The Watchtower

spelling Holy Land.
    “The public isn’t aware of this tide yet, just a select few. Which I am inviting you to join. Visionaries who ride this tide using their energies, intellects, spirits, and—if I may be so presumptuous—fortunes, though only to what extent prudence dictates, will be richer and more venerated than the greatest of alchemists. The new alchemy requires no tools, no chemicals, no base metals. No fire or air. Only the vision to ride the tide and, if I may add this, a facility with numbers.”
    “Numbers?” Will was not a mathematician, but he did enjoy working with the numbers involved in writing formal poetry.
    “Yes, numbers.”
    “What exactly is it you speak of, then?” Will asked in a more energetic voice than before.
    “The stock market, my boy, the alchemy of which can perform miracles no metal ever forged can dream of.” Liverpool propelled his chair back to the table’s edge. “A place where a mere piece of paper is worth a pound one day and a hundred pounds the next. Certain streets are starting to seethe with it, on the sly, of course, as the king’s agents are all about. It won’t be lawful until the chancellor of the exchequer figures out a way for the king to get his fair share! Or more.
    “This is the true alchemy, son! I’d like to introduce you to it. The alchemy of ‘all that glitters is gold.’ Where those in the know reap all that glows.”
    Will allowed himself a minute to ponder the man’s ravings.
    Wealth could make a crucial difference to him, for whatever of his hopes remained with Marguerite after the morning’s calamity, and for continued independence from his potentially vengeful father. And he was attracted to the number logic of poetry, the math of its rhythms, even if the crassness of commerce had never appealed to him. But he suppressed this reaction. He’d received no tangible evidence to support anything Liverpool had said, and John Dee was someone who had summoned demons with aplomb.
    Liverpool, observing Will’s hesitation, grew more expansive. “If riches are not enough, son, ponder immortality. Eternal glory will come your way for being part of such a grand innovation as the stock market, which will reveal all preceding economies for the crudities they are. But then there’s also the physical immortality this wealth can be used to find. Because, in the end, life’s all in the blood, my boy. In the blood.”
    “What?”
    “If we can transform the nature of human blood in the same way the stock market is changing money, in the same way the ancient alchemists changed lead, we can live forever, man. Simple as that!”
    Will’s thoughts went to that sunlight, passing through his hand as if it weren’t there, hours ago. Delineating the very atoms of his hand! Was a new sort of blood possible?
    But he could not linger on such wild hopes, not with this bearish man still directing a heavy, burdensome stare at him, not on a day when the deepest romantic hope of his life had been dashed. He’d had enough dreams for one day.
    Even as Liverpool removed his handkerchief to show that both metal lumps were gold now, something Will dismissed as magic, he got up without a further word and stalked away from the table, onto the crowded pavements. Ten feet away, he turned back toward Liverpool to say, “I’m at Mrs. Garvey’s in Harp Lane if you care to bring me actual evidence of this alchemy, more than rhetoric and scheming. Documents, for one. I am neither fool nor waif to be trifled with so. Good day, sir!”
    “Expect me soon,” Liverpool replied in a booming voice. “As lead turning to gold before your eyes has not been enough!” His eyes were already scanning the tavern’s shadowy interior, as if for other prospects.
    Will strolled briskly back now to Mrs. Garvey’s. He remained exhausted from walking, drinking, exasperating conversation, and heartache, but the prospect of deep rest in his bed overcame all his fatigue.
    Though, one thing he couldn’t bear much anymore was heat. He crossed abruptly over to the shady side of the street, diving for the shadows as though diving into an ocean of coolness … and collided with a man so muffled in black robes that he’d been indistinguishable from the surrounding shade.
    “Excuse me,” Will said.
    “Prego,” the dark-robed figure muttered under his breath, darting quickly into the even deeper black of an alley like an eel slithering into the shelter of a shoal. A flash of gold accompanied