The Alchemist's Daughter

Contents

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

C
HAPTER
O
NE
                           
The Alchemist’s Daughter

C
HAPTER
T
WO
                           
A Puff of Smoke

C
HAPTER
T
HREE
                           
Three Letters in Between

C
HAPTER
F
OUR
                           
Journey Home

C
HAPTER
F
IVE
                           
Pillars and Porticoes

C
HAPTER
S
IX
                           
Westminster Abbey

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN
                           
The Furnace Shed

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT
                           
St. Edelburga’s Fair

C
HAPTER
N
INE
                           
Fire and Air

C
HAPTER
T
EN
                           
The Emilie Notebooks

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN
                           
Looking for Sarah

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE
                           
Aurelie

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT PAGE

F
OR
M
ARK
L
UCAS

C
HAPTER
O
NE

The Alchemist’s
Daughter

[ 1 ]

True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true

FIRST PRECEPT OF THE EMERALD TABLET

I
N ONE OF
my earliest memories, I walk behind my father to the furnace shed. He wears a long black coat that gathers up fallen leaves, and his staff makes a little crunch when he stabs it into the path. My apron is so thick that my knees bang against it, and the autumn air is smoky on my face. Suddenly I trip over the hem of his coat. My nose hits ancient wool. He stops dead. My heart pounds, but I recover my balance, and we walk on.

When we reach the shed, I take a gasp of fresh air before being swallowed up. Gill is inside, shoveling coal into the arch of the furnace mouth, which roars orange.

My father’s finger emerges from his sleeve and points to a metal screen Gill made for me. There is a little stool behind it, and at just the right height a couple of peepholes covered with mesh are cut into the metal. I must not move from this stool in case something spills or explodes. We are boiling up vatfuls of urine to make a thick syrup that eventually will become phosphorus. After a while the stench of sulfur and ammonia is so strong that it almost knocks me off my stool. I can’t breathe properly and my throat is hot, but I hold firm and don’t let my back slump. Gill is like a black shadow moving back and forth; a twist of his upper body, a jerk of the shovel, a stooping out of sight, another turn, the racket of falling coal, and then the flames roar fiercer until I think the furnace will blow apart and the shed, Selden, the woods, the world will all fly away in pieces.

But my father isn’t worried, so I feel safe, too. He stands at his high desk by the door and puts his left hand to his forehead as he writes. The only bit of his face I can see under his wig is his beaky nose. This black and orange world is crammed with a million things that he knows and I don’t. I want to be like him. I will be soon, if I can only pay attention and learn fast enough.

[ 2 ]

I
HAVE NO
memories of my mother because she is a skeleton under the earth all the time I am a child. When I was born, she died; and though I appreciate the symmetry of this, I’m not satisfied. It’s hard finding out more about her because I’m not allowed to ask my father, and Mrs. Gill, who looks after me, is a woman of few words.

However, on my sixth birthday, May 30, 1712, I ask Mrs. Gill the usual questions about what my mother was like and she suddenly sighs deeply, puts down the great pot she is carrying—it is the week for brewing up the elder flowers—and takes me on a long journey through the house past the Queen’s Room, through a series of little doors, and up a flight of narrow stairs until we come to a low room with a high lattice window and a sloping floor. She says, “That’s where you were born.”

The only furniture is a rough-looking chest and a high bed shrouded in linen, which I look at with wonder. The bed is surely too small and clean for such an untidy event as a birth. “Why?” I say.

“Because everyone has to be born somewhere.”

“Why this room and not a bigger one?”

“Because it’s quiet and ideal.” She leans over the chest in that Mrs. Gill way of not bending her back or knees but just lowering her upper body. I go closer as she brings up the lid, and I see that the inside is lined with white paper but is otherwise nearly empty. It smells like nothing else on earth, a dusty sweetness of folded-away things. And out comes a cream-colored shawl like a spider’s web, a tiny bonnet, a baby’s tucked nightgown, and a coil of pink ribbon with a pin in one end to keep it rolled up. “These were your things that I made you,” she says, patting the clothes, “and this was your mother’s.” She hands me the ribbon, which I rub and sniff. “You can have that if you like. And now those elder flowers will be boiled half dry, so down we go.”

L
ATER SHE TELLS
me the story of my parents’ marriage. My mother, Emilie De Lery, was from a family of Huguenot silk weavers who had been driven out of France in 1685 and settled in a district of London called Spitalfields. Competition in the silk market was fierce, but my grandfather De Lery decided that fashionable London wanted color, so he went to the Royal Society to see if he could find someone who knew about dyes.

When Grand-père De Lery knocked at the Royal Society’s door, my father, Sir John Selden, was giving a paper about the green mineral malachite. Grand-père De Lery listened rapturously, collared my father afterward, and insisted he dine
en famille
in Spitalfields. There John Selden met the daughter, Emilie, twenty-two years old to his forty-nine, and his old bachelor heart was won by her dark eyes and shy smile. Within six months a new shade, De Lery green, had swamped the silk market; within a year my father had abandoned his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and carried Emilie off to his home, Selden Manor, in Buckinghamshire.

Of course all that happiness didn’t last long. My mother died nine months later on a May morning crowded with blossom and birdsong. She, Emilie the elder, was buried under a stone in the churchyard of St. Mary and St. Edelburga, while I, Emilie the younger, was wrapped in the cobwebby shawl and committed to the care of Mrs. Gill, housekeeper.

My father never went back to Cambridge but devoted himself to his own research and my education. Mrs. Gill said he was so sad when my mother died that he burned all her things. The pink ribbon was saved because Mrs. Gill thought I should have something as a keepsake.

[ 3 ]

U
NTIL THE AGE
of nineteen, I never left our estates, which included acres of woodland, a sprinkling of neglected farms, and the two villages of Selden Wick and Lower Selden.

Seldens had lived in Buckinghamshire at least since the eleventh century, when the first Sir John Selden was buried in the north transept of the new church of St. M. and St. E. Selden Manor was a long, low patchwork of a house, part stone, part brick, part timber-framed, with wings and roofs and chimneys tacked on here and there whenever a new generation could afford to make a mark.

As an infant, I met the scuffed chair legs that had supported centuries of restless Selden backsides, and door panels pitted by the spurs of passing boots. My fingers clutched the fat balusters on the staircase and traced the grooves in the carving of the family motto round the newel-post:
Vide Mira Domini
. It was my first Latin:
Behold the wonderful works of the Lord
.

By the age of five, I was eye level with the battered cuisses of a suit of armor worn by a John Selden at Bosworth—Seldens were not politicians, said my father; they always picked the losing side in a war. The groan of joints when I shook the rusty gauntlet had me squirming with pleasure, and I sucked my fingers to taste the metal. The rest of my Selden ancestry, each frozen in a portrait, had only two dimensions. Selden women were hung in the alcoves of upstairs passageways. They had oval faces with semicircles instead of eyebrows.

“Where’s my mother?” I asked Mrs. Gill.

“There was no time to have her painted.”

“How long does it take to paint a portrait?”

“Too long.”

“More than nine months?”

“Most like.”

“If there had been a portrait, what would she have looked like?”

“Like you, of course.”

Mirrors were in short supply at Selden. My father had given me a piece of polished obsidian, and if I peered in a good light I could see the shadow of my face, and there was an ancient looking glass in a disused bedchamber, where I climbed on a chair and saw distorted little features: thin nose, slanted black eyes under thick brows, hair that didn’t lie flat. I translated these into one of the upstairs portraits and gave my mother a long neck, a white bosom, and jewels in her ears like the other Lady Seldens. I dressed her in silk, of course; there was a farmer’s wife in church who sometimes wore black silk, and it went
hush-hush
like wind in the leaves, but my mother didn’t wear black, oh no, she wore green, lovely shifting green, De Lery green to match the emeralds on her throat.

Selden men were lined up in the great hall. I liked the detail of their pleated ruffs and spindly thighs, and even better I liked the fact that they were part of me. Their eyes were elliptical and full of mystery and learning. Mrs. Gill taught me to look for a symbol inside each picture. One Selden had a globe, another a set of compasses, a third an exotic plant. These were clues to the fact that Seldens were driven by the pursuit of knowledge. Some had been explorers, others astronomers, astrologers, scholars, or plant collectors. But all Seldens had one thing in common that didn’t show up in their portraits. They were puffers—or as my French mother would have said,
souffleurs
, dabblers in alchemy.

My father was no dabbler but a true alchemist, though he had received an orthodox education at Trinity and was fascinated by all branches of natural philosophy. He had become a fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of his expertise in minerals and investigations into the nature of fire, but still his vocation remained alchemy. Like most alchemists, he was largely self-taught, though he was in secret correspondence with other practitioners, notably his former teacher at Cambridge, Isaac Newton, now president of the Royal Society.

As he had no male heir, my father passed on every speck of knowledge to me. Very few girls in the history of the world had been given the chances I had, he said. “You are an empty flask, and I am filling you up as fast as I can. You are my daughter, and I will make you into me, just as if you were my son. And at the end of each day, I will write down your progress, so that when you become a great alchemist, greater perhaps than Mary the Jewess, people will see how I did it. And when you lapse, I will write that down, too, and try to discover what has caused the weakness.”

This Emilie Notebook of his was a source of great anxiety to me. At Selden, the written word was sacred. Ink was measured drop by drop, and paper was kept in a locked drawer. A word committed to paper was regarded as a little explosion of energy. I had access to the notebooks on plants, minerals, and alchemy, but not to the Emilie Notebooks, which he wrote after I had gone to be bed and were kept locked away in a hiding place I never saw and therefore haunted me with their ghostly authority.

[ 4 ]

T
O THE WORLD
beyond Selden—say to the blacksmith’s daughter, brought up on the other side of the gates separating our manor house from the village—our life must have seemed very strange. Had the girl poked her head through the bars to take a closer look, she would have seen a quiet house unchanging from season to season except for varying quantities of smoke coming from the chimneys. I know we were talked about in the village because when Mrs. Gill took me to church or visiting in the cottages, people stared.