The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  In breaks in our work Edward entertained me with curious stories of the old alchemists. Raymond Lully featured among them, though in apocryphal form, as the subject of a singular conversion experience: inflamed by illicit passion for a married woman, he would brook no denial until she took him to her house and there, in the presence of her husband, bared to Raymond’s astonished eyes a breast almost entirely devoured by cancer. Thereafter he became a missionary of heathen Africa, wrote a seminal alchemical text called the Clavicula, and was reputed to turn himself into a red cock when occasion demanded. He seems to have lost the knack when he most needed it, for he was stoned to death by unimpressed heathens.

  Then there was Denis Zachaire, a young gentleman of Guienne, who invested all the money meant for his education in the furnishing of an alchemical laboratory – regrettably to no better effect than the loss of his tutor, who died from the quantity of soot he inhaled. But Zachaire was bitten by the gold bug and wandered around Europe, one jump ahead of the plague, seeking to learn from the motley swarm of alchemists to be found in the abbeys and cities. By his own account, after much expenditure of charcoal and years of failure, he discovered a powder through which he made a successful projection of sufficient gold to pay off his creditors. According to one story (though this was told of others too), he was later murdered in his sleep by a servant who ran off with both the powder and Zachaire’s wife. Alchemy, it seemed, was not an entirely happy affair. The man known as Helvetius might have produced gold which withstood the tests of assayers, but Bernard Trevisan was duped out of a fortune before finally performing the magnum opus, and Thomas Norton prepared the Elixir twice and was twice robbed of it before dying in poverty. Michael Sendivogius was imprisoned by the Emperor Rudolph on pain of yielding his secrets, and it was he who wrote what struck me as fair comment on the Hermetic enterprise in an imaginary complaint of the alchemist to Nature:

  Now I see that I know nothing, only I must not say so for I should lose the good opinion of my neighbours and they would no longer trust me with money for my experiments. There are many countries and many greedy persons who will suffer themselves to be gulled by my promise of mountains of gold. Thus day will follow day, and in the meantime the King or my donkey will die, or I myself.

  Edward advised me not to be fooled by this open confession of fraud: it was an early exercise in disinformation. Each of the alchemists, he claimed, was in his way an incarnation of Mercurius – the ever-ambiguous tutelary spirit of the Art who promised much and was not to be had for the asking. The true face of the Hermetic philosopher was to be seen in the final picture of the Mutus Liber where the adept and his mystic sister raised their fingers to their lips in the gesture of the secret. This was why Louisa Agnew had chosen the title of that text for her epitaph, and if he and I were ever to unravel that secret, he said, we should get back to work.

  Inevitably I saw more of Edward than of Laura. She was hard at work in her jealously private workshop, though she called in briefly at the library from time to time, and I was invited back to the Lodge for meals some evenings. I delighted them once with a return invitation to dine at The Pightle. The soufflé made up in ambition for what it lacked in accomplishment, but the wine was good. We talked a lot, laughed a lot, drank a lot – another round in the warming game of friendship that left me happy at the time, and aching afterwards as I contemplated the lonely bed.

  Under question, Edward told me a little more about Laura’s past than she herself was willing to volunteer. Her father was president of his own securities corporation, an East Coast patrician – “a Mammonite”, Edward called him – “a man whose feelings have been arrested by money, power, the dead hand of his ancestors. He’s a kind of Giant Holdfast who both loves and terrorizes his children. His wife is a doer-of-good-works. She keeps their home as clean as a refrigerator and about as warm. Sadly, they lack both the elegant wit of the eastern intelligentsia and the street-irony of those who do not share their advantages. You can smell dead redskins in the woods about the house.”

  Pressed more closely, he told me that for a number of years Laura had lived an almost schizophrenic life, symbolized by two quite different wardrobes – one for her parents, the “goody two-shoes” suits, the other for what she believed to be her real self. He claimed that her private world had been little more than an experiment in frenzy, and that a breakdown had been inevitable. It came when her parents pried into her secrets and were horrified by what they found. In particular they were appalled by the discovery that their daughter was deeply in love with a young Jew. Neither Laura nor the young man had been strong enough to withstand their frigidly withering assault.

  “After that,” Edward said, “she wouldn’t speak, scarcely ate. She was afraid that her very capacity for love had been defiled. Her feelings were frozen. She had no great wish to live, and slipped into an anorexic depression which kept her to her room, resisting all approaches. She tells me it felt as though she was living in a violent void, that she was losing touch with everything until…” He hesitated, decided, continued. “What happened was the first recurrence of an experience she had not had since she was a child. I really don’t feel free to tell you about this, but it seems to have been both deeply deranging and profoundly helpful. It was also kept intensely private. It happened many times over a period of weeks and, between the… visitations… there were moments when she doubted her own sanity. It can still frighten her, though she has learnt how to handle its tensions, how to guide such experiences and use them. But if you wish to know more you will have to ask Laura. I doubt she will want to tell you.”

  I gathered that her parents had seen only that Laura was losing touch with reality. They insisted that she consult a psychiatrist and, fortunately, Laura had the strength to insist that it be a woman. One was found – “a pragmatic, civilized feminist who did not pretend to understand all that had happened to Laura but had the good sense to see that she was a great deal saner than her parents. It was she who eventually recommended that Laura go to a college she knew of – one where she would find an environment supportive of her experience. The college is in Connecticut. It is called the Heartsease Institute. I have a longstanding association with its work. That is where we met, and the rest you know.”

  He would say little more, for my questions infringed on what he considered Laura’s private domain. When I asked him about the college, he volunteered only that it was an experimental community of researchers and students – “the kind of imaginative endeavour you will find only in the States”. It offered, I was told, “a variety of approaches to the more inclusive aspects of speculative enquiry into the natural order”.

  It seemed an unlikely sort of place, and even more unlikely that Laura’s conservative parents should entrust their daughter to it. “But they were desperate,” Edward answered, “and desperation is often strangely fruitful. Somewhere they knew they had crippled her life, and their own responses were inadequate. They’re sad people really.”

  “You’ve met them?”

  Edward sighed. “Yes… I tried to talk to her father… by the pool house. Over root beer, would you believe? For a moment I thought he was about to dare to let himself like me, but the wife was watching, alas. Mind you, he was also daunted by the fact that I was some years his senior. The poor devil wasn’t sure whether to call me ‘sir’ or ‘scoundrel’. Had the idea I was after his money, I suppose. And the thought that I was bedding his daughter…” Edward winced mischievously up at me. “You should go to America. The action’s there. It’s the alembick of the age – one that might blow up in all our faces, and yet… I don’t know. I only know that Laura is well out of it.”

  “She doesn’t want to go back ever?”

  “Why should she? She is much loved here. Her life has meaning now.” Edward looked at his watch. “Cambridge, you’re a great waster of time. I have things to do.”

  Reflecting how Laura herself invariably shied away from mention of her gifts, I was left with my thoughts
. Either Edward’s account was true, or there was some bizarre pattern of collusion between them – he providing cover for her insecurity, or – equally possible – she reinforcing his. For the life of me, I couldn’t say which was the case.

  Later that afternoon he came to me with some of my translations from the index cards. “I’m puzzled by something you’ve turned up,” he said. “These parenthetical references to a mystic brother.”

  “Frater mysticus meus,” I said. “My mystic brother, right?”

  “Yes, but the term means nothing to me. There’s no precedent for it. The female assistant was known as the mystic sister, but the man was always the Adept, the Master, Magister. Louisa wouldn’t have thought of her father as a mystic brother.”

  “Could she have been thinking of her real brother?”

  Edward wrinkled his nose dubiously. “He took no interest in the work. He rarely even came down from town.”

  I smiled at him. “Perhaps they were in telepathic communication?”

  Edward was not amused.

  “There was something I noticed about those references,” I added in recompense. “They all looked as though they’d been written at a different time from the rest of the notes on the cards. The ink’s different. Even the handwriting. See what you think.”

  Edward studied the original cards – most of them contained quotations from the Rosarium Philosophorum, a text I hadn’t read. They were principally concerned with the Coniunctio Solis et Lunæ, the marriage of the solar and lunar principles. One was from the Arisleus Vision: “With so much love did Beya embrace Gabricus that she entirely absorbed him in her own nature and dissolved him in inseparable atoms.” I’d thought about that one for a long time, wondering who Beya and Gabricus were, and had paid little attention to the note in brackets which had been added afterwards: (Frater mysticus meus.)

  “I think you may be right,” Edward said after a moment. “This is closer to the handwriting of her later letters. She must have gone back over the cards much later, when she was old. But what did she mean by it?”

  “No clues in the journals?”

  “Not as far as I remember. She stopped making entries when she began work on the Treatise. The last entry is in January 1849. She must have been too busy after that. If only she’d kept it up.”

  “Was there anything significant about that last entry?”

  “Not really. Just her regrets about the Rector’s wife who’d had a miscarriage… Frater mysticus meus.” He whispered the words aloud as though to conjure the hidden meaning from the card.

  “You think it might be important?”

  “It’s certainly puzzling… But then what isn’t, dammit?”

  “Might Laura have some idea?”

  “She might,” Edward said dubiously. “I’ll ask her this evening.” Puzzling still, he returned to his desk. I riffled through the shoebox of index cards and found several more with the same cryptic postscript. Marking the places from which they’d come with scraps of paper, I decided to translate them first.

  I had another dream that night, less orderly and dramatic than my dream of alchemy, but it felt significant. I was checking the rooms of The Pightle for leaks and other necessary repairs, when I discovered an entirely new wing. There were several rooms, all in good condition, which seemed to have been rented out though I was aware that they remained my responsibility. One room had the smell of a hospital ward, and there were patients asleep there with a nurse in attendance, who was not surprised by my intrusion. I passed down the ward and opened a door at the end of a passage. A whole order of nuns was waiting to welcome me. I remembered that they had been there all along, and wondered how I could ever have forgotten them.

  The scene shifted and I found myself at the head of a stairwell, aware that yet another place might be reached but only by somersaulting over the banister and walking my feet down the opposite wall as one might descend a defile in a crag. Others had done it, I knew, but I felt nervous about accomplishing the tricky manoeuvre. Then Laura appeared, and there was something odd in the manner of her appearance. She felt more substantial than the other figures in the dream, almost as though she had troubled to step out of her own dreams to assist me with mine. I was relieved to see her and encouraged by the confidence she gave me. I gripped the banister and swung myself head over heels, then came out on the roof of a tower. When I made my way down its spiral staircase, I found myself in the main thoroughfare of the town where I was born. The dream ended with the thought that if I had known this was the main road, I need not have resorted to the acrobatics that had brought me there.

  I woke feeling good, eager to get back to the Hall, but I wrote down the dream first, thinking I would tell it to Edward. Then, over breakfast, I decided I’d keep it to myself.

  Edward was in a foul mood, applying himself obsessively to his studies, encouraging no conversation. When we broke for coffee, I asked him whether he’d consulted Laura about the references I’d turned up.

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Nothing helpful.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “What did she say?”

  Edward scowled at me. “Her mind wasn’t really on it. She’s at a crucial point with her own work. We were at cross-purposes.”

  “You mean you had a row?”

  “Yes, we had a row. Not that it’s any of your damned business.”

  Except that I had to live with the aftermath.

  It was the first time the old coldness had returned. For a moment I thought he was about to apologize, but he didn’t. He resumed his work. I looked across to where he sat hunched like a crow over carrion, and thought what a cantankerous old sod he could be when he chose.

  Around three, Talbot came up to the library with a telephone set in his hand. “There’s a call for you, sir. If you’d care to use the extension plug by your desk, no doubt the estate office will connect you.”

  For once Edward was in no mood to bait the man. He glowered at the instrument, plugged it in, then picked up the receiver. I returned my attention to the papers on my desk as Talbot left the room. Though I had the distinct impression that Edward would have preferred me to leave too, he said nothing, merely drummed his fingers on the desk top, then snapped, “Well?” into the receiver.

  I heard the faint warble of Laura’s voice but could discern no words.

  “Oh for God’s sake, why couldn’t you wait till the weekend? I thought we agreed. You know I’d have helped you then.”

  There was a mixture of irritation and concern in his voice. He was shaking his head as he listened.

  “I know you’d prefer to do it on your own, but it’s obvious you can’t. You were bound to run into trouble. Do you need me to come right now?”

  “…”

  “What on earth for?”

  “…”

  “But that was an accident. My concentration slipped. I’m not about to do it again.”

  There was a further prolonged warble, to which Edward replied, “I think we can manage perfectly well on our own.” He swivelled his chair away from me and stared out of the window. “But if you weren’t even sure you wanted me around…”

  “…”

  “All right. On your own head be it.”

  Laura said something else, Edward grunted and put down the phone. His chair swivelled back my way. Again the fingers drummed. “Listen, Laura’s having trouble with a firing. She’s running out of chopped wood and needs help. Last time I practically took my thumb off and apparently she doesn’t trust me not to do it again. She wondered whether…”

  “I’d love to,” I said.

  It was another stunningly hot, windless day, the sky an unclouded eggshell-blue, the temperature in the high seventies, so it was good to hang my head from the open window of Edward’s car and let the air come pelting at my face. I had never seen a kiln fired before and the unpredictable behaviour of live flame could only add to the alre
ady restless sensuality of the afternoon. The prospect exhilarated me.

  Yet somehow Edward must be appeased, so I sought to make a virtue of my ignorance, asking questions that would allow him to air his greater experience. He knew what I was doing, and answered only in clipped, unhelpful sentences. “All you have to do is chop. And keep out of her way. She does the whole thing by feel… listening to the kiln.”

  “But something’s gone wrong this time?”

  “It’s a delicate business. Not like a machine. It’s alive. You have to nurse it along. She must have got the balance wrong and it’s stuck. She should never have tried to do it alone.”

  He braked in the yard at the rear of the Lodge, and through the windscreen I saw a plume of smoke rising almost vertically beyond a pantiled outbuilding which I assumed must be Laura’s studio. Edward saw it too and his mood changed. His eyes glinted at me. I saw the excitement there. “Come on then,” he said, “let’s make the elements dance.”

  He led the way round the studio. I saw an open shed stacked with timber, graded according to its thickness, and then, as we turned the flint gable, there was Laura crouched before the kiln in a muddle of faggots and fire irons, her rump in the air, legs bare beneath the sawn-off fringes of her denim shorts, wearing a blue-grey sleeveless T-shirt that had ridden up around her waist. One of its shoulder straps had drooped to her upper arm. Her hair was piled at her head, tied in a scarlet bandanna, and when she turned her face to look wanly up at us, there were soot marks on her brow and cheeks where she had wiped away the sweat with the back of her hand. “I can’t get the draught right,” she said. “I need more wind.”