The Alchemist's Daughter Part 13

I followed the progress of a little boat weaving in and out of larger vessels and discovered that I was nearly happy, with my head full of ideas and purpose. After the lecture, I would go to Spitalfields, and this time I would certainly find news of my mother's family. Sarah had been the problem before. Her att.i.tude had discouraged me and made me timid.

I had to pay sixpence for admission to the upstairs room at the Swan. The rows of chairs were already packed with interested citizens of every age and calling, who went quiet as a slight man in an untidy wig made his entrance, took his place behind the lectern, and began with a dramatic question: "What is life?"

He was so struck by his own profundity that he stood stock-still for several minutes, fixing us with his mournful brown eyes. Then, like a magician at the Selden Wick fair, he added confidentially and in a strong Germanic accent, "I will tell you. Life is a vital force called the Archaeus. This Archaeus has a more familiar name, Nature, and is the essence of life when combined with matter in water or air. Meanwhile, light shines from the sun and stars, and when dispersed through the Archaeus forms fire. Many natural philosophers, among them the greatest and the best, including the phlogistonist Georg Stahl, are now pursuing this idea to its inevitable conclusion."

I jumped at the sound of that word, phlogistonist, and glanced behind me in case my father was listening. But there was only the same motley audience, some already bored, others nodding wisely as if they knew all this already.

"That is why metals," said Wepfer, "gain weight when they are reduced to a calx; in the process of strong heating they take the Archaeus from the air, and that makes them heavier. And this same spirit or Archaeus affects the fermentation of plants and the action of our own nervous system." Here he produced a chart showing the inner workings of the human body, its veins and arteries accurately drawn but with a most improbable looking fire in the belly.

I had never heard so much nonsense talked in so few minutes. Wepfer was undoing years of painstaking research and made no reference to the experimental method, which required proof of a theory rather than wild speculation and the reckless linkage of unrelated ideas. But I did understand one truth as a result of the lecture. His high-flown foolishness was permissible because even the late-lamented I. N. had not nailed the question of whether fire was state or substance, and whether the air consisted of just one type of corpuscle or several.

By the end of the talk, the room was so smoky that several ladies had to be escorted out. Wepfer said that there was time for only three questions. My hand shot up, and he turned to me with amus.e.m.e.nt. "I wonder if you are familiar with John Mayow and his conclusions about fire and air?" I asked. His smile faded, but he nodded gravely. "Then you'll know that Mayow noticed that if a mouse was placed under a gla.s.s, it could not live after part of the air-the part he called the nitro-aerial spirit-had been consumed, even though some air was left in the gla.s.s. Likewise with a candle flame. How does Mayow's theory that air in fact consists of at least two different parts fit your theory of the Archaeus, which you say is a force separate from the air?"

People turned their heads and looked at me with a mix of astonishment and annoyance. "I am impressed," said Wepfer, "that you have read a digest of Mayow's Tractatus Quinque Medico-Physici, but my dear lady, I'm afraid it never does to believe that just because one has understood a particular detail everything else will be equally clear. Behind the most simple explanation is a world of experience, a lifetime's reading, not just a wet afternoon curled up with the latest journal." Laughter. "The Archaeus, madam, is a much more plausible theory than that of Mayow, who believed that the invisible air around us could be divided into various parts." And he turned to the next questioner.

[ 8 ].

I STALKED OUTSIDE to find that the sunlight was gone and a haze descended on the street, but spurred on by outrage, I flagged down another chair and asked for Spitalfields. The men calculated the cost and told me that I had enough for the journey there, but not the one home afterward. I didn't care. My good mood was all gone, and I was back in the same fever of confusion and sorrow I had felt in the Abbey.

The latest journal . . . a digest of Mayow . . . my dear lady . . . My father had told me that I knew more than any other woman alive, and yet I had been patronized by a charlatan with a taste for public lecturing. If I had no voice, if my knowledge was discounted, what had all those years with my father been for? I shifted restlessly in the chair and felt the men adjust their handhold as we lurched round a corner. What was left of me if the learned Emilie was taken away? A hollow thing with no father, no mother, and no child.

Here it came, that sudden headlong rush to my heart, the baby again, the little creature in its bubble of a lost opportunity.

THE MEN DROPPED me in Spital Square and scrambled off. I walked up and down a nearby street, scanning each house. Mrs. Gill had told me that my mother's family house was destroyed by fire, so I thought there should be one house newer than the rest.

I knocked on doors. After a few minutes, a maidservant would come panting up from the bas.e.m.e.nt, and sometimes I was shown into a back parlor where the lady of the house sat over her knitting or nursed a child or two in her lap. Some of the women spoke English, some French. "Do you remember the De Lery family?" I asked.

"De Lery? Non."

I mentioned "un feu depuis vingt ans."

Shrug. "Non. Pas un feu. Pas ici."

I gave my mother's married name. "Selden."

"Selden. Non."

The more I asked, the more lost I felt. My questions became frantic, people looked at me strangely, I was on the brink of tears. Someone should have known the De Lerys. I tried another tactic. I peered through open doors, saw rack after rack of silk bales, carts loaded with silk thread, the confusion and commotion of the looms and the vats of dye, the lanterns of the pattern drawers, the nerve-tingling slicing of silk. Everyone had a purpose except me.

Panic-stricken, I reviewed what I did have of my mother and found it hopelessly inadequate-a strip of ribbon, a gravestone, an empty chamber. And somewhere, if they were not destroyed, my father's notebooks. The Gills never told me anything useful, Shales had talked to my father in confidence, the villagers who might have known her were alienated. A blank, in fact.

The sun was now blotted out altogether by brown smoke, and I was confused by the maze of streets. I knew I should head south toward the Thames, and then west, but I soon found myself in an area I had never visited, where the houses were so crammed together that I could have stood in the middle of the street and touched the walls on either side. In five minutes, I had rubbed shoulders with more people than I had met in nineteen years at Selden. Though the dense fog m.u.f.fled sound and dulled color, my black silk cloak stood out by being so l.u.s.trous and densely dyed. There was a sliding of eyes, a stiffening when I pa.s.sed by, as though people were valuing the clothes on my back and registering that I was unprotected. It seemed shameful that I, swathed in my shimmering cloak, should ask the way of a ragged girl. She would be sure to realize that I was not a lady at all but an alchemist's daughter with the smell of acid in the folds of my petticoat and my heart full of grief.

I stumbled down yet one more alley and found that I had reached a dead end with rubbish piled against a high gray wall. The only way was back, though I dreaded the contemptuous eyes of the street children who sat on the steps and watched. For a moment, I stood still, bracing myself, while the stench from the heap penetrated the scented folds of my hood. I stared abstractedly, struggling to stay calm. The rubbish heap was made of rags, dirt, and bits of brick and metal soaked in the flyblown mess of emptied privies.

Something caught my eye, a purple triangle sticking out of the waste. I darted forward and put my hands to my mouth, then spun round and walked away.

Faster, Emilie. If you stop, these children will fall on you and tear you to shreds.

But the perverse Emile, the natural philosopher's daughter, would not walk on. Instead, she turned back, covered her nose with her mantle, and went right up to the heap.

Now the terrible thing took shape. What I had seen was the heel of a newborn babe flung face down in the rubbish, and on top of it, so that their two knees were locked together, the baby's twin. Both infants were naked. One had its face compressed against the muck; the other's was turned sideways so that I could see its miniature profile, round forehead, tiny beak of a nose, pouting lips. Their little bellies were distended, and their arms and legs sticklike.

I had never been allowed to show distaste during a dissection in the laboratory or to recoil from putrefaction, so I brought my face closer, closer, and remembered the weight of my own stillborn fetus, hot like a stewed plum, and the few moments I had spent examining its petal-thin ears. When I looked again, I distinctly saw the infant's mouth gape.

London was bellowing. I heard a thousand wheels turn beyond the watchful silence of the alley as I crouched down, took off my glove, reached out my hand, and touched a stone-cold foot. Behind me there was movement among the spectators in the alley.

I scooped up both the little bodies and folded them in my cloak, wrapping them up tight until only their mouths were exposed. Then I strode out of that dreadful place, spurred on by hope that made my instinct for home preternaturally sure, so that I found my way with never a wrong turn, pushing confidently through the crowds as if my own mission was the only one that mattered.

When I reached Hanover Street, Sarah opened the door. She started to say something, but I took no notice. "Fetch warm water," I said. "Quickly."

I ran up to my dainty chamber and laid the cloak by the fire. Immediately, all of Kempe's carefully contrived perfume was blotted out by a terrible smell of excrement and rancid meat.

Sarah came in with two pails. "Shall you be bathing, madam?"

I was crouched over the cloak with my back to her. "Bring the water to the fire. Hurry. Now fetch me some towels." Gently, I unraveled one infant from her sister-they were both girls. "Look what I found on a dung heap. I couldn't bear to leave them. One of them may be alive. I think I saw her lips move. I want you to send for a doctor and a priest."

I lifted the child with the turned head, laid her on my lap, and placed my fingers over her heart. Did her hand twitch? I circulated my fingertips on the little chest and put my face to her mouth to see if she breathed, but the baby was certainly dead, as dead as her sister. Her head was flung back on my lap, and her perfect little nostrils were gray and useless. The soundless cry must have been an illusion. Both had probably been dead for many hours.

Then I became aware that the room was filled with noise. Sarah was standing behind me, eyes fixed on the dead babies, fists pressed into her mouth. From the back of her throat came a steady screeching.

"Stop that, Sarah. It helps no one." I laid the babies tenderly on the lining of my cloak and folded it around them. "You must go and fetch a priest. These poor children should at least be buried properly."

She didn't move.

"Sarah."

At last she came forward and shoved her face so close to mine that her saliva spat on my lips. "You have ruined that beautiful cloak. Have you any idea how much it cost? What was you thinking of?"

[ 9 ].

AFTER SARAH HAD gone, I was triumphant at first. Good, she obeyed me. But what with the long trek home, her shrieking, and the blow of finding both babies dead, I began to tremble so hard that my teeth knocked together.

To calm myself, I dipped my hands in the pail of water. The sight and feel of the metal reminded me of home and Mrs. Gill. Everything she touched got clean in the end. Then I had a good idea-I'd wash the babies anyway. That's what you did with the dead. So I picked up a baby and lowered her into the bucket, but her head on its thread of a neck flopped onto my wrist and then down into the pail, dragging the rest of her body with it.

I shook harder but managed to haul her out, though gray bruises appeared on her arm where I'd held her too tight. "Well, Emilie. It's just as well that your own child died. What a mess you'd have made of bringing her up. A ducking like that would have killed her," I said briskly as I soaped her downy head. I even began to hum a melody from yesterday's Te Deum.

Then the door burst open, and my husband appeared. "By Christ, Emilie, what have you done?" and I was jolted back to the reality of my parlor, where sc.u.m floated on tepid water in the bucket, a heap of dead flesh lay on the red lining of my cloak, and lice crawled through the folds of my filthy skirts.

I clutched my hands tight together to stop them flying off my wrists. "I couldn't leave them in a dung heap. They deserve a proper burial."

He was pale and dull-eyed. I hadn't seen him angry like this since the day he came out of the library after the interview with my father. "Deserve. Emilie. They're b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Some wh.o.r.e throttled 'em and slung 'em away. A hundred such are tossed into the gutters every month. Christ knows what infection you've brought into the house."

"But they are babies. They have a soul."

"Women have hanged for less. Who's to prove you didn't kill them yourself? This is London, Emilie. You're supposed to behave in a civilized way."

The horror of the dung heap and the blank eyes of those watching children came back in such a rush that my knee jolted one of the babies off my lap. "I expect the priest will be here soon. A guinea or so should be enough for their burial."

"There'll be no burial."

"They must be buried. I could take them back to Selden, if you like." For a lovely moment, I was in the gra.s.sy graveyard near my mother's little plot. Just the place. She would take care of them with her silken hands. Gill could make them a box lined with flannel to keep them warm, and surely Shales would agree to bury them. He and I would try to understand why some poor woman took them to that dreadful place and abandoned them, dead or alive.

I should have been paying more attention to my husband, because he lunged forward, bundled up the babies, and made for the door.

"Where are you taking them?"

"Never you mind. The nearest ditch. Where they belong."

"No." I tried to reach him but tripped on my petticoats, so that he had the door half open by the time I caught hold of his knee. My other hand gripped his heel, but he kicked me aside, and I was flung back on my elbow. I lunged after him again, and this time his boot got my chin and sent me reeling. The door slammed shut, and I heard the key turn in the lock and his pounding feet on the stairs.

I lay with my face on the Persian rug. Pain ran round my jaw and into my eyes, but it seemed a welcome and definite feeling compared to the chaos in my head, swirling vortices like those described by Descartes and disproved by Newton-only Descartes' vortices or whorls of matter weren't chaotic, they moved in one direction, or he thought they did until a wayward comet was observed traveling the wrong way, thereby causing a dent in his tidy universe.

Comets. What were comets? Heavenly portents unleashed by G.o.d as a warning, according to Newton. But good old saintly Newton never accepted an easy answer. Instead, he went on and on looking at a problem until he had beaten it into submission. The elliptical path of the comet, for instance, had shown him the way all planets move. How wise Newton had been sometimes to study heavenly rather than earthly bodies, which were so unpredictable and full of pain.

I was mesmerized by the flames in the hearth, which went on flaring and licking despite everything. Mrs. Gill told me that some midwives choke unwanted babies with a spoonful of gin to finish them off. A baby was snuffed out by gin, fire by water, and a rose by imprisonment in a flask.

Putrefaction, the black crow of alchemy, according to my father, was a necessary process as the decomposition of one thing gives life to another, otherwise the planet would groan under the weight of too much creation. In a year or so, all that would be left of the babies apart from their immortal souls-and that seemed to be a matter of some argument-would be bone and fingernails.

For those lumps of flesh, I had put my husband into such a rage that he would surely never forgive me. No wonder he kicked me. I had got it all wrong again. But what was more wrong, to bring home putrid babies, to leave them in the dung heap, or to put them back there? And I'd come no closer to my mother after all. Another failure. The frustration, the pointlessness of my day's work, had me forcing my wrist into my mouth to hold back the sobs, just as I used to when I was a child and my father was angry with me for shattering a flask by overheating.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

The Furnace Shed [ 1 ].

THE NEXT DAY, Sarah and I drove back to Selden. We were not on speaking terms. She never bothered to explain her nonappearance on the night of Sir Isaac's funeral, and I blamed her for fetching Aislabie rather than a priest. My head still ached because of the dark bruise under my chin. Fortunately, she and I were forced apart because the carriage was stuffed with bales of cloth and crates of other things needed for my husband's a.s.sembly, or party, as he chose to call it. He had been so impressed by Sir Isaac's funeral that he decided to decorate Selden Manor crimson, this particular color being Sir I. N.'s favorite. The great hall was to be swagged in red muslin, the guests would be required to wear red, and only red food would be served by a cook brought from London.

Selden was turned upside down. Aislabie shoehorned Mrs. Gill out of her usual haunts and sent her upstairs to supervise the clearing of dozens of unused chambers. The party was in four weeks, and after that the demolition would start. I met her on the stairs one morning with a trio of village girls and Gill in tow. They were on their way to my father's room, and once there Mrs. Gill took no notice of me but gave a series of rapid instructions. "The chest is wormy and must be burned. Likewise its contents, which have been taken by moth. The bedding is to be washed. The windows must be treated with vinegar, and the mirror. You will need to sprinkle the floor before sweeping."

"Mrs. Gill." She stared across at me. "Mrs. Gill, a word." She finished her list before joining me on the landing. "These are my father's things. Do you not think I should be consulted?"

"I a.s.sumed that these orders were from you since you'd not troubled yourself to speak to me."

"They are from my husband."

"Then with your consent, I suppose."

"No. No. But I can't stop him. I cannot seem to make my mark with him."

"Have you tried?"

"You don't understand. He doesn't take me into account."

"And why should he? You are like a rock in the river. You watch us all gush past, and you don't lift a finger to stop us."

"It's because I can't. I don't know how. My father . . ."

"Your father is dead and gone. He has nothing to do with what happens now." We stood side by side on the drafty landing, aware that there was silence from within the room where the girls stood about and listened. But I remembered the night of the dead babies and how my husband's foot had cracked against my chin, and I knew that I hadn't the strength to fight him, so in the end I said, "Well, well . . . So I'll trust your judgment."

[ 2 ].

GILL PRESIDED OVER a bonfire in the bee orchard as day after day a procession of servants formed to carry out wormy cradles and broken-backed chairs. Anything of value was spirited over the wall and into the village. I caught Annie creeping across the stable yard with a warming pan, a footstool, and a rolled carpet. She looked frightened and dropped the pan with a terrible clang onto the cobbles. "Mrs. Gill said I could have them."

I took the footstool and examined it curiously, because I'd never seen it before and wondered which of the Selden wives had worked the elaborate tapestry. "I won't take it if you don't want," said Annie.

"No. Have anything, have it all." I left her standing there with her worn trophies. What right had I to protest now, when I had never cared about these things in the past?

Meanwhile, Sarah produced a skein of red silk, sat in the window of my chamber from whence she had a good view of the parrot bowl on the mantel, and proceeded to embroider a fiery edge to my black petticoat.

[ 3 ].

THOUGH I WAS sometimes aware of what was happening, just as I knew by the greening of the woods and the startling volume of birdsong that spring had come, I spent most of my time in the laboratory. When I first got back, I opened the door cautiously, afraid of what changes I might find, but everything was in order. Gill had kept the fire going and completed the dissolution process.

I sat in my father's chair and tried to remember what had been in my head before I went to London. His instructions for the next, most delicate stage of the process of palingenesis were clear. The distillation. Ah, the distillation.

For this we used a bain-marie, named after our alchemical predecessor, Maria Prophetissa, or Mary the Jewess. The bain-marie was an iron pan inserted into the top of our medium furnace. We filled the pan with water, heated it to a gentle simmer, and then suspended the flask of mixture in the bath to keep it at a constant temperature. The flask was one of our most precious, a cucurbit bought fifty years ago and purified annually between each alchemical experiment. It lay on its side at the end of the workbench, a gritty gray solution clinging to its base, and beside it was the alembic, or still head, which had to be cemented to the top so that the vapor from the heated mixture could collect, condense, and trickle through a long, downward-pointing neck into a receiver, like a swan dipping its head. Maria Prophetissa's preferred seal was a mixture of clay-my father and I had fine white clay brought from London-chopped human hair, my own, and a little dried cow dung.

My father's alchemical notebook did not go beyond this stage. He had prepared the bain-marie and cucurbit but gone no further. His notes stopped on March 28, 1726, and I knew why. In recent years, his fingers had grown so stiff that I had to perform the delicate operation of sealing the neck of the cucurbit to the still head for him. It had been my job to mix the paste, handle the gla.s.s, and suspend it over the bain-marie; his, to record the operation. He had stopped work because he simply hadn't the heart or the physical skills to go on without me.

Hence the last heading: March 28, 1726. The Distillation. And nothing more. Defeat.

But I was determined not to be defeated; I knew exactly what to do now. So I summoned Gill and told him to light the medium furnace, then I chopped off a fistful of hair and snipped it smaller, smaller, until I had a heap of black filings. Gill lifted a lump of clay from its moist nest in the cellars and fetched a scoop of dung from the stable yard, and I mixed the paste with gobs of spittle until I had a perfect glue, reeking of the earth. Next I added my own alchemical mixture to the dried-up remains my father had left in the cucurbit. The contents would surely be much more potent if I used both.

The trouble came when I picked up the delicate vessel and tried to add a measure of distilled water to the alchemical brew. Since Sir Isaac's funeral and the dead babies, my nerves were in such a state that I scarcely trusted my fingers to hold such a precious thing. There seemed to be a constant shrieking around me, and I had to shake my head and clutch my skirts to steady myself. When the equipment was at last set up and the water bath had reached its ideal temperature, I perched on the stool and rested my chin in my hands. The furnace had to be watched day and night through weeks of distillation.

[ 4 ].

ON THE DAY before the party, Aislabie sent for me to the Queen's Room to view his new outfit. The prospect of seeing him frightened me, because we had hardly spoken since the day after Newton's funeral. Aislabie had spent a lot of time in town, and on the occasions when he was home had been solicitous, though wary, as if afraid of what I might do or say next. Once or twice after supper, I caught him watching me speculatively, but I always withdrew my hand if he took it or averted my face from a kiss. I was relieved that he didn't come near me at night, because the incident with the dead babies was still in my head, and I wasn't sure if I could bear him to touch me. Yet, perversely, all this time I had been waiting for him.

The strange thing was that he seemed to have forgotten the episode altogether and greeted me with his usual exuberance and affection. He was a vision in a waistcoat of crimson damasked satin very flared below the waist and stiffened with buckram. It had thirty or so matching b.u.t.tons and was so gorgeous that the front of his coat had been cut away to reveal its full glory. His breeches were dyed amber, his buckles were decorated with amber, his cravat was pinned with a miniature amber dagger, and he had a new cane with an amber k.n.o.b the size of a hen's egg. He smiled at me from amid all this finery in the old rakish way, brought his arm up behind me, and stroked my back with the handle of the cane.

I held back at first, but his mouth tasted of apples, and with a few caresses of his fingertips there it was, the old magic, the promise of refuge and excitement. I fell against him with relief because it seemed that I was forgiven and the nightmare of the babies was over.

"My pale girl," he said, "what have you been up to? Never mind. After the party, we'll be off to London, and then you'll climb aboard Flora and we'll all sail away together. What do you think, Em?"

"Is Flora fit to be seen at last?"

"Flora is the sweetest little vessel in all the wide world. You should see her bra.s.ses and the tight coils of her ropes and the way her sails are all tucked up. I've had a cabin fitted out high up in the stern, and you and I will sleep there, Em. Imagine lying together amid the motion of the waves, the moving forward at a great rate."

I tried to visualize the confinement of a little cabin. How would Aislabie be on board a ship with nowhere to go but a narrow deck and nothing to do but watch the waves? Perhaps I could teach him about the tides, show him the constellations, explain how Arisototle had believed the saltiness of the sea was due to the action of the sun on the waves, whereas Leonardo da Vinci and later Boyle knew that all the sea is salty, not just the surface, and that salt is contained one way or another in all created things.

I was so absorbed by these speculations that I hardly noticed our lovemaking. I expect it was energetic as usual, a pulling up of petticoats and an unb.u.t.toning of breeches, an urgent union of flesh, a great many kisses planted on my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs while I clutched at his clothes and tried to hold him inside me for a little longer. I expect my body clamored under his fingers, but I have no memory of it, though I do remember that he was in a hurry to get downstairs and review the arrangements for the party.