The Alchemist's Daughter (24 page)

[ 1 ]

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Sarah and I drove back to Selden. We were not on speaking terms. She never bothered to explain her nonappearance on the night of Sir Isaac’s funeral, and I blamed her for fetching Aislabie rather than a priest. My head still ached because of the dark bruise under my chin. Fortunately, she and I were forced apart because the carriage was stuffed with bales of cloth and crates of other things needed for my husband’s assembly, or party, as he chose to call it. He had been so impressed by Sir Isaac’s funeral that he decided to decorate Selden Manor crimson, this particular color being Sir I. N.’s favorite. The great hall was to be swagged in red muslin, the guests would be required to wear red, and only red food would be served by a cook brought from London.

Selden was turned upside down. Aislabie shoehorned Mrs. Gill out of her usual haunts and sent her upstairs to supervise the clearing of dozens of unused chambers. The party was in four weeks, and after that the demolition would start. I met her on the stairs one morning with a trio of village girls and Gill in tow. They were on their way to my father’s room, and once there Mrs. Gill took no notice of me but gave a series of rapid instructions. “The chest is wormy and must be burned. Likewise its contents, which have been taken by moth. The bedding is to be washed. The windows must be treated with vinegar, and the mirror. You will need to sprinkle the floor before sweeping.”

“Mrs. Gill.” She stared across at me. “Mrs. Gill, a word.” She finished her list before joining me on the landing. “These are my father’s things. Do you not think I should be consulted?”

“I assumed that these orders were from you since you’d not troubled yourself to speak to me.”

“They are from my husband.”

“Then with your consent, I suppose.”

“No. No. But I can’t stop him. I cannot seem to make my mark with him.”

“Have you tried?”

“You don’t understand. He doesn’t take me into account.”

“And why should he? You are like a rock in the river. You watch us all gush past, and you don’t lift a finger to stop us.”

“It’s because I can’t. I don’t know how. My father . . .”

“Your father is dead and gone. He has nothing to do with what happens now.” We stood side by side on the drafty landing, aware that there was silence from within the room where the girls stood about and listened. But I remembered the night of the dead babies and how my husband’s foot had cracked against my chin, and I knew that I hadn’t the strength to fight him, so in the end I said, “Well, well . . . So I’ll trust your judgment.”

[ 2 ]

G
ILL PRESIDED OVER
a bonfire in the bee orchard as day after day a procession of servants formed to carry out wormy cradles and broken-backed chairs. Anything of value was spirited over the wall and into the village. I caught Annie creeping across the stable yard with a warming pan, a footstool, and a rolled carpet. She looked frightened and dropped the pan with a terrible clang onto the cobbles. “Mrs. Gill said I could have them.”

I took the footstool and examined it curiously, because I’d never seen it before and wondered which of the Selden wives had worked the elaborate tapestry. “I won’t take it if you don’t want,” said Annie.

“No. Have anything, have it all.” I left her standing there with her worn trophies. What right had I to protest now, when I had never cared about these things in the past?

Meanwhile, Sarah produced a skein of red silk, sat in the window of my chamber from whence she had a good view of the parrot bowl on the mantel, and proceeded to embroider a fiery edge to my black petticoat.

[ 3 ]

T
HOUGH
I
WAS
sometimes aware of what was happening, just as I knew by the greening of the woods and the startling volume of birdsong that spring had come, I spent most of my time in the laboratory. When I first got back, I opened the door cautiously, afraid of what changes I might find, but everything was in order. Gill had kept the fire going and completed the dissolution process.

I sat in my father’s chair and tried to remember what had been in my head before I went to London. His instructions for the next, most delicate stage of the process of palingenesis were clear. The distillation. Ah, the distillation.

For this we used a bain-marie, named after our alchemical predecessor, Maria Prophetissa, or Mary the Jewess. The bain-marie was an iron pan inserted into the top of our medium furnace. We filled the pan with water, heated it to a gentle simmer, and then suspended the flask of mixture in the bath to keep it at a constant temperature. The flask was one of our most precious, a cucurbit bought fifty years ago and purified annually between each alchemical experiment. It lay on its side at the end of the workbench, a gritty gray solution clinging to its base, and beside it was the alembic, or still head, which had to be cemented to the top so that the vapor from the heated mixture could collect, condense, and trickle through a long, downward-pointing neck into a receiver, like a swan dipping its head. Maria Prophetissa’s preferred seal was a mixture of clay—my father and I had fine white clay brought from London—chopped human hair, my own, and a little dried cow dung.

My father’s alchemical notebook did not go beyond this stage. He had prepared the bain-marie and cucurbit but gone no further. His notes stopped on March 28, 1726, and I knew why. In recent years, his fingers had grown so stiff that I had to perform the delicate operation of sealing the neck of the cucurbit to the still head for him. It had been my job to mix the paste, handle the glass, and suspend it over the bain-marie; his, to record the operation. He had stopped work because he simply hadn’t the heart or the physical skills to go on without me.

Hence the last heading:
March 28, 1726. The Distillation
. And nothing more. Defeat.

But I was determined not to be defeated; I knew exactly what to do now. So I summoned Gill and told him to light the medium furnace, then I chopped off a fistful of hair and snipped it smaller, smaller, until I had a heap of black filings. Gill lifted a lump of clay from its moist nest in the cellars and fetched a scoop of dung from the stable yard, and I mixed the paste with gobs of spittle until I had a perfect glue, reeking of the earth. Next I added my own alchemical mixture to the dried-up remains my father had left in the cucurbit. The contents would surely be much more potent if I used both.

The trouble came when I picked up the delicate vessel and tried to add a measure of distilled water to the alchemical brew. Since Sir Isaac’s funeral and the dead babies, my nerves were in such a state that I scarcely trusted my fingers to hold such a precious thing. There seemed to be a constant shrieking around me, and I had to shake my head and clutch my skirts to steady myself. When the equipment was at last set up and the water bath had reached its ideal temperature, I perched on the stool and rested my chin in my hands. The furnace had to be watched day and night through weeks of distillation.

[ 4 ]

O
N THE DAY
before the party, Aislabie sent for me to the Queen’s Room to view his new outfit. The prospect of seeing him frightened me, because we had hardly spoken since the day after Newton’s funeral. Aislabie had spent a lot of time in town, and on the occasions when he was home had been solicitous, though wary, as if afraid of what I might do or say next. Once or twice after supper, I caught him watching me speculatively, but I always withdrew my hand if he took it or averted my face from a kiss. I was relieved that he didn’t come near me at night, because the incident with the dead babies was still in my head, and I wasn’t sure if I could bear him to touch me. Yet, perversely, all this time I had been waiting for him.

The strange thing was that he seemed to have forgotten the episode altogether and greeted me with his usual exuberance and affection. He was a vision in a waistcoat of crimson damasked satin very flared below the waist and stiffened with buckram. It had thirty or so matching buttons and was so gorgeous that the front of his coat had been cut away to reveal its full glory. His breeches were dyed amber, his buckles were decorated with amber, his cravat was pinned with a miniature amber dagger, and he had a new cane with an amber knob the size of a hen’s egg. He smiled at me from amid all this finery in the old rakish way, brought his arm up behind me, and stroked my back with the handle of the cane.

I held back at first, but his mouth tasted of apples, and with a few caresses of his fingertips there it was, the old magic, the promise of refuge and excitement. I fell against him with relief because it seemed that I was forgiven and the nightmare of the babies was over.

“My pale girl,” he said, “what have you been up to? Never mind. After the party, we’ll be off to London, and then you’ll climb aboard
Flora
and we’ll all sail away together. What do you think, Em?”

“Is
Flora
fit to be seen at last?”

“
Flora
is the sweetest little vessel in all the wide world. You should see her brasses and the tight coils of her ropes and the way her sails are all tucked up. I’ve had a cabin fitted out high up in the stern, and you and I will sleep there, Em. Imagine lying together amid the motion of the waves, the moving forward at a great rate.”

I tried to visualize the confinement of a little cabin. How would Aislabie be on board a ship with nowhere to go but a narrow deck and nothing to do but watch the waves? Perhaps I could teach him about the tides, show him the constellations, explain how Arisototle had believed the saltiness of the sea was due to the action of the sun on the waves, whereas Leonardo da Vinci and later Boyle knew that all the sea is salty, not just the surface, and that salt is contained one way or another in all created things.

I was so absorbed by these speculations that I hardly noticed our lovemaking. I expect it was energetic as usual, a pulling up of petticoats and an unbuttoning of breeches, an urgent union of flesh, a great many kisses planted on my breasts and thighs while I clutched at his clothes and tried to hold him inside me for a little longer. I expect my body clamored under his fingers, but I have no memory of it, though I do remember that he was in a hurry to get downstairs and review the arrangements for the party.

It’s a pity I wasn’t paying attention, because that was the last time I ever lay with Aislabie.

[ 5 ]

S
ARAH AND
I were still not quite back to normal—she contemptuous, me apologetic—so it was a relief the next day to find her much more like herself. Because of my father’s death, I was excused the red rule, but my new black gown, an early birthday present from my husband, was hardly suitable for mourning—cut like a vast coat with a crossover bodice that revealed most of my bosom, and skirts pinned up to display the red embroidered petticoat. Sarah treated me roughly, as if I was a clotheshorse, and when I complained about the amount of exposed flesh, she pinned a pleat of ribbon to my bodice so clumsily that she scratched me. She sucked her lower lip and tutted with irritation, bundled up my hair, and threw row after row of jet beads round my neck.

The reason for this hurry was that she, like all the other more presentable servants, had to help serve. I saw her later, airy and winsome, slipping from room to room with a muslin apron tied above her waist and a tiny cap perched on the back of her head. I, by contrast, was thrown off balance by the weight of my overlapping skirts. I stood in the great hall amid vases of monstrous peonies and watched petals fall like gobbets of flesh. I picked one up and thought I might preserve it under glass, like the rose, but guests were arriving with splashes of red in their costumes—on caps, handkerchiefs, stockings, or waistcoats. They stared at me, and I knew they were thinking, “There’s that fright, Emilie Aislabie. Did you know she went around London picking up babies as if they were stray dogs? Their raised voices filled my head almost to the brim, and the quintet from London sawed their elbows back and forth and produced music vivace, staccato, crescendo, tangling with my hair and crushing me against tables of food daubed by that same red-soaked paintbrush: glossy red jellies, dyed vegetables, berries, bleeding pink meats.

Then my hand was taken by a sharp-nailed lady who dragged me into her circle of country matrons, some of whom I knew dimly from childhood glimpses at fairs and feast days and who now sat like red cabbages in their great skirts.

They interrogated me about the house: “Is it true that the white columns will be seen from the bridge at Lower Selden?” “They say twenty acres of woodland will disappear.” “And the lake will drain the wells in the village, so the poor souls will be without water . . .” I saw diseased teeth like chips of resin and turkey flesh hanging from a receding chin. And on the other side of the room, Aislabie stood in front of the mantel, glass in one hand, cane in the other. He’d drawn some favored individual aside for a more intimate conversation, and I couldn’t catch his eye. Then he summoned a servant—Sarah—with the twitch of an eyelid. She was at his elbow in an instant, took his order, curtsied, left. Nobody would have guessed the venom beneath the surface.

Other ladies joined the group: Lady Essington, the fair woman I knew from London, with the little black slave child ever in tow, and a couple of her sophisticated friends. She sat on a low stool next to me so that her skirts billowed, and smiled winsomely across at Aislabie. He blew her a kiss. I swear I saw it go wafting over the heads of the other guests like a bit of gossamer to land on her moist lips, and I was sad that it hadn’t come my way. The conversation turned to childbearing: who was lying in, whose infant had lately died, the difficulty of finding reliable nursemaids, the cost of laundry, the question of education. I knew what was going on; because I was childless, there were whispers about what was or was not happening in my marriage bed.

And then they lowered their voices and put their hands on their throats and slavered over the even more delectable topic of unwanted children. It was an iniquity. These girls. When would they learn? Everyone knew that in London babies smothered at birth lay knee deep in the ditches. And this sickness had even extended to the country, where you couldn’t move without tripping over dead infants. A fund had been set up, but should one contribute? Surely that would simply encourage these girls, who frankly couldn’t keep their legs together . . .