The Alchemist's Daughter (14 page)

“We all were. The Gills and me.”

“Tell me how he died.”

“He stopped breathing. After each breath, there was a silence, and then he simply failed to draw another breath.”

“Did you pray over him then?”

“We did.”

I imagined the sheet drawn up over my father’s beaked nose, the flesh tight on his little bones, and to escape these images I got myself round the desk and walked into the hall. With my hand on the latch, I said, “Why are you living in this ridiculous house when there is a spacious rectory at Selden Wick?”

“My curate has six children. I thought his need for space was greater than mine.”

“Well, I think you are a fraud, Mr. Shales, when you claim to be a natural philosopher. You know nothing about the experimental method. You’re wasting your time with those plants and that apparatus.”

“I hope not. It has taken me months to perfect. I am simply trying to measure the quantities of air generated by distillation of plant matter.”

“And you are going to do nothing with the air you have collected in the tube?”

“I have no further use for it, but if you have a suggestion, I’d love to hear it. Please stay and drink some tea, or let me accompany you home.” He had followed me, and I was conscious that he was struggling to find some word or gesture that might comfort me, but I swept up my filthy skirts, got out onto the step, and slammed the door shut behind me.

A flurry of icy wind blew me away down the street, back across the river, and into the woods. And behind every tree, at every twist in the path, I looked for my father. Only yesterday his living self, his beating heart, his resentment, rage, and cruel exclusion, had been the truest part of me.

[ 7 ]

W
HEN
I
GOT
back to Selden, I locked myself in the laboratory, mixed some ink, sharpened a quill, and wrote to Aislabie that my father was dead. There was nothing else to do. Nothing happened. No one came. No clock ticked.

I waited for some other feeling to strike me than this absence of feeling. Nothing. Then I thought of my mother, and how my father had given all her belongings to the fire after she died. Should I do that with his things?

The laboratory was cold and dark. It never used to be, but now it was. I went to the window and flung back the shutters one after another until the room was revealed in all its complicated vastness. Then I sank down on the window seat. Everything was wrong. The laboratory had been the hub of my universe, its wheels turned by fire and water, the instruction of our notebooks, the recording of our processes. I had indexed and labeled its contents myself because my father, fanatical about order and economy, depended on being able to put his hand on a book, a substance, a crucible the instant he needed it. And every instrument had to be maintained to a perfect level of utility: scales balanced, chisels polished, irons scrubbed clear of rust, chemicals redated and replenished. Even while the hedges on our land were broken and our roses mildewed, our laboratory had remained airy, well oiled, constant. But now the room was furred by a kind of violent neglect.

Next to my hand was the rose. I held it up to the light. Its desiccated leaves rattled faintly against the glass, and its petals had only a ghostly tinge of pink. I saw how roughly the flasks had been sealed, quite unlike my usual neat work. What a frenzy I’d been in that day when Aislabie came.

The thought of my energetic husband revived me somewhat. When he got my letter, he would come and take possession of both me and Selden. Thank God for Aislabie.

I turned the glass roughly in my hands. After all, it was only a long-dead flower plucked at the command of an arrogant old man who believed he could find the secret to immortality. What right had he to inflict such pain on me? I drew back my hand and hurled the flasks the length of the laboratory, where they smashed against the wall and showered themselves in a million splinters.

The door to the cellar flew open and in came Gill, blank-eyed with consternation as the breaking of glass rang on and on. It occurred to me that since my father’s death he must have suffered, too, like a drone without a hive. I pointed to my desk. “That letter is to be sent to my husband.” For a moment, he didn’t move except for a clenching and unclenching of his thick fingers. Then he blew a long gust of air and crossed the room, his feet soundless as ever though he walked from the hip because his knees had long since ceased to bend. “Why is this place so dirty?” I demanded.

He looked sideways at the shattered glass but said nothing.

“Well?” I shrieked. “The fire hasn’t been lit for months. He must have been so cold.”

He picked up the letter and hung his head. “He locked me out.”

“It was your job to keep him warm.”

“Shall I be lighting you a fire then?”

“No, no fire.” And then, as he moved toward the cellar, I asked, “Gill, where are my father’s notebooks?”

“On his desk and shelves.”

“Not those. The other notebooks he kept at night.”

He looked round blindly, like the mole that he was. “I said. They’ll be on his desk.”

“No, no the others.” But he had disappeared onto the dark staircase.

[ 8 ]

I
SAT IN
front of a plate of supper in the kitchen, where flames roared in the hearth and not a pan, ladle, or dish had altered. Mrs. Gill stared at me from her gooseberry eyes. “You are grown so thin and grand I would scarce have known you.” I laid my arms along the surface of the table and put my head down, sniffing the grain for the faint smell of flour and onions, connecting my cheekbone to the ancient wood. After a moment, her hand fell on my neck, and she spoke more gently than I had ever known. “He never stopped punishing us for not keeping more of an eye on you that summer. It was not just you that had to suffer.”

“I was determined to be with Aislabie. It wasn’t your fault.”

“He thought so. He would scarcely speak to me until he was at his very last breath.”

“What did he say then?”

“I could scarcely hear. I think he thanked me for my care of him.”

“Did he talk about me?”

“Ah, yes. He was sorry you had lost that child.”

“Did he say that?”

“He did. Most unfortunate, he said.”

“Did he talk about my mother?”

“No, his thoughts were on you.”

“Did he give you the notebooks he kept about me?”

“I know nothing about those. He spoke most to Reverend Shales.”

“I went to see Shales and told him he had taken too much on himself. He should have written to me.”

“Your father wouldn’t have it.”

“Shales should have guided him.”

“Your father was so sick, Emilie, the smallest upset had him failing and choking. Reverend Shales was very patient sitting up with him night after night, reading. I think he brought some comfort.”

“He seems a cold man.”

“It’s not how it appears to the village. They like him. And he has their pity, because he had a wife who died in the year before he came to Selden. He’s always courteous to me, and when I’ve seen him with a sick mother or baby he’s been very kind and appropriate.”

It had not occurred to me that Shales might have a history. I closed my eyes, ground my cheek against the table, and thought I’d stay there forever.

[ 9 ]

B
UT
I
WAS
alive and had to pass the time, so I roamed the house looking for distraction. My father’s notebooks became something of an obsession. They at least would bring him back to me in some form. I couldn’t find them in the laboratory or library, though I unlocked every cupboard and searched each shelf. Next I crept up to his bedchamber, where I opened every shut chest and drawer but found no books.

When I visited this room as a child to fetch his spectacles or handkerchief, I took a deep breath and dashed in and out, afraid of glimpsing something too intimate. Now that he was gone, I realized that what I had feared was the unknown in my father. In the laboratory, I saw the natural philosopher, alchemist, and teacher who at night presumably removed his wig and outer garments and slept for a few hours on this bed. But there must have been a different man altogether once, although I simply could not imagine him losing himself in a woman as Aislabie did in me. I couldn’t imagine him in a moment of abandon.

There was no sign of the notebooks. It was quite possible he had burned them before he died. Though I didn’t give up looking for them, my search lost momentum for the time being. Then I had nothing else to do. In my own room, Sarah sat like a pink and white spider repairing my clothes. She got up and curtsied, but I was too weak to drive her away and claim the space for my own use. The wintry gardens meant nothing, because there were no lessons to learn and no collections to be made. Once I went up to my mother’s room, but when I reached the door, I didn’t have the heart to press down the latch. Inside would be nothing but emptiness, the old absence. And last time I lay on her bed with the child growing inside me, I had been sad and sick and hopeful all at the same time. What richness of emotion that now seemed compared to this horrifying blankness.

In between my ramblings, I went back to the laboratory time after time, like a doe I had once watched from my oak tree, grieving her dead fawn. She had recoiled in terror, then gone back to sniff and paw at the little corpse as if simply by repetition she might bring him back to life. Each time I went there I felt a glimmer of hope that I would find it miraculously restored, with my father standing over the furnace and all the clocks ticking.

On my third visit, I picked up the rose, intact in its bed of broken glass but light and brittle as burned parchment. Then I found a long jar with a cork plug, polished it with my petticoat, slid in the rose, and replaced it on the windowsill. This small act cheered me a little because at least I had put something back together again, and afterward I sat in my father’s chair by the hearth and dared to hold his staff in my lap. The brass handle was so tarnished that I couldn’t resist buffing it to a sheen.

A dull knock came from behind the double thickness of the library doors. “Mrs. Aislabie. Emilie. Reverend Shales is here.”

I couldn’t face him, had probably behaved badly—I would not have been quite so harsh if I’d known his wife was dead—and I had no idea what to say to him. Shales disturbed me. Perhaps it was that he had been there at the start of palingenesis or that I couldn’t forgive him for warning me against Aislabie. Either way, he knew too much.

Mrs. Gill rattled the handle, called again, then went away, but the incident made me restless. I remembered the atmosphere of purpose and contemplation in Shales’s study, and here was I in the neglected laboratory, doing nothing. So I got up and wound the clocks. Each had stopped at a different hour, and as I had no idea of the real time I left them to march on, one from 3:38, another from 5:11, the third from three minutes past twelve. Suddenly, it seemed, the laboratory hiccuped into life and the old pulse was reestablished. Then I took my apron from its hook, fetched Gill’s broom from the top of the cellar steps, and began to sweep. The restoring of the rose to its glass prison had inspired me. If I could not have my father back, I could at least return the laboratory to a state that would please him. I began with the shards of glass, which I heaped together, raising clouds of dust from the cracks in the boards. Then I extended the circle of my sweeping and collected mouse droppings and ash into my pile, along with tobacco, dead insects, flakes of rust, and wood shavings. As I swept, I grew more ambitious and went to the kitchen to ask for quantities of hot water, soap, rags, beeswax, and vinegar.

Sometimes, when I raised a lot of dust or made a great deal of noise, I held still and listened. In the old days when Gill came to clean the hearth or sweep the floors, my father vanished into the library until everything was back to normal. So I leaned on the handle of my broom and peered through the dust cloud, sure that at any moment I’d hear the key in the latch, and in he would come with his shuffling gait and his coattails pinned up. His staff would tap across the damp floor and his head tilt to one side as his beady glance took in Gill’s work and checked that I had performed the tasks he’d set.

I stood waiting for several minutes, then moved on to the next cupboard and took down a row of bottles one by one, sniffed their contents, wrote fresh labels, brushed the shelf—busy, busy, until it was time to listen again. And as I cleaned, I searched for the notebooks, testing the boards for a hidden door, a hinge, a cavity. The more I couldn’t find them, the more I wanted them.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Pillars and Porticoes

[ 1 ]

A
N AFFECTIONATE LETTER
arrived from my husband, full of sympathy and assurances that he would come to Selden just as soon as he had found a captain for
Flora
. There was no time to lose—she must start paying for herself immediately and would set sail in May. Not much of a refit was needed, just a little carpentry and a few adjustments to the hold. This letter brought Aislabie very close, but the thought of his vibrant presence at Selden made me quake; I simply couldn’t imagine what it would be like living in these austere rooms with him.