The Alchemist's Daughter Part 3

I NEVER KNEW when he would come or what mood he'd be in. Sometimes he was lighthearted, offered his arm, and teased me; sometimes he was distant and clasped his hands behind his back. He talked of places, politicians, writers, countries, clubs, sports I'd never heard of, and my total ignorance of the world was laid bare. After he left, I spent the evening foraging through our library. An ancient map of London taught me to place Lambeth, Southwark, Vauxhall, Leadenhall, and Ludgate, but it couldn't help me with Lloyd's or Jonathan's, with Addison, Gay, Defoe, Pope, Walpole, Whigs and Tories. Before I met Aislabie, I thought I knew almost everything. After a couple of hours in his company, I found I knew next to nothing.

And what I was most ignorant about was myself. I knew the Emilie who had lived at Selden for nineteen years with her father, but I had no knowledge of this person who woke each morning with throbbing wrists and beating heart because she wanted more, more, more of Aislabie. He changed my image of myself. On the day I told him about my French mother, he put his hand under my chin and said, "Yes, that accounts for it. I have never in my life seen eyes like yours. I lie in bed at night wondering how anything so black could be so bright."

I stored up the wonderful thought that at the same time I was awake thinking of him, he thought of me. "My mother died on the day I was born. Her window was on the second floor-there, four from the end." I pointed to the most ancient part of the house, gray stone with crooked windows. And suddenly, for the first time in my life, I felt pitiable. Under the molten gaze of his blue eyes, I felt that I should have a mother.

"Tell me about her," he said.

"I wish I could. All I know is that she was French and that her family were silk weavers."

"Their name?"

"De Lery."

He shook his head. "Don't know of them."

Another locked door swung wide open. Was it possible that this man could knit his brow, run through a few names, and come that close to knowing my mother's family? "How would you know them?"

He laughed. "I've dabbled in silk in my time. Most merchants do, but it's a cutthroat old world."

"There is a dye named after my mother's family called De Lery green."

He shrugged. "Perhaps there's family left."

"I doubt it. Mrs. Gill says there was a fire in my grandfather's house, and after that the family went back to France. I never met any of them."

"Which part of France?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe Paris. Beautiful city. You'd like it. You should go looking for your mother's family. You never know, they might have flourished."

"I've never even been to London."

"You shall. You shall go to London. You'd take London by storm. You are so different. People are quickly bored in London. You'd amaze them." He kissed each fingertip except for the little finger, which he held between his lips and caressed with his tongue, thereby doing astonishing things to my insides. "My motherless girl. My sleeping beauty."

[ 11 ].

WHEN I RETURNED to the house, I found an unexpected and not very welcome visitor in the entrance hall. Reverend Shales was hanging about by a window with the air of one who had been there a long time. He had removed his coat and wig, revealing a head of cropped, curling hair. He hastily replaced the wig but not the coat, then bowed. "I hope you're well, Mistress Selden."

I had intended to lie on my bed and suck Aislabie's hot kisses from my fingers. Instead I stood at another window and smiled dazedly at Shales, who seemed very austere in his plain waistcoat. It was months since I'd seen him. The heat had glazed his skin, and he was less gaunt than I remembered.

"I'm aware that your father is away and wondered if you were lonely. Perhaps I could encourage you to come to church," he said.

I nearly laughed. "It's a kind thought, Reverend Shales, but I'm not lonely."

He shot me a surprisingly keen look. "There are few in Selden who share my love of natural philosophy. I should like to discuss my research with you and especially explore the issue of combustion. Everywhere I go in the parishes, I hear of your reputation for learning. I have been prevented from calling by my sense that it might be disloyal to your father, in view of his quarrel with me. What do you think?"

This time I did laugh. "I think you're right."

There was a long silence, during which he pressed his lips together and stared out of the window. On our previous encounters, he had not seemed unsure of himself, and his struggle to find words was unsettling. I was struck by how crowded my life had become, what with Aislabie in the garden and Shales in the entrance hall.

Shales suddenly slapped the wall and plucked his hat off a nearby chair. "Mistress Selden, I wish I knew you better. If I did you might do me the honor of listening to me."

"I am listening to you, Reverend Shales."

"There is word in the village that you have been receiving a visitor. Indeed, I have seen this visitor myself and tried to speak with him, but he had urgent business elsewhere so our conversation was brief and unproductive. I beg you to be careful." I was speechless but in any case he hadn't finished. "At least wait for your father to come back before you commit yourself to some irreversible step."

"I have no intention of committing myself to an irreversible step."

"Of course. No. But sometimes it is hard to see the danger. People can be very persuasive."

"I think you forget who I am, Reverend Shales. I am not some stupid village girl."

He nodded several times, turned his hat in his hands, and gave me another searching glance. "Of course. Well, thank you for hearing me."

I folded my arms and waited for him to leave, but he only got as far as the door before turning back. We stared at each other, and I was disconcerted by the contrast between this man and Aislabie, and understood that Shales would not have come in defiance of my father unless strongly provoked. He seemed trustworthy-there was an urgency about him, a clarity in his eye that was hard to doubt-whereas Aislabie was all light and shade, quirky, mischievous, unpredictable.

Shales said, "I think your father would forgive us if we were to read a book or two together. I'm sure we could make great progress. You, after all, are an authority on fire, and my book is about air. And we could keep away from the th.o.r.n.y subject of alchemy."

"The trouble is, Reverend Shales, I think as my father does about alchemy. How could I talk to you if I knew that secretly you were disapproving of me and despising me for the work I do with my father?"

"Despise? No."

"Nevertheless."

The entrance hall was a large low room, unfurnished except for some ancient chairs, the Bosworth armor, a few pictures, and the oak staircase. Dusty sunlight fell on the scratched and tarnished boards. Shales suddenly came across and took my hand, the same hand that had been caressed so ardently by Aislabie a few moments before, and touched it briefly with his lips. "I beg you to take care of yourself, Mistress Selden."

"Thank you, Reverend Shales, be sure I shall." And then he did go at last, although he turned back at the door, and I had a last glimpse of his troubled face. I watched him from the window as he crossed the lawn and let himself out, clanging the side gate shut behind him. I understood that he was informing the village that his visit, at least, was not clandestine.

I paced from window to window and wished he'd never come to spoil the enchantment of my afternoon with Aislabie. He was ridiculously tall and prim. And how dare he listen to gossip? But there was a part of me that was flattered, and just for a moment I imagined discussing the nature of fire with a fellow of the Royal Society other than my father. Then I remembered how Aislabie had kissed my fingertips, and I ran up to my chamber, lay on my bed, and relived climbing the terrace steps at his side, my arm resting on his and my fingers interlaced in his warm hand.

[ 12 ].

SELDEN WAS LOOSENING its grip on me. I never went near the laboratory anymore because I was too busy throwing open all the lattices that weren't sealed up with damp, and bringing armfuls of flowers and branches into the house. I saw them now not as specimens but as part of a shifting green and gold world I shared with Aislabie. The time he wasn't there was full of longing and excitement. Where would he touch me next? Once, while asking the name of a little bird, he stood behind me and laid his hand on the back of my neck as if to support himself. My knees buckled. His thumb moved an inch upward and a thread tugged at my stomach and v.a.g.i.n.a and went on tugging long after he had gone. My body, it seemed, had functions and responses that were not covered by Vesalius or any other author in our library.

I understood that this was love. My father had used Homer to teach me Greek, so even I knew that it was natural for a woman to yearn for a man. And alchemical literature is full of couplings. One of my favorite books, the Mutus Liber, or Wordless Book, shows fifteen figures, among them a man and woman working together at their alchemy. In one picture, the man clutches a child to his bosom; in the last, they join hands in joy of the completed work. I thought about my extraordinary transformation and decided that I was ready to be part of a pair. I was half of Aislabie now, incomplete unless we were together.

On his fifth visit, I led him to the orchard, where I wanted to show him the gla.s.s-sided beehive Gill had built under my father's instruction. "We think the bees have a different signal to show whether food is far or near," I said. "And bees observe geometrical patterns, because they move in circles and semicircles."

Aislabie pretended to be nervous of the bees, so we sat under a distant apple tree. As I lay back on my elbows and looked up at the bubbles of apples and the burning sky, I thought my desire for him would come gushing out and drown us both, so to hide my longing I started talking again. "When Isaac Newton stared at the sun through a gla.s.s, he blinded himself for months afterward."

"What a lot you know about Newton." He leaned on one elbow and smiled into my eyes. His full-lipped mouth fascinated me because it was so pliant-it could smile or frown or tease with the merest twitch of a muscle.

"The image of the sun was scorched into his retina, but even from his pain he made deductions. He studied the image within his head and noted that there are spots in the sun." Aislabie brought my hand to his lips, kissed each knuckle, and played the tip of his tongue across the scar from when I first opened the door to him. My throat went slack, but I babbled on. "Newton even pressed a bodkin between his eyeball and the socket in order to distort his vision and understand the play of light on the retina . . ."

He untied my hat and pushed it off, pulled out the pink ribbon, and wound his hand through my hair. Then he kissed my mouth. "Emilie. Silence, Emilie."

I had barely been kissed in all my nineteen years except for dry little pecks on the cheek or hand from my father and the occasional bosomy hug from Mrs. Gill, so I was entranced by what that kiss did to me and thought it the loveliest thing I knew to have my mouth fastened to his. When our tongues touched, my knees fell apart, and I thought, Why have I been wasting my time all these years not being kissed?

The kiss, which went on and on, unhinged me. I started to cry and shrank away in shame, but Aislabie seemed not to mind. Instead, he gathered me into his lap and sat with his back to the tree, stroking my cheek and shoulder, kissing the tears, pressing his mouth to my neck, and whispering, "My Emilie. Emilie." I clung to his neck and kissed him harder.

Love, I thought, was more powerful than alchemy. It had transformed us both. Aislabie had come to our house the self-a.s.sured London gentleman b.u.t.toned up in his lovely waistcoat, but now he was all loose cravat and floating shirtsleeves. I heard his heavy breathing and thought that I, Emilie, had done this, touched him so that he was no longer himself but a panting creature whose mouth and hands searched my flesh, exposing my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and knees almost without him knowing what he did. I sank under him and clamored for more.

But as we rolled among the daisies and bobbles of fallen fruit, my education, which had included the dissection of plants, fish, and mammals, rea.s.serted itself a little. My father and I, in our desire to get to the essence of things, had studied the sac of tiny eggs in the body of a female trout and made detailed observations as to why a flower needs the bee to reproduce itself. It dawned on me that my body had changed its behavior in such a radical and clamorous way during the past few minutes because it was priming itself not just for love, but for reproduction.

I cried, "No," but Aislabie's tongue filled my mouth. I pushed his shoulder and jolted my knee, but he was a stranger and strong, and I was feeble as a reed under him. Dark shadows came to my sunshiny mind. A tiny creature, perhaps a bee, alighted on my bare calf. Fear tightened my stomach and dried the tears on my cheek.

"No," I said more insistently, but he threw my skirt up to my neck and caged me in my petticoats. I flung my head from side to side-first toward the tree, then to the hive where the bees carried on their business as usual-but he took hold of my chin and pulled my mouth back under his. The sun burned my thighs. I locked them together, but he had finished fumbling with his own clothes and suddenly pressed his hand onto my pubic bone.

I went still and quiet and stared up into his eyes as his fingers worked their way inside me until I was helpless as a frog spread out for dissection. Then he took his hand away and lifted himself up, never taking his eyes from my face as I felt a nudge and then the pressure of a long slow lunge that pushed my head against a root and split my insides apart. Emilie, the Emilie I had known, the clever, irritable, longing, knowing Emilie, sank away into the lush gra.s.s, leaving only a gaping vessel for Aislabie.

The inside of my head fogged with curiosity and the need to please. He lowered himself until his thighs connected to mine and my mouth was covered and I was all Aislabie, filled up by Aislabie, drinking him in as he worked his knees between mine, took hold of my b.u.t.tocks and pushed harder, harder until I felt the knock on my womb and little red flames inside my thighs. Then he lifted himself out, kissed my wet belly, covered me up, and drew me back onto his lap.

I pulled up my knees like a child, buried my face in his crumpled neckcloth, and thought, It is over. I am different.

"We will be married, Emilie," he said.

[ 13 ].

WHEN MY FATHER came home ten days later, I didn't meet him at the gate as I had every other year because I thought he was bound to see Aislabie staring out of my eyes.

After supper, my tired, shrunken father sank deep in his chair, put his hand to his forehead, and peered about as if to rea.s.sure himself that he was actually home. There was a brown paper package on the table. "A gift, Emilie," he said.

He had brought me things from London before-my prism, for example-but he had never called them gifts. I could not bear to open the parcel, to see the gleam of antic.i.p.ation in his eye or to think that he had perhaps remembered our argument and racked his brains for a way of making things better between us. "Open it," he said. "Go on."

I untied the string. It was a volume of lectures, in Latin, by the Dutch Boerhaave. "Hot off the press," said my father, and his eyes sparked with rare humor. "Unauthorized, I think. You will be one of the first in this country to read him, Emilie, and you will find so much to interest you. He thinks as you do on phlogiston, and he is eloquent on the subject of fire. He has weighed it and concluded that although it is an element, it is weightless."

I opened the book for the sake of showing a little interest and found a diagram of a thermometer, but I couldn't take in what I saw. My father began a long speech about what he had seen in London, and for the first time I realized that he was not just telling me things for the sake of my education but to relive each new experience for himself. "I visited Sir Isaac in his Kensington house. He's getting more and more infirm, I thought, terrible cough."

I had never been less interested in the state of Newton's health, but I said, "What did you talk about?"

"He mentioned the possibility of a translation of the Principia into English. Of course, he has mixed feelings about that-doesn't want it to fall into ignorant hands. How is your own translation, Emilie?"

"I didn't have much time, after all."

"Nor for the laboratory," he said sharply. "I found the rose as I'd left it."

We had lit his pipe, so I was kneeling at his feet. "I should like to marry Robert Aislabie, Father." His head jerked back and he fumbled for his staff, which instead fell to the floor with a clatter. I picked it up and gave it to him. "What do you think?"

"I think you will not marry anyone, especially not him."

"I believe I must." I thought of the weight in my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, my lack of appet.i.te, my desire to avoid scrutiny by Mrs. Gill. "I believe I may be carrying his child."

The effect of this news on my father was so terrible I could almost have wished the last month undone. He seemed to shrivel before my eyes until he was yellow and ancient. His hand came up and covered his face.

"Please, Father, I know I shall be happy."

He wouldn't speak to me, though I knelt there for some minutes stroking his coat and hand, pleading with him. Then I retreated to the window. "Father. Please give me your blessing. I am sorry if I have hurt you. But please, Father. You know how it is to love. I believe you loved my mother. Don't you remember? So you must know how it was. Father. Father." My voice faded. Outside it was almost dark, but I could still see the bars of the old gates. I wanted to be on the other side of them, driven by Aislabie into a painless new life.

After half an hour, I crept away, and from that day I was shut out of the laboratory and the library. If we happened to meet in the pa.s.sage, my father ignored me; and though every few hours I went and knocked on the door, he never answered.

I dreaded to think what he wrote in his notebook that night.

CHAPTER THREE.

Three Letters in Between [ 1 ].

ON THE DAY after my father's return, Mrs. Gill found me in the screens pa.s.sage, where I was keeping watch on the library door in case he came out. "Follow me," she said.

I followed. There was no disobeying Mrs. Gill when she used that voice. She stood me under the high kitchen window and took hold of my shoulders so she could study my face. "What have you done?"

I couldn't speak for dread of what she'd say next. Suddenly she cried, "While your father was gone, you were in my care, Emilie." I stared at her. I had never seen her weak or incapable, but now she was both. Her skin was clammy and her lips trembling.

"I love him," I said.

She pushed me away, picked up the corner of her ap.r.o.n, and rubbed her eyes. "Love him. Love him. You know nothing about it. I should have seen. I should have known what was coming. I should have been here."

"It's not your fault," I said.

"It's too late for fault. Or so it seems. Sit down, Emilie. Listen very carefully. You don't have to marry this Mr. Aislabie. There are other choices. The baby, if indeed there is a baby, might miscarry." She looked me hard in the eye.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you do not yet know if the baby will survive to full term."

"I want to marry him," I said, "baby or not."

"Your father will relent in the end. I'm sure. We could keep the baby here. Or you could marry him in time, when you know him better."

"I'll marry Aislabie soon," I said.

"You don't know him. What do you know of him except that he is the type of man who seduces a girl the moment her father's back is turned?"

"Seduce." I considered the word. Seducere. To lead aside. "No. I wanted him."

Suddenly she took me in her arms and pressed my head to her shoulder. "Oh, my lamb. We have failed you."

"No. No." I drew back and looked at her in horror. Why was I pitiable because I loved Aislabie? I hurried out of the kitchen, and there was Gill hanging about at the scullery door, well within earshot. He looked blindly past me as if terrified of meeting my eye and admitting the truth of what had happened.

[ 2 ].

A PALL OF silence fell on Selden as the four of us crept about, miserably isolated. I had fractured the rhythm of our lives. Every few days I wrote a letter to Aislabie. My writing covered both sides of a page crossways and down, as if by writing I would forge an inky chain between us. I told him every last detail of my life at Selden, including my father's grief, and when I was sure of it I told him about the baby. His letters in reply were brief but ardent. A child, he wrote. Dearest, dearest Emilie. You can have no idea how happy I feel. All my life I have been working toward this. It even makes me believe after all that there is some providence that responds if we want something enough and labor hard enough to achieve it. To have you, Emilie, as my wife, and to be the father of our child . . . I will come very soon, within a fortnight, to make arrangements with your father.