The Alchemist's Daughter
In one of my earliest memories I walk behind my father to the furnace shed. He wears a long black coat that gathers up fallen leaves and his staff makes a little crunch when he stabs it into the path. My apron is so thick that my knees bang against it and the autumn air is smoky on my face. Suddenly I trip over the hem of his coat. My nose hits ancient wool. He stops dead. My heart pounds but I recover my balance and we walk on.
When we reach the shed I take a gasp of fresh air before being swallowed up. Gill is inside, shovelling coal into the arch of the furnace mouth, which roars orange.
My father’s finger emerges from his sleeve and points to a metal screen Gill made for me. There is a little stool behind it and at just the right height a couple of peep holes covered with mesh are cut into the metal. I must not move from this stool in case something spills or explodes. We are boiling up vatfuls of urine to make a thick syrup which eventually will become phosphorus. After a while the stench of sulphur and ammonia is so strong that it almost knocks me off my stool. I can’t breathe properly and my throat is hot but I hold firm and don’t let my back slump. Gill is like a black shadow moving back and forth; a twist of his upper body, a jerk of the shovel, a stooping out of sight, another turn, the racket of falling coal, then the flames roar fiercer until I think the furnace will blow apart and the shed, Selden, the woods, the world will all fly away in pieces.
But my father isn’t worried so I feel safe too. He stands at his high desk by the door and puts his left hand to his forehead as he writes. The only bit of his face I can see under his wig is his beaky nose. This black and orange world is crammed with a million things that he knows and I don’t. I want to be like him. I will be soon, if I can only pay attention and learn fast enough.
I have no memories of my mother because she is a skeleton under the earth all the time I am a child. When I was born she died and though I appreciate the symmetry of this I’m not satisfied. It’s hard finding out more about her because I’m not allowed to ask my father and Mrs Gill, who looks after me, is a woman of few words.
However, on my sixth birthday, 30 May 1712, I ask Mrs Gill the usual questions about what my mother was like and she suddenly sighs deeply, puts down the great pot she is carrying – it is the week for brewing up the elderflowers – and takes me on a long journey through the house past the Queen’s Room, through a series of little doors and up a flight of narrow stairs until we come to a low room with a high lattice window and a sloping floor. She says, ‘That’s where you were born.’
The only furniture is a rough-looking chest and a high bed shrouded in linen, which I look at with wonder. The bed is surely too small and clean for such an untidy event as a birth. ‘Why?’ I say.
‘Because everyone has to be born somewhere.’
‘Why this room and not a bigger one?’
‘Because it’s quiet and ideal.’ She leans over the chest in that Mrs Gill way of not bending her back or knees but just lowering her upper body. I go closer as she brings up the lid and I see that the inside is lined with white paper but otherwise nearly empty. It smells like nothing else on earth, a dusty sweetness of folded-away things. And out comes a cream-coloured shawl like a spider’s web, a tiny bonnet, a baby’s tucked nightgown and a coil of pink ribbon with a pin in one end to keep it rolled up. ‘These were your things that I made you,’ she says, patting the clothes, ‘and this was your mother’s.’ She hands me the ribbon, which I rub and sniff. ‘You can have that if you like. And now those elderflowers will be boiled half dry so down we go.’
Later she tells me the story of my parents’ marriage. My mother, Emilie De Lery, was from a family of Huguenot silk weavers who had been driven out of France in 1685 and settled in a district of London called Spital Fields. Competition in the silk market was fierce but my grandfather De Lery decided that fashionable London wanted colour so he went to the Royal Society to see if he could find someone who knew about dyes.
When we reach the shed I take a gasp of fresh air before being swallowed up. Gill is inside, shovelling coal into the arch of the furnace mouth, which roars orange.
My father’s finger emerges from his sleeve and points to a metal screen Gill made for me. There is a little stool behind it and at just the right height a couple of peep holes covered with mesh are cut into the metal. I must not move from this stool in case something spills or explodes. We are boiling up vatfuls of urine to make a thick syrup which eventually will become phosphorus. After a while the stench of sulphur and ammonia is so strong that it almost knocks me off my stool. I can’t breathe properly and my throat is hot but I hold firm and don’t let my back slump. Gill is like a black shadow moving back and forth; a twist of his upper body, a jerk of the shovel, a stooping out of sight, another turn, the racket of falling coal, then the flames roar fiercer until I think the furnace will blow apart and the shed, Selden, the woods, the world will all fly away in pieces.
But my father isn’t worried so I feel safe too. He stands at his high desk by the door and puts his left hand to his forehead as he writes. The only bit of his face I can see under his wig is his beaky nose. This black and orange world is crammed with a million things that he knows and I don’t. I want to be like him. I will be soon, if I can only pay attention and learn fast enough.
I have no memories of my mother because she is a skeleton under the earth all the time I am a child. When I was born she died and though I appreciate the symmetry of this I’m not satisfied. It’s hard finding out more about her because I’m not allowed to ask my father and Mrs Gill, who looks after me, is a woman of few words.
However, on my sixth birthday, 30 May 1712, I ask Mrs Gill the usual questions about what my mother was like and she suddenly sighs deeply, puts down the great pot she is carrying – it is the week for brewing up the elderflowers – and takes me on a long journey through the house past the Queen’s Room, through a series of little doors and up a flight of narrow stairs until we come to a low room with a high lattice window and a sloping floor. She says, ‘That’s where you were born.’
The only furniture is a rough-looking chest and a high bed shrouded in linen, which I look at with wonder. The bed is surely too small and clean for such an untidy event as a birth. ‘Why?’ I say.
‘Because everyone has to be born somewhere.’
‘Why this room and not a bigger one?’
‘Because it’s quiet and ideal.’ She leans over the chest in that Mrs Gill way of not bending her back or knees but just lowering her upper body. I go closer as she brings up the lid and I see that the inside is lined with white paper but otherwise nearly empty. It smells like nothing else on earth, a dusty sweetness of folded-away things. And out comes a cream-coloured shawl like a spider’s web, a tiny bonnet, a baby’s tucked nightgown and a coil of pink ribbon with a pin in one end to keep it rolled up. ‘These were your things that I made you,’ she says, patting the clothes, ‘and this was your mother’s.’ She hands me the ribbon, which I rub and sniff. ‘You can have that if you like. And now those elderflowers will be boiled half dry so down we go.’
Later she tells me the story of my parents’ marriage. My mother, Emilie De Lery, was from a family of Huguenot silk weavers who had been driven out of France in 1685 and settled in a district of London called Spital Fields. Competition in the silk market was fierce but my grandfather De Lery decided that fashionable London wanted colour so he went to the Royal Society to see if he could find someone who knew about dyes.
True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true 1st Precept of the Emerald Tablet
<TITLE>Katharine McMahon, national bestselling and award-winning author of The Rose of Sebastopol, The Crimson Rooms and Season of Light</TITLE>
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<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Welcome to the official website of Katharine McMahon, author of The Rose of Sebastopol (chosen for Richard and Judy's Book Club 2008), The Crimson Rooms and The Alchemist's Daughter.">
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<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Katharine, McMahon, author, novel, books, Rose, Sebastopol, official, Alchemist, Season, Light, romance, romantic, historical, writer, history, books, book, writer, readers, Crimson, rooms, Katherine,">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Welcome to the official website of Katharine McMahon, author of The Rose of Sebastopol (chosen for Richard and Judy's Book Club 2008), The Crimson Rooms and The Alchemist's Daughter.">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">