Free The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon

sunshiny mind. A tiny creature, perhaps a bee, alighted on my bare calf. Fear tightened my stomach and dried the tears on my cheek.
    “No,” I said more insistently, but he threw my skirt up to my neck and caged me in my petticoats. I flung my head from side to side—first toward the tree, then to the hive where the bees carried on their business as usual—but he took hold of my chin and pulled my mouth back under his. The sun burned my thighs. I locked them together, but he had finished fumbling with his own clothes and suddenly pressed his hand onto my pubic bone.
    I went still and quiet and stared up into his eyes as his fingers worked their way inside me until I was helpless as a frog spread out for dissection. Then he took his hand away and lifted himself up, never taking his eyes from my face as I felt a nudge and then the pressure of a long slow lunge that pushed my head against a root and split my insides apart. Emilie, the Emilie I had known, the clever, irritable, longing, knowing Emilie, sank away into the lush grass, leaving only a gaping vessel for Aislabie.
    The inside of my head fogged with curiosity and the need to please. He lowered himself until his thighs connected to mine and my mouth was covered and I was all Aislabie, filled up by Aislabie, drinking him in as he worked his knees between mine, took hold of my buttocks and pushed harder, harder until I felt the knock on my womb and little red flames inside my thighs. Then he lifted himself out, kissed my wet belly, covered me up, and drew me back onto his lap.
    I pulled up my knees like a child, buried my face in his crumpled neckcloth, and thought, It is over. I am different.
    “We will be married, Emilie,” he said.
    [ 13 ]
    W HEN MY FATHER came home ten days later, I didn’t meet him at the gate as I had every other year because I thought he was bound to see Aislabie staring out of my eyes.
    After supper, my tired, shrunken father sank deep in his chair, put his hand to his forehead, and peered about as if to reassure himself that he was actually home. There was a brown paper package on the table. “A gift, Emilie,” he said.
    He had brought me things from London before—my prism, for example—but he had never called them gifts. I could not bear to open the parcel, to see the gleam of anticipation in his eye or to think that he had perhaps remembered our argument and racked his brains for a way of making things better between us. “Open it,” he said. “Go on.”
    I untied the string. It was a volume of lectures, in Latin, by the Dutch Boerhaave. “Hot off the press,” said my father, and his eyes sparked with rare humor. “Unauthorized, I think. You will be one of the first in this country to read him, Emilie, and you will find so much to interest you. He thinks as you do on phlogiston, and he is eloquent on the subject of fire. He has weighed it and concluded that although it is an element, it is weightless.”
    I opened the book for the sake of showing a little interest and found a diagram of a thermometer, but I couldn’t take in what I saw. My father began a long speech about what he had seen in London, and for the first time I realized that he was not just telling me things for the sake of my education but to relive each new experience for himself. “I visited Sir Isaac in his Kensington house. He’s getting more and more infirm, I thought, terrible cough.”
    I had never been less interested in the state of Newton’s health, but I said, “What did you talk about?”
    “He mentioned the possibility of a translation of the Principia into English. Of course, he has mixed feelings about that—doesn’t want it to fall into ignorant hands. How is your own translation, Emilie?”
    “I didn’t have much time, after all.”
    “Nor for the laboratory,” he said sharply. “I found the rose as I’d left it.”
    We had lit his pipe, so I was kneeling at his feet. “I should like to marry Robert Aislabie, Father.” His head