The Alchymist and The Silurist is a new historical novel based on the lives of 17th-century Welsh twins Thomas and Henry Vaughan, distant kinsmen of the author. Members of a family with a tradition of strong Loyalist ties, the twins interrupted their studies at Oxford to join their Cousin Colonel Herbert Price during the Parliamentarian and Puritan uprising. Following military service, Henry took up work as a physician, while Thomas, now a defrocked Anglican minister, took up the study of alchemy and sought the key to the fabled philosopher's stone in the king's laboratory at Whitehall in London. The attention of the author was first drawn to his distant Welsh kinsmen while browsing in Robert Vaughan's antiquarian bookshop in Stratford.
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Stories of the controversial alchymist Thomas Vaughan were revived some two hundred years after his death by a roguish French writer named Gabrielle Jogand-Pages, who created elaborate hoaxes, pitting Freemasons against Catholics. Writing under various pseudonyms, he published a series of salacious stories about a young American girl named Diana Vaughan, who had journeyed to Paris hoping to prove her kinship to the 17th-century Welsh scientist. The incidents portrayed in this novel occurred simultaneously with the Paris Exposition of 1896, and the infamous Dreyfus Affair. This book, Diana and Leo, the sequel to The Alchymist and The Silurist, is now available from the publisher, Trafford Publishing. Click here for details, and then return to this site via your browser's back < button.
