The Alchemist's Daughter (2 page)

The church was named after St. Edelburga, a saint so fond of books that she’d built an entire abbey so that her niece could be educated in it. A window in the side chapel had a stained glass picture of Edelburga, who had black brows like my own and therefore, I presumed, my mother’s. The Selden pew was at the front under the pulpit, so I had an excellent view of Reverend Gilbert’s chin and nostrils and was expert at dodging a spray of spittle. After the service, his damp fingers clung to my hand as I argued some point in his sermon. My father and I did not believe in the Trinity. Only God was God, not Jesus and not the Holy Spirit, whereas Gilbert preached the “three in one.” Meanwhile, everyone else hung about and listened. At the time, I thought it was because they were amazed at how much I knew. Actually, I must have been an odd little black-haired, pale-faced thing, full of long words but no girlish charm.

Sometimes church made me sad because I couldn’t help but notice that most other children had mothers. The blacksmith’s wife held a baby against her shoulder and another on her hip as she thrust her way down the aisle with the rest of her brood tagging onto her skirts. What was it like, I wondered, to have a mother who let you plait her hair, kept crusts in her pocket in case you were peckish, hauled you off the gritty floor if you fell, kissed your tearful face, and let you play with her string of blue beads?

My own mother was in a corner of the churchyard. Sometimes Mrs. Gill and I went and had a look at her grave. My anatomical education was such that I could picture the arrangement of her bones and the hollow of her pelvis, wide enough for my baby head to slide through, but there was no reaching her. I was very critical of my mother’s grave. All the other Seldens were under slabs in the church or had grand memorials in the wall. The Bosworth Selden even had a tomb on which his stone replica lay with a sword at his side and a book in his hand. Some Selden women had little oval plaques like afterthoughts, but at least they were inside out of the rain. “So why is she out here?” I asked Mrs. Gill.

“Lord knows. I suppose because she loved the fresh air.”

But I knew there was no fresh air under the ground. I had scooped up handfuls of earth and discovered that it smelled of cellars and tasted of coal. I had watched a fat worm writhe across my palm. “Was she wearing a silk dress when you buried her?” I asked Mrs. Gill.

“What a waste that would have been,” she said.

And then it was time to go home past villagers huddled in groups, nodding and smiling. I thought they envied me. I thought every girl in the village must want to be me and spend her days as I did, distilling and calcifying and learning the myriad qualities of sulfur, the works of Maier and Paracelsus, and the
Twelve Keys
of Basil Valentine. Anyway, I was usually too busy, too fascinated by the dramas of our investigations, to pay much attention to the world beyond. My vision was so filled with books and fermentations and hypotheses that I had no time for the study of human beings other than of their anatomy and the circulation of their blood.

S
ELDEN
M
ANOR WAS
the crucible in which my father, the Gills, and I lived together. I peer into it now with the respectful caution with which I was taught to approach any volatile experiment. I am searching for a day to illustrate our life before 1725, the year when everything changed. And unlike the blacksmith’s daughter, I am an expert in observation. I know what I am looking for—bubbles of gas, a rise in temperature, an alteration in texture—small indications of chemical change that mean something significant is happening.

[ 5 ]

I
T IS
O
CTOBER
1721. I am fifteen, and my father and I are at the very beginning of our phlogiston phase. I wake at dawn, and the room smells of the spicy woods outside. The clock in the church tower is striking six, which means I am late. I leap out of bed and crouch over the chamber pot. We are still very interested in urine at Selden. Gill uses it to fertilize his wife’s herbal beds and as a moistening agent in the making of cement linings for alchemical vessels, which have to withstand intense heat.

Next I examine my body for smallpox symptoms. A week ago my father told me that he had discovered a method that would protect me from ever having the disease. “I shall engraft you with the pus taken from the pox of a child with a very mild form of the smallpox. You will probably feel unwell, but that’s all. Afterward you will be safe forever from the infection. This is a method that I saw tried last year on six condemned convicts. Each was inoculated with the disease, recovered, and pardoned. I shall offer the same treatment to anyone in the village who wishes to accept.” He made me roll up my sleeve, scratched my skin with a needle, and dropped a yellowish liquid from a phial onto the wound. My arm felt sore afterward but nothing worse has happened yet.

Once I’ve established that I don’t have the smallpox, I put on a bunchy woolen dress sewn by Mrs. Gill, then a canvas apron. When I have stuffed my hair into a cap, I am ready to make the journey to the kitchen, where my breakfast is on the table.

Mrs. Gill and I grunt to each other. She has staring eyes, a lumpy nose, and thin pink skin stretched tight over her cheeks and forehead. She smells of cotton, pastry, sweat, and above all her own cottage tang of fermenting herbs and dried flower heads. She is not only housekeeper at Selden, but also the local midwife and herbalist. I wasn’t very pleased when I first realized this. I thought she was mine, that her hands existed only for my needs, to force my face down into the washbowl, to cook my dinners, to empty my chamber pot, and that the reason for her cottage was so that I could go there when my father was angry or away. But I am old enough now to be reconciled to her dual life. Besides, I don’t need her much anymore.

The household is still running to its autumn timetable and I have to be in the laboratory by half past six, so I set off again in my lisping felt slippers back along the flagged passageway to the quiet chambers at the front of the house: the screens passage, the hall, and the library, which is an anteroom to the laboratory. On the far side, a brocade curtain, double thickness, hangs over a door. Inside is a little cavity then yet another door, which opens inward to the laboratory.

I close it softly behind me. Sunlight streams through the lattices of a two-story bay window and the air is dancing with gold dust. Now that I am back, it feels as if the hours I have spent away have been wasted time. I am at the hub of the world and am filled up with excitement and dread.

My father is at his desk, and his wig, a vast, fuzzy affair, already hangs on the back of his chair. It helps him think and is worn so that it can be snatched off when he gets excited. He is sixty-three, but he still has lots of silver hair, which he strokes from time to time with his left hand. He takes up very little space but burns so fiercely that he has only to lift a finger for everything to change. I think of him as the sun and me as a little planet held in place by the force of his intellect.

He is writing a paper for the Royal Society entitled
The Nature of Fire
. Nobody on earth knows what fire is or even whether it is a state or a substance. My father has been in correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton, who suggests that fire is caused by a vibration of the ethereal medium in hot bodies, but we don’t like this explanation because we can’t prove it.

I sit at my desk, which is pushed up close under my father’s, and open the tract he has given me to read: Robert Boyle’s
New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects
. I already know about Boyle’s investigations into the vacuum and his analysis of air, but I don’t mind the repetition because I am fascinated by anything to do with air and fire.

As I read, I am alert to what else is happening in the laboratory. I hear the tick of our three clocks—we measure everything accurately, including time—and the scuffles of mice in their cages. My father is breathing heavily, particularly when he inhales, and his pen squeaks. I can smell ancient wool and tobacco. Beyond him the room flies away, filled with things I know as intimately as my own hands.

A late-fifteenth-century Selden who loved praying—very unusual for our family—built this room as a chapel, but his son had other ideas and knocked out the walls and ceilings to make a laboratory. There’s plenty to distract me: large and small furnaces, benches, shelves, barrels, vats, boxes, a globe, barometers, scales, a variety of bellows, and receptacles of every shape—retorts, cucurbits, crucibles, and alembics. We use some of these things every day; others are too rare and precious except for the most advanced stages of alchemy.

The latest member of our little menagerie is a barn owl that Gill found in the attic. She had hurt her wings by dashing them against the window frame. He thinks she is one of a pair that nests in the church tower. We keep her in the laboratory while she recovers so that we can study her habits, though the mice aren’t happy because we feed them to her one by one. I can just see her from my desk. She seems to be asleep.

I read a bit more about Boyle’s corpuscular theory of matter. Boyle used his vacuum pump to test the possibility that there is a substance called ether that fills up the spaces between corpuscles of air, of the type described by M. Descartes . . .

The owl has opened her black eyes. She stares at me. I stare back.

“Emilie.” I jump. “Repeat the line you have just read.”

I can’t. I have been lost in the owl’s gaze.

“Your concentration is very poor. Why is that?”

“The owl, I suppose.”

“You were a better scholar when you were five. You are slipping.”

“Slipping, Father?”

“I’ll make a note in the book.”

The clocks strike the half hour. He blots his work, takes off his spectacles, and puts on his wig, which shrinks his face until he is all nose and glinting eyes. “Gill tells me we should release the owl,” he says. “We’ll take her up to the roof after supper.”

He has taught me that it is wrong to have feelings for any animal, so I say nothing. The owl has closed her eyes

“Phlogiston,” he says. “New heading, Emilie. Today we will replicate Mayow’s experiment with gases as described in the
Tractatus Quinque Medico-Physici
.” His voice, like everything else about him, is worn thin. I spring into action, though I am still hurt about the owl.

In the laboratory, we are always on the way to somewhere else, and I struggle to keep up. My nerves are on edge. Not only must I take in all that my father teaches me about what he already knows, but I must also keep abreast of our new experiments. I have to anticipate, predict, and hypothesize. Alchemy takes up less than six months of the year, and in all the rest of our work we follow Sir Isaac Newton’s experimental method rigorously. I must not break things. I must not say anything foolish. I must not forget what I have already been taught. I must not ask stupid questions. Above all, I mustn’t cry. If I do any of these things, my father will be angry, and then he doesn’t speak. Depending on the offense, the silence can last for hours or even days while he sits at his desk with his forehead in the fingertips of his left hand until he is ready to write what I’ve done in the notebook.

He is just back from his annual visit to London. Each year, he spends four weeks there so he can buy the latest books and equipment and give or listen to papers at the Royal Society, where he is thought to be a very great person. At the moment he is full of news, not only about inoculating the smallpox, but about a Bavarian, Georg Stahl, and phlogiston. Thanks to Stahl, we now have to rework all our experiments on the nature of fire to see if the phlogiston theory works.

We suspend a little platform holding camphor over a lighted candle placed in a trough of water, and invert a glass bulb over the top. I use a siphon to draw off the air inside the bulb until the water levels are even inside and outside, then carefully pull out the siphon tube. As we expect, the candle goes on burning for a while, then flickers and dies. The water level inside the flask rises. Stahl says the candle goes out because the air has become phlogisticated, packed with the substance phlogiston—from the Greek
phlogistos
—to have been set on fire—released by the burning wax.

Then I take the experiment to the window and try to ignite the camphor by using a magnifying glass to concentrate the rays of the sun. It won’t burn because, according to Stahl, the air in the glass is already full of phlogiston. My father grips the workbench. He is excited by this new theory of fire and makes little popping noises with his lips. His hands are covered by the sleeves of his topcoat, which is of a thick, dark-gray worsted, shiny at the elbow and rear. It has a deep collar and sags beyond his knees at the front and almost to the floor at the back. Underneath he wears an assortment of waistcoats, shirts, and breeches, all in colors between brown and gray. His mouth is pulled inward, the lower lip tucked under the upper—it’s got stuck like that because of the thousands of pipes he’s smoked—and his eyes are fixed on the candle.

My father says, “I believe there is something in this phlogiston theory that may shed all kinds of light on the behavior of metals when heated or burned. We will next try the same experiment on sulfur, iron, and lead. Make a list.” He pulls off his wig, throws it on the bench, puts it back on his head.

I write what he dictates, but I am not happy with the idea of phlogiston. I think that the results of our experiment support Stahl’s theory to an extent but don’t prove it. I wish we could catch the air inside the glass and do more experiments to see how it really differs in quality from what Stahl would call the dephlogisticated air around us, but I say nothing of this to my father. I do as he says, and after a while I feel peaceful again. I love the flow of ink from my pen, the smells of sulfur and camphor, dusty wig and tobacco, and the satisfaction of watching an experiment go as predicted. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that my father’s hands are trembling more than ever and that after a little while his knees sag and he perches on a stool.