The Alchemist's Daughter (13 page)

“What on earth for?”

She went on gaping. Curse the man, I thought, and set out across the stable yard and through the bee orchard, where mortar crumbled from the walls and the trees were crooked and bare. I didn’t pause to look at the beehives or remember what had happened here. I held it all at bay.

[ 6 ]

M
Y FATHER OWNED
the living of two parishes: Lower Selden, on the other side of the river, and Selden Wick, the cluster of cottages, rectory, and church built up close to the manor. Reverend Shales for some reason had not chosen to live in the comfortable modern house in Selden Wick, but had settled instead for the ancient church cottage at Lower Selden, a three-mile walk through the woods and across the river. My gown had a short train, ideal for cutting a swathe in a crowded salon but hopeless in a swampy lane, and my boots were designed for brief strolls across London cobbles. The sky oozed and branches dripped in the morning thaw. Gill’s cart had worn deep ruts, which were so filled with water I was often calf deep.

I slowed down. I couldn’t help it. Where a pool had collected in a felled tree trunk, I leaned forward, lifted my veil, touched the water with my tongue, and watched a little creature flit across its surface. If you don’t look up, Emilie, Father will surely come treading carefully along the track, take a test tube from his coat pocket, and capture some of these water insects to study under the microscope.

Mrs. Gill said he had a disease of the lungs, but hadn’t she noticed that his breathing was always labored—probably because he sniffed and tasted chemicals with a reckless disregard for what van Helmont called “gas,” released by their interaction with each other? Perhaps in the end he got so ill that every breath was a struggle until his lungs collapsed altogether. I knew what that must have been like. We had experimented on the lungs of a live dog by tying it down and cutting open its windpipe just below the thorax, because we wanted to try the effect of different types of air, first by allowing it to breathe only its own expired air caught in a bladder, then by driving fresh air into it through a tube. I had seen the light come and go in the dog’s eyes, the inflation and deflation of its abdomen as it gasped for breath, the failure of its pulse whenever we stopped blowing in the clean air. Then it lay quietly, concentrating on each next breath.

Finally, my father had demonstrated what happened when a creature drowned. He trickled water into the tube and filled the dog’s lungs until it choked. Death came too quickly for us to rescue it, though my father had wanted to pump out the water and try to recover the dog with a different type of air, possibly the fumes produced by burning brimstone.

These memories of the dog’s suffering and our frantic efforts to revive it worked me into a fury. Had I been told my father was ill, I would have made him recover. This was all Shales’s fault.

I stopped on the bridge and looked down at the empty jetty. Our boat had gone. Yesterday, when I stepped ashore, I was full of hope and fear; now I was scrambling to undo the past. Don’t look there, I thought. Concentrate on Shales. He is the cause.

A lane ran up the main street to his house opposite the church. Heaps of grit had blown into the corners of well-worn steps. I lifted the knocker and tapped sharply. Nobody answered. Across the lane, a steep bank supported the graveyard. The church was squat, it had no tower, and the flags inside were so uneven that during a sermon the congregation slid together along the tilting pews. Shales must have had a sort of pretend humility, a desire to lower himself in order to seem more pious. After all, he might have lived, like all rectors before him, in the shadow of St. M. and St. E. in Selden Wick, a proper church with stained glass, a ring of bells, and a spire.

I was about to tap sharply on the window when the door was flung open by a bleary-eyed servant.

“I want to speak to Reverend Shales. I’m Mrs. Aislabie.”

“Step in.”

The doorway wasn’t wide enough for my hoop. She showed me into a room so small that I stood crushed against the wall by the volume of my own clothes, and for a moment surprise made me forget why I was there.

Every available inch was filled with instruments: a barometer, a globe, an armillary sphere to demonstrate the Copernican system by which the planets revolve round the sun in circles, an air pump, a microscope, and a telescope. On the table in the center was an orrery, a model of the sun and planets supported by wires with a mechanism underneath to turn each in its individual orbit. The machine had been made by a true craftsman, every tiny part polished and balanced to perfection. The beams of light cast by these instruments—brass, glass, varnish—shone dimly through my veil, and for a moment it was as if I had entered a pod of my childhood: the stillness of the air, the fragility of precious things, a web of ideas interlocked by steel wires of learning and experiment, the presence of my father like a flashing blade at rest one minute, lethally aroused the next.

“Mrs. Aislabie.”

I turned abruptly. Shales was in the doorway, his head on one side to avoid the lintel. We stared at each other. I was conscious that the last time I saw him was when I had run in from the garden all damp with heat and desire after an afternoon with Aislabie. I had forgotten the peculiar intensity of his eyes.

“I had not expected you yet,” he said.

“Yet?”

“I wrote two days ago, and here you are already.”

“I didn’t get a letter. I came because I had heard nothing from my father. In the end, I couldn’t bear the silence.”

The maid popped her head up behind him in an effort to see what was going on while he peered into my face, trying to penetrate my veil. At last he remembered his manners. “Please, Emilie . . . Mrs. Aislabie, won’t you sit down,” he said, and backed into his study, trampling the maid. He ordered tea, and I squeezed myself and my skirts into yet another little room while the maid went out and closed the door.

He drew up a chair for me near the hearth, but I wouldn’t sit down. I thought that I must stay in charge and quickly get what I’d come for—an admission of guilt—so I intended to keep my face covered, rap out a few questions, and leave. But I was already thrown off balance by what I had seen in the other room, by his courtesy and the unexpected ordering of tea. After the horror of the previous evening, the sudden tranquillity of this study was shocking, and I had such a longing to weep that I drew breath sharply and allowed myself to be distracted by what was on the desk: an arrangement of retort and receiving flask, an open ledger, a candle. I threw back my veil for a better look and had a sudden whiff of hot wax and fermentation, saw the lovely gleam of polished glass, the invitation of blank paper. In all my months in London, I had not been so homesick as in that moment.

“I have been heating plant matter—in this case, peas—to see how much air is produced. I measure the liquid in the tube over a number of days,” he said.

I moved round the desk to look at his meticulous measurements, made every six hours over four days. There were thread markings on the tube to show how the water had been forced down. The neatness of the experiment and his records, the measured ticking of his clock, and the soft fall of a coal in the hearth opened a wound in me.

“I have repeated the experiment several times with different plant matter. I can show you my findings, if you like.”

“What do you do with the air once you have collected it?” I asked.

There was a pause, and I glanced up impatiently. He was gazing down at my face with the same expression I had noticed in church when he lifted the host—absorption, fascination even. “Well?” I demanded.

“Well, I release it.”

“What a waste.”

“What would you suggest I do, Mrs. Aislabie?”

But I had remembered why I was here and would not be drawn into a conversation about airs, so I sat down in his chair behind the desk, folded my hands, and tried to stop my gaze from straying back to the retort.

He arranged the other chair so he could face me. “I’m sorry your father is dead,” he said.

“Why didn’t you write to me?”

“Your father ordered me not to.”

“Why? Why would he do such a thing?”

“I can’t say.”

“Didn’t you try to make him change his mind?”

“I did.”

The door burst open and in came the maid with the tea tray resting on her bosom. The room was so small that her skirts flurried the flames in the hearth and the candle almost blew out. She stooped down with a lot of huffing and puffing, poured us both a cup, and then disappeared, somewhat reluctantly. The quiet came back, and I thought, I must sort this out quickly before I lose control of my voice. “Did he not mention me at all before he died?”

“Yes. He spoke about you.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m very sorry that I can’t tell you. We talked in the absolute confidence of a dying man to his priest.”

“My father was not religious. What did he care for priests?”

“Nothing in the conventional sense, I’m sure. No. But he was suffering and very sad.”

I got up so violently that my hand knocked over the dainty teacup, breaking its handle and spilling tea on the desk. “I wrote to him month after month, and he never replied. It was his choice to suffer.”

“He never mentioned to me that you wrote to him.”

“Would it have made a difference? Was the reason you didn’t tell me about his illness that you thought I deserved punishment for not being a dutiful daughter?”

“I was carrying out his wishes. Of course I tried to persuade him to let me write. On the occasions when I visited London, I wanted to call on you but felt I would be breaking my word. He was very sick for quite a long time. Do you remember how we had quarreled about alchemy? I think he would not have allowed me back into his study if he wasn’t desperate. We spent a great deal of time discussing phlogiston, which interested us both for different reasons—him because of his observations on fire, me because of what I had discovered about air. But although we grew quite used to each other in the end, when it came to persuading him to send for you, he wouldn’t listen and became so agitated that I stopped trying.”

“Then you did wrong. You should have convinced him to see me. What could be more important?”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said in the same measured voice, but softly, “I thought it most important to give what little comfort I could to a dying man.”

“I wonder how you managed that, Mr. Shales. I hope you didn’t pray over him. He hated prayer.”

“No, I knew better than that. I read to him. I had a book by Sir Thomas Browne that he coveted. It became a little joke between us that I possessed that book and he didn’t.”

“Did you talk about anything else? Did you talk about my mother?”

Another pause. “We did.”

“What did he say?”

Silence. He picked up his pen and pressed it into the blotter. I nearly snatched it from his hand to stop him from damaging the nib. He was pale, and his lips were compressed. I knew it was no use arguing with him.

“Mistress Aislabie.”

“You won’t tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“Did you ever talk about alchemy?”

Shales put his hand to the back of his head and patted his wig as if arranging his thoughts in better order. All the time he watched me closely, perhaps wary of my next outburst, and I didn’t take my eyes off his face because I wanted to pounce the moment I saw weakness. “We talked about alchemy. Yes.” Silence. Another long look at me. A deep sigh. “He was a very disappointed man. He felt that alchemy had failed him in the end. He could get nowhere with his project on regeneration, though he had spent his last year on it. He seemed very bitter and afraid that he had been pursuing a futile dream.”

“I’m sure you were happy to agree with him, given your views on alchemy.”

“I was not happy at all. I would have given a great deal to have seen the old man satisfied with his life’s work. I tried to persuade him that many of his more fruitful investigations—into dyes and phlogiston, for instance—had emerged through his alchemical work.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I do in a way. I believe nothing is wasted, that there is no real failure in natural philosophy.”

“But I was a failure. He saw me as something of an experiment, and I failed him.”

Another long, considering look. His eyes had grown darker, I noticed, and warmer. “Mrs. Aislabie, I think he believed that it was he who failed in his proper understanding of you.”

“I know I failed him. He used to write me down each night in his notebook. He wanted to see if a girl was capable of learning, but I proved as weak as all the rest. So yes, I failed him. I’m sure that’s what he told you.”

Silence.

“Did he show you the notebooks?”

He shook his head.

And it was in that silence, broken by the faintest shuffling of coals and the song of a thrush on a branch outside, that the truth of my father’s death struck me. I felt it like a hollowing out, an absence of hope, an ending made a thousand times worse because I hadn’t been there. I thought of the dust falling and falling on the glass containing the dead rose, my father’s abandoned staff, his coat on the hook behind the door. “Have you any idea how it felt for me to come home and find him gone?” I cried. “I wonder when you would have written to me. After a month, a year, never?”

“As I said, I wrote two days after the burial, as instructed.”

“Mr. Shales, I loved my father. You can have no idea how much. If you had an ounce of humanity, you would have thought not only of him but of me. I know him. He was rigid. He wouldn’t have known how to change his mind, but if I could have seen him we might have been reconciled.”

“I thought about all that. But I reasoned that he might have ended up forgiving neither of us, and then he’d have been left with no one.”

“You reasoned. But what did your heart tell you, Mr. Shales, if you have one? If you had ever lost someone without any opportunity to say good-bye or to ask for forgiveness, you would never have treated me like this.”

I didn’t look up to see his reaction, though I think he covered his face with his hand. I twitched my veil over my face and said fiercely, “Were you there when he died?”