The Alchemist's Daughter (45 page)

September 30, 1725

For my daughter Emilie Selden, in the event of her being left alone, under any circumstances. The sum of seventy pounds per year, the capital of which has been deposited . . .

The name of a lawyer in Buckingham appeared at that point. Then came a phrase typical of my father:
seventy pounds being more than sufficient, I have found, for the proper running of Selden
. Finally his signature.

I refolded the paper and pressed the seal together. On September 30, my father had closed the library door in my face when Aislabie called to discuss our marriage. And yet, that same morning, he had written this note for me, which I now held to my breast like a love letter.

T
HE FIRST
I saw of Selden was a thin plume of smoke from the kitchen chimney and an uneven cluster of roofs huddled into the side of the valley with a jagged space where the oldest wing used to be. Near the woods was the scar left by the excavated lake—apparently no work had been done in our absence. Then we rounded a sharp bend, I saw the church tower and the first cottage, and Annie craned out of the window to catch a glimpse of the forge. My heart pounded with excitement because I was coming home with Aurelie and the world was therefore utterly changed.

At Selden, we dashed through the rain into the entrance hall, and suddenly there was a crowd, the first since my husband’s party: the parrot, the baby in her basket, Mrs. Gardner, who said she had a terrible headache from all the green air, the Gills, and Annie’s vast family turned out to welcome her back. There was no sign of Harford. According to Mrs. Gill, he’d got sick of the silence and taken himself off days ago on a drinking bout in Buckingham. No one mentioned Shales. I received a kiss on the cheek from Mrs. Gill, another from Annie’s mother, who was overwhelmed with relief at the safe return of her daughter, and a bone-crunching handshake from the blacksmith. Aurelie was admired, the parrot exclaimed over. The joy of such a homecoming made me dizzy.

A
FTER SUPPER,
A
URELIE
, who had slept most of the day, was wide awake despite being brimful of milk. Mrs. Gardner, by contrast, was dropping with headache and exhaustion, so I sent her to bed, swaddled Aurelie up tight, and took her on a tour of the house.

Her arrival changed my view of Selden utterly. I no longer saw it as a place of broken memories, but as a refuge for her. The rooms would have to be sealed against the coming winter, the derelict parts closed down, the remaining chimneys swept. When we went out onto the terrace, I pointed to the moon as it came dashing from among the clouds and shone on the window of my bedchamber, where she would sleep. Tomorrow, I told her, we will begin work on the gardens. We will restore the rose garden in memory of my father.

I carried her into the stable yard and showed her how the water came gushing from the pump, and then we peered into the pantries and still room, and admired the thickness of the walls and how the air circulated through the high mesh windows. In the kitchen, we studied the embers in the hearth and their reflection in the brass pots, and I chatted to the parrot, whose cage hung under the high window and who had stuck his head under his wing as if disgusted at being consigned to servants’ quarters yet again.

By the time I reached the entrance hall and the library door, Aurelie’s head was lolling against my neck, and her breath came in even little puffs.

Aurelie. What will we find? I remember the library in its heyday, when a fire always blazed in the hearth and light flickered on the rows and rows of ancient books, on the bowl of my father’s pipe, and in his astute little eyes. But the library then was a place more of shadow than of light, a reminder of all the books that I hadn’t yet read, the things I didn’t know, the reasons I hadn’t discovered. And it was a place where time was suspended, an anteroom to the laboratory.

I picked up a candle and flung open the door. The room was very quiet with a slight draft winding its way through the forest of iron props and up the yawning chimney. With one hand, I supported Aurelie’s sleeping body; with the other, I shone the light onto the empty shelves and the swept hearth. Then we walked through the screen of scaffold to the laboratory. I held her tighter, lifted the candle, took another step.

There were great changes here. The shutters had been repaired and nailed into place, the furnace cleaned, and a fire laid. My father’s workbench was in its old position, the top planed smooth and polished, his staff propped against it. Even more intriguing was that some form of experiment had been set up: a long tube of metal from what looked like a gun barrel had been bent into an S shape, one end of which was connected to a retort, the other to an inverted flask.

I put down the candle, and its light pooled on the waxy surface of the wood. The bowl of the retort, I realized, could be filled with a substance to be heated and placed above the furnace. The air produced would then run down the gun barrel and be collected in the inverted flask above water. And once collected, that air might be tested to see if it had the same properties as the air around us. We could try to light a candle and thereby establish whether it would sustain fire and life. We could test its solubility in water. We could introduce the air produced by heating saltpeter to discover whether we might make so-called phlogisticated air elastic again. There was no end to what we might do with that separated and stored air.

And there was something else, a gleam of parchment at the far end of the bench, an invitation in the form of a new notebook open at a blank page, and a freshly cut quill.

Aurelie was now deeply asleep against my neck, a concentrated, warm weight as I swayed from foot to foot, hung over the open notebook, looked up at the closed cellar door, listened. Shales was so present to me in the careful setting up of the experiment, the exact placing of quill and inkstand, the open notebook, that I half expected him to appear. I thought of what I would say when I met him again: So, Shales, despite all I’ve said, you expect me to pursue my investigations into the nature of fire . . . I imagined the expression in his eyes when I smiled at him.

I wondered what would be my first words in the notebook. After all, it was many months since I had written anything of substance. Perhaps I would draw up a chart or a record of what happened when I tested the air collected at the end of the gun barrel. Perhaps I would devote the book to Aurelie, an account of her birth and childhood, so she could read it when she was older. Or perhaps I would tear out a page and write a letter to Shales.

I took a few more turns about the room and thought how beautiful were these dark, empty spaces and how intimate the arrangement of candle and notebook. Finally, I shifted Aurelie’s weight to one side, picked up the light, and walked away through the laboratory and the old library, across the entrance hall, and up the stairs to bed.

[ 6 ]

T
HE NEXT DAY
, the first of September, was fine and warm again. All morning I worked in the rose garden with Gill, pruning the bushes and sweeping away the debris left by the workmen. He brought a barrow to the bottom of the steps, and we piled in the diseased cuttings so that he could wheel them to the bee orchard and build a bonfire.

I brought Aurelie out to watch the flames. Her lips made little sucking motions and her eyes, which I thought had something of her mother’s uneven quality about them, fixed on my face. She took in every word as I told her that the air above the fire was quivering because of the heat and that it wasn’t often that we could see the air like this, but I, Emilie Selden, knew for sure that air was complex, made up of at least two gases, and when Aurelie was older she and I would find out the properties of those gases and astound the world.

But the sight of that bonfire made me restless. All day I had worked with great energy to hold myself at Selden, but now I couldn’t wait any longer, so I took Aurelie inside and handed her to Annie’s sister.

“Do you know if Reverend Shales is home?” I asked.

“For all I know, Mrs. Aislabie.”

“You don’t think he’s in Norwich.”

“I’d say not. I’ve seen him often in the village, and he was up here these last few days working away to clear up that room that were taken by fire.”

I went to the laboratory and collected my father’s staff. Then I tied on my old straw hat and walked past the dying bonfire, where Gill was raking together the embers, past the new lake, already pooled with water from the recent rain, and into the woods.

The leaves were tinged with brown, the bracken collapsed and beaten down. The air smelled of sulfur, as if saturated with smoke from Gill’s fire. Sometimes I ran; sometimes I slid on the muddy track and had to jab in the staff to balance myself. Sometimes I held the staff at arm’s length or used it to swipe at a snake of bramble, and once I threw it far ahead of me and watched its brass tip catch the sunlight as it turned over and over. I stooped to pick it up, and as I came upright saw creatures on the path, a doe and her fawn, watching me with grave brown eyes. We stared for a while, utterly still as the sun baked down on us, then the mother kicked up her hooves and disappeared into the dappled shadow with the fawn lolloping in her wake.

When I reached the river, I found it unlike its usual calm self; instead, it gushed and foamed under the narrow bridge and was full of twigs and fallen leaves. Farther along the bank, trailing branches of willow were dragged along in the rush of water.

The lane beneath the churchyard was empty as ever, and my feet were silent on the damp ground. The front door of the church cottage stood open, and halfway down the passage Shales’s study door was ajar. I propped the staff against the wall and waited to catch my breath. Then I heard the chink of wood on glass.

Next came more definite movements from upstairs—the rhythmic thump of a broom and his maid’s heavy footfall. My feet took me across the threshold and into the hall.

He was sitting at the far side of the desk, bareheaded, rule in one hand, pen in the other. In front of him was a glass vessel inverted over a dish of water and quarter full of what looked like coal, with an unlit candle on a platform above and a siphon running into it, presumably so that he could measure and test the expelled air. Near me was the chair he kept for visitors.

Upstairs, the broom hit a piece of furniture, his bed probably. I took another step, and I could see the hearth, the clock, and the miniature of his wife. Footsteps crossed the floor above.

I rested my hand on the back of the chair. “Shales.”

He went utterly still, then put down his pen and rule, blotted his work, and sat for a moment with his head bent. I became aware of the peculiar, hesitant tick of the clock. Then he looked at me, and I heard my own sharply indrawn breath. He got up, crossed behind me, and shut the door. We were so close that the brim of my hat nudged his chest. I took it off and laid it on the desk.

“There is a child at Selden in need of christening,” I said.

Acknowledgments

W
ITH SPECIAL THANKS
to the following for their help and advice: Dr. Patricia Fara, fellow of Clare College and author of
Newton, The Making of Genius;
Dr. Andrew Szydlo for his advice on alchemy; the keepers of Dennis Severs’ House, 18 Folgate Street, London; and Professor Tim Hitchcock of the University of Hertfordshire.

Also thanks to Charonne Boulton, Cheryl Gibson, Mary Groom, and Barbara Luckhurst, and to Steve Cook and the Royal Literary Fund for their imaginative encouragement and support. Last, my love and thanks to Martin, Jenny, Charlotte, and Jake Rainsford, without whom the book could never have been written.

About the Author

K
ATHARINE
M
C
M
AHON
is the author of four novels published in the United Kingdom. She has taught in secondary schools, performed in local theater, and worked as a Royal Literary Fund fellow teaching writing skills at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Warwick. She lives in Hertfordshire, England.

Title page art:
The Dead Alchemist
(detail), oil on panel, 1868, by Elihu Vedder (American, 1836–1923); courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, bequest of William H. Herriman.

Copyright © 2006 by Katharine McMahon

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London.

CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McMahon, Katharine.

The alchemist’s daughter : a novel / Katharine McMahon.—1st ed.

1. Scientists—Family relations—Fiction. 2. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 3. Conflict of generations—Fiction. 4. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Fathers—Death—Fiction. 6. Social isolation—Fiction. 7. Country homes—Fiction. 8. Young women—Fiction. 9. Alchemists—Fiction. 10. England—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.C5755A43         2006

823'.914—dc22                                                                                                                                                                                                      2005009902