The Alchemist's Daughter (3 page)

At one o’clock, I go back to the kitchen for my dinner. My father eats alone in the dining parlor and then rests while I study.

[ 6 ]

I
N THE LATE
afternoon, we go outside to learn about the natural world. My father wears a tricorn hat pressed firmly down on his wig and a trailing cloak that flattens the grass. We both have stout boots sent from Buckingham, and I carry a leather satchel and a jar with a cork lid in case we find anything of interest. His staff has a plain brass handle, and he waves it in front of him as if he needs to push aside the air. He walks too slowly for me, and I rein myself back to keep one step behind.

We have embarked on the collection and classification of tiny organisms—creatures that can only be seen through the lens of our latest microscope, an instrument so precious that I’m afraid even to nudge it with my eyelid. We come to a round pond within a dank circle of trees, and I scoop up a sample. A transparent shrimp coils in the muddy water. “
Chirocephalus
,” I say.

The water shakes when my father holds the jar. “Tell me, Emilie, what we can expect to see when we place this creature under the lens?”

But suddenly I don’t care. I think of the hours I’ll have to spend drawing and labeling the wretched little shrimp, and I want to smash the jar against a stone. I see the tiny creature cling to the glass and think I can make out its sootlike speck of an eye.

“I’m sorry, Father.” I rub my belly with my hand. “I believe that I am . . . I must.” He gives me a cold look and turns away. There is an unspoken understanding that my growing female body has functions I may not discuss with him, and I know he disapproves.

I run, crashing through the trees to the oak that Gill taught me to climb. I hitch my skirts, clamber up as if it were a ladder, straddle a branch, and watch the leaves rise and fall above me. Each one is dappled with the shadow of another. A shaft of sunshine warms my wrist and I think about heat. Is it a state or a substance? How is it passed from one object, the sun, to another, my arm?

The wind stirs the leaves. There is movement in the air. The air moves. Air is not a state but a substance.

The passage of blood through my veins beats in my ears. I grow calm. I belong in the tree, the greenwoods at Selden, on the twirling planet as it makes its elliptical journey round the sun. I am Emilie, part of the plan. But as I sway in the tree, I think about the shrimp and how my father controls my knowledge and every movement of my day. I want to know much more than he will ever tell me. Each year, I beg to be taken to London, so I can hear more music than the dissonant chords in the church organ and the thin piping of the minstrels at the annual fair. I want to know what people look like in other worlds than mine, but he won’t show me them. And above all I want to know about that other woman, my mother, who bled and had breasts and soft inner thighs like mine. The older I get, the more I long to see her. Just one glimpse of her face, brush of her skirts, or whisper of her voice would do. I am no longer satisfied with fantasies of her. But if I ask about her, my father turns his head away, and there’s the end to it.

[ 7 ]

I
N THE EVENING
, when my father and I eat supper together by the library fire, the torment of the afternoon is forgotten. Afterward, I kneel by his chair to fill his pipe. He takes a leather pouch from his pocket and gives it to me—the leather, still warm, is old and crisscrossed with wrinkles like his skin, but the tobacco inside is moist and fragrant. I pinch it up with my finger and thumb and drop a few strands into the bowl of the pipe.

“Well, Emilie.”

“Well, Father, I have been thinking about the phlogiston theory in the light of Boyle’s investigations and our own experiments today.”

His eyes go warm. The little breaths he huffs through his nose are the closest he comes to a chuckle. I must not waste a single flake of tobacco, so I take my time with the pipe. “On the one hand, Stahl’s theory is beautifully simple because it allows us to accept the ancient view that air is a fixed state, a constant. Our experiment supported Stahl’s theory. Phlogiston is released from the candle wax during combustion until the air can take no more. Later, when we tried to ignite a piece of camphor we couldn’t, though we know that the camphor would have caught fire outside the flask because camphor is highly combustible, or, as Stahl would say, rich in phlogiston.”

He doesn’t take his eyes from my face as I light a taper from the fire, hand him his pipe, and watch him suck until the tobacco catches.

“But I am still not ready to discount Mayow and Boyle. Mayow says the flame goes out because nitro-aerial particles are used up from the air—what Boyle would call ether—and though plenty of air remains in the flask, it is these particles that are needed for combustion.”

“Sir Isaac also supports this view,” puts in my father. He pats his lips against the stem of his pipe and blows out a perfect smoke ring, a sure sign of contentment.

“I am not satisfied with Stahl’s theory for all its simplicity. Surely it can only be true if substances lose the weight of phlogiston during combustion. But we know that metals gain weight when they are burned.”

He nods and hiccups softly—he loves argument as long as it is well founded and leads to further experiment.

“And if the air became phlogisticated, why did the water level rise in the flask?” I ask.

“We will make a note of all these questions in the morning, and we will not be content until we have dealt with them.”

The clock strikes nine. It is time to release the owl, so I creep into the laboratory and pick up the cage. I am not used to being alone here at night, and I sniff old wood, old minerals, old chemicals. Old is the most normal state of things at Selden. The bird is wide awake, and its huge eyes are eerie in its white face. Mrs. Gill says barn owls are birds of ill omen, but my father and I pay no attention to superstitions of that nature.

When I pick up her cage, the bird adjusts her claws on the perch. My father and I study her for the last time. “She is a killing mechanism,” he says, “ideally suited to her task because she strikes from above, in the dark.”

And yet her feathers look so soft, I long to bury my hands in them. I can easily see the hand of God in the owl’s perfect symmetry—perfectly hooked beak and claws, perfect heart-shaped face.

We carry her up through the house. It is my privilege to hold the cage. My father lights the way, and Gill follows at a distance. He never gets too close to me these days. Gill is my father’s alchemical assistant and does the heavy tasks, like feeding the furnace and lugging crates of minerals. When not needed in the laboratory, he is supposed to be steward to the estates, but I have never known him to go out of earshot. He is ubiquitous. The bird shifts on her perch and swivels her head from side to side. I am afraid that she will suddenly panic and crash against the bars, but she seems calm. At the top of the great staircase, we turn right onto the landing designed for the reception of Queen Elizabeth, though in the end she never visited Selden. On the other side of the queen’s bedroom, we pass through a low door to the oldest wing, where the boards creak and even my narrow skirts brush the walls. The second floor is reached by a winding staircase, and now we are outside the room where my mother died and I was born. My heart beats faster. It always does. Her door is very low and made of oak planks.

My father gives the lantern to Gill, and we climb yet another staircase to the roof. A breeze catches my father’s coattails and hollows the wind funnel we set up last year for our meteorological studies. The night is mild and fine, and a segment of moon sits over my oak tree in the woods. The owl’s feathers ruffle, and her eyes are blacker than ever. Gill comes up behind us and stands with folded arms.

Twelve hooks fasten the cage to its base, and I release them gently one by one until she is free. She doesn’t move from her perch, though there are no longer any bars between her and the night sky.

My father whispers, “She is letting her eyes adjust to the dark and the distances she must travel. Remember what Georg Bartisch says about the properties of the pupil.”

“I wish we didn’t have to let her go,” I say.

I expect him to be harsh with me, but instead he tucks his hand through my arm and holds my wrist. He’s never done this before, and I am absolutely still in case he moves away. His touch fills me with joy and makes me feel powerful, with my skirts blown backward and the woods at my feet rolling away to the river that snakes through our land on its way to London.

The owl lifts her wings suddenly and drops them again. My father’s hand trembles against my arm, and he holds tight to his staff. And then, as the wind blows in a sudden gust over the parapet, the bird takes flight. One minute she is still; the next she soars away and her pale, beating wings are like the pages of a great book. For a moment or two I strain to follow her, but she is gone.

My father takes his hand away. I kiss his bony knuckles and urge him not to stay too late writing in his notebook, then I light a candle from Gill’s lamp and walk down through the quiet house past my mother’s room. For once I don’t stop at her door, because I am too happy.

I go to my bedchamber, take off my outer clothes, and climb into bed. Soon Mrs. Gill looks in to make sure that I have snuffed the light.

I lie in the dark. My mind at the end of the day is a beehive. I visit various cells putting new facts in order, sorting and tidying away the phlogiston theory. I still haven’t developed any symptoms of the smallpox, but then it is only eight days since the engrafting. I remember my father’s hand on my wrist and I smile.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

A Puff of Smoke

[ 1 ]

A
T THE END OF
November 1724, Reverend Gilbert went to join his Maker—or Makers, as he would have it—and by the beginning of the new year my father had appointed a new rector, one Thomas Shales, formerly of Middlesex. This Shales was a fellow of the Royal Society and had published a book entitled
The Qualities of Plants and Aires
, which we had read and admired. He and my father had been joint witnesses to the experiment in which convicts were engrafted with smallpox and had corresponded on the matter of phlogiston. Both were disciples of Sir Isaac N., so it was hardly surprising that Shales should be my father’s first choice.

The prodigy soon arrived to pay his respects to my father. I was very excited at the thought of meeting him, but instead was set a lengthy piece of study from Paracelsus and told to stay in the laboratory.

T
HE NEXT
S
UNDAY
, Mrs. Gill and I went to church, where the pews were unusually full and the chancel decorated with snowdrops. When the frail organist struck his first discordant note, the vestry door opened and I saw the new rector bend his head to avoid cracking it on the lintel. So the first shock was his height, the second his youthfulness; I judged him barely thirty. He wore a crisp alb, and his well-combed wig framed bony, severe features. His speaking voice was firm, and he addressed God as if talking to a trusted friend, very different to the mournful intonations of Reverend Gilbert.

During the sermon, Shales didn’t climb into the pulpit, but stood quite near me under the chancel arch. I couldn’t stop looking at his face, which consisted of unusual planes and angles. His brow jutted over deep-set eyes, his jawbone was pronounced, and his lips were pressed together in a firm line. He spoke without reference to notes about his pleasure in finding himself at Selden, and he praised the woods and rolling hills. There was already a connection between him and Selden, he said, because his former parish had also been on the Thames, though much nearer London. When, at the very end of the sermon, he smiled, the harsh lines in his face broke up, and he looked directly at me. I felt excited to be singled out like that, but I noticed afterward how in moments of silent reflection his eyes were bleak, and at one point he leaned against the wall as if afraid of falling.

I was so intrigued by Reverend Shales that I was surprised to find the service over. The last hour had changed me. I was wider awake, and my skin was tingling. I fretted about the fact that I had never been taught to curtsy properly and that I would make a fool of myself when I met him on the porch. But he smiled at me with considerable sweetness, kept tight hold of my hand for a moment, and said he’d heard great things of me from my father. My cheeks grew hot because I had no idea how to respond to a compliment, and I hurried away full of anxiety about how I should behave the next time we met.

[ 2 ]

A
S IT WAS
, he took me by surprise. On the last day of January, my father and I set out for our walk early in the afternoon. Gill had lit a bonfire in the orchard, so the air was pungent with woodsmoke; frost clung to ruts in the path, and cold seeped through the soles of my boots. I thought wistfully of the kitchen, where I had left Mrs. Gill tucked close to the hearth with her skirts pulled up and her calves exposed to the blaze.