The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  With a pang of dismay she saw how everything she knew came only from a marriage between native intelligence and the wisdom of old books. Though the books were sound, her apprehension clear, the meeting joyful, could that possibly be experience enough?

  She looked back through the many pages she had written, and saw the great names glitter there – Proclus, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Ficino, Pico, Agrippa. Ardent spirits all. Men who had known and endured the world. These and the adepts of the Art were her fiery masters. Apart from her father and her brother, these were the only men she had ever deeply known. She loved them all and, yes, she could write of them. Out of her mating with their books a small book of her own would be born. She had set her mind to it, and it would certainly be accomplished, but in that winter dusk, as the rain fretted at her window, as she recalled the innocence of the child who had once sung alone in the house where her grandfather had done such wrong, Louisa Anne Agnew, already twenty-seven years old, wondered whether her life had yet properly begun at all.

  “As far as I am concerned,” said Dr Horrocks, “the matter is plain enough.”

  “I am greatly relieved to hear it,” said Edwin Frere.

  The noise in the doctor’s throat might have been a groan or a growl. “I am afraid you misunderstand me. The plain fact of the matter is, there is nothing I can do for your wife.” Then he saw from the sudden anxiety on the parson’s face that this too might be misunderstood. He hastened to add, “Physically, Mrs Frere is sound as a bell. There is no good reason why she should remain in her bed, and the darkness of the room can only aggravate her melancholic condition. She must stir herself, Mr Frere, and if she will not, then you must stir her.”

  From the despair in the parson’s eyes the doctor saw that this remedy had already been tried to no avail. Clearly the dose had not been severe enough. But how, delicately, to suggest as much?

  “At the very least, this taste for laudanum must be discouraged. The tincture has its uses, but restoration of active vigour is not among them. It does not help, Mr Frere, it does not help.”

  Frere’s eyes were now wandering unhappily.

  “Come, sir,” the doctor pressed. “You must take her firmly in hand. In so far as decorum allows, I have tried to do so myself, and at some cost to my reputation for a sympathetic bedside manner. As you will have observed, your wife was not pleased to see me; she remained impatient of my attentions throughout, and the only profit from the visit is my own. I need hardly say that I don’t care to have things so. Don’t care for it at all.”

  Frere murmured an apology which Horrocks hastily dismissed. “Dammit man, I know these things can be difficult but some people must be bullied back to shape. And there are occasions – this is most certainly one of them – when it is the husband’s place, not the doctor’s, to do the bullying. You must learn to sharpen your tongue, sir. Even in the pulpit there are moments when mildness of manner is not enough. It is certainly the case in bed.”

  Frere’s face reddened – a blush, yes, but also a hint of anger too. “I have exhorted my wife to the point where I am at a loss for patient words,” he protested. “Would you have me take a crop to her, Dr Horrocks?”

  The doctor smiled. “You might show her one. A touch more of the spirit that is in you now can do no harm.”

  Sighing, Frere flapped his hands at his sides like a seal. “You will forgive me if I insist that I understand Mrs Frere better than you do yourself. It will only turn her to stone, I promise you. It would do the same to me.”

  “Stone against stone sparks fire, Mr Frere. Set a fire beneath her bed and I warrant she’ll be out quick enough.” Tom Horrocks had scented something suspect in Emilia Frere’s continuing frailty – it had been too sharply belied by the animus in her eyes. Yet he saw that this rough humour would not serve.

  “It is not in my nature,” Frere appealed.

  The doctor weighed his man. “Perhaps, after all, you are in need of help. Mrs Frere needs company, stimulus…”

  “She will see no one but myself.”

  “What about her own family? Has she no sister perhaps?”

  “Indeed she does, but she will not have me write to her.”

  “Good God, man, you don’t need her consent. Do it at once. Have her come. The surprise alone will be restorative. Take my advice, sir – put pen to paper instantly.”

  The thought of Harriet fussing about the Rectory held little charm for her brother-in-law. In his opinion, though it had never been openly expressed, she was little more than a flibbertigibbet whose thoughts rarely ranged further afield than the next gratification. Neither was at ease in the other’s company. But the doctor was right: he stood in need of help, and where else was there to turn?

  “Perhaps it would be wise,” he said. “I shall do it today.”

  “Excellent. See to it that the resolve does not expire with my departure.” Dr Horrocks turned in search of his hat and crop, then decided that a further word was needful. “We are friends, I think, Mr Frere?”

  “I have been happy to think so.”

  “Then, as a friend, let me ask you to have a care for yourself as well. My manner can be a little brusque, I grant you, but there is a reason for it – a sound professional reason. The care of others can be a wearing business. One must take steps to preserve one’s own virtue – I use the word in the classical sense, you understand. I advise you to take some such steps yourself. Otherwise, my dear fellow, you will soon be of no use to wife, man nor beast. Remember – I saw you on the ice. You did not falter there. You displayed a rare vitality. I am certain that your wife is not the only one who would profit from its wider deployment. Delight and laughter, sir, delight and laughter! If you hear tell of better tonics I should be glad to hear of them.” But the doctor discerned no more than the ghost of either in the Rector’s smile. “Well, you must excuse me now,” he sighed. “I have other calls upon my time.”

  Outside, Tom Horrocks stood for a moment stroking the nose of his great bay. He was fond of the man who fretted beside him, and a touch impatient with him too. But when ears were deaf, what use were admonitions? He put a foot to the stirrup and swung himself into the saddle. “Fish or mend nets, Mr Frere,” he said. “One or t’other and I don’t mind which.” And with that he reined the mare’s head about and was off down the lane, brandishing the crop, significantly, above his shoulder.

  Frere watched him go, and such hopes as he might briefly have entertained receded with the clop of hooves. For an instant envying his friend’s unmarried state, he turned into the house to pacify whatever agitated waters the doctor had left in his wake.

  Sometimes far into the evening she kept herself locked at the desk, writing, writing. No longer could she take any pleasure in the act; almost she had come to hate the interminable travail. Her wrist was stiff, her fingers calloused by the pen. And yet, as though not she but some other invisible agency were the true author of the work, page after page was done. It was a process of automatic writing such as she had heard tell of in the sillier drawing rooms of the county where idle men and women amused and, she suspected, sometimes alarmed themselves by tinkering in realms they did not understand; except that this was very different, for the entirety of her intellect was engaged. It danced in consort with whatever power it was that provoked her thought, and so energetically at times that, when a day’s work was over, she felt as weary as one of the dancing princesses from a fairy tale, exhausted by their demon partners.

  Then, at what was to her the crucial moment of the work, the music began to fail. At the beginning of each new paragraph she must summon her strength to overcome enormous resistances. A voice whispered that the work was nonsense, too far removed from the interests of the age to be of value. It would be mocked, scorned, spurned. She merely revealed herself for what she was: a cloistered innocent, lacking the fashionable touch, too earnest by half in her endeavours to persuade a jaded world that she knew best. Still worse, her mind was recurrently invaded now by carnal fantasies
.

  She had reached the point in her argument where she must examine and explicate the emblems offered by the masters for the Coniunctio Solis et Lunæ, the redemptive marriage-dance of sun and moon. Such emblems were manifold and she was embarrassed by their riches. Only after considerable thought and a number of false starts had she decided to take for her key reference the mysterious poem called the ‘Enigma Philosophorum’ from Elias Ashmole’s Theatre of Chemistry:

  There is no light but what lives in the Sun,

  There is no sun but which is twice begott;

  Nature and Arte the parents first begonne:

  By Nature ’twas but Nature perfects not.

  Arte then, what Nature left, in hand doth take,

  And out of one a twofold work doth make.

  A twofold work doth make, but such a work

  As doth admitt Division none at all,

  (See here wherein the secret most doth lurk)

  Unless it be a mathematical.

  It must be two yet make it one and one

  And you do take the way to make it none.

  Lo here, the primar secret of this Arte,

  Contemne it not but understand it right,

  Who faileth to attaine the foremost part,

  Shall never know Arte’s force or Nature’s might,

  Nor yet have power of one and one, so mixt,

  To make by one fixt, one unfixed fixt.

  It was, she thought, perfect for her needs. Gnomic, succinct, its puns and allusions introduced all the themes she must develop, yet it remained abstract enough for her mind to keep firm purchase on her errant feelings.

  Such was her hope and her intent, but once launched upon her exposition she quickly found herself confused by the royal actors of the Art. They were not to be chastened by homilies like children at a Sunday school. Flamboyant, mercurial creatures, they had passionate wills of their own; they exercised a devious, seductive fascination. She struggled to preserve detachment, yet even as her mind appeared to perform its duty, covering page after page with swiftly written words, elsewhere it found ever more disturbing ways to misbehave.

  Nor was it the mind alone. Her body had reached a climactic moment of its cycle, and felt famished and restless. Its clamourings against solitude were a constant distraction from the cooler processes of thought; yet even as her spirit chafed at this conflict between body and mind, Louisa understood that such stress was specific to her task and not to be avoided. Body and mind were among the contraries to be reconciled, and the true union of opposites was always preceded by bitter conflict. If her treatise was to fulfil the expectations raised by its prologue, she must make this difficult passage now – though it was, at times, an agony merely to remain seated at her desk.

  The turns of the work became ever more perplexing as the themes she must address became ever more entangled with the tensions she endured. In former ages certain masters had solved the problem by avoiding words entirely and resorting to pictures alone. There had been nothing either prurient or arbitrary in their choice of frankly sexual emblems to embody the mystery of the Conjunction, but even in times less hypocritical than her own such pictures had proved subject to misinterpretation. How much greater then the difficulty of conveying the mystery in words, and to an age reluctant to contemplate those experiences where the pathos of our animal nature stands in greatest tension with the highest aspirations of the soul! Nor was she herself exempt from confusion. In the erotic landscape on which her thoughts now opened, the illusory and the actual were so intimately twinned that only the most cautious eye might distinguish between them, and at each passionate encounter the symbolic and the literal seemed to enfold their embrace more tightly. Day by day her bewilderment increased, and, such was the fascination exercised upon the mind by these anarchic powers, she might find herself at any step allured in folly, and dizzily unaware of her plight.

  She had, in part, been prepared for this. After all, Mercurius was the tutelary deity of the Art, and it was of his very nature to beguile and confuse in this manner, but she could take no comfort from the knowledge, for she must pursue him as through a hall of mirrors, from one bride-chamber to the next, and at each remove he shifted shape with such dispiriting agility that, again and again, she might have cried out loud for rest. And then, one afternoon, with the rain still beating down outside, appallingly he assumed the face of Madcap Agnew.

  Aghast, incredulous, she craned to see more clearly if this was indeed her own mad forebear toying there inside her thought, and he turned to leer at her.

  Louisa recoiled. The image vanished, but for several minutes now she sat in shock. It had been his face. Those features were familiar from the portrait in the Hall – the raffish eyes, the shining cheekbones, the lines about the lips and nostrils, that air of derisive irony. All were unmistakable, but if the crazed face of her grandfather had elided with the beckoning features of Mercurius then something had gone very wrong.

  She looked back over what she had written: the words were empty, devoid of all vitality. It was not merely a matter of correction here and there – these were ashes; at best a discord such as some chained bear might pound on a piano. She released her breath in a sigh of exasperation. It was an attempt to preserve her objectivity, but it could not suppress a rising panic. She had deluded herself; she had believed that innocence of spirit and a devout purpose were adequate guides through this treacherous domain, but the facts were clear enough now: she had diminished mystery to pious platitude, and some devious element at work in the deeps of her imagination was scorning her efforts even as she made them… Did you truly believe, it seemed to say, that I was to be so easily pinned down?

  Suddenly she felt cold. Half-consciously, she reached to pull the wrap more tightly round her shoulders, and still some seconds passed before she realized. The fire was still burning in the hearth; all the draughts had long since been stopped; but the room itself had gone chill around her. The cold came like the dowsing of a light. It was like a smell on the air. She was surrounded by it. Her palms, she saw, were damp.

  Simultaneously, it seemed, there had been a change in barometric pressure. The room was unnaturally still about her, but the stillness might shatter at any second. It was waiting for something to happen; as she too was waiting for something to happen – something which must, at all costs, be forbidden.

  Then it felt as though the world was sliding inside out as, slowly, noiselessly, a panel swivelled in her mind. A hand somewhere might have touched a secret spring, for a whole wall was turning on a hinge to reveal a hidden chamber. There were figures in there, sounds.

  Either she must close her eyes against this or she must enter. Unnerved, stricken with terror now, there was no choice, but the darkness of her tightly shut eyelids offered no release. It brought the images to sharper focus.

  The chamber was candlelit. A man was there, reclining on a Récamier sofa, one booted leg slung along its length, the heel of the other cocked against the floor. His shirt was casually unbuttoned at the chest, the trousers high at the waist and tight about his hips. They were, she observed, of a cut long since outmoded. A ringed hand held a thin cigar which – as if in impatient expectation of her arrival – he stubbed in a silver tray. The Lodge had altered around her. She recognized none of the hangings, the furniture, the instruments scattered about. It was like a disorderly tack room, smelling of saddle leather – except that the air was also heavy with some dry exotic odour, dense and sensual. And everywhere – an emanation of the cold itself–there was a sense of incipient evil.

  Distantly she could feel the tremor of a heart still recognizably her own – though whether it shook with terror or from the first stirrings of a ferocious excitement was hard to distinguish now. Her mind was no longer entirely her own. Every nerve smouldered on a short fuse. There was an insatiable need for action. With what remained of her objective consciousness Louisa strove to tell herself that this encounter was not of her reality, not of her willing… but even as she
struggled, she felt herself drawn under the influence of a mind at once alien and familiar – a mind resolute to lacerate its own fine sensibility, and with a perverse, intellectual sang-froid. Slowly, as under the scientific patience of a practised tormentor, all things were disfigured now. Around her and – more terribly – within her, everything which had once promised exultation and delight was warping to extravagance and vice. Everything – however vile – was possible, and nothing forbidden. The consequences left her sick with shame.

  So far did the experience lie beyond the normal province of time, she could not later tell whether it lasted for moments only or extended into hours. What was certain was that throughout its duration she felt wasted by an emptiness that no extremes of violence, and no throes of humiliation, could even remotely begin to fill. Bedevilled so, and moaning at her desk, she might have frozen there had not Pedro come fretfully to her side. He pushed his muzzle into her lap, wagging his rump, pleading to be let out. Louisa crashed back into time.

  Instantly she knew that she too must get out of the Lodge. Even in the heavy rain she had to be out in clean air, running among the trees, anywhere other than inside the hot chamber of her skull.

  As soon as the door was opened Pedro was gone. Louisa snatched her cape from the peg, banged the door shut behind her and leant against it, panting. She saw Pedro disappear among the trees, called after him vainly, then stood in the rain, hands holding the hood tight over her ears. Then she too was gone, running, making for the trees.

  At that same moment, many miles away, Harriet Frogmore – Emilia’s younger sister and wife of a Cambridge gentleman-of-leisure – sat in what she was pleased to call her study, pondering the letter arrived that day from Norfolk.