I am willing to describe my day as long as you swear by Aletheia to keep my work a secret. Times are dangerous here in Roman Alexandria during this, the first century of the Common Era. I am an alchemist, and while the goal of our league is to perfect human life—to heal, extend, and rejuvenate it—we also focus on base metals like copper and iron, to perfect them into gold. But that’s where we can get into trouble, big trouble. The emperor is afraid that by synthesizing gold, we will undermine his currency and overthrow the empire. And so, the practice of alchemy, even the possession of an alchemical document, is punishable by the summum supplicium, the most extreme punishment. Like the vilest of criminals, any suspect is summarily crucified, left to hang outside the city gates to serve as an appalling warning to others. And so, it was when an alchemical document was stolen from my home that I began to practice sleuthing. So, you must swear to keep my work as an alchemist a secret.

I live in the Jewish Quarter of Alexandria, on the coast and farthest from the main necropolis. So, we inhale the scent of the sea instead of the stench of the embalming workshops. If it’s exceptionally hot or I’m carrying valuables, my bearers take me in the sedan chair to the agora, our central marketplace. Otherwise I walk to the heart of our city, this cloaca of gossip, our venue for seeing and being seen, for hearing and being heard. Approaching the plaza, I feel its vigor filter into my arteries as haranguing hawkers and hucksters, orators and priests, soothsayers and astrologers, tricksters and swindlers, magicians and conjurers, snake charmers and peddlers, wizards and sorcerers promise me a miracle for a price.

But I used to have another reason for going to the agora, and that was to see Judah. I can still dream my way to that first encounter with him, that unexpected ache when I walked into his shop. He raised his lids to look at me and then squared his shoulders with a slow, deep, almost guttural intake of breath and an even slower exhale. That sensation of his nearness, close enough for our air to mingle and for his hand to brush against mine, continues to ignite my private fantasies.

The other day, while raising my hem to tiptoe around a twist of excrement dotting the pavement, I encountered my friend, Nathaniel ben Ruben, the itinerant potbellied dwarf who, while living at The Pegasus, helped me investigate the murder of Kastor, the public slave who’d been staying there. Standing before me in a yellowish woolen tunic that stretched across the bulge where his waist might have been, he told me he’d just returned from Ephesus on the Thalia, the very ship that anchored in Alexandria just before the mischief began to damage the jewel-laden mantle of our Torah.

Ben Ruben and I were soon sitting at a table behind a bowed cabinet stacked with nested cookware in the empty dining room at the back of Cato’s, a thermopolium near the West Gate of the agora. The proprietor, presumably Cato, a swollen man, all gut and jowls with purple threads fanning across his cheeks and wriggling up his hatchet-shaped nose, had already brought us a crater of water mixed with an indifferent wine from the Delta and ladled it into our goblets. We were waiting for only a platter of cucumbers, forest mushrooms, and fish livers with onions. I could smell them cooking and hear them sizzling over the charcoal-burning furnace recessed into the marble-topped counter that separated the eatery from the porch.

Inasmuch as I was looking for someone on that sail, I asked ben Ruben about the voyage: “Nothing wrong with the sea or the winds, even the sky for that matter, but passengers jittery just the same as if some dread lurked in the bowels of the ship. I felt it too, like a worm crawling inside me. Gambling got rowdy, rowdier than usual, plenty of fights, but no, not because of the sea. Stolen jewels. Mostly we were afraid of a search. Suppose the thief under threat of exposure planted the jewels in someone else’s bedding? What then? Besides, who among us,” he asked, the pitch of his voice climbing as he jabbed the air with his forefinger, “has nothing to fear from the authorities?”

At that point, my Phoebe would have warned me not to pepper him with any more questions. All I could do was wonder whether the theft in Ephesus had anything to do with the damage to the Torah mantle. But I still couldn’t figure out why. Not that day anyway.

Giveaway: Leave a comment below for your chance to win a print copy of The Deadliest Fever. U.S. entries only, please. The giveaway ends November 22, 2018. Good luck everyone!

You can read more about Miriam in The Deadliest Fever, the fourth book in the Miriam bat Isaac Mystery Series set in Ancient Alexandria.

Miriam bat Isaac, a budding alchemist and amateur sleuth in first-century CE Alexandria, is concerned when she learns that the Torah mantle in Alexandria’s Great Synagogue has been damaged. She takes the mantle to Judah, a renowned jeweler and the unrequited love of her life. He repairs the mantle but assures her that the gems are genuine. Like Miriam, he is astonished that someone would damage the mantle but leave the gems behind. But Miriam suspects that something is not right. She is even more convinced that something is amiss, a few days later, when an anonymous note arrives, warning that the security at the Synagogue needs to be increased. As she digs for answers, she learns that some of the people she trusts are not what they seem, and she may not survive long enough to uncover the truth. . .

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Meet the author
June Trop and her twin sister Gail wrote their first story, “The Steam Shavel [sic],” when they were six years old growing up in rural New Jersey. They sold it to their brother Everett for two cents.

“I don’t remember how I spent my share,” June says. “You could buy a fistful of candy for a penny in those days, but ever since then, I wanted to be a writer.”

As an award-winning middle school science teacher, June used storytelling to capture her students’ imagination and interest in scientific concepts. Years later as a professor of teacher education, she focused her research on the practical knowledge teachers construct and communicate through storytelling. Her first book, From Lesson Plans to Power Struggles (Corwin Press, 2009), is based on the stories new teachers told about their first classroom experiences.

Now associate professor emerita at the State University of New York at New Paltz, she devotes her time to writing The Miriam bat Isaac Mystery Series. Her heroine is based on the personage of Maria Hebrea, the legendary founder of Western alchemy, who developed the concepts and apparatus alchemists and chemists would use for 1500 years.

June lives with her husband Paul Zuckerman in New Paltz, where she is breathlessly recording her plucky heroine’s next life-or-death exploit.

All comments are welcomed.