The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  Hattie was not the kind of woman ever to be troubled by demons. Her social calendar was far too full to entertain such disagreeable company, and should any turn up inadvertently among her guests then someone else must deal with them. Her own vague, frankly scatter-brained manner would always get away with it. Chatterboxes do.

  Regrettably, however, she felt that Edwin’s importunate letter must be taken seriously. No doubt he exaggerated (such was his wont where his conscience was concerned), yet the only news she had received from Em herself had not been happy, and now – to learn that she had suffered a miscarriage in that desert place at such a time of year, and that she had not felt able to share the grief of it with her own affectionate sister… Well, something was plainly wrong, and it was evident that Edwin was far too feeble to cope with it alone.

  Hattie read the letter again, and sighed. As if her father’s interminable complaints were not enough, no matter how she put herself out to please him. He had ever favoured Em – there were no two ways about it – and Em had been quite wrong to post herself to Norfolk in the first place. Sydney Smith had been wrong too; it seemed that the country was not even a healthy grave; though, judging from Edwin’s pusillanimous letter, Smith might have been in the right when he suggested that there were three sexes – men, women and clergymen!

  What qualities Em had ever seen in Edwin Frere quite beggared comprehension. The thought of several days cooped up with the man in some dreary Rectory was… Well, it was uninspiring, and Hattie needed inspiration. But she must go. Plainly she must go. Her appointments for the following week could, at a pinch, be postponed. Frogmore must hold the fort.

  Hattie opened her writing case, took out a sheet of paper and her pen, then sat gazing wistfully out of the window over Parker’s Piece while she wondered whether or not to cooperate with Edwin’s stratagem that this must appear a chance visit. How complicated the man made everything! Emilia would never be deceived; the sisters knew one another far too well. In fact, on second thoughts, would it not be far more sensible to invite Emilia to come to Cambridge? Surely, to get her out of that tedious place – if only for a time – must be a better answer. And that way she need cancel nothing. Em would enjoy the stimulus of old friends. It would cheer her no end, and it would delight their father too. Of course!

  My dearest darling Em, she penned.

  Then it occurred to her that this new plan would require two letters – this first and an explanatory note to Edwin, which was tiresome. Yet not half so tiresome as a February expedition across the fens.

  How clever of her to think of this! She would remind Froggy of it the next time he ragged her for a noodle.

  Calling vainly for her dog, Louisa pushed on deeper between the trees. She longed to encounter some other human presence and could not bear the thought of it. She felt contaminate. She would infect even the trivialities of conversation with the vileness of her thought. So she kept to the woods, following the way Pedro had led, until she came at last to the clearing at the head of the ride. It was the place where her grandfather, indulging some pharaonic whim, had planned to raise an obelisk. He might have done so, she reflected bitterly, had not madness made him its own monument first.

  She stood with the cape drenched about her, the rain at her back, and knew she would never go back to the Lodge. The memory of what had happened there defied all thought. She had been too long the creature of thought, and now she had seen. She refused to think, to see, again.

  She looked down the long ride to where, at the distant foot of its slope, the lake shuddered in the wind. She stared into its surface, which exercised a deep downward draw, as when one peered into a well and felt one’s thoughts involuntarily plummet. She stared and stared until there was no division between the lake and her mind. Both were unappeasable. Here, like the mingled waters of a flood, was the first chaos of things. It was the dead sea of being female. Here one drowned.

  A gust of wind tugged the hood to her shoulders. Freed hair fluttered about her eyes in soft, damp lashes. She must toss her head to see the lake clear again, and the action recalled how differently she had felt on the day when she skated there with Edwin Frere and Tom. She wanted to feel the world real around her again. She wanted to touch and be touched. She wanted to be comforted with closeness, to forget everything in such immediate intimacy, to be told that it was all right, that the world was real, and she had woken from a bad, bad dream…

  And there was nowhere to turn. Even Pedro had fled from her. And if she abandoned the search for him, and hurried to the Hall, back to her father, what comfort there? A forty-year madness, he had called it, one which had laid waste the best years of her young life, yet he was back in the thick of his obsession now, and so elated by his own recent progress that he lacked the time to ask about her own. A wave of rage assailed her. He was a self-absorbed old fool. He had drained all the virtue from her. He had taken her innocence and beguiled it, filled her childish head with enthusiasm for his own mad fantasies and left her depleted, a high-minded virgin on the rocks of her own barren dreams. A monstrosity.

  There was so much anger in her she could not see what might be done with it. And how had all this happened? Because her father was afraid of life. As a child he had been unable to cope with the passions around him; he had hidden himself away in books, consoling himself with golden reveries. And then, as a man, he had needed a fellow conspirator to make those consolations real, to confirm him in the righteousness of his seclusion from the world. Wisely, her brother had refused, but she… She had wandered innocently into this self-sealing labyrinth of fantasy until she was afraid of life herself. As now, in this terrible rain, she was afraid.

  Emilia Frere had been right after all. To be a woman was to be a shell-less creature, bereft and vulnerable. It was to be the sport of men’s insensitive obsession, raw matter tormented for the truth. One could survive only by silence and a strict refusal of complicity. One survived by guile.

  But the thoughts sickened her. She was as much their victim as the naked flesh she had seen in that bleak vision had been victim to the flail. They did not fill the emptiness inside her; they only scarified it. She recoiled from the ugliness of it all, for the bitter reflections felt part of the epidemic of hatred she had encountered in the Lodge, and to brood on them was to remain its passive prisoner.

  Had her father not tried to warn her after all? She should never have shut herself away in that dreadful place. And in another matter he was right: she had possessed no knowledge of the rigours of the task when she so confidently proposed it. On both counts he had tried to stay her impetuous hand. As always she had won her way, and now she was paying the price of it. She was suffering as he must have suffered, and, if he knew her pain, might he not come to her, as she had so often come to him, gently reminding her that despair was an unavoidable but essential ordeal of the quest?

  He might; but would she believe him if he did? In this miasma of voices, which were to be trusted? And if she tried to tell her father what she had experienced in the Lodge, what then? He would, she knew, be terrified himself. He would immediately forbid her return.

  But was that not what she wanted – for a voice outside the clamour of her own head to tell her that she need not go back, that she must not go back? That it was folly to persevere, a needless risk. What she wanted was permission to cease.

  Was she a child then still, that she could not take the decision for herself?

  In confusion again, Louisa looked up and saw that the light was performing wondrously now across the lake. The billows of cloud were gleaming as they moved through the rain, and briefly her senses lifted at the sight, but there was no instant consolation there – only, inside a crowded mind, a sudden increase of space. Animate or inanimate, indifferent or not, there was something luminous and terrible about these clouds, raining as they did on the just and the unjust alike. Willingly she would have surrendered the gift of consciousness if only she might drift like these in a blind passion of being, exem
pt from question, yet even as she yearned wistfully so, another voice inside her agitated mind was whispering the old caveat from the Rosarium: that all error arose from failure to begin with the proper substance, from a proud forgetfulness that the magisterium is Nature’s work and not the worker’s. She had no desire to hear it but the voice was insistent. It required a calmer appraisal of her predicament.

  If she returned to the Hall and told her father what she had endured, she would be forbidden to return – that was what must happen. And what then would become of her days? The task would never be resumed. She would have no heart for it. She would drift listlessly about the rooms, her dreams extinguished. It would be the end of all her high ambitions, and though the world would not greatly suffer thereby – for by now she had lost all confidence that anything she might say would alter the course of things – that crisis which was privately her own would remain for ever unresolved.

  If she did not return to the Lodge she might never experience such terror again, but the memory of it would never leave her. It might diminish with time, secreting itself away in some irregularly attended cranny of her brain, but it would be there, waiting, finding its moments. Somewhere, for ever, she would be afraid. Her sanity might be preserved, but wherein would its value lie?

  Yet if she went back…

  Again she found herself trembling at the thought. Nothing could persuade her to enter the Lodge again. Yet she could not remain here, huddled against the rain which ran down her face and still would disguise from no one the humiliation of her tears.

  She was still sick at heart when she passed down through the last glade and found herself staring at the Lodge’s covert thatch, its closed door. She stood for a time in the yard outside, afraid to enter. She walked away, around the house to the jetty where her skiff bobbed on its painter, puddled with rain. She must bail before she could leave if she was not further to dampen her skirt, but what did that matter? She was already drenched. That alone might account for her shivering.

  And still there was no sign of Pedro.

  With more bravery than she had ever mustered before, Louisa retraced her steps. She pushed open the door on silence. The fire was dead in the hearth, the shadows gathering. She stepped inside and, still wearing the soaked cape, ready at an instant to flee, sat down at her desk. The pages of her book stared back at her. She waited.

  For a long time she waited, and nothing more terrible came to enter that silence than her own dark imaginings. A decision was taken then. And Pedro’s continued absence insisted that she act on it at once.

  Half an hour later, driven by a resolve almost beyond her comprehension, she was across the lake, informing Tilly that it had become necessary for her to take up more permanent residence at the Lodge. The wet journeys back and forth were, she explained, a weary imposition on her time, and she had decided that until the work was done she would pass the nights there. Provisions must be laid in, now, that day. Sheets and blankets would be needed, candles, food.

  More alarmed by her mistress’s drawn features and wet clothes than by her brusque manner, Mrs Tillotson wondered aloud whether this could possibly be wise.

  Wise or not, Louisa insisted angrily, it was essential. She would be grateful if Tilly would stir herself about it.

  “I should be a deal happier,” Mrs Tillotson protested, “if the master were consulted first.”

  “By no means must he be disturbed,” Louisa snapped. “Nor will I have you worry him behind my back. I am about his business and must accomplish it as best I may. Is that quite clearly understood?”

  Astonished but not dismayed by this severity, the housekeeper surveyed her bedraggled mistress. With that homely air of perplexed affection that had so long endeared her to Louisa’s heart, she gave voice to a remaining consideration. It seemed, at that moment, to distress her above all others. “But there will be no one by at night to dress your hair.”

  Louisa laughed then, though her laughter was close to tears. “Then I shall be a fright,” she answered. “Forgive me, Tilly, I don’t mean to dismay you, but you have no understanding of how urgently these matters press. You must trust my judgement. I am safe enough at the Lodge and with your help I shall make all snug. Now come, waste no more of my time. I must be back before light fails.” And how deeply she wished she could feel the confidence impressed upon her voice as she added with forced lightness, “Apart from any other consideration, I still have a wet dog to find.”

  Unconvinced, shaking her grey curls under the mob cap, Mrs Tillotson did as she was bidden.

  The bedroom was insufferably dark, though if he insisted that the drapes be further drawn they would open only onto a dour and leaden sky.

  “You have heard from Hattie?” he enquired.

  “I have.”

  “And what does she have to say?”

  There was a long silence. Which he must finally break. “My dear?”

  “Did I not ask you that my family not be troubled?”

  “Indeed you did, Emilia, but…”

  “Do my wishes count for nothing in this house?”

  “You know that is not the case. All of us desire nothing more than that you should take hold of your life again…more freely exercise your will. There is no future in this confinement from the world.”

  “Do you think I would choose to be so?”

  “Indeed I do not,” lied Edwin Frere. “Yet you must have help to free you from this condition and, frankly, I have found myself at a loss. When the good doctor suggested that I override your wish and write to—”

  “That man was behind this then? I might have guessed.”

  “He has only your best interests at heart.”

  “The man has no heart. You have no conception how deeply he distressed me. He would be better employed as beadle, or as taskmaster in the Saxburgh Union.”

  “Nevertheless, he wishes you well. If his manner was a little rough…” The sentence was stifled under the thick cushion of Emilia’s sigh.

  “Well, the harm is done,” she said, and placed the letter at her bedside table next to the sal volatile.

  “No harm, I am sure of it. Only good can come from loving company. Tell me, what does Hattie say?”

  Frere was unaware of it but his sister-in-law had spared herself the burden of a second letter. He was, in consequence, in an agony of apprehension.

  “She wishes the impossible.”

  “She does?”

  “Though she seems most eager to see me.”

  “But why not? We have plenty of room here at the Rectory. It would be a delight to have her bright spirit about the place.”

  “I know you do not greatly care for her, Edwin. Do not patronize me. I am not yet without my wits.”

  Chastened, Frere said, “Hattie would be excellent company for you. You could take the country air together. Surely your sister could do what I have failed to do… restore your cheer, your vigour?”

  “As always you grasp the stick by the wrong end. Hattie wishes me to visit her, in Cambridge.”

  For a moment, Edwin Frere was stunned. How could the silly chit have so mistaken his intent? He had been at such pains. Never had a letter been more carefully worded.

  “She is of the opinion that the loneliness of this place accounts for my condition. She believes that the respite of a holiday in Cambridge would speed my recovery. Of course, it is out of the question.”

  “But I made it absolutely clear how frail you were… that it was imperative that she come here…”

  Emilia looked up sharply in the gloom. “Imperative? You used that word? Harriet mentions nothing of this.”

  Caught in the toils of his own deceit, Frere’s eyes scouted the room. He found its heavy odour suffocating.

  “I thought… the surprise…”

  “You would seek to conspire with my sister behind”

  Suddenly he was out of all patience. “Dear God, Emilia, there is no pleasing you and your family. What am I supposed to do? Whatever motion
I make you hasten to find fault. You terrorize the servants, insult the good doctor, accuse me of sedition… Is all the world to blame but you? Why, you become as tiresome as your father.”

  Had he smacked her across the face, the result could not have been more devastating. Emilia stared at him with Medusa’s eyes a moment then eased herself further into the bed where she lay gripping the coverlet with white fingers. On the stone mask of her face no tears appeared. Frere got up from his chair, hating himself, to prowl the room like a caged panther. Damn the woman, he would not apologize. He was almost of a mind to tear the sheets from the bed, heave her out, send her sprawling in an agony of humiliation across the floor.

  Emilia said quietly, “I think you have it in your heart to murder me.”

  “Don’t be preposterous, madam.”

  But a hot darkness sweltered at his head. The breath was constricted in his chest and he found it difficult to swallow. Dear God, what had he done that things should come to such a pass as this? He turned to face his wife who lay, it seemed, transfixed with terror at his unprecedented rage, and hating him, hating him.

  Violently he shook his head and slammed his way out of the room.

  If Louisa had not dreamt badly on her first night at the Lodge, it was because she hardly slept at all. Little enough daylight was left by the time Pedro came skulking back, and for most of the evening she had sat, talking to him, stroking the soft rug of his ear between tense fingers, and waiting for the fit to come again.

  Nothing had happened. Louisa hardly knew whether she felt more relieved or cheated, for the act of summoning all the courage and then being able to employ it only against her own anxiety had depleted her to no useful purpose. She felt as a nervous duellist must feel when his challenger fails the appointment – angry, braver in the aftermath than in the apprehension, her stomach slightly queasy with unassimilated dread.

  The truckle bed had been narrow and hard, and she was profoundly unwilling to surrender herself to sleep. Though the Lodge was quiet enough, it would have been a too perilous lowering of her guard, so she tossed and turned until not long before dawn, when her body took matters into its own exhausted hands.