chatter from the next room, trying to tally the voices.
    Clarke said, “They’re not ours.”
    “Boarders?”
    “Some of the local yeomen send their young ones to my brother’s school. We have room upstairs, and my wife is fond of children.”
    “Are you?”
    “Some more than others.”
    The young boarders dispatched their porridge and mobbed the exit. Enoch drifted over to a window: a lattice of hand-sized, diamond-shaped panes, each pane greenish, warped, and bubbled. Each pane was a prism, so the sun showered the room with rainbows. The children showed as pink mottles, sliding and leaping from one pane to another, sometimes breaking up and recombining like beads of mercury on a tabletop. But this was simply an exaggeration of how children normally looked to Enoch.
    One of them, slight and fair-haired, stopped squarely before the window and turned to peer through it. He must have had more acute senses than the others, because he knew that Mr. Clarke had a visitor this morning. Perhaps he’d heard the low murmur of their conversation, or detected an unfamiliar whinny from the stable. Perhaps he was an insomniac who had been studying Enoch through a chink in the wall as Enoch had strolled around the stable-yard before dawn. The boy cupped his hands around his face to block out peripheral sunlight. It seemed that those hands were splashed with colors. From one of them dangled some kind of little project, a toy or weapon made of string.
    Then another boy called to him and he spun about, too eagerly, and darted away like a sparrow.
    “I’d best be going,” Enoch said, not sure why. “Our brethren in Cambridge must know by now that I’ve been in Oxford—they’ll be frantic.” With steely politeness he turned aside Clarke’s amiable delaying-tactics, declining the offer of porridge, postponing the suggestion that they pray together, insisting that he really needed no rest until he reached Cambridge.
    His horse had had only a few hours to feed and doze. Enoch had borrowed it from Wilkins with the implicit promise to treat it kindly, and so rather than mounting into the saddle he led it by thereins down Grantham’s high street and in the direction of the school, chatting to it.
    He caught sight of the boarders soon enough. They had found stones that needed kicking, dogs that needed fellowship, and a few late apples, still dangling from tree-branches. Enoch lingered in the long shadow of a stone wall and watched the apple project. Some planning had gone into it—a whispered conference between bunks last night. One of the boys had clambered up into the tree and was