Free The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon Page B

told him every last detail of my life at Selden, including my father’s grief, and when I was sure of it I told him about the baby. His letters in reply were brief but ardent. A child , he wrote. Dearest, dearest Emilie. You can have no idea how happy I feel. All my life I have been working toward this. It even makes me believe after all that there is some providence that responds if we want something enough and labor hard enough to achieve it. To have you, Emilie, as my wife, and to be the father of our child . . . I will come very soon, within a fortnight, to make arrangements with your father.
    Despite the evidence of these letters, loneliness and exclusion made me wonder whether I had dreamed Aislabie, but exactly at the agreed hour I heard hoofbeats through the village and there he was at the gates, horse steaming, hat whipped off for the blacksmith’s daughter, who happened to be passing. I emerged from the porch as Gill put his shoulder to the rusty iron. Aislabie wore dark clothes except for a jaunty yellow cockade and was more solemn than I remembered as he leaped down and kissed my hand and cheek. “You are pale, my dear love.”
    He was a stranger, and I had an instant of pure terror. His face was more fleshy, he seemed altogether weightier, less boyish than before, and his blue eyes looked eagerly past me to Selden. Then he held me tight in his arms, buried his face in my neck, kissed my mouth so that I felt the shock of sudden intimacy and fell against him thinking, I love him, I do love him. He held me at arm’s length and studied my face, then my waist. “Are you well? What about our child. Is he thriving?”
    These were beautiful words to me, especially the “our.” They closed the gap between us and made me feel that after all I did have a place somewhere, even if not at Selden. “All is well.”
    “How is the old man?” he whispered.
    “I hardly know. He won’t speak to me. He won’t let me near him, though I knock on his door every day.”
    He kissed my hand again. “Never fear, my love. I’ll find a way round him.”
    I led him across the hall, tapped at the library door, and stood aside to let him through. My father stayed out of sight, but I heard a board creak under his foot. The door was left wide open, and I glimpsed the glow of firelight on the laden shelves and smelled tobacco. I wasn’t invited in. It was a sunless day, and the hall was cold. I had no doubt that the open door was a deliberate ploy and that I was supposed to overhear this conversation. I was hoping for a miracle, that Aislabie would find precisely the right words to soften my father and readmit me to the old life. His cultivated London voice was very low and I missed the beginning of his address: “. . . daughter’s hand.”
    There was a long silence, during which Aislabie twirled his hat, and I tiptoed closer. “. . . rent and furnish a house by the end of November and have the banns read,” he said.
    My father was probably huddled under cover of his everyday wig, refusing to speak or meet Aislabie’s eye. There was another silence, after which Aislabie said much more abruptly, “So we come to the terms of the marriage settlement. Of course, I understand that it may be difficult for you to make more than a token payment now, so I am prepared to accept an entailment after your death, sir.”
    I retreated a few steps. I had never heard my father spoken to so curtly. There could be no hope of reconciliation now. “. . . land already entailed,” came his frail voice at last.
    “I think not, sir. I believe the land is entailed to Emilie, and once she is married it will be my privilege to have charge of her property. All I ask is that you add a clause to the effect that in the event of her early death the estates should be passed to me in trust for any children, or if we are unfortunately without a living child . . .” Aislabie, glancing up, had seen me standing in the shadows. He sprang forward and shut the