The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  Like it or not, Louisa Agnew was driven back upon the Hall. Observing her return from the Decoy Lodge one afternoon, blue and chapped about the lips, her father forbade further voyages across the lake until that frozen wind relented. So well had her work progressed at the Lodge, and so greatly – for all the discomfort – had she enjoyed her solitude, that Louisa momentarily tried defiance, but she was shivering uncontrollably even as she did so. She knew it was with good reason that she had brought her papers back across the lake that day. There was no virtue in having her fire soul expire in ice while she laboured to make it burn more brightly for the world. If Nature herself sought to impede her progress, then resistance was mere pride and folly. There would be time enough in more clement days to come.

  By the next dawn – a Saturday – even the lake at Easterness was frozen over. For the first time in years it was thick enough to bear. Furthermore the wind had dropped, the sun shone brilliantly over the ice, and already, early in the morning, small boys were sliding through the radiant air, whooping and hallooing, and sending broken boughs skidding across the frozen surface with a hollow, reverberating whoosh. Few people in the village had skates, but those who did were not the only ones to gather at the lake that morning without invitation or fear of rebuke. Such a rare marvel had instantly become public property.

  Even Sir Henry came out of his chill library to stand for a time, wrapped in greatcoat and mufflers, surveying the Breughel-like gathering at the lake. “Tundra,” he said with distaste, the word accompanied by a white plume of breath. “Don’t much care for it myself but it seems the people do. Louisa, we should have Ducker get out the stove… roast some chestnuts… mull some wine. If any of these poor beggars die of cold, old Starling will have a hard time digging a hole for them.”

  “You arrived at the thought a moment before I did,” his daughter answered. “It’s good to see you outdoors again, Father. To see some colour in your cheeks.”

  Henry Agnew sniffed. “Well, I’ve tasted the air and found it frigid. Enough is enough.”

  “You will not stay to watch me skate?” She pouted at the shake of his fur hat. “And surely once word reaches Saxburgh that the lake is bearing, Tom Horrocks will ride out to take a turn on the ice?”

  “Then he may join me indoors when he’s had enough, as I already have.” With that the old man turned away to give orders that the assembled villagers be shown the hospitality of the Hall. Privily he would have liked to enjoy the fun but his heart was already labouring against the cold. It frightened him a little.

  Louisa had been skidding unsteadily about the ice for the best part of an hour when a carriage came round the rear drive of the Hall and, after a moment’s debate, Edwin Frere sprang down to give a helping hand to his well-muffled wife. Louisa was surprised by the arrival and glad of it, for young Frank Wharton had been ragging mercilessly her occasional graceless descents to the ice, petticoats and undergarments protruding from her skirt, skates flailing above them. Frank’s incorrigible efforts at flirtation had become tiresome to her and, the truth of the matter was, he was no great dandy on the ice himself for all his mockery. It was a relief therefore to make for the frozen shore where the parson was protesting that his wife would be safer and more comfortable if she remained in the carriage. She might observe the proceedings equally well from there.

  “I am no invalid,” Emilia replied. “If you will not permit me to skate, you must at least allow me to stand near the ice. This is as close as I have felt to Cambridgeshire for some considerable time.” She turned to greet Louisa with a ruddy-cheeked smile. “Good morning, Miss Agnew. Do I discern that skating has not been a frequent pleasure in these parts?”

  “Sadly so, Mrs Frere, as my inelegance attests. The lake rarely freezes so we have little opportunity to discover our ice-legs. But you are looking well this morning. It is a great delight to see the glow of health about you. We have wine on the mull. May I offer you a warming glass?”

  Emilia sighed and waved a weak, refusing hand. “I fear it will not agree with me. It is a pleasure, like that of the ice, I must forgo… in the interests of the third of our small party, you understand?”

  “Of course. But, Mr Frere, surely I can persuade you?”

  “In a moment, Miss Agnew, I would be delighted – but first I must try our Norfolk ice.”

  “It seems from the eager glint in your eye that you are a practised hand… or do I mean foot?”

  “In my day, Miss Agnew, in my day.”

  “Then you must impress us, Mr Frere. If you skate with the same passion as you preach, I dare say you will have the whole parish at your feet.”

  It was perhaps more than the chill air that flushed the parson’s cheeks as he bent to fasten his skates. “After the narrow dikes of Cambridgeshire,” he said standing again, “the span of this lake offers an exhilarating prospect. Will you accompany me, Miss Agnew?”

  “I should rather keep company with Mrs Frere. We shall stand breathless in admiration together.”

  “Then here I go.” Frere stepped onto the ice, sniffed at the cold air, and then, hands clasped at his back, the tail of his frock coat lifting a little in the breeze, he sailed off. One confident stride after another pushed him out across the ice until he wheeled sharply, shedding a spume of flakes at his feet. He smiled back at them, shifting his weight smoothly from foot to foot as he reversed, turned again and was off at an ever accelerating pace round the bend of the lake and swiftly out of sight. Louisa gasped with delight to see the man and his reflection travel together so fluently. The party of astonished villagers raised a spontaneous cheer at this virtuoso performance. Open-mouthed, a little aghast perhaps, Frank Wharton pushed himself stealthily further out across the ice where he could view the parson’s progress, the better to see how the thing should be done.

  “Upon my soul,” Louisa exclaimed to Emilia Frere, “your husband is a man of surprises. Why, he is as proud as a regimental stallion. I confess his grace amazes me.”

  Emilia smiled with satisfaction but said nothing. Inwardly she chafed a little that she too could not take to the ice and show this country maid a quicksilver pair of heels. How exhausting it was the way circumstances conspired against her simple pleasures.

  Momentarily Louisa was troubled by her companion’s silence. Had a too open show of admiration given offence? For she had felt a flame leap to her throat to watch the man’s confident pride in his body, the actuality of his skill, the sheer command. Who would have thought the ear-tugging parson to have such grace? Who would have thought it?

  Then her eyes were caught by Frere’s swift return around the bend of the lake. Imprinted against the sculpted white drifts of the opposite shore, he sprang from the ice in a swift, frisky curvet, landed with perfect balance, and sped towards them with a lithe, energetic swing from foot to foot, faultlessly timed. The shores rang to the sound of his skates against the ice, a resonant hollow warble drawn at each stride from the depths of the lake. He pulled himself erect and floated effortlessly across the shining surface to brake in a shower of ice shards at their feet. He was panting and smiling, an ice-glow radiant at his face. “This is heaven,” he said.

  “Certainly you skate like an angel, Mr Frere.” The male voice came from behind Louisa and Emilia. They turned and saw Tom Horrocks smiling there, a pair of skates slung over his shoulder. “If the road to heaven ever freezes over, you’ll be there before the rest of us. But then I suppose you would be anyway. At least I shall be warmer in the opposite direction.”

  “I very much doubt you will have the chance to discover,” Frere laughed. “Take a turn with me, Doctor, and I’ll lay my faith to your scepticism that I make the weir and back before you.”

  Tom Horrocks snorted. “I’m too old a hand to make wagers with sharpers, Mr Frere – even those sporting bands. But if a stately progress to the other shore and back will serve your turn then I’m your man. Provided, of course, I’m furnished with a glass of good red mull before we set out. It’s been
a cold ride from Saxburgh. And are those hot chestnuts that I see?”

  “They are indeed,” Louisa answered. “Come, help yourself.”

  Horrocks chatted affably a moment with Tilly, who presided over the hot griddle amidst a ring of ragged children. He took a chestnut from the pan and bounced it from hand to hand as he turned cheerily to enquire after Mrs Frere’s welfare. “It’s good to see you out and about. Fresh air is what you need – that and time will see you through these early discomforts. And you must eat. Here, have a chestnut.” Laughing he tossed the hot nut, and Emilia, squealing, caught it in gloved hands. “You’ll take a glass with me, Mr Frere?”

  “Indeed I will.”

  The mull was hot, well spiced and laced with brandy. Horrocks smacked his lips. “Ichor!” he exclaimed. “The gods’ own blood. I shall need it if I am to race with Mercury here.”

  Louisa started a little at the name so casually used. Mercury, or Mercurius as he was known to the alchemists, had been much on her mind of late. He was the tutelary deity of the Hermetic Art – a slippery, ambiguous figure, who was, according to that great master Gerhard Dorn, “the true hermaphroditic Adam”. Only the previous day Louisa had been pondering a passage from the Aurelia occulta in which Mercurius promised to bestow on the adept the powers of male and female, of heaven and earth. By the philosophers I am named Mercurius, he said there, my spouse is the gold; I am the old dragon found everywhere on the globe of the earth, father and mother, young and old, very strong and very weak… often the order of nature is reversed in me. I am dark and light. I am known yet do not exist at all. I am the carbuncle of the sun, the most noble purified earth, through which you may change copper, iron, tin and lead into gold.

  As the familiar words passed through her memory again, Louisa was gazing at Edwin Frere where he stood on the ice, warming his hands on the glass of mulled wine, smiling in chatter with Tom Horrocks. In this moment all contraries seemed reconciled in him – shyness and strength, awkwardness and grace, the spirit bright within the balanced body, his parson’s black against the white of the distant drifts. Beyond him a gleaming snow-light travelled across the lake, and, for a moment, it appeared to flake from his hair. It shimmered even more vividly around the sunlit icy reflection at his feet with the bright iron of the skate blades between. Frere stood tall on the ice, his head thrown back in laughter. The breath was cold at Louisa’s lips. There was a faltering, unanticipated agitation within her. This day was turning strange. She felt as though something quite terrible was about to happen.

  Then she knew herself addressed by Emilia Frere.

  “I’m so sorry,” she answered.

  “An angel passing, my dear?”

  Louisa smiled uncertainly. “It is so strange, don’t you find? This sudden ice… our little world so utterly transformed. It feels almost as though it might stay this way for ever.”

  Discreetly Emilia dropped the unwanted chestnut in the snow and gathered the collars of her coat about her. “It is my earnest hope that it will not.”

  Frere turned towards her in concern. “You are cold, my dear? You wish to leave?”

  “Perhaps a few minutes more,” she answered. “You must not disappoint the Doctor of his chase…”

  Horrocks looked up from the strapping of his skates. “You are well-wrapped, Mrs Frere. The air will do you no harm. And this light. Just look at it. What do you think, Mr Frere? Do you not agree that if God ever did say Let there be light he must have been over Norfolk at the time?”

  “He is still there, Dr Horrocks. Look, his angels are shining from those great hammer beams of cloud.”

  “To a believer’s eye mayhap. For me the light alone is enough.” Horrocks saw the shadow of disapproval cross Emilia’s face and smiled. “Come then, Frere,” he said, “humiliate me. You will join us, Louisa?” He stepped down among the frozen reeds.

  “I fear the two of you will leave me far behind.”

  “Not at all,” Frere answered. “Come, we shall skate three-handed, like the horses of a Russian sleigh.”

  “Excellent,” said Horrocks, “that way I am sure to stand.”

  “Or I shall drag you both down with me.” Louisa stepped onto the ice, crossed her hands and held them out to her escorts. She was breathing quickly. “This is very gallant.”

  “By the left then,” Horrocks urged, “and off we go.”

  Slowly at first, then ever more rapidly, she was drawn out across the lake. Ahead of her glittered the tracks of Frere’s previous solitary excursion. The wind came cold and fast to her face. Supported by her two companions, she found that she need not even move her feet. Once they had turned the Mount, with the full span of the ice shining before them, the two men gathered pace, at once in harmony and contention, drawing vigour from the presence of the young woman between them, who cried out, not in fear but encouraging them on to greater exertions. Her lips were open so that the cold air came gasping there like water flowing much too fast to drink. Helpless other than in the firm clasp of their hands, she was all exhilaration; sweeping, it seemed, down a steep cylinder of ice and air. Both the sun and the pale moon were in the sky above her, and she was, in the words of an old adept, “running without running, moving without motion”. Ice shot from their feet like sparks, scattering behind them. And on they sped so swiftly that she might almost have cried out with Ostanes, less in trepidation than delight, “Save me, O God, for I stand between two exalted brilliances… Each of them has reached me and I know not how to save myself.”

  Then Tom Horrocks was panting beside her. “Enough,” he called, “enough. This old horse is jaded.” Firmly clutching her hand, he slowed, and Frere arced around them on still skates so that he made a sweeping circle on the ice before they came, breathless, to a halt.

  Tom Horrocks dropped his head, hands at his knees, groaning and smiling up at them. “Another ten seconds,” he gasped, “and I should have been down, or Louisa torn limb from limb between us. You are a fit man, Mr Frere… You must carry me back.” He stood erect again, reached a hip flask from his pocket and proffered it.

  Smiling, Frere declined. Seized by an impulse of delight, and with an untypical desire to impress, he pushed away again and was suddenly spinning like a top on his skates, arms outstretched. Pigeon-toed beneath her crinoline, Louisa clapped his performance, and the sound of her clapping sped across the ice to echo back from the trees. Ducks, disgruntled among barbed reeds, took flight. Further down the lake, back in the direction whence they had come, children were playing coach and horses with a sledge. The sound of their cries tinkled on frigid air. Tossing his head, Frere braked to a sudden stop. Horrocks, who had watched with the flask arrested halfway to his mouth, said, “Here’s to you, Mr Frere – a true prince of the ice,” and swigged at his brandy.

  Frere stood feeling the park sway around him as he panted, and when the dizzy motion stopped he was looking through the brilliant air at a thatched dwelling, snow-laden, secreted among the trees, its dark jetty seized in ice. “What a splendid situation,” he said. “I had not noticed it before.”

  “The old Decoy Lodge,” said Horrocks.

  “But who loves solitude enough to live there, I wonder?”

  “That is my phrontistery, Mr Frere,” Louisa smiled. “My retreat in more clement weather. That is where I go to be myself.”

  “In my experience,” Frere answered, “you are that everywhere, Miss Agnew.”

  “But I have secrets, Mr Frere, and one needs a place to keep them.”

  He gazed at her, puzzled, for a moment, then assumed that he was teased. “You could not have found one more sequestered,” he said, “or more lovely.”

  “I thought the Lodge had been shut up,” the doctor put in.

  “I have opened it again.” Louisa rubbed her hands for warmth. Even inside the gloves her fingers were stinging a little.

  “And Henry does not object?”

  Louisa arched her brows. “He does not greatly care for it, but I need its solitude
if I am to accomplish what I am about.”

  “May one be so inquisitive as to enquire what that is?”

  “Nothing of which you would approve, Doctor Horrocks,” she teased, and saw immediately that the Rector might misunderstand. She turned towards him, “Nor of which you would disapprove, I hope.”

  “More mumbo-jumbo?” Horrocks laughed.

  “I am sure you would think so.”

  “Henry should know better than to keep you cooped up with his books. If I were ten years younger, my girl, I should come and carry you away myself.”

  “And ruin your bachelor peace with my tattle? I think you deceive us both.”

  “This is where you belong,” the doctor protested, “out here, in the light of day. There is more to life than the mind, young woman.”

  “Indeed there is. More too than the flesh – for all your assertions to the contrary.”

  Tom Horrocks shook his head and slipped the flask back into his pocket. “Either way,” he said, “the flesh has its needs, and they must out or fust. Am I not right, Mr Frere?”

  Frere stood flustered at the turn their banter had taken. Such intimate familiarity was no part of his normal intercourse with the parish. He was surprised that the doctor should seek to draw him into such boldness with one who was of the other sex, and the daughter of a friend. He tried for abstraction. “There is a case to be made for asceticism…”

  “A damned special case,” Horrocks grunted. “Louisa is no nun. Look at those eyes. If there is not more mischief there than…”

  But his comparison was interrupted by a shouting down the lake. All three of them turned their heads. Young Frank Wharton stood unsteadily on his skates, waving one hand and calling, “Mr Frere. Mr Frere. You must come at once.”

  The chill air was suddenly colder about them.

  “Something is amiss,” Frere said. “You will excuse me…” At a speed that neither could match, Louisa and Horrocks saw him hasten back down the lake. They were still some distance away when he slewed to a halt beside Frank Wharton and, after the briefest confabulation, sped on. Frank shouted, “Doctor, you must come too. It’s Mrs Frere.”