The Alchemist's Daughter Part 7

And it was in that silence, broken by the faintest shuffling of coals and the song of a thrush on a branch outside, that the truth of my father's death struck me. I felt it like a hollowing out, an absence of hope, an ending made a thousand times worse because I hadn't been there. I thought of the dust falling and falling on the gla.s.s containing the dead rose, my father's abandoned staff, his coat on the hook behind the door. "Have you any idea how it felt for me to come home and find him gone?" I cried. "I wonder when you would have written to me. After a month, a year, never?"

"As I said, I wrote two days after the burial, as instructed."

"Mr. Shales, I loved my father. You can have no idea how much. If you had an ounce of humanity, you would have thought not only of him but of me. I know him. He was rigid. He wouldn't have known how to change his mind, but if I could have seen him we might have been reconciled."

"I thought about all that. But I reasoned that he might have ended up forgiving neither of us, and then he'd have been left with no one."

"You reasoned. But what did your heart tell you, Mr. Shales, if you have one? If you had ever lost someone without any opportunity to say good-bye or to ask for forgiveness, you would never have treated me like this."

I didn't look up to see his reaction, though I think he covered his face with his hand. I twitched my veil over my face and said fiercely, "Were you there when he died?"

"We all were. The Gills and me."

"Tell me how he died."

"He stopped breathing. After each breath, there was a silence, and then he simply failed to draw another breath."

"Did you pray over him then?"

"We did."

I imagined the sheet drawn up over my father's beaked nose, the flesh tight on his little bones, and to escape these images I got myself round the desk and walked into the hall. With my hand on the latch, I said, "Why are you living in this ridiculous house when there is a s.p.a.cious rectory at Selden Wick?"

"My curate has six children. I thought his need for s.p.a.ce was greater than mine."

"Well, I think you are a fraud, Mr. Shales, when you claim to be a natural philosopher. You know nothing about the experimental method. You're wasting your time with those plants and that apparatus."

"I hope not. It has taken me months to perfect. I am simply trying to measure the quant.i.ties of air generated by distillation of plant matter."

"And you are going to do nothing with the air you have collected in the tube?"

"I have no further use for it, but if you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it. Please stay and drink some tea, or let me accompany you home." He had followed me, and I was conscious that he was struggling to find some word or gesture that might comfort me, but I swept up my filthy skirts, got out onto the step, and slammed the door shut behind me.

A flurry of icy wind blew me away down the street, back across the river, and into the woods. And behind every tree, at every twist in the path, I looked for my father. Only yesterday his living self, his beating heart, his resentment, rage, and cruel exclusion, had been the truest part of me.

[ 7 ].

WHEN I GOT back to Selden, I locked myself in the laboratory, mixed some ink, sharpened a quill, and wrote to Aislabie that my father was dead. There was nothing else to do. Nothing happened. No one came. No clock ticked.

I waited for some other feeling to strike me than this absence of feeling. Nothing. Then I thought of my mother, and how my father had given all her belongings to the fire after she died. Should I do that with his things?

The laboratory was cold and dark. It never used to be, but now it was. I went to the window and flung back the shutters one after another until the room was revealed in all its complicated vastness. Then I sank down on the window seat. Everything was wrong. The laboratory had been the hub of my universe, its wheels turned by fire and water, the instruction of our notebooks, the recording of our processes. I had indexed and labeled its contents myself because my father, fanatical about order and economy, depended on being able to put his hand on a book, a substance, a crucible the instant he needed it. And every instrument had to be maintained to a perfect level of utility: scales balanced, chisels polished, irons scrubbed clear of rust, chemicals redated and replenished. Even while the hedges on our land were broken and our roses mildewed, our laboratory had remained airy, well oiled, constant. But now the room was furred by a kind of violent neglect.

Next to my hand was the rose. I held it up to the light. Its desiccated leaves rattled faintly against the gla.s.s, and its petals had only a ghostly tinge of pink. I saw how roughly the flasks had been sealed, quite unlike my usual neat work. What a frenzy I'd been in that day when Aislabie came.

The thought of my energetic husband revived me somewhat. When he got my letter, he would come and take possession of both me and Selden. Thank G.o.d for Aislabie.

I turned the gla.s.s roughly in my hands. After all, it was only a long-dead flower plucked at the command of an arrogant old man who believed he could find the secret to immortality. What right had he to inflict such pain on me? I drew back my hand and hurled the flasks the length of the laboratory, where they smashed against the wall and showered themselves in a million splinters.

The door to the cellar flew open and in came Gill, blank-eyed with consternation as the breaking of gla.s.s rang on and on. It occurred to me that since my father's death he must have suffered, too, like a drone without a hive. I pointed to my desk. "That letter is to be sent to my husband." For a moment, he didn't move except for a clenching and unclenching of his thick fingers. Then he blew a long gust of air and crossed the room, his feet soundless as ever though he walked from the hip because his knees had long since ceased to bend. "Why is this place so dirty?" I demanded.

He looked sideways at the shattered gla.s.s but said nothing.

"Well?" I shrieked. "The fire hasn't been lit for months. He must have been so cold."

He picked up the letter and hung his head. "He locked me out."

"It was your job to keep him warm."

"Shall I be lighting you a fire then?"

"No, no fire." And then, as he moved toward the cellar, I asked, "Gill, where are my father's notebooks?"

"On his desk and shelves."

"Not those. The other notebooks he kept at night."

He looked round blindly, like the mole that he was. "I said. They'll be on his desk."

"No, no the others." But he had disappeared onto the dark staircase.

[ 8 ].

I SAT IN front of a plate of supper in the kitchen, where flames roared in the hearth and not a pan, ladle, or dish had altered. Mrs. Gill stared at me from her gooseberry eyes. "You are grown so thin and grand I would scarce have known you." I laid my arms along the surface of the table and put my head down, sniffing the grain for the faint smell of flour and onions, connecting my cheekbone to the ancient wood. After a moment, her hand fell on my neck, and she spoke more gently than I had ever known. "He never stopped punis.h.i.+ng us for not keeping more of an eye on you that summer. It was not just you that had to suffer."

"I was determined to be with Aislabie. It wasn't your fault."

"He thought so. He would scarcely speak to me until he was at his very last breath."

"What did he say then?"

"I could scarcely hear. I think he thanked me for my care of him."

"Did he talk about me?"

"Ah, yes. He was sorry you had lost that child."

"Did he say that?"

"He did. Most unfortunate, he said."

"Did he talk about my mother?"

"No, his thoughts were on you."

"Did he give you the notebooks he kept about me?"

"I know nothing about those. He spoke most to Reverend Shales."

"I went to see Shales and told him he had taken too much on himself. He should have written to me."

"Your father wouldn't have it."

"Shales should have guided him."

"Your father was so sick, Emilie, the smallest upset had him failing and choking. Reverend Shales was very patient sitting up with him night after night, reading. I think he brought some comfort."

"He seems a cold man."

"It's not how it appears to the village. They like him. And he has their pity, because he had a wife who died in the year before he came to Selden. He's always courteous to me, and when I've seen him with a sick mother or baby he's been very kind and appropriate."

It had not occurred to me that Shales might have a history. I closed my eyes, ground my cheek against the table, and thought I'd stay there forever.

[ 9 ].

BUT I WAS alive and had to pa.s.s the time, so I roamed the house looking for distraction. My father's notebooks became something of an obsession. They at least would bring him back to me in some form. I couldn't find them in the laboratory or library, though I unlocked every cupboard and searched each shelf. Next I crept up to his bedchamber, where I opened every shut chest and drawer but found no books.

When I visited this room as a child to fetch his spectacles or handkerchief, I took a deep breath and dashed in and out, afraid of glimpsing something too intimate. Now that he was gone, I realized that what I had feared was the unknown in my father. In the laboratory, I saw the natural philosopher, alchemist, and teacher who at night presumably removed his wig and outer garments and slept for a few hours on this bed. But there must have been a different man altogether once, although I simply could not imagine him losing himself in a woman as Aislabie did in me. I couldn't imagine him in a moment of abandon.

There was no sign of the notebooks. It was quite possible he had burned them before he died. Though I didn't give up looking for them, my search lost momentum for the time being. Then I had nothing else to do. In my own room, Sarah sat like a pink and white spider repairing my clothes. She got up and curtsied, but I was too weak to drive her away and claim the s.p.a.ce for my own use. The wintry gardens meant nothing, because there were no lessons to learn and no collections to be made. Once I went up to my mother's room, but when I reached the door, I didn't have the heart to press down the latch. Inside would be nothing but emptiness, the old absence. And last time I lay on her bed with the child growing inside me, I had been sad and sick and hopeful all at the same time. What richness of emotion that now seemed compared to this horrifying blankness.

In between my ramblings, I went back to the laboratory time after time, like a doe I had once watched from my oak tree, grieving her dead fawn. She had recoiled in terror, then gone back to sniff and paw at the little corpse as if simply by repet.i.tion she might bring him back to life. Each time I went there I felt a glimmer of hope that I would find it miraculously restored, with my father standing over the furnace and all the clocks ticking.

On my third visit, I picked up the rose, intact in its bed of broken gla.s.s but light and brittle as burned parchment. Then I found a long jar with a cork plug, polished it with my petticoat, slid in the rose, and replaced it on the windowsill. This small act cheered me a little because at least I had put something back together again, and afterward I sat in my father's chair by the hearth and dared to hold his staff in my lap. The bra.s.s handle was so tarnished that I couldn't resist buffing it to a sheen.

A dull knock came from behind the double thickness of the library doors. "Mrs. Aislabie. Emilie. Reverend Shales is here."

I couldn't face him, had probably behaved badly-I would not have been quite so harsh if I'd known his wife was dead-and I had no idea what to say to him. Shales disturbed me. Perhaps it was that he had been there at the start of palingenesis or that I couldn't forgive him for warning me against Aislabie. Either way, he knew too much.

Mrs. Gill rattled the handle, called again, then went away, but the incident made me restless. I remembered the atmosphere of purpose and contemplation in Shales's study, and here was I in the neglected laboratory, doing nothing. So I got up and wound the clocks. Each had stopped at a different hour, and as I had no idea of the real time I left them to march on, one from 3:38, another from 5:11, the third from three minutes past twelve. Suddenly, it seemed, the laboratory hiccuped into life and the old pulse was reestablished. Then I took my ap.r.o.n from its hook, fetched Gill's broom from the top of the cellar steps, and began to sweep. The restoring of the rose to its gla.s.s prison had inspired me. If I could not have my father back, I could at least return the laboratory to a state that would please him. I began with the shards of gla.s.s, which I heaped together, raising clouds of dust from the cracks in the boards. Then I extended the circle of my sweeping and collected mouse droppings and ash into my pile, along with tobacco, dead insects, flakes of rust, and wood shavings. As I swept, I grew more ambitious and went to the kitchen to ask for quant.i.ties of hot water, soap, rags, beeswax, and vinegar.

Sometimes, when I raised a lot of dust or made a great deal of noise, I held still and listened. In the old days when Gill came to clean the hearth or sweep the floors, my father vanished into the library until everything was back to normal. So I leaned on the handle of my broom and peered through the dust cloud, sure that at any moment I'd hear the key in the latch, and in he would come with his shuffling gait and his coattails pinned up. His staff would tap across the damp floor and his head tilt to one side as his beady glance took in Gill's work and checked that I had performed the tasks he'd set.

I stood waiting for several minutes, then moved on to the next cupboard and took down a row of bottles one by one, sniffed their contents, wrote fresh labels, brushed the shelf-busy, busy, until it was time to listen again. And as I cleaned, I searched for the notebooks, testing the boards for a hidden door, a hinge, a cavity. The more I couldn't find them, the more I wanted them.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Pillars and Porticoes [ 1 ].

AN AFFECTIONATE LETTER arrived from my husband, full of sympathy and a.s.surances that he would come to Selden just as soon as he had found a captain for Flora. There was no time to lose-she must start paying for herself immediately and would set sail in May. Not much of a refit was needed, just a little carpentry and a few adjustments to the hold. This letter brought Aislabie very close, but the thought of his vibrant presence at Selden made me quake; I simply couldn't imagine what it would be like living in these austere rooms with him.

I told Mrs. Gill that he had ordered servants to be hired and rooms aired. She said, "Extra staff will need paying. I hope he knows that," but I chose to ignore this uncomfortable subject and walked away. "Reverend Shales called again," she added. "He left you this." There was a book on the table, a brown, leather-bound volume with a slip of paper between the pages. I kept my distance. That book was a reminder of the years I had spent with my father, the life I had not chosen. Besides, the book was from Shales-a peace offering, maybe. Well, I wouldn't touch it. I couldn't. It had nothing to do with me.

In any case, the task of restoring the laboratory was vast and all-absorbing. I soon grew tired of carrying hot water from the kitchen, so I relented and called Gill. He was an expert at making fire, and within a few minutes flames were blazing in the hearth. The heat transformed the room: first color-yellow, blue, orange licking through the tinder-then the smell of smoke and spirit of salts. After half an hour, shadows and light gave the hearth definition, and flames licked cleanly under my cauldron of water.

I worked from the outside in, beginning with windows and ceiling. Earwigs, wood lice, and beetles scurried from the cornices, and my hair was tangled with cobweb. A moth the size of a small bird beat against the window until I released it into the frosty air. Then I took down more and more precious alchemical volumes, dusted the spines and pages, and replaced them in order; unstoppered each bottle, threw away the contents or relabeled it, polished it, and returned it to its proper place; cleaned our instruments and turned out the drawers of my desk. And all the time I was avoiding the root cause of the mayhem-my father's desk and workbench, which I could not bring myself to touch.

[ 2 ].

THE HOUSE BEYOND the laboratory was full of strange faces: a maid on her hands and knees brushed the hearth in the great hall, and another girl ran up a back staircase with an armful of pressed linen. When I pa.s.sed the kitchen, the blacksmith's daughter was was.h.i.+ng windows.

All these girls lived within a few hundred yards of the house and went home at night. Only Sarah stayed. Instead of mixing with the others, she lurked in my bedchamber with her back to the door and st.i.tched my father's death into a petticoat, exquisitely quilted and embroidered with black leaves climbing up white satin. She seemed dug in, had already colonized my room and hers by scattering herbs and ribbons, hanging up my clothes, importing rugs from other chambers. It was as if by the ferocious thrusts of her needle she might sew herself into the fabric of the house.

[ 3 ].

AFTER A FORTNIGHT or so, I heard the commotion of rusty gates sc.r.a.ping on stone that heralded the arrival of my husband. I took off my ap.r.o.n, locked the laboratory doors, and ran through the library, the great hall, and the kitchen pa.s.sage. Outside the still room, I careered into Mrs. Gill, who had a jar of pickles clutched to her bosom, and together we crossed the gray flagstones past the distillery to the stable-yard door. A cl.u.s.ter of girls blocked the way, their untidy heads haloed by a shaft of sunlight. Even Sarah was there, arms folded. Whispers and giggles filtered back to me as I stood on tiptoe and saw that my husband had already dismounted. His horse, the chestnut stallion, steamed and bucked while Gill hung onto the reins. I smelled leather and manure and glimpsed a metallic flash on my husband's hat.

The girls nudged each other and let me through. Aislabie, in mourning for my father, wore a black coat and brilliant white gloves, and his head was flung back to survey the tottering archway, bowed roof, barley-twist chimneys, and wormy timbers of his new possession, Selden Manor. Sunlight gleamed on his throat and the folds of his necktie.

The stable yard had never seen such brilliance. Usually the pace here was slow: A carthorse was led clip-clop across the cobbles, hens pecked between the paving stones, a dairymaid's pattens went tapping from door to door, and water was pumped into a pail with a grind and a gush. Colors were mellow, uneven russet brickwork, cobbles shaded gray on gray, the faded blue of a servant's jerkin.

Time stood still for one beat while my husband's gaze flicked across our faces. When they met mine, his eyes were turquoise bright. He smiled-that wicked widening of the mouth, the dinting of the cheek. There was a moment's disjointedness as I left the twilit world of the laboratory behind me, and then something inside me that had been out of time clicked into place, my body leaped with delight, and I knew I was very glad to see him.

Selden's new master flung out his right arm and made an expansive gesture with the flat of his hand. "There will be guests soon," he told Mrs. Gill, who was gawping at him over her jar. "I have invited two gentlemen to stay."

The servants trampled each other as he sprang toward us, and Sarah slid backward into shadow. "Now then, Mrs. Aislabie," he said, pulling off his glove and taking first my knuckle then my palm to his lips, "show me our kingdom."

The house was too low for him. He had to duck when he climbed a stair or walked under a beam and quickly grew bored with the chill of unused rooms, with peering through opaque gla.s.s at the wintry garden, and with asking about some staring ancestor in a painting. Through his eyes, I saw how tarnished and broken everything was. In the dining parlor, there was a stale smell of a hundred thousand dinners. Chairs sagged, tapestries were faded, and a marble bust of Caesar had a chipped nose.

When we came to the library, where our marriage negotiations had taken place, Aislabie didn't drop my hand but strode about as if claiming every dusty inch. While he was sharply etched in black and white, everything else in this room was brown and muted. Our entire library, that vast repository of knowledge, was made finite by his presence: an ancient room filled with unfas.h.i.+onable books.

He threw his cloak over a chair with such force that its weight drove the legs a few inches along the floor. A book lay on the table. Aislabie read the spine with some difficulty: "Thomas Browne. Pseudodoxia Epidemica." His left eyebrow disappeared into his wig. Then he opened the book and picked up the marker. "Mrs. Aislabie, perhaps this will interest you. T. Shales. And who is T. Shales?"

"The rector here. A friend of my father's. I believe he spent a great deal of time reading this book to my father before he died."

I was transfixed by the book, which now, perversely, I longed to read, but Aislabie dropped it dismissively onto the table. "I trust Shales's motives are pure. You never know with a clergyman."

His gaze fixed on the curtain covering the door to the laboratory. He kissed the inside of my wrist, and the many textures of him were brought up close: the ripples of his wig, the stubble on his chin, the puckers of velvet on his arm. "Poor Em. Dearest Em. How have you managed without me?" He smelled of the outdoors, of horseflesh, salt, and smoke, and his eyes were very bright as they glanced over my shoulder at the locked door. He kissed me again and stroked the back of my neck with his fingertips until I dipped my fingers between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and took out the key.

He was looking down at me under his eyelids, smiling but inexorable, and I felt a shudder of loss. The laboratory was my dominion, and he was going to take it away. Then I felt a panic, just for a moment, that it might not have been me that he'd wanted after all, but this. I drew back the curtain, unlocked first the outer door, then the inner one, and stood with my back to the wall to let Aislabie through. He was unusually hesitant. I peeped over his shoulder and saw that although most things were now in order, they were also diminished. I thought I had re-created clear, airy s.p.a.ces, but in fact the laboratory was no more than a muddle of crooked cupboards and shelves, piled books and ancient gla.s.sware.

He didn't go in, just looked about him. "Well, you must teach me what all this means."

"It doesn't mean anything. It's a place of work."

"Not at all as I expected. I thought it would be mysterious . . . fiery, full of potions and smells."

"Much of our work was very dull and painstaking." He began to wander about, pointing to things and asking their purpose. Then he flicked through my father's notebooks and some alchemical texts, but they were all in Latin, so he drummed his fingers on the pages and after a while looked up and smiled. "You'll have to translate for me. My Latin is somewhat of the schoolboy variety."

"If I did, you wouldn't understand. Most of it's in code. It takes decades."

Next he went to my desk, picked up my prism, and squinted first at the fire, then at me, before replacing it carefully. When he touched my father's staff, I couldn't prevent a hiss of indrawn breath. He glanced at me sideways, gave it a twirl, and began a tour of the room, leaning on it from time to time to read the t.i.tle of a book or the inscription on a bottle, even though the staff was too short for him and he had to stretch out his arm to balance himself. For several minutes, he rummaged among the contents of the workbench, sniffing and prodding. Finally, he touched my chin with the tip of the staff and ran it in a straight line down my neck to the top of my bodice.