Tea & Alchemy

Prologue

Harker Tregarrick

Pushing open the casement, I bent close and breathed the moist air rolling in off Goss Moor. We’d seen the last of the long, sun-drenched days that had left me parched as harvest stubble.

Though the English Channel lay some seven miles to the south, my finely tuned senses sifted the seawater tang from the gentle movement of air. They also made me painfully aware of something much closer—a scent that had tormented me almost daily for the last two years.

A woman was walking along the road that divided the village of Roche from my family estate. A towering wall of granite and a thorn hedge screened her from me, but I could hear her shoes lightly striking the packed earth.

I knew neither her name nor her face. Neither her age nor her station in life. Only that she walked to town most days and occasionally took a footpath across the rocky, uneven heathland that sloped down from my stone fortress.

Roche was a small hive of activity that supported the surrounding farming and mining communities, and many people traveled that road. But this woman . . . she smelled of meadowsweet. No floral essence or apothecary-formulated scent, simply her own delectable smell.

Sweet almond and light musk.

The scent was strongest in the mornings. In the late afternoon, when she returned home, it had been muted by village smells—horseflesh, coal fires, pipe smoke, tea.

Yet behind this ever-evolving perfume, I could always smell her blood.

Everyone who passed along any boundary of my land smelled of it. But none of the others tempted me away from my “vital essence” as she did.

I swung the casement shut, for all the good it would do. Fitted to the fifteenth-century window opening, it sealed out drafts about as well as you might expect.

My fortress was a chapel, constructed from the same type of stone that it rested upon by my ancestor John Tregarrick (originally Tregarrek, Cornish for “homestead of the rock”). He had intended it for a gift to the church but then moved in with his family when a fire destroyed the manor.

So the place was a “chapel” in name only. The black quartz schorl walls, which looked like a natural outgrowth of the high outcrop on which they rooted, enclosed the unholy. They shielded Roche’s inhabitants from my ancient family, and vice versa.

Here I grew up, half orphaned from the day I emerged from my mother’s womb.

The strange tragedy of the place, and the secrecy of my family, had long generated lore in the parish.

Some said religious zeal had caused John Tregarrick to withdraw here.

Others, that he’d contracted leprosy. The idea of an old hermit in the chapel persisted, though a new heir took possession every century or two.

Almost as if the villagers believed there had only ever been one master of the estate. They weren’t far wrong.

Other, darker tales of the place were still told, especially in the autumn and winter months, when the nights grew long. They warned of a “Wolf of Roche Rock,” mad and murderous. Fantastic tales in this bright new age of science and industry. Believed only by superstitious fools.

Yet some of the old things were best not forgotten.

I had made it my long life’s work to ensure the good folk of Roche village—including my anonymous tormentor—could rest safely in their forgetfulness.

I had studied the condition passed down from father to son.

My studies had led me to alchemy, which helped me to understand my physical body’s lack. The reason for my deadly thirst.

Alchemy, too, had provided a kind of treatment. My alchemical vital essence was a substitute for the natural vital essence that flowed through the veins of every living creature.

Though an aqua vitae (“water of life”) in more ways than one, my vital essence was no cure. Alchemy had not transmuted me into a normal man any more than it had transmuted base metals to gold or yielded the secret to eternal life.

I was grateful for what it had given me. A lessening of the fear that at any moment my true self could break free, reviving old terrors among my countrymen. Unleashing the ancient evil.

A lessening was all it could be.