The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon Read Free Book Online Page B

else?”
    “Nothing else.”
    He tore off his wig and ran his hand across the stubble of white hair. “Emilie. Observe. Think. What did he talk about?”
    “Himself mostly.”
    “Money. He talked about money. The making of money. What else?”
    “Nothing. I saw nothing else.”
    “Then you’re a fool. I’ve wasted my time on you. One step outside the laboratory, one glimpse of finery, and all I’ve taught disappears. You’ve been dazzled. I’ll make a record in my notebook. He pretended to be interested in phlogiston, Emilie, and I suppose he might be, if it will save him a few hundred pounds. But he took no notes or references. His eyes glazed when I talked to him. He’s gone away no better off than when he came.”
    “Then why was he here? Why did he travel such a long way?”
    “That’s the only reason I’ll let him come back. I want to find out.”
    [ 7 ]
    F OR THE NEXT two nights, I scarcely slept while I thought about Robert Aislabie. My father had seen him in a false light, distorted by the lens of age and prejudice. Aislabie was perfect. Every corpuscle in my body shook at the memory of his smile, his sideways glance, the quirk of his lip, the voice that was mined from a secret place inside him. I wanted to see him again so much that it was all I could do to stop myself from rushing to the gates every ten minutes. The ground under my feet was wafer thin, and I thought I might fall into a pit of despair if he didn’t come back. And all the while I had to pretend that nothing had changed. My father was getting ready for his trip to London, and there was work to be done copying papers and putting the laboratory in order.
    Time behaved with extraordinary waywardness—crawling minute by minute or springing forward in leaps and bounds—until at four o’clock on the second day I heard his horse and a brisk knock. I was ready, of course, had been for two days, with my hair brushed under a clean cap. When I opened the door, I allowed myself one glance only—any more and he would see how my whole being was on fire with longing—but that glance was enough. His eyes looked directly into mine, smiled, went misty. We said nothing as I led him as before to the library. This time he spent only half an hour with my father while I walked up and down the screens passage, passing and repassing the two open doors to the entrance hall. I was carrying a straw hat, so that when he came out I would seem to be on my way to the garden.
    The door opened, and he caught me on my twentieth trek down the passage. I curtsied. He bowed. “Mistress Selden.”
    He leaned his shoulder against the doorway with his hat tucked under one arm, the other raised to grasp the lintel, but he was not at ease. His voice was low and his color high. My father must have been unkind. My ancestors stared past him from above their starched ruffs, and I was struck by the contrast. There was nothing two-dimensional about Aislabie. He was breathing and muscular, with stray hairs floating loose from his rippling wig and soft fabrics tumbling at his throat and wrists.
    “That hat looks very purposeful,” he said.
    “I am on my way to the orchard.”
    He nodded, glanced at the closed library door, transferred his own hat from right hand to left, and raised his elbow in a gesture I was too ignorant to understand. “Perhaps you will show me?”
    Instead of taking his arm, I walked down the kitchen passage and through the stable yard to the orchard, where we stood apart from each other. I had no words. I was, like my father pissing into the chamber pot, utterly exposed. Bees probed the clover, butterflies clung together in midair, a blackbird called throatily from its perch on a medlar. Aislabie asked about the trees and whether they cropped well. I managed a yes and was silent. He bowed abruptly and turned away. I ran after him until we were in the shade of the stable yard, where desperation at last put words into my mouth. “Did my father tell you