The Alchemist's Daughter Part 6

My father never wasted paper. Every sheet he wrote was covered in minute script, both sides. Not these.

My own desk was completely bare. Where were my things? I opened drawer after drawer, tearing my nails in my frantic rush. Where were they, my treasures brought for me by my father? I found them at last buried under a pile of papers and pulled them out one by one: the prism, so that I could see for myself how Sir Isaac had split light; the magnifying lens; my collection of rocks; my piece of obsidian. My foot hit something that rolled backward and went on swaying from side to side, metal on wood-his staff, with its heavy bra.s.s k.n.o.b at one end and casing to protect the tip at the other. Never in my life had I seen my father stray more than a foot or two from this staff. My hand closed over its globed handle and my shadow flew up the wall, flickered along the shelves of bottles, balances, notebooks, globe, clock, and hourgla.s.s.

The house enclosed me: the attics, the labyrinthine cellars, the kitchens, the dairy, the furnace shed, the stables and gardens. I clutched the staff tight to my breast and rested my chin on its handle.

The planet turned.

Sir Isaac Newton's law of inertia. Things will go on moving unless prevented by an opposing force. Death, in this case.

[ 4 ].

WHEN I WENT upstairs at last, Sarah was waiting for me. She'd lit a row of candles and a blazing fire, unheard of in a bedchamber at Selden. After she'd undressed me, she fussed with the sheets, brushed my hair for five minutes, then sat in a corner and fiddled with the laces on my stays.

"Have you found somewhere to sleep, Sarah?"

"In here with you, since you've had bad news." I thought this show of concern was in part due to her terror of the profound darkness beyond my room. To get rid of her, I blew out every candle except one, which I thrust into her hand, then showed her the room next door that Mrs. Gill had used when I was a child.

After she'd gone, I lay in my old bed and watched the cushiony shadows cast by the firelight. At first I heard her creep about, then, when she was settled, a shifting and cracking of boards as the house rearranged itself. From somewhere deep in the woods came the screech of an owl.

Hush, Emilie, hush. There is no great change after all. I strained to see into the night sky beyond the lattice. Where was the girl I had left behind at Selden? Just out of reach-I had heard her rustle and sigh as I picked up my father's staff. She circled the house in her stiff linen ap.r.o.n, sniffed a dribble of sap from a yew tree and tasted its sweetness, stared at the moon and plotted the stars. Her hands trailed the riverbed and picked up fistfuls of mossy stones.

Emilie Selden, natural philosopher and alchemist.

Where are you now?

[ 5 ].

GILL MUST HAVE driven early to Lower Selden and fetched our boxes because in the morning Sarah brought me chocolate, a substance unheard of at Selden. I was full of determination. It had occurred to me that the person to blame for my father's disappearance was Reverend Shales, who had taken it upon himself to bury him without permission. Such high-handedness could not be allowed. If I confronted Shales, the past would surely unravel and my father come back.

Sarah laid out a plain gown and worsted stockings. "No, silk," I said. "I am paying a call today." I would give Reverend Shales a dose of London finery. In my blackwork bodice, white quilted petticoats, veil, and glazed kid gloves, I would descend upon him like an avenging angel.

While Sarah dressed my hair, I risked a glance at her face in the mirror. Her brows were drawn together and her teeth clenched, so I took pity on her and said, "You can come with me if you like. It's up to you."

"Whatever you want, madam."

How did she manage to make even the simplest phrase so insolent? Nothing on earth, she seemed to suggest, would please me less than a walk with you. "I shall be perfectly all right on my own, if you prefer to stay here," I said weakly.

"Then I'll stay."

THERE WAS A maid in the scullery, one of the blacksmith's daughters. "What is your name?" I asked.

She stared at me with rabbity eyes. "Annie."

"Annie. Do you know Reverend Shales?"

She nodded.

"I presume he'll be at home in the rectory?"

She gaped until I walked away. "No," she called after me.

"Then where?"

"He don't choose to live at the rectory. He chooses to live at the church cottage in Lower Selden."

"What on earth for?"

She went on gaping. Curse the man, I thought, and set out across the stable yard and through the bee orchard, where mortar crumbled from the walls and the trees were crooked and bare. I didn't pause to look at the beehives or remember what had happened here. I held it all at bay.

[ 6 ].

MY FATHER OWNED the living of two parishes: Lower Selden, on the other side of the river, and Selden Wick, the cl.u.s.ter of cottages, rectory, and church built up close to the manor. Reverend Shales for some reason had not chosen to live in the comfortable modern house in Selden Wick, but had settled instead for the ancient church cottage at Lower Selden, a three-mile walk through the woods and across the river. My gown had a short train, ideal for cutting a swathe in a crowded salon but hopeless in a swampy lane, and my boots were designed for brief strolls across London cobbles. The sky oozed and branches dripped in the morning thaw. Gill's cart had worn deep ruts, which were so filled with water I was often calf deep.

I slowed down. I couldn't help it. Where a pool had collected in a felled tree trunk, I leaned forward, lifted my veil, touched the water with my tongue, and watched a little creature flit across its surface. If you don't look up, Emilie, Father will surely come treading carefully along the track, take a test tube from his coat pocket, and capture some of these water insects to study under the microscope.

Mrs. Gill said he had a disease of the lungs, but hadn't she noticed that his breathing was always labored-probably because he sniffed and tasted chemicals with a reckless disregard for what van Helmont called "gas," released by their interaction with each other? Perhaps in the end he got so ill that every breath was a struggle until his lungs collapsed altogether. I knew what that must have been like. We had experimented on the lungs of a live dog by tying it down and cutting open its windpipe just below the thorax, because we wanted to try the effect of different types of air, first by allowing it to breathe only its own expired air caught in a bladder, then by driving fresh air into it through a tube. I had seen the light come and go in the dog's eyes, the inflation and deflation of its abdomen as it gasped for breath, the failure of its pulse whenever we stopped blowing in the clean air. Then it lay quietly, concentrating on each next breath.

Finally, my father had demonstrated what happened when a creature drowned. He trickled water into the tube and filled the dog's lungs until it choked. Death came too quickly for us to rescue it, though my father had wanted to pump out the water and try to recover the dog with a different type of air, possibly the fumes produced by burning brimstone.

These memories of the dog's suffering and our frantic efforts to revive it worked me into a fury. Had I been told my father was ill, I would have made him recover. This was all Shales's fault.

I stopped on the bridge and looked down at the empty jetty. Our boat had gone. Yesterday, when I stepped ash.o.r.e, I was full of hope and fear; now I was scrambling to undo the past. Don't look there, I thought. Concentrate on Shales. He is the cause.

A lane ran up the main street to his house opposite the church. Heaps of grit had blown into the corners of well-worn steps. I lifted the knocker and tapped sharply. n.o.body answered. Across the lane, a steep bank supported the graveyard. The church was squat, it had no tower, and the flags inside were so uneven that during a sermon the congregation slid together along the tilting pews. Shales must have had a sort of pretend humility, a desire to lower himself in order to seem more pious. After all, he might have lived, like all rectors before him, in the shadow of St. M. and St. E. in Selden Wick, a proper church with stained gla.s.s, a ring of bells, and a spire.

I was about to tap sharply on the window when the door was flung open by a bleary-eyed servant.

"I want to speak to Reverend Shales. I'm Mrs. Aislabie."

"Step in."

The doorway wasn't wide enough for my hoop. She showed me into a room so small that I stood crushed against the wall by the volume of my own clothes, and for a moment surprise made me forget why I was there.

Every available inch was filled with instruments: a barometer, a globe, an armillary sphere to demonstrate the Copernican system by which the planets revolve round the sun in circles, an air pump, a microscope, and a telescope. On the table in the center was an orrery, a model of the sun and planets supported by wires with a mechanism underneath to turn each in its individual orbit. The machine had been made by a true craftsman, every tiny part polished and balanced to perfection. The beams of light cast by these instruments-bra.s.s, gla.s.s, varnish-shone dimly through my veil, and for a moment it was as if I had entered a pod of my childhood: the stillness of the air, the fragility of precious things, a web of ideas interlocked by steel wires of learning and experiment, the presence of my father like a flashing blade at rest one minute, lethally aroused the next.

"Mrs. Aislabie."

I turned abruptly. Shales was in the doorway, his head on one side to avoid the lintel. We stared at each other. I was conscious that the last time I saw him was when I had run in from the garden all damp with heat and desire after an afternoon with Aislabie. I had forgotten the peculiar intensity of his eyes.

"I had not expected you yet," he said.

"Yet?"

"I wrote two days ago, and here you are already."

"I didn't get a letter. I came because I had heard nothing from my father. In the end, I couldn't bear the silence."

The maid popped her head up behind him in an effort to see what was going on while he peered into my face, trying to penetrate my veil. At last he remembered his manners. "Please, Emilie . . . Mrs. Aislabie, won't you sit down," he said, and backed into his study, trampling the maid. He ordered tea, and I squeezed myself and my skirts into yet another little room while the maid went out and closed the door.

He drew up a chair for me near the hearth, but I wouldn't sit down. I thought that I must stay in charge and quickly get what I'd come for-an admission of guilt-so I intended to keep my face covered, rap out a few questions, and leave. But I was already thrown off balance by what I had seen in the other room, by his courtesy and the unexpected ordering of tea. After the horror of the previous evening, the sudden tranquillity of this study was shocking, and I had such a longing to weep that I drew breath sharply and allowed myself to be distracted by what was on the desk: an arrangement of retort and receiving flask, an open ledger, a candle. I threw back my veil for a better look and had a sudden whiff of hot wax and fermentation, saw the lovely gleam of polished gla.s.s, the invitation of blank paper. In all my months in London, I had not been so homesick as in that moment.

"I have been heating plant matter-in this case, peas-to see how much air is produced. I measure the liquid in the tube over a number of days," he said.

I moved round the desk to look at his meticulous measurements, made every six hours over four days. There were thread markings on the tube to show how the water had been forced down. The neatness of the experiment and his records, the measured ticking of his clock, and the soft fall of a coal in the hearth opened a wound in me.

"I have repeated the experiment several times with different plant matter. I can show you my findings, if you like."

"What do you do with the air once you have collected it?" I asked.

There was a pause, and I glanced up impatiently. He was gazing down at my face with the same expression I had noticed in church when he lifted the host-absorption, fascination even. "Well?" I demanded.

"Well, I release it."

"What a waste."

"What would you suggest I do, Mrs. Aislabie?"

But I had remembered why I was here and would not be drawn into a conversation about airs, so I sat down in his chair behind the desk, folded my hands, and tried to stop my gaze from straying back to the retort.

He arranged the other chair so he could face me. "I'm sorry your father is dead," he said.

"Why didn't you write to me?"

"Your father ordered me not to."

"Why? Why would he do such a thing?"

"I can't say."

"Didn't you try to make him change his mind?"

"I did."

The door burst open and in came the maid with the tea tray resting on her bosom. The room was so small that her skirts flurried the flames in the hearth and the candle almost blew out. She stooped down with a lot of huffing and puffing, poured us both a cup, and then disappeared, somewhat reluctantly. The quiet came back, and I thought, I must sort this out quickly before I lose control of my voice. "Did he not mention me at all before he died?"

"Yes. He spoke about you."

"What did he say?"

"I'm very sorry that I can't tell you. We talked in the absolute confidence of a dying man to his priest."

"My father was not religious. What did he care for priests?"

"Nothing in the conventional sense, I'm sure. No. But he was suffering and very sad."

I got up so violently that my hand knocked over the dainty teacup, breaking its handle and spilling tea on the desk. "I wrote to him month after month, and he never replied. It was his choice to suffer."

"He never mentioned to me that you wrote to him."

"Would it have made a difference? Was the reason you didn't tell me about his illness that you thought I deserved punishment for not being a dutiful daughter?"

"I was carrying out his wishes. Of course I tried to persuade him to let me write. On the occasions when I visited London, I wanted to call on you but felt I would be breaking my word. He was very sick for quite a long time. Do you remember how we had quarreled about alchemy? I think he would not have allowed me back into his study if he wasn't desperate. We spent a great deal of time discussing phlogiston, which interested us both for different reasons-him because of his observations on fire, me because of what I had discovered about air. But although we grew quite used to each other in the end, when it came to persuading him to send for you, he wouldn't listen and became so agitated that I stopped trying."

"Then you did wrong. You should have convinced him to see me. What could be more important?"

He was silent for a moment. Then he said in the same measured voice, but softly, "I thought it most important to give what little comfort I could to a dying man."

"I wonder how you managed that, Mr. Shales. I hope you didn't pray over him. He hated prayer."

"No, I knew better than that. I read to him. I had a book by Sir Thomas Browne that he coveted. It became a little joke between us that I possessed that book and he didn't."

"Did you talk about anything else? Did you talk about my mother?"

Another pause. "We did."

"What did he say?"

Silence. He picked up his pen and pressed it into the blotter. I nearly s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his hand to stop him from damaging the nib. He was pale, and his lips were compressed. I knew it was no use arguing with him.

"Mistress Aislabie."

"You won't tell me."

"I can't."

"Did you ever talk about alchemy?"

Shales put his hand to the back of his head and patted his wig as if arranging his thoughts in better order. All the time he watched me closely, perhaps wary of my next outburst, and I didn't take my eyes off his face because I wanted to pounce the moment I saw weakness. "We talked about alchemy. Yes." Silence. Another long look at me. A deep sigh. "He was a very disappointed man. He felt that alchemy had failed him in the end. He could get nowhere with his project on regeneration, though he had spent his last year on it. He seemed very bitter and afraid that he had been pursuing a futile dream."

"I'm sure you were happy to agree with him, given your views on alchemy."

"I was not happy at all. I would have given a great deal to have seen the old man satisfied with his life's work. I tried to persuade him that many of his more fruitful investigations-into dyes and phlogiston, for instance-had emerged through his alchemical work."

"Do you believe that?"

"I do in a way. I believe nothing is wasted, that there is no real failure in natural philosophy."

"But I was a failure. He saw me as something of an experiment, and I failed him."

Another long, considering look. His eyes had grown darker, I noticed, and warmer. "Mrs. Aislabie, I think he believed that it was he who failed in his proper understanding of you."

"I know I failed him. He used to write me down each night in his notebook. He wanted to see if a girl was capable of learning, but I proved as weak as all the rest. So yes, I failed him. I'm sure that's what he told you."

Silence.

"Did he show you the notebooks?"

He shook his head.