The Alchemist's Daughter (11 page)

“Where would my husband have found such a gown?” I asked.

“Benjamin Cole,” she said through a mouthful of pins, “for the fabric.”

“Who is Benjamin Cole?”

“Merchant. St. Paul’s Churchyard.” She ran her pearly little nail under a strip of lace and her eyes were full of yearning. “And that lace is from Gostlin’s. It’s the best.”

“If you like, you can try the dress on,” I said.

She recoiled as if I had hit her and bustled about folding my shift and lifting my shoes from their box. “These are from a new shoemaker in Pall Mall. French. See the embroidery. I’d say forty stitches to the inch.” She spoke with great respect as she inserted her fist to mold the fabric, arranged them on the floor, and held my hand gravely so that I would keep my balance when I stepped into them. “Now I’ll show you the curtsy.” Picking up her skirts, she put her right foot behind the left and performed a wonderful little bob with her head inclined in such a way that she could still peep at herself in the mirror. When I tried, of course, I staggered, crumpled my skirts, caught my heel on a petticoat hem. She laughed, and I glimpsed her little teeth, a sudden, childish merriment in the eye, even malicious satisfaction that she could curtsy and I couldn’t. But when she caught me looking, she sobered immediately. “You must do it again,” she ordered. So I tried again and again until she was satisfied. “We will practice again tomorrow.”

It struck me, as she left, that my father would have applauded Sarah’s determination to get things absolutely right. Like Sir Isaac, he would have said, she is an expert.

A dancing master was hired to show me how to wield a fan and dance a few simple sets, and, best of all, Aislabie set aside an hour each day to teach me hazard, backgammon, ombre, and cribbage. I loved the intimacy of those lessons held in the smoky little back room with the velvet curtains drawn and candles lit. He sat me on his knee so he could look at my hand and show me how to hold the cards close to my chest, and interspersed each instruction with kisses on my shoulder or the back of my neck, so that more often than not our games ended in the bedroom.

Then one morning Sarah pressed me into a chair, bit her lip, took my earlobe between finger and thumb, and pushed a needle into me. In the mirror, I saw her absorption and the flash of excitement as blood trickled along my jawbone. She picked up a pearl droplet and forced it into the hole. Dizzy with pain, I laid my head on my arm, but she turned my neck and took hold of the other ear. Only when it was all done and she had wiped away the blood did she lean forward and breathe a word in my ear: “Good.”

[ 10 ]

O
N THE NIGHT
of the party, my waist was corseted to a couple of hands’ span and my hair piled high under a speck of lawn, but I resisted paints and patches. When Aislabie saw me, he lifted me off my feet, kissed my mouth, pushed a silk nosegay between my breasts, and gave Sarah a nod of approval. My feet in their two-inch heels went
clip-clop
as he led me downstairs.

Our house was transformed. The furniture, paintings, rugs, and parrot had disappeared behind a dazzling crowd of people. We stood above them and there was sudden quiet, a bloom of upturned faces, then applause, and I felt a twinge of anticipation, even pleasure. At last I had a function in the ant heap of London. Aislabie held me tight to his side as he waved and bowed with mock grandeur before leading me among them. “This is my Emilie. My little philosopher. She can sing you the music of the spheres and argue the case for Newton’s fluxional method against Leibniz’s differential calculus . . .”

Hands caught hold of mine, lips kissed my skin, eyes roved my face and body. A quintet was playing, and the noise confused me. I had spent nineteen years in near silence except for the groaning church organ, and I couldn’t hear music without trying to work it out.

“So this is the alchemist’s daughter,” said a man with a complicated, wrinkled face under a toppling pile of curls. The alchemist’s daughter? But I wasn’t. The alchemist had cut me off. I turned in panic to my husband, but somehow my hand had been passed onto someone else’s arm. For the first time, it occurred to me that Aislabie was not unique but one of a kind. There were other Aislabies, none so playful and desirable, but dozens of young men in sumptuous wigs and elaborate waistcoats, heads full of ambition and knowledge.

A woman with a bold face, pale luxurious hair, and wide blue eyes called Lady Essington pulled me into her group. “We have to know, how did you entrap our Aislabie?”

Leaning against her leg was a little page boy. His skin was all black, and his eyes were as dark as mine. “Entrap?”

“We all wanted him. So tell me, did you cast a spell?”

“I don’t know any spells.”

“We don’t believe you. We hear you were up to all sorts in your enchanted castle.”

“Not a castle.”

“What did you do there all those years? Is it true you never went anywhere? Tell us what it was like living alone with your father?”

“What it was like?”

“Weren’t you bored? Didn’t you long for variety?”

“I learned mathematics and natural philosophy.”

“You must be very clever,” said Lady Essington, smiling with her crimson lips. “Tell us what you know.”

“Very little compared to some.”

The ladies bent their heads seductively, and the movement of their fans slowed. I lifted my chin and felt a rush of confidence. The chance to talk about my lost studies was irresistible, especially as the fair, blue-eyed lady gave me such an encouraging nod while her black servant boy fixed me with his huge eyes. “My own special interest lies in the nature of fire.”

“Fire. Fire. How passionate and extraordinary. And what is the nature of fire?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. I can only tell you what other people have said. Sir Isaac Newton, for instance, believes that light communicates heat to bodies by the vibrations of a medium he calls ether, hundreds of times more elastic than air so that it can penetrate even solid bodies. Robert Boyle, on the other hand, thought that fire is due to fiery corpuscles that exist in the air. And then the latest theory from the Continent is phlogiston.”

The ladies were eyeing each other across the top of their fans. I knew they weren’t interested, but I didn’t have the skill to extricate myself.

“And what does your father, the alchemist, say?” asked Lady E.

“You’d have to ask him. I have my doubts about the phlogiston theory. My own belief is that the clue to fire lies in the air. I have noticed that only part of air is used in combustion—the same part that perhaps exists in substances such as gunpowder, which will burn under water or in a vacuum. So I think that it is not air itself, but part of air, that causes fire.” As I spoke I felt a great welling up of hunger for the old life, but I had lost the attention of most of my audience—one or two were whispering behind their fans, others swayed their hoops or allowed their gaze to drift past my face.

Then they suddenly straightened up and sparkled again because Aislabie had come back, brilliant in shades of green and primrose. He kissed my nose and took my hand. “Vultures,” he whispered, “watch your back,” then swept me away past the first-floor drawing room where silk-clad feet were dancing a measure far too complicated for my limited experience. Instead, we paused at the door of the little room where I had learned to play cards, now full of men drinking punch and smoking. They grinned and waved at me through a thick haze.

“Will you play, Mistress Aislabie?” asked my husband. He drew up a chair and stood with his hand on my shoulder. Lady E. was opposite, her blue eyes hard as sapphire as she looked above my head to him. Her black servant boy leaned his head on her arm, and his lids sank half shut over his liquid eyes. Aislabie squeezed my shoulder and kissed my hair, and at the end of half an hour I had won three guineas. The other players called it beginner’s luck, but actually I owed my success to my mathematical education. The winning and losing of money meant little to me because I knew nothing about its value. I felt only a cold-blooded enjoyment in numbers added up and taken away. But I was soon exhausted, hemmed in by the hoops of other women, showered with extravagant compliments, shot through with the strange compulsion of the gaming table.

A
T FOUR O
’
CLOCK
, when the first birds were already shouting in the eaves, we went to bed. For once, Aislabie left the curtains open and a streak of moonlight fell on my pillow. He lay above me and traced the moonbeams across my face with his tongue.

I thought of Selden, where the same moonlight would be falling through the uncurtained windows of my empty bedchamber, on the silent passageways, and into the library where my father sat by the fire, writing and writing in his secret notebook.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

Journey Home

[ 1 ]

A
ISLABIE HAD THREE AMBITIONS
: the first was a son, the second was to buy a ship, the third was to know and be known by everyone. I was necessary for the first, redundant in the second, and a useful partner in the third because my educated brain and narrow French nose made me a novelty. As long as I kept my language simple, everyone wanted to talk about natural philosophy. They plied me with questions as if I was the authority on everything from gravity to gases.

The more I talked, the more homesick I became. My hand twitched for the touch of an alembic or a pair of scales. I longed to wrestle with calculus or argue about phlogiston, and anxiety for my father was like a tumor gnawing away at me. The knowledge that by just one letter he might have given me weeks of happiness made me furious with him. All that we had done together apparently counted for nothing compared to his disappointment in me. I was as bewildered now as I had been when he first locked the library door against me. He despised conventional religion, so why did he hate me simply for getting the usual order of marriage and conception wrong? My waist narrowed by the month as I grew thin with confusion, and by autumn the pink dress had so many darts in the bodice that Sarah scolded me. “You don’t eat,” she said.

“I’m not often hungry.”

“You should eat. And you should carve. A woman should be proud to carve at her own table.”

“I don’t know how.”

“I could teach you,” she said. “I have watched enough ladies in my time.”

I put my hand on her wrist. My fingers were long, bony, and scarred by too many encounters with acids and sparks; hers were small, well formed, white. “What else should I do?” I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“As a lady. What else should I do?”

“To be a proper wife, you mean?” She withdrew her hand. I had been teasing her, but she was in deadly earnest. “You should take an interest. We should be out to the Old Exchange to buy fans and ribbons. We should go walking in St. James’s Park. We should go to concerts and plays and card parties. We should not be forever waiting for him.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere without my husband.”

“Surely, madam, it’s clear to you that husbands and wives are not always seen together.”

She spoke coldly, as if she despised my lack of knowledge. And perhaps, I thought, as I sent her away, one of the things a lady should not do is ask her maid for advice. Perhaps that’s yet another mistake.

[ 2 ]

O
N THE FIRST
day of January 1727, I dreamed I was lying on my mother’s bed, so heavily pregnant that I couldn’t get up to close the window, though leaves were blowing in from outside. When I woke, my first feeling was of overwhelming grief for the miscarried child, then disappointment that I wasn’t at Selden after all. I nudged Aislabie awake and told him that I had to go home.

He nuzzled against me sleepily. “Then you shall.”

“Will you come with me?”

“Would love to, Em. But can’t leave business just now. Delicate stage. I have found a ship called
Flora
—wonderful little frigate going cheap because her owner’s finances have come adrift. But don’t let me stop you going.”

“Will you take me to see
Flora
first?”

“Nothing to look at yet—sails in shreds, masts broken, a rotten little hull—but just wait till we get her under way. She’ll be a beauty. My God, she’ll be halfway round the world and back before the rest have left port.” I loved his exuberance and sudden enthusiasms. His capacity for delight was completely alien to my cautious Selden bones. “Take Sarah with you to Selden. You’ll be safe enough with her. All mouth and nails, it seems to me, that girl.”

“Sarah will hate Selden. I don’t think she’s ever set foot outside the city.”

“It’s not Sarah’s job to have feelings. She’s your maid.”

“But she makes me feel awkward, as if she is doing me a favor by looking after me.”

“That’s the way of London maids. They know that good servants are hard to come by, so they give themselves airs. It is for you to impose discipline. What you order is what will happen. If she doesn’t like it, she’s free to leave. But she won’t leave.”