The Alchemist's Daughter (15 page)

I told Mrs. Gill that he had ordered servants to be hired and rooms aired. She said, “Extra staff will need paying. I hope he knows that,” but I chose to ignore this uncomfortable subject and walked away. “Reverend Shales called again,” she added. “He left you this.” There was a book on the table, a brown, leather-bound volume with a slip of paper between the pages. I kept my distance. That book was a reminder of the years I had spent with my father, the life I had not chosen. Besides, the book was from Shales—a peace offering, maybe. Well, I wouldn’t touch it. I couldn’t. It had nothing to do with me.

In any case, the task of restoring the laboratory was vast and all-absorbing. I soon grew tired of carrying hot water from the kitchen, so I relented and called Gill. He was an expert at making fire, and within a few minutes flames were blazing in the hearth. The heat transformed the room: first color—yellow, blue, orange licking through the tinder—then the smell of smoke and spirit of salts. After half an hour, shadows and light gave the hearth definition, and flames licked cleanly under my cauldron of water.

I worked from the outside in, beginning with windows and ceiling. Earwigs, wood lice, and beetles scurried from the cornices, and my hair was tangled with cobweb. A moth the size of a small bird beat against the window until I released it into the frosty air. Then I took down more and more precious alchemical volumes, dusted the spines and pages, and replaced them in order; unstoppered each bottle, threw away the contents or relabeled it, polished it, and returned it to its proper place; cleaned our instruments and turned out the drawers of my desk. And all the time I was avoiding the root cause of the mayhem—my father’s desk and workbench, which I could not bring myself to touch.

[ 2 ]

T
HE HOUSE BEYOND
the laboratory was full of strange faces: a maid on her hands and knees brushed the hearth in the great hall, and another girl ran up a back staircase with an armful of pressed linen. When I passed the kitchen, the blacksmith’s daughter was washing windows.

All these girls lived within a few hundred yards of the house and went home at night. Only Sarah stayed. Instead of mixing with the others, she lurked in my bedchamber with her back to the door and stitched my father’s death into a petticoat, exquisitely quilted and embroidered with black leaves climbing up white satin. She seemed dug in, had already colonized my room and hers by scattering herbs and ribbons, hanging up my clothes, importing rugs from other chambers. It was as if by the ferocious thrusts of her needle she might sew herself into the fabric of the house.

[ 3 ]

A
FTER A FORTNIGHT
or so, I heard the commotion of rusty gates scraping on stone that heralded the arrival of my husband. I took off my apron, locked the laboratory doors, and ran through the library, the great hall, and the kitchen passage. Outside the still room, I careered into Mrs. Gill, who had a jar of pickles clutched to her bosom, and together we crossed the gray flagstones past the distillery to the stable-yard door. A cluster of girls blocked the way, their untidy heads haloed by a shaft of sunlight. Even Sarah was there, arms folded. Whispers and giggles filtered back to me as I stood on tiptoe and saw that my husband had already dismounted. His horse, the chestnut stallion, steamed and bucked while Gill hung onto the reins. I smelled leather and manure and glimpsed a metallic flash on my husband’s hat.

The girls nudged each other and let me through. Aislabie, in mourning for my father, wore a black coat and brilliant white gloves, and his head was flung back to survey the tottering archway, bowed roof, barley-twist chimneys, and wormy timbers of his new possession, Selden Manor. Sunlight gleamed on his throat and the folds of his necktie.

The stable yard had never seen such brilliance. Usually the pace here was slow: A carthorse was led
clip-clop
across the cobbles, hens pecked between the paving stones, a dairymaid’s pattens went tapping from door to door, and water was pumped into a pail with a grind and a gush. Colors were mellow, uneven russet brickwork, cobbles shaded gray on gray, the faded blue of a servant’s jerkin.

Time stood still for one beat while my husband’s gaze flicked across our faces. When they met mine, his eyes were turquoise bright. He smiled—that wicked widening of the mouth, the dinting of the cheek. There was a moment’s disjointedness as I left the twilit world of the laboratory behind me, and then something inside me that had been out of time clicked into place, my body leaped with delight, and I knew I was very glad to see him.

Selden’s new master flung out his right arm and made an expansive gesture with the flat of his hand. “There will be guests soon,” he told Mrs. Gill, who was gawping at him over her jar. “I have invited two gentlemen to stay.”

The servants trampled each other as he sprang toward us, and Sarah slid backward into shadow. “Now then, Mrs. Aislabie,” he said, pulling off his glove and taking first my knuckle then my palm to his lips, “show me our kingdom.”

The house was too low for him. He had to duck when he climbed a stair or walked under a beam and quickly grew bored with the chill of unused rooms, with peering through opaque glass at the wintry garden, and with asking about some staring ancestor in a painting. Through his eyes, I saw how tarnished and broken everything was. In the dining parlor, there was a stale smell of a hundred thousand dinners. Chairs sagged, tapestries were faded, and a marble bust of Caesar had a chipped nose.

When we came to the library, where our marriage negotiations had taken place, Aislabie didn’t drop my hand but strode about as if claiming every dusty inch. While he was sharply etched in black and white, everything else in this room was brown and muted. Our entire library, that vast repository of knowledge, was made finite by his presence: an ancient room filled with unfashionable books.

He threw his cloak over a chair with such force that its weight drove the legs a few inches along the floor. A book lay on the table. Aislabie read the spine with some difficulty: “Thomas Browne.
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
.” His left eyebrow disappeared into his wig. Then he opened the book and picked up the marker. “
Mrs. Aislabie, perhaps this will interest you. T. Shales.
And who is T. Shales?”

“The rector here. A friend of my father’s. I believe he spent a great deal of time reading this book to my father before he died.”

I was transfixed by the book, which now, perversely, I longed to read, but Aislabie dropped it dismissively onto the table. “I trust Shales’s motives are pure. You never know with a clergyman.”

His gaze fixed on the curtain covering the door to the laboratory. He kissed the inside of my wrist, and the many textures of him were brought up close: the ripples of his wig, the stubble on his chin, the puckers of velvet on his arm. “Poor Em. Dearest Em. How have you managed without me?” He smelled of the outdoors, of horseflesh, salt, and smoke, and his eyes were very bright as they glanced over my shoulder at the locked door. He kissed me again and stroked the back of my neck with his fingertips until I dipped my fingers between my breasts and took out the key.

He was looking down at me under his eyelids, smiling but inexorable, and I felt a shudder of loss. The laboratory was my dominion, and he was going to take it away. Then I felt a panic, just for a moment, that it might not have been me that he’d wanted after all, but this. I drew back the curtain, unlocked first the outer door, then the inner one, and stood with my back to the wall to let Aislabie through. He was unusually hesitant. I peeped over his shoulder and saw that although most things were now in order, they were also diminished. I thought I had re-created clear, airy spaces, but in fact the laboratory was no more than a muddle of crooked cupboards and shelves, piled books and ancient glassware.

He didn’t go in, just looked about him. “Well, you must teach me what all this means.”

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a place of work.”

“Not at all as I expected. I thought it would be mysterious . . . fiery, full of potions and smells.”

“Much of our work was very dull and painstaking.” He began to wander about, pointing to things and asking their purpose. Then he flicked through my father’s notebooks and some alchemical texts, but they were all in Latin, so he drummed his fingers on the pages and after a while looked up and smiled. “You’ll have to translate for me. My Latin is somewhat of the schoolboy variety.”

“If I did, you wouldn’t understand. Most of it’s in code. It takes decades.”

Next he went to my desk, picked up my prism, and squinted first at the fire, then at me, before replacing it carefully. When he touched my father’s staff, I couldn’t prevent a hiss of indrawn breath. He glanced at me sideways, gave it a twirl, and began a tour of the room, leaning on it from time to time to read the title of a book or the inscription on a bottle, even though the staff was too short for him and he had to stretch out his arm to balance himself. For several minutes, he rummaged among the contents of the workbench, sniffing and prodding. Finally, he touched my chin with the tip of the staff and ran it in a straight line down my neck to the top of my bodice.

I was nervous of him. The light of anticipation had gone from his eye. He was disappointed. “I’ll demonstrate Newton’s experiment with light, if you like,” I said shakily, but he took the prism from me, held it up to his face, and brought his distorted eye close to mine. “Lovely piece of glass. Fine workmanship.” He tossed it from hand to hand, never taking his eyes from my face. I laughed anxiously, fumbling to understand what was happening as he placed it in my palm and pressed my fingers until they were clutched round it and his hand enclosed mine. Was he telling me that he wasn’t interested in Newton’s experiment with light, that he had no desire to enter my world if all I had to offer was a bit of glass and a candle? But then I became absorbed in the stitching along the neck of his coat and the way the muslin on his cravat was twisted carelessly at the throat and had floating ends falling from a ruby pin, and I thought that after all nothing mattered except that Aislabie was here at Selden.

[ 4 ]

M
RS.
G
ILL HAD
prepared Queen Elizabeth’s bedchamber by throwing out piles of parchments, a tapestry, and a writing desk collected by the ambitious poetic Selden who had never after all received a visit from his monarch. The room was the finest in the house, with silk hangings and unblemished oak paneling. Sarah was kneeling over the hearth, but when she heard us she stood up and dropped a slow curtsy, bending her slender neck so far forward that I could see soft hairs rising on the nape. She flickered past, leaving behind the habitual after-smell of antagonism.

Aislabie examined with great interest the tasseled canopy over the bed and the screen on which a creamy Diana and her buxom maids bathed after a hunt. He flung open the window and looked out over the terraced gardens and the woods plunging down to the river, then pulled me close, tucked his foot under my hoop, took hold of my face, and kissed me until my knees buckled. The episode with the prism still lingered, but I dragged at his clothes and covered his skin with kisses. I remembered the heat of our first embrace in the bee orchard, the burning sunlight. How could our lovemaking in the stifling Hanover Street bed be a substitute for this? Here there was no hurry. In this chamber, we were a dozen rooms away from the next person, and beyond the windows there was only sky and forest. There were no constraints, no eavesdroppers, no events or business to take Aislabie away.

A
FTERWARD, WE LAY
topsy-turvy on the bed. He wore one boot and half his breeches. The cold air from the window chilled my breasts. “Tell me what you have been doing in London all this time,” I whispered.

“Plotting. Spending money.
Flora
’s a demanding mistress. She’s proving to be an expensive proposition. And I still haven’t paid for the cargo.”

“
Flora
. My rival.”

“
Flora
has half your beauty and no brains at all. But she is glorious. When I sniff the new paint and see her sails unfurled, I am dizzy with love.”

“What will she carry?”

He took hold of a tassel from the bed curtains and dabbled it between my legs, watching the silken strands with more concentration than I’d seen him apply to anything else.

“Weapons. Tower guns, mostly. Brandy. Rum. Beads. Your mother was a Huguenot, wasn’t she? Or so you say. They drive a hard bargain over their amber beads, the Huguenots.”

“Tower guns. Rum. Brandy. A highly combustible cargo, I should say.”

“Precisely so. We’ll have to avoid mutiny at all costs, eh, Em? That’s the trick. Keep everything shipshape.”

“And organize your cargo carefully.”

“Don’t worry your head. There are experts.”

“But I should love to help. I know that extreme agitation can in some cases cause combustion. If enough heat is generated.”

He rubbed his foot along my calf and licked my ear.

“And who will buy this cargo?” I whispered.

“
Flora
will sail to the South Seas. Africa. Calabar.”

Calabar. I gave a mental twirl to the globe in the library and found Calabar on the western coast of Africa. The world opened before Aislabie easily as a nutshell. I had more questions, but he kissed me again, prized my legs apart with his chin, and flickered his tongue inside me until the bed was a warm red boat in which I sailed away on wave after wave.

I lay back, sated as a queen bee, but Aislabie never stayed in one place for long, even the queen’s bed. As he scrambled back into his clothes, he said, “We must keep this room. Imagine the fun we could have with it.”

“Keep?”

“I’ve got plans for this house, Em. You’ll see. Trust me. Wait till you meet my friend Harford. The man’s a genius. And I tell you what else we’ll do. We’ll have a party. Let the local gentry know we’ve arrived.”

“I can’t have a party with my father only just dead.”