The Alchemist's Daughter (5 page)

Shales was still for a moment, then bowed and turned suddenly to me. “Mistress Selden, if you ever have time to call, I should be delighted to show you my most recent work with plants and airs, and to hear your views.” He crossed the room a few paces toward me, but I wouldn’t look at him or offer my hand for fear of my father. The door closed, and I heard the sound of his feet on the bare boards in the entrance hall.

I finished my transcript and blotted my work. Neither of us spoke. As usual when my father was in a rage, I tried to obliterate myself by keeping quiet and anticipating every demand, but I was stricken by the loss of a potential friend. In the end, I couldn’t decide who had been most at fault, Shales or my father.

No more was said about that meeting, though I thought about it often, especially when I heard the ringing of the church bell on a Sunday morning. When Shales came to the house—and Mrs. Gill told me that he did call from time to time—my father refused to see him. I didn’t even know if Shales would have remained long in the parish afterward had it not been for the arrival late that summer of Robert Aislabie, in a puff of smoke.

[ 4 ]

E
ACH YEAR WE
began our alchemical phase on August 3, my father’s birthday. That morning, I was sent out to find a perfect rose.

The rose garden was south-facing and very hot, sheltered by the high wall of the terrace. Neglected bushes scrambled into each other, a wasp pestered, my skirts snagged, and all the roses were overblown or diseased. My search seemed hopeless. In fact, there was a part of me that wanted to fail. Since Shales’s visit, the prospect of palingenesis had seemed impossibly far-fetched. If there was no rose, there could be no experiment. It had to be a perfect rose, a tough-stemmed, fragrant, mystical flower. But as I came to the farthest corner, I saw a pink gleam in the shadows. I pushed aside one thorny branch after another until my cheeks and hands were scratched, reached to the very back of the bush, and uncovered a perfect rose.

I thought of my father huddled over the fire in the laboratory. In this most imperfect of rose gardens, I had found a perfect rose, just as he ordained. It was on the cusp of being full blown and had a bead of dew on an inner petal. I held its stem and made a clean cut, let the branches fall back, and stood up with the sappy knife in one hand and the perfect rose in the other. Its fragrance was intense, and I threw back my head to draw a deeper breath. Then I saw a puff of smoke on the London road.

The hillside was scorched, the hedgerows tinder dry. A fire would destroy the wheat crop. I was about to shout for help when I noticed that the smoke was following twists in the lane. Not smoke then, but dust kicked up by a horse’s hooves.

Apart from Shales, Selden rarely had visitors capable of riding a horse, let alone galloping. Occasionally an elderly scholar came to call, or a tradesman, or a neighboring squire on a mission: “Weeds do spread, Selden; have you thought of turning over the long field by the river?” This energetic horseman would doubtless gallop through the village and away, so, to cheat myself of disappointment, I walked briskly back to the laboratory, where my father’s delight in the rose was sufficient reward. He got to his feet and took the flower reverently in his hand, placed it in a jar of water, and turned it round and round, sniffing with admiration. Then he nodded at me. “Good, Emilie. I’m pleased.” He began calling out its various characteristics for me to record: the measurement and number of its petals, the exact appearance of each stamen and leaf. But after a few minutes we heard hoofbeats at the gate, the rasp of metal on gravel, and then a brisk knock on our redundant front door.

I laid down my pen, though my father didn’t even look up. There was nobody to answer the door but me—neither of the Gills would bother—so I trekked through the library and across the entrance hall. The door was so unused to being opened that I cut my knuckle on the rusty bolt. White sunlight poured over me. I put up my hand to shade my eyes and there, smiling down from beneath the shade of his hat, was an astonishing young man.

“Good afternoon, mistress,” he said, and bowed so deeply that he swept the step with his turquoise plumes. “I’m told that this is Sir John Selden’s house?”

I couldn’t reply, just went on staring. He shone. The sun touched glossy curls, flushed cheeks, and silver buttons. Warmth spilled out of his eyes. He raised his brows, but I still couldn’t speak. Instead, I turned and walked toward the library. He and the scorching light followed, so that between them they burned the back of my dress. In the library, I pointed with my bloody hand to a chair by the window, ducked under the curtain covering the door to the laboratory, and told my father that a stranger had come.

[ 5 ]

M
Y FATHER AND
his visitor spent the rest of the day in the library while I worked on the rose. We intended to let it dry in a sealed container so that it would not be contaminated by insects or dust. After listing, measuring, and sketching the flower’s various parts, I dried its stem and placed it in a clean flask. Then I inverted another, identical flask over it and pasted the necks together with a seal made of pipe clay and freshly cut clippings from my own hair.

After it was done, I put the flower on the window seat, where it had an untouchable sheen in its glass prison, like a pebble in water. I was guilty of neglect. As I worked, I should have willed myself inside the rose to blend my spirit with its sap, but one look at that stranger had blown away my concentration. I was listening for his departure. I had to catch another glimpse of him before he left.

In the end, I escaped through a little door used by Gill that led to a stone staircase down to the cellars. From there I ran to the stables and checked that the stranger’s horse was still tethered inside, then raced to the orchard, where I was safely hidden but would still hear him go. For two hours, I strode about or flung myself down in the shade with my ear to the ground. My pulse throbbed. I saw everything with startling clarity: the calyxes of the daisies, flecks on the peeling membrane of bark, and the bees on their aerial pathways to the hives by the hedge. But I was impatient with all this familiar detail and my body refused to behave, rolling itself over until my legs were tangled in my skirts.

Of course, I had put up with uncertainty before. When my father bought me a prism and told me to repeat Sir Isaac’s experiment with white light, my stomach was full of butterflies. We closed the shutters except for a chink and turned the prism until the light shone directly through, and there on our screen of paper was a rainbow. But until that moment I had been afraid just in case it didn’t happen and Newton was proved fallible. And then there was the smallpox episode, when I’d woken each morning expecting to find myself ill or disfigured. In the end, on the tenth day I had felt hot, then cold, and rather sick, but only for a few hours. About twenty spots appeared, but they left no scars. I was relieved not just because I’d survived, but because my father was right as usual.

This experience in the orchard was much worse, because it was quite possible that after the young man had gone my father wouldn’t mention his visit at all. The episode with Shales was still a sore point in my memory; relations with him had been so ruthlessly severed. But the arrival of the stranger had hooked me clean out of my old self and made me something else. Not even my father could keep me away from him. I must see him again. I couldn’t breathe for wanting it so much.

Meanwhile, I branded the memory of him onto my inner eye. Again and again I opened the door and discovered him on the porch, his forehead dewy with sweat and his eyes a light blue. He was so broad-shouldered that I couldn’t see past him, though his stamping horse had been somewhere in the background.

I gave up at last and went back inside. The kitchen was hot as a furnace with the oven lit. A village girl, one of the blacksmith’s daughters, was tossing peeled potatoes into a pot. A mess of gutted poultry was heaped on the table, and the air was filled with bloody vapors.

“It’s a pity your father never made the stirring of soup part of your grand education,” said Mrs. Gill. “We’ve a guest to supper, and you’re to eat with them in the dining parlor.”

I gawped at her while my heart did cartwheels. I saw him again with the sun on his curls, his silver buttons, his polished boots. And here was I with damp armpits, tangled hair, hands caked with clay. I flew back to the stable yard, loosened the neck of my dress, and plunged my head and shoulders under the pump. From the stables behind me, I heard a restless movement of hooves and the tossing of a bridled head. His horse. None of our old workhorses had the energy to stir on such a hot day. I scraped the dirt from under my fingernails, pulled up my skirts to wash my feet and calves, wrapped my hair in my apron, and ran up to my room, dripping along the passageways.

Mrs. Gill had given me a better mirror for my eighteenth birthday, extracted from a stack of furniture in some distant room. I peered into its spotted glass and despaired. Black rats’ tails. Black eyes. Black brows. White skin. Too much contrast. Then I unhooked my best gown—pale-green calico and not one of Mrs. Gill’s most successful efforts. She’d copied a dress worn by the modish farmer’s wife, and unlike my other gowns it had an open bodice pinned to a quilted stomacher. The edges of the bodice were so uneven and the stomacher cut so low that I had to hold one shoulder higher than the other to keep myself decent. My bosom bulged over the top. What would my father say? I chewed my lip as I fixed the bodice in place and covered myself up with a muslin neckerchief. I had nothing else to match the visitor’s gorgeous plumes, no necklace, no rings—just my mother’s pink ribbon, which I pulled out of a little drawer, held to my face, then wound through my hair and tied in a bow, just visible behind my ear.

[ 6 ]

I
N THE DINING
parlor, a pearly mist floated through the open lattices and candlelight made soft shadows amid the folds of our visitor’s cravat. Fortunately, my father barely glanced at me. He was already scooping up soup, pursing his lips after each mouthful to ease it down. “Robert Aislabie,” he said, waving his dripping spoon at the stranger. “Come to talk to me about phlogiston. My daughter, Emilie.”

I took little sips of Aislabie along with my soup, which I spooned up by leaning forward from the waist—I couldn’t bend my neck in case I fell out of my gown or jabbed myself with a pin. He rippled on the edge of my vision in lustrous splashes of color, and his snowy cuffs and cravat had a radiance unknown at Selden. He wore a turquoise waistcoat embroidered with pink and cream butterflies and flowers, and a jacket of peacock blue to match the plumes in his hat. My mother, I thought with amazement, would have worn silks like this, iridescent and gorgeous. His brilliance scattered over everything else like pollen. The room, which had always seemed dull, was mellow with the textures of ancient wood and pewter. Even the plain food was spiced by the presence of Robert Aislabie.

Meanwhile, he told us his story. He was the younger son of a Norfolk farmer, had studied for a brief spell at Cambridge with a view to the church but found himself too liberal in his views, and had instead gone into trade with an uncle. By the time he was nineteen, Aislabie had so successfully invested spare income in the import of molasses and cotton, the export of refined sugar and cloth, that he was able to buy South Sea stock. While others lost heavily when the Bubble burst, Aislabie sold out in the nick of time and transferred his funds into coffee, tea, chocolate, and silk. But business was still precarious. Recently, he had lost an entire cargo during a shipboard fire. Fire was the scourge of shipping because it could wipe out profits in half an hour. So, having read my father’s recent paper on phlogiston during one of his frequent visits to the Royal Society, of which he hoped soon to be admitted as a fellow, Aislabie had come to Selden seeking advice on how ships might best be protected against fire.

While my father and Aislabie discussed the combustible nature of shipping materials, I risked a few peeps at Aislabie’s face. His nose in profile was straight and long but quite broad at the tip with prominent nostrils, and an intriguing little hollow beside his mouth came and went when he smiled. Beside him, my father was like a dry twig next to a young birch. My father’s crabbed hands had yellow nails, his neck was wizened, his gums were nearly toothless, and his table manners were, I now realized, disgusting. He carried dripping lumps of meat to the center of the table to dip them in the salt, sopped his bread in the sauce, stuffed his cheeks with food, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. If asked a question, he never answered immediately but scrutinized it as if it were a bit of moth-eaten cloth. Aislabie, meanwhile, had the muscular hands of a farmer’s son, used fork and knife with careless ease, cut his meat very small, and pressed his lips together after each new mouthful.

Toward the end of the meal, my father picked up his staff, heaved himself away from the table, and went to piss in the pot behind a curtain. I suffered as I heard him fart and sigh and release a trickle.

For perhaps three minutes, Aislabie and I were alone. At first he didn’t speak, but then he said, “Mistress Selden. Your ribbon has come loose, and I’m afraid you’re about to lose it altogether.” His voice had many layers: a throatiness and soft sibilance that made me shudder. I glanced up and saw that his eyes were brimming with laughter because of the activities behind the curtain.

The ribbon had fluttered over my shoulder. When I tugged at the end, more and more slid away and my hair fell down. I pulled out the ribbon and tried to pin up my hair, but now I was in a worse state, because by lifting my arms I had strained the precarious arrangement of my neckerchief so that I had to cover my bosom with my hair and thrust the ribbon into my pocket. Fortunately, when I glanced at Aislabie, he seemed unaware of my discomfort, only smiled so that the dimple came in his cheek.

My father sat down again and began his nighttime yawns. Once started, they went on and on, contorting his face until he was like an ancient lizard. Aislabie leaped to his feet, apologized for keeping us too long, and asked permission to come back soon in case my father had any further thoughts on the application of the phlogiston theory to shipping. My father said that he was about to leave on his annual trip to London, but Aislabie could call again in two days’ time.