The Alchemist's Daughter (38 page)

I marched back toward the entrance hall, and he dodged ahead of me to open wide the door. He added, “Building the dome will be a difficult engineering task because the roof and supporting walls will have to be strengthened, and the staircase that currently occupies the middle of the house will have to be demolished.”

I swung round so suddenly that he nearly barged into me. “This all sounds very ambitious, considering nothing at all seems to be happening at the moment.”

“Ah, madam. At the moment work has stopped.”

The sudden exertion after days of being an invalid had made me faint. I stood at the bottom of our oak staircase and wished I could retreat upstairs to my bedchamber, but instead I sank down on the bottom step and supported my shoulder on the newel post.
Vide Mara
. . . “Why has it stopped?”

“Are you well? You look very—”

“Why has work stopped?”

“Money. There is a temporary shortage of funds.”

“Does my husband know?”

“I have written to your husband at every stage of the proceedings, but as I’m sure you’re aware, he’s only just back from France. He had promised to send the profits from his journey, but there are none forthcoming at present. It seems he must use them to refit the ship for her next voyage.” He lowered himself onto the step beside me and sighed. I hated him to be this close; he smelled bad, and his gaze roamed freely over my burned face. “Your husband is very sanguine about the prospects for that next voyage. Indeed, he has become so enchanted with seafaring that he is determined to go with
Flora
to West Africa. But I’m sure you already know all this.”

His hand had strayed too near my thigh for comfort, and it occurred to me that he perhaps knew about my mother or he would never have taken such liberties.

“And what are your own plans, Mr. Harford?”

“Somebody must stay here and keep an eye on the place. And as I’ve not been paid myself, I am in a very awkward position regarding my contract . . .”

“How much are you owed?”

“Something in the region of a hundred pounds. I’m afraid I had to sign promissory notes for the last weeks of work to all the laborers.”

“I assume you have kept careful accounts.”

He patted his many pockets. “I don’t have them about me just now. But yes.”

“If you leave a forwarding address, I will send the money.”

He leaned back on his elbows, legs spread, thumbs loosely joined. “I’ve taken a liking to Selden, Mrs. Aislabie. I think I’ll wait here until such time as the money materializes.”

I left him sprawled on the stair and went up to my bedchamber, where things were uncannily the same as usual; my bed was made up, and the floor newly swept. Next I peeped into Sarah’s room, which was exactly as she had left it. I went to the closet, gathered up my green silk gown, retreated to my own bed, and lay down.

The green silk subsided with a rustle into a puffy bundle beside me. Where my skin touched it, the fabric grew warm and smelled faintly of Sarah’s perfume. The old association with my mother came to my mind, and I pushed it quickly aside. No, no more, I thought, and the white-necked lady of my fantasies slipped away into the creases of the fabric. But my flesh gave a twitch of recognition at the memory of stays and petticoats, and I wondered if Annie would manage the tapes and whether the dress would stand a journey to London, given that it was the only armor I had.

[ 2 ]

T
HAT NIGHT
I slept at Selden, with Annie in Sarah’s bed next door to keep me company. Sometime in the small hours it began to rain, and the house was full of strange noises, as if it had lost part of its anchorage and was likely to be washed away.

The next morning, I leaned on Annie’s arm and went outside to view the extent of damage done by the workmen. My mother’s wing had gone, except for traces of ground-floor walls and fireplaces. Already a few weeds had grown between cracks in the flagstones, and there was no barrier for the wind, which gusted up from the woods across a desert of broken stone. The furnace shed, along with an assortment of other outbuildings, had also disappeared, except for a bit of broken chimney and the blackened stone plinth on which the furnace had been built. I stood on the old foundations, breathed the clean air, and thought how quickly a dark and secretive space had been burst wide open.

Then we walked on through the bee orchard, where what had once been a grassy path was now a rutted track made by carters taking rubble to the lake. The bees were restless in the damp wind, and the hives were peppered with agitated little bodies.

Beneath the orchard was more destruction. Instead of ancient trees, the track was marked by a regiment of sawn-off trunks. The lake, which had been dug in places to its full depth of twelve feet or so, was lined with all manner of rubble from the house, much of it unbroken, so that I recognized bits of barley-twist chimney stack and brick from the furnace shed. We climbed up the broken steps, past the rose gardens, which were littered with debris as if someone had shaken a giant sieve above them, to where Gill waited on the terrace to take us down to the cellars.

Here at last everything was as it had always been. It seemed to me that in any case these chambers had a fluid quality; there was no shape or end to them, so who could tell if they were changed or not? Gill’s lantern shone on the usual collection of broken furniture, tools, sacking, and barrels, and I wondered if Harford had found his way down here and sniffed out the wine and cider. At one point, the light reflected ghoulishly from the suit of armor rescued from the entrance hall, and on a stack of Selden portraits.

At the bottom of the steps leading to the laboratory, Gill gave me the light while he tugged at a mound of canvas sheeting. Underneath were piles of boxes. Some I had carried down on the day of the explosion; others he must have transferred from the library afterward. He prized up the lid of the nearest. Across the top was my father’s staff, still intact, though blackened by fire. I held it with shaking hands and pressed the brass handle against my cheek. Underneath were a series of linen packages. I unwrapped the first and discovered my prism, then my father’s spyglass and a vacuum pump. In my frenzy to get on with the explosion, I had packed these things haphazardly, but now each had been parceled up meticulously, tied with string, and nestled into place.

Gill’s eyes were lost in their deep sockets, and his mouth was a slit. I perched on a step and held the lantern while he and Annie packed three boxes full of my most precious possessions so that we could take them to London and sell them. I allowed myself no sentiment. First in went the parrot bowl, present from my husband, then the spyglass and our delicate scales. I chose fifty or so leather-bound volumes, the most modern or the most rare, a little globe that used to stand in the library, and one of the more impressive Selden portraits.

The plan was that the next day at dawn, Gill would drive us up to the stagecoach, along with these three crates, and off we would go to look for Sarah.

[ 3 ]

I
N THE EVENING
, supported by my father’s staff, I walked to the church. Despite the recent rain, the graveyard was parched, although a few daisies struggled up among the scant grasses and a pair of blue butterflies darted close to my mother’s grave. I scratched up a couple of dandelions and cleared weeds from round her headstone.

E
MILIE
S
ELDEN

D
IED
M
AY 30, 1706

I sat for a while with my back to the stone. She lay a few feet beneath me, a neat arrangement of bones, and if she was dug up nobody would be able to tell from the shape of her skull or the length of her fingers what she had been. But I knew. When I thought of her now, I saw Sarah big with child, in fear of her life.

I imagined that I had been conceived during some frantic coupling like in the furnace shed or under the apple tree. My blood father’s identity seemed an irrelevance—what did it matter whether he had been young or old, rich or poor, kind or vicious, when I owed nothing to him except existence? The notebooks made it clear that I had inherited my dark eyes and uncomfortable gift for survival from my mother. So I picked a handful of daisies, slit the stalks, wove a little crown for her headstone, and promised her that I would find Sarah and bring her home. Then I stabbed my father’s staff into the hard soil, I pulled myself up, and limped across to the church.

The interior was cool and quite dark. My slippers lisped on the stone slabs as I made my uneven way up the aisle to the side chapel and stood over my father’s grave. St. Edelburga gripped a book in the window above me, the ragged remains of a painted St. Christopher strode across the plain white wall with the infant Jesus on his arm, and a couple of priestly stone heads peered down from the top of a pillar. The silence reminded me of the laboratory in the evenings, another place where stillness had been deceptive because it was composed of so many little noises: the stirring of a mouse, the creaking of a board, the mechanism of a clock, and the wind knocking on glass. I liked the fact that there were live things in this church: the flowers, a beetle ticking in a beam, a candle waiting to be lit. I liked the way the light drifted in from a second tier of windows beneath the roof and the dust hung softly in the air.

I laid my staff beside the reclining Sir John, the Bosworth Selden, and rested against his side. “I am here, Father,” I said.

The door opened suddenly. Footfall. Male. My fingers gripped the knight’s stone hand. I knew at once, perhaps by the shape of the displaced air, that it was Shales. When he reached the chancel, he tore off his wig and pressed his face to the stone arch. He was in his shirtsleeves, and there was mud on his boots.

My breath came in quick gasps as I took in the fact that it really was him—his shoulders, his back, his long legs. But after so many weeks of yearning to see him, I wished myself a thousand miles away. This was too sudden. My face was wrecked. I was ashamed. And I was an intruder in his space. It was terrible to watch him kneel and put his arm across his face as if in great distress.

I thought perhaps I could creep away or that he would leave without noticing me, but he turned his head and looked directly at me. The color drained from his cheek, his eyes were blank, and I could see the bones in his knuckle where he gripped the arch. “Is that you?”

Sir John Selden’s leg took my weight as my knees began to shake.

Shales said, “I thought you were dead. Good God, Emilie.” He went on staring as if afraid I might be a phantom, then came and took hold of my upper arms, drew me into the nave, and turned my chin toward the light. Over his shoulder, I saw the Lamb of God prancing across a yellow window with a flagstaff balanced in its leg. My scarred face and whorish eyes were all exposed, and I was trembling with shock as he crushed me against him, rocked me, held my head. “I thought you were dead.”

“I had an accident. I was working in the laboratory.”

His thumbs brushed the scars and scaly patches of skin on my hands. A tear left a trail across my wrist. “What kind of accident?”

“Just a mistake. There was no question of dying. Anyway, it all happened weeks ago. Didn’t Mrs. Gill tell you I was well?”

“I haven’t seen her. I came straight here. My curate agreed to send me a report punctually once a month and didn’t think an explosion at Selden was significant enough to write sooner. I came the minute I heard.”

“Well, there. You see. It wasn’t significant.”

“How did it happen?”

“Alchemy. It was to do with palingenesis. I added too much saltpeter to the mixture.”

“But you know the qualities of saltpeter. You know what is likely to happen. Isn’t there enough pain in the world without inflicting this on yourself?” His hands were tight on my arms and his wet eyes were full of rage. Love, like a falling leaf, flipped over and over inside me.

Appalled by his suffering, I started to babble: “Anyway it was worth it, that explosion. I advanced my understanding of fire, because I discovered that the theory of phlogiston is nonsense. I saw a sudden expansion of the air. It couldn’t be contained when I threw in the saltpeter, so it burst out of the flask. The air burned, but not all the air; I felt a draft, a sucking.”

Shales tucked my hand under his arm, and we began to walk across the front of the nave into the side chapel, back to the main aisle, down to the door, as if we were in Westminster Abbey and he was moving me apart from a crowd of people. “This was an explosion,” he said more calmly, “a violent reaction between two or more volatile substances. It is not the same as fire.”

“But there must be a relationship. And something else. The fire sought the higher part of the room. I fell back on the floor and saw it race above my head, and that’s why I wasn’t badly burned. Mayow says that animals die and flames go out faster in the upper part of a vessel because the air that is expired is lighter once deprived of the dense, nitro-aerial particles needed for life. I believe he was right about air consisting of different types of particles.”

“Then prove it. Write your paper on the nature of fire.”

“No. No, I can’t prove it. My days in the laboratory are over. I’m about to join my husband in London.” We walked on in silence. By mentioning Aislabie, I had brought my husband into the church, and now there he was, lolling against a pillar, sardonic, watchful. I withdrew my hand from Shales’s arm. “I was wondering why you left so suddenly on the day after the party. Aislabie mentioned that you had business with your father-in-law.”

We had reached the high, empty space under the tower where the colored bell ropes were looped overhead. “Duty, Mrs. Aislabie. Your favorite word. My father-in-law had been pressing me to visit him for some time. He’s a justice of the peace, and too many prisoners in his jail were dying before they’d served their sentence. He thought that with my knowledge of airs, I might be able to show the authorities how best to ventilate the place.”