The Alchemist's Daughter (36 page)

. . . the knowledge of what I was going to do had already formed in me.

While she was being bathed, I sat by the fire in a state of considerable agitation. I knew what she was. I had seen her sort often enough in London. It was, on the face of it, hardly my business that she had come to Selden. Mrs. Gill would find a place for mother and child if I gave her a sovereign or two, I thought.

And once again I made for the laboratory doors with a view to working until suppertime. It occurred to me that my meal would be very late that night, and I could use the opportunity to work with the green ferrous. But I found I couldn’t get myself through those doors, but must sit down again by the hearth and think about how a child would be born at Selden and it might be a living child, and the more I thought of this the more I was filled with a most distracting excitement. I began to wonder how it would be if I were to keep the child as my apprentice, because this is a lack I have often felt. Gill is willing enough but slow and has no aptitude for books. Besides, he’s nearly as old as I am. And finally I thought, I will consult my texts and let them decide, because it cannot be by chance that she came to my window in the wind and the rain, so I went into the laboratory, and I noted that now at last I was allowed to enter those doors, and in the dark I put out my hand and seized the first book from the shelf and opened the page and put my finger on a line, and this is what I read:

“When the spirit of darkness and of foul odour is rejected, so that no stench and no shadow of darkness appear, then the body is clothed with light and the soul and spirit rejoice because darkness has fled from the body. And the soul, calling to the body, that has been filled with light, says: “Awaken from Hades! Arise from the tomb and rouse thyself from darkness! For thou hast clothed thyself with spirituality and divinity, since the voice of the resurrection has sounded and the medicine of life has entered into thee.”

—A
RCHELAOS

I wasted no more time. It seemed to me that I must make this child mine, and in so doing embark on an experiment never tried before. I would regard this whore’s son as an empty vessel to be filled with light. Indeed, it seemed probable that he was to be my homunculus or alchemical instrument. I calculated that by the age of eighteen he would know all I knew, given that he would spend his time on nothing but learning—I had been allowed to waste so much of my early life on toys and fishing and running about the countryside—and I would teach him nothing except the arts he needed for alchemy and natural philosophy, and his mind, therefore, would be as pure as spring water, but running rich with knowledge.

I went looking for her through the house, and I found that she had been brought to the most ancient part, under the roof. Her hair had been tied up so that she looked like a poor bird with her long thin nose and great eyes, and she seemed much quieter, though from time to time pain threw her half off the bed, and she tugged at a length of ribbon that was in her hand for the sake of familiarity, as Mrs. Gill said.

Mrs. Gill had set herself up to watch over her, but I asked for another chair to be brought and sat down and took her hand in mine. I had never held a woman’s hand before, and although this was a rough and well-used hand, I saw how different the bones were to my own and how narrow the wrist and long the fingers. Whenever she was conscious, I asked her questions, very carefully and patiently, and it was as I thought, she was the daughter of a beggar family from Spitalfields come to London a generation ago and fallen on desperate times. She had long since resorted to whoring, but despair over the coming child had taken her to the river. She paid to be carried upstream, where she might die in peace, but after she plunged was hooked out by a couple of boatmen and deposited on our landing stage. And so she gave up dying and took to crawling instead, all the way up through the woods to the light in our window. This peculiar chapter of incidents I took to be another sign that she was meant for me.

Mrs. Gill said she must examine the girl, and so I lit my pipe and walked on the terrace beneath her window, though it was still raining, and after a while I heard her screams begin. The first light of dawn was showing over the trees, and I thought that I must secure the child and that to do this I must marry the mother. It was a thought of astonishing suddenness, given that twelve hours before I would no more have considered marrying than cutting off both my hands, but the thought was no sooner in my head than I saw it was part of the mystical plan.

And as all things were by the contemplation of one, so all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adaptation.

The father thereof is the Sun, the Mother the Moon.

The Wind carried it in its womb, the Earth is the nurse thereof.

—T
HE
E
MERALD
T
ABLE

So I summoned Gill and told him to fetch Reverend Gilbert, and then I went back up to the girl and sat by her and talked in French about vitriol, that being the first subject that came to mind, though sometimes she boiled with pain among the sheets. Mrs. Gill took me on one side and said she couldn’t live. The Thames water had poisoned her, and she had all manner of sickness from her past life.

The girl was so weak that her screeches came more like those of a kitten, and Mrs. Gill put a cloth between her teeth to stop her biting her tongue because she was past reason, and I sat and held her hand and waited for Gilbert and cursed him for being so slow and ignorant. There was no moving me from the chair, though Mrs. Gill thought it immodest for me to be there while she stroked the girl’s belly and thighs, but I reminded her of the dogs and cows I had seen delivered.

When Gilbert came, I went into the passage to speak to him. I said, “I am determined to marry this girl, Gilbert, and give the baby a decent home at Selden. I want no argument, and it must be done now.”

He was usually a pale man, liverish, but he went a shade of purple and said I should consider and it wasn’t decent and I was not in my right mind, but I said that if he refused, I would withdraw his stipend, so he said I must get her consent, stipend or no. The little room was fetid now and the poor girl weaker still, hardly making a sound when the pain took her, and I found myself praying with all my heart and soul that the baby be spared at least, prayer being in this case entirely apposite and a form of incantation, as over the Stone. Then I sat beside her and spoke to her over and over again about the baby and how she could make it safe if she married me, and I said her name and put my face close to hers, and suddenly she opened her eyes and they were very clear and calm, and I swear she nodded her head.

The Gills were witnesses, and we devised a ring from a bit of wire I had in a pocket, and at last we were married, and Gilbert rushed away like the coward and Trinitarian he is.

Then birdsong came in through the glass, and a strip of sunshine, and I must here give credit to Mrs. Gill, who has always been an excellent housekeeper but this morning proved her worth because she suddenly began to work away on the girl, who was no longer conscious, and whose hand lay limp in mine. And then the baby came in a gout of blood, and I felt the hand grow colder even while Mrs. Gill packed her with cotton, and her pulse failed and I saw the last breath.

Mrs. Gill picked up the baby and wound it in a sheet and put it in the crook of the dead mother’s arm, where it lay with its fluff of black hair and round dark eyes staring up.

“But it’s a girl, sir,” said Mrs. Gill.

I have never wept in my life that I remember, but I wept then, with disappointment, I think, but also some kind of relief that the night was over. Then I took the baby and was surprised at her warm, living weight. Her eyes were steady and full of intelligence, and I carried her downstairs to the library where her mother had sat the night before, and held her on my knee and tried to prevent her head from flopping on my arm. After a moment, she opened her mouth and wailed. The inside of her mouth was dry, and I saw the cartilage joining the tongue to the floor, and the arc of the roof, and I noted that her fingers were curled like ferns, thus supporting my theory that there is the life of all living things in each one of us, and I thought this is a girl and a whore’s daughter, but I will fill her with knowledge and enlightenment, I will write on her as on a blank page, and at the end of my life I will reveal to her that alchemy is stronger than nature.

[ 8 ]

S
IR
I
SAAC
N
EWTON
’
S
greatness lay in his ability to uncover truths that people know at once are so right that it is incredible to believe anyone ever thought any differently. Gravity, for instance, to anyone with a little learning, is unarguably right and makes sense of the movements of a million stars. So with me when I read my father’s first Emilie Notebook.

It was as if all these years I had been clinging to Ptolemy’s model of the universe, in which the earth is the still center around which all the other planets and stars rotate. Because Ptolemy’s model seemed right but was actually wrong, ever more complex mechanisms had to be introduced to force in all the other pieces of the jigsaw. So, as soon as the story of my father’s sudden meeting with M. De Lery and his family of Huguenot silk weavers was replaced with this new explanation, so many things that had seemed a puzzle became wonderfully clear.

For a while I lay in a trance of revelation and was almost smug that palingenesis had worked after all, because hadn’t the addition of saltpeter to the alchemical mixture revealed the notebooks to me, and thereby restored my father and my mother in their true colors? And I thought, Now I can forgive my father his harshness, because I understand that the sacrifice he made was for a whore’s bastard daughter rather than his own flesh and blood.

But when the implications of this began to dawn on me, I went rigid, covered my mouth with my burned hand, stared up at the dancing elder leaves, and thought, “That’s what I am, a whore’s bastard. In fact, I am lower than Sarah, because she at least had some knowledge of the streets from whence she came.

Dear God. Sarah.

When my mother crawled up through the woods and knocked on my father’s window, he let her in. I, on the other hand, sent Sarah away.

Now I saw that my treatment of her had been inhuman. Wicked. From the moment she came to my room and offered to lace me into my pink gown, I had been frightened of her and shuddered away. Aislabie had treated her as a scrap of linen to be used and discarded, but I was almost worse—she had performed the most intimate services for me, spent days embroidering my petticoats, starched every tuck and pressed every inch of lace, failed only once to wake me in the morning and prepare me for bed at night, and yet I had never really engaged with her at all.

I tried to blame my father. This is what he taught me, I thought. He was cruel to me. He sent me away when he thought I’d betrayed him. Of course I would do the same to Sarah.

So I opened the last notebook, thinking it would reassure me because in it I’d read more about his feelings of rage and hurt once I’d told him of my pregnancy. I’d learn of the process by which he had hardened himself against me, and I would thereby discover how much in his likeness I had become.

October 5, 1725

Began the alchemy. Why not? thought I. But I was disheartened. My wrists ached after a very short time of grinding. In the end, decided to relent. Thought I would let her back for one day, just for the grinding.

Went looking for her through the house, opening door after door, until I found her in her mother’s room. She lay asleep on the bed with her dark hair fallen across her cheek, hand on stomach, breast rising and falling. Was afraid of the feelings I had. Gripped my staff. Would have beaten her. Would have taken her in my arms. Would have lain on the bed and buried my face in her hair. Torture myself by thinking of her hair, and how when I used to stand close to her in the laboratory I smelled the rain in it and liked to follow with my eye its coils to the nape of her neck.

I surprise myself. I am not myself. These violent feelings that she has thrust upon me. Came away. But now whenever I think of her it’s in that room, on that bed, above me or along the corridor if I’m in my own bedchamber. She infects my sleep. I hear her breathing. And I see the bastard within her. I imagine it squirm. I imagine it unfolding.

She is her mother’s daughter.

October 13, 1725

Hid the copy of the Boerhaave I brought back from London for her. Can’t bear to look at it, but nor could I burn it, so I thrust it away under the floor. All wasted. Wept again when I touched that book. On the journey back from London had planned how I would argue with her. Knew that she would be triumphant when she read Boerhaave on fire. Looked forward to seeing her smile, and thought I would tease her. She has become an excellent advocate. She could stand up before two hundred fellows at Trinity and hold her own.

October 14, 1725

And so to work. And so to the grinding again. Thought, I used to do this on my own, before she came. But the tools fall from my hands. She is everywhere. I listen for her step outside the library. Even though I’ve locked the door against her, I imagine she will cross the room to me. I am so used to her here, with her head bent over a book and her hair dropping from under its cap. I am used to her kneeling by my chair. She has broken my heart.

I should never have allowed her in.

How did that happen? She burst through. She was the merest chick, another experiment. Why grieve? Why not cast her out like the end of every bit of alchemy? I will devise a method for exorcising her.