The Alchemist's Daughter (35 page)

August 23, 1725

He came again, and I have sent him away. Emilie took him to the orchard, and they spent a few minutes together, according to Mrs. Gill. The corruption has set in quickly. Now she wants to go with me to London, presumably so she can meet him there—or another like him. I believe Shales to be the root cause of all this restlessness. He began it.

She is not ready to face the temptations of the city. Am not convinced she could withstand them. Shall buy her a present. An alembic, perhaps, or a book. This must suffice. And then another time will take her to London, when she has proved herself to be a little wiser. Perhaps there would be no harm. Could take her to a lecture or two. My fellows at the society will be amazed at what I have achieved.

September 22, 1725

She

She

She

Monstrous

She

Well I will not

September 23, 1725

I do not deserve this.

I am an old man. I have given her every last ounce of myself.

I trusted her.

I should never have gone away.

September 26, 1725

Called Gill. Said, “Where were you when this happened? Don’t tell me you didn’t know what was going on.” He stood with his hands hanging. I said, “Gill, she was in your charge. You witless . . . you ungrateful . . .” Brought staff down on his head and shoulder. He scarcely flinched. Stared dumbly. He was there at her start. Had he no remembrance of that? Brought it down again on his shoulder, and he took it from me, placed it on the bench, and walked away.

The misery that she has brought upon us all.

Mrs. Gill came in with my supper. Said, “You must eat, sir.” I said, “After all I have done for you. You have been negligent.” She was weeping. Weak tears. She said nothing at first. Then she said, “She is a woman, sir. She will make her own choices. I am not her jailer, and neither are you.”

She said, “There is no turning back time, for all your art. You stand to lose her if you won’t forgive her.”

Every hour or so the girl has come to the door and knocked. I hear her skirt brush against the wood. I hear her breathing. So I keep the library door locked and go into the laboratory, where I won’t be troubled anymore.

September 30, 1725

He came.

I weep. Can’t stop. Saw him so clearly for what he is. How could she be so foolish as to fall for him? Of all people. He is nothing. He is like Flamsteed at the society, caring only for his own ambition.

I see it all. It is her mother. And, fool that I am, I only realize now that since her birth I have been fighting not one enemy but two—mother and father.

This Aislabie is perfumed and smooth-handed. Have lain awake at night and thought of how he must have touched her. My Em . . . I had speeches ready. I thought I would say to him, “I know you through and through. I found you out while I was in London—the slave trading, the South Sea dealings, the false story about your father and his farm. You are nothing.” I thought I might send him away and keep Emilie with me and look after her and forgive her, but I saw it was hopeless. She will have him because she can’t resist him. He comes from the world that is in her blood. He’s been there all along, and I never noticed. And he knows too much. He is full of veiled threats. I won’t have him hurt her like that. It seems he has uncovered all our secrets.

In the space of a few weeks he undid all I had achieved, every last shred of sense, because something in his flesh called out to her. My life’s work is over. The experiment has failed.

[ 5 ]

T
HERE WAS ONE
more notebook, but I stopped reading. I had my answers, and I thought if I read about my father’s suffering after I married Aislabie his words would haunt me forever.

Annie came as usual to swab me with ointment, dress me in a clean shift, wash my face. Mrs. Gill was away delivering twins in Lower Selden and not expected back until morning. I said, “How can I repay you, Annie, for all you’ve done?”

“I’m paid well enough by Mrs. Gill.”

“Nevertheless, I should like to thank you.”

I expected her to ask for money—I had won ten guineas at the gambling table on the night of the red party—but instead she crept back toward the bed and stood with her hands clasped and her tongue showing. “There is something, if you mean it. I should like to know how to read.”

I wondered how someone as stupid as Annie could be taught to read. And I was strangely resentful that she should want such a thing. I think I saw her, just for a moment, as a rival. But then I told myself that between them she and Mrs. Gill had saved my life, so I promised her that we would begin as soon as I had the strength.

I was rewarded by a smile reaching almost ear to ear. “I’ve always wanted to read,” she said, “since I saw you in church following the prayers in the book.”

“You remember me from when you were a child?”

“Of course.”

“And what did you think of me, Annie?”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you saw me, what did you think?”

“I felt sorry for you, of course.”

“Sorry? Why?”

“Because you had no mother. Because you was alone with him in that great house and there seemed no way out for you.”

[ 6 ]

T
HE NEXT MORNING
when Mrs. Gill came, I was sitting up with a shawl wrapped round my shoulders and my hair brushed. “I should like to get up now, so that you can sleep in your own bed,” I said.

“Don’t worry on my account. I can sleep anywhere. I still have my room at the house.”

“What’s happening there?”

“They’ve been taking it apart, bit by bit. But for now they’ve stopped. I slept late as a result.”

She uncovered my burns and said I would soon be well. I touched my face and felt the hard skin on my cheeks. When I asked for a mirror again, she said she’d bring one from the house. She was in a great hurry and wouldn’t meet my eye. I think she knew what was coming.

I said, “Mrs. Gill, was there no affection at all between my parents?”

She shrugged.

“Why did my father suspect that my mother might have Catholic blood in her? I thought you said her family were Huguenots.”

“I may have done.”

“Why does he keep writing about my mother’s nature as if it was foreign to him?”

“She was foreign. She was French.”

“Yes, but what about his own nature? Why does he never talk about his own blood and how I have inherited his nature?”

She was about to fasten the neck of my shift, but her hands went still. Her face was so close to mine that I could see the veins in the thin skin of her eyelids.

“So,” I said, “I’m not my father’s child. Then who am I? Wasn’t my father married to my mother?”

“Of course they were married. You are his child.”

“Did she deceive him with another man?”

“She never deceived him.”

“Then what?”

She buttoned the shift—quite a struggle, as Sarah had sewn such tight little buttonholes. Sarah. I’d scarcely given her a thought since the explosion. Where was she now? The last I remembered was a pair of trim ankles retreating up the terrace steps, a slight stagger to accommodate the weight of pregnancy. Of course, that was another thing wrong with my father’s notebooks. “He began writing about me when I was a day old,” I said. “That’s not right. He would have begun at my beginning.”

“Leave it, Emilie.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t.”

She was white-faced. “You tell me this, Emilie, is it always best to know everything, as you and your father insist on doing? Or sometimes is it best just to be quiet and let things lie as they are?”

“If it’s possible to know, I have to know.”

“Is that why you nearly killed yourself in that laboratory? Even if the finding out kills a person, is that still best?”

“Yes. Yes. The truth is everything. If we can only know. That’s what he taught me.”

“Then that’s your choice,” she said, “but it isn’t mine.”

[ 7 ]

I
HEARD NEARLY
every chime in the church tower that night. The swallows stirred in the eaves before four o’clock, and then at last I slept, but only fitfully, because I knew I had set something in motion I couldn’t stop. And sure enough, in the morning Mrs. Gill stormed up the stairs and said she’d had enough of me being in her bed and that I must go back to Selden soon, my brooding and waywardness were making her cordials go sour. So she and Annie wrapped me up and helped me downstairs and through the steamy little kitchen to the garden, where Gill had laid out a mattress and heap of cushions from the manor. He hovered at the end of the garden to catch sight of me, and when I waved and called his name he nodded vigorously several times and picked up a spade as if he had no time to linger. Then I was left alone to watch the play of sunlight on the leaves and the headlong plunge of a bee into the trumpet of a foxglove. At eye level with dandelions and camomile buds, I followed the business of ants and leafhoppers, ladybugs and wood lice, and I stared so long at a stem of fennel that I swear I saw it grow. A robin hopped over my still hand; I felt its slight, brief weight, saw the dust on its feathers. There was so much going on that I thought I would lie there forever with my head to the ground and never have to involve myself with my own kind again.

Mrs. Gill came back with the last—or, as it turned out, the first volume—more worn than the rest with swollen pages and bruised corners. She hung over me, still holding the book. “You’ll blame me for what you’ll find in this, but I have always done what I was told. Gill and I spoke about it. He said that what she doesn’t know will plague her more than what she does. So here it is, given you’ve asked for it. But remember, Emilie, whatever you might read and whatever you might think, you have been loved.”

I looked up at her shiny, inscrutable face, and knew as I took the weighty little volume and felt its cover, soft as moss, that she and Gill were the only solid things left to me and that I must hold tight to what she had said.

May 30, 1706

I had spent the day investigating the nature of green vitriol that Digby believed has healing properties and can knit wounds. (Discussed same with Mrs. Gill, who says the essence of healing in a wound is clean air and as little interference as possible.) Consulted Glauber for his expertise on irons and read how he recommended the same for treatment of some ulcers and cancers.

It was early evening but very windy and wet from heavy gray clouds, and I worked by the light of a single candle. When seven struck, I took up my staff and prepared to enter the laboratory, and it was at that moment, as I moved away from the fire, that I saw a woman’s face at the window. She was very low in the glass, just her head visible, with the rain streaming from black hair and one hand held flat to the pane, so that at first I thought she must be a chimera. I snuffed the candle to see her better, and her hand again fell against the glass then slid down as if she hadn’t the strength to hold it there. I summoned Gill and told him to bring her in, and meanwhile went so far as to light four candles that I might see her properly. I then prepared this notebook so I could write her down, and put away my other books and eyeglass in case she proved to be a thieving girl.

Gill was half carrying her, and she was wringing wet and huge with child. We put her in my chair by the fire and looked at her. There was a great deal of flesh exposed at her breast and neck, and her feet were bare. She was sodden, head to foot, and filthy from the mud she had picked up in the woods. Her ankles, from what I could judge, were swollen to twice the normal size for a woman of her age. By comparison, the wrists were thin. Her skirts were torn and ragged, and there were bits of ribbon and lace hanging down. As I have written, the bodice was gaping so that one breast was entirely exposed. I noted that it was veined like a cow’s udder and the nipple was dark and wide, and rested on the high swelling of her belly. She was white and shivering and moaning a great deal. She smelled of the river and mud, and something else, somewhat fishy, which I took to be a woman’s smell. Her fingernails were bitten and black.

I asked where she had come from, but she didn’t reply. Nor when I asked her name. Then she jolted her knee up and put her hand on her belly. Her face contorted, and it occurred to me that Mrs. Gill should be brought.

“But she’s sewing upstairs and I daren’t disturb her,” said Gill.

I ordered him away, and meanwhile tried again with the girl. Then it came to me that she was actually mumbling not in English but French. My own French is fluent for the purposes of reading, rather than speech, but I managed to make her understand when I asked her name. At last I heard her say, “Emilie.” But then she moaned and arched her back and almost jerked herself out of the chair.

Mrs. Gill came in and made a great fuss as was to be expected. “Lord,” she said, “what have you got there, sir?” She fell on her knees and touched the girl’s hand and then her belly. “She’s crawling with lice. What were you thinking of bringing her in among your books?”

She told Gill to fill a bath in the stables, and then they went off with her. Mrs. Gill asked where she should be put and was surprised, I think, that I said any room in the upper, most distant part of the house. I hardly know why I answered that. Perhaps the knowledge of what I was going to do had already formed in me.

Well.

Well. It was fortunate that I lay on the ground under the elder, because I had no distance to fall.

There she was, my mother. I had her at last. The old image of her all dressed in swirling green silk rustled away among the mint and feverfew, and instead I saw the rain dripping from my new mother’s black hair and the wild night reflected in her black eye. And Emilie Selden sloughed off me like an old skin, and I was my mother’s daughter with an ancestry as impenetrable as the vast distances in space. It was like standing on the rooftop at Selden and staring down giddily.