The Alchemist's Daughter Part 5

"If we were to go to the place where you were born."

"You mean down across the bridge? Stoney Street. But why would we go there?"

"If we wanted to visit your parents."

She fixed me with expressionless eyes. "Parents?" And then it dawned on me. Sarah had been sp.a.w.ned like a tadpole. Her history was short as her own memory, and at the thought of this I suddenly yearned to be back at Selden. What family did I have, come to think of it, except for Aislabie?

[ 9 ].

NOW THAT I was better, we were to host a party in my honor, but first I had to be trained. I couldn't help being interested in any new procedures and was an expert pupil. Aislabie told me to choose the color for a gown, which duly arrived-emerald green as a tribute to my mother-with a plunging neck, a cascade of lace at the elbows, and a petticoat of b.u.t.tery satin.

Sarah handled the gown as if it might poison her fingers. "I told you. Green's unlucky."

"In the country, everything's green, and yet it is not an unlucky place."

"I shouldn't like to go there." I watched in the mirror as she hooked up the bodice, and I could tell from the set of her jaw that she really meant what she said. The gown pinched under the bosom and burst like a seedpod below the waist. For a moment I thought it hideously ill-fitting, but she knelt down and began a series of adjustments to the hem, pulling and tucking, inserting pins at the waist and under the arm, dragging at the sleeves, until suddenly the dress and I looked as if we belonged together.

"Where would my husband have found such a gown?" I asked.

"Benjamin Cole," she said through a mouthful of pins, "for the fabric."

"Who is Benjamin Cole?"

"Merchant. St. Paul's Churchyard." She ran her pearly little nail under a strip of lace and her eyes were full of yearning. "And that lace is from Gostlin's. It's the best."

"If you like, you can try the dress on," I said.

She recoiled as if I had hit her and bustled about folding my shift and lifting my shoes from their box. "These are from a new shoemaker in Pall Mall. French. See the embroidery. I'd say forty st.i.tches to the inch." She spoke with great respect as she inserted her fist to mold the fabric, arranged them on the floor, and held my hand gravely so that I would keep my balance when I stepped into them. "Now I'll show you the curtsy." Picking up her skirts, she put her right foot behind the left and performed a wonderful little bob with her head inclined in such a way that she could still peep at herself in the mirror. When I tried, of course, I staggered, crumpled my skirts, caught my heel on a petticoat hem. She laughed, and I glimpsed her little teeth, a sudden, childish merriment in the eye, even malicious satisfaction that she could curtsy and I couldn't. But when she caught me looking, she sobered immediately. "You must do it again," she ordered. So I tried again and again until she was satisfied. "We will practice again tomorrow."

It struck me, as she left, that my father would have applauded Sarah's determination to get things absolutely right. Like Sir Isaac, he would have said, she is an expert.

A dancing master was hired to show me how to wield a fan and dance a few simple sets, and, best of all, Aislabie set aside an hour each day to teach me hazard, backgammon, ombre, and cribbage. I loved the intimacy of those lessons held in the smoky little back room with the velvet curtains drawn and candles lit. He sat me on his knee so he could look at my hand and show me how to hold the cards close to my chest, and interspersed each instruction with kisses on my shoulder or the back of my neck, so that more often than not our games ended in the bedroom.

Then one morning Sarah pressed me into a chair, bit her lip, took my earlobe between finger and thumb, and pushed a needle into me. In the mirror, I saw her absorption and the flash of excitement as blood trickled along my jawbone. She picked up a pearl droplet and forced it into the hole. Dizzy with pain, I laid my head on my arm, but she turned my neck and took hold of the other ear. Only when it was all done and she had wiped away the blood did she lean forward and breathe a word in my ear: "Good."

[ 10 ].

ON THE NIGHT of the party, my waist was corseted to a couple of hands' span and my hair piled high under a speck of lawn, but I resisted paints and patches. When Aislabie saw me, he lifted me off my feet, kissed my mouth, pushed a silk nosegay between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and gave Sarah a nod of approval. My feet in their two-inch heels went clip-clop as he led me downstairs.

Our house was transformed. The furniture, paintings, rugs, and parrot had disappeared behind a dazzling crowd of people. We stood above them and there was sudden quiet, a bloom of upturned faces, then applause, and I felt a twinge of antic.i.p.ation, even pleasure. At last I had a function in the ant heap of London. Aislabie held me tight to his side as he waved and bowed with mock grandeur before leading me among them. "This is my Emilie. My little philosopher. She can sing you the music of the spheres and argue the case for Newton's fluxional method against Leibniz's differential calculus . . ."

Hands caught hold of mine, lips kissed my skin, eyes roved my face and body. A quintet was playing, and the noise confused me. I had spent nineteen years in near silence except for the groaning church organ, and I couldn't hear music without trying to work it out.

"So this is the alchemist's daughter," said a man with a complicated, wrinkled face under a toppling pile of curls. The alchemist's daughter? But I wasn't. The alchemist had cut me off. I turned in panic to my husband, but somehow my hand had been pa.s.sed onto someone else's arm. For the first time, it occurred to me that Aislabie was not unique but one of a kind. There were other Aislabies, none so playful and desirable, but dozens of young men in sumptuous wigs and elaborate waistcoats, heads full of ambition and knowledge.

A woman with a bold face, pale luxurious hair, and wide blue eyes called Lady Essington pulled me into her group. "We have to know, how did you entrap our Aislabie?"

Leaning against her leg was a little page boy. His skin was all black, and his eyes were as dark as mine. "Entrap?"

"We all wanted him. So tell me, did you cast a spell?"

"I don't know any spells."

"We don't believe you. We hear you were up to all sorts in your enchanted castle."

"Not a castle."

"What did you do there all those years? Is it true you never went anywhere? Tell us what it was like living alone with your father?"

"What it was like?"

"Weren't you bored? Didn't you long for variety?"

"I learned mathematics and natural philosophy."

"You must be very clever," said Lady Essington, smiling with her crimson lips. "Tell us what you know."

"Very little compared to some."

The ladies bent their heads seductively, and the movement of their fans slowed. I lifted my chin and felt a rush of confidence. The chance to talk about my lost studies was irresistible, especially as the fair, blue-eyed lady gave me such an encouraging nod while her black servant boy fixed me with his huge eyes. "My own special interest lies in the nature of fire."

"Fire. Fire. How pa.s.sionate and extraordinary. And what is the nature of fire?"

"I don't know. I wish I did. I can only tell you what other people have said. Sir Isaac Newton, for instance, believes that light communicates heat to bodies by the vibrations of a medium he calls ether, hundreds of times more elastic than air so that it can penetrate even solid bodies. Robert Boyle, on the other hand, thought that fire is due to fiery corpuscles that exist in the air. And then the latest theory from the Continent is phlogiston."

The ladies were eyeing each other across the top of their fans. I knew they weren't interested, but I didn't have the skill to extricate myself.

"And what does your father, the alchemist, say?" asked Lady E.

"You'd have to ask him. I have my doubts about the phlogiston theory. My own belief is that the clue to fire lies in the air. I have noticed that only part of air is used in combustion-the same part that perhaps exists in substances such as gunpowder, which will burn under water or in a vacuum. So I think that it is not air itself, but part of air, that causes fire." As I spoke I felt a great welling up of hunger for the old life, but I had lost the attention of most of my audience-one or two were whispering behind their fans, others swayed their hoops or allowed their gaze to drift past my face.

Then they suddenly straightened up and sparkled again because Aislabie had come back, brilliant in shades of green and primrose. He kissed my nose and took my hand. "Vultures," he whispered, "watch your back," then swept me away past the first-floor drawing room where silk-clad feet were dancing a measure far too complicated for my limited experience. Instead, we paused at the door of the little room where I had learned to play cards, now full of men drinking punch and smoking. They grinned and waved at me through a thick haze.

"Will you play, Mistress Aislabie?" asked my husband. He drew up a chair and stood with his hand on my shoulder. Lady E. was opposite, her blue eyes hard as sapphire as she looked above my head to him. Her black servant boy leaned his head on her arm, and his lids sank half shut over his liquid eyes. Aislabie squeezed my shoulder and kissed my hair, and at the end of half an hour I had won three guineas. The other players called it beginner's luck, but actually I owed my success to my mathematical education. The winning and losing of money meant little to me because I knew nothing about its value. I felt only a cold-blooded enjoyment in numbers added up and taken away. But I was soon exhausted, hemmed in by the hoops of other women, showered with extravagant compliments, shot through with the strange compulsion of the gaming table.

AT FOUR O'CLOCK, when the first birds were already shouting in the eaves, we went to bed. For once, Aislabie left the curtains open and a streak of moonlight fell on my pillow. He lay above me and traced the moonbeams across my face with his tongue.

I thought of Selden, where the same moonlight would be falling through the uncurtained windows of my empty bedchamber, on the silent pa.s.sageways, and into the library where my father sat by the fire, writing and writing in his secret notebook.

CHAPTER FOUR.

Journey Home [ 1 ].

AISLABIE HAD THREE AMBITIONS: the first was a son, the second was to buy a ship, the third was to know and be known by everyone. I was necessary for the first, redundant in the second, and a useful partner in the third because my educated brain and narrow French nose made me a novelty. As long as I kept my language simple, everyone wanted to talk about natural philosophy. They plied me with questions as if I was the authority on everything from gravity to gases.

The more I talked, the more homesick I became. My hand twitched for the touch of an alembic or a pair of scales. I longed to wrestle with calculus or argue about phlogiston, and anxiety for my father was like a tumor gnawing away at me. The knowledge that by just one letter he might have given me weeks of happiness made me furious with him. All that we had done together apparently counted for nothing compared to his disappointment in me. I was as bewildered now as I had been when he first locked the library door against me. He despised conventional religion, so why did he hate me simply for getting the usual order of marriage and conception wrong? My waist narrowed by the month as I grew thin with confusion, and by autumn the pink dress had so many darts in the bodice that Sarah scolded me. "You don't eat," she said.

"I'm not often hungry."

"You should eat. And you should carve. A woman should be proud to carve at her own table."

"I don't know how."

"I could teach you," she said. "I have watched enough ladies in my time."

I put my hand on her wrist. My fingers were long, bony, and scarred by too many encounters with acids and sparks; hers were small, well formed, white. "What else should I do?" I asked.

"How do you mean?"

"As a lady. What else should I do?"

"To be a proper wife, you mean?" She withdrew her hand. I had been teasing her, but she was in deadly earnest. "You should take an interest. We should be out to the Old Exchange to buy fans and ribbons. We should go walking in St. James's Park. We should go to concerts and plays and card parties. We should not be forever waiting for him."

"I don't want to go anywhere without my husband."

"Surely, madam, it's clear to you that husbands and wives are not always seen together."

She spoke coldly, as if she despised my lack of knowledge. And perhaps, I thought, as I sent her away, one of the things a lady should not do is ask her maid for advice. Perhaps that's yet another mistake.

[ 2 ].

ON THE FIRST day of January 1727, I dreamed I was lying on my mother's bed, so heavily pregnant that I couldn't get up to close the window, though leaves were blowing in from outside. When I woke, my first feeling was of overwhelming grief for the miscarried child, then disappointment that I wasn't at Selden after all. I nudged Aislabie awake and told him that I had to go home.

He nuzzled against me sleepily. "Then you shall."

"Will you come with me?"

"Would love to, Em. But can't leave business just now. Delicate stage. I have found a ship called Flora-wonderful little frigate going cheap because her owner's finances have come adrift. But don't let me stop you going."

"Will you take me to see Flora first?"

"Nothing to look at yet-sails in shreds, masts broken, a rotten little hull-but just wait till we get her under way. She'll be a beauty. My G.o.d, she'll be halfway round the world and back before the rest have left port." I loved his exuberance and sudden enthusiasms. His capacity for delight was completely alien to my cautious Selden bones. "Take Sarah with you to Selden. You'll be safe enough with her. All mouth and nails, it seems to me, that girl."

"Sarah will hate Selden. I don't think she's ever set foot outside the city."

"It's not Sarah's job to have feelings. She's your maid."

"But she makes me feel awkward, as if she is doing me a favor by looking after me."

"That's the way of London maids. They know that good servants are hard to come by, so they give themselves airs. It is for you to impose discipline. What you order is what will happen. If she doesn't like it, she's free to leave. But she won't leave."

For a moment, I contemplated life without Sarah. My feelings about her were very mixed. On one hand, she was a constant reminder of my shortcomings as a fashionable lady; on the other, she smoothed my path and unraveled the mysteries of London life. And anyway, I need not have worried. When next I saw her, my husband had already spoken to her, and though she made it clear by the set of her mouth that she hated the idea of leaving town, she said not a word in protest. So the trunks were packed and sent ahead and a boat was ordered to take us to Selden, much safer and quicker than traveling by road at that time of year. I didn't give my father notice, in case he ordered me to stay away.

[ 3 ].

TWO DAYS LATER, we set out, rowed by a couple of boatmen hired by Aislabie, who must have tamed them with threats or bribes because they hardly spoke a word all the weary journey home. Sarah and I sat at either end of the boat, I in my velvet mantle, she in gray wool. At first, she stared longingly over my shoulder, then shrank down in the shelter of her hood. Her stormy face made it quite plain that she would rather be anywhere else but in that boat with me, and once I thought I saw a tear welling in her eye.

London from the river was a much more manageable city than London from the streets, and we slid through it as easily as rats in a gully. The river traffic soon thinned, as did the number of buildings cl.u.s.tered on the bank. Then there were only winter trees and bedraggled reeds, the bare earth of plowed fields, the great houses of the rich, and the little villages huddled up tight for winter. We spent the night in the inn at Chertsey, but I was so chock-full of fear and antic.i.p.ation that I could neither sleep nor eat.

The next morning, as we rowed farther upstream, the river narrowed, the bones of the countryside pressed in on us, and the sky sank closer until our boat was the blade of a knife slitting the river from the clouds. Behind us, the two closed up like mercury. And now the banks were heavily wooded and so quiet that if a bird moved even so much as a claw, a branch cracked and my heart leaped. He was there. I strained my eyes to see between the trees. Was that him, with his hat pulled far down and his coat trailing? If he saw me, he would surely raise his staff in welcome and a joyful spark would gleam in his eye.

It was dusk when we drew near Selden. Mist shrouded the boat and stifled the dipping oars. The quiet was shocking after the racket of London. The boat coiled to the right, the boatman leaped ash.o.r.e, and with a creak of his leather breeches and a twist of the rope bound us tight. He put out his bare hand; I took it in my gloved one and sprang out. My foot in its silver-buckled boot ached with recognition of the boards on the jetty. I looked down at the slick water and quivered like a cat.

The only sign of the inn at Lower Selden, which lay a couple of hundred yards away, was a faint glow of rushlight and a drift of smoke. I gave the boatmen a purse of money and told them I would send Gill for the boxes in the morning. Then Sarah and I began the long walk through the woods to the house. She kept close to my shoulder as we went deeper into the trees and the darkness fell. I knew every inch of these woods, even in the dark. Under that oak, my father and I had studied a clump of mushrooms, and here was the split ash tree where Aislabie used to tether his horse. Sarah was so close that sometimes she trod on my hem. The tables had turned. If I left her alone, she would be utterly lost, just as I was lost in her talk of fashion, gowns, manners, shows, and shops.

At last, when I saw a glimmer of light through the trees, I could no longer stand her dragging presence. "Follow at your own pace," I said. "See the light? Keep to the left of the house and you'll find a door leading to the kitchen."

I plunged away through the trees. At first I blundered from trunk to trunk, but I soon grew more sure of myself and headed in a straight line toward Selden, breaking the silence with the gush of my skirts and the crushing of leaves, my stride so long and fast that my petticoats couldn't keep up and got tangled with my knees. I was a kind of dervish, mixed up in my silks with no form of my own.

A lighter shade of gray marked the edge of the woods, and I came out on the lower lawn. Above me sprawled the house with candles lit in one window, the rest dark. I paused. Now that I was here, the house seemed neutral, neither welcoming nor resisting, exactly as in the past. Suddenly I was a girl again, home late after a long walk in the woods. My father would be waiting for me in the library. Up I climbed past the sunken garden and the rose garden with my skirts slipping over worn steps and the ends of my veil flying. Faster and faster I went, until my silks fled from me like sails and the skeletal rose bushes floated by as if vapor.

On the terrace, I turned sharply to the left, dodged round the side of the house, and entered by the door leading to the kitchen pa.s.sage. The smell of the house was exactly as before. My father. Chemical, pungent, old. I picked up a candle left burning in a bracket by the door, crept past the kitchen, where someone clashed a pan onto the hearth, and entered the screens pa.s.sage. The blank eyes of my ancestors urged me across the hall to the library, which was in darkness. He must be in the laboratory. I put my candle on the floor and pulled back the curtain. The door was locked. I tried the latch twice, then threw my shoulder against it and hammered on the door. "Father. Father."

We kept spare keys behind a volume of Democritus, so I climbed on a stool, pulled out the book, found the key, inserted it into the latch, and opened first the outer door, then the inner one. The room was empty and unlit. "Father," I called, and this time was answered by a shuffling behind the door that led to the cellars-Gill, holding a lantern. He was much bulkier than I remembered, with bags of flesh under his staring eyes.

"Where's my father?" I didn't wait for a reply, but ran through the library to the great hall, shielding my candle from the draft and taking the stairs two at a time. Though Mrs. Gill called my name, I didn't stop but went on up to his room, which was also in darkness, very austere with bare boards and uncurtained windows, a whiff of old man's sweat in the air and everything in place: wig stand, brushes, books. "Father."

I was drowning. The water was almost over my head, but I went on running along pa.s.sages and stairs to my own bedchamber, back to the landing, down to the entrance hall again-and there was Mrs. Gill with Sarah hanging back, white-faced. They had lit half a dozen candles, which dazzled me.

Mrs. Gill had aged, and her brow was now bare as a puffball right up to the edge of her cap. "Where's my father?" I cried.

"Emilie . . ." I was ready to run again, but she took hold of my arm. Her eyes were full of sorrow. "My dearest Emilie." This was an outrage-she never called me dearest. When she tried to hug me, I held her off. "Your father is dead."

I wrenched away and headed for the library past Sarah, whose head was down with her face hidden. Mrs. Gill followed me. "He died on the last day of the year. He'd been ill for some time of a disease that affected his lungs. We buried him two days ago."

I could have struck her for being so ponderous and stupid. "I would have been told," I said.

"No. Your father was very insistent. He said Reverend Shales wasn't to write until after the burial."

"Father hated Reverend Shales."

"Not at the end. The rector came often." Something had happened to Mrs. Gill's face. It was blurred and wet. We stared at each other. There was a rushing in my head and I thought I'd faint, so I walked away very straight-backed, got myself into the laboratory, set my candle down, and locked the doors.

Smell first. The smell had changed, the brew not nearly as rich as before. Old wood, yes, alcohol, a hint of sulfur, but a softness in the air of too much dust. And then silence, not even the stirring of a mouse in straw or the ticking of a clock.

My candle reflected on the smeared surface of a flask. When I moved, light fell on a disorderly bookshelf, an empty cage, the mouth of our smallest furnace, my father's desk, which looked as if its surface had been stirred with a giant ladle: notebooks left open, the inkstand rusty with dried ink, books piled up anyhow, the contents of his tobacco pouch spilling onto the floor. On the nearby workbench, a pestle was stuck into some dried-up substance, there was a powdering of spilled crystals, bottles were unstoppered, and instruments were dirty.

"Father." My voice was faint. I sniffed the contents of the mortar. Clay, hard and useless, mixed with a black powder that was in fact hair cuttings-the clay I had used on the day Aislabie came to Selden. I crossed to the window. More gla.s.s-two flasks, one inverted over the other, containing a dead rose.

"Father."

I blundered back across the room and looked at the writing in his notebook; uneven, spidery, no attention to straight lines. He had written the same t.i.tle over and over again with different dates attached. The last read, September 18, 1726. Palingenesis. And above that appeared August 3, 1726. Palingenesis. June 9, 1726. Palingenesis. In the book beneath, I found a little more coherence: October 4, 1725. Palingenesis. To begin with the purification of our instruments, and the grinding . . . The alchemical process, as regular to me as the coming of snowdrops in spring, was set out in precise detail: observations, repet.i.tions, explanations. But the last date with any detailed notes attached was March 1726, and then the new notebook and a new t.i.tle.