Alchemy and Meggy Swann Read Online Free PDF Page B

she could."
    "Why?" Nicholas asked.
    "Why do you ask so many questions?" she asked him in return.
    "My father says I am curious as a jay," the boy said. And he smiled a gap-toothed, satisfied smile.
    Out of one eye Meggy saw Master Peevish leave the house and hurry up the lane. Whither did he go? she wondered. And how long might he be gone? Perhaps Meggy could discover what mysterious things happened in the upper rooms without encountering him. If she could climb the stairs. And perhaps she might find a crust of bread there. Or a dusty almond cake. Or a withered apple. Even such leavings were beginning to sound appealing. If she could climb the stairs.
    Meggy bade farewell to the cooper's boy and hurried Louise into the house. "Remain you here, Louise," she told the goose. "I will return anon."
    The girl lumbered slowly up each step, stopping to rest often. This will take a goodly long time, Meggy thought, so I pray his errand takes longer.
    The next floor, as she had assumed, was the man's chamber. Naught but a bed with threadbare coverings, a clothes press with a broken lid, and six more steps. At the top of those stairs was a door, which, when pushed, swung open with a sound like a sigh. The attic room was smoky from a low-banked fire burning in a small earthen furnace, and dark, despite the tall window, for the glass was besmirched with spider webs and encrusted with dirt. The air was thick with the odors of ancient dust and candle wax, spoiled eggs, and sharp-smelling things for which Meggy had no name.
    Leaning carefully on her sticks, Meggy moved into the room. Shelves were crammed to bursting with a hodgepodge that overflowed onto the floor: kettles and pitchers, stands and tongs, little jars full of queer-smelling things, and the skulls and bones of various small animals. There were clay bottles labeled in a language the girl could not read, although she had most of her letters; odd copper jugs with long spouts; and strange-looking vessels made of glass. Books, greasy with candle drippings, were piled on a rickety table and on the floor, higgledy-piggledy like the houses in Crooked Lane. For all she was small as a garden pea, Meggy feared she could not move without putting something in danger of ruination.
    Just what did the man here? What was mixed in those bowls and cooked in that furnace? She could see nothing perfect and certainly no gold. Meggy longed to curl up near the warmth of the furnace, but the smellsome air burned her nose.
    She found naught in the room to eat and so she turned to go, near colliding with a man looming in the doorway. "What do you in my laboratorium?" Master Ambrose asked in a voice that thundered in the small room. "I do not believe I gave you leave to enter, err, mistress."
    Startled, Meggy stumbled into a shelf of glass implements. Before she could steady it, a beaker tipped and fell toward the floor. The alchemist reached out one long arm and caught it. "Clumsy girl, this glass be fragile and most costly."
    Meggy's heart thumped. The man was so tall and his eyes so fierce that all sense left her. "I ... I ... I..." she stammered.
    He put the glass beaker back on the shelf. "God save me," he murmured, "she is crippled, clumsy, and mute."
    Meggy bristled. "Praying your pardon, sir," she said, "I am hardly mute. You but frighted me."
    The man leaned closer. "Do you meddle in my things?"
    She might have come uninvited, but she did not meddle. "Nay, sir, I was but curious. Never have I known someone engaged in a Great Work."
    The man pulled at his earlobe, once, twice, three times, and then said, "So you be neither mute nor addlewitted. Mayhap I—"
    Just then, with a great squawk, Louise climbed the last of the stairs and burst into the room, not around but over the books and flasks and bottles on the floor. She stepped into a basket, which fastened itself to her foot, and flapped noisily about, the basket slapping against the floor with each step.
    "Louise!" Meggy called. "Come hither to