Read The Secret of the Rose and Glove for Free Online Page A

only transmute lead to gold and resurrect the dead, but could also restore the aged to youth.
    At this point the Golden Youth removes his disguise, revealing that he and the Golden Sovereign are one and the same, and confessing the other sad fact: his philosopher’s stone is broken and useless without the Silver Maiden’s aid.
    Here alchemical metaphor began to cross into alchemical fact, for as amazing as the fabled artifact was, it shared the flaw of the least extract of the alchemist’s art: when exposed to air, the philosophic mercury in its center quickly decayed, and quickly tarnished into uselessness. This had occurred with the Golden Sovereign’s broken stone.
    However, useless does not mean worthless, and an artifact is not so easily destroyed. Just as tarnish can be turned back into silver with the application of a bath of soda ash and foil of a lesser metal—the alchemical reaction to remove sulfur from silver—Duke Arjan Devore hoped, with the help of his clever young bride and the purifying radiance of the toad stone and the unicorn’s jewel, to discover a process to separate the philosophic mercury from the philosophic sulfur, thus recreating the White and Red Elixirs, the penultimate stages of the great work.
    At this point alchemical theory moved back to poetic metaphor and the conventions of the theater: The White Queen and the Red King combined, singing a particularly passionate duet, then merged into the Divine Hermaphrodite and gave birth to their magical child, the Golden Heir. For the masque’s finale, all the wedding guests reappeared, ascending the mount of the alchemists to attend the christening, singing the praises of the heir who was one and the same with the philosopher’s stone, and also praising the proud parents, the King and Queen, not only separate once again but both now blessed with the glory of eternal youth for achieving the alchemist’s quest, and even the birds in the tree of knowledge at the summit joined in the song.
    That was the theory, at least. In reality, Duke Arjan died of old age and his bride ended up fleeing a revolution.
    Of course, very few lives go according to plan. Norret paged back through the book to the part where Aballon, the Horse, fastest of the planets and symbolic of quicksilver, sends the youngest filly from his herd as both herald and wedding gift, there to act as page and messenger in the happy couple’s hall. Rather than being played by the child of some nobleman or other powerful friend, this part was given to the daughter of the duke’s stable master, a remarkably pretty child with her hair braided with ribbons, a happy smile on her face, a hobby horse in one hand, and dreams of one day being a great bard or entertainer.
    It had taken Norret almost a minute of staring at the hand-tinted etching to realize he was looking at Rhodel, ten years before the Revolution. Ten years before she had slept with the revolutionaries who came for her former mistress and every soldier since, taking up a rather different form of entertainment than she had originally planned, successfully saving her neck, if not her dignity.
    Norret closed the book. Rhodel had taken that dignity back at the end. Say what you would about the old slattern, but despite madness, drunkenness, disease, and desperation, she had not chosen a coward’s fate and would face the Lady of Graves with her head held high.
    That said, the credits and thank-you notes of Darl Jubannich’s masque explained a great deal more. Formerly, all Norret had known about the Liberty Hostel’s design was that Duke Arjan Devore had bankrupted the village creating ostentatious expansions to his ancestral manse and redecorating to please his vain young bride. The text of masque did not dispute that, but explained that the entire chateau was not only rigged up like an immense steam-driven musical waterclock, the baths and fountains forming the mechanism, but was also an alchemical allegory on a grand scale, each