The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  The next day had been largely wasted. When she saw that her tense efforts to concentrate were getting nowhere, she made a swift expedition back to the Hall. She wished to collect two items overlooked in the haste of her first departure: her deck of Tarot cards and, for wise consoling company, the porcelain figure of a Chinese mandarin which had stood for many years in her bedroom at the Hall. His face was smiling and, when you tapped the head, it rocked on a concealed axle so that he seemed to chortle at the absurdity of human antics. It was the smile she wanted with her, for she had felt its lack about her in the Lodge, and now that lack was remedied. Yet even under the Chinaman’s cheerful protection the second night was little improvement on the first. Though she had slept longer, her dreams, if not alarming, had been most unpleasant, and she woke feeling unrested. Later that day she had been forced to catnap at her desk, having achieved little else of consequence there.

  Brief as it was, the sleep did her good. On waking, it occurred to her with renewed conviction that the experience of two days before might have been no more than a temporary aberration of an exhausted mind. In the cool light of this brighter day it was hard to conceive of it as a visitation of demons. She looked back over the recently written unsatisfactory pages of her book, and there was no doubt that her mind must have been tired. She winced at their infelicities, at the clumsy way they beat about the bush. She saw that it had been a mistake – an evasion perhaps? – to hamper herself with the abstractions of that cryptic poem. Her attempts at explication had only clouded her own contemporary voice, and led her far astray from the feeling heart of the matter. She was fresher now, more confident; confident enough to scrap the entire chapter and begin anew.

  An hour or so was spent drafting a new outline for this second approach on the mysteries of the Coniunctio and, when she was satisfied that its thread was strong enough to guide her through the maze, she took up again the pursuit of Mercurius through the bridal chambers of the mind.

  Around nine o’clock on what was now her third night at the Lodge, she looked up from the page and saw a face at the dark window staring in at her through the rain.

  Instantly the entire surface of her skin went cold. She stared at the window aghast, and the woman’s face stared back, shadowy and haggard, blurred by the streaming rain. She stared in at Louisa like a crazed creature, silently beseeching help.

  Several seconds passed before the face of the strange woman dissolved into her own recognized reflection. Heart pounding still from the certainty that here was the returning shade of one of her grandfather’s mistresses, Louisa slumped back into her chair and dropped the pen. When she looked back at the window there was the face again, but it was attempting now to smile.

  She had been foolish to neglect to draw the window blind, but there was no comfort in this self-reproof. The plain fact was she had been terrified by her own reflection, and this was not lightly to be dismissed. Anonymous anxieties still swirled inside her. Again the questions returned.

  Why was she subjecting herself to this penal state of solitary confinement? Why was she afraid? Of what? And then – with final, frightening clarity – what inward turbulence of her own soul might possibly explain this sense of Madcap Agnew’s unrequited presence in the Lodge?

  For a moment, like a scholar contending both with his own conscience and the uncovered fact which calls an entire thesis into question, Louisa gazed in fascination at the thought, then flinched from it. Surely it was disproportionate? What need to import further obscure perplexities into an already complex situation – particularly when simpler and convincing explanations lay to hand? She was a woman alone on a blustery night with no one by in case of need: here was reason enough for timidity. Were she not to experience such moments of trepidation, there would be something strange in her nature indeed.

  To calm herself she scrutinized the evening’s work. Her heart fell again. If she had neutered the quick of mystery in platitude before, she was smothering it with symbols now. It was hopeless, hopeless.

  Again panic seized her. Fighting it, she scrumpled the pages in her hands. There was no question but that something vital had been missed, ignored, neglected there… something scarily associated with the darksome presence of her grandfather. She was in flight from it – as she had imagined that woman in the rain in flight. And, like her, she was drawn back, again and again, to the very place of terror that she fled.

  As her father had so often complained, to engage with this task was to enter a labyrinth, and it seemed that whichever way she turned she came to this impasse. Perhaps, like the frightened creature she had imagined in the night – it was after all herself – it would always be so until she turned and truly faced the thing she feared?

  Louisa stared at her reflection in the drenched, dark glass. She stared until it was hard to know which was herself – the disconsolate woman in the chill room or the other sorrowful face in the night outside. Somewhere, it seemed, she was ignorant of both.

  A further decision was taken then. She pushed back her chair, stood up and crossed the room to open her box of tarot cards.

  Four hours later she had begun to understand. Almost the entire deck of cards – sixty-six of them – were spread out on the floor before the fire. At the centre of a triangle of twenty-two cards, within a rectilinear arch constructed from the rest, lay the single card she had consciously chosen to represent herself. It was The Queen of Swords. Louisa’s solitude, the wary alertness of her face, the way – symbolically at least – she brought the bright sword of her intellect to her defence – these and many other factors required this particular card and no other as her ambassador in the court of Le Grand Jeu. This was the name of the spread she had chosen, and it displayed an entire interior self-portrait on a scale she had never attempted before. Reading that wealth of images had tested her powers of concentration to the utmost, yet this act of unremitting self-scrutiny had left her more energized than exhausted, for much of critical importance had emerged.

  The reading had fully revealed a fact which she had dimly apprehended before but lacked the courage to confront until she saw it reflected in the mirror of the spread. The fact was that for many years she and her father had been living with a dangerous illusion, and the illusion was that they were entirely virtuous in their endeavours, entirely on the angels’ side. She had striven to make her work perfect – forgetful that it was not perfection which life required, but completeness. And what a failure of sensibility this had been!

  To make the recognition now was not to deny that she and her father had been aware of their flaws and petty vices, but to consider themselves only commonly fallible was less than half the tale. They had ever been larger than common in their aspirations, and the shadow they cast was correspondingly deep.

  In angry self-reproach, Louisa saw how much sooner it should have been evident to her that in identifying so completely with his most noble ancestor, her father had been at pains to exclude all thought of his more immediate and darker legacy. Aware that Madcap Agnew’s name was scarcely mentioned in the Hall, that the Lodge had been for many years a forbidden place, and that her father’s heart still quailed to reflect on the terrors he had suffered as a child, Louisa had not dared to let her reflections on this unhappy history reach far enough. Still worse, she had allowed herself to be drawn into a conspiracy of exclusion. She had made – and with far less justification than her father – the same grave error as he. Had it not been for the ignorant impetuosity which demanded the Lodge as the most appropriate environment for her work, the truth might have continued to elude them. Nevertheless, the facts of the case were now plain enough in her spread: Madcap Agnew remained as much alive inside them as did the glorious seventeenth-century adept of the Art. He was, perhaps, more powerfully so, and not merely as a matter of proximate generation but precisely because such strenuous efforts had been made to exclude him.

  In an enterprise such as theirs every aspect of the complex inward theatre must be brought into play and ass
igned its proper place, and this – though she shuddered at the consequence – included the daemonic figure of her grandfather. Refused admission by the front door, he had forced his way through the back – and with quite terrifying violence. It seemed that her brother had been right after all when he warned her that the Decoy Lodge was haunted. Madcap Agnew was still here. He was here because she was here herself. In part at least, she was his returning shade, and that shade was clamouring now to be embraced.

  The truth was fearsome and unavoidable. She remain uncertain still what was to be done with it, though she consoled herself with the thought that in entering the court of Le Grand Jeu and submitting to its verdict, she had already taken the first tentative steps. Yet she knew that the ordeal to come must tax all her strength and, not impossibly, exceed it.

  Nor was a reckoning with her grandfather’s shade the only sentence imposed by the spread. Another and equally disconcerting presence had materialized there – one which she had attempted to diminish some time ago and send packing from her thoughts. Yet there the figure remained and was, in a way, still less acceptable, for the mean spirit it betrayed lacked stature. To acknowledge it – as the cards insisted that she must – a portion of herself was to recognize features which were paltry and despicable; it forced the reluctant awareness that she was, in part at least, a smaller person than she believed herself to be. But there in her spread was Emilia Frere – afraid of life, querulous, cold-hearted – and they were, it seemed, sisters beneath the skin. Somehow she too must be embraced.

  The whole picture ranged wider far, but two vital considerations immediately emerged. The first was that she and her book would have nothing complete to say to the age until her grandfather’s misspent energy had been redeemed inside herself. The second gave cause for more personal concern. It was evident from the spread that enormous powers were available within her – powers which might be channelled into rich creation, or which might, if not subjected to correct restraint, become destructive. She began to understand how the bleak vision she had been shown was no more and no less than the extremes to which such powers might go if once they lost touch with the exactions of a loving heart. Hitherto she had experienced the unruly masculine spirit inside her soul as little more than a matter for jocular asides or occasional remorse to see it bound like Pedro into mischief, but notice had now been served. The powers of this spirit were immense and impersonal. Unassimilated, they might one day wreak havoc in her life.

  How to engage with it then, when at the first glimpse of its potentially monstrous nature she had fled? It still terrified her – even more now that it was acknowledged as a portion of her soul. She was far from confident that she possessed the moral courage to endure further revelations from that dark side of her moon. Yet the process of reading the spread had been like mounting a ladder that vanished beneath her: once started there was no return. She could not now pretend that none of this was known to her, that she was still simply a diligent and faithful daughter, loyal handmaid of a noble art. Consciousness exacted its price: as surely as it increased freedom so it diminished it. She must proceed.

  Congenial or not, the truth had been made evident to her in the spread. She had seen it there not in terrible isolation but as a part, a vital part, of a larger pattern – one that pointed the way towards completion of her task. Completion must be her watchword now, whatever admissions it entailed, and was not completion at the very heart of the Coniunctio – the central symbol which had proved the stumbling stone of her work? It was the reconciliation of Sol and Luna after the violence of their strife, the chymical wedding of Sulphur and Quicksilver, the meeting of the dark and light in close embrace from which the golden stone was born. She had known this all along, but she knew it with a different knowledge now. It was a more than intellectual comprehension, and to write of it she must strive to become that meeting. She must submit to its ordeals.

  Last time Madcap Agnew had stepped unbidden from the chamber of her mind. She must summon him now.

  Unconscious of the hour, driven by a nervous certainty, Louisa crossed to her desk, smoothed her hand across a fresh sheet of paper, and took up her pen.

  “Well, old fellow in the cellarage,” she whispered lightly to herself, though the breath was shallow in her throat, “it seems I must speak with you at last.”

  If the domestic servants at the Rectory were surprised when their mistress came downstairs the following morning, her husband was astounded. Had his violent loss of temper done the trick after all? Was his wife human again?

  Under her cold regard Frere quickly saw that his outburst would not easily be forgotten. And why should it, he reflected, when a sullen anger smouldered in him still? He had scarcely slept that night. He had let the sun go down on his wrath and woken with it. Anger, he saw, had not been lightly numbered among the deadly sins. For Horace it might have been a short madness; in Frere it threatened to become a running sore. Not even George Herbert’s counsel that the country parson’s rage might here and there be justified had comforted. Nor could he even remember now what he had said in that burst of spleen. He dreaded that it might be unforgivable.

  “My dear,” he attempted, “how good to see you up and about again.”

  Emilia informed the maid that she would take a lightly poached egg and some toast.

  Thereafter there was silence in the dining room.

  “I was about to visit old Will Yaxley at The Pightle,” Frere volunteered eventually. “I fear he cannot last much longer… But I will remain here and keep you company if you wish.”

  Again there was no answer.

  Frere swallowed, looked about him. “His will be my first funeral in Munding, I believe.”

  “Then perhaps you had better attend to the mending of his soul. He is a spiteful man and a drunkard. One who appears to find more comfort in the Feathers than the church.” There was an absence of interest in Emilia’s voice.

  “Yes, perhaps I should go.”

  “As you wish.”

  Frere’s breakfast was finished. He ringed his napkin, scraped back the chair, made to get up, then had second thoughts. “You are feeling stronger today?”

  “A little.”

  “I am glad to hear it.” Again he made to rise.

  “There is dust on the banister rail, Edwin. You had not observed the servants’ negligence?”

  Frere sighed. “My mind has not been on dust, Emilia.”

  Studiously Emilia declined the implication. “Then I must speak to Mary myself,” she said. “When I have done so, I think I shall retire again.”

  “A little at a time is perhaps best. I would not have you overtire yourself.” Frere hesitated, cleared his throat. “Emilia, about yesterday afternoon…”

  “I prefer not to speak of it.”

  “Surely we must?”

  “You may speak if you wish. I shall not answer.”

  “You will accept no apology?”

  She regarded him without warmth. “In my opinion, if we are to survive together here it is best that we behave as though that… incident… had not occurred.”

  That such a policy was entirely unfeasible was evident in her manner. He was on the point of saying so, when he despaired. No, thought Frere, this is my first funeral. Let us bury it and be done.

  “Very well. If you prefer it so.” He got up from his chair.

  “And how am I to respond to Hattie’s letter?”

  Whatever way you choose, damn you, he thought. He said, “Can there be any question? You are not yet well.”

  “That is true.”

  “Then you must thank her for the invitation and suggest a postponement.”

  Emilia nodded. “You would have no objection to my going when I feel ready to do so?”

  “Of course not. Why should I?”

  “As you are not free to go yourself, I merely wondered whether you might not feel my absence.”

  Dear God, he was beginning to think he would be glad of it. “Of course I should. B
ut a few days…”

  “I was thinking of a longer stay.”

  “You were?”

  “As you know, Father has not been well and Hattie is not the most reliable of attendants. She says in her letter that he misses me dreadfully.”

  She would not hold his gaze. A cold suspicion entered Frere’s mind. He realized that he could no longer trust his wife. “How long a visit did you have in mind?”

  “Oh, I cannot possibly say at this point. The very thought of the journey wearies me… Several weeks perhaps.”

  “Several?”

  “Two or three. Perhaps more. I really cannot say.”

  What was this sudden panic round his heart? As though he had stepped on a rotten floorboard and it had fallen through.

  “Well,” he hedged, “as this is not an immediate matter, we must speak of it again,” and turned away.

  “Of course, if you would rather I wilted here?…”

  And there was the rage again. “Emilia,” he demanded roughly, “what are you saying to me?”

  “If you continue to speak to me in that cold manner,” she answered, “I shall say nothing at all. Go to your dying drunkard – it is quite clear you are out of all patience with me.”

  At which point the maid returned with a salver and a rack of toast.

  “We will speak of this again,” said Frere.

  “Do you sit up, Will Yaxley, and make yourself a bit more pleasant now, for Parson Frere is come to comfort you again.” The sick man’s wife pushed a cushion behind his head and brushed a wisp of white hair back across his brow. Then she turned to smile uncomfortably at the priest. “Will you take a cup of something, Rector?”

  “No, thank you, Mabel,” Frere answered. “Don’t trouble yourself. Leave me and this old sinner alone awhile.”

  There was an insanitary stink throughout The Pightle, but how should it be otherwise with the sick man, his wife, two sons, a daughter-in-law and three children crowded here? Frere was in the bedroom at the top of a winding stair, and the door to the only other upper room stood open on a clutter of pallet beds and dirty clothes. Through the tiny windows under the thatch eaves he could see the bare boughs of an apple tree and, beyond, the turned sods glinting in cold sunlight – land that this sick man had worked for thirty years or more, cursing the soil he tenanted from King’s to yield a narrow living. Somewhere downstairs came a clatter of pails, and the outraged squawk of a chicken rousted from the tabletop. There had been no sign of little Sam. If the child had sense, he was out somewhere in the fields, away from the squalor of this wretched hovel.