The Alchemist's Daughter (42 page)

“But surely to use the sun as a measure is dangerous?” I said. “How do you withstand the glare of the sun at noon?”

“Exactly, Mrs. Aislabie. Hence this new type of quadrant, or backstaff. We turn our backs to the sun, thus, and measure the shadow it casts. It’s all about finding our position. Latitude and longitude. Latitude we can find by using the compass. Longitude is trickier and very complicated.”

“I noticed that some of the ships on the river were painted white underneath. Why was that?”

“Barnacles. They latch onto the boat and can affect her seaworthiness in time. Some people believe that a mix of tallow, resin, and sulfur will protect the hull from barnacles.”

“
Flora
isn’t painted, though.”

Minshall said nothing, and I wondered what other cost-cutting measures had been employed by Aislabie. Meanwhile, Minshall had sidled closer and seemed to be snuffing the air near my neck, so I thanked him for his time and said we would wait here for my husband.

When he’d gone, I sank onto a velvet couch and indicated that Annie should do the same, but she refused and instead peered anxiously out of the large windows as if afraid we might be cast off and on our way to Calabar.

One way and another
Flora
had been a shock. I realized now that I had thought of her as a kind of whim, like the projected dome and cascade at Selden, but I had discovered she was in deadly earnest. And Aislabie had transferred his most treasured possessions here. He’d even hung the landscape by Lorrain, which used to be in Hanover Street, between two of the portholes, and mounted copies of the plans made by Harford and Osborne for the house and garden at Selden in frames under glass on a little side table.

We waited half an hour or so. I played with the instruments and fathomed how to use the quadrant, but I was distracted by those plans for Selden. I kept going back for another look at that gracious mansion with its twin flights of steps, pillars, and porticoes, until in the end the sight of it made me so angry that I pushed the glass aside, pulled out the plans, rolled them up, and tucked them into a pocket.

It was time to go. The more time I spent on board
Flora
, the less I wanted to be there, and it occurred to me that Aislabie must have been warned of our presence and chosen not to come aboard. In any case, one of my main purposes in paying this visit had been defeated. I had wanted to be part of
Flora
, to give myself an entitlement to her profits and the good things she could bring back, but such was my disgust for everything aboard that I wanted nothing to do with her. So I told Annie sharply we should leave, and suddenly in a great hurry we climbed over the side and into the waiting boat. Shivering we set off, and shivering we sat in silence until we got back to London Bridge.

[ 8 ]

T
HE NEXT DAY
was Sunday, and any respectable business was closed. I should have waited in Hanover Street to discover the outcome of my visit to
Flora
, but instead I set off on another foolhardy and extravagant journey. Although I was ashamed of spending some of the precious parrot bowl money on an excursion that would bring us no closer to Sarah, my feet carried me down to the jetty, with Annie, of course, in tow, and my hand released five shillings into the palm of a boatman who promised to get us to Twickenham and back by evening.

This time we went upstream and there was hardly any traffic on the river. The temperature had dropped still farther, and there was a distinct whiff of autumn in the air. Yet I was glad to be on the move again, especially as we were rowing away from
Flora
and toward Selden. And this expedition could do no harm, I argued to myself. It was only to fill the time.

Annie trailed her hand and stared at London as it tumbled down to the riverbank and then farther upstream unfolded itself into gardens and scrubby fields. When last I made this journey, I had been sick with longing for a glimpse of my father. Now when I thought of Selden, I saw broken walls, the laboratory blown apart, and Shales stooped to enter the homes of his parishioners or at work in his leafy little study. I had thought, as I traveled home in January, that I was significant. Now our boat seemed a mere speck, an irrelevance to the great onward rush of time. And this made me understand the imperative of palingenesis. My father, sensing approaching death, had wanted so badly to live again.

At Twickenham, I told the boatman we would be an hour at most, and he shipped the oars, hauled his boat up the jetty, and left us on the pebbly beach. Annie stood patiently beside me, but I couldn’t move. It was as if I was trespassing on private property. This was the view Shales had seen each time he came down to the river: maybe this same pair of swans, though with a different clutch of cygnets dipping their scruffy necks; that far view of poplars on the opposite bank; that same farmer holding the same cart horse by the reins.

I turned away at last, walked up the beach, and crossed the lane. Here was the rectory with a smart front door that Mrs. Shales must have stood at several times a day to receive visitors, the gabled porch where Shales would have left his boots, the garden battered by recent rain but full of beans, cabbages, and fruit trees. I noted that one or two had been lopped or engrafted, a sure sign that Shales had once lived here. And to the left, set well back in an orderly graveyard, was a low church with a slatted wooden tower.

The congregation was just spilling out and we hung well back, watching a portly cleric greet his parishioners. His alb fluttered in the wind, and at one point he put his hand on his wig to prevent it from blowing away. As soon as the last person had walked by, he scurried back into the porch; a few minutes later, I saw him blow across the graveyard toward a little gate admitting him to the rectory garden.

The church door stood wide open. Inside was the familiar perfume of cool stone, summer flowers, and the lingering breath of the congregation. Annie crept over to a side chapel and spelled out the inscriptions on the memorials—poor soul, she was not yet able to tell if the words were in Latin or English—while I sat in a pew and stared. The hexagonal pulpit was a touching affair with carvings of squirrels and rabbits running through the panels, and I imagined Shales climbing the four steep steps and standing before the congregation to address them with moderate words of praise and commitment.

After a while, I got up to read the plaques, but none was to his wife, although his name was inscribed at the bottom of a list of former incumbents:
Thomas Shales, 1710–1725
. I thought of Mrs. Shales arranging greenery in glass jars or polishing the brasses, a calm, small-mouthed woman, as unlike myself as it was possible to be.

The churchyard was windy but well-kept, with the gravestones in neat rows, the yew clipped, the paths clear of weeds. I found her at last in a far corner under a young medlar.

H
ANNAH
M
ARGARET
S
HALES OF THIS PARISH

D
EPARTED LIFE
A
UGUST 30, 1724

A
GED 30 YEARS

W
IFE TO
T
HOMAS
S
HALES,
R
ECTOR.

A
ND
T
HOMAS, THEIR ONLY SON, AGED TWO WEEKS

O
N THE SAME DAY.

Annie was at my shoulder, plowing her way through the spellings. “No,” I said. “No. Oh no.”

“Mrs. Aislabie?”

I read the inscription out loud: “. . .
And Thomas, their only son, aged two weeks
. . . .” Then I turned my head and covered my face with my elbow.

Voices called from across the graveyard: “Is your mistress quite well?”

A couple of elderly women moved across and stared at me. Annie took my arm. “That was a sad affair,” one of the women said, nodding toward the grave.

“Knew her, did you?” the other asked.

“We know about her,” said Annie. “We are visitors here. Reverend Shales is our rector at home.”

“Very fortunate for you. It seemed hard on us that we should lose him as well, but he couldn’t bear the place once she’d gone.”

“We haven’t taken to the new man half as much, though he’s very clever,” put in her companion. “Rattles away about heaven and hell. Our Reverend Shales spoke only of this life. We liked that. And we all wanted him at our sickbed because he had a gift for cheering us up. He talked about all sorts, caterpillars and other bugs even. Nothing was too low for him. But then she died, and the baby, and he wasn’t the same.”

“How did she die?” said Annie, and this was one of the few questions I ever heard her ask.

“She died of the smallpox. Caught it from the doctor her father insisted be brought from London, though Reverend Shales said the local midwife was good enough for the rest of the village and ought to be for his wife.”

“Should have been inoculated,” said Annie. “We all was. Our Sir John insisted.”

“Ah, but there’s the terrible thing. The reverend wanted her to be. He had all the household and anyone else in the village who wanted it inoculated, but Mrs. Shales refused. There were differences between them, and this was one of them. Her father was a cleric, too, very strict and opposed to interfering with the work of God, which is how he saw the inoculations.”

The smaller of the two women was so thin that her neck was stringy as a chicken’s, but her eyes were a bright brown. “I remember that time,” she said. “Do you remember? A terrible time. We used to see him carry the baby down to the river to show him the swans. It was a warm August, and he thought the sunlight would do the child good. We used to meet him, do you remember, carrying him about so that his sick wife wouldn’t hear the child’s cries. I’ll never forget the sight of that great man with that tiny babe. But it couldn’t thrive. Anyone could see that. It was a sickly little thing from the start. And so they were both buried in one grave, and he stood there and prayed over the single coffin. Do you remember?

“We wanted him to stay, but he never got over his grief. He used to go night after night down to the river and never visited us in our homes anymore. He blamed himself for the arguments that had divided them. She hated the work he did with plants and wouldn’t be convinced, you see, of the rightness of any modern thing. His sermons got shorter, and sometimes he forgot himself in the middle of a prayer, so in the end he had to go.”

Her companion was staring into the distance with her watery blue eyes. “We met him here one evening. I said to him, ‘How are you, Reverend?’ And he gave me that nice smile of his, but I could tell he was all wrought up. I said, ‘I hope you’re feeling a little soothed now, Reverend,’ and he said a terrible thing. He said, ‘I feel as if I shall never be soothed. How could I be? Our child would have lived if we had cared for each other a little more and not been so obstinately set on being right.’ I said, ‘But you are a good man, one of the best I know, you shouldn’t be tormenting yourself,’ and he shook my hand and smiled so tender at me and walked away.”

“How is he now?” asked the other. “Is he better?”

I didn’t answer, so after a moment Annie said, “I’d say yes.”

She thanked the women, and they told us to send Shales their best wishes. Then we went back to our boat. We were early, so there was time to be on the beach again and look across at the poplars and the swans sailing indifferently by. Annie stood close to my shoulder, and after a while I put my hand through her arm and leaned on her.

The boatman came back full of ale and good cheer. On the way downriver, Annie and I were pressed against each other, and the boatman winked at us and cracked jokes because he said we seemed gloomy, but he gave up after a while, sighed deeply, and pulled strongly on the oars to get us back as fast as possible.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Aurelie

[ 1 ]

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Annie played the lady’s maid and brought a tray of chocolate to my room with a scrap of paper scrawled in my husband’s hand:
Sarah Holborne. Powder Yard. Off Red Lion Street
.

I was somewhat suspicious of such a rapid capitulation but wasted no time. Annie sewed twenty guineas into the hem of my petticoat and off we set. The rain had stopped, and the morning was full of stench and steam under a hot sun. As we got farther from the more opulent streets, we linked arms and entered a maze of overhanging walls—old houses deserted by their rich inhabitants and infested instead with street sellers and silk winders living four or five to a room, in cellars and attics or shacks put up in courtyards, in rookeries teetering crookedly in former gardens so that one street led to another, a yard to an alley, an alley to a dead end. And in every bit of open space, in gutters or gaping windows, Londoners and immigrants fell over each other to earn a penny or two, to get some air, to be anywhere that was not inside the foul buildings where they slept.