The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon

childish, or simple. None of them had anything to do with me. I had never met indifference before.
    Crane Court had such a narrow entrance that the driver refused to take the carriage through. I leaned out and saw the usual dirty paving stones and high buildings. This was a deep disappointment. I had expected white marble pillars at least, and Sir Isaac Newton enthroned amid a host of acolytes. I wasn’t bold enough to go into the yard alone, and there was no question of asking Sarah, because she had suddenly shrunk down in the corner of the carriage. “Are you ill?” I asked. “Do you want to go back?”
    She had an astonishing repertory of shrugs and curls of the lip. “I don’t mind, madam.”
    “Then we’ll go on, and perhaps you could point out the names of streets and churches so I get my bearings.”
    She intoned a few names, but as we reached Ludgate Hill she folded her arms across her chest and went stony silent until St. Paul’s. I wished my initiation into the mysteries of London had been with Aislabie, or with my father—whose carefully planned education, I noted, had failed to prepare me for any of this—but for the first time since the miscarriage I was really excited. It was so easy, after all these years, to be carried toward Spitalfields and my mother. I leaned forward, thinking that she would have seen that inn, those houses, that warehouse. But, of course, I had no idea of the De Lery address, so once in Spital Square I was at a dead end. I decided that one day soon I would come back by myself and knock on doors to see if anyone remembered my mother’s family, but for now it was enough to look at her square, the wedge of sky that she had known, the topography of her childhood. Meanwhile, a little crowd had collected round the carriage.
    Sarah sighed pointedly and rolled her eyes. “My mother was brought up here,” I said. “Her name was De Lery. Her family made silk.” She looked a bit more interested, even peered out. “De Lery green. Do you know it?”
    “Green’s unlucky.”
    “Nevertheless.”
    She puffed air through her nose as if to say that if she hadn’t heard of such a color, it couldn’t exist.
    “So where would I find silk of that color?” I asked.
    “A silk warehouse.”
    “Where might one be?” She stared at me for a moment, then stuck her head out of the window, yelled up to the coachman, and off we lurched until we came to a vast building with large windows and an imposing front door. The proprietor gave Sarah an obsequious bow, called her Miss Holborne, led us in, and allowed us to wander among rolls and swathes of cloth. For once Sarah’s face was animated as she fingered and sniffed the silks, which shimmered in every possible shade from black to white, cherry to gold, buttercup to azure: silks with the dense luster of my obsidian; silks woven with leaves and flower heads or entire vases of blooms; striped silks in blue and pink; silks embroidered with butterflies and birds; silks so thick they could have stood alone, and silks like gossamer. But it was the greens that drew me—moss green, leaf green, the green of my oak tree at Selden.
    I asked the merchant, “Have you a silk called De Lery green?”
    “De Lery, madam? Not that I know of.”
    I was disappointed, but I realized that of course there must be fashions in silk. De Lery green might have been sought after twenty years ago, but not now. So I called Sarah away from some creamy translucent stuff and we went back to the carriage, dazed by so much splendor.
    It seemed to me, despite the lack of De Lery green, that I had come another step closer to my mother, and I was sufficiently moved to ask, “Where were you brought up, Sarah?”
    She shrugged and turned down the corners of her mouth. “South of the river.”
    “In London?”
    “Of course.”
    “Far from here?”
    She stared at me. “Not far. Nothing is far in London.”
    “So where are we now?”
    “Now we are on Gracechurch