The Alchemist's Daughter (39 page)

“Did you succeed?”

“To an extent. I think the wretches may live longer thanks to me, though it’s debatable whether prolonging their miserable lives is actually doing them a favor.”

“Will you go back?”

“The work is not quite finished.”

“You should perhaps look for a living there. My husband doesn’t like the influence you have in Selden.”

He laughed. “My father-in-law can’t abide me near him for long, either. We don’t agree on much; in fact, we are opposites. I did him this one favor because I thought I owed him.”

“Owed him what?”

“I suppose I feel the duty of a son to his father. He is a lonely man.”

“Is your mother-in-law still alive?”

“She died some years ago, and Hannah was his only child. It’s a pity we’re not better friends, but I’m afraid that when Hannah died, we quarreled. I can’t like the old man, so I try to make reparation in other ways.”

“Why did you quarrel?” He’d never spoken her name before. Now, twice. Hannah. It seemed to me he named her with great tenderness.

“There is often recrimination after a death. We all look for someone to blame. He and I are theologically a thousand miles apart. He sees me as a radical. Where religion is involved, everything is connected.” But as usual when his wife was mentioned, evasion soon followed, accompanied by an opaqueness in his eyes.

It struck me how unequal our knowledge of each other was—that he had always known everything about me while keeping his own history dark. “You probably thought it didn’t matter that you left in a hurry,” I said. “After all, I’m nothing to you. My father was right, by the way. Palingenesis was successful. I found out who my mother was and how I came to be born at Selden. You must have thought me such a fool all this time, behaving like a great lady taking the front pew in church, sharing my father’s life, when really I am nobody. You should have told me the truth, Shales. You might have spared me a great deal of trouble. And as you probably know, my maid, Sarah, is pregnant with my husband’s child.” He nodded. Of course he knew. I began to limp back down the aisle. “In a fit of rage, I sent her away. I didn’t know what I was doing. So now I have to go to London and bring her back, if she’ll come, or at least offer to adopt the baby.”

“You shouldn’t travel in this frail state,” he said, with cruel formality.

“It’s my duty. Of course I’ll go. It won’t be the first time an unwanted child will find a home at Selden.” I could barely speak. All these weeks I had longed just to see him again, but now it was as if a fatal wound had reopened. We were trapped as ever by the reality of our two separate lives.

St. Edelburga’s little chapel was so dim that I couldn’t at first make out where I had left my father’s staff. Everything was gray with the grayness of a cloudy evening: the stone floor, old Sir Selden with his book and his sword, even the stained glass. My legs hurt when I stooped down, and the staff rolled away from my stiff hand. Shales picked it up and pressed the handle into my palm. “I never thought you a fool,” he said.

“Well, good.”

“But I did think about you constantly. Since I first saw you, scarcely an hour has passed when you haven’t been on my mind. Your father did me a kindness by offering me the living here. I was running away from my old life; I thought that as there was no chance of happiness, I might as well be at Selden as anywhere. I remember taking Communion for the first time in this church, my thoughts as I picked up my book, the weariness I felt that I must start everything again. The doorway from the vestry was very low, and I was afraid of cracking my head. Then I crossed in front of your pew and saw your face, and by the time I reached the altar everything had changed because already you were unforgettable. It was that look of burning interest you gave me then—I’d never seen such intensity in a woman’s eyes. And when you greeted me on the porch, you smiled. I thought to myself, That is a rare smile, perhaps not used often, and it would be worth a great deal to win another. I met you and your father in the forest one day, and I still remember how I walked home blindly afterward, hardly knew how I got home. I have never been able to walk through those woods since without remembering the mist of your breath in the air. You were in my blood after that. You haunted me. When your father asked me to call at the house, all I could think about was meeting you—in fact, I was so distracted that I was caught off guard and drawn into an argument with him. It’s my greatest fault to be too rigid—far too rigid—in what I think I know about right and wrong. Afterward, I cursed myself for being so outspoken. What did my views on alchemy matter, I thought, when if I’d agreed to work with your father I might have met you every week? So I never stopped calling at the house, even though I got turned away first by your father then by Aislabie.”

The saints in the wall paintings, the Selden clan under their tombs and brasses, the priestly heads on the tops of pillars, a Green Man and assorted gremlins in the bosses in the roof, and my poor father under his slab were all listening to Shales. “I promised myself that I’d never unsettle you with a hint or a word. I could only justify staying at Selden because I told myself that for your father’s sake I should watch over you. But when you brought me to the laboratory on the night of the party, I knew that I was on the inside of your life, where I have wanted to be all along, but that I could only do you harm by being there. So I left.”

In the sudden silence, there were hurried footsteps on the porch outside and a rattling of the iron door handle. “How could you harm me?” I whispered. I knew the answer, of course; it was his duty as a clergyman not to seduce the wives of his flock, even if a member of that flock was the faithless Aislabie.

Annie’s voice called, “Mrs. Aislabie. Are you there? Mrs. Gill sent me to find you.”

Shales said, “You don’t know me, Mrs. Aislabie. I don’t have a gift for love. I have done terrible wrong in the past.”

“Mrs. Aislabie,” Annie called again, with less certainty. Shales and I were tucked away out of sight in the chapel, a little apart from each other. I thought that if I had to walk away from him now, my flesh would tear. Annie’s wooden soles came clacking up the aisle, and she called again, “Mrs. Aislabie.”

I said, “I’m here, Annie,” and there she was at my elbow. We had no more time. Her hair straggled across her face and wind gusted from among the gravestones through the open door. She gaped when she saw Shales, then grinned at him, and he was suddenly the clergyman as he shook her hand distractedly and asked after her family. Then she offered me her arm, he and I nodded at each other, and I was led away down the aisle.

The threshold was worn to a deep curve by centuries of Selden feet and there were two steep steps down to the porch, so I had to lean on her for balance. I didn’t look back as I waited for her to close the door, but leaving that church so abruptly to go and find Sarah was the hardest thing I had ever done, harder than holding out my arm to be engrafted with smallpox, harder than adding saltpeter to the alchemical mixture, harder even than telling my father that I was pregnant with Aislabie’s child.

Above the churchyard, the clouds had lifted suddenly and the light had turned golden and dusky. The twilight was laden with birdsong, and from a field beyond the village came excited shouts of children. Annie fastened the lych-gate behind us, then we walked the few yards to Mrs. Gill’s cottage.

“You have overdone it,” she said when she saw me. “You are very pale.”

“I’m well.”

“I’m not at all sure you should go tomorrow.”

I kissed her cheek and went on through the hot little kitchen and along the brick path to the gate in the back wall. Selden in this light was transfigured; honeyed, eternal. I knew that whatever happened, I would remember every detail of the past hour, including the walk through Mrs. Gill’s workaday strip of a garden and standing with my back to her gate. In those first, sudden moments after leaving Shales, I stood in a trance of love and grief, thinking that when I saw him again, there would be only one certainty: that everything would be changed.

[ 4 ]

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I got up in the rainy dawn and stood shivering in my shift while Mrs. Gill and Annie manipulated me into the green dress.

Annie hardly seemed a promising companion, what with spare clothes spilling out of a bundle, food stowed in a fraying basket, and eyes huge with self-importance under a flapping hat brim. Her entire family came to the gates to wave us off: countless siblings, who clung to her legs as if she’d be away a year rather than weeks, as well as her grandmother, her mother, and the blacksmith himself, who patted her shoulder with fiery pride. I kept my distance, though he tilted his head at me in what I took to be approval.

In a few minutes, the village dropped away altogether, and we were swallowed up by dripping hedgerows so tall that we could see nothing of Selden along the valley behind us. I looked back one last time, but the lane was empty. After that, there was little to see but Gill’s backside clothed in an ancient leather garment that wrinkled like a second skin. Annie’s mouth dropped open, and her eyes swiveled to right and left as if she’d never seen a gate or hedge before. When we plunged into dense woods, Gill pulled his elbows tight to his body, and the horses flung their heads from side to side to shake water from their manes. Annie gawped up into the canopy of leaves, and water plopped into her mouth.

At the inn, Gill unloaded our boxes into the care of an ostler and stood in the rain with his hands hanging and the rain dripping from his hat brim. Then he climbed back into the cart, whistled to the horses, and disappeared. Annie and I sheltered under the gallery and stared after him, then went inside to watch the rain and an occasional burst of activity. I was conscious that Annie was a keen observer, eager to embrace every second of this rare escape from Selden. And she was not distracted and aching like me.

The servants seemed to do a great deal of hanging about and yelling at each other from one covered place to the other. I thought of Sarah, who had come here with her heap of boxes filled with my gowns, and I wished that living things did have a signature of some kind as my father had believed, so that she could have left something of herself for us to gather up as a sign that she was still alive.

There was a sudden bustle, the thud of hooves, and a bark of instruction as the stage thundered under the arch and into the confined space of the yard. We clustered in the low doorway, and in a few minutes were swept into the coach. Despite our shortage of funds, I paid for Annie to sit inside, thinking that she would die of fright if her first sight of London was from the precarious height of the roof.

And there I was in a world far removed from the intensity and isolation of Selden, pressed close to a hook-nosed mother and her three daughters, one wriggling and straining in her nursemaid’s arms, the others loudly disputing the right to a place near the window. The mother began a speech, supposedly for the benefit of her girls, about how the family was moving to a house in Audley Street, a very new and exclusive part of London south of the Oxford road, and how they would see little of their father due to his importance to the world of print now that his machines were turning out three broadsheets daily. She sighed and patted her chest, rolled her eyes, and mourned the loss of her quiet life in Buckingham, though with a self-satisfied smile on her lips.

It was near midnight when we were set down in Bread Street, by which time she had chosen furnishings, colors, and wall coverings for her rooms, pots for her kitchen, flowers for her garden, planned a month’s menus, decided that she and her girls must be fitted with the latest striped gowns, and listed every sight in London they would visit by the autumn. She was met by her browbeaten husband and his coach, while I had to spend a precious half crown on a hackney carriage. The driver was bad-tempered already because of the rain and furious when he saw that there was a heap of boxes to load in after us, but I remembered one of the valuable lessons learned from Sarah, tossed my head, averted my eye, and drummed my toe until the boxes were safely stowed.

When we were inside, Annie spoke for the first time in five hours: “The lights.” I realized how full of lanterns the streets were and how brilliant the London night compared to the dark of a cloudy night in Selden. The rain formed a sheet of yellow specks in the lamplight, and I felt a rising panic at being in the place of dead babies again, and of meeting Aislabie, who belonged here and had been sucked back into the city and all its temptations. It was also quite possible that the house would be closed up altogether. What would I do then?

But the Hanover Street house was ablaze. Lights shone from every floor, and when I peered into the basement I saw a servant stooped over the hearth and the parrot’s cage hanging in the open window. There was music, laughter, the chink of glass—a card party.

I hammered on the door and a footman opened it, dressed in a new livery. He looked at me disdainfully, and then over my shoulder at Annie.

“Mrs. Aislabie,” I said and swept past him, followed by Annie and the driver with one of our precious boxes. A number of ladies who resembled overblown roses were clustered on the staircase. One of them was Lady Essington—blond hair, swelling bosom, staring blue eyes. She put a hand on her companion’s forearm, the other on the head of her little native servant. “Lord. It’s the mad wife,” she murmured and took in every inch of me—creased skirts, badly dressed hair, scorched cheeks. They all watched in amazement as the heap of boxes grew.

I ordered the footman to take the boxes to my bedchamber and told Annie to ensure they were safely stowed away. When I faced Lady Essington again, I noticed that one of her eyelids had lowered slightly and a little of the radiance was gone from her cheeks. “We were about to join your husband for a hand of cards,” she said. I took her offered arm and sailed into the card room, which had already gone quiet in anticipation of my arrival.

Aislabie was draped across a small chair, all the generous expanse of him sprawled in an inverted arc of blue and primrose. He clasped a fistful of cards, and there was a glass of wine at his elbow and coins on the table. A grin spread from one side of his mouth but stopped at his eyes.