The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  So, Sir Mercurius, you are named now, and I must needs consider more carefully how you have recently beguiled me.

  Item: it was you who provoked me to meddle so lightly with the Tarot cards, and sprang upon my casual attention the mystery of The Hanged Man’s smile – a perplexity I may well have merited, but which abides to trouble my more sober contemplations.

  Item: it was your insouciance that prompted my teasing of Mrs Frere, laying snares to catch the frightened rabbit which twitches behind her formidable smile without her suspecting what you are about. However, after this morning’s satirical conspectus of local society, the good lady is doubtless the less deceived as to our naivety, and I shall now have the greater work to prove myself worthy of her benevolence. It is a fault that must be made good if I am not to stand, as I do already with Mrs Bostock et al., in her patronizing disapprobation.

  Item (and this most vexatiously of all): you have lured me into a most questionable encounter with that gentle and diffident man, her husband, who must now entertain the gravest doubts of my propriety. How – I am left wondering – how am I to engage with him in the niceties of trivial conversation, which is the proper mode of intercourse between the parson and a young spinster of the parish, when there is the knowledge between us that we have both looked upon the private parts of Gypsy May and I have impudently advised him to take her to his bosom?

  Come, my Mercurius, I must learn to keep a tighter rein upon your mischief or one day, surely, it will quite undo me.

  Now that the spider was caught and Edwin had safely deposited it out of the bedroom window, Emilia expressed a guarded satisfaction with the spacious Rectory. “It is an airy and elegant place,” she agreed, “though certainly too large for our immediate needs.”

  “Ah, but when – as surely he shortly must – the good Lord sees fit to grace us with a family… will this not prove an excellent situation to raise them happily? The garden alone, my dear… It can soon be restored. It must have been a glory once. And all these rooms… Why, it makes our house in Portugal Place seem positively pinched.”

  Emilia’s eyelids flickered at this infelicitous alliteration, though the complaint was one she had often expressed herself. “It will be difficult to heat in winter,” she suggested.

  “I see no shortage of fuel in the separts. And the temporalities… They are substantial. Almost disproportionately so. I think that we might live very comfortably here.”

  Emilia stood by a window, gazing westwards. “You do not find Munding largely bare of diversion? I cannot but think that I shall miss Hattie and Charlotte and all our…”

  “But there are new friends to be made. Did I not see you getting on famously with Mrs Bostock?”

  “She is an admirable woman… if a little restricted in her interests.”

  “And then there is Saxburgh at no great distance. I am told there is an Assembly Room at the Black Boys Hotel, and a subscription library…”

  “And the promise, one hopes, of a wider circle of acquaintance.”

  “Well then… And Norwich itself is none too far away. Wharton tells me the railway will reach here soon, and that will bring all the world much closer.”

  Emilia sighed. “I confess that it still weighs heavily with me that we shall be a long and dreary distance from my father.”

  Frere’s own heart fell a little under that weight. He had counted it among the advantages of the location that it was not too far to Cambridge in case of actual emergency, yet far enough to counter trivial demands. That he should harbour such thoughts would not impress his wife, however, and the railway card was already played.

  “It will not be possible to pay the same close attention to his welfare that residence in Cambridge allowed. As you know, Edwin, he was quite desolate at the thought of our leaving, though he sought to conceal it, and he is not well.”

  Once more Frere could not bring himself to admit that he did not entirely trust the nature of Mr Davenport’s needs. “But Hattie is there, and the journey not insufferable.”

  For a long moment Emilia held her husband in a steady gaze. Why, oh why could he not have been happier in Cambridge? She had tried so hard to make him so. And it was hard that she should now be required to choose between the two people who mattered most in her life. Of course, should she put her foot down, she might remain in the place where no choice was needful, but then she must live with Edwin’s disappointment, for it appeared that his heart was now set on this move. And certainly something in their life must change.

  If only she had fallen pregnant in Cambridge. He would be such a good father, his happiness would have been assured, and she need never have faced this difficult decision. Again she looked out of the window, beyond the far wall of the neglected garden, where a plough team drudged across the long flank of a stubble field. The turned sods glinted in the chill light. And it was all very well for Edwin to wax lyrical about this lucid air and spout lines from the Georgics at her, but was not this the bare reality of country life – this dogged tussling with mud? She was a child of the city. Its gossip, its passing show, the toings and froings of witty company were her daily cordial. So must she accept this dull yoke? Almost she might have wept. But it had been many years since Emilia had shown her weakness to the world, and – much though her heart might flinch from the consequence – she was a dutiful wife.

  This was all too difficult for her.

  “The decision must rest with you, my dear,” she said eventually. “If you hear the vocation then we must trust to it.”

  His heart went out to her. He could feel the sacrifice, was sensible of the responsibility it placed in his hands and, nervous of this, he too was uncertain again. “Munding is a little remote,” he conceded. “There will be hardships and deprivations. Also it may well be that the larger opportunities of life may pass us by.”

  She smiled at him then, a wan reflex of sympathetic affection, for she was long reconciled to the knowledge that his ambitions reached no higher than an eventual canon’s seat in some cathedral chapter. Edwin was not the stuff of princes, but she cared for him no less for that. “I have only modest demands to make of life,” she said, “and foremost among them is your contentment.” But this was not the whole of her truth, and she must speak the rest. “What I must have is your assurance that you will be content in this parish, for it is not rich in such resources as we have learnt to take for granted in Cambridge.”

  She sensed immediately that it had been an error to mention Cambridge again.

  “I believe” – Frere was frowning as he spoke – “even that may have its advantages. In such a small parish as this… the closeness of such a community… a man might make a deeper mark upon the hearts of others. And that, surely, is where true contentment lies?”

  It was hard for him that he felt unable to share with his wife the fruits of his earlier reflections. Their occasion scarcely permitted it. And yet, with the source of his new resolve concealed, there was an incompleteness to his answer. He was left with hints, implications and the hope that his wife might gather from his earnest gaze that much of importance to his moral fibre was here at stake. “If that were so,” he added, “then one might begin to feel… worthy again.”

  “The parish would be more than fortunate to have you.” It was her pride that spoke, yet Frere felt her subtly withhold from him, as though her will was momentarily in abeyance rather than harnessed eagerly to his cause. A mantle of service and consideration seemed to muffle the pulse of life between them. He must venture more. But he paused for a long time in solitary contemplation before speaking again.

  “Yes I do feel… have felt… a kind of summoning. It is very curious… almost as though I knew the place already… have been in the hamlet before. As though to take the living would be a kind of return.” He looked up in search of understanding, but Emilia was staring out of the window now.

  He was decided then. She must be practical about it, and she was not patient with metaphysical speculations when pra
ctical issues crowded upon her mind. There were moments when it was wiser to yield than to resist, and this was one of them. She must give him his head and make her own dispositions accordingly. It had already occurred to her that the temporalities of the living were substantial enough whereby, when this backwater proved tedious, a curate might be appointed and they could still enjoy a prosperous life in Cambridge. For the moment, however, this planning against contingency must be kept to herself. She was too well-appraised of her husband’s present disapproval of absentee parsons.

  So even as their sentences tacked towards agreement, somewhere, deeply, they were at odds. They spoke together as they might have written letters apart – affectionately, yet from regions of experience at a far and dark remove.

  Throughout the day dark rain clouds had lowered across Easterness so that dusk when it came – earlier than usual that drear October evening – seemed a sealing of an already insuperable gloom. Henry Agnew sat alone in his library, meditating no longer on the volume at his desk. The small flame of the candle beside the book was, in any case, insufficient for reading without further injury to his sight, and he was feeling out of sorts. He was a little breathless from the dense weight of depression gathered at his stomach, and in the past few moments an unfamiliar tingling sensation, fiery and heavy, had begun to shoot from his chest along his arms. In other circumstances he might have dismissed it as writer’s cramp, but today… He had written so little. In fact, the first clear day since the departure of the Freres had produced no more than a scrumple of paper. And now, suddenly, this pain that brought with it a queer, sickly giddiness. It frightened him a little.

  Nervously, as though to test his own vitality, he reached for the candlestick, gripped and lifted it. There was the remote numbness of a hand gone to sleep. It was unsteady, and he would have replaced the brass sconce instantly but the glow of the small flame reached out across the gloom to animate the face of his distant ancestor, Sir Humphrey Agnew, where it smiled down, full-wigged, in the gilt frame against the panelling. It was a smile from outside time, unlined except where the skin tones had been crazed and mellowed by a varnished craquelure. Humphrey had been a young man when he sat for that portrait – for by Henry’s standards one’s forties were still a youthful season – yet the triumph of achieved intellectual consciousness was fully evident in the angled three-quarter face. During more than forty years of assiduous study, most of which had been passed here under the patronage of that smile, Henry Agnew had found a source of constant inspiration there. Now, in that uncertain light, its serene composure had taken on the aspect of a taunt.

  For so long had Agnew been the autocrat of his own solitude that nothing had been permitted to stand in the way of an ambition cherished since his youth. It had begun before he was twenty as a golden enterprise; yet now, when the harvest of those long years should at last come home, he questioned whether his metrical epic of the Hermetic Mystery would ever reach completion. Daily the crisis of the age cried out for it and he made no progress. Had he left it too late? Had he made the old adage that haste is the Devil’s part a mere excuse for procrastination? The fear that this was the case lay close to the root of his present gloom, for the consequences… The consequences were unthinkable.

  Trembling, he replaced the candlestick on his desk. The pains in his arms – he was convinced of it – were the first alarums of a heart threatening to fail. With a touch of malign irony he imagined its final spasm – an inward explosion of light, the sudden dark, and then a servant coming to the library, finding his body slumped across a book. A condign end to the intellectual arrogance of one who had persuaded himself – poor fool – that he too was of the Aurea catena, that golden chain linking across the generations all those who had striven to keep the fire soul live and burning in the world of men. Yet to have escaped from the mad shadow of his father for that, no more…

  These dismal reflections were interrupted by a rap that came lightly at the library door. It was followed, when he did not speak, by Louisa’s voice. “You are sleeping, Father?” Wearily he lifted his brow from his hands and answered, “No.”

  The door was opened. Louisa stood for a moment in the aura of the lamp she held, then shook her head. “How often must I beg you not to read by candlelight?”

  “I was not reading.”

  She heard the glum defiance in his voice, sighed – though not impatiently – she came across to share her light. “It has not gone well?” And, when he did not reply, “Perhaps if you chivvied the Muse less furiously she might prove readier to take you unawares.”

  She found no answering lightness in his face – only the black crow that haunted him so much of late. “Tell me,” she said, “what impedes your progress?”

  “It is a madness,” he said with sudden bitter vehemence. “A forty-year madness in which I have bruised my brains to no advantage and laid waste the best years of your young life.” Appalled by his own acrimony, he stared at her wide-eyed a moment, then looked away, shielding his face from her gaze with a quivering hand.

  She too was taken aback. Wondering, she looked down at his freckled crown, the ruffled silver hairs glistening in the lamplight. She saw the ink-stains at his thumb. After a moment she said, “You know it is not so.”

  “I know nothing. Nothing.”

  She placed the lamp on the desk, and her lowered glance took in the spoil of paper at his feet. Perceiving that in this black mood only some indirection might reach him, she put a hand to his shoulder waiting for inspiration.

  “I have misled you,” he said. “All those years when you might have been out in the bright world among your peers, tasting the very quick of life, I have kept you here… letting you fust away with an obsessed old man and his delusions…”

  She essayed one further lightness. “I am no fusty old maid, sir, and I would not have you think me so. Nor will I hear your priceless knowledge slandered – not even at your own lips.”

  He would not look at her, sat shaking his head. “There is no justification for what I have done, and no meaning in it. It is waste. All waste and dereliction.”

  An exclamation of protest was at Louisa’s lips. Then, for a moment, she was on the point of sharing with him an enterprise which had been quietly incubating in the privacy of her mind for some weeks now – one which would demonstrate how utterly wrong he was to judge her years of study waste. She saw instantly that this was not the time. In his present mood her father would negate all hope. He simply would not hear, and what she had in mind required his full assent. No, she must hold her peace a while, and find some other means to strengthen him.

  “Then you have forgotten all you taught me,” she said quietly. “I see you do not remember what I recall most vividly – those prescient words that John Pordage wrote for Jane. Must I remind you now?” He did not stir. She waited a moment then, softly, as though the music of her voice was an echo of a muffled whisper deep in his own mind, she quoted the old adept: “Now it seems to the artist that all his work is lost. What has become of the Tincture? Here is nothing that is apparent, that can be perceived, recognized or tasted, but darkness, most painful death, a hellish fearful fire, nothing but the wrath and curse of God.” She paused, stroking his shoulder with her hand. “Yet he does not see that the Tincture of Life is in this putrefaction, that there is light in this darkness, life in this death, love in this fury and wrath, and in this poison the highest and most precious medicament against all poison and sickness.”

  As she spoke his left hand moved from his temple to lie gently upon hers at his shoulder. His head was still bowed, but his breathing had slowed a little. It had ever been so, that she could quiet him like this, but today he could hardly bring himself to look at the child who had been the one great consolation of his life.

  A blinder man might have seen only that the birth of this daughter had cost him the loss of his wife, and indeed so deeply had Agnew grieved that it had been a long agony of time before he dared to look upon the babe for fear th
at he should hate her. Yet what awaited him, when finally he found the heart to see, was a priceless gift.

  If evidence were needed that we enter this life not from darkness but out of a radiance remembered by the infant soul, then it lived and breathed in that small child. Here was no common rag doll of a babe but a shining presence, and as the years passed that pristine clarity remained undimmed. Even after the accession of knowledge when so many children changed into wilful tyrants and conspirators, the subtle enquiring grace of her imagination astounded and delighted him. Swiftly she had learnt Latin, Green and Hebrew at his knee. Her intellect had been trained for his great purpose. Without her able secretarial assistance the long years of research might never have been completed. And she was more, far more, than a gifted amanuensis: she was his muse. Again and again her words had come like the rap of a wand on rock, freeing his thought. Such was the communion of their minds there had been times when he entered an almost trance-like condition. A mesmeric stillness would descend between them, then he was rapturously possessed once more with the gift of tongues. It might last for hours, this state, and was as exhilarating as it subsequently proved exhausting, and he had come to trust that such insights as might otherwise have perished with the passing of the trance were later to be found, impressed as in wax, on the clear tablet of Louisa’s memory. She had been indispensable to the work. She was – and still he quailed at the thought – his mystic sister.

  As Jane Leader had been mystic sister to John Pordage, as Peronelle to her husband Flamel, as Theosebeia in ancient times to Zosimus, and as – much closer to home – Janet Dyball had served his own glorious ancestor, Sir Humphrey, so Louisa had become mystic sister now to him. But that a man should use his daughter so… This was not the first time the thought had troubled him, but there it was – she had served him so with pride; she had done all that was possible to bring him to the moment where he must work alone. Only success could justify the demands he had made upon her, and should he, as now seemed probable, fail…