The Alchemist's Daughter (9 page)

When, after another ten minutes, the door opened again, I was standing in the same place, shaking. I saw Aislabie but not my father, who was hidden by the door. He said very distinctly, “I don’t regard Emilie as my daughter so much as a woman for whom I have some responsibility. I have brought her up, and therefore must attend to her future well-being. Though I am sorry she has fallen into your hands, I am sure that whatever the afterlife contains for me I shall be indifferent to the fate of both Selden and Emilie, and therefore I agree to your terms provided I am spared any further meeting with you.”

Aislabie waited a moment longer, then bowed, came swiftly across the hall, took my cold hand, and led me onto the porch. He had lost color, and his eyes were dark. Cupping my face, he pressed hard kisses on my lips and eyes. “Dearest woman. Dearest girl. I’m coming for you soon. You must not worry. You must take care of yourself and the baby. That is your only concern. I’ll send you a firm date. Take care, my love.” He patted my back and whispered more endearments, but I could feel that his muscles were taut. Gill brought his horse and went to open the gates while Aislabie kissed me one last time, mounted, and rode away with a stab of his spurs and a pounding of hooves.

[ 3 ]

T
HERE WAS A
great deal of time to be got through before my wedding, and I passed most of it in my mother’s bedchamber. Each day I made the pilgrimage along the creaking passageways, lifted the latch, ducked my head, and closed the door behind me. Silence. Or perhaps a loose pane stirred in a lattice.

I knelt by the box and lifted the lid with extreme caution, as if she might come flowing out in a sigh of silk. Inside there was that lovely papery whiff of trapped air. If cobwebs had a smell this was it, musty and sweet. Next I unfolded the shawl, the bonnet, and the nightgown and tried to imagine them worn by a real baby, my own child with a warm, heavy head and strong little limbs. Afterward, I lay on the bed, which Mrs. Gill had made up for me with quilt and pillows. The floor sloped down toward the window so I could see into the sky above the woods, as my mother must have done. I watched the racing clouds and listened. She, too, would have heard birdsong, a rush of movement in the trees when the wind blew, and sometimes the barking of a dog in the village or the scuffle of a creature in the eaves.

I tucked myself up in the quilt and felt my body grow slack with drowsiness. As my mind misted, she came so close that she hovered outside the door and even once hung over me. I swear I felt her breath on my cheek. But when I woke, I was always alone, and I felt sick and chilled in the unheated room. At those times I would have been glad to speak to anyone, but there was little company to be had at Selden.

One afternoon when I went down to the kitchen, I heard unfamiliar footsteps, then the closing of the stable-yard door. “Who was that?” I asked Mrs. Gill.

Relations between us were strained. I thought she might show a little more interest in my condition, perhaps sew some garments for the baby, but beyond making me potions for my nausea or suggesting that I take more exercise, she rarely spoke to me. Now she never even looked up from peeling shallots for the pickle jar. “Reverend Shales. That’s the second time he’s called and been turned away.”

My first instinct was to thank whatever passed for God these days that at least I didn’t have to meet him. Then I dashed along the kitchen passage and flung wide the door. It was drizzling, and the yard was empty except for Gill, who was standing in the doorway opposite, arms folded as if he had been expecting me, and a couple of hens, who pecked round his feet. I ran across the wet cobbles and looked under the arch. “Is Reverend Shales gone?”

He nodded.

“What did he want?”

“Sir John says he’s not to come in.”

Gill lived by a simple, unswerving rule: what Sir John says, goes. We looked at each other for a moment. His clothes were dark with damp, and as always he appeared to have nothing in the world to do except what he was engaged in at that moment. I had an odd sensation of displacement, as if I didn’t know him anymore because I was no longer part of his particular system of existence. And the look in his eye was defiant; he was daring me to question his loyalties.

I went back to the kitchen. I had no idea what I might have said to Shales, but I felt a mix of disappointment and relief that I’d missed him. “I suppose Shales knows what’s happened,” I said. “I suppose everybody does.”

“They will not have heard it from us.”

But of course the whole parish would know. Every move Aislabie had made since his first gallop through the village would have been noted and discussed. “I don’t regret what has happened,” I said. “I’m sorry to have made you all unhappy, but I can’t regret it. I chose Aislabie.”

She laid down her knife at last. “Then you chose. And you must bear the consequences.”

“But why? I don’t understand why you are all punishing me.”

“It’s not a matter of punishment. It’s a matter of coming to terms with losing you when sometimes it seems to me you’ve barely arrived.”

Suddenly I saw her life as a long passage of years in which every autumn she had stood at this table peeling shallots, then nineteen years of Emilie, then nothing again but the shallots. “I will come back,” I said.

“Of course you’ll come back.” She nodded toward the block where the knives were kept, which I took to be an invitation to join her at the chopping board, though I could only peel half a dozen onions to her twenty.

[ 4 ]

O
N
D
ECEMBER 1
, I got up at four and called good-bye to my father through the library door. He didn’t answer, though I knocked and spoke his name three times. In the kitchen passage, Mrs. Gill clutched me tight for a moment while Gill turned away, put the flat of his hand on the doorframe, and leaned his forehead against it. He would not look round at me. Then I, and a small bag containing the baby clothes from the box in my mother’s room, were enclosed in Aislabie’s hired carriage and bounced from the soft seat as the horses sprang forward. Aislabie rode alongside, and as my last glimpse of Selden was hidden by a view of his spurred boot, I had no idea whether my father came to the library window. Anyway, I was too busy clasping my stomach and trying not to be sick. This was my first long journey anywhere, but I was too ill and frightened to take it in. By the time we reached London, I was huddled in a corner, faint with cold and bewildered by the lack of sky.

We were married on the Strand in a church so new that it smelled of paint and plaster. Shivering and nauseous, I swayed beside my new husband and held tight to his hand. I asked if any of his family would be present, but he said Norfolk was much too far for them to think of coming; in fact, none of them had ever set foot more than half a dozen miles beyond the farm. So the wedding was witnessed by a business associate, and afterward we drove to the new house in Hanover Street, which seemed as large as Selden until I realized this was not one house but many and that each in the row was narrow and high. I couldn’t see anything green.

My new husband had furnished the house with staggering attention to detail; he showed me a dining room equipped even to the smallest salt spoon and a caged parrot hanging in the window. “Watch what you say, Emilie,” he whispered, feathering the back of my neck with his fingertip. “That bird will copy every indiscretion.”

I was still reeling from the shock of change. Selden Manor had been a hellish place of silence and isolation, but still I couldn’t take in the tumult and enclosure of the city. When I saw the parrot, I found myself thinking, My father will be interested in that bird. He will test its green feathers to discover the nature of their pigment, measure its cranium to see how it compares with other, less-able birds, and when it dies slit its little throat to examine its larynx.

Upstairs in a drawing room prepared especially for me, a fire burned briskly, translucent cups were laid out on a frail-looking table, and a teapot was warming over a spirit burner. The room smelled of orange peel and rose petals. I sat carefully on a cream satin chair as a carriage rolled by outside and the house shook. The chair was my anchor. When a maid appeared and removed the tea tray, I clutched the seat and smiled blindly at her.

At supper, Aislabie fed me tidbits from his fork, and I felt a little more of myself arrive in London. The rest was still lurching about in the carriage. But later, when I lay under a canopy of flowered damask and watched him shut the bed curtains, I panicked and begged him to let me see the window. “Nonsense, Em, you don’t know London. We wouldn’t sleep for the noise.”

He lay down beside me and buried his face in my neck. “You’re my peach, my plum, all mine now, Emilie.” His fingers and mouth played on my skin, but I lay wide-eyed with shock, peering through the darkness at the canopy above and drawing up my legs to protect our child from the enthusiastic weight of its father. Aislabie kissed me fearlessly. “We have a tough little Aislabie in here, no need to worry.”

So my legs wrapped themselves round him, my body pulsed with desire, and my face streamed with tears of relief and love. But I was still two Emilies. One Emilie ran her hand shyly over the contours of her husband’s back, buried her fingers in his hair and drank in his kisses; the other flew across the chimney tops and along the river to Selden, where her father sat alone in the library, head in hand. Would he remember to go to bed, or would he sit up all night thinking about me? And then I tasted the salt of perspiration on Aislabie’s neck and smelled the musk of his skin as he plunged into me and sent ripples across my belly and thighs until I drifted away from my father into a hot elemental world of tangled sheets and muscular spasms that contracted my abdomen and drew Aislabie deeper and deeper.

I was woken in the small hours by a woman screaming in the street outside. There was a rhythmic ache in my womb and warm liquid surged down my legs. By morning I had given birth. I made them uncover the bowl and show me the perfect fourteen-week fetus floating in a puddle of blood, a curved little thing with transparent hands and ears like shells, and I thought, This is my punishment for breaking my father’s heart.

[ 5 ]

A
FORTNIGHT LATER
, I wrote to my father and told him that I had arrived safely in London, married Aislabie, but miscarried the child. These last two events seemed dangerously interchangeable with only the three letters between them. My father didn’t reply. After that, I wrote once a week, but there was never any response from him or anyone else at Selden. Mrs. Gill couldn’t write, and though Gill was literate he was hardly one for letters.

In the meantime, I spent three months a prisoner in the Hanover Street house, first because of illness, then clothes. As neither of these matters had been relevant at Selden, I was very ignorant of both.

The doctor said I must stay in bed for at least six weeks, so my first experience of London was from the horizontal. I felt rather than saw the proximity of hundreds of thousands of people as our house swayed to the thunder of carriages and the slamming of doors, and voices came from above and below and either side of my bedchamber. If I peeped between the drapes, I saw a row of houses opposite and people disappearing suddenly round corners rather than slowly receding, as they did in the country. How could I ever find a place for myself amid such confusion? I longed for Aislabie to come, but he was engaged in important negotiations and could only spare me half an hour at a time.

His visits were worth the wait, though at first we were nervous of each other, as if afraid of this new-married but childless state. But in fact it didn’t altogether dawn on me at first that I had lost anything because those early weeks in London were so similar to my last days at Selden, except that I lay in a warmer bed and there was a great deal more going on in the house around me. At the back of my mind was always the thought that soon I would get up and carry on with being pregnant. So when Aislabie crept up to the bed and held my hand with great tenderness, as if my fingers were porcelain rather than flesh, I drew his face down to mine, delighted by the smell of him and his willingness to lie beside me and hold me tight. After he’d gone, I’d curl in the emptiness he left behind, sniff the pillow where his head had been, and remember baby mice in the cages at Selden and how they’d coil together in such a bundle of pink flesh that it was impossible to tell where one creature ended and another began.

Aislabie brought me presents of books but had no idea how much I already knew.
The Castle of Knowledge
, for instance, I had read from cover to cover when I was eight. I tried a book of poetry and a play by Shakespeare, but the words would not form themselves into sensible ideas. I read for an hour, and then discovered that I had taken in nothing but the page numbers. All the time my mind had been ranging instead along the bookshelves at Selden and leafing through volumes of natural philosophy.

On Christmas Eve, Aislabie arrived with a huge box containing a gown of pink embossed silk, which he whirled about and threatened to wear himself if I didn’t get up soon and put on. Next he produced a matching hat, a fan, and a pair of slippers. I couldn’t resist his antics with the fan, so I tried on the dress; but the seams writhed round my arms, the bodice wouldn’t join at the back, and my head poked out from a froth of lace. My legs were feeble, and there was no strength in my spine. Altogether the gown seemed to have won a battle against me. Aislabie sent for a maid who stood by the door, bit the edge of her thumb, and awaited instructions. I had none to give her. She looked longingly at the heap of silk, but I said I felt faint and that I wanted to go back to bed. Aislabie kissed me and stroked my hair and told me that in a couple of weeks I’d take London by storm in that pink dress.

The doctor said I should begin to take a little exercise, though I must stay inside and not expose myself to the infected airs of the winter city. Obediently, I crept out of my room and poked my head round doors, cautious as a housebreaker. The servants, who were never fully out of earshot, intimidated me. I found a bedchamber furnished in burgundy velvet and a little back room reeking of stale alcohol, with a round table in the center and heavy drapes at the window.