The Alchemist's Daughter (12 page)

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 ]

T
WO 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 clustered 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 anticipation 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 ashore, 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 passage. 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 passage. 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 passages 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 glass—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 title 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, repetitions, explanations. But the last date with any detailed notes attached was March 1726, and then the new notebook and a new title.

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 brass knob 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 hourglass.

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 ]

W
HEN
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 apron, 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 ]

G
ILL 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.”

T
HERE 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.”