![]() ![]() ![]() As she penetrates farther into the alchemical labyrinth, she is haunted both by her own history and by that of her neighbours, the menacing Mrs Zetterberg and the disfigured Pluto - and, finally, by the enigma of Smith himself. In the medieval cellar she unearths a hidden manuscript and begins to read of secret fire and mysterious prime matter, a green lion and a raven's head, a fatal conjunction of king and queen, a descent into Blackness and putrefaction. Thirty years later, Eileen comes to live in Smith's vicarage. Gradually the shadow of alchemy falls over those around him a young girl whose sudden pregnancy is a local scandal Janet, trapped in a barren marriage and Robert who pursues his own quest for the legendary blue glass of Chartres. As he pits himself against the bizarre perils of the Great Work, it becomes clear that his arcane transformations are as much spiritual as chemical. ![]() In 1952 a country clergyman called Smith begins his tortuous quest for the Holy Grail of alchemy - the Philosophers' Stone which transmutes base metal to gold and confers immortality. ![]()
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