The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  “What about Louisa herself?” I suggested. “She lived on into this century – sixty or more years after the crisis. Her book might have been burned, but her knowledge… You can’t burn ideas, experience. Did she never speak about it to anyone?”

  Edward must have sensed the altered tone of my approach, though his face was still creased with something approaching despair. “As far as I know, she kept it to herself. She lived in more or less permanent seclusion… never married. Ralph says there was a deep emotional shadow over her life which surfaced every now and then behind the calm exterior, but the aftermath of 1849 and her father’s death would account for that. She must have felt the responsibility of it even though Henry was already an old man.”

  For a moment I thought Laura was about to speak – the breath was drawn before she decided otherwise. Unaware of it, Edward sighed and continued. “Ralph knows no more of the details than I do… only that she was an old lady of extraordinary strength and resolution and calmness of mind… much loved by everyone and, at the same time, impenetrable.”

  “Then what about Ralph’s father – didn’t he know more?”

  Edward snorted. “Ralph asked him once. Apparently on one occasion his father tried to talk to Louisa about her work. He pressed her quite hard, I gather, and when she refused to answer, he demanded to know why. She simply directed him to one of the most beautiful texts in the library, the Splendor Solis …” Edward laughed, drily sardonic. “What he must have read there was this: Alphidius, one of the old Philosophers said, ‘Everyone who does not care for the trouble of obtaining the Philosopher’s stone will do better in making no enquiries at all than only useless ones.’ If he bothered to read any further, he would soon have got bogged down. He was driven by curiosity, you see… no genuine desire to understand. He told Ralph not to waste his time over it.”

  “So the secret – whatever it was – died with her?”

  Edward nodded. “I’ve been through her correspondence – apparently there was a moment in the 1880s when her interest in the formation of the Theosophical Society reawakened hope for the possibility of sharing her knowledge. But she seems to have measured the movement and found it wanting. She would have seen through Madame Blavatsky like a shot. In any case, none of her associates at the time could press her very far and she soon withdrew into seclusion. She spent most of her time with her brother’s grandchildren. One of them, Hilary, appears to have had the makings of a poet and it’s just possible that she confided in him. But it was a kindness she died when she did, for Hilary and his elder brother were both killed in Flanders. It would have broken her heart to see what the world did to them… to see the inevitable catastrophe of it all. Ralph himself was too young to know her as anything other than a delightful old lady. Most of what he knows of her early life comes at second-hand and much edited. Had Hilary survived perhaps…” Edward opened his hands in a gesture of futility. He sighed, then looked uncertainly across at Laura. “Are you all right, my dear?”

  Laura fixed him with a sharp resentful glance, then averted her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to cross you.” But she was not to be won back so easily. She sat, locked in her own thoughts, apparently impervious to either of us. While Edward and I had talked, she had withdrawn into the cold angry space that is left for women while men jostle their ideas, their minds. I myself had pushed Jess into such a corner many times. I too had struggled, as Edward did now, to draw her out when I was ready… when I saw, too late, what was happening.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Look, Laura, there are some things on which we disagree… that’s all.”

  “Dammit, Edward, it’s not that.”

  “Then what?”

  She drew in her breath fiercely. “Look, I’m tired and I feel used. I’ve done all I can and where’s it got us… Scenes like tonight – earlier, I mean – before Alex came…” She shook her head as though to dispel the memory. “We can’t carry on like this – you getting more and more bad-tempered, me at a loss – expected to be there when you need me, blown away when you don’t. It’s doing neither of us any good. We’re going nowhere fast but down.”

  Shocked by her vehemence, hating that it happened in my presence, Edward murmured, “It’s only frustration… Forgive me. I’d be lost without you, you know that.”

  “The truth is you’re lost with me as well. Look, I don’t really care about what happened just now. I’m used to it. But face it, Edward, we need help. I thought when I read Alex’s dream…” But she faltered there, seeing the mask of despair on Edward’s face, softening despite herself.

  “What did you think?” I asked.

  She looked across at me, a glance somewhere between doubt and defiance. “I don’t know now if you’ll understand, but I’ve learnt to trust coincidence – that if you’re in touch with something real there’s a kind of symmetry to things. Like my meeting Edward in the first place. I was drawn to his class – it was an option, not even in the mainline of my own work, but the moment I heard him speak I knew that it mattered to me, that I was part of it. I knew that he needed me, and that…” She hesitated, looked across at Edward, who sat, eyes closed, with his head resting on one hand. “And now” – she had changed course – “when we’re really stuck, you turn up with a dream that might have come straight from the pages of Louisa’s book… I don’t know…”

  “It’s true,” Edward murmured quietly. “Laura’s done all she can. She’s helped me to build a clearer picture of what Louisa was like. But much of what we’ve learnt is as confusing as it is clarifying. We don’t know what to make of it, and at times, as you’ve seen, it leaves us at odds. And for the rest…” He sighed heavily. “I’ve been working through all the remaining documents. Ralph has given me access to the family papers – notebooks, journals, letters. And there’s the library – hundreds of volumes are annotated. There’s a vast file of index cards. I’m trying to take bearings from them, using deductive logic, intuition, guesswork – anything that might shake the pieces into some sort of pattern, but the material is vast. They were working on it together for the best part of a decade, and Agnew had been preparing his notes for almost thirty years before that. Many of the references are in Latin – mine’s rusty, Laura doesn’t have it, and on my own I…” He looked up, haggard-eyed.

  The room was very still.

  Then Laura spoke again. “Tell me something,” she said quietly, looking at me, “hasn’t any of this reached you?”

  I sensed immediately that much might hang on my answer, that this was a yes-or-no moment. And, if she wanted me to believe, it didn’t feel like a desperate search for a fellow conspirator. Nor did she have the evangelical ardour of a true believer. It was, uncomfortably, a little like looking into Jess’s eyes after the event – that vulnerable reservoir of care which had been at the time entirely unacceptable to me. Except here there was no shadow of guilt, no need to prove anything. This woman and I were virtual strangers, distinct, with no claims on one another. No need even to prolong the acquaintance beyond the end of the evening. Yet what I thought I saw in her gaze was a mild hope – no more than that – that I wouldn’t wilfully blind myself to some richer possibility.

  “I mean,” she pressed, “given the fact of your dream – and it was that which started all this, remember – didn’t it ring any bells at all?”

  For a moment I felt cornered by the direct appeal. Yes, of course bells had rung – lots of them, and some of them were alarm bells, such as the one that was ringing inside me now as I held her gaze.

  I was conscious too of Edward’s silent attention. Behind that wrinkled frown lay a hero of my youth – a man who might, with luck, have evolved into a master of English verse, yet had abandoned that promise for this chimerical quest he clearly believed essential. One thing was clear: however he might mask it, the man really cared. He cared about what was happening in the world. He was striving, by
his lights and against the odds, to come to terms with it. What’s more, and amazingly enough considering the spoken and unspoken contention between us, he seemed to care about what was happening to me.

  In some way I could not grasp we were all implicated in one another.

  Then I remembered how the figures of my dream had been illuminated by the light radiating from the Pelican – that soft warm blur of belonging that suffused the other-world of dream, and in which all things appeared subtly interfused. For an instant I glimpsed it again. Less vividly, but with power enough to excite, I saw how it was possible that everything – each one of us – is the condition by which all else exists. I saw that reality might not be a fixture – crudely, inescapably there – but a continuing, spontaneous enterprise of the imagination. It might be shaped, remade, revalued, again and again, through each act of perception, each inventive gesture of relationship.

  I could diminish Edward to a deluded eccentric or make him my friend, and my own being would be enlarged or diminished by the decision. I could make a fantasy out of Laura – a figment concocted from my lovelessness and the memory of her naked in the glade – or I could cleanse my senses and discover who she might really be. More immediately, I must answer yes or no to her question. One reply would put a stop to this, leaving my rationality intact if not my honesty. The other might open on all manner of new beginnings.

  Wordlessly, I reflected how much of my life had been spent waiting for the present to happen: here, suddenly, was a moment in which a delicious sense of risk was all the more present because the future hovered about it, ready to alight.

  “Yes,” I said, “of course it did. And I don’t know if this is at all wise, but – if it helps – I do have Latin.”

  The words came like a change of atmospheric pressure in the room. For an instant it felt as though their lives too had hung in the balance. Then I smiled at their astonished, upturned faces.

  8

  A Season of Ice

  After the first success in the matter of Amy Larner, who was now comfortably situated with Dr Horrocks’s friends in Saxburgh, Edwin Frere found himself a little at a loss, for his parish proved less permeable than he had hoped to the motions of the spirit.

  He had inherited a sleepy congregation from Matthew Stukely. Only the church band – two clarinets, a serpent, a bassoon and an ill-tempered violoncello – brought much vigour to the services; after the harmonies of King’s, their enthusiasm fell stridently on the Rector’s ear. His wish that the entire community might join in the responses had met with no immediate assent and so, apart from the hymns, his own voice and the clerk’s must remain the sole conductors of divine energy. There were, however, some lusty singers among his parishioners, and he looked forward to the time when it might prove possible to fill the chancel with an unsurpliced choir. Otherwise they were a dour lot, these rural East Anglians. Though the village seemed blessedly free from active dissent, even those most in need seemed more suspicious of than grateful for Frere’s efforts of charitable service. His visits were regarded as occasions for embarrassment rather than pleasure or consolation, and he was left wondering why, when his motives were generous, these people should find it so difficult to respond with a matching warmth. Sadly, if patiently, he came to recognize that, though he might be their Rector, he remained – and would, he feared, for some time remain – a foreigner first.

  Neither had Frere derived much encouragement from his fellow clergymen in the area. The best of them, Canon Ivory in Saxburgh, brought more diligence to the care of his hives and garden than to the needs of his parish. The worst were spreaders of terror, like Cuthbert in Thrandeston, or crassly negligent, like Jackman of Shippenhall, who spent his days ruing the loss of his investment in a bogus railway company, and took pleasure only in riding to hounds. The sole promise of rewarding friendship had come from Sir Henry Agnew and his daughter; yet both now, it seemed, were deeply engaged on speculative work of their own, and had taken to a life of almost complete seclusion.

  Despite the difficulties, Frere was committed to his new life and regretted only that enthusiasm came less easily to his wife. An educated woman, attuned to the refinements of Cambridge society, Emilia found it hard to relate otherwise than de haut en bas even to the local gentry. Though she tried as faithfully as she might to devote herself to the needs of this rude community, she knew that she was not greatly liked and the knowledge injured her. It was not that she felt a need for approval, but it was disheartening that these people should show so little comprehension of the sacrifice she had made in wedding her life to theirs. Nor would Edwin concede more than a spineless encouragement that she be hopeful and humble in their work together. He seemed incapable of accepting that she was very lonely.

  Frere dared not silence, but neither could he see the value of, Emilia’s recurrent nostalgic reveries over their former life, but he was deeply troubled when she drew his attention to the fact that the services of a curate could be acquired for as little as thirty pounds a year. He knew what was suggested by her apparently abstract interest and would not hear of it, yet the price of his deafness was high. Emilia’s subsequent ill-temper spent itself on the domestic staff, and she interpreted his own efforts to placate the ruffled servants as treachery.

  “You will always seek the easy way, Edwin,” she complained, “and it will not serve. The softness of your manner may appear to win their loyalty but only feeds their impertinence. And it is I, not you, who must bear the brunt of it. Were you to bring a tenth of the consideration that you show them and your parishioners to needs that lie closer to home, you would find a more contented wife at your side. I would not be like this. It is not native to my disposition. Were my friends in Cambridge to see the change in me, I vow they would not believe it. I can hardly believe it myself.”

  As the days grew shorter, the Rectory colder, the pleasure they took in reading together or playing backgammon before the fire began to pall. Their prayers beside the bed were more articulate in their silences than anything that was uttered aloud. And then, miraculously it seemed, the most fervent of Frere’s prayers was answered.

  Shortly after a delay in her monthly courses, Emilia fainted and both knew that, at last, she was pregnant.

  To all who heard it – even if they did not understand the full depths of the resonance he intended – Edwin Frere’s first Christmas sermon to the congregation of Munding St Mary’s was clearly an inspired delivery. There, at the heart of the cold season, at the very dead of winter, he spoke in bright impassioned terms of the birth of the Christ-child as the abiding promise of new life. His previous sermons had been pitched a little too high for their comprehension. The words had sailed over their heads to be lost among the hammer beams. One could not doze easily as one had done in Matt Stukely’s day, for there was something too insistently personal in this new parson’s efforts to reach them; yet they had remained stolidly unreached till now, when the fervour of his exhortation spoke to them as with an angel’s tongue. It was cold inside the little candle-lit church, but each heart was briefly warmed by the Rector’s words and yearned again for its lost innocence. At the first chords of the carol – ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ – they raised their voices as though they sought to equal in adoration the praises of the angels in Bethlehem long ago.

  To complete the picture it is necessary to add that, at each reference to babies and new life, Mrs Bostock and Eliza Waters had exchanged meaningful smiles. They knew the secret of the parson’s enthusiasm. They knew too that the parson’s wife was distressed by a persistent sickness that left her retching and queasy, and though there was some satisfaction in seeing her humbled, the two friends were quick to remark on how little such eagerly expectant fathers as the parson truly understood of the tribulations of the woman’s role in these mysteries.

  Nevertheless it was out of his own immediate sense of the renewal of life, his very own good news that seemed to match the eternal Good News out of Bethlehem, that Frere spoke to his congregati
on that Christmas. He knew that, for the first time, his words had found them. He was glowing like an altar candle as he spoke, and the words presented themselves like gifts. They were hardly his own yet sprang from his heart as though, in those exalted moments, it were itself a living vessel of the Christmas mystery. New life, green as the holly leaf, was at work inside him as surely as it stirred inside his wife.

  Around him the voices of his congregation swelled in jubilant carol. His own rich baritone rang out with joy, and at the words Lo he abhors not the Virgin’s womb, Frere thought briefly, almost affectionately, of Gypsy May in the cold and dark outside those walls. What was she, after all, but a crude precursor of the Divine Mother whose labours they celebrated here in a church consecrated to her name? At all times all wise men had revered the mysterious organ of generation through which alone might life be entered. It was no devourer but the very portal of life.

  So, sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation, sing, all ye citizens of heaven above. Glory to God in the highest.

  Glory.

  In excelsis Gloria.

  Early that January a bitter wind blowing off the far Urals seized East Anglia in a grip of ice. After a night-long blizzard the villagers of Munding woke to find the water meadows glittering and still, the ford across the lane crusted over. The repose of snow was everywhere. The wind had dropped but the still air winced with frost. All the pumps were frozen and had to be freed with burning straw. Mattocks were taken to the ice-bound troughs. Icicles dangled from roof thatch and porch. Each window pane hung dizzily fronded.

  Cattle moaned in the stalls. When they staled in the yards it quickly froze. The geese seemed driven off their heads with ice as the nights became a vast gallery of frozen stars, the air so stiff it scarcely yielded breath. The moon itself was not colder or more silent than this strangely arctic Munding landscape. Already it felt as though the earth would never warm again.