The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  “Is it not obvious, my dear? The pace of my work… it is, of necessity, slow, while with every day that passes I have a more agonized awareness of the urgent need for its completion.” And he was launched now on a passionate jeremiad against the iniquities of the age.

  Surely he need not remind her of the convulsive events recounted in young Henry’s letter? And beyond the immediate turmoil, he insisted, the world continued to mistake for progress its accelerating descent into the prison of matter. He reflected gloomily on the drift from the land into the noisome inferno of the cities, on the terrible speed with which machines disordered the ancient balance between man and nature. “And how rapidly,” he growled, “those brute, obedient servants must soon turn master. They will diminish men to desperate creatures, void of all dignity, and ever more violent as their efforts to lay hands on life prove ever more vain. Believe me, Lou, in my blacker moments I foresee a time when all reverence for the divine spark occluded in man will be mocked out of court. And what shall our pains have been worth if unregenerate matter finally triumph over spirit?”

  That can never happen, Louisa was thinking, but he pressed on in his ferocious misery. “The vision of a golden world will be cashed in for muck and brass. Already men’s minds are so infatuated with the brisk profits of material gain they take no heed for the consequences. And the church – ha, the church! Those reverend gentlemen are consumed with their own quarrels… heat generated without illumination, authority without knowledge, a monstrous preoccupation with the trivial while the dark powers range.” Agnew glowered as though the entire Anglican synod quailed before him, then murmured, “There is so little time, Lou, so little time…”

  Louisa listened, her head tilted slightly so that the dark ringlets crumpled at her shawl. The fingers of one hand fondled the locket at her throat – it contained a tress of her mother’s hair. Around them, under a racing sky, the parkland gleamed. The windy light disavowed each sombre prophecy, yet so tight was the grip of her father’s beetled brows he was able to see none of it.

  Nothing of what he said was new to her. Was not this precisely why they had worked together all those years? And if the crisis of the age was grave, graver perhaps than it had ever been, an age-old tradition of wisdom was still alive in them, still available to answer it, still filled with golden promise as the elms and beeches here were crowned with golden leaf.

  No, none of this was new – nothing except the note of despair threatening to undo their long years of perseverance. She had heard the uncertainty in his voice and it confirmed what she suspected: her father was indeed in great distress, though not at all as her brother believed. Even now he spoke truer than he knew, for in his weariness and frustration he had become so obsessed with time he was no longer free to use it. His imagination was imprisoned by his doubts. No wonder his verses would not flow, for they were dammed by a rock that could and must be lifted. She glanced quickly his way and saw that she could tell him this and it would make no difference. He would nod, contrite, ashamed – or maybe he would bluster, and either way it would do no good. Something new must enter the situation.

  “Tell me,” she responded, drawing lightly on the air, “do you trust my understanding of the work?”

  Agnew sighed and looked away. “There are times when I trust it more than my own judgement.”

  “Very well. Then I have a proposal to make.”

  He looked across at her, a little puzzled, though he had sensed her eyes bright with purpose when she insisted they take this walk together.

  “However,” she added, her voice assuming that pretence of sternness which was a mark of her endearment, “there is first a statement I must make, and you must promise to be patient with me.” She took in the mild distraction of his nod, then stopped in her tracks to look out across the lake. When she spoke again, her tone was graver. “I understand that the full resonance of the work can only be communicated in verse. I know it is of the nature of truth to deplete in the telling, and that only poetry can offer sufficient resistance to such depletion. It is clear to me that no substitute, however well-endowed with reason and lucidity, could stimulate the minds of men with equivalent power. Nevertheless…”

  He thought he caught her drift and hastened to forestall it. “Do not suggest that I abandon verse for prose. There is…”

  A raised finger reminded him of promised silence. “Can you think I have given my assistance all these years only to deter you from your true vocation?”

  His cane chastised the grass. “Then what?…”

  “That I know what you too gloomily forget – that your work in verse must and will be brought to fruition.” She paused to adjust her shawl, then added before he could interrupt again, “But it occurs to me that your epic might meet with a yet more receptive audience if the way for it had first been prepared.” How yellowish, she saw, had the corners of his eyes become: she had been remiss not to notice it before. “Is it not also possible,” she persisted, “that a prose treatise on the work might go some small way towards meeting the immediate crisis of the age… arouse the proper attention, at least, until the moment when the true voice shall be heard?”

  He shook his head in exasperation, and resumed his walk. “Have I not already said there is little enough time for verse without the additional burden of a work in prose?”

  She had not followed his steps. Her voice was carried by the breeze over his shoulder. “You have not yet understood me. I do not suggest that you should be the author of this preliminary treatise.”

  Five or six paces away by now, he stopped, and turned, and saw the sole alternative candidate for this difficult task. Louisa held his troubled gaze a moment, then turned the delicately boned oval of her face – the chin tilted a little, the tip of her tongue at her upper lip – to look across the lake once more.

  Somewhere, he realized, he still thought of her as a child – as his creature, whose life he had shaped and possibly disfigured by the intellectual discipline he had imposed. In this, as in so much else, he was wrong. Here was a free spirit, adult, autonomous, freely choosing to remain at his side, and not for his sake alone. Quietly he said, “I see,” and looked away.

  Already she was regretting that she had not found a way to make the idea spring from his own lips. That would have been shrewder, more efficient, for she could sense the lines of his jaw begin to set in resistance, but it would also have been manipulative, and therefore wrong. She said, “Do I trespass too far?”

  He heard disappointment, a genuine anxiety in her voice. “My dear,” he procrastinated, “it would be an awesome task.”

  “But one for which I have been well prepared.”

  “Indeed.”

  “All those years of note-taking and redaction,” she encouraged, observing the quick activity of his eyes, “ – more than half the labour is already done. Surely what remains would be the joyful part?” She hesitated, remembering that in his own work he had not found it so of late. Better to press on, however, while she held the initiative still. “I have an outline in my mind… a plan of the chapters that would take me from our speculations on the early mysteries, the Chaldaic Oracles and Pythagoras, through to the Alexandrian Platonists; then on by way of Geber into the medieval sages – Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, Bacon, Lully. Thence to Ficino, Pico, Agrippa and all the grand adepts of the Paracelsian school…”

  There was more, but she faltered there at the uncertain expression on his face. What thoughts was he mustering behind that darkly furrowed brow?

  Agnew listened as the great names rippled from her tongue like a register of classmates, or friends she would eagerly invite to some grand occasion. Then – almost as though she had divined this latter thought – she added, more shyly now, “I have even conceived a title for the treatise.” She waited a moment for a response that did not come. “It is: An Open Invitation to the Chymical Wedding, being a Modest Prolegomenon to a Fuller Revelation of the Hermetic Mystery.”

  Out of nowhere, it seeme
d, jealousy flickered across Henry Agnew’s mind. It seared with the full biblical force of the word. This was his knowledge, his learning. He had given it to her. Then how was it that she should be so blithely confident of its public dissemination while he laboured like a mole in grudging darkness? He turned his back, began to walk again. “It would appear,” he muttered, “that you have long contemplated this.”

  She had seen the dark cast to his face, heard the resentment in his voice. She followed him, saying, “I had thought only that my project might relieve you a little from the burdensome pressure of time… that it would free your spirit for the greater work.”

  Agnew stared up at the hurrying sky. He was shamed by the injury imminent in her voice. Dear God, had he not burdened her often enough with his complaints? Had he not avowed at times that she was more naturally equipped for the work than he? If this tremendous vocation had fallen to her now, he was himself in large measure responsible.

  To his credit Agnew did not doubt his daughter’s capacity for the task. He may, as any doting father might, for too long have regarded her as a child, but that she was a woman – that in itself was no objection. Women such as Paphnutia and Maria Prophetissa had been amongst the greatest exponents of the Art. Indeed, certain aspects of its mysteries were accessible only through female wisdom, and for that very reason his need of her had been so great. If she was ready, eager even, to undertake this solemn charge, should he not rejoice in that – rejoice that the living flame had been passed on, and take strength in the knowledge that this lesser work would be in safe hands while he resumed the higher task?

  Yet there was still an obscure heaviness at his heart.

  By now she had caught up with him. They advanced a few paces side by side. “It goes without saying,” she offered, “that I could proceed only with your full approval.”

  He sensed the quick appeal of her glance but did not raise his eyes. “Certainly,” he conceded, “your proposal merits further thought.”

  And let that be the end of it.

  Yet what a dismal response was that to this further gift she brought him. And the unfamiliar formality of their tones – it was an estrangement. Must he lose touch even here, in the one place where solace might still be found? I am the walking grave of my own dreams, he thought, a vision’s carcass. Afraid of this sudden coldness, he said aloud, “Child, I wonder how well you appreciate the rigours of even this preliminary task?”

  Suddenly Louisa was strong again, stronger than this uncertain, too morose old man she so dearly loved. Her glance was proud, at once respectful and reproving, as she answered. “I have had a great teacher; one who has exampled me in perseverance. In this endeavour – as when I was a child indeed – I would be carried on your shoulders.” Again she halted on the path, and this time he was arrested with her. The touch of her fingers at his wrist assured it. “But it is true,” she added, “that one thing further would be needful.”

  “Which is?”

  “The knowledge that such an enlargement of our work together would bring you greater happiness.”

  Agnew was assailed by an enormous grief. As though a rough gust of wind had shouldered past him, he lurched away, and the distant elms blurred against the sky, which was itself a drenched and melting opalescence now. For a space he knew that only tears might answer her. What else? To confess again that he had been wrong to lead her into this labyrinth where he had lost himself? To prevent her from entering deeper now while it was not too late? Such was her faith she would never hear him. How could she when her life and her faith in him were one?

  On all sides he was oppressed and vulnerable. He was old and tired and lost. He was in contention now with death itself, and could not tell her. She asked for happiness and all he had to show was grief, which was, if truth were told, no more than the last thin shift of his despair. Some paces ahead he saw the stump of a felled oak. He made for it, his breath labouring, and sat, head down, crabbed hands crossed at the pommel of his cane.

  Briefly Louisa recalled another troubled figure seated there with Pedro dancing round him, and then she was suddenly concerned at something feeble, unshored, in her father’s posture. “You are quite well?” she asked, the breath cold at her throat.

  He nodded, murmured, “Well enough… A little weary perhaps…” but would not look at her.

  Louisa approached, aware how short his breathing was. For so long had his hale condition been a fact of her life that she was shocked to see how suddenly old he was become. Her concern was sharpening to alarm as she crouched at his knees, forcing him to meet her anxious gaze. “You are sure?”

  Wanly his face contrived a reassuring smile.

  Which she wished to believe. Yes, he was tired. He had taken too little exercise of late. She must, at some more auspicious moment, remind him of this. “I have presumed too much,” she said.

  He saw that her dress was crumpled among damp leaves, took her hands, and made her rise to her feet again. “Child, all the happiness I have known since your dear mother died I owe to you alone.” He eased his breathing in a sigh, and looked at the surface of the lake where a sere autumnal glow of sunlight had scattered, quivering, like a trash of leaves. “I have no right to ask for more.”

  “You have every right,” she exclaimed. “There is not a man in all the land I would sooner serve.”

  Agnew reached out to hold his daughter close against him. He pressed his head to her bosom, felt her hands at his shoulders, and heard the steady beat of her heart almost as clearly as when he had listened once, experimentally, through Tom Horrocks’s stethoscope. “Is this what you truly wish?” he said.

  “It is,” she whispered. “It is why I am here.”

  His own tired heart was ravished by her certainty. “Then perhaps it must be so.”

  “I have your confidence?” she urged.

  “My every confidence.”

  She pulled away a little, smiled down, eliciting a response from the mesh of lines about his lips and nose. “Then I promise that if my efforts can win it for you, you shall have your happiness again.” She saw that more than the wind glistened at his eyes and, fearing that they might both be overwhelmed, gripped the old hand at her side. “Now come,” she encouraged. “I think in your despondence there is something you have overlooked. Tom Horrocks will come by tonight. Good food, good wine, the port, a game of chess and Tom’s bluff company should soon restore your spirits. Then tomorrow,” – she straightened his collar, planted a quick kiss on his brow – “tomorrow we begin anew.”

  The plight of Amy Lamer weighed heavily on the Reverend Edwin Frere, and all the more so because he was now ignorant of her whereabouts. Enquiries of Amos Starling, the sexton, had produced only the information that she had last been seen walking to Saxburgh, that she was a bad lot, and a good riddance – sentiments expressed with such animus that, had Frere been of a less charitable disposition, he might have perceived himself speaking to a rejected amorist. Other tentative researches took him no further. The villagers had not yet taken the full measure of the new parson and seemed, at best, sceptical of his motives. Conversation was impeded by the still unfamiliar cadences of the local accent (designed, Frere was coming to believe, more for concealment than communication) and, as he walked away in confusion from a brawny gossip of the parish and her squinting friend, he blushed to imagine their subsequent opinion of his interest in the fallen young woman. It had, after all, not been quite possible to be specific, and his predecessor had set no good example.

  Doubtless Mrs Bostock and her friend, Eliza Waters, would have proved a mine of information, but that was a mine he had no present wish to enter. In any case, his wife was in their company at the moment and would not relish further embroilment in this unhappy affair.

  Throughout that gloomy day Frere brooded on the problem and on his own inadequacy before it. Had not Goethe proposed the life of a protestant clergyman as the finest subject for a modern idyll – the priest-king of his small community, furthering th
e spiritual education of his flock, blessing them at each milestone of their way, consoling them in adversity, and strengthening their hope of bliss to come? What a poor start to such an idyll was this! That he should be so swiftly compromised before his wife and his parish by a matter so delicate. Unless steps were taken, a shadow would fall across his ministry that would not easily lift.

  Frere was a man of imagination: there were strengths in that, and there were weaknesses. As rapidly as his finer thoughts could scale spiritual heights so could their darker equivalents plunge into purgatorial gloom. Before many hours had passed, he had watched Amy Larner’s progress from the hedge of Munding Rectory to the streets of Saxburgh and down into unspeakable shame. If she ended, as he feared she might, selling herself outside the alehouses and dingy gin palaces of Norwich, then he was answerable. At his door the first stone would have been cast. It was not enough to console himself with pious hopes for her welfare.

  As he could not release himself from this preoccupation, and his wife did not share it, dinner at the Rectory that night was an unhappy affair. Emilia, it seemed, had banished the unpleasant events of the previous day from her mind, and Frere was reluctant to conjure the spectre of Amy Larner back into the house. He had no wish to aggravate the dour humour that seemed to have settled over his wife with the recent cold weather. In springtime Munding might have its charms, but Emilia’s first not entirely satisfactory adventure into local society had left her apprehensive of the long dull winter to come.

  Consolingly Frere suggested that she must still be exhausted from the exertions of the move. It would take a little time to recover and respond to the pleasures of this new environment. Emilia could not detect their promise. A wearisome afternoon feigning interest in rural tittle-tattle at Mrs Bostock’s well-appointed but not altogether fashionable home had left the refinements of Cambridge society livelier to her mind. She was, she must admit, more than a little homesick for their house in Portugal Place. Nor would she have believed how draughty this great barracks of a Rectory must prove. How were they ever to make it homely? The mere thought of the difficulties worsened the headache that already troubled her composure. Would Edwin mind if she retired early that evening? Her day had not been the success she had hoped. She would like to bring it to an early close.