Isaac the Alchemist by Mary Losure

Author:Mary Losure [Losure, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7636-8047-3
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2017-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

When spring arrived, workers trod slowly across the warming ground, sowing wheat and rye. As they walked, their hands scattered the seed in the same slow rhythm — step, toss, step, toss — they had used for generations. Isaac bent over his papers, scribbling, his thoughts so far away it was as though he lived in a different world, a different time.

Summer came again. New apples ripened in the orchard.

By autumn, the plague in London seemed to have lifted. A doctor looking at the death tolls later wrote, “In 1665 and 1666 there died about two hundred thousand men, women, and children of the pestilence, which was a visitation beyond any formerly in this Nation; and I hope and pray that God will never send the like, and that we nor our Posterity after us may never feel another such judgment.”

And then, that fall, a fire began at a bakery on Pudding Lane in London. It swept down the narrow streets, igniting wooden buildings and thatched roofs until, four days later, most of the city lay in blackened ruins.

The year 1665–66 had brought death and desolation on a scale that not even the astrologers had foretold. Soon, it would be called the annus mirabilis, Latin for “year of wonders,” named after the momentous and terrible events that occurred in one short span of time.

Someday, when the world learned the amazing things that Isaac had discovered all alone during that very same time, the phrase “year of wonders” would take on a new meaning. That one person could have discovered so much in such a short span of time . . . it seemed like a miracle.

But for now, Isaac’s discoveries lay hidden in his notebooks.

He was still working, of course, still trying to solve the great mystery of how the world worked. But soon, his search would stray from the broad road that led to science and spaceships.

He would wander down a narrow path set with boulders at every turn. It wound and forked and turned back on itself, while all around it swirled mists and magic.

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