The Alchemist's Daughter (40 page)

I had time to note that he wore a trim new wig with curls gathered at the nape before he unfurled himself and sprang across the room. “Well, dearest Em, here’s a thing,” he said, then kissed my hand and cheek. “My wife, ladies and gentlemen, a refugee, I don’t doubt, from the building site that is our estate just at present.”

He held tight to my hand, instructed a servant to bring me wine, asked if I’d eaten. “Then we must find you some supper,” he said, and bowed us out of the room and up the stairs. People gathered for a better view, and there was a frantic waving of fans, high-pitched laughter, a fuzz of horsehair, satins, raised eyebrows.

I looked on this crowd with the detachment I used to feel for mice in the laboratory, although Aislabie squeezed my burned hand so tightly that he hurt me. He placed me in the middle of a dainty sofa, offered to send up a plate of cold chicken, and abandoned me to the company of Lady Essington, who peppered me with question and comment: How long was I staying? Wasn’t I brave to travel alone? Was I still working away at my wonderful experiments with . . . what was it? But she’d heard there’d been an accident at Selden recently—did I know anything about that? And did I know that I had started quite a trend with my natural philosophy, which was now all the rage? She herself had recently been to a lecture given by John Desaguliers, a close friend of the late Sir Isaac Newton, all about mechanics and mathematics. Push and pull, that was the essence.

I answered in monosyllables and smiled across at her little servant, who watched me throughout with huge, lustrous eyes. “What’s your name?” I asked when his mistress was silent at last.

“He answers to Samuel,” she said.

“And where were you born, Samuel?”

“He doesn’t know. He was a gift from my husband.” She rubbed her fingernails through his curls. “Such a sweet, good boy, eh, Sam?” She took his little hand in her white fingers and led him away.

The night wore on, and the more I sipped champagne, the more amazed I became that I had ever tried to belong here. When I went downstairs again, I found Aislabie up to his old tricks: smoking with a special crony, keeping him apart by leaning his elbow against the wall, and thereby cocooning them from the rest to exchange schemes and secrets.

He pulled me to his side. “Here she is, my little alchemist. We’ve been talking about you, Em—or rather that dear friend of yours, Thomas Shales.” The name cracked about my head like a pistol shot. Aislabie’s arm was on my back, and his hand kneaded my shoulder.

“Ah, you know the tragic Reverend Shales, Mrs. Aislabie?” said his smooth-faced, smooth-voiced companion.

“Tragic.”

“Is what his friends call him. Your husband might have another adjective.”

My husband caressed the side of my neck. “Poor Em. There’s not much choice of companion in the country. But the Reverend Shales strikes me as a little too high-minded even for you, my love. A whole barrage of articles by him has hit the press about the evils of absentee landlords, how the current system of parish support is failing, rents are too high, and on and on . . .” His fingers strayed across my collarbone. “Good Lord, doesn’t the man understand the meaning of the words
moderation
or
progress
? The Selden air obviously ain’t doing him any good; turned him sour, in fact.”

“He was formerly rector at Twickenham, so he’s not always been so far from the center of things,” said the other man, whose gaze was following the path of my husband’s fingers as they caressed the dip between my breasts.

“Ah, Twickenham. The height of fashion, in fact. But despite his vast experience with dandelions and crab apples, and an excellent reputation among his cohorts at the Royal Society for measuring airs, the man will have to leave our parish. Can’t have people thinking he’s voicing my opinions. How would that be for business?” said my husband. Our companion flung back his head and showed his yellow teeth. “So next time you see him, Em, a word in his ear. Tell him to keep quiet, at least until he’s found another living.”

I was given a little push, which sent me reeling onto the stairs, but I stood my ground and refused to go to bed, though my body was humming with fatigue and my mind too full to allow sensible conversation. At one point, I stumbled down to the basement in case Annie was there, but I was told she’d been sent to bed, her being no use whatever to anyone. The maids were white-faced and limp, and the sulky parrot had lost shine from its green feathers and wouldn’t fix me with its cloudy eye.

Upstairs, people were leaving, but Lady Essington hung back while my husband held her hand a very long time, kissed it passionately, turned it over, kissed her wrist, leaned forward, and whispered something in her ear. She wished him a safe voyage, and it dawned on me that this must be a farewell party, because she was pleading with him to take care and telling him that she would be waiting for him. She let her blue eyes dwell fondly on his bent head and then turned her gaze on me, not bothering to veil her look of possession and resentment. Then she stooped down for Samuel to fasten her cloak, patted him on the head, waited until he had swept up her train, and sailed out to her carriage.

As soon as she’d gone, the effects of alcohol, kept at bay by her fragrant presence, took Aislabie from the inside, thickened his lips, drained the warmth from his eyes, and made him lurch on the stairs. I followed and spoke his name, but he didn’t reply, only climbed on and on until he came to the door of the crimson bedchamber and shut it in my face.

Below me, the servants gathered glasses and blew out candles. I sensed that they were hoping to witness an argument, but I took a candlestick and opened the door of my own chamber. It was not, as I’d anticipated, all bundled up in dust sheets; rather, it was fresh-smelling, with roses in a little glass on the table. The Selden boxes were piled in a corner unopened—hardly surprising, as Gill had nailed down the wooden lids with considerable vehemence. I hadn’t the heart to summon an exhausted maid to unlace my gown, so I removed my hoop, averted my eyes from the hearth where I had knelt with a lapful of dead babies, and lay down on the bed, not between the sheets, because of what had probably been planned to take place between them.

I listened to the house and wished that I could turn back the clock and hear Sarah on the backstairs, even if it was in the course of an assignation with my husband. Then I relived my precious conversation with Shales in the church, every word, every gesture, and wondered for the hundredth time what would have happened if Annie had not come. The noises of London filled my head, and the house swam through the teeming night toward morning and heaven knew what developments.

[ 5 ]

T
HE NEXT DAY
the skin around Annie’s eyes was greenish with exhaustion. She said she hadn’t slept much because of the din in the streets outside, though her face was animated with excitement at the prospect of the day ahead. Of course, she was not sufficiently hardened to the ways of the fashionable world to wrench properly at the laces of my stays, so I had to call in a London maid.

“Could you tell me what time my husband will be up?” I asked.

“Oh, ma’am, he went out at eight.”

“And where is he likely to be?”

“I couldn’t say.”

I slid her a sixpence, and her lips pursed with self-importance. “At his ship perhaps, or in a coffeehouse?” I asked.

“Either of those. Anywhere. He takes an interest in all sorts, I’m told. Down toward the Strand, I think he often goes.”

“And where is the ship moored?”

“Lord knows. Wapping, probably.”

Another sixpence. “Do you remember a maid called Sarah Holborne who worked here last year? Have you seen her recently?”

“Not recently. Not since last month, when she called a few times, but the master wasn’t home to her.” A knowing smirk. Presumably the whole household—except for me, of course—had known the exact nature of Sarah’s relationship with my husband.

A
N HOUR LATER
, Annie and I set forth into the filthy morning to find a trader who would give me a fair price for my possessions. We took the parrot bowl and my father’s spyglass as samples. Annie wore her stable-yard pattens, and I carried an ancient umbrella found in the stand by the front door, a tattered silk affair that knocked against her uncomplaining head as we walked.

Though I had been away barely three months, London had swollen, and the streets near Hanover Square were full of scaffolding and loudmouthed laborers. We went east to Soho in search of the kind of dealer who might appreciate the perfection of the parrot bowl. Each time I unwrapped it I felt a pang for the buttery glaze and the bird’s gold-dusted feathers. The London buyers were astute enough to note my desperation, because the most I could raise was eight guineas. Meanwhile, Annie dragged her feet at every shop window, goggling at the displays of locks, laces, porcelain, silverware, candles, and silks. But it was the bookstalls that slowed her down the most. She ran her fingers over the spines, picked up a volume as if it were a fragile piece of glass, and stooped to sniff the pages. “Could you read every one of these?”

“Unless they were in German or Hebrew or some other language I don’t understand.” She replaced the book reverently but would have stayed there for hours searching the pages for a key to their secrets, so in the end I said, “We’ll start reading lessons tonight,” and that made her move all right. She hitched up her skirts and clung to me like a bloodhound.

We were by now near St. Paul’s, and the air was thick with a fog of smoke combined with the wet of a most unseasonable August. Filth clogged the streets, and the press of carriages, carts, and chairs thrust us against more humanity in a hundred yards than had crowded into Selden Wick during the entire run of the fair. But perhaps the map of the city had been engraved on my mind on the day of the dead babies, because I was the expert leading Annie into the labyrinth, and she was full of wonder at my assurance. We found an instrument maker, a Monsieur Cheret, whose French name endeared him to me and who handled my father’s spyglass with great reverence and said he would take anything else of similar quality.

Next we returned to the Strand, where coffeehouses had opened up in every alley and street corner. We hovered outside each in turn until a gentleman on his way in or out happened to catch my eye, when I would ask him to go and shout for Aislabie. Each time the door opened, I smelled tobacco, spirits, and burned coffee beans. Each time, after it had shut in our faces, we stood for several minutes waiting for the gentleman to come back or my husband to appear. Usually no one came, but one or two put their heads round the door to give me a leer or a shake of the head. Only at Jonathan’s did a man walk past me almost without pause but held the door open while he called, “Aislabie,” as if he expected a response. I saw long trestles, male heads bent together in conversation, male hands holding up newspapers, smoke winding from their pipes, coffee cups pushed aside. “Aislabie,” he shouted again. One or two of the patrons looked up and then across at me, but there was no sign of my husband.

[ 6 ]

A
FTER SUPPER,
A
NNIE
reappeared in a clean apron. “I’ve come for my reading lesson,” she said.

I had no idea how to begin. Until that moment, the transference of knowledge from my head to hers had seemed a straightforward matter; but now I didn’t even know whether to start with letters or words. Nevertheless, I lit a candle, and we sat on either side of
The Castle of Knowledge
, one of the few volumes in the house. “First I’ll tell you what the book is about, so that the words you read will not be too unexpected or mysterious.
The Castle of Knowledge
concerns an old argument, which until recently was so hotly debated that it lost people their lives—whether the sun or the earth is at the center of the universe. Hence the subtitle:
A Reader on the Progress of the Heliocentric Argument
.”

We then began to spell out word after word, but it was a tortuous process, what with her drooping lip and labored breathing. When I learned to read, I seemed to remember, I made rapid leaps between letters and words so that books were revealed to me all of a sudden, complete and lucid. Annie staggered over each new letter, and even when she spelled out the words they made no immediate sense to her. I had to remind myself that she, despite being the legitimate daughter of a respectable family, had received none of my early privileged education. Besides, I owed her a great deal, and I remembered that when my father taught me something that I failed at first to understand, he would try again using a different method or example. Even so, by the end of half an hour I was on the brink of losing patience, so I set her to work out the phrase
as the world turned
and copy it onto a slate.

At which point, in came my husband. Annie reverted to her customary limpness and my hands went chilly, but he seemed in a good mood as he sauntered over and picked up her work. He winked at her and shot me an amused glance from under his wig. “Highly commendable, Em, but is it wise? Words equal aspirations, as you well know.” He jerked his head toward the door and watched Annie scuttle away, then flung himself down on her little chair, extended his legs, and pulled at the ruffles on his shirtsleeves. “Well, you have become quite a gadabout, dear Em. You’d best explain yourself.”

“I have been showing Annie the city.”

“So I gather. I heard you had been asking for me at Jonathan’s. Can’t have that. Makes me look a fool.”

“I needed to speak with you urgently and you disappeared this morning. I have no money.”

“Lord, I’m amazed you came all the way to London, if that’s the case. Nowhere gobbles up money like London.”

I took heart from the fact that he obviously hated me to be there. “Your friends seem to think I am mad anyway.”

“They do. You are. I gather that since I was at Selden, you tried to blow yourself to kingdom come.”