The Alchemist's Daughter (8 page)

Love, I thought, was more powerful than alchemy. It had transformed us both. Aislabie had come to our house the self-assured London gentleman buttoned up in his lovely waistcoat, but now he was all loose cravat and floating shirtsleeves. I heard his heavy breathing and thought that I, Emilie, had done this, touched him so that he was no longer himself but a panting creature whose mouth and hands searched my flesh, exposing my breasts and knees almost without him knowing what he did. I sank under him and clamored for more.

But as we rolled among the daisies and bobbles of fallen fruit, my education, which had included the dissection of plants, fish, and mammals, reasserted itself a little. My father and I, in our desire to get to the essence of things, had studied the sac of tiny eggs in the body of a female trout and made detailed observations as to why a flower needs the bee to reproduce itself. It dawned on me that my body had changed its behavior in such a radical and clamorous way during the past few minutes because it was priming itself not just for love, but for reproduction.

I cried, “No,” but Aislabie’s tongue filled my mouth. I pushed his shoulder and jolted my knee, but he was a stranger and strong, and I was feeble as a reed under him. Dark shadows came to my sunshiny mind. A tiny creature, perhaps a bee, alighted on my bare calf. Fear tightened my stomach and dried the tears on my cheek.

“No,” I said more insistently, but he threw my skirt up to my neck and caged me in my petticoats. I flung my head from side to side—first toward the tree, then to the hive where the bees carried on their business as usual—but he took hold of my chin and pulled my mouth back under his. The sun burned my thighs. I locked them together, but he had finished fumbling with his own clothes and suddenly pressed his hand onto my pubic bone.

I went still and quiet and stared up into his eyes as his fingers worked their way inside me until I was helpless as a frog spread out for dissection. Then he took his hand away and lifted himself up, never taking his eyes from my face as I felt a nudge and then the pressure of a long slow lunge that pushed my head against a root and split my insides apart. Emilie, the Emilie I had known, the clever, irritable, longing, knowing Emilie, sank away into the lush grass, leaving only a gaping vessel for Aislabie.

The inside of my head fogged with curiosity and the need to please. He lowered himself until his thighs connected to mine and my mouth was covered and I was all Aislabie, filled up by Aislabie, drinking him in as he worked his knees between mine, took hold of my buttocks and pushed harder, harder until I felt the knock on my womb and little red flames inside my thighs. Then he lifted himself out, kissed my wet belly, covered me up, and drew me back onto his lap.

I pulled up my knees like a child, buried my face in his crumpled neckcloth, and thought, It is over. I am different.

“We will be married, Emilie,” he said.

[ 13 ]

W
HEN MY FATHER
came home ten days later, I didn’t meet him at the gate as I had every other year because I thought he was bound to see Aislabie staring out of my eyes.

After supper, my tired, shrunken father sank deep in his chair, put his hand to his forehead, and peered about as if to reassure himself that he was actually home. There was a brown paper package on the table. “A gift, Emilie,” he said.

He had brought me things from London before—my prism, for example—but he had never called them gifts. I could not bear to open the parcel, to see the gleam of anticipation in his eye or to think that he had perhaps remembered our argument and racked his brains for a way of making things better between us. “Open it,” he said. “Go on.”

I untied the string. It was a volume of lectures, in Latin, by the Dutch Boerhaave. “Hot off the press,” said my father, and his eyes sparked with rare humor. “Unauthorized, I think. You will be one of the first in this country to read him, Emilie, and you will find so much to interest you. He thinks as you do on phlogiston, and he is eloquent on the subject of fire. He has weighed it and concluded that although it is an element, it is weightless.”

I opened the book for the sake of showing a little interest and found a diagram of a thermometer, but I couldn’t take in what I saw. My father began a long speech about what he had seen in London, and for the first time I realized that he was not just telling me things for the sake of my education but to relive each new experience for himself. “I visited Sir Isaac in his Kensington house. He’s getting more and more infirm, I thought, terrible cough.”

I had never been less interested in the state of Newton’s health, but I said, “What did you talk about?”

“He mentioned the possibility of a translation of the
Principia
into English. Of course, he has mixed feelings about that—doesn’t want it to fall into ignorant hands. How is your own translation, Emilie?”

“I didn’t have much time, after all.”

“Nor for the laboratory,” he said sharply. “I found the rose as I’d left it.”

We had lit his pipe, so I was kneeling at his feet. “I should like to marry Robert Aislabie, Father.” His head jerked back and he fumbled for his staff, which instead fell to the floor with a clatter. I picked it up and gave it to him. “What do you think?”

“I think you will not marry anyone, especially not him.”

“I believe I must.” I thought of the weight in my breasts, my lack of appetite, my desire to avoid scrutiny by Mrs. Gill. “I believe I may be carrying his child.”

The effect of this news on my father was so terrible I could almost have wished the last month undone. He seemed to shrivel before my eyes until he was yellow and ancient. His hand came up and covered his face.

“Please, Father, I know I shall be happy.”

He wouldn’t speak to me, though I knelt there for some minutes stroking his coat and hand, pleading with him. Then I retreated to the window. “Father. Please give me your blessing. I am sorry if I have hurt you. But please, Father. You know how it is to love. I believe you loved my mother. Don’t you remember? So you must know how it was. Father. Father.” My voice faded. Outside it was almost dark, but I could still see the bars of the old gates. I wanted to be on the other side of them, driven by Aislabie into a painless new life.

After half an hour, I crept away, and from that day I was shut out of the laboratory and the library. If we happened to meet in the passage, my father ignored me; and though every few hours I went and knocked on the door, he never answered.

I dreaded to think what he wrote in his notebook that night.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Three Letters in Between

[ 1 ]

O
N THE DAY
after my father’s return, Mrs. Gill found me in the screens passage, where I was keeping watch on the library door in case he came out. “Follow me,” she said.

I followed. There was no disobeying Mrs. Gill when she used that voice. She stood me under the high kitchen window and took hold of my shoulders so she could study my face. “What have you done?”

I couldn’t speak for dread of what she’d say next. Suddenly she cried, “While your father was gone, you were in my care, Emilie.” I stared at her. I had never seen her weak or incapable, but now she was both. Her skin was clammy and her lips trembling.

“I love him,” I said.

She pushed me away, picked up the corner of her apron, and rubbed her eyes. “Love him. Love him. You know nothing about it. I should have seen. I should have known what was coming. I should have been here.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“It’s too late for fault. Or so it seems. Sit down, Emilie. Listen very carefully. You don’t have to marry this Mr. Aislabie. There are other choices. The baby, if indeed there is a baby, might miscarry.” She looked me hard in the eye.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you do not yet know if the baby will survive to full term.”

“I want to marry him,” I said, “baby or not.”

“Your father will relent in the end. I’m sure. We could keep the baby here. Or you could marry him in time, when you know him better.”

“I’ll marry Aislabie soon,” I said.

“You don’t know him. What do you know of him except that he is the type of man who seduces a girl the moment her father’s back is turned?”

“Seduce.” I considered the word.
Seducere
. To lead aside. “No. I wanted him.”

Suddenly she took me in her arms and pressed my head to her shoulder. “Oh, my lamb. We have failed you.”

“No. No.” I drew back and looked at her in horror. Why was I pitiable because I loved Aislabie? I hurried out of the kitchen, and there was Gill hanging about at the scullery door, well within earshot. He looked blindly past me as if terrified of meeting my eye and admitting the truth of what had happened.

[ 2 ]

A
PALL OF
silence fell on Selden as the four of us crept about, miserably isolated. I had fractured the rhythm of our lives. Every few days I wrote a letter to Aislabie. My writing covered both sides of a page crossways and down, as if by writing I would forge an inky chain between us. I told him every last detail of my life at Selden, including my father’s grief, and when I was sure of it I told him about the baby. His letters in reply were brief but ardent.
A child
, he wrote.
Dearest, dearest Emilie. You can have no idea how happy I feel. All my life I have been working toward this. It even makes me believe after all that there is some providence that responds if we want something enough and labor hard enough to achieve it. To have you, Emilie, as my wife, and to be the father of our child . . . I will come very soon, within a fortnight, to make arrangements with your father.

Despite the evidence of these letters, loneliness and exclusion made me wonder whether I had dreamed Aislabie, but exactly at the agreed hour I heard hoofbeats through the village and there he was at the gates, horse steaming, hat whipped off for the blacksmith’s daughter, who happened to be passing. I emerged from the porch as Gill put his shoulder to the rusty iron. Aislabie wore dark clothes except for a jaunty yellow cockade and was more solemn than I remembered as he leaped down and kissed my hand and cheek. “You are pale, my dear love.”

He was a stranger, and I had an instant of pure terror. His face was more fleshy, he seemed altogether weightier, less boyish than before, and his blue eyes looked eagerly past me to Selden. Then he held me tight in his arms, buried his face in my neck, kissed my mouth so that I felt the shock of sudden intimacy and fell against him thinking, I love him, I do love him. He held me at arm’s length and studied my face, then my waist. “Are you well? What about our child. Is he thriving?”

These were beautiful words to me, especially the “our.” They closed the gap between us and made me feel that after all I did have a place somewhere, even if not at Selden. “All is well.”

“How is the old man?” he whispered.

“I hardly know. He won’t speak to me. He won’t let me near him, though I knock on his door every day.”

He kissed my hand again. “Never fear, my love. I’ll find a way round him.”

I led him across the hall, tapped at the library door, and stood aside to let him through. My father stayed out of sight, but I heard a board creak under his foot. The door was left wide open, and I glimpsed the glow of firelight on the laden shelves and smelled tobacco. I wasn’t invited in. It was a sunless day, and the hall was cold. I had no doubt that the open door was a deliberate ploy and that I was supposed to overhear this conversation. I was hoping for a miracle, that Aislabie would find precisely the right words to soften my father and readmit me to the old life. His cultivated London voice was very low and I missed the beginning of his address: “. . . daughter’s hand.”

There was a long silence, during which Aislabie twirled his hat, and I tiptoed closer. “. . . rent and furnish a house by the end of November and have the banns read,” he said.

My father was probably huddled under cover of his everyday wig, refusing to speak or meet Aislabie’s eye. There was another silence, after which Aislabie said much more abruptly, “So we come to the terms of the marriage settlement. Of course, I understand that it may be difficult for you to make more than a token payment now, so I am prepared to accept an entailment after your death, sir.”

I retreated a few steps. I had never heard my father spoken to so curtly. There could be no hope of reconciliation now. “. . . land already entailed,” came his frail voice at last.

“I think not, sir. I believe the land is entailed to Emilie, and once she is married it will be my privilege to have charge of her property. All I ask is that you add a clause to the effect that in the event of her early death the estates should be passed to me in trust for any children, or if we are unfortunately without a living child . . .” Aislabie, glancing up, had seen me standing in the shadows. He sprang forward and shut the door.

Silence. I clutched a ridge of paneling. How had a few sunlit walks and half an hour of lovemaking in the bee orchard led to such cold-blooded bartering?