Alchemy, Book Two of the Mercian Trilogy by K. J. Wignall Read Free Book Online Page B

of my curriculum, but knew from the outset that it was the one subject I was not to discuss freely outside of the schoolroom. Even my mother never discussed it with me, all the better to encourage my discretion
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    Such was the liveliness of my intellect and the completeness of my general education that I hardly wanted for other subjects of polite conversation. Indeed, to the wider world, I was a bright but ordinary boy of my class, enjoying healthy outdoor pursuits and the society of my equals. And in that way, the eager child grew into an accomplished young man
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    In the final year or so I spent with my family I was considered a figure of note – handsome enough, more than wealthy enough, blessed with various talents. With some retrospective irony, it was openly speculated upon, in that last summer, that I might prove an ideal match for Lady Maria Dangrave, eldest daughter of the Earl of Mercia
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    She would have made a fine match too, pretty andintelligent, with a wry humour, and I think we liked each other well enough. Of course, little could I have known then that she was of the same bloodstock as the demon that had unwittingly shaped me
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    Lady Maria Dangrave. I think back on her now, her curls of fair hair, her lively eyes, delicate lips, and I cannot help but think what a short, happy life I might have lived with her. I say this even as I know it is pointless to think on it, for it wasn’t to be
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    Within twelve months of each other, my great-uncle and my grandfather had died, and my mother decided the time had come to conclude my education abroad. I have sometimes wondered if she was driven by the alarm she felt at my growing attachment to Maria. Whatever her motive, the timing was fortuitous in one regard – after all, it’s the only reason I’m telling my story now, two hundred years after I should have died an old man
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8
    W hen Will got to the house, he turned and walked across the east lawns instead of going inside. He reached the ruins and strolled among them. It was something he’d avoided until now because it filled him with sadness to see the remnants of these walls standing jagged like broken teeth.
    So much of his world had survived in the city, and at times he would glance along streets or up at the walls or at the church itself and momentarily forget that he’d been cast adrift in the future. Yet Marland, the image of which was still so firmly fixed in his mind, the monks and their herb gardens and apiaries and their devotions, the quiet order and beauty of it all, had been reduced to these fallen walls.
    He’d come now only because something had occurred to him, something that should have suggested itself earlier. Some of the walls had been so demolished as to leave something resembling a raised stone footpath in places, and he clambered about on it, and looked at theviews into all those lost rooms. He tried not to think of what had once been there, but of another memory.
    And as he climbed up on to a small buttress of stones and looked across to an ornate window arch that appeared almost free-standing, the images slipped into place and he knew this was it. This was the place he’d been dreaming of since November, the ruins among which he’d walked constantly with Eloise on a summer’s day.
    He stepped down on to the grass, which crunched beneath him, and he sat on the wall and looked across at the window arch and the other views across the ruins. He couldn’t begin to think why he was being tormented with dreams of something he could never see. Yes, he could see these ruins in front of him now, he could bring Eloise here, but he could never recreate those visions.
    That sunlit afternoon was something that could never and would never be his, just as his relationship with Eloise could never be what it often seemed to be in those dreams. It was a uniquely cruel torture that his mind should show him glimpses again and again of things he wasn’t permitted to know.
    He sat there for a while, his