The Alchemist's Daughter Part 4

Despite the evidence of these letters, loneliness and exclusion made me wonder whether I had dreamed Aislabie, but exactly at the agreed hour I heard hoofbeats through the village and there he was at the gates, horse steaming, hat whipped off for the blacksmith's daughter, who happened to be pa.s.sing. I emerged from the porch as Gill put his shoulder to the rusty iron. Aislabie wore dark clothes except for a jaunty yellow c.o.c.kade and was more solemn than I remembered as he leaped down and kissed my hand and cheek. "You are pale, my dear love."

He was a stranger, and I had an instant of pure terror. His face was more fleshy, he seemed altogether weightier, less boyish than before, and his blue eyes looked eagerly past me to Selden. Then he held me tight in his arms, buried his face in my neck, kissed my mouth so that I felt the shock of sudden intimacy and fell against him thinking, I love him, I do love him. He held me at arm's length and studied my face, then my waist. "Are you well? What about our child. Is he thriving?"

These were beautiful words to me, especially the "our." They closed the gap between us and made me feel that after all I did have a place somewhere, even if not at Selden. "All is well."

"How is the old man?" he whispered.

"I hardly know. He won't speak to me. He won't let me near him, though I knock on his door every day."

He kissed my hand again. "Never fear, my love. I'll find a way round him."

I led him across the hall, tapped at the library door, and stood aside to let him through. My father stayed out of sight, but I heard a board creak under his foot. The door was left wide open, and I glimpsed the glow of firelight on the laden shelves and smelled tobacco. I wasn't invited in. It was a sunless day, and the hall was cold. I had no doubt that the open door was a deliberate ploy and that I was supposed to overhear this conversation. I was hoping for a miracle, that Aislabie would find precisely the right words to soften my father and readmit me to the old life. His cultivated London voice was very low and I missed the beginning of his address: ". . . daughter's hand."

There was a long silence, during which Aislabie twirled his hat, and I tiptoed closer. ". . . rent and furnish a house by the end of November and have the banns read," he said.

My father was probably huddled under cover of his everyday wig, refusing to speak or meet Aislabie's eye. There was another silence, after which Aislabie said much more abruptly, "So we come to the terms of the marriage settlement. Of course, I understand that it may be difficult for you to make more than a token payment now, so I am prepared to accept an entailment after your death, sir."

I retreated a few steps. I had never heard my father spoken to so curtly. There could be no hope of reconciliation now. ". . . land already entailed," came his frail voice at last.

"I think not, sir. I believe the land is entailed to Emilie, and once she is married it will be my privilege to have charge of her property. All I ask is that you add a clause to the effect that in the event of her early death the estates should be pa.s.sed to me in trust for any children, or if we are unfortunately without a living child . . ." Aislabie, glancing up, had seen me standing in the shadows. He sprang forward and shut the door.

Silence. I clutched a ridge of paneling. How had a few sunlit walks and half an hour of lovemaking in the bee orchard led to such cold-blooded bartering?

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 ].

THERE WAS A great deal of time to be got through before my wedding, and I pa.s.sed most of it in my mother's bedchamber. Each day I made the pilgrimage along the creaking pa.s.sageways, 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 pa.s.sed for G.o.d these days that at least I didn't have to meet him. Then I dashed along the kitchen pa.s.sage 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 punis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage 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 ].

ON DECEMBER 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 pa.s.sage, 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. s.h.i.+vering 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 a.s.sociate, 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 h.e.l.lish 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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.

There were other worlds to discover without setting foot outside the house. Aislabie had a taste for French paintings, which were arranged around the walls of the first-floor salon. I peered into one and found delicate ladies in pastel robes, a copse of birches, and a little stone temple. The painting reminded me of Selden because of its cloudy sky and silver river running into a distant forest, but of course there was no old man in an ancient coat thras.h.i.+ng his way through the undergrowth, no Emilie with restless eyes and creased ap.r.o.n. So I searched deeper and deeper until I was lost in the picture, and instead of roaming through that unknown French landscape, I was at home in Selden, skirting past Gill in the bee orchard, darting into the kitchen to scoop up a fistful of peas, standing at the window in my mother's room to watch the top of my oak tree blowing deep in the woods. And then at last I came to my senses, because the pain of thinking of that window in that room where I used to lie in the early months of pregnancy was too much to bear.

Every day I studied a different painting and then had a whispered conversation with the parrot, who c.o.c.ked its head and gave me a piercing glance from one eye. I thought it a poor excuse for a bird compared to our owl, which had so much confined energy. This parrot made no effort to fly, just sat in stony silence, but I wrote about it again to my father and enclosed a green feather.

[ 6 ].

BY THE BEGINNING OF February, Aislabie's visits had become more frequent. He said he couldn't stand the smell of enclosure in the room, so he threw open the window, then rang the bell and ordered wine to be brought and the fire to be heaped with coal. When the maid left, he blew out all the candles but one, climbed into bed beside me, and held the winegla.s.s to my lips. I lay against his shoulder and watched the roar of the flames as the draft got to them. The wine warmed the back of my throat and made me sleepy and light-headed. "What have you been doing all day?" I asked.

"I have been hither and yon. To the club and the Exchange and the river."

"Why were you at the river?" In my mind's eye, I saw the gush of water under the bridge at Selden and my father leaning on his staff to watch the flight of a heron.

Aislabie took hold of my chin and kissed my mouth. "You shouldn't lie here looking so beautiful and so sad and expect small talk, my Emilie. Those black eyes and this soft skin do not invite conversation," he said. Then he kissed me again and covered my breast with his hand. When he stroked my stomach, I flinched at the thought of my empty womb and my treacherous legs, which had allowed the baby to slip away, but he was too much for me. "Dearest Em, this is the way to make another child, you'll see, easy as the last. And even more fun." He nuzzled my ear and pressed his leg against my thigh until, despite myself, I ached for him.

The trouble was he never stayed long enough. I had imagined that marriage to him would be like a perpetual walk through the gardens at Selden, but in London Aislabie was always in a hurry. He'd make love to me for half an hour, then dash away to dress and go out again. I grew restless with the time I was forced to spend alone. I still couldn't bear to read because books reminded me of the library at Selden, and I obviously had no place in the kitchen with the servants. The pink dress hung in the closet, but I knew I could never squeeze myself into its tiny bodice, and my only other garments were the Selden frocks made by Mrs. Gill-even I could tell that the lowliest London kitchen maid would turn her nose up at them. So I sat at the window and watched all those strangers on their way to somewhere necessary, and I waited for Aislabie.

[ 7 ].

ONE EVENING, HE announced that he had a present for me, which would arrive in the morning. "You won't know yourself after that, Em. Silk purse from sow's ear."

The present was a young woman called Sarah Holborne, who knocked vehemently on the door and brought in my tray of chocolate. What with her pastel frock and lawn ap.r.o.n, she looked as if she'd stepped from my husband's painting by Watteau. She had a pointy chin and disturbing eyes, one uptilted more than the other under flyaway brows.

I spilled chocolate on my s.h.i.+ft while she flitted about the chamber touching every surface. "How shall we begin, madam?" She picked up a garter, rubbed it between finger and thumb, and brushed it against her cheek.

I tucked the sheets tight round my neck and waited for her to go. Instead, she sat down on a chest and adjusted the laces on my corset with such fierce concentration that I thought she was mad. The back of her neck was fragile as the stem of a poppy.

"Mrs. Aislabie, get up now," she said. Her voice was husky but authoritative, and there was no disobeying her. I stood quaking. When she came close and put her fingers on the top b.u.t.ton of my s.h.i.+ft, I saw how soft her hair was, pulled back in an arc from her forehead. The s.h.i.+ft fell to the floor, then she walked round me, studying my body with the same air of intent expertise I would once have given a dissected dog's brain. I accepted her scrutiny because I had no idea what pa.s.sed for fas.h.i.+onable behavior in London. My tousled hair fell to my waist, and she picked up a strand, held it to the light, and let it fall. The top of her head was level with my nose, and her little face frowned with concentration as if she was committing the curve of my hip and the shape of my toes to memory. Meanwhile, I looked past her to my crumpled bed and s.h.i.+vered.

"Stand straight," she ordered, "and hold the bedpost. Put your feet apart. Look." She pushed me aside and demonstrated. Then she made me thrust my arms into a corset, stood behind me, and worked so fast on the laces that I didn't have time to draw breath. My lungs were deflated when she pulled the strings, and I couldn't fill them up again. The ends of my ribs jabbed internal organs and my back went ramrod straight.

She tied on a hoop and flung lakes of petticoat over my head. They smelled of the wooden shuttles that had woven them, steel needles, starch. My mother, I thought, would have recognized that smell of new silk. When she pressed me into a chair, my body shrieked with pain. She coiled my hair round her fist, dragged it up by the roots, and jabbed pins through it. My scalp burned, and my hands clutched at the silken waterfall of my lap.

"Now you can look," she said.

My hidden feet took me and the cartload of pink fabric across the room and stood us in front of the mirror. A beam of sunlight fell on the blue and cream rug. I took a step back, then forward, turned to left and right, stood side on to the gla.s.s, and put my hands on the sloping shelves of my skirt. Then I looked myself in the eye.

Emilie Aislabie. Do I know you?

A black-eyed stranger, inserted correctly into her gown, stared back. Sarah had given me a new, definite shape. I could have drawn with a ruler the slas.h.i.+ng lines for each side of the bodice and the folds of the skirt. When I turned sideways, I saw that I was flat from breast to navel. She had taken away the last flicker of doubt that the baby was gone. Behind the mistress stood the new maid, Sarah Holborne. Our eyes met briefly in the gla.s.s, and her disconcerting gaze was full of satisfaction, not with me, but with what she had achieved.

[ 8 ].

I WAS NOW declared to be in good health, and Sarah provided me with both a veneer of fas.h.i.+on and a chaperone, so there was no excuse to stay inside. She b.u.t.toned me up in a vast mantle and hustled me down to the waiting carriage. I hovered on the Hanover Street steps like a fledgling. London, as glimpsed on the day of my marriage, had seemed like some hideous evocation of Gill's compost heap, except that whereas life in the heap-writhing, sucking, flitting, crawling-hummed softly, London screeched. It had no form, no beginning and no end, no wide lid of sky, no soft earth beneath my feet.

"Where shall we go, madam?" asked Sarah.

I knew of only two places in London, the Royal Society's headquarters and my mother's birthplace, Spitalfields, so I gave the name of one of them-Crane Court, home of the Royal Society. She raised her crooked eyebrows, gave an order, and off we lurched.

I thought that the carriage would be crushed like a bird's egg. How could it withstand the pressure of so much traffic? But it was the faces outside the window that made me shudder. I hadn't been trained to interpret faces. There seemed to be no pattern to them, though my father said that everything in nature has a pattern. They turned on me or away from me, opened their gaping mouths, wept, laughed, glowered, shouted, cursed, scolded; they were haggard, pocked, pretty, flyblown, b.u.t.ton-nosed, handsome, childish, or simple. None of them had anything to do with me. I had never met indifference before.

Crane Court had such a narrow entrance that the driver refused to take the carriage through. I leaned out and saw the usual dirty paving stones and high buildings. This was a deep disappointment. I had expected white marble pillars at least, and Sir Isaac Newton enthroned amid a host of acolytes. I wasn't bold enough to go into the yard alone, and there was no question of asking Sarah, because she had suddenly shrunk down in the corner of the carriage. "Are you ill?" I asked. "Do you want to go back?"

She had an astonis.h.i.+ng repertory of shrugs and curls of the lip. "I don't mind, madam."

"Then we'll go on, and perhaps you could point out the names of streets and churches so I get my bearings."

She intoned a few names, but as we reached Ludgate Hill she folded her arms across her chest and went stony silent until St. Paul's. I wished my initiation into the mysteries of London had been with Aislabie, or with my father-whose carefully planned education, I noted, had failed to prepare me for any of this-but for the first time since the miscarriage I was really excited. It was so easy, after all these years, to be carried toward Spitalfields and my mother. I leaned forward, thinking that she would have seen that inn, those houses, that warehouse. But, of course, I had no idea of the De Lery address, so once in Spital Square I was at a dead end. I decided that one day soon I would come back by myself and knock on doors to see if anyone remembered my mother's family, but for now it was enough to look at her square, the wedge of sky that she had known, the topography of her childhood. Meanwhile, a little crowd had collected round the carriage.

Sarah sighed pointedly and rolled her eyes. "My mother was brought up here," I said. "Her name was De Lery. Her family made silk." She looked a bit more interested, even peered out. "De Lery green. Do you know it?"

"Green's unlucky."

"Nevertheless."

She puffed air through her nose as if to say that if she hadn't heard of such a color, it couldn't exist.

"So where would I find silk of that color?" I asked.

"A silk warehouse."

"Where might one be?" She stared at me for a moment, then stuck her head out of the window, yelled up to the coachman, and off we lurched until we came to a vast building with large windows and an imposing front door. The proprietor gave Sarah an obsequious bow, called her Miss Holborne, led us in, and allowed us to wander among rolls and swathes of cloth. For once Sarah's face was animated as she fingered and sniffed the silks, which s.h.i.+mmered in every possible shade from black to white, cherry to gold, b.u.t.tercup to azure: silks with the dense l.u.s.ter of my obsidian; silks woven with leaves and flower heads or entire vases of blooms; striped silks in blue and pink; silks embroidered with b.u.t.terflies and birds; silks so thick they could have stood alone, and silks like gossamer. But it was the greens that drew me-moss green, leaf green, the green of my oak tree at Selden.

I asked the merchant, "Have you a silk called De Lery green?"

"De Lery, madam? Not that I know of."

I was disappointed, but I realized that of course there must be fas.h.i.+ons in silk. De Lery green might have been sought after twenty years ago, but not now. So I called Sarah away from some creamy translucent stuff and we went back to the carriage, dazed by so much splendor.

It seemed to me, despite the lack of De Lery green, that I had come another step closer to my mother, and I was sufficiently moved to ask, "Where were you brought up, Sarah?"

She shrugged and turned down the corners of her mouth. "South of the river."

"In London?"

"Of course."

"Far from here?"

She stared at me. "Not far. Nothing is far in London."

"So where are we now?"

"Now we are on Gracechurch Street."

"And how would we get to your home from here?"

"What do you mean?"