The Alchemist's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

prolong a conversation that had opened up the most unexpected possibilities. Instead, when we reached the bottom of the steps leading to the terraces, I said I would go and warm myself at Gill’s bonfire. So while my father toiled up to the house, I skirted the lower lawn and ran to the orchard, a half acre or so of apple trees planted last century by a plant-loving Selden favored by Charles I (a Selden on the winning side, but not for long). In one corner of this orchard was an apiary, including one hive with a glass side so that we could study the habits of the bees. At the far end, nearest the house, was the patch of ground where Gill lit his bonfires. He was there still, feeding the flames with brushwood and old cuttings.
    When he saw me, he stopped work, leaned on his fork, and stared from under his wild eyebrows. He was the darker side of vegetable, the inner leaf of old cabbage, the earthy root of parsnip. He and his clothes had a density that repelled me now that I was grown up, though when I was small and he used to carry me to bed I’d snuggle my face into his shoulder and delight in his muddy smell. For a while, I stood on the opposite side of the fire, turning my hands to the heat and lifting my face to the light of a rosy winter sunset. I knew that Gill was watching me, because he always did.
    The heat on my hands and face made the rest of me colder, so after a few minutes I moved toward the house, but Gill blocked my way to the gate. When I tried to get past him, he took a step toward me. I stood my ground, shivering. There was a heaviness in his small eyes that I had noticed quite often recently. At some indefinable moment, he had ceased to be the third great prop of my life and instead had become elusive, even shifty. But most of my mind was still on Shales, who was walking alone in the woods and who had brushed my shoulder as he hooked the bramble aside. Then I became aware that Gill was breathing heavily and had raised his hand, ingrained with sixty-odd years of Selden dirt, and brought it close to my breast.
    Before he could touch me, our eyes met and I saw that his were moist, as if he had been drinking. I came to my senses at last and realized that unless I acted, something terrible and irrevocable would happen, so I spoke the two words that would put a stop to it all: “My father.” Then I added more gently, “My father will need a good fire in the library. Our walk has made us very cold.”
    His hand fell as he took a step back then turned, opened the gate, and walked away. The bonfire whispered as I crouched to draw the last warmth from the embers. My heart ached, but I wasn’t sure why.
    [ 3 ]
    W ITHIN A MONTH , my father had fallen out with Shales once and for all, and there was no further communication between us. I was even forbidden to attend church. The disagreement was fundamental and concerned alchemy.
    In the spring of that year, we began preparing for our most ambitious project ever. Our plan was to grow a rose from its own ashes. My father had been reading the work of the French physician Joseph Du Chesne, who says that each living thing has its own signature, which exists forever and makes it utterly unique. Du Chesne said he had once seen twelve sealed vessels in which flowering plants had been grown from their ashes. His view was substantiated by the great Paracelsus, by Daniel Coxe, by Jacques Gafferel, and by others. After all, transmutation is at the root of all alchemy, and if a metal such as tin can be dissolved in acid and restored by the action of an alkali, or water become steam and then water again through condensation, why couldn’t the same principle apply to the recovery of a plant?
    My father was sixty-eight years old, and I suspect all too conscious of his own mortality. He had a persistent cough, and his breathing was labored. I was so terrified by the prospect of being left alone that I would have sold my soul to prolong his life. This process of regeneration seemed