The Alchemist's Daughter (26 page)

A burst of laughter penetrated from the library and a carriage rolled away outside, followed by the squeal of our rusty gates. What with the fire and the furnace, the warm night, and too much wine, I felt stifled, so I opened a high central flap in the shutters. The moon had come out and its white face, squashed like a grapefruit, shone directly onto the cloud of vapor collected in the receiver. There it was, exposed. Palingenesis.

Shales leaned on the mantel, arms folded, one side of his face in darkness, watching me. There was such tension between us that I think if I’d put out a finger and plucked the air it would have quivered like the string of a lyre.

I moistened my dry lips. “Palingenesis,” I said.

He made no move.

“The distillation.”

Still he didn’t seem to understand, though he glanced at the receiver and crossed the room to take a closer look.

“Alchemy. All this time I’ve been working for my father.”

He perched on a stool and ran his hand over his face.

“You disapprove. You think I’m mad.”

He shook his head.

“What then? What do you think? Shales?”

“You know what I think.”

“Tell me.”

“I think this is a terrible waste of your gifts.”

“Gifts.”

“Your father knew he had an extraordinary daughter. He told me that you were the guiding force in his work on the nature of fire. That’s what I thought you were doing. If we knew more about air and fire, we might change the way we think about the world.”

“Well, as you see, my whole being is fixed on this.”

“You must know this work is fruitless.”

“No. No. If palingenesis can work with a rose, it can work with any once-living thing. I want my father back.” I stopped, appalled by the boldness and truth of this statement. “I broke his heart, so I want him to come back and be made better.”

“I think, Emilie, he broke his own heart.”

“It comes to the same thing.”

“Do you really think you can raise the dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if he did come back, what would you do then?”

“I’d tell him I’m sorry. I’d help him put everything right.” I saw my father standing on the terrace with his coattails afloat and his staff in his right hand to drive away Harford and Osborne and the menace of their measures and maps; I saw Sarah scuttle through the trees with her apron strings flying and her hair pulled loose from its immaculate cap; and I saw Aislabie gallop away in a cloud of dust, and then a slow settling of silence on Selden. Except there was something so deadly in the silence that it made me shake. “I can’t stop working on this. He is directing me. I can’t stop. I feel him watching me. When he was alive, he kept a notebook, and he wrote me down in it, every move. I believe he planned my life minute by minute as if I was a flask into which he could drop one substance after another until I was full up. And he’s plotting me still. I’m part of his design. But if I make him come back, I’ll be able to show him how he failed. He taught me to listen and copy and learn and deduce. He taught me to experiment with the material world and to make bold hypotheses about why things happen and then to prove them again and again. But he didn’t teach me how to make choices. He didn’t teach me how human beings are or to understand the complication of feelings. He didn’t teach me . . .”

More laughter came from next door. Shales reached out, stroked the warm receiver with the back of his finger, and watched me with his steady, odd-colored eyes. I thought that this was the first and last time he would ever set foot in here, so I tried to memorize him, the many planes of his nose, cheeks, and chin, the shadows and textures of his skin, the caress of his finger on glass. “He didn’t teach you . . .”

“He didn’t teach me that with some people what seems to be real, isn’t real at all. I used to trust what I saw. He taught me that if I could see a thing and touch it, and if it behaved as I hoped it would, then these were true qualities. But I find that men aren’t like that, so how do I know what I can trust? Even my father, when I had offended him, even he didn’t love me much, when the test came.”

“Your father loved you, Emilie. I’m sure.”

“Not enough to forgive me or to talk to me about my mother, who I can’t find however hard I try.”

Another long silence. “He should have said more about her, I think.”

“You tell me.”

“How can I? I never knew her.”

“You spent night after night with my father before he died. I don’t believe he never talked about her.”

“Mostly he talked about you.”

“No, that’s not good enough. What do you know about my mother?”

No reply.

“Please. Please tell me.”

His hand went still.

“Shales?”

“I gave my word.”

“Dear God, Shales, you stand there judging me, but you won’t help me. You won’t bend one inch. Well, then, take what you want and go.” I began to snatch things off shelves and out of cupboards. “Take it all. Take it. Silver, nitrate, mercury, potash, copper, verdigris. Scales, test tubes, alembics. Take them. The clocks, the measures, the balances. The books. The lot. Have them. Bacon, Libavius, Sendivogius. I’ll never read them again.” I slammed the books one on top of the other until the air was cloudy with dust. “I have no time for them now. Take them. Or Gill will pack them in crates and bring them in the cart. Sell them if you like. Send them to London. Use the money to mend a few thatches in the village.”

“Palingenesis,” he said suddenly. “How will it happen?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Help me understand.”

“It’s a mystery. It happens through the application of centuries of experience and learning, through ritual and heat and natural philosophy. It combines the alchemist’s belief in a vital force with our knowledge of how matter behaves. It is a mix of what we see with what we believe.”

“Then it is no different to my religious faith, except that in religion the agent is God and in alchemy the agent is man or woman.”

“But your religion, which after all is yet another leap in the dark, you think is sane and permissible. Alchemy, you think, is absolutely wrong.”

“What I think doesn’t matter, Emilie.”

“Without alchemy, what other way forward do I have?”

“You’ll find a way.”

“I can’t.”

“You haven’t told me yet what help you need.”

“I need to put right the past. I was a fool to marry Aislabie.”

I spoke so low I wasn’t sure he heard. There was a long silence. Then he said, “I thought that this experiment with palingenesis was about regeneration, not rewriting the past.”

“I can try. I must try.”

The laboratory was changing, and it was as if we were in a bubble of glass, like the alchemical mixture, and everything else was melting away. “What has happened?” Shales said.

I couldn’t tell him. The shame of what I’d seen in the furnace shed was too terrible.

“Emilie?”

I studied him: his somber black coat, the tilt of his head, the concentration in his eyes. Meanwhile, the water in the bain-marie hissed, another carriage set off outside, and faintly, from a distant corner, I thought I heard my father’s cough. Now I knew why I had been led through the labyrinth of the miscarried embryo, the bleak homecoming, the dead babies, the furnace shed—it was all to show me this.

This, Emilie, is the life you could have had. This is the man who, in the end, I would have chosen for you.

I put my hand over his and felt the tension in his muscles. Then I leaned so close that I heard his heartbeat and how his breathing was rapid and shallow. Minutes passed, and I turned inward, so that his cravat brushed my nose. When he put his hand on the back of my neck, it was like the moment when a substance first breaks down and becomes another—ice to water, liquid to steam. The clocks began to tick in harmony, the mice scuffled in the empty cages, the flames leaped in the hearth, and my father turned the page of his notebook.

“Do you really want the dead to awaken?” Shales said.

“You had a wife. Wouldn’t you want her back?”

“When she died, yes. I remember the night after the burial as the most terrible I have ever experienced. I couldn’t fathom my loss. You see, it wasn’t just my wife that had died. I lost . . . I lost . . .”

His hand was tense on my neck. I couldn’t bear for him to be frail and struggling, so in the end I said, “And now?”

“Now I’ve changed. It’s nearly three years. I still grieve, of course. But I wouldn’t go back. I am different now.”

“But if you could turn back time in some way. If you could go back to how it was in the months before she died . . .”

Inside the furnace, hot charcoals hissed and shuffled. The room was so close, despite the open window, that sweat ran down the back of my knees. He stroked my neck and spoke into my hair. “Still, I’m not sure. My memory would not be erased, I presume, and I would therefore know too much. I would rather be as I am now, here in this place I have come to since then.”

I stood in his arms and thought, This is how love could be. I do believe that however much I argued or cried or made mistakes, Shales would still hold me. But there was a sudden change; he drew a shuddering breath, put his hands on my shoulders to set me upright, and took a step back. “Perhaps we should find a way of living in the present rather than the past.”

“But the present is intolerable.”

“Then we must change the way it is, if we can.”

“And if we can’t?”

He touched my face, just my cheekbone, but said nothing.

“Please, Shales.”

His face was suffused with pain and longing. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Endure, I suppose.”

Faintly, through the double thickness of the doors, again came laughter. In a trance of despair, I picked up the lantern, thinking, Please, please don’t let this be the end. We didn’t speak and we didn’t touch as I led him back through the cellars and up to the stables, and by the time we reached the open air the long, aching silence between us had made me sick with the knowledge that by marrying Aislabie I had burned every last bridge, and there were no words and no actions that could undo that fact.

My husband was standing under the arch, waving to some departing carriage. He caught my eye, glanced over my shoulder at Shales, and gave me a knowing wink. Shales bowed and would perhaps have kissed my hand, but I withdrew sharply, stepped past him, and went back to the laboratory.

[ 8 ]

T
HE NEXT DAY
in the late afternoon, I went up to my bedchamber to dress for dinner.
She
was there, packing my combs into a wooden box. She looked up and went very still. Her back was to the window so I couldn’t see her face, but I could smell her fear.

“What are you doing, Sarah?”

“Packing, madam.”

“Don’t.”

“You are going to London in the morning.”

“I shall be staying here.”

She shuffled the contents of the box so as to fit in more combs and ribbons. Only my mother’s pink ribbon was still draped over a hook. Sarah despised it because it was faded and crumpled. “I think you have to go,” she said.

I tied the ribbon round my throat and told her to fetch my green gown. She looked surprised but didn’t argue, though it was the first time I had worn a strong color since my father’s death. She handled it with great caution, as if the unlucky fabric might scorch her fingers, and stood behind me as usual to tie the strings. I could see our faces in the mirror: mine dead white, eyes black and blank as obsidian, cheekbones sharp as knives, and a twist of black hair falling over my shoulder; she very pale and intent, her lower lip caught in her teeth.

Her fingers were ice cold on my back. When she knelt in front of me to reach under my skirts and straighten the hoop, I saw the panicky rise and fall of her bosom. I couldn’t bear for her to touch my head or face; and when she tried to comb my hair, I knocked her hand away and sent her out.

D
OWNSTAIRS, THE HOUSE
was stripped bare, and at dinner there was just Harford and Aislabie, who occupied my father’s old place at the head of the table. He wore a lilac waistcoat and an amethyst jewel in his neck pin, his eyes flashed iridescent as his silks, and he was in an expansive mood. Mrs. Gill, perhaps in defiance of the London cook, had produced a fricassee of duck along with a fowl and a side of beef, which my husband sliced with his usual neat enthusiasm. He exploded in and out of my consciousness, so that I caught only fragments of what he said, but I was transfixed by the bloody liquid that dripped from his fork and puddled under the meat.

“So, Em. What have you been up to all day?” I said nothing while Harford crammed food into his mouth and Aislabie filled my glass. “Thank God we’re off to town in the morning. This place won’t be safe after tomorrow. I hope your bags are packed.”

“It’s best to be out of the way,” said Harford, helping himself to more sauce. “Everything will begin quietly, but how deceptive that will be. The first job is to mark out the lake and start digging. The rubble from the demolished house will be used as lining.”

“Brilliant,” said my husband. “Economical. That’s how I like things.”

“I’ll be off tomorrow to see about hiring the right kind of men. It’s delicate work. There is a chance that the house won’t withstand the pressure of having interior walls demolished, so this will be a dangerous place for anyone to live in for a while.”

“Shore them up. There must be a way. The Romans managed a dome with no fuss. Why can’t we?”

I sensed a degree of calculation behind this energetic conversation. “I shall stay here,” I said.

“There’ll be nothing for you, Em. You’ll be in the way.”

“I’ve told Sarah she can leave. I don’t need her. You can take her with you.”

“Lord, Em, what would I do with a lady’s maid?”

There was a moment’s silence, then Harford snorted with laughter. “What a question for the lady to answer, Aislabie.”

I stared at my untouched food and the snails’ trails of grease on the edge of the plate, then shoved it aside so sharply that a spoon clattered to the floor. Aislabie separated a sliver of breast from a boiled fowl and filled his mouth. “You come to London, my dear Em. We’ll be aboard
Flora
by the end of the week. She’s twitching away in that dry dock of hers.” Another mouthful, a change of subject. “Your friend Sir Isaac Newton never touched meat, I understand. In fact, as far as I can tell, he would have nothing to do with the flesh, beastly or human.”