The Alchemist's Daughter (20 page)

I leaned sideways and snuffed out the lantern. The darkness was astonishingly complete and stifling.

“Little bitch,” he said, holding me tighter. I put my fist under his chin, brought up his head, and pushed him back to the wall, stumbling among the bee baskets until the canes of my petticoat squeaked. Then I slid off his wig and pressed my lips to his ear. “I want you to change your mind about Selden. I want you to let me keep my mother’s room at least, and the laboratory, and the cottages until new ones have been built.”

He laughed and pulled me down among the heap of baskets. I imagined dead bees trapped in the straw meshes all winter suddenly released by this battering, their airy little bodies crumbling on the stone floor. My hair caught on something rough and pulled loose as I twitched sideways and crouched down among the baskets.

“Emilie.”

I began to crawl away. I wouldn’t surrender so easily this time. He must give me something in return. He was quiet, too, waiting for the darkness to break apart. Our breathing rode the space between us, and suddenly he pounced, grabbing first my ankle then my knee and yanking me down until I was helpless as an upturned bee. He climbed my body inch by inch, clutching fistfuls of feathers, and though I writhed and kicked he had me by the waist, pulled plumage from my bodice, and slapped me back and forth across the thighs with the flat of his hand until I was whimpering with shock and the cellar echoed with the report of skin on skin.

I fought him with a deadly desire to wound and be satisfied. I tore at his clothes and thumped him with my heels and fists, grabbed his short hair and twisted, tried to bite him, but he only laughed and clamped down harder, ground my head against the stone floor, and bit my breast until I howled with pain. Then he drove himself inside me and my legs opened wider, wider, my body arched, and I pounded my wrists in an ecstasy of sensation. But I was a divided Emilie—and one half looked on at this sensuous, thrashing creature and hated her.

We spoke not a word of tenderness when we lay back to rest against the summery baskets, though he massaged my stomach with the flat of his hand. “You’re not keeping anything from me, Em? No little Aislabie brewing? Never mind. We’ll keep trying. Not too much hardship in that.”

I knelt up and tried to put my clothes straight. “I’ve been to church. Everyone’s very angry with us.”

“Who is everyone?”

“The congregation. Shales.”

“Shales. This Shales is a troublemaker. I hope he’s not been stirring things up.”

“You should talk to him. I’m sure he’s not against change for the sake of it. But people are frightened. They don’t know what you have in mind.”

“Well, they must wait until the plans are drawn up. Then we’ll show them how they’ll be much better off in the end.”

“I felt a fool, unable to explain why you have ignored him all this time.”

“Then you shouldn’t have gone out. You should have stayed home and cooked up some more alchemical brews in your laboratory. When are you going to show me what you’re up to, Em?”

“I’m up to nothing.”

He plucked feathers with his teeth and arranged them on my bosom. “Not what I’ve been told. My friends say you’re in there night and day.”

“Where else can I go? There’s no peace elsewhere in the house.”

“What are you up to, Emilie?” He hung over me and planted little kisses between my nose and ear, then nipped my chin. “What are you doing in there?”

“Working on phlogiston. It’s still not resolved in my mind that fire is caused by the phlogiston in combustible materials.”

He bit again, this time my earlobe. My eyes watered. “What else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Nothing else. Well, just you let me know when you find that old philosopher’s stone, because I could do with the gold.”

I turned my head aside, and he suddenly kissed me softly on the nose. “Now, don’t be peevish, Em. I’ve brought you a present.” He kissed me again and again on the cheeks and lips and eyes until I began to kiss him back. “Come on, my dearest girl, come and see what I’ve brought you.”

The remaining feathers on my gown drooped, my hat and veil were ruined, my hair had come unrolled on my shoulders, and I smelled of sex and cellar. My rebellion, my desire to stand apart from him, was utterly defeated. He had turned me inside out; my mouth was slack with kisses, my thighs wet and bruised, but even so I wanted more of him. When we reached the stables, he pushed my hair behind my shoulders, squeezed my breast, and kissed me long and lazy on the throat. Then he took me by the hand and led me along the kitchen passage to the dining parlor, where candles were lit, though it was barely noon, and Sarah, who seemed better, was unpacking his saddlebags. She lifted out a porcelain bowl glazed a buttery yellow with a design of leaf and flowers in green and orange. On the inside was a painted parrot, a replica of the real bird that perched in our dining parlor on Hanover Street. It had mossy green feathers, chocolate brown claws, and folded wings tipped with a dusting of dull gold.

“French,” said my husband. “Paul le Riche.”

Sarah held the bowl to the candle flame so I could see every detail. When I stepped forward for a closer look, she paused for a moment to take in my ruined clothes and bruised skin before placing the bowl on the table with infinite care.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

Westminster Abbey

[ 1 ]

A
ISLABIE RETURNED TO
Selden with a new idea. He had met the designer of the gardens at nearby Hall Barn and decided that we must have a cascade that would gush down to the lake through a broad avenue in the woods directly opposite the dome. Everyone was so absorbed by the detail of this plan that they failed to comment on my long absences. I made myself visible at breakfast, dinner, and supper, but not in between or at the end of the day, when the wine bottles came out.

I now had two lives: the life I shared with my husband, a life of violent emotions, passion one minute, despair the next; and my life in the laboratory, the one I shared with my dead father. Never before had I applied myself to alchemy with such intense devotion.

Compared to the dissonance beyond the laboratory, alchemy seemed straightforward, even rational. I simply had to follow my father’s method. On November 8, 1725, he had written,
The calx obtained from prolonged and gentle heating next has to be dissolved in oil of vitriol
. At Selden, we always used vitriol for this stage of the alchemical process because we thought it purer than nitric or sulfuric acids. And we needed an outside force, concentrated white light, to consecrate the dissolution. My father preferred to work by moonlight, but his diary recorded night after night of cloudy skies, so by early December he had resorted to candlelight.

He must have hated this defeat, but it suited me because it enclosed me deeper in the laboratory with him. I polished a lens and adjusted it in front of a candle, turning the glass until a steady beam shone onto the workbench. My father’s notebook was a pressing weight in my lap, and his staff rolled in my hand. If I looked up, I would see the gleam in his cold, clever eye, the many layers of his clothing, each pocket with its allocated function—pipe, pen wiper, pipette, wire, string, or measure—the sleeves tucked with a row of his own neat stitching and his little black slippers trodden down at the heels. I could smell him, shade on shade.

But instead I stared at the candle flame, like water in its fluidity and movement but lighter than air, tongue-shaped, blue at the base, gray and cool in the center, then a pure yellow drawn up and up to a point as if dragging against the pull of gravity. Flame—too little air and it would go out, too much and it would blow away.

[ 2 ]

O
N
M
ARCH 22
, Aislabie came back from a visit to London and summoned me to the library, where I found him sprawled in my father’s chair, surrounded by teetering piles of unsorted books. His feet were propped on a small chest with leather straps, and he held a long furl of paper.

“Your friend Shales has been busy,” he said. “Fifty names. Or rather crosses. Most of them ain’t literate.” I took the paper and saw Shales’s precise handwriting above the list. Aislabie folded his hands and seemed to be examining his thumbs, but I knew he was weighing up my reaction. “He’s taken against the plans for the house and got the tenants to protest.”

“What will you do about it?”

“I shall have a word with Reverend Shales. I expect loyalty. He depends on me for his living.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t intend to be disloyal.”

“The fact is, if he wasn’t stirring up dissent nobody would say a word. He’s a subversive, and I won’t have it. But never mind, my dearest love, none of this affects you. I’ve brought you this.” He nudged the chest with the toe of his boot. “Open it up, Em.”

Inside was a vast black lustring mantle that went on and on, pouring into my lap. I threw it round my shoulders, and the heavy gathers settled at my throat and went tumbling to a slight train at the back. The weight and coolness of it was like being caught in a deluge of rain; it had a brilliant crimson lining and the hood was so deep I had to fold it away from my face.

Aislabie slid down the chair and thrust his legs to the fire. He flashed gold and bronze in a new wig and cinnamon waistcoat with winking buttons, and his drowsy eyes watched me examine the cloak. Then he drew me down so that it shuddered into a black pool. “You need a mourning cloak, Em. The news from London is that Sir Isaac Newton is dead. People don’t talk of anything else. He’s to lie in state and have a funeral at the Abbey. Good God, I bet if Walpole himself died he wouldn’t get half the attention. Everybody will be there.” My first thought was that it was high time Newton died. After all, he was fifteen years or more older than my father. “Genius,” added my husband surprisingly. “He put the fear of God into counterfeiters. Ferreted them out and saw them hung. They were costing us a fortune in lost revenue.”

“My father was a great admirer of Newton’s scientific work.”

“That’s the difference between your father and me, Em. It all boils down to money in the end. I make it, he spent it. The thinkers of this world need the doers to keep their bread buttered. Newton just happened to be both. That’s what I admire. He didn’t limit himself to one line of interest.”

“My father’s career was thwarted because of me; otherwise, he would have done as much as Newton. When my mother died, he chose to live at Selden with me rather than retain his fellowship at Cambridge.”

“Exactly so. What a distracting bunch you women are. Newton was eighty-four years old. Never married. A moral for us all, eh? Anyway, I expect you’d like to go to the funeral.”

This was such a surprising offer that at first I couldn’t take it in. “I thought women never went to funerals in London.”

“This woman can if she likes.”

“But I would be out of place.”

“So what’s new, Em?”

“I can’t leave Selden.”

“Em. That ain’t very gracious when I brought you this lovely cloak and came back all this way to fetch you.”

“All the same, I’d rather not.”

“Matter of respect. Your father would have gone.”

The question I should have asked was why he wanted me in London, but all I could think of was that I couldn’t leave the alchemical experiment. “It’s because of my father that I can’t go. I couldn’t bear it.”

Aislabie had been caressing my neck and hair, but his fingertips were a little less gentle as they kneaded my scalp behind my ear. “Can’t have you rotting away down here, Em. London needs a glimpse of your lovely face. So do I. We should be seen at the Abbey. It’s been the devil of a job getting us an invitation. And you will be welcome because of your pa. Lord, Em, you’ve no idea how you’re talked about in some circles. Come back with me before they forget all about you.”

I knelt in the silken folds of my new cloak and bent my head as his fingers worked my neck and breasts. I love him, I do love him, I thought, kissing his knee. He wants me in London, so to London I will go.

[ 3 ]

A
ISLABIE RODE, WHILE
Sarah and I drove in the carriage. I thought she’d be glad to leave Selden, but at first she seemed more miserable than ever, with her arms wrapped tightly under her breast and her chin sunk low. Only after an hour or so did she rouse herself enough to plan my costume for the next day. She unstrapped the chest containing the cloak and ran the fabric between finger and thumb. “With such a cloak, it will hardly matter what you wear beneath.”

“Something plain, I suppose, for a funeral.”

She shook her head. “In Westminster Abbey, you must wear your finest. And your black-and-white petticoat. First thing in the morning, I will buy new ostrich feathers for your hat.”

“Does it matter about the feathers in my hat?”

“It matters. Of course it matters. And no veil. Veils are not worn this season.”

What a pity. A veil provided a convenient screen behind which I could hide and observe. The prospect of immersing myself once more in the fashionable world frightened me. London was not a place where I knew myself, and as we drew closer I remembered vividly the bewilderment and sorrow of my wedding day. Hanover Square, for all its elegance, had a harsh symmetry unrelieved by lines of elm trees just coming into leaf. When I ran up the steps of our house in Hanover Street, I was met by the scent of potpourri and the clutter of too many fabrics: pine cones printed onto flock wallpaper, sprigged muslin, the fateful French painting by Lorrain, silk rugs, brocade, linen, lace. But I was glad to see the parrot, who had been moved down to the kitchen, though he was almost as rigid as his porcelain counterpart and glared at me from one round eye.