The Alchemist's Daughter (10 page)

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 thrashing his way through the undergrowth, no Emilie with restless eyes and creased apron. 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 cocked 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 ]

B
Y 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 wineglass 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 ]

O
NE 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 apron, 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 shift 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 button of my shift, I saw how soft her hair was, pulled back in an arc from her forehead. The shift 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 passed for fashionable 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 shivered.

“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 glass, 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 slashing 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 glass, 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 fashion and a chaperone, so there was no excuse to stay inside. She buttoned 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, button-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 astonishing 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 shimmered in every possible shade from black to white, cherry to gold, buttercup to azure: silks with the dense luster of my obsidian; silks woven with leaves and flower heads or entire vases of blooms; striped silks in blue and pink; silks embroidered with butterflies 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 fashions 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?”

“If we were to go to the place where you were born.”

“You mean down across the bridge? Stoney Street. But why would we go there?”

“If we wanted to visit your parents.”

She fixed me with expressionless eyes. “Parents?” And then it dawned on me. Sarah had been spawned like a tadpole. Her history was short as her own memory, and at the thought of this I suddenly yearned to be back at Selden. What family did I have, come to think of it, except for Aislabie?

[ 9 ]

N
OW THAT
I was better, we were to host a party in my honor, but first I had to be trained. I couldn’t help being interested in any new procedures and was an expert pupil. Aislabie told me to choose the color for a gown, which duly arrived—emerald green as a tribute to my mother—with a plunging neck, a cascade of lace at the elbows, and a petticoat of buttery satin.

Sarah handled the gown as if it might poison her fingers. “I told you. Green’s unlucky.”

“In the country, everything’s green, and yet it is not an unlucky place.”

“I shouldn’t like to go there.” I watched in the mirror as she hooked up the bodice, and I could tell from the set of her jaw that she really meant what she said. The gown pinched under the bosom and burst like a seedpod below the waist. For a moment I thought it hideously ill-fitting, but she knelt down and began a series of adjustments to the hem, pulling and tucking, inserting pins at the waist and under the arm, dragging at the sleeves, until suddenly the dress and I looked as if we belonged together.