The Alchemist's Daughter (30 page)

I replaced the miniature Mrs. Shales exactly on the same sliver of dust-free mantel and sat down again, this time in Shales’s chair on the other side of the desk. From here, I could see the whole room, including Mrs. Shales, but not her sewing case. This is what Shales must see every day: the row of religious texts, the window overlooking the street and the stone wall supporting the graveyard, the ticking clock, the miniature of his wife.

How he must love her, I thought, to keep her portrait so close. A cold voice in my head added, Nobody ever had your portrait painted. Nobody loved you enough.

I looked across at the empty chair, my chair. All the time I sat there, Mrs. Shales had been watching me. I imagined my own drooping head, my untidy black hair, my faded gown. Suddenly I heard myself speak quite loudly into the quiet room. “No,” I said. “No, I can’t. I won’t. Don’t ask me.”

The kitchen door burst open and the maid came puffing in. “I had no idea you was still here. Are you all right? Will there be anything else?”

I stumbled to my feet. “Thank you, I feel much better now. I’ll be on my way.” She stared in astonishment as I trod my feet back into the slippers, took a last look at his desk, the pincushion, and the shifting shadows on the white walls, then fled the house.

[ 7 ]

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I was woken at dawn by the workmen. Nobody brought my breakfast, and my clothes were in a heap where I had left them. The chamber pot hadn’t been emptied since the previous morning, so the air was sour. I put on my crumpled gown and went looking for Sarah. Her room was bare, not just of her but of all her things. The bed was stripped and the sheets neatly folded.

On the far side was an open door leading to the closet in which she kept my clothes. The last time I looked a few months ago, this closet had been tight packed as a dressmaker’s shop, half a dozen gowns billowing from their pegs, shelves piled with starched linen, shoes arranged on racks, hats on stands with the feathers straightened and the ribbons washed, a cascade of petticoats and hoops. Now the closet was empty except for one old petticoat heaped in a corner and the green silk gown. Every other item was gone, even the feathered monstrosity.

Those gowns were worth a small fortune; in fact, now that I thought about it, they had probably been my greatest financial asset. Their bulk would have filled at least two large chests. How on earth had she spirited them away?

The house vibrated with noise as I raced through the downstairs rooms and looked in the pantries, the kitchen, and the dairy—no sign of the Gills or Sarah, though Harford was under the arch, his sleeves already soggy with heat. He doffed his hat. “I hope, madam, that you haven’t been too discomposed by all the noise . . .” I rushed past him across the lawn and through the gate to Mrs. Gill’s garden.

The plants were ravaged, their seeds and blossoms harvested. The cottage door was wide open, but the kitchen was empty. I walked through the neat parlor to the front door, lifted the latch, and found myself in the packed village street. The fair was in full swing, and I hadn’t even noticed.

I knew that Mrs. Gill would have set up her stall under the churchyard wall, so I made my way there, picking up my skirts to avoid heaps of dung. A couple of youths were in competition to tip flagon after flagon of ale into their mouths; I passed stalls of cheeses rank with mold, gingerbread swarming with flies, overripe strawberries seeping juice, a heap of gaudy neckerchiefs, and raw-timbered ladders ranked against a cottage wall. But it wasn’t until I was deep in the crowds and had paused a moment to peer over someone’s shoulder at a couple of farmers arguing over the price of a calf—the creature rolled her tender brown eyes and defecated into the mud—that I became fully alert and realized the danger I was in.

Shales had given us plenty of warning that there was unrest in the village, but I had assumed they were angry with Aislabie, not me. Now I noticed that nobody smiled and that wherever I stood a ring of silence formed around me. I was afraid of the absorption in the eyes of people who usually led lives rigorously ordered by the rising and setting of the sun. They had abandoned themselves to strange fascinations and cruel pleasures: gawping at a pig-faced lady with a huge silver ring through her nostrils, at a sly-eyed mountebank selling cures for toothache. I had seen this possessed look in the face of Aislabie when he lay with me in the orchard and in my father when he was nearing the end of an experiment, and it terrified me because it left me out.

I couldn’t get close to Mrs. Gill because a little throng of people were waiting for a consultation. On the table, held down firmly by Annie, lay a purple-faced baby with eyes weeping yellow pus. I stood aside while Mrs. Gill dropped salve into the child’s furious eyes, then I went behind the stall and touched her elbow.

She eyed me coldly. “I haven’t time,” she said, then turned her back and beckoned the next customer, a boy with a putrid boil on his neck. Bewildered, I drifted over to a nearby ribbon seller and fingered some lengths of material. I was conscious of shifting and whispering behind me as I held up a pink strip and smiled. The ribbon seller seemed to smile back, though she didn’t pay much attention to me because she was gossiping to a customer.

The ribbon was cheap and soft—not like the glossy silks Sarah had stolen, but of another texture, dull on one side, shiny on the other, which for a moment made me yearning and dreamy, so that I forgot where I was and touched it to my lips. This pale pink ribbon was the precise width and texture of the frayed scrap left by my mother and which now hung round my neck to hold the laboratory key.

Another woman had joined the conversation. “. . . this place was too small for him. They say he’s got short of money.”

“Nobody of his sort of standing would stay in such a godforsaken hole for long,” said another.

“I’m disappointed in him. I thought he’d see us through this.”

“Never trust a man of the cloth,” said the ribbon seller, and she laughed. But when she saw that I was listening, her eyes hardened. I let the ribbon fall on the table and turned away, but I was pressed so close by the crowd that my thighs were bruised by the table edge. I smiled again and fumbled at the waist of my gown as if searching for money, but the ribbon seller’s lips were now pursed together, and for a moment I thought she must have some disfigurement. Then I realized she was gathering spittle.

The crowd behind me went quiet, and a man turned his bearded face to mine so close that I saw flaking skin caught in his whiskers, cracked flesh at the corner of his mouth, broken veins in his cheek. He looked through me, his muscles slack with malice.

“Let me pass,” I said, but nobody moved. “Let me pass.” My voice rose and wavered. I took a step back from the table, and my foot landed on someone’s toe.

The bearded man clutched my elbow and spoke hot in my ear: “Mistress Aislabie, I’d like a word, if you please.”

Where was Mrs. Gill? Surely she wouldn’t let them hurt me. A flock of sheep was being driven up the street behind the crowd, and there was a great confusion of frightened animals. The man kept his hand on my arm and drew me along. People stepped aside one at a time until we were in an alley where there was a bit of shade. I was pressed so near to him that I could smell his sweat and feel the heat of his skin. “You probably don’t know who I am. Barton. Blacksmith. My daughter Annie sometimes used to work up at the house.”

“Yes. Yes. I know.”

“I should like to show you what we’ve come to at Selden while you’ve been drawing up plans for your great house.”

He kept such tight hold of my elbow that my flesh ached. I tried to form the right words to explain that he’d got it very wrong, but my hat had fallen back and the ribbon was tight round my throat. Meanwhile, the blacksmith was hurrying me along the main street, and I was conscious that a little crowd of children followed behind.

We were soon out of the village street and among a cluster of tumbledown cottages with glassless windows and ragged thatch. He pushed open a warped door and urged me in. The sun had baked through the broken roof and made a reeking oven of the place, but some poor creature lay in the corner huddled under a heap of blankets while a baby mewled in its crib and a hen pecked at the earth floor.

“Nobody’s been paid since April for all the laboring that’s gone on to get your house emptied and the crops weeded,” said the blacksmith, who still had tight hold of my arm, “and there’s rumors that this year’s will be a bad harvest. The likes of this widow Mrs. Moore and her grandchild are dying for want of decent nourishment. What will you do about it, Mrs. Aislabie?”

The heat pressed hard down on me and flies buzzed in the chamber pot. The smell was very bad, perhaps worse than the dead babies.

I looked him in the eye. He didn’t seem a bad or violent man, just angry. But he frightened me because I had no answers for him, so I tore away and got back into the main street. There I was worse off than ever, because the crowd had gathered again and stood in a semicircle, waiting. Some faces I recognized from church; some were strangers, probably from neighboring villages. They were led by the ribbon seller, with her bitter mouth and staring eyes.

There was no way past them. The sun burned down on my bare head. I smelled manure and gingerbread, my own fright, excrement, and sick human flesh from the cottage behind me. My skirts crumpled in my fists, and I thought of my quiet laboratory, of my husband sailing away before a strong wind, and of Shales, who wasn’t coming back.

They came closer. A child had found his way through the forest of legs and stared at me as if I was part of some show. I backed a little and found that others had crept round behind me. I was hemmed in.

The ribbon seller spat in my face—it was almost a relief to feel the soft saliva on my cheek. Perhaps this was enough punishment, and it would end here. I thought that if I met her eye, all would be well, but her mouth was working and another gob of spittle darkened the skirt of my gown. I thought, That will sponge off; Sarah will deal with it. From far away, the blacksmith’s voice said, “Now, now that’s enough,” but the crowd shuffled closer. Then something small and hard hit the side of my neck and fell to the ground with a rattle. “Bastard,” someone shouted.

A little murmur went through the crowd, like the wind in my oak tree. The blacksmith said loudly, “That’s enough. She’s had a fright. I’m sure she’ll speak up for us now.”

I turned my head to thank him, and from the corner of my eye saw another stone, much bigger, hurtle from the crowd. I twisted my neck, but it got my cheek and breast, and then a dead weight cracked against the back of my head. The blacksmith had me firmly by the arm and was pulling me backward. The crowd was yelling, some were backing away, others pressing close enough to get a fistful of skirt and yank hard. My other hand was grabbed, and the fingers wrenched apart so violently that pain shot up my arm. Then suddenly through it all I heard Mrs. Gill’s voice come in fits and starts: “Stop this. Stop. Are you out of your minds? Are you savages? What is this?”

The crowd parted, and I was hauled along the street, thrust through a gate, and pushed down on something hard. “She’ll be safe here. I’ll see to them,” someone said. Then there was the click of a heavy latch and sudden quiet.

There were shouts on the other side of the wall, and after a while other noises came back: the fiddle again, cows lowing, poultry. I clutched my injured hand and stared down at the mucousy stain in the lap of my gown, at swept cobbles, and, a little distance away, a pair of small feet in heavy boots.

Mrs. Gill said, “Fetch some water for Mrs. Aislabie, if you please.”

The boots moved away. She knelt in front of me and fumbled with my hat strings until the hat fell from my neck and allowed me to breathe more freely. “Let me see your face.”

I shut my eyes and felt her dab at my cheek with something soft and run her hands over the back of my head where the stone had got me. “Tell me where it hurts, Emilie.”

The hobnails rang, there was the clang of a pitcher, and a beaker was held to my lips. More cold water trickled onto my stinging cheek. “Emilie, show me that you can hear me.”

It was weeks since I had looked at her properly, and it was a shock to see the fright in her eyes and the sweat on her brow. “You must be out of your mind coming here,” she said. “Do you really have no idea what’s going on?”

I was still dizzy from the blow to my head. “Were they talking about Shales when they said he wasn’t coming back?”

The blacksmith’s boy had been leaning on the wall with one foot propped behind him. When she gave him a nod, he levered himself forward and ambled away into the smithy.

“Lord knows what they were talking about. Why can’t you pay attention?”

“Why are you so angry?”

She stared at me until her eyes bulged. “Have you really no idea?”

“What have I done? God knows I’ve done nothing.”

“Then who sent that wretched girl away?”

“She was carrying my husband’s child.”

“Have you no mercy?”

I shook my head to clear it. “She was my husband’s mistress. She had been sleeping with him all through my marriage. She stole my clothes. Why do you side with her?”

“It’s not a matter of siding with her. I told her you’d be kind. I trusted you.”

“She’s a whore.”

“Did you ever think why she lives like this? Did you ever ask her?”

“No. Why should I? She was scarcely forthcoming.”

“Dear God, it’s uncanny how he trained you up in his likeness. I have never known anyone as ignorant of life beyond the laboratory as that man. Or as incurious.”

“He had a great deal on his mind.”

“He was mighty choosy about what he thought about. Same as you.”

“What has this to do with Sarah?”

“Good Lord, Emilie, you had only to look at her to know what a state she was in. She was sick with misery, apart from anything else. It was a wickedness to bring her away from London in the first place. I don’t think she slept for the first month.”

“Sarah is tough. She’ll survive. She stole my clothes.”