The Alchemist's Daughter (6 page)

I followed Aislabie across the entrance hall and waited with him in front of the house while Gill brought his horse. The top of my head was level with his upper arm, and we stood so close that the tip of his boot almost touched my uneven hem. We said nothing, but when he mounted I stepped away and looked up at him. At first he gave me a polite smile of farewell, but then his eyes filled with heat and I thought I saw into his soul, pure as gold itself. He pulled the reins, the horse reared its powerful front legs, and they were gone.

W
HEN
I
GOT
back to the dining parlor my father peered at me. “Well?”

“Father?”

“What are your observations?”

Since the Shales episode, I had learned to be cautious. “I don’t have any.”

“You must. What did you see?”

“I saw a young man, Father.”

“What else?”

“He held you in a great deal of esteem.”

He laughed through his nose and jabbed his staff at me. “He had no more respect for me than for a barrel of good sherry. He’ll give me as much attention as he needs until he gets what he wants, then he’ll drop me—except for the fun he’ll have at my expense in his coffeehouse. So think again, Emilie. Tell me what you saw.”

“I saw a young man who traveled a long way to ask your opinion. He has a problem and thinks you can solve it. Where is the harm in that? You’ve always taught me that one of the keys to success is knowing where to look for answers.”

“There is no harm, Emilie, so long as you’re not taken in. But you were. You missed all the signs. You think that the man is after knowledge, when what he actually wants is profit. Tell me how I know.”

I was as close to tears as I’d been in years. I had rarely seen my father so virulent in his attack of anyone except Shales, who had dared challenge the validity of alchemy, and various charlatans guilty of publishing rubbish. M. Étienne-François Geoffroy, for instance, had devised a table that ordered chemical substances according to their affinities for each other, but he had made the mistake of mixing up physical and chemical properties, an error so fundamental that my father had spent weeks muttering that it was beneath his dignity to publish a rebuke.

“Tell me.” His eyes had gone cold.

“His clothes were very fine,” I said at last.

“Ah yes, they were. But don’t you go confusing the quality of what a man wears with the quality of his soul. Anyone with a bit of money can pay for expensive tailoring.”

“He dressed with care. What’s wrong with that? He wanted to impress you.”

“No. He wanted to overwhelm me, because he knew that I was a reclusive old man. If he’d wanted to please me, he would have dressed plainly. Now what else?”

“Nothing else.”

He tore off his wig and ran his hand across the stubble of white hair. “Emilie. Observe. Think. What did he talk about?”

“Himself mostly.”

“Money. He talked about money. The making of money. What else?”

“Nothing. I saw nothing else.”

“Then you’re a fool. I’ve wasted my time on you. One step outside the laboratory, one glimpse of finery, and all I’ve taught disappears. You’ve been dazzled. I’ll make a record in my notebook. He pretended to be interested in phlogiston, Emilie, and I suppose he might be, if it will save him a few hundred pounds. But he took no notes or references. His eyes glazed when I talked to him. He’s gone away no better off than when he came.”

“Then why was he here? Why did he travel such a long way?”

“That’s the only reason I’ll let him come back. I want to find out.”

[ 7 ]

F
OR THE NEXT
two nights, I scarcely slept while I thought about Robert Aislabie. My father had seen him in a false light, distorted by the lens of age and prejudice. Aislabie was perfect. Every corpuscle in my body shook at the memory of his smile, his sideways glance, the quirk of his lip, the voice that was mined from a secret place inside him. I wanted to see him again so much that it was all I could do to stop myself from rushing to the gates every ten minutes. The ground under my feet was wafer thin, and I thought I might fall into a pit of despair if he didn’t come back. And all the while I had to pretend that nothing had changed. My father was getting ready for his trip to London, and there was work to be done copying papers and putting the laboratory in order.

Time behaved with extraordinary waywardness—crawling minute by minute or springing forward in leaps and bounds—until at four o’clock on the second day I heard his horse and a brisk knock. I was ready, of course, had been for two days, with my hair brushed under a clean cap. When I opened the door, I allowed myself one glance only—any more and he would see how my whole being was on fire with longing—but that glance was enough. His eyes looked directly into mine, smiled, went misty. We said nothing as I led him as before to the library. This time he spent only half an hour with my father while I walked up and down the screens passage, passing and repassing the two open doors to the entrance hall. I was carrying a straw hat, so that when he came out I would seem to be on my way to the garden.

The door opened, and he caught me on my twentieth trek down the passage. I curtsied. He bowed. “Mistress Selden.”

He leaned his shoulder against the doorway with his hat tucked under one arm, the other raised to grasp the lintel, but he was not at ease. His voice was low and his color high. My father must have been unkind. My ancestors stared past him from above their starched ruffs, and I was struck by the contrast. There was nothing two-dimensional about Aislabie. He was breathing and muscular, with stray hairs floating loose from his rippling wig and soft fabrics tumbling at his throat and wrists.

“That hat looks very purposeful,” he said.

“I am on my way to the orchard.”

He nodded, glanced at the closed library door, transferred his own hat from right hand to left, and raised his elbow in a gesture I was too ignorant to understand. “Perhaps you will show me?”

Instead of taking his arm, I walked down the kitchen passage and through the stable yard to the orchard, where we stood apart from each other. I had no words. I was, like my father pissing into the chamber pot, utterly exposed. Bees probed the clover, butterflies clung together in midair, a blackbird called throatily from its perch on a medlar. Aislabie asked about the trees and whether they cropped well. I managed a yes and was silent. He bowed abruptly and turned away. I ran after him until we were in the shade of the stable yard, where desperation at last put words into my mouth. “Did my father tell you what you needed to know?”

His face, now I dared look at it, was sad. The light had gone from his eyes. “Your father said he couldn’t help me any further.”

“But I could. I know everything he knows. More.”

I swayed closer, but he took a step back and bowed. “Thank you, Mistress Selden.” Then he called for his horse. For one more moment I was close enough to touch him—I reached out and put my finger on the back of his arm so lightly that he couldn’t possibly have known, but I felt his heat and the hardness of muscle. Then Gill brought his horse, and Aislabie swung himself into the saddle. He raised his arm in farewell, but didn’t look at me again.

[ 8 ]

M
Y FATHER WAS
leaving for London the next day. Our last meal together was usually full of his instructions and my reassurances, but at supper that night I was so agitated I couldn’t speak to him. In my mind, I was following Aislabie along the road to London. My father—this obstinate, wrongheaded, filthy old man—was the reason for our separation.

He handed me his pipe, but I spilled a few strands of tobacco, so he snatched it back and lit it himself.

“While I am away, Emilie, you are to give the rose a quarter turn every eight hours so that its petals dry evenly. In the meantime, translate the
Principia
, the 1723 edition—at least to the end of Book One—by the . . .”

For the first time in my life I interrupted him. “What did Mr. Aislabie want, Father?”

He sucked his pipe and stared blankly.

“Did you talk about phlogiston?”

“He was no more interested in phlogiston than is Mrs. Gill.”

“Well, what then?”

He jabbed the bowl of the pipe into my face. “He pretended to have a broad interest in the nature of fire, but he is an impostor. Alchemy, that’s what he was after. He’s been sniffing around in London and found out my reputation. But of course he’s not after knowledge, only gold. The next thing he’ll be asking about is the philosopher’s stone. He calls himself a modern man, but just in case there’s an easy fortune to be made he’s willing to make himself charming to me. He’s already tried to wheedle his way into the laboratory by asking me if I would demonstrate the theory of negative air. He was trying to impress me, of course, so I tested him by mentioning Gassendi’s
Syntagma
and the theory of the atom, but he had never heard of either, so I said if he had any more questions he could call on me at the society in Crane Court. I won’t have him here again. Alchemy is what he wanted, and he wasn’t even honest enough to say so.”

I sat in silence for a while. Then I said, “Take me with you to London, Father.”

“Whatever for?”

“I want to see what it’s like there. I want to see where Mother was born.”

He knocked his pipe against the side of the hearth. “There’s no place for you in London.”

“I wouldn’t be a nuisance. Please, Father.”

“Who would take care of the rose?”

“Gill.”

“No, no, it has to be you.”

“Don’t leave me, Father.”

He groped for his staff and got up. “It’s all that man. You were satisfied before.”

“I don’t think I was. I think I was impatient. I was waiting for something to happen.”

“The notebook,” he said suddenly. “I’ll write this in the notebook.”

“Yes, you must. But in the meantime, please let me go to London.”

We stared at each other. He looked baffled and furious, and I knew it was hopeless.

He didn’t put out his hand to be kissed, so I walked away with my head high. In the morning, I watched Gill drive our ancient carriage out of the stable yard. My father was shut up tight inside. It was my job to fasten the gates behind them. Once I had dropped the iron latch, I turned to face Selden. I would rather die than go back to the laboratory where I had worked all yesterday with such high hopes of seeing Robert Aislabie, so instead I lay on my bed and relived again and again the minutes with him in the orchard. He had been bored. My father had offended him. He had been eager to leave. I would never see him again.

[ 9 ]

T
HE FOLLOWING EVENING
, Gill returned with the empty carriage. In a month or so, when summoned, he would drive back to London and collect my father. This period of his master’s absence was traditionally one of holiday for him, and he was rarely to be seen. Mrs. Gill, by contrast, was even busier than usual and disappeared into the kitchen of her own cottage, where she brewed up potions for the coming winter. In the past, I would have helped her, but now I was too restless and impatient. Then she was called out to a difficult birth in Selden Wick. She thought I was studying, but actually I roamed down to the river, dabbled my feet, and watched the water flow busily toward London and Aislabie. It seemed to taunt me by touching my feet and rushing on and on. Water couldn’t be held back and restrained. Water, like fire, was awesome; a servant one moment, a force of destruction the next.

On the way home through the woods, I noticed that some leaves had already fallen and the nettles were dusty. I leaned on the papery trunk of a silver birch and closed my eyes. My neglected studies, the rose in the laboratory, and the prison that Selden had become dragged at me like a heavy cloak. Then there was movement on the track behind me, and suddenly Aislabie walked out of my longings and into the Selden woods as if I had conjured him up. He had slung his red coat over his shoulder, and his boots shone. I clutched the tree and stared stupidly up at his smiling face.

There was a little crease between his brows as if he was unsure of how I might react, then he bowed with what I took to be a London flourish—I could see London in every complicated stitch of his clothing. “Mistress Aislabie, I want to apologize for my rudeness. Last time I came your father was so brusque that I was somewhat offended. He was suspicious of my motives and disparaged my business interests. I’m sorry that in my anger I treated you so coolly, and I have come to take you up on your kind offer. Perhaps you and I could have a conversation about phlogiston.” His smile slanted from the corner of his eye to the dimple in his cheek, and his elbow was bent toward me like last time. I realized that I was expected to slide my hand through the space between his arm and his body, and this procedure drew me up so close I could scarcely breathe. My fingers skimmed the material of his sleeve, and the slightest movement brought his flesh hard under my fingers.

He tightened my arm against his side. “Phlogiston,” he said.

Freshness returned to the leaves, and I seemed to fly beside him as I gabbled in my attempt to impress. “We’ve been working on phlogiston for four years, and although in one way the theory does much to explain how fire happens, there are problems. The main difficulty is that metals gain weight when heated to a calx—you would expect them to lose weight because of the phlogiston lost to the air. Some people support a theory called ‘negative weight’—they think that bodies lose their porous nature when they’re burned, and therefore the air presses down harder on them and they aren’t so buoyant and seem heavier. We think this theory is unsupportable.”

We perched on either side of a slimy pond in the sunken garden and gazed intently into the jungle of water lilies as if we really cared about the fish that came gasping to the surface. But actually all I saw was our faces reflected dimly in the green water.

“Fire is one of the four elements,” I said, “the
Materia Prima
from which all matter is formed. The ancients believed that fire was masculine.” I was hearing words for the first time, and they made me quiver.
Fire. Masculine
. Aislabie was the personification of masculinity and heat. “Fire is present in sulfur and phosphorus. It is a transforming force. But we don’t know what fire is or how it is made.”