Parting

by Isaac Newton, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The Warden came into the assay room a little after nine, when the presses had stopped and the only sound in the Mint was the sentry on the wall stamping his feet. He had snow on his hat. He did not take it off. He set a paper on the bench beside the balance case, unfolded it with two fingers, and stood back from it as if it might spill.

In the paper lay a button of white metal the size of a thumbnail, flat on the bottom where it had cooled against the crucible, domed and wrinkled on top.

"Weigh it," he said.

Nathaniel Ebbs had been banking the muffle furnace for the night. He was nineteen, an apprentice to the King's Assay Master, and the Assay Master was in Kent with a fever. He wiped his hands on his apron and opened the glass door of the case. The button went on the left pan. He built the weights on the right, the brass and then the little silver ones, and lowered the beam and watched the pointer swing and settle.

"One ounce, four pennyweights, and a grain under."

"Say it in grains."

"Five hundred and seventy-five."

The Warden wrote it in a book with a black cover, and then, from his other pocket, took out a second, smaller book and wrote it there too. Nathaniel saw that the second book was ruled differently. He looked away from it.

"Where was it had, sir?"

"From a lodging in Mint Street in Southwark. A man called Gedge. He is in Newgate." The Warden drew another paper from his coat, folded long, written in the clerk's round hand. He held it near the candle and read from it without expression, as a man reads the measurements of a room.

"I never clipped nor coined. I took old money that was mine, being shillings of the old Queen that my father left, and dissolved them in strong water as I was shown, and put in quicksilver, and a tree grew in the glass in a night with branches like frost. I fed it a week with more of the water. It ripened at the root. There was a brown earth under it from the first night, that I took for the seed of the thing, and when I melted the tree and the earth together in the fire the earth went yellow. I never meant it for money. I meant it to grow."

He folded the paper.

"He had a mould for half-crowns under the floor," the Warden said. "He will be tried for the mould. Not for this."

"Then what is this for?"

The Warden looked at him for a moment, and Nathaniel felt that he had asked a question with the wrong end of it foremost. "It is for knowing what it is," the Warden said. "Is the furnace hot?"

---

It was not, quite, but it could be made so. Nathaniel opened the draught and fed the fire with charcoal from the scuttle and worked the small bellows until the muffle, the clay arch inside the furnace where the cupels sat, went from a sullen red to the colour of a ripe cherry and then to something lighter. The room grew warm. Snow melted off the Warden's hat and ran down the brim and he did not seem to notice.

There was no cupel in the house large enough for a whole ounce, so Nathaniel pressed one from the bone-ash in the mould, a broad shallow dish, and set it in the muffle to dry and heat. He weighed out lead, granulated, eight times the button by his master's rule, and wrapped the button in it.

"The whole of it?" he said. "My master would take a cutting. Twelve grains from the edge."

"If there is something in it, it may not be in the edge."

That was true, and Nathaniel had not thought it. He took the tongs.

The lead went into the cupel and sank down to a bright pool, and the button went under it. A skin formed on the pool and broke and formed again. The lead was burning off as litharge, a reddish smoke at the top and a dark wet stain spreading into the bone-ash, the cupel drinking it. Nathaniel had watched a thousand of these and still did not know a better thing to watch. The metal in the cupel moved. It rolled on itself, it threw off colours like oil on water, rainbow skins sliding over it toward the edge, and it grew smaller as the cupel took its lead.

"You see the colours," the Warden said. He was standing at Nathaniel's shoulder now, close enough that Nathaniel could smell the wet wool of his coat.

"Yes, sir."

"What do you call them?"

"Nothing, sir. My master calls them the colours."

"In some books they are a peacock's tail." The Warden did not say which books. "It is a thin skin of the lead's calx, thinner than any leaf you could beat. I have measured skins like it in another way. The colour is the thickness. A little thinner, the colour changes. At the last it is too thin to show any colour at all."

The pool was a bead now, the size of a pea and then of a large pea, and the rainbow ran over it faster and faster. Then the colours stopped. For a breath the bead lay dull. Then it went bright all at once, as though a candle had been lit inside it, and was still.

Nathaniel's shoulders came down. They always did, at that moment. He drew the cupel to the front of the muffle to cool slowly so the bead would not spit.

"Again?" the Warden said. "Does it always do so?"

"Always, when the lead is gone. Unless there's copper left, and then it's dull at the end."

"Then the copper is gone." The Warden took out the smaller book and wrote. "Weigh it when it will bear weighing."

The bead, cooled and brushed of bone-ash, weighed five hundred and sixty-nine grains. Six grains less than the button.

"Shillings of the old Queen are sterling," Nathaniel said, half to himself. "Eighteen pennyweights of copper in the pound. There should be more loss than six grains."

"Should there?"

Nathaniel thought about it. Gedge's strong water had taken the shillings, silver and copper alike, and made one clear water of them, faintly blue. Then the quicksilver. The tree grew of silver and quicksilver together. The copper had nothing to grow on. "The copper stayed in his water," he said slowly. "He poured it away with the water. The tree was only silver. The six grains are what the fire couldn't drive off before. Quicksilver, or the last of the copper."

"Write that," the Warden said, and Nathaniel understood that he meant write it down, in the Mint book, in his own hand, and not that the Warden would. He did it. His hand was not steady and the ink blotted.

---

The bead was beaten flat on the anvil to a thin plate and rolled into a loose coil, so the water could reach all of it. Nathaniel had aqua fortis in a stoppered bottle, made the week before from saltpetre and oil of vitriol. He poured it into a tall parting glass and set the glass in warm sand at the side of the furnace and dropped the coil in.

The water fumed red where it took the silver. Little bubbles crowded the coil and stood off it. The coil went thin and lacy and sank in on itself. The water above it, which had been clear, went cloudy and then clear again, holding the silver in itself the way Gedge's water had held his shillings.

When the coil had gone entirely, there was something left.

On the bottom of the glass lay a little dark matter, a brown so deep it was nearly black, loose, soft, like the mud left in a cart rut after rain. It did not go into the water. It lay there.

The Warden bent until his face was level with the glass. He did not speak. Nathaniel had seen men look at a woman like that, or at a fire after a long cold walk. He had never seen anyone look so at a glass of acid.

"There's his brown earth," Nathaniel said.

The Warden straightened. "Wash it."

He poured off the silver water into a clean flask, very slowly, with a glass rod held to the lip, so that the dark matter stayed behind. He washed it with hot rainwater three times, pouring off each time. He tipped the dark matter into a small clay cup and dried it at the mouth of the furnace and then pushed it into the muffle with the tongs.

In the heat it changed. The brown went to the colour of a dry leaf, and then the leaf went yellow, and when Nathaniel drew it out there was no doubt about the yellow at all.

On the balance it weighed one grain and three quarters.

"Gold," Nathaniel said.

"Yes."

"Then he did it." Nathaniel heard his own voice go high, like a boy's. "The tree. It made—"

"Did it?" said the Warden.

That was all. Two words, quite mild. But they stopped Nathaniel the way a hand stops a door. The Warden was not looking at the gold. He was looking at the clerk's paper, which he had unfolded again and was reading by the furnace light with his lips pressed together.

"A brown earth under it from the first night," the Warden said. "That I took for the seed of the thing. He saw the earth at the root first. Before he fed the tree. Before it had time to ripen anything." He put the paper down. "The water you used just now. Would it dissolve gold?"

"No, sir. It'll never touch gold. That's why it parts them."

"Would Gedge's water dissolve gold?"

"If it was strong water like mine—" Nathaniel stopped.

He stood very still. He had parted gold from silver a hundred times for his master, gold coins mostly, guineas coming in light, and had never once thought of it the other way round: that a man might take silver and dissolve it and find gold lying in the glass, and not know what he was looking at, because he had never seen silver that wasn't pure.

"It was in the shillings," Nathaniel said. "It was in them all along."

"Perhaps," said the Warden. "Has it been done twice?"

---

The melting-house was cold and dark and smelled of old smoke. The recoinage had been going two years, and against the far wall stood barrels of the old hammered money brought in from every county, waiting for the furnaces, clipped to ovals and worn to blanks. Nathaniel took a lantern and went along the barrels reading the chalk on their lids until he found one marked Eliz. He put his hand in. The coins were cold and many were too thin to read. He picked out a shilling where he could still see the old Queen's face and the edge was nearly whole.

Back in the assay room he weighed it. Ninety-two grains. Lead, cupel, muffle. The colours ran, and stopped, and the bead went bright. The bead was smaller and the copper gone from it. He flattened it, coiled it, dropped it into fresh aqua fortis in a clean glass. He was aware the whole time of the Warden standing behind him and not speaking, and of the snow outside going on and on, and of the fact that he did not know what he wished the glass to show.

The coil went. A brown speck lay at the bottom of the glass. It was so small that he had to tilt the glass to the candle to be sure of it. He washed it and dried it and annealed it, and it went yellow in the heat like the other.

He could hardly get it onto the pan. On the balance, with the finest weights he had, it was a little more than a quarter of a grain.

The Warden had his smaller book open. He wrote, and then wrote again under it, and Nathaniel, looking despite himself, saw a column of figures worked by long division in a small, very even hand.

"One grain and three quarters of gold to five hundred and seventy-five of his button," the Warden said. "That is one part in three hundred and twenty-nine. At the same rate, ninety-two grains of a shilling should carry twenty-eight hundredths of a grain." He closed the book. "You have weighed a little more than a quarter."

"It's the same, sir. Near as I can weigh."

"It is the same."

Something went out of the room then. Nathaniel did not know what it had been. The furnace ticked as it cooled.

"So he didn't make gold," Nathaniel said. "He only parted it. He did what I do. He did an assay and didn't know it."

"He did a careful assay," the Warden said. "He lost nothing, which is more than most of the assayers in Goldsmiths' Hall could say. He kept the earth because he thought it was the important thing. He was right in that, and wrong in everything else." He turned his hat in his hands. The brim had dried crooked. "The old refiners never troubled to part it. It was not worth their charcoal. There will be gold in every barrel in that house."

"Will you tell the court?"

"The court will ask about the mould." The Warden picked up the clerk's paper, read it once more, and folded it small. "The court will not ask about this."

He put the paper in his inside pocket, next to the smaller book.

---

Nathaniel cleaned the bench while the Warden stood by the window. He swept the bone-ash into the bucket and wiped the balance pans with chamois and put the weights back in their velvet beds. He labelled the two grains of gold, the large and the small, in two papers, and laid them in the Assay Master's drawer with the date. The silver water from the first parting stood in its flask on the end of the bench, clear as rainwater in the candlelight, five hundred and sixty-seven grains of silver held in it and nothing to see.

"I'll throw copper in it in the morning, sir," Nathaniel said, "and get the silver down."

"No," said the Warden. "Not that one."

He came and took the flask by the neck. He looked at it against the candle for a long moment. Then he took a cork from the drawer, without asking which drawer, and stoppered it and wiped the outside of the glass with his handkerchief.

"Sir. It belongs to the King. It's the man's silver. Forfeit."

"I will account for it." The Warden took out the smaller book and, holding the flask in the crook of his arm, wrote a line in it, and showed Nathaniel the line: the date, the weight of silver in grains, and his initials. Then a mark beside it that Nathaniel did not know, a little crescent with a cross beneath. "You see? It is in the book."

"Yes, sir."

"You did well tonight. You will say so to your master when he is well. You will say the Warden asked for a parting and you made it."

"Yes, sir."

"And nothing else."

"There isn't anything else, sir."

The Warden looked at him with something that might have been approval, and buttoned his coat over the flask.

Nathaniel let him out by the small door into the street that ran inside the Tower walls, between the Mint houses and the curtain wall. The snow had stopped. It lay a hand deep and untrodden in the lamplight. The Warden went along it toward the gate with his head bent and both arms folded across his chest, carefully, as a man carries a thing that must not be let to grow cold.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Isaacō Newtōnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Isaac Newton, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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