The Alchemist's Daughter (23 page)

[ 8 ]

I
STALKED OUTSIDE
to find that the sunlight was gone and a haze descended on the street, but spurred on by outrage, I flagged down another chair and asked for Spitalfields. The men calculated the cost and told me that I had enough for the journey there, but not the one home afterward. I didn’t care. My good mood was all gone, and I was back in the same fever of confusion and sorrow I had felt in the Abbey.

The latest journal . . . a digest of Mayow . . . my dear lady . . .
My father had told me that I knew more than any other woman alive, and yet I had been patronized by a charlatan with a taste for public lecturing. If I had no voice, if my knowledge was discounted, what had all those years with my father been for? I shifted restlessly in the chair and felt the men adjust their handhold as we lurched round a corner. What was left of me if the learned Emilie was taken away? A hollow thing with no father, no mother, and no child.

Here it came, that sudden headlong rush to my heart, the baby again, the little creature in its bubble of a lost opportunity.

T
HE MEN DROPPED
me in Spital Square and scrambled off. I walked up and down a nearby street, scanning each house. Mrs. Gill had told me that my mother’s family house was destroyed by fire, so I thought there should be one house newer than the rest.

I knocked on doors. After a few minutes, a maidservant would come panting up from the basement, and sometimes I was shown into a back parlor where the lady of the house sat over her knitting or nursed a child or two in her lap. Some of the women spoke English, some French. “Do you remember the De Lery family?” I asked.

“De Lery?
Non
.”

I mentioned “
un feu depuis vingt ans
.”

Shrug. “
Non. Pas un feu. Pas ici
.”

I gave my mother’s married name. “Selden.”

“Selden.
Non
.”

The more I asked, the more lost I felt. My questions became frantic, people looked at me strangely, I was on the brink of tears. Someone should have known the De Lerys. I tried another tactic. I peered through open doors, saw rack after rack of silk bales, carts loaded with silk thread, the confusion and commotion of the looms and the vats of dye, the lanterns of the pattern drawers, the nerve-tingling slicing of silk. Everyone had a purpose except me.

Panic-stricken, I reviewed what I did have of my mother and found it hopelessly inadequate—a strip of ribbon, a gravestone, an empty chamber. And somewhere, if they were not destroyed, my father’s notebooks. The Gills never told me anything useful, Shales had talked to my father in confidence, the villagers who might have known her were alienated. A blank, in fact.

The sun was now blotted out altogether by brown smoke, and I was confused by the maze of streets. I knew I should head south toward the Thames, and then west, but I soon found myself in an area I had never visited, where the houses were so crammed together that I could have stood in the middle of the street and touched the walls on either side. In five minutes, I had rubbed shoulders with more people than I had met in nineteen years at Selden. Though the dense fog muffled sound and dulled color, my black silk cloak stood out by being so lustrous and densely dyed. There was a sliding of eyes, a stiffening when I passed by, as though people were valuing the clothes on my back and registering that I was unprotected. It seemed shameful that I, swathed in my shimmering cloak, should ask the way of a ragged girl. She would be sure to realize that I was not a lady at all but an alchemist’s daughter with the smell of acid in the folds of my petticoat and my heart full of grief.

I stumbled down yet one more alley and found that I had reached a dead end with rubbish piled against a high gray wall. The only way was back, though I dreaded the contemptuous eyes of the street children who sat on the steps and watched. For a moment, I stood still, bracing myself, while the stench from the heap penetrated the scented folds of my hood. I stared abstractedly, struggling to stay calm. The rubbish heap was made of rags, dirt, and bits of brick and metal soaked in the flyblown mess of emptied privies.

Something caught my eye, a purple triangle sticking out of the waste. I darted forward and put my hands to my mouth, then spun round and walked away.

Faster, Emilie. If you stop, these children will fall on you and tear you to shreds.

But the perverse Emile, the natural philosopher’s daughter, would not walk on. Instead, she turned back, covered her nose with her mantle, and went right up to the heap.

Now the terrible thing took shape. What I had seen was the heel of a newborn babe flung face down in the rubbish, and on top of it, so that their two knees were locked together, the baby’s twin. Both infants were naked. One had its face compressed against the muck; the other’s was turned sideways so that I could see its miniature profile, round forehead, tiny beak of a nose, pouting lips. Their little bellies were distended, and their arms and legs sticklike.

I had never been allowed to show distaste during a dissection in the laboratory or to recoil from putrefaction, so I brought my face closer, closer, and remembered the weight of my own stillborn fetus, hot like a stewed plum, and the few moments I had spent examining its petal-thin ears. When I looked again, I distinctly saw the infant’s mouth gape.

London was bellowing. I heard a thousand wheels turn beyond the watchful silence of the alley as I crouched down, took off my glove, reached out my hand, and touched a stone-cold foot. Behind me there was movement among the spectators in the alley.

I scooped up both the little bodies and folded them in my cloak, wrapping them up tight until only their mouths were exposed. Then I strode out of that dreadful place, spurred on by hope that made my instinct for home preternaturally sure, so that I found my way with never a wrong turn, pushing confidently through the crowds as if my own mission was the only one that mattered.

When I reached Hanover Street, Sarah opened the door. She started to say something, but I took no notice. “Fetch warm water,” I said. “Quickly.”

I ran up to my dainty chamber and laid the cloak by the fire. Immediately, all of Kempe’s carefully contrived perfume was blotted out by a terrible smell of excrement and rancid meat.

Sarah came in with two pails. “Shall you be bathing, madam?”

I was crouched over the cloak with my back to her. “Bring the water to the fire. Hurry. Now fetch me some towels.” Gently, I unraveled one infant from her sister—they were both girls. “Look what I found on a dung heap. I couldn’t bear to leave them. One of them may be alive. I think I saw her lips move. I want you to send for a doctor and a priest.”

I lifted the child with the turned head, laid her on my lap, and placed my fingers over her heart. Did her hand twitch? I circulated my fingertips on the little chest and put my face to her mouth to see if she breathed, but the baby was certainly dead, as dead as her sister. Her head was flung back on my lap, and her perfect little nostrils were gray and useless. The soundless cry must have been an illusion. Both had probably been dead for many hours.

Then I became aware that the room was filled with noise. Sarah was standing behind me, eyes fixed on the dead babies, fists pressed into her mouth. From the back of her throat came a steady screeching.

“Stop that, Sarah. It helps no one.” I laid the babies tenderly on the lining of my cloak and folded it around them. “You must go and fetch a priest. These poor children should at least be buried properly.”

She didn’t move.

“Sarah.”

At last she came forward and shoved her face so close to mine that her saliva spat on my lips. “You have ruined that beautiful cloak. Have you any idea how much it cost? What was you thinking of?”

[ 9 ]

A
FTER
S
ARAH HAD
gone, I was triumphant at first. Good, she obeyed me. But what with the long trek home, her shrieking, and the blow of finding both babies dead, I began to tremble so hard that my teeth knocked together.

To calm myself, I dipped my hands in the pail of water. The sight and feel of the metal reminded me of home and Mrs. Gill. Everything she touched got clean in the end. Then I had a good idea—I’d wash the babies anyway. That’s what you did with the dead. So I picked up a baby and lowered her into the bucket, but her head on its thread of a neck flopped onto my wrist and then down into the pail, dragging the rest of her body with it.

I shook harder but managed to haul her out, though gray bruises appeared on her arm where I’d held her too tight. “Well, Emilie. It’s just as well that your own child died. What a mess you’d have made of bringing her up. A ducking like that would have killed her,” I said briskly as I soaped her downy head. I even began to hum a melody from yesterday’s Te Deum.

Then the door burst open, and my husband appeared. “By Christ, Emilie, what have you done?” and I was jolted back to the reality of my parlor, where scum floated on tepid water in the bucket, a heap of dead flesh lay on the red lining of my cloak, and lice crawled through the folds of my filthy skirts.

I clutched my hands tight together to stop them flying off my wrists. “I couldn’t leave them in a dung heap. They deserve a proper burial.”

He was pale and dull-eyed. I hadn’t seen him angry like this since the day he came out of the library after the interview with my father. “
Deserve
. Emilie. They’re bastards. Some whore throttled ’em and slung ’em away. A hundred such are tossed into the gutters every month. Christ knows what infection you’ve brought into the house.”

“But they are babies. They have a soul.”

“Women have hanged for less. Who’s to prove you didn’t kill them yourself? This is London, Emilie. You’re supposed to behave in a civilized way.”

The horror of the dung heap and the blank eyes of those watching children came back in such a rush that my knee jolted one of the babies off my lap. “I expect the priest will be here soon. A guinea or so should be enough for their burial.”

“There’ll be no burial.”

“They must be buried. I could take them back to Selden, if you like.” For a lovely moment, I was in the grassy graveyard near my mother’s little plot. Just the place. She would take care of them with her silken hands. Gill could make them a box lined with flannel to keep them warm, and surely Shales would agree to bury them. He and I would try to understand why some poor woman took them to that dreadful place and abandoned them, dead or alive.

I should have been paying more attention to my husband, because he lunged forward, bundled up the babies, and made for the door.

“Where are you taking them?”

“Never you mind. The nearest ditch. Where they belong.”

“No.” I tried to reach him but tripped on my petticoats, so that he had the door half open by the time I caught hold of his knee. My other hand gripped his heel, but he kicked me aside, and I was flung back on my elbow. I lunged after him again, and this time his boot got my chin and sent me reeling. The door slammed shut, and I heard the key turn in the lock and his pounding feet on the stairs.

I lay with my face on the Persian rug. Pain ran round my jaw and into my eyes, but it seemed a welcome and definite feeling compared to the chaos in my head, swirling vortices like those described by Descartes and disproved by Newton—only Descartes’ vortices or whorls of matter weren’t chaotic, they moved in one direction, or he thought they did until a wayward comet was observed traveling the wrong way, thereby causing a dent in his tidy universe.

Comets. What were comets? Heavenly portents unleashed by God as a warning, according to Newton. But good old saintly Newton never accepted an easy answer. Instead, he went on and on looking at a problem until he had beaten it into submission. The elliptical path of the comet, for instance, had shown him the way all planets move. How wise Newton had been sometimes to study heavenly rather than earthly bodies, which were so unpredictable and full of pain.

I was mesmerized by the flames in the hearth, which went on flaring and licking despite everything. Mrs. Gill told me that some midwives choke unwanted babies with a spoonful of gin to finish them off. A baby was snuffed out by gin, fire by water, and a rose by imprisonment in a flask.

Putrefaction, the black crow of alchemy, according to my father, was a necessary process as the decomposition of one thing gives life to another, otherwise the planet would groan under the weight of too much creation. In a year or so, all that would be left of the babies apart from their immortal souls—and that seemed to be a matter of some argument—would be bone and fingernails.

For those lumps of flesh, I had put my husband into such a rage that he would surely never forgive me. No wonder he kicked me. I had got it all wrong again. But what was more wrong, to bring home putrid babies, to leave them in the dung heap, or to put them back there? And I’d come no closer to my mother after all. Another failure. The frustration, the pointlessness of my day’s work, had me forcing my wrist into my mouth to hold back the sobs, just as I used to when I was a child and my father was angry with me for shattering a flask by overheating.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

The Furnace Shed