Pieter Blanket was sworn to secrecy, which he maintained until long after his master's disappearance. He had little to do with the world beyond the house anyway, since his duties kept him busy and his only contacts outside were with shopkeepers who brought goods to the back door, and the occasional visitor on business whom he would show in to the master.
He accompanied his master in taking the black rock to an assayer, across the Bridge and into the walled square mile of the old city. Pieter would have been on foot, leading the bay gelding through the street crowds with Johannes in the saddle. The man they went to was Giordano Corbelli, whom the master knew could be bought and would be glad of the trade, as he was not of the Goldsmiths' Company and earned a poor living compared to those who were. Corbelli was a Florentian with a reputation for sorcery. Some years later, after he published'Exercitatio Alcymia , a 'Compendium of Alchemical Excercises,' he was driven out of London by threats from the Company and the animosity of his neighbours; but at this time he was known, by those who needed such knowledge, for acceptable work with no questions asked. His clientele of thieves bringing stolen gold and silver for valuing and smelting would use the back door, off Lanyard Alley: Johannes Cruytser went in through the front, leaving Pieter in the public courtyard to mind the horse.
It is Giordano Corbelli whose account completes all that we know for sure of Johannes Cruyster's disappearance; and that account appeared in print, oddly enough, as an appendix to his alchemical reference book. No copies of the complete book are known to have survived, but a copy of the appendix did which maybe testifies to its greater importance than the treatise itself. I doubt my father could have seen it and his version of the story must have come down to him from our ancestors; however, I have a photocopy of an eighteenth century translation of the Italian original, originating I believe from the Ferguson collection at Glasgow University, Scotland, which bears out the published story in all but the detail.
Giordano Corbelli had arrived in London sometime in the late 1550s, when he might have been seeking asylum in a more tolerant environment than his homeland. With Queen Elizabeth's accession to the throne in 1558 on the death of her half-sister Mary, England had once again veered away from Catholicism and broken with Rome. The protestants of Europe crossed the English Channel in their thousands in hopes of escape from persecution by Papist governments. There's no evidence that Corbelli ever embraced protestantism but as a suspected practitioner of magic he probably thought he'd have a better chance in a protestant country.
He rented or bought a small property in Trapper's (or Trappist) Court, back of Blackfriars, and set up his furnace in a tiny yard at the rear. We don't know if he had a wife or family: none are mentioned in any literature. Given his lifestyle and readiness to shut up shop and travel at a moment's notice it's not unreasonable to assume he had no attachments.
On September 23, 1557, he records entertaining a gentleman in his parlour of business and receiving a sample of 'lusterish black cristall' for assaying. Cruytser allowed him to break off five ounces of the rock to work with, and at first insisted that he would wait for a result; but on Corbelli's warning that it might be a few days before all his tests were complete and the composition determined, the merchant said that he would send his man for whatever answer he could have that same evening. He called Pieter inside so that Corbelli might recognise him on his return, and promised a supplement to the fee if the work was done before sunset.
Corbelli had been allowing himself time to filter out the many impurities he anticipated in the rock. As it turned out, the stranger had been truthful: to Corbelli's amazement he had been able to separate from the small sample 'upward of a quarter-ounce of au., enough to make a littel coyne, and as much agayn of ag.' When Pieter came back for his report, Corbelli demanded to know where the ore had come from. Pieter of course would have said nothing even if he knew.
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