The Alchemist's Daughter Part 2

After it was done, I put the flower on the window seat, where it had an untouchable sheen in its gla.s.s prison, like a pebble in water. I was guilty of neglect. As I worked, I should have willed myself inside the rose to blend my spirit with its sap, but one look at that stranger had blown away my concentration. I was listening for his departure. I had to catch another glimpse of him before he left.

In the end, I escaped through a little door used by Gill that led to a stone staircase down to the cellars. From there I ran to the stables and checked that the stranger's horse was still tethered inside, then raced to the orchard, where I was safely hidden but would still hear him go. For two hours, I strode about or flung myself down in the shade with my ear to the ground. My pulse throbbed. I saw everything with startling clarity: the calyxes of the daisies, flecks on the peeling membrane of bark, and the bees on their aerial pathways to the hives by the hedge. But I was impatient with all this familiar detail and my body refused to behave, rolling itself over until my legs were tangled in my skirts.

Of course, I had put up with uncertainty before. When my father bought me a prism and told me to repeat Sir Isaac's experiment with white light, my stomach was full of b.u.t.terflies. We closed the shutters except for a c.h.i.n.k and turned the prism until the light shone directly through, and there on our screen of paper was a rainbow. But until that moment I had been afraid just in case it didn't happen and Newton was proved fallible. And then there was the smallpox episode, when I'd woken each morning expecting to find myself ill or disfigured. In the end, on the tenth day I had felt hot, then cold, and rather sick, but only for a few hours. About twenty spots appeared, but they left no scars. I was relieved not just because I'd survived, but because my father was right as usual.

This experience in the orchard was much worse, because it was quite possible that after the young man had gone my father wouldn't mention his visit at all. The episode with Shales was still a sore point in my memory; relations with him had been so ruthlessly severed. But the arrival of the stranger had hooked me clean out of my old self and made me something else. Not even my father could keep me away from him. I must see him again. I couldn't breathe for wanting it so much.

Meanwhile, I branded the memory of him onto my inner eye. Again and again I opened the door and discovered him on the porch, his forehead dewy with sweat and his eyes a light blue. He was so broad-shouldered that I couldn't see past him, though his stamping horse had been somewhere in the background.

I gave up at last and went back inside. The kitchen was hot as a furnace with the oven lit. A village girl, one of the blacksmith's daughters, was tossing peeled potatoes into a pot. A mess of gutted poultry was heaped on the table, and the air was filled with b.l.o.o.d.y vapors.

"It's a pity your father never made the stirring of soup part of your grand education," said Mrs. Gill. "We've a guest to supper, and you're to eat with them in the dining parlor."

I gawped at her while my heart did cartwheels. I saw him again with the sun on his curls, his silver b.u.t.tons, his polished boots. And here was I with damp armpits, tangled hair, hands caked with clay. I flew back to the stable yard, loosened the neck of my dress, and plunged my head and shoulders under the pump. From the stables behind me, I heard a restless movement of hooves and the tossing of a bridled head. His horse. None of our old workhorses had the energy to stir on such a hot day. I sc.r.a.ped the dirt from under my fingernails, pulled up my skirts to wash my feet and calves, wrapped my hair in my ap.r.o.n, and ran up to my room, dripping along the pa.s.sageways.

Mrs. Gill had given me a better mirror for my eighteenth birthday, extracted from a stack of furniture in some distant room. I peered into its spotted gla.s.s and despaired. Black rats' tails. Black eyes. Black brows. White skin. Too much contrast. Then I unhooked my best gown-pale-green calico and not one of Mrs. Gill's most successful efforts. She'd copied a dress worn by the modish farmer's wife, and unlike my other gowns it had an open bodice pinned to a quilted stomacher. The edges of the bodice were so uneven and the stomacher cut so low that I had to hold one shoulder higher than the other to keep myself decent. My bosom bulged over the top. What would my father say? I chewed my lip as I fixed the bodice in place and covered myself up with a muslin neckerchief. I had nothing else to match the visitor's gorgeous plumes, no necklace, no rings-just my mother's pink ribbon, which I pulled out of a little drawer, held to my face, then wound through my hair and tied in a bow, just visible behind my ear.

[ 6 ].

IN THE DINING parlor, a pearly mist floated through the open lattices and candlelight made soft shadows amid the folds of our visitor's cravat. Fortunately, my father barely glanced at me. He was already scooping up soup, pursing his lips after each mouthful to ease it down. "Robert Aislabie," he said, waving his dripping spoon at the stranger. "Come to talk to me about phlogiston. My daughter, Emilie."

I took little sips of Aislabie along with my soup, which I spooned up by leaning forward from the waist-I couldn't bend my neck in case I fell out of my gown or jabbed myself with a pin. He rippled on the edge of my vision in l.u.s.trous splashes of color, and his snowy cuffs and cravat had a radiance unknown at Selden. He wore a turquoise waistcoat embroidered with pink and cream b.u.t.terflies and flowers, and a jacket of peac.o.c.k blue to match the plumes in his hat. My mother, I thought with amazement, would have worn silks like this, iridescent and gorgeous. His brilliance scattered over everything else like pollen. The room, which had always seemed dull, was mellow with the textures of ancient wood and pewter. Even the plain food was spiced by the presence of Robert Aislabie.

Meanwhile, he told us his story. He was the younger son of a Norfolk farmer, had studied for a brief spell at Cambridge with a view to the church but found himself too liberal in his views, and had instead gone into trade with an uncle. By the time he was nineteen, Aislabie had so successfully invested spare income in the import of mola.s.ses and cotton, the export of refined sugar and cloth, that he was able to buy South Sea stock. While others lost heavily when the Bubble burst, Aislabie sold out in the nick of time and transferred his funds into coffee, tea, chocolate, and silk. But business was still precarious. Recently, he had lost an entire cargo during a shipboard fire. Fire was the scourge of shipping because it could wipe out profits in half an hour. So, having read my father's recent paper on phlogiston during one of his frequent visits to the Royal Society, of which he hoped soon to be admitted as a fellow, Aislabie had come to Selden seeking advice on how ships might best be protected against fire.

While my father and Aislabie discussed the combustible nature of shipping materials, I risked a few peeps at Aislabie's face. His nose in profile was straight and long but quite broad at the tip with prominent nostrils, and an intriguing little hollow beside his mouth came and went when he smiled. Beside him, my father was like a dry twig next to a young birch. My father's crabbed hands had yellow nails, his neck was wizened, his gums were nearly toothless, and his table manners were, I now realized, disgusting. He carried dripping lumps of meat to the center of the table to dip them in the salt, sopped his bread in the sauce, stuffed his cheeks with food, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. If asked a question, he never answered immediately but scrutinized it as if it were a bit of moth-eaten cloth. Aislabie, meanwhile, had the muscular hands of a farmer's son, used fork and knife with careless ease, cut his meat very small, and pressed his lips together after each new mouthful.

Toward the end of the meal, my father picked up his staff, heaved himself away from the table, and went to p.i.s.s in the pot behind a curtain. I suffered as I heard him fart and sigh and release a trickle.

For perhaps three minutes, Aislabie and I were alone. At first he didn't speak, but then he said, "Mistress Selden. Your ribbon has come loose, and I'm afraid you're about to lose it altogether." His voice had many layers: a throatiness and soft sibilance that made me shudder. I glanced up and saw that his eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with laughter because of the activities behind the curtain.

The ribbon had fluttered over my shoulder. When I tugged at the end, more and more slid away and my hair fell down. I pulled out the ribbon and tried to pin up my hair, but now I was in a worse state, because by lifting my arms I had strained the precarious arrangement of my neckerchief so that I had to cover my bosom with my hair and thrust the ribbon into my pocket. Fortunately, when I glanced at Aislabie, he seemed unaware of my discomfort, only smiled so that the dimple came in his cheek.

My father sat down again and began his nighttime yawns. Once started, they went on and on, contorting his face until he was like an ancient lizard. Aislabie leaped to his feet, apologized for keeping us too long, and asked permission to come back soon in case my father had any further thoughts on the application of the phlogiston theory to shipping. My father said that he was about to leave on his annual trip to London, but Aislabie could call again in two days' time.

I followed Aislabie across the entrance hall and waited with him in front of the house while Gill brought his horse. The top of my head was level with his upper arm, and we stood so close that the tip of his boot almost touched my uneven hem. We said nothing, but when he mounted I stepped away and looked up at him. At first he gave me a polite smile of farewell, but then his eyes filled with heat and I thought I saw into his soul, pure as gold itself. He pulled the reins, the horse reared its powerful front legs, and they were gone.

WHEN I GOT back to the dining parlor my father peered at me. "Well?"

"Father?"

"What are your observations?"

Since the Shales episode, I had learned to be cautious. "I don't have any."

"You must. What did you see?"

"I saw a young man, Father."

"What else?"

"He held you in a great deal of esteem."

He laughed through his nose and jabbed his staff at me. "He had no more respect for me than for a barrel of good sherry. He'll give me as much attention as he needs until he gets what he wants, then he'll drop me-except for the fun he'll have at my expense in his coffeehouse. So think again, Emilie. Tell me what you saw."

"I saw a young man who traveled a long way to ask your opinion. He has a problem and thinks you can solve it. Where is the harm in that? You've always taught me that one of the keys to success is knowing where to look for answers."

"There is no harm, Emilie, so long as you're not taken in. But you were. You missed all the signs. You think that the man is after knowledge, when what he actually wants is profit. Tell me how I know."

I was as close to tears as I'd been in years. I had rarely seen my father so virulent in his attack of anyone except Shales, who had dared challenge the validity of alchemy, and various charlatans guilty of publishing rubbish. M. etienne-Francois Geoffroy, for instance, had devised a table that ordered chemical substances according to their affinities for each other, but he had made the mistake of mixing up physical and chemical properties, an error so fundamental that my father had spent weeks muttering that it was beneath his dignity to publish a rebuke.

"Tell me." His eyes had gone cold.

"His clothes were very fine," I said at last.

"Ah yes, they were. But don't you go confusing the quality of what a man wears with the quality of his soul. Anyone with a bit of money can pay for expensive tailoring."

"He dressed with care. What's wrong with that? He wanted to impress you."

"No. He wanted to overwhelm me, because he knew that I was a reclusive old man. If he'd wanted to please me, he would have dressed plainly. Now what else?"

"Nothing else."

He tore off his wig and ran his hand across the stubble of white hair. "Emilie. Observe. Think. What did he talk about?"

"Himself mostly."

"Money. He talked about money. The making of money. What else?"

"Nothing. I saw nothing else."

"Then you're a fool. I've wasted my time on you. One step outside the laboratory, one glimpse of finery, and all I've taught disappears. You've been dazzled. I'll make a record in my notebook. He pretended to be interested in phlogiston, Emilie, and I suppose he might be, if it will save him a few hundred pounds. But he took no notes or references. His eyes glazed when I talked to him. He's gone away no better off than when he came."

"Then why was he here? Why did he travel such a long way?"

"That's the only reason I'll let him come back. I want to find out."

[ 7 ].

FOR THE NEXT two nights, I scarcely slept while I thought about Robert Aislabie. My father had seen him in a false light, distorted by the lens of age and prejudice. Aislabie was perfect. Every corpuscle in my body shook at the memory of his smile, his sideways glance, the quirk of his lip, the voice that was mined from a secret place inside him. I wanted to see him again so much that it was all I could do to stop myself from rushing to the gates every ten minutes. The ground under my feet was wafer thin, and I thought I might fall into a pit of despair if he didn't come back. And all the while I had to pretend that nothing had changed. My father was getting ready for his trip to London, and there was work to be done copying papers and putting the laboratory in order.

Time behaved with extraordinary waywardness-crawling minute by minute or springing forward in leaps and bounds-until at four o'clock on the second day I heard his horse and a brisk knock. I was ready, of course, had been for two days, with my hair brushed under a clean cap. When I opened the door, I allowed myself one glance only-any more and he would see how my whole being was on fire with longing-but that glance was enough. His eyes looked directly into mine, smiled, went misty. We said nothing as I led him as before to the library. This time he spent only half an hour with my father while I walked up and down the screens pa.s.sage, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing the two open doors to the entrance hall. I was carrying a straw hat, so that when he came out I would seem to be on my way to the garden.

The door opened, and he caught me on my twentieth trek down the pa.s.sage. I curtsied. He bowed. "Mistress Selden."

He leaned his shoulder against the doorway with his hat tucked under one arm, the other raised to grasp the lintel, but he was not at ease. His voice was low and his color high. My father must have been unkind. My ancestors stared past him from above their starched ruffs, and I was struck by the contrast. There was nothing two-dimensional about Aislabie. He was breathing and muscular, with stray hairs floating loose from his rippling wig and soft fabrics tumbling at his throat and wrists.

"That hat looks very purposeful," he said.

"I am on my way to the orchard."

He nodded, glanced at the closed library door, transferred his own hat from right hand to left, and raised his elbow in a gesture I was too ignorant to understand. "Perhaps you will show me?"

Instead of taking his arm, I walked down the kitchen pa.s.sage and through the stable yard to the orchard, where we stood apart from each other. I had no words. I was, like my father p.i.s.sing into the chamber pot, utterly exposed. Bees probed the clover, b.u.t.terflies clung together in midair, a blackbird called throatily from its perch on a medlar. Aislabie asked about the trees and whether they cropped well. I managed a yes and was silent. He bowed abruptly and turned away. I ran after him until we were in the shade of the stable yard, where desperation at last put words into my mouth. "Did my father tell you what you needed to know?"

His face, now I dared look at it, was sad. The light had gone from his eyes. "Your father said he couldn't help me any further."

"But I could. I know everything he knows. More."

I swayed closer, but he took a step back and bowed. "Thank you, Mistress Selden." Then he called for his horse. For one more moment I was close enough to touch him-I reached out and put my finger on the back of his arm so lightly that he couldn't possibly have known, but I felt his heat and the hardness of muscle. Then Gill brought his horse, and Aislabie swung himself into the saddle. He raised his arm in farewell, but didn't look at me again.

[ 8 ].

MY FATHER WAS leaving for London the next day. Our last meal together was usually full of his instructions and my rea.s.surances, but at supper that night I was so agitated I couldn't speak to him. In my mind, I was following Aislabie along the road to London. My father-this obstinate, wrongheaded, filthy old man-was the reason for our separation.

He handed me his pipe, but I spilled a few strands of tobacco, so he s.n.a.t.c.hed it back and lit it himself.

"While I am away, Emilie, you are to give the rose a quarter turn every eight hours so that its petals dry evenly. In the meantime, translate the Principia, the 1723 edition-at least to the end of Book One-by the . . ."

For the first time in my life I interrupted him. "What did Mr. Aislabie want, Father?"

He sucked his pipe and stared blankly.

"Did you talk about phlogiston?"

"He was no more interested in phlogiston than is Mrs. Gill."

"Well, what then?"

He jabbed the bowl of the pipe into my face. "He pretended to have a broad interest in the nature of fire, but he is an impostor. Alchemy, that's what he was after. He's been sniffing around in London and found out my reputation. But of course he's not after knowledge, only gold. The next thing he'll be asking about is the philosopher's stone. He calls himself a modern man, but just in case there's an easy fortune to be made he's willing to make himself charming to me. He's already tried to wheedle his way into the laboratory by asking me if I would demonstrate the theory of negative air. He was trying to impress me, of course, so I tested him by mentioning Ga.s.sendi's Syntagma and the theory of the atom, but he had never heard of either, so I said if he had any more questions he could call on me at the society in Crane Court. I won't have him here again. Alchemy is what he wanted, and he wasn't even honest enough to say so."

I sat in silence for a while. Then I said, "Take me with you to London, Father."

"Whatever for?"

"I want to see what it's like there. I want to see where Mother was born."

He knocked his pipe against the side of the hearth. "There's no place for you in London."

"I wouldn't be a nuisance. Please, Father."

"Who would take care of the rose?"

"Gill."

"No, no, it has to be you."

"Don't leave me, Father."

He groped for his staff and got up. "It's all that man. You were satisfied before."

"I don't think I was. I think I was impatient. I was waiting for something to happen."

"The notebook," he said suddenly. "I'll write this in the notebook."

"Yes, you must. But in the meantime, please let me go to London."

We stared at each other. He looked baffled and furious, and I knew it was hopeless.

He didn't put out his hand to be kissed, so I walked away with my head high. In the morning, I watched Gill drive our ancient carriage out of the stable yard. My father was shut up tight inside. It was my job to fasten the gates behind them. Once I had dropped the iron latch, I turned to face Selden. I would rather die than go back to the laboratory where I had worked all yesterday with such high hopes of seeing Robert Aislabie, so instead I lay on my bed and relived again and again the minutes with him in the orchard. He had been bored. My father had offended him. He had been eager to leave. I would never see him again.

[ 9 ].

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Gill returned with the empty carriage. In a month or so, when summoned, he would drive back to London and collect my father. This period of his master's absence was traditionally one of holiday for him, and he was rarely to be seen. Mrs. Gill, by contrast, was even busier than usual and disappeared into the kitchen of her own cottage, where she brewed up potions for the coming winter. In the past, I would have helped her, but now I was too restless and impatient. Then she was called out to a difficult birth in Selden Wick. She thought I was studying, but actually I roamed down to the river, dabbled my feet, and watched the water flow busily toward London and Aislabie. It seemed to taunt me by touching my feet and rushing on and on. Water couldn't be held back and restrained. Water, like fire, was awesome; a servant one moment, a force of destruction the next.

On the way home through the woods, I noticed that some leaves had already fallen and the nettles were dusty. I leaned on the papery trunk of a silver birch and closed my eyes. My neglected studies, the rose in the laboratory, and the prison that Selden had become dragged at me like a heavy cloak. Then there was movement on the track behind me, and suddenly Aislabie walked out of my longings and into the Selden woods as if I had conjured him up. He had slung his red coat over his shoulder, and his boots shone. I clutched the tree and stared stupidly up at his smiling face.

There was a little crease between his brows as if he was unsure of how I might react, then he bowed with what I took to be a London flourish-I could see London in every complicated st.i.tch of his clothing. "Mistress Aislabie, I want to apologize for my rudeness. Last time I came your father was so brusque that I was somewhat offended. He was suspicious of my motives and disparaged my business interests. I'm sorry that in my anger I treated you so coolly, and I have come to take you up on your kind offer. Perhaps you and I could have a conversation about phlogiston." His smile slanted from the corner of his eye to the dimple in his cheek, and his elbow was bent toward me like last time. I realized that I was expected to slide my hand through the s.p.a.ce between his arm and his body, and this procedure drew me up so close I could scarcely breathe. My fingers skimmed the material of his sleeve, and the slightest movement brought his flesh hard under my fingers.

He tightened my arm against his side. "Phlogiston," he said.

Freshness returned to the leaves, and I seemed to fly beside him as I gabbled in my attempt to impress. "We've been working on phlogiston for four years, and although in one way the theory does much to explain how fire happens, there are problems. The main difficulty is that metals gain weight when heated to a calx-you would expect them to lose weight because of the phlogiston lost to the air. Some people support a theory called 'negative weight'-they think that bodies lose their porous nature when they're burned, and therefore the air presses down harder on them and they aren't so buoyant and seem heavier. We think this theory is unsupportable."

We perched on either side of a slimy pond in the sunken garden and gazed intently into the jungle of water lilies as if we really cared about the fish that came gasping to the surface. But actually all I saw was our faces reflected dimly in the green water.

"Fire is one of the four elements," I said, "the Materia Prima from which all matter is formed. The ancients believed that fire was masculine." I was hearing words for the first time, and they made me quiver. Fire. Masculine. Aislabie was the personification of masculinity and heat. "Fire is present in sulfur and phosphorus. It is a transforming force. But we don't know what fire is or how it is made."

His reflection nodded. And now I couldn't stop. I wasn't used to an audience and thought my only chance of keeping his interest was to impress him with what I knew. So I spilled out information on common air, elasticated air, geometry, and mathematics. The only subject I daren't mention, of course, was alchemy.

We walked on along the mossy terraces up to the jungle of the rose garden. I was enchanted by a new, double consciousness: Emilie, the watcher of Emilie, the girl in the midst of this extraordinary experience. There was Aislabie, the incarnation of an impossible dream, and here was Emilie, so excited she must be physically shining, like phosphorus. My Selden world was utterly transformed. The neglected garden was now full of beautiful secrets: a stone bench hiding behind a shower of full-blown roses and a tangle of briars wrapped round the throat of a lichened dryad.

I was much too shy to ask Aislabie about himself. He was a novelty, from the fine cloth of his coat to the texture of his wig. I saw him as a perfect equation, like Kepler's third law of celestial harmony, which states the proportion between the time taken for a planet to orbit the sun and its distance from the sun. He stayed for an hour, and then we walked back to fetch his horse from the woods. "So, Mistress Emilie, we have established that the phlogiston theory won't save my cargoes or my pocket, but what have you offered instead? A blank." The touch of his lips on my hand connected disturbingly to nerves in my b.r.e.a.s.t.s; the heat of his breath and the way he smelled of flowers and evergreen made my thighs ache. My hand stayed in his.

"I can warn you not to ventilate your precious cargo too much, because one thing we do know is that fire loves the air and won't burn in a vacuum," I said.

"Thank you. But of course I must have some ventilation in my hold or the rot will set in. Anything else?"

I shook my head, dumb with misery. He was slipping away from me.

He kissed my hand again, and while his head was dipped I risked a proper look along the slope of his back, but he glanced up and caught my eye. "Mistress Emilie. I may stay just a little while longer in Buckinghamshire. If I do, would I perhaps find you again some day in this wood?"

"You might."

"Would you mind?"

I shook my head. He nodded thoughtfully, gave a deep bow, untied his chestnut horse, and led it away. His stride was easy, his hips narrow, his shoulders straight and strong. This time he wasn't in a hurry, and where the track bent he turned and waved. My heart swayed on the palm of his hand.

[ 10 ].