The Alchemist's Daughter (37 page)

October 16, 1725

This is what I do. She comes to my mind. I hear her voice calling me Father, the way her black eyes smile into mine when she has a question or has been especially clever, the way she tilts up her head when she is angry. Or I imagine I see the hem of her gown as she springs off her stool and runs to the workbench and leans on it in that way of turning her hands outward and gripping the edge of the bench with her thumbs. She has the most beautiful thumbs—slender, long, white, strong. I hate her to be careless with those thumbs, like that time she plucked a crucible from the flame and burned herself. She has elbows that bend both ways, I’ve noticed. The hinge is not fully formed, so when she leans she is not like other people. But she doesn’t know this thing about herself.

She comes to mind, and I turn her round in my head. I look at the back of her, at her little cap that is so often crooked, and I imagine her walking away. That’s how I get rid of her.

October 17, 1725

Or I conjure up an image I dislike. Emilie in the garden, yawning, bored, Emilie gray-faced as she told me about the child. And I think, Good, good you’re rid of her.

October 26

The calcinations.

She is still in the house. I welcome the roar of the flames because it drowns the rustle of her skirts. I can’t hear her knocking any more. I waste so much time.

(Shales called. Refused him.)

December 1, 1725

She is gone.

Mrs. Gill came up first thing and said, “You should say good-bye.”

“I will not,” I said.

“You are a fool, sir.” This is the second time she has called me a fool. Stood at the window, well back, where no one would see me. Saw the plume of his hat, and on the far side of him the carriage taking my Emilie. Watched Gill close the gates.

I walk through the house and I don’t know where I am. Don’t recognize the rooms. Found myself in her bedchamber. A maid was there and ran away. I went to the bed. The pillow still bore the shape of her head. I put my hand between the sheets, and there was a hint of warmth.

Emilie. For the first time since her birth, when I called her name she wasn’t there to answer. And I think I cried out when the thought came to me: What did I do that was so wrong?

Mrs. Gill came up to me later and said, “Sir, you must eat.” I didn’t know I was kneeling with my face on her pillow and my hand between the sheets.

Shales called. Refused to see him.

December 20, 1725

A letter from my girl. A letter and a green feather. A parrot’s feather. She has a parrot. I would have bought her a parrot, had she asked for one.

The baby is miscarried. I can’t stop weeping. I have tried. I am not myself.

I think of Emilie lying ill in some foreign bed. I think of her picking up the feather and twisting it round in her fingers and thinking of me and writing the letter, with her lips pressed together and working as she writes, and the smear of ink on the joint of her third finger because she is always clumsy and wasteful of ink, as I have often told her. I imagine her wiping the pen on her apron and enclosing the feather, and clasping the seal in her thin fingers, which have always reminded me so much of the mother’s.

December 21

Wrote a long letter in reply. Burned it. Wrote, “I am glad you are alive.”

I can’t keep warm.

Shales to call. Received him this time. He spoke very sensibly about the village. Can’t help blaming him for all this.

January 8

Shales to call. Said you don’t look well, sir. Offered to write to Emilie, was sure she must miss me. I said nothing at all. I could not. I had her, and I let her go. I did her a terrible wrong. I tried to own her. When I look at Shales, I see how I might have kept her close to me still but for my jealousy. I see it. Too late. Obtuse. Obstinate. Wicked old man.

I would give every last drop of blood to turn back time and have her here with me again, just as she was a year ago, full of hope and brilliance and pent-up energy.

My dearest Emi—

My dearest love.

My dearest child. My love. My love.

[ 9 ]

I
N THE AFTERNOON
, there was a commotion at the far end of the garden, and Annie and Mrs. Gill appeared bearing a weighty oak mirror from the Queen’s Room at Selden.

They stood it in front of me. “It’s safe to look,” said Mrs. Gill, her eyes bulging with challenge. “You won’t have too much of a shock.”

I pulled myself up, stared across at my image, and saw a mass of greenery glinting and bouncing in the sunlight, a backdrop to a still figure dressed in white. Her black hair, singed at the front, stood up wildly round her face and fell almost to her waist, cloaking her shoulders. Her eyes were staring and black, and her cheeks and chin were blotched with patches of new skin. Her body was formless in the voluminous shift, and she looked as if she was rising out of the earth.

“Well?” said Mrs. Gill.

I collapsed back on the cushions. “Get back to that straining,” Mrs. Gill told Annie, who helped her lay down the mirror, gave me an agonized look, and darted away into the kitchen.

“You know it makes not a blind bit of difference where you came from,” Mrs. Gill said.

“You lied to me.”

“It was a story. It was a picture we gave you of yourself. Is that so different to the way anyone else lives? You are Emilie Selden, and don’t you forget it.”

“I trusted you.”

“Stop that. Stop it. Foolish girl. We made a choice, and we stuck to it. Why not see yourself as blessed rather than cursed? That mother of yours was nearly drowned with you inside her. You might never have lived. You might have been turned onto the parish. Instead, your father made you his own child.”

“But I failed him.”

“I knew we’d come to that. He failed himself. He treated you like one of his wretched caged birds. That was the failure. He had no sense.”

“Nevertheless, if I’d known, I would have been more grateful. I would not have let him down like that.”

“You were the apple of his eye. When you broke into his life, you brought such sunshine. He doted on you. You gave him nineteen years of joy.”

“What about my husband? What would he do if he found out?”

“It seems to me he married far above himself. In any case, I’m sure he knows. Lord, Emilie, anyone with a mind to probe would find out from the village something of what had gone on.”

“Reverend Shales? Did my father tell him?”

“And if he did, what difference would it make?” She gave me one of her blank-eyed stares.

“Of course it makes a difference. If he knew all along. He must think me utterly pitiable.”

“Nonsense. Why would he pity you? He would see you for what you are.”

“But I am nothing. I came from nowhere.”

“You are your father’s daughter. He made you his. He chose you.”

“I can’t bear to think that Shales has known the truth about me all this time.”

“Well. I see. That’s your first thought, is it?”

“No. No, my first thought is Sarah.”

She folded her arms and was silent.

“Tell me what you remember of my mother, then,” I said.

“I remember little except her suffering. She must have been a tough girl to go through so much. I remember her black eyes. I remember thinking when I put her to bed that she must never have slept anywhere so clean or so comfortable before. She gave me such a look. Fear and then gratitude, I think. She did seem foreign to me with her ribbons and her dark skin.”

“Was my pink ribbon really hers?”

“Of course.”

Of course. Why hadn’t I noticed? It was a cheap ribbon, not silk at all, but some shiny cotton stuff. Sarah must have known straightaway.

“I must go and find Sarah,” I said.

“In your state?”

“I’ve already wasted too much time. Will her baby be born yet?”

“I should certainly hope not.”

“Will you come with me?”

“To London? How could I?”

“Then I’ll go by myself.”

“Take Annie. She’s a useful girl.”

“Annie.”

“No need for that look. She’s worth fifteen of you. And she’ll never complain or do rash things, like some.” She adjusted the front of her apron, and I had the distinct impression that this conversation was not a surprise to her—indeed, had been anticipated. “You’ll need money,” she said.

“I have ten guineas.”

“And I have some saved. You can use that.”

“You’d never get it back. No. I must be like Sarah, take something to sell.”

“Well, there’s not much left in Selden that would attract a buyer.”

“I’ll find something. I’ll go home and take a look tomorrow.”

“You won’t like what you see.”

There was a peculiar lightness between us, almost hilarity. One great change that came about after I read the notebooks was that I was readmitted into the faint warmth of Mrs. Gill’s good graces.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Looking for Sarah

[ 1 ]

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I limped up the village street and waited while Gill unlocked the gate to Selden. Though the weather had broken at last and it was a cloudy, cold morning, a little cluster of villagers gathered at a distance. Mrs. Gill said that it had been rumored that I would never recover. Children, still scantily clad after the long heat wave, pranced about in the skittish wind or waved and stared.

The gate groaned as Gill pushed it back. It was only when I stepped through and heard it clang shut behind me that I realized there was an absence of other noise. Not only had the demolition stopped, but there were none of the usual Selden background sounds of hens and horses or bustle from the kitchens. No smoke rose from the chimneys, but the entrance door stood wide open.

Inside was a new smell of damp earth recently uncovered. Apart from a dense coating of dust, everything looked much as ever, except that the suit of armor and the pictures of Selden ancestors had disappeared. The latter had left pale rectangles on the paneling somewhat more interesting than the portraits themselves.

While I walked across to the library, Gill remained in the porch, blotting the light. “Take care,” he said.

I threw open the door, and my first thought was that I had stepped out of Selden and into some other house altogether. The air had a whitish sheen like in church, and the wall between library and laboratory had been replaced by a forest of props, so that the space went on and on to the double tier of windows at the far end. The side of the house gaped like a toothless mouth, because although the structure of the bay window was still intact, the shutters had been pulled off and much of the glass was broken, probably by my explosion. Underfoot, the oak boards were covered with grit and dust, and all the furniture—my father’s chair, the little table for his pipe, my own chair—had disappeared.

As I crept forward, the air changed subtly, and I caught the first whiff of combustion. The laboratory walls were streaked with black and the floor was mushy and charred where they had doused the flames. My father’s workbench lay on its side, my own desk was ruined, but the medium furnace was intact in the center of the room. Piles of rubble and broken glass had been swept into the far corners, and when a gust of wind blew, the air smelled of ash, and sap from the woods outside.

I looked round at Gill, but he had been replaced by Harford, who was wearing a hideous mustard waistcoat and soiled shirtsleeves. He bowed with elaborate care. “Madam, I am glad to see you have recovered.”

I turned again in that vast space. Harford now was at my elbow, and I was struck first by a waft of stale alcohol, then by the realization that this was a very different man to the obsequious vassal who had planned the destruction of Selden. His shirt was grubby, his waistcoat was soiled with plaster dust, and his large face seemed to have been pumped up like a bladder so that his lips, eyelids, and jowls bulged.

“As you see, madam, there have been great changes here.”

I walked through the ruined laboratory, examining the rubble for something I might recognize.

“You helped us out,” he said. “Expedited the work no end. For that we thank you.”

I had found the cavity in the floor where my father’s notebooks and my letters had been. It was empty and blackened, licked by the fire.

“We have retained all the existing foundations,” said Harford, “and it was considered best not to disturb the cellars, which may be five centuries old.” He paused. The door to the cellars, I noticed, was shut fast.

“Shall I explain, madam?” Harford, who stood exactly on the spot where the double doors between the laboratory and library had once been, now threw out his arms and gazed up at the temporary beam. “This will be a central chamber for music and dances. We plan a marble floor with tessellated blocks in white and black, although it may be that if we have to tighten the purse strings scagliola could be used—a type of plaster. The overall design wouldn’t suffer, and the colors can be very subtle. Then, of course, a new white marble fireplace with a mirror in the overmantel and egg and dart molding; and above, the gallery, which will house the library and various artifacts brought back from foreign climes by your husband—he aims to start a collection, he tells me. And then the dome itself. There’s to be a ring of windows round the base and a ceiling painted by some notable artist—William Kent, if we can get him. Your husband will be a central figure, and yourself, of course, madam, in some lustrous gown, with at your feet, I’m sure . . . perhaps by then . . . a host of cherubic infants.”