The Alchemist's Daughter Part 16

"And Sarah?"

"I've told you. Sarah is a minor irritation. She'll disappear soon enough if you give her a couple of sovereigns. Don't bear a grudge, Em. Forgive your old Aislabie. All will be well, you'll see."

I watched him untuck his s.h.i.+rt and unb.u.t.ton his breeches, the hairs on his calves, the thrust of his b.u.t.tocks. The odd thing was he was no different than he'd ever been and really did have as much affection for me as when we first met. It was simply that his feeling was of the kind that he might have for his horse or other slightly cherished object that delighted his senses from time to time. Whereas I had loved him so much that I had abandoned myself to him utterly. And because I had loved him so, the reverse of that feeling was not indifference or contempt, but the coldness of stone. I saw him now as an agent of destruction, bringing havoc in the wake of his irresistible smile.

As I left the room, I glimpsed the flicker of a skirt and caught a whiff of Sarah's floral perfume. Though I couldn't forgive her, I did pity her for what she had surely overheard.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

St. Edelburga's Fair [ 1 ].

WHEN THE CLOCK in the tower of St. M. and St. E. struck five, I stood in the entrance porch to watch Aislabie go. I wanted to be sure. He might be careless and leave bits of himself about: a dimple on the landing, a satirical twinkle in the gaps between the flagstones. I wanted to be rid of him, a clean slate.

It was the kind of May morning when everything s.h.i.+fts: gra.s.ses, leaves, clouds. I wasn't alone. Sarah had got up early, too. Somewhere on the edge of it all, a dove-gray skirt fluttered, there was a breath of her fragrance and a s.h.i.+ver of animosity.

Then a clip-clop of hooves on cobbles, and Aislabie broke into the morning like a fist through parchment. He and his horse were tight-packed with energy: the brilliance of harness and glossy flank, the sheen of fabric, the stamping impatience to be gone. I stepped forward and he doffed his hat, bowed very low, and came up smiling so that his teeth flashed white as his cuffs. "Wish me bon voyage, Em, and you be good. Harford will be keeping an eye on you."

Then the smile froze, and his eyes slid away from the damson tree, where Sarah must have been waiting. He shrugged and looked to the open gates, the lane beyond, and in the distance London, Flora, a new adventure. The horse hooked up its tail, and a stream of dung thundered onto the gravel. Aislabie lifted his hat one last time and then was gone. The carriage rolled, Gill put his shoulder to the gates, the dust settled, and there was quiet.

[ 2 ].

ALL THIS TIME, through the crimson party and beyond, the distillation had continued; the water in the bain-marie simmered and a cloud of condensation gathered on the still head, trickled down the delivery spout, and dripped into the receiver. When there had been a period of four hours or more and no moisture was collected, we poured the cloudy distillate from the receiver back into the flask containing the crusty alchemical residue, and began again.

No two alchemists agree when the distillation phase should stop. Some search for planetary, occult, or meteorological signs. My father was even more inexact. The sign of fire was what he waited for. When I asked him to be more definite he said, "We will know, Emilie." And lo and behold there was always something-a comet, an eclipse, a streak of lightning, a fire in a haystack, or even the unexplained guttering of a candle-to show us it was time to finish distillation.

In fact, the next phase was the most lethal of all and had always marked the end of our alchemical adventure. Whereas the distillation is a delicate stage of the process, the next requires the addition of volatile saltpeter to the mixture, and this causes an explosion that results at worst in the sudden death of the alchemist and at best an end to all his hopes. Mayow says the combination of fixed salt with nitro-aerial particles causes niter to fly off like smoke. And Sir Thomas Browne says the explosion of gunpowder is due to the generation of a large bulk of air by the antipathetic reaction of saltpeter to sulfur.

My father, needless to say, always took the most elaborate precautions before embarking on this dangerous stage by muttering a series of conciliatory incantations, banis.h.i.+ng me to a far corner, and making Gill stand by with pails of water. Then he held the flask deep within the emptied water bath and added a meticulous measure of white powder one speck at a time. And little Emilie, wide-eyed behind her sheltering barrier, hands over her ears, saw the flash of light, smelled the delicious, acrid, wonderfully right scent of burning, and knew with sinking heart that this was the peak and the end of our alchemy, because all that would be left was broken gla.s.s and some charred, useless substance. The explosion, which invariably ended in disaster, marked a headlong slide to disappointment.

But that little brick furnace, the gently steaming water bath, and the fine gla.s.s delivery spout were the warm heart of Selden, my pivot in a spinning world. It seemed to me that the end of distillation was the precipice toward which I was now racing. Beyond that I had no goals and no expectations. All I knew was that I must be ready at the sign of fire.

[ 3 ].

BEYOND THE LABORATORY a deathly hush fell. Harford went away to a.s.semble a team of laborers, the hired girls disappeared into the village, and Mrs. Gill and her new familiar, Annie, retreated to her cottage to prepare for the annual fair held at the end of June in honor of bookish St. Edelburga. As for Sarah, at first I had no idea what had happened to her except that she certainly never came near me.

The fair was a time of great bustle for Mrs. Gill, because her reputation as a herbalist had spread far and wide, and people queued at her stall for hours. To satisfy the demand for lotions and potions, she spent the early summer in her kitchen, where she ripped and boiled, fermented and ground the contents of her garden, while Gill was sent out to gather more elusive specimens from the woods and hedgerows.

I intended to help. One evening, I stepped outside into a slanting blue and green world of shadows and sunlight and had a sudden childhood memory of pounding mint in Mrs. Gill's kitchen, of tipping dried camomile flowers, airy as dead bees, into little bags, of watching the fruity simmer of rosehip. I had a yearning to go back there, so I hurried across the lawn to her garden gate and fought my way through the currant bushes along the brick path to the open kitchen door. I thought I would be gladly received and put to work.

The kitchen was tiny and crowded with furniture. A door on one side of the hearth led to the front parlor, on the other to the ladderlike staircase. The flagged floor was heaped with greenery, berries, and flower heads.

Mrs. Gill's back was to me as she heaved a great pot from a hook above the range, and Annie sat at one end of the table tearing elder flowers from their stems and tossing them into a pail of water. I was about to go in, and imagined that Mrs. Gill would turn to me gladly and make some caustic remark-"Well, I never thought you'd stoop so far . . ."-but there was another figure, a neat body in a pale pink frock, seated at the table, sewing muslin into bags with flying fingers and a flas.h.i.+ng needle.

I could scarcely take it in. I thought that Sarah and Mrs. Gill despised each other, and that of all people Sarah would most hate to spend an afternoon with gormless Annie. But she looked more contented than I had ever seen her. A bee near her left hand nuzzled from one lavender head to the next, and her little foot was buried in a cloud of heartsease.

I backed away, reeling from the shock of seeing her penetrated so deep into my world. And I was ready to weep with self-pity. Is there no end to what that girl will take from me, I thought?

[ 4 ].

I SHOULD HAVE been glad to be alone. I should have enjoyed the tranquillity of the laboratory, the smell of sunlight on old wood, the meditation over the alembic, the opportunity to delve deep into near-impenetrable texts. Alchemy, after all, is altogether a safer and more predictable art than life. Alchemy involves no physical journeys, no interaction with living human beings. The alchemist suffers heartbreak and disappointment, but not often betrayal.

But my mind wasn't on alchemy. Sometimes I remembered the furnace shed, the bee orchard, or the dead babies; sometimes I thought about Sarah, and the way she had been insinuated first into the Hanover Street house and then Selden; and sometimes I thought of my father, how right he had been about Aislabie, and how my punishment, which had begun the moment I plucked the rose, apparently had no end because most of the time what I thought about was Shales.

I paced the laboratory, packed away some of our best alembics and instruments, and tried to convince myself that I was fickle; that I was haunted by the memory of Shales only because he had gone away, just as I had once been tormented by thoughts of Aislabie, and so I had no right to trust what I felt.

But it did no good. I was plagued by unanswered questions. Why had he left so abruptly? Why hadn't he told me on the night of the party that he was going? Didn't he care for me at all, that he could just disappear when he knew I was so unhappy? I should never have told him that I was still engaged with alchemy. He despised me for it. Or he realized that I had fallen in love with him and was amazed and frightened by the knowledge. Even repulsed. In any case, he'd put a distance between us. But why hadn't he at least said good-bye?

ONE MORNING, I went to the library and began packing books, boxes and boxes of them, and I remembered how Shales had brought me Sir Thomas Browne as a peace offering, and how before that he had come to warn me against Aislabie. I stared at the little table by the window where I had sat to make notes on the day my father invited him to hear about palingenesis, and with horror I remembered the smell of toasted bread, my greasy fingers and tangled hair, and the bruises on my neck when he first came to call on Aislabie. I tore the books off the shelves with frantic haste in an effort to exorcise these memories.

Then I got disheartened and sat in my father's chair. His smell hardly lingered at all now-just the slightest hint of tobacco. The hearth was empty, and the doors to the laboratory were wide open so that I could watch the still. Everything was bathed in honey light dispersed by millions of dust particles raised from the books. I had a dazed sense of the laboratory being out of reach, like a looking-gla.s.s world.

Between me and the door was my chair, plain oak with curved arms-the chair also used by visitors. That chair, set at an angle to the hearth, spoke of absence. I a.s.sociated Shales with quiet rooms, with moments of sudden calm. I decided that when he came back, I would visit him in his little study, sit in the chair by his desk, and direct him to collect the airs from his plants so that we could try out Mayow's experiments. I would offer to work with him on the extra chapter of his book. After all, I would soon complete my work on palingenesis and therefore be free to undertake a new project. We would test to see whether those exhaled airs were the same as common air. And then we would collect the air that is left when a candle has been burned under a flask, the so-called phlogisticated air, and discover its qualities.

We would be restrained. There would be no need to touch. We would talk only about air and fire. There could surely be no harm in that. And I dozed, comforted by this dream of spending time with Shales.

[ 5 ].

I WAS JOLTED wide awake. Someone somewhere had dealt Selden a shattering blow. Immediately afterward came not just one hammer blow but half a dozen, wallop, pause, wallop, that rattled the lattices and made jars clink on the shelves.

I felt the blows the length of my spine and rushed to the laboratory to check that nothing had been damaged. The water in the bain-marie was lapping the sides and the cellar door burst open. "It's begun," moaned Gill.

"Where have they started?"

"The furnace shed is nearly down already. And the roof pa.s.sage."

The roof pa.s.sage. I remembered that long-ago procession with the owl up the main staircase, past the Queen's Room, into the creaking pa.s.sageway of the most ancient wing where the floorboards slanted and I had to duck the lowest beams. And then I realized the danger. My mother's room would be lost.

Another shattering blow, a slide of tiles from the roof, and I was out of the laboratory, across the hall, and up the stairs two at a time to the door linking the new wing with the old, but my way was barred by heavy planks crisscrossing the threshold. I pounded with my fist and tore at the planks, but they were held in place by three-inch nails.

Down I went, this time hurtling along the kitchen pa.s.sage, across the stable yard, where grit blew into my eyes and I was struck by the smell of newly broken stone, and out onto the terrace. There they were on the far side of the house against the backdrop of a heavenly blue sky, strange men stripped to the waist swarming across the roof and breaking Selden open as easily as if it had been an eggsh.e.l.l. Already the attics were exposed, and ancient chimneys had crumbled in on themselves like sand. The men flung bits of tile and stone, plaster and oak beam, down a canvas shoot. As I watched, a sledgehammer struck the roof above my mother's ceiling, and farther along a chimney-a spiral of interlocking brick-teetered and fell.

I screamed, "No," but my voice couldn't reach them. "No. No." A sledgehammer lifted again and another shower of roof tiles came s.h.i.+vering down. "No."

"Madam." Sarah's hand was on my arm. "Madam."

I wrenched my arm free and ran along the side of the house. "Stop."

A lump of stone came spinning from the roof and landed near my foot. Then a bearded face peered down at me, and there were shouted orders to stop work. In the sudden silence, stones rattled, there was the rhythmic fall of a distant ax, and then the resumption of birdsong.

"You can't break up her room," I cried.

"What room's that?"

"I haven't cleared it. I wasn't ready."

"It's all clear up here." My eyes were blinded by the brilliant sky. Other heads appeared among the broken rafters. Sarah stood at my elbow. There was a moment's impa.s.se, and then Harford came panting round the side of the house.

"What's happened? Mrs. Aislabie, come away, my dear madam, you have put yourself in terrible danger."

"You must stop them. They're destroying my mother's room. I hadn't been up there to prepare it. It wasn't empty."

"Madam, we cleared everything. Come away."

"I won't. I won't move. I can't bear this."

He gave a tut of irritation and pressed a handkerchief to his forehead. The sun burned on our backs. "I thought you understood what was going to happen," he said, as if to a child. "That's why we suggested you go to London."

"I hadn't said her room could be taken," I said obstinately.

Another tile slithered and fell perilously close to Harford. He looked up uneasily. "Would it help if you came inside with me and told me what you wanted preserved? I'm sure we could keep a little of the wall covering. The fireplace, even."

"There was a bed and a chest," I said.

"A bed and a chest. But they will have gone on the bonfire if no one wanted them. We cleared all the rooms, as I said." He offered his arm. "We'll go along to the bonfire, if you like, and see if there's anything left, but I wouldn't hold out much hope."

"Only if you stop the work."

"I can't, madam. Funds are short. These men are paid by the hour. I can't have them stopping and starting like this. Now you come away." He took one elbow, Sarah linked her arm through the other, and I was ushered off between them like a puppet. I was in no state to resist, but I kept straining backward for another look. As soon as we were safely onto the terrace, the work went on again.

It was my fault, I knew. I had been so absorbed by what was happening in the laboratory that I had lost track of events in the rest of the house. I deserved to lose my mother if this was how I behaved.

We came to the bee orchard and found that the bonfire had long ago gone cold; now there was only a circle of charred soil, carefully raked over. "There," said Harford, "why don't you walk about with your maid in the shade of these trees. That will do you good. But you stay away from the house, Mrs. Aislabie. We can't have you hurt." He backed to the gate and closed it carefully behind him.

The trees were in full leaf, and tiny fruit had formed. Underfoot, the gra.s.s was long and silky even in the hot sun, but all I could think about was the black circle where the bonfire had been. I was wearing a pair of London silk slippers under my old cotton gown, and I dabbed a dainty toe in the ashes and uncovered lumps of charred wood, a metal hinge, a door latch.

Five minutes must have pa.s.sed, and still I hovered by the site of the bonfire and listened to the shattering of Selden's roof. Somewhere in my mind a little s.h.i.+p with white sails floated on a blue ocean-and in it, Aislabie.

"Madam, I must speak with you." I thought I was alone, but Sarah was still there, a few feet behind my left elbow in the shade of a twisted crab apple. "Madam, would it be convenient to speak with you?"

I flicked my hand to send her away.

"Madam, please."

"Not now, Sarah."

"Madam, I must."

"I have said not now."

"It cannot wait, madam."

"Another time."

"Please. I have tried before but never been able to find you."

I walked away from her, but when I came to the gate and looked toward the neglected rose garden I had another shock. Harford had gone panting down the terrace steps, pulled off his wig, and was now flapping a coil of paper at another team of workmen. They had pegged out the shape of the lake like a giant lozenge with a smaller disk in the center, which would be the island. A tree was being felled on the far side where the rope boundary wound through the woods, and digging had begun on the old lawn.

Sarah stood so close that I felt the hem of her skirt s.h.i.+ft against mine. Blows were falling one after another on the roof, so that the whole of our conversation was punctuated by violent a.s.saults. "Mistress Aislabie, I need your help. I am going to have a baby."

A baby.

Another blow fell on the roof, and again I was distracted. If only I had gone to my mother's room-they wouldn't have dared touch it if I'd been there.

"Madam?"

A baby.

And then I thought, My father is behind this, and he has a cunning far more devious than I had ever suspected. I looked down at my hands resting on the cracked wood of the gate-blotches of paler skin showing where acid had splashed, the calluses from old burns. Sarah presumably had no idea that she was just a spoke in the alchemical wheel.

In a gap between blows to the roof, she persisted: "Well, madam?"

"How long?"

"I'm not sure."

Her fingers were knitted together and her crooked eyes cast down. "Turn round," I ordered.

She didn't move.

"Turn."

She turned sideways so that she was facing the hives.

"Put your hands by your sides." The pregnancy was obvious. Her belly was swollen under the gathers of her ap.r.o.n and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s strained against her bodice. I was transfixed by the plum shape of her. How could she have kept it hidden? Except, of course, she hadn't. It was simply that since the night of the dead babies, I could hardly bear to look at her.

"What am I to do, Mistress Aislabie?"

"Surely my husband should answer that question."

"He said it was up to you."

I laughed, because this was so exactly what he would say. Her head drooped farther. The ground juddered underfoot. "How long have you been his mistress?"

"Three years. Not anymore." A tear fell onto her bosom. I was ice and fire. I thought I didn't care now about my husband, but I did care that on the August day when he stood in the porch all covered with enchantment, when he smiled at me and let his seductive eye linger on my loosened ribbon, he had lately slept with her and had doubtless gone straight back to her.

"I'm surprised my husband is so casual," I said. "I thought he'd be glad to father anything, even a b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"He said it was for you to have his child. He said it was a pity you never had one, but that he hadn't given up hope. He said I should get rid of it."

"And why didn't you?"

"I tried. I did my best while you was in the Abbey that time. She ripped me half to pieces, but it wouldn't budge. She said I'd come to her too late."