The Alchemist's Daughter (18 page)

He sighed. “I’ve already told you, nothing ever stays the same except at Selden. You and your father were unique. When I arrived, I was amazed. It’s like stepping back in time. But the house isn’t useful or modern. You can’t keep something just because it’s old. Old isn’t good enough.”

“For the sake of memory. And affection.”

“But that’s the past. You’re my wife now. You are part of me. Selden is like an old skin. Shed it, my lovely girl, my jewel. I want to see you in a brand-new setting.”

“I don’t think you understand. I have nothing at all of my mother except her room.”

“Her room. Well, show me if it’s so special. We can perhaps keep the furniture. How about that? Or the curtains. Come and show me.” He held out his hand.

I couldn’t take him up there of course. I imagined him standing in the little chamber and kicking open the lid of her box. “There is nothing to keep except the space.”

“The space?” He threw back his head and laughed. “There’ll be plenty of space in the new house.”

He was still smiling, but deep in the heart of him I saw a hardness like iron. “What about the village?” I asked more calmly. It seemed to me I must stay rational in the face of this insanity. “You plan to change so many lives. What about the people who live there?”

“They’ll have spanking-new houses, never fear. And we’ll reform the way we use the land. Bigger fields. Crop rotation. All sorts. In a few years’ time, they’ll be far-better off.”

“You must consult them. You must give them time.”

“Of course there’s time. Nothing’s going to happen tomorrow.” He glanced over my shoulder. Harford and Osborne were hovering in the doorway. “Emilie’s been talking about our plans,” he told them. “She’s afraid of change. We need to reassure her.”

They were eager to explain. “This is the century of change, Mrs. Aislabie. No one likes change at first. But this is not just a moving forward, it’s a going back to the most ancient of harmonies, the classical world . . .”

Sarah brought wine. She was a different girl in their company—sweet, flirtatious, and pliant. They clutched my father’s crystal in their well-kept hands, gulped the ruby liquid, and drew close together. Their laughter rolled into the cornices and up the chimney.

I stood in my white alamode, watched my husband, and thought, Dear God. Dear God. Do I love him? Why do I love him?

When I backed to the door, nobody noticed.

[ 11 ]

T
HE ALCHEMIST
’
S DAUGHTER
. That’s what they thought. Emilie Selden, an irrelevance. I went to the stable block, seized a lantern, entered the pitch-black cellars, and groped my way to the winding staircase leading to the laboratory.

Let them do as they like. Let them.

I am the alchemist’s daughter.

I was in a frenzy of terror. If I didn’t love Aislabie. If I didn’t love him.

Gill had lit the fire, sharpened my pen, dampened and swept the floors. Everything was ready.

The alchemist’s daughter, that’s what I was. My hands shook when I picked up my father’s notebook.
Palingenesis. October 5, 1725. And so to the grinding. Four hours, for four days. Four lots of four days. And on the fifth day I rest. First to cleanse the
. . . My father had been late starting his alchemical experiment in the autumn I was pregnant with Aislabie’s child; usually we began the grinding process in September, under the sign of Virgo. I couldn’t bear to think of it. I had made him late. While I lay upstairs in my mother’s room, he hesitated.

If my father had been right about Aislabie all along . . . And after all, the baby had died . . .

Usually, we shared the work an hour at a time, grinding the iron ore, the lemon juice, and the quicksilver that began all alchemy. We believed that there is mystical power in repetition. The same action again and again and again, and on the hundredth or thousandth or ten thousandth attempt the great change would happen. So all our processes were painstaking, because it was safer to stay with one phase than move on to the next, the next being closer to the end, and the end inevitably resulting in disappointment.

Suppose Aislabie had stopped loving me. Suppose this episode with the house marked the end of his love? I couldn’t think of any other reason why he would ignore my wishes. Unless this was how marriages always were. How would I know? In the last year or so, Aislabie had done exactly as he wanted, but then I had never asked for anything other than what he chose to give me.

My father and I took it in turns to sit in the chair by the fire with the pestle between the flat of our hands and the mortar clenched in our lap, grinding, grinding. While he ground, I was half immersed in my book, half aware of the chinking of the ore against the mortar, the practiced chafing of his hands, the tilt of his head, the glint in his eye as he cast his wig over the fire irons. He loved this stage, the first daub on the blank canvas of alchemy, and I loved his dedication, even though with the weighing of the ore, the turn of the pestle, came the cloud of incipient failure.

So, Aislabie, I thought. So your mind is made up. You will take everything and transform it in your chosen image. I felt the pressure of my corset and the pinch of my brocade shoes. He had certainly changed the image of Emilie Selden. Then I picked up the piece of obsidian from my desk. Dr. Dee, the queen’s magician, had believed that the future was revealed in its glassy depths, but I saw only the shadow of Emilie’s face: blank eyes, pointed chin, features faded into blackness. Fearfully, I put down the stone and pressed my hands to my cheeks. Yes, I was substantial. Yes, I existed still. Aislabie wouldn’t have all of me until I had tried one last time.

In the grinding, the simple exercise of blending substances, my father’s spirits were always high, and the laboratory hazy with expectation.

So that’s what I did. I started to grind. I ground, while on the other side of two doors my husband and his cronies planned to pull Selden down about my ears.

I began the experiment called palingenesis. My aim was to regenerate a dead rose, and so become once more the alchemist’s daughter.

[ 12 ]

A
ISLABIE WENT BACK
to London because
Flora
needed his attention. Meanwhile, Harford and Osborne colonized the house like ants. They broke open locked doors, inspected the cellars, examined the roofs, and explored the outbuildings. Wherever I went, I found one of them accompanied by an acolyte measuring, recording, sketching, or scrutinizing. When I appeared, they stopped work and bowed, Osborne briskly from the neck, Harford with such enthusiasm that his face went red.

Only the laboratory stayed out of bounds to them, because I had the key and nobody dared press me for it. My father’s reputation was too potent for H. and O., and for the time being I reigned supreme there, though I knew it would just be a matter of time before they insinuated their way in. So I worked with a haste that would have horrified my father.

November 26, 1725
, he wrote.
The calcination. I summon Gill to light the medium furnace. We have modified the chimney with another vent . . . a gray plume of smoke above the crucible . . .

Calcination was the second phase. My father had made observations of the changes wrought by heating the alchemical paste. There was evidence of these activities on the workbench—the discarded crucibles blackened by heat, one with a perforated base through which molten metal could flow during fusion.

I was so intent on following his every move that I even looked up the references he’d made to other alchemists, though in the old days I had disliked their portentous prose. But with Selden under threat, I read these alchemists with different eyes. The more Harford and Osborne tapped into the hidden cavities of Selden, the more I became committed to the alchemical process. H. and O.’s preoccupations were transitory. If Selden could be torn down once, it could be torn down again. But alchemy was at the heart of Selden, and they couldn’t touch that. It seemed to me now that the alchemists were entirely justified in their faith in a unifying spirit that transcended the material and mortal life. Thus Paracelsus on the immortal soul:

The Iliastric (uncorrupted, immortal soul) is so natured that neither cold not heat can harm it. Rather heat is its life and nourishment, joy and pleasure. Therefore it is the salamandric Phoenix which lives in the fire and indeed this truly is the Iliastric soul in Man.

There must be an immortal soul, I thought, or human life is absurd; my father’s life had no meaning. It is my destiny to find its key. So during the day, perched beside the workbench or at my desk, I sank deeper and deeper into the old preoccupations. But at night, in the small hours, I was so restless and anxious that I decided I couldn’t watch passively while Selden was torn down. I must gain time. I must act. I must save something from Harford and Osborne.

And then I thought of Reverend Shales. Surely he would help me resist the demolition of half a village.

[ 13 ]

I
DECIDED THAT
my meeting with Shales should take place on relatively neutral territory, after communion at St. Mary and St. Edelburga, Selden Wick, but the trouble was that I needed a chaperone. First of all I tried Mrs. Gill, who was in the pantry hanging a couple of fowl. “If only I had time for church,” she said.

“Just the once,” I pleaded.

“Emilie, these friends of your husband make three times the work. I haven’t noticed you offering much help.”

“I don’t have time,” I said, wishing I’d never raised the matter, “but I’m sure Sarah could help out more than she does.”

“I’ve scarcely seen that girl for weeks. Besides, what does she know of kitchens and scrubbing?”

“You could teach her.”

“She’s the type who’ll learn only what she chooses. She certainly doesn’t choose to come near me. Sometimes I’m amazed you keep her with you here.”

“But she belongs with me,” I said.

She gave me a long stare and raised a thin eyebrow. “That girl seems to me to belong nowhere.”

“She’s my maid.”

“She’s not a person to be owned. She has a mind of her own. And it’ll be an entirely different mind to yours, so just you watch out.”

I thought of Aislabie, and how he would say that Sarah was not paid to have a mind, and was suddenly confused by the incongruity of talking to Mrs. Gill about how a servant should be treated, so I left the pantry rather hastily. As I reached the passage, she called after me: “I wish they would go, your husband’s friends.”

I hovered a moment, but in the end said nothing in reply.

I
N FACT,
S
ARAH
’
S
recent behavior had been more encouraging than usual. She had been self-effacing and cooperative, skimming in and out of my presence as I presumed a good maid should, although she still seemed to be homesick for London. I once saw tears fall on her sewing, despite the danger of leaving rust marks. I wondered whether to ask what was wrong, but I thought that she would dislike it. After all, her lessons on how to be a lady had not indicated intimacy between mistress and maid.

She was the obvious chaperone to church, though I waited until Sunday morning to tell her so. In the country, I wore my hair parted plainly in the center and rolled into the nape, but she still insisted on brushing it until it crackled. The rhythm was hypnotic, and she began to hum a slow arpeggio repeated over and over.

“We shall go to church today, Sarah,” I said into the glass. The back of the brush knocked against my skull and went clattering to the dressing table. “It’s much more expected in the country,” I added.

“I have never been to church in my life,” she said.

“It’s not so bad. It’s just a matter of standing still and being quiet.”

“I would rather not go to church, madam.”

“But I need you to be there. I can’t go alone. It would look very strange.” And now I was determined that she should go. It was her duty, after all, to do as I said.

She went on glaring into the mirror. Then her head went down. “Please. No.”

“Sarah. I hardly ask you to do anything for me. Of course you will come. Why ever not?”

“It is not the church; it is the being under the eye of God.”

I laughed. “If God has an eye, we are under it all the time, not just in church. You’ll come with me to church, if only as part of your education.”

She was silent a while, then rallied. “You can’t go to church anyway, madam. There’s nothing suitable for you to wear.”

“Any of my gowns will do.”

She flounced next door to where my clothes were stored and came back with my most unattractive gown flung across her shoulder. Though I now wore my clothes with some confidence, I had no idea how to choose them for myself, so my gowns, gifts from my husband, arrived full-blown, swathed in muslin. I didn’t mind because dressmakers terrified me, but sometimes Aislabie’s choices seemed very odd. This particular gown was a monstrosity of brocade trimmed with black feathers, and I especially did not want to wear it to church. I doubted whether Shales knew any more about fashion than I did, but even he could not fail to notice the ostentation of those feathers.

I watched Sarah’s white face in the mirror as she shook out the skirts and untied the laces. “That gown is too grand for a village church,” I said.

Her arms went limp, the dress sighed to the floor, and her angry eyes stared into mine. “Which would you like to wear, Mistress Aislabie?”

“Any other. Yesterday’s.”

“Even though the skirts are full of dirt? I’ve taken it down to be brushed.”

“The blue silk.”

“Blue,” she repeated, flinging the word into the crosscurrents of my confusion.

“Sarah, if you hate going to church, I’ll not ask you again.”

She gave one of her annihilating shrugs. Though her left shoulder and eyebrow were raised only a fraction, the effect was as momentous as Sir Isaac’s celebrated planetary wobble. He said that because of the varying rotational forces on the earth it had become flat at the poles and rounded at the equator. In the same way, Sarah’s shrug changed the shape of my morning. “Is there nothing else black?” I begged.