"Just so. Now, the story goes that if you could find some of King Solomon’s gold and put it in a crucible, you could extract from it minute traces of the Philosophic Mercury. I believe that our buyer somehow got wind of this yarn about the Alchemical Resurrection in Bedlam twenty-five years ago, and reckoned that the shortest and quickest way for him to get his hands on a sample of the Philosophic Mercury was—"