Fireworks and Darkness

by Natalie Jane Prior

  While the water ebbed in the treasurer’s cellar, the celebrations whirled on inside the palace, the queen’s guests in their silks and laces oblivious to the peril in which they had stood. A few people remarked on the absence of the treasurer’s daughter, and many more on the news that Princess Christina had unexpectedly left the capital. Nobody paid any attention to the upheavals taking place under their feet. Even the coachmen and grooms who were the nearest to what was happening were preoccupied, drinking, or dead drunk. It was Christmas, after all, and though a coachman claimed to have heard subterranean rumblings, and a stablehand swore a bedraggled man passed him in the tunnel, it was not until much later that it occurred to them to report this. In consequence, when Casimir, Ruth and Joachim stumbled out of the cellar shortly before midnight, nobody stopped or questioned them. The world, except for them, was too busy having a good time.

  After the light in the cellar had faded, there had been a great deal of confusion. Nobody could see, and Ruth, who had been washed into the stairwell by the first inrush of water, had badly injured her hand. While Casimir was not precisely in shock, he was in a state of denial, refusing to admit that his father was dead, that Circastes had won a sort of pyrrhic victory over them before vanishing. Even when Joachim fetched—stole—a lantern to prove that Simeon and the magician had, truly, disappeared, he had not wanted to leave the cellar. He sloshed around thigh-deep in the darkness, while Joachim fished for bodies and Ruth clung, onehanded, to the rail of the cellar steps. On Casimir’s insistence, he and Joachim had even explored the river passage for a short distance, until the water reached the ceiling and they could go no further. But there was nothing to find. The dark human shape Casimir had seen under the glow on the water was gone.

  ‘He must be there. I saw him, he must be.’

  In the end, Joachim lost his temper. ‘Face facts, Cas. He’s not here. Or if he is, he’s drowned, and there’s nothing we can do. There’s no point in pursuing this. If we’re going to have a chance of getting away, we have to leave, now.’

  ‘We can’t.’

  ‘We can. And we will.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ said Ruth, and that was when they’d gone back to the house. Inside the servants’ Christmas party, like the queen’s, had reached the raucous drunken stage. They stopped at the linen room for towels and Joachim backtracked to wipe up the puddles of water they had left. Then they crowded into Ruth’s little sitting room, where a small fire was still burning from earlier in the evening.

  Gathering the necessaries from around the house took some time. They needed salves and bandages, laudanum, dry clothes, food, as much money as Ruth could give them, which, since her father controlled her purse strings, proved in the end to be not very much at all. Joachim demanded a razor, and retreated into an adjacent bedroom to shave off his beard. Casimir stripped off his wet things and towelled himself dry. He pulled on the ill-fitting clothes Ruth had found for him and sat on the settle. The soles of his bare feet were peeling and new pink skin showed through the scorch marks. Simeon’s last magic had healed, even as it had burned through his flesh. Nevertheless, the scars would always remain to remind him of what had happened.

  The door opened and Ruth came into the room. She poured a dose of laudanum from the bottle she was carrying and drank the sickly, brown fluid down.

  ‘How’s your hand?’ asked Casimir.

  ‘Hideous.’ She grimaced, but the pain on her face was very real and Casimir realised only iron willpower was keeping her going. ‘I think it may be broken. I shall have to have it seen to by a doctor. But it can wait. It will have to. What are you going to do now? Go to your mother?’

  Casimir shook his head. ‘I don’t even know where she is. I guess I’ll go into the army. I can mix gunpowder and operate a cannon. They won’t ask too many questions when they learn that.’ He thought of Simeon at seventeen, fleeing from the magician’s stilt house above the waterfall, and wondered if he would ever break free from the consequences of his father’s sin. Grief welled up inside him, for Simeon, for himself, so intense it blotted out almost everything else. For a moment he hardly realised that Ruth was speaking to him, far less heard what she was saying.

  ‘Casimir, about your mother.’ She said it again and somehow, this time, her words penetrated the fog of Casimir’s wretchedness. ‘I didn’t realise. I always assumed you knew where she was. Simeon told me. She’s married and living in Sluijt.’

  ‘In Sluijt?’ If Ruth had said his mother was in China, Casimir could not have had more trouble taking it in. Yet Sluijt was three hundred miles away, not three thousand. It was a difficult journey, but not an impossible one. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, if you want to go to her, that’s where she’s living,’ said Ruth. ‘Your father told me. After she’d left him, he worried about her, and he always kept track of where she lived. I think he was trying to stop me feeling jealous by telling me she was so far away, but all he did was make me angry that he still cared enough to be concerned after all those years. Of course, I didn’t know about Circastes, then. I suppose Simeon must have been using magic to keep an eye on her.’

  Casimir thought of the lock of hair he had found in the guncase. ‘Do you know anything more?’

  ‘I believe her husband’s a dealer in salted herring.’ Ruth shot him a twisted smile. ‘They have three young children. It all sounded terribly respectable. But I can’t give you precise directions, or her husband’s surname, just that the youngest child was called Anneke. She was born last summer, and when Simeon told me, I got really upset. After what happened to me years ago, I can’t have children. But with your mother’s name, and the baby’s, and the husband’s profession, you should be able to track them down. They sounded reasonably well-to-do, and Sluijt’s not that big a place.’

  To Casimir, it seemed like a miracle. He could not quite believe it: that Ruth, whom he had detested, and whose life he had worked so hard to make difficult for the last nine months, had just thrown a rope into the pit of his despair. For if his mother was not dead, or mad, or any of the terrible things he had imagined, but alive and well and married, living beyond the borders of Ostermark, then there was hope for him, too. And if he ever got over the loss of his father, if he ever came to truly understand what had happened twenty years before and over the past five days, then maybe it would be possible to forgive himself for being his father’s son and fight back. Not against Circastes, for that would only reduce him to the magician’s level, but against the dark glamour which Simeon had struggled all his life to reject, the magic which Circastes called power, but which in the end was only deceit and coercion, and the imposition of one human’s will onto another.

  On impulse, he blurted out, ‘Why don’t you come with us?’

  ‘I can’t. I’d be a millstone around your neck.’

  ‘If you stay, Christina will kill you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on that,’ said Ruth, and a note of harshness had returned to her voice. ‘My father knows the procurator well. As soon as you’re far enough away to be safe, I’ll be making arrangements to talk with Margrave Greitz about Christina. I’m sure, between the three of us, we will be able to reach some kind of accommodation.’

  The door opened before Casimir had a chance to reply, and Joachim reappeared. He had changed his wet clothes, shaved, and trimmed his hair with a pair of scissors. Without his beard he looked so different that Casimir barely recognised him.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Casimir pulled on his boots. ‘Yes.’

  He picked up the bags that Ruth had put together for them and the three of them went back downstairs. Joachim disappeared to fetch something and Casimir and Ruth went out into the River Court. It was dead midnight. The lamps along the carriageway were starting to burn out. It was still drizzling rain, and as they stood on the water stairs, waiting for Joachim in front of their boat, it seemed to Casimir that Ruth looked old and worn. On impulse, he put his arm around her and gave her a swift awkward
hug.

  ‘Goodbye, Ruth,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Ruth clung to him for a moment.

  ‘Goodbye, Cas,’ she said. ‘Try not to hold it against me.’ She let him go, and Casimir climbed into the boat. For a moment Ruth stood forlornly on the landing, but then she seemed to realise there was no point in waiting and went back up the steps. Casimir watched her disappear into the drizzle. Of them all, he realised, Ruth had gambled and lost the most. Something else besides Simeon had passed out of her life for good. She was the one who would have to make the explanations and deal with the procurator and Princess Christina. Casimir shivered. Whatever she said about doing deals with the Procurator, he did not think the princess would treat those who thwarted her kindly.

  Joachim came running down the steps. The night wind ruffling his newly shorn hair. He had a bulky oilskin bundle under his arm, which he thrust at Casimir; it was flat, and irregularly shaped, and Casimir thought he knew what it was. He moved the baggage to make room for his uncle at the oars and sat in the prow with it huddled in his cloak.

  He leaned over the side and loosed their mooring. Joachim pushed off. As they drifted downstream and the lights of the palace slowly faded in the rain Casimir heard, in the distance, the last bell tolling the passing of Christmas Day.

  They travelled downriver all day, a swift current running behind them, and crossed from Soderdale into Strasland in the middle of the afternoon. Since it was the morning after a holiday, and raining, they saw hardly anyone, only a farmer securing his haystacks against the weather, and the odd solitary wanderer travelling nowhere. Shortly before sunset Joachim steered the boat ashore. The muddy banks of the Ling rose up onto a piece of waste ground. Casimir pulled their baggage into a heap on the bank and sent the boat floating on downstream. There were two knapsacks Ruth had given them, one of them stuffed with papers. There was also the firework boy. Joachim had rescued him from the cellar and, with uncharacteristic sentiment at the last moment, refused to leave him for the guards.

  ‘He saved my life, Casimir,’ he said. ‘I owe you for that. Don’t think I will ever forget it.’

  ‘We can’t take him with us, though,’ said Casimir. ‘He’s too big.’

  ‘True,’ said Joachim, ‘but we’ll give him a hero’s funeral, just the same.’

  Casimir cleared the ground and together he and Joachim gathered wood to build a fire. There was not much dry kindling anywhere and the damp sticks would not light. He pulled some sheets of paper out of the knapsack and started screwing them into balls. After a page or two he realised smudges of ink were coming away on his hands. He looked more closely, and saw that it was the manuscript of The Tyrant which he had last seen snatched by Simeon from the kitchen fire. Ruth had obviously given it to him as a parting present.

  ‘Here, Cas,’ said Joachim. ‘It’s not safe to take that with us. Let me.’ He scrunched the rest of the poem up quickly and poked the paper balls between the sticks. A moment later a small flame appeared in the midst of the twigs.

  ‘Do you think Circastes survived?’ Casimir asked. It was his first implicit admission that Simeon had not.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Joachim. ‘I don’t know. I lost hold of him in the water. I had him in my grip and then suddenly he wasn’t there any more. He might have drowned and been caught in the passage, he might have escaped back to where he came from. If he has, there’s no doubt he’ll be back. No matter where you go, no matter who you travel with, there will always be that element of uncertainty and suspicion. But I just don’t know.’

  He threw the last of The Tyrant on the fire. Fuelled by the paper the flames raced through the twigs and pine needles and licked at the larger sticks. A few words stood out in silhouette on one of the pieces of paper, but though he tried, Casimir could not read them. The page twisted and collapsed, its cinders lifting on the hot air.

  ‘Go on, Cas,’ said Joachim. ‘This is your magic, now.’

  Casimir picked up the firework boy and tossed him awkwardly onto the flames. A shower of sparks flew up, and, since he had only imperfectly dried out, it was a while before he caught. But at length a bluish flame began to lick along the edge of the glossy painted curls and the cardboard cases of the coloured matches flared up and sank back into ash. Some sparks flew from the hair and the catherine wheel eyes gave a few sizzling starts and spun lopsidedly around. When the last spark had extinguished the board that was the firework boy’s body caught ablaze. The flames turned green from the paint and gave the blue and crimson trousers a strange metallic sheen. Finally, that too, was gone. Casimir kicked it to ash and ground the last few bits of charred wood and paper into the mud.

  ‘That’s it then,’ he said. He picked up his bags and turned his face to the setting sun, a red wintry sun that sent gleams of crimson through the bare branches of the trees.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Joachim. He smiled at Casimir, and the two of them went together into the darkness, leaving nothing to mark their passage except two sets of footprints, one large, one slightly smaller; and behind them on the river bank the mark of one bare foot.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I am not generally given to writing afterwords to novels, but Fireworks and Darkness is such a special book, and one in which so many people believed with such sincerity and passion along the way, that I thought this time I would break my normal rule and elaborate a little on its origins.

  Fireworks and Darkness has had a much longer gestation period than anything else I have ever written. Simeon and Joachim, or versions of them, date back over fifteen years; the story of the firework shop and its inhabitants almost twelve. My first attempts to put it down on paper were a depressing failure, largely due to my own inexperience at that time. Yet the idea was too potent to give up on, and over the years, in between many other books, I kept coming back to it, worrying the text to pieces and reassembling it over and over again. Bits were added and thrown away, the point of view swung around like a weathercock, the age of the main character changed (at one stage I even considered changing his sex). Throughout this frustrating time the manuscript was abandoned more than once in sheer despair; but books are like politicians, for if they hang on long enough, their time generally comes. Early in 2000, in the course of one of my periodic returns to Fish Lane, I rewrote the opening chapter for what seemed like the hundredth time. Miraculously, after all those years, it came out exactly the way I had always wanted it to, and I knew then that the day of Fireworks and Darkness had arrived.

  People who have read the novel to date have invariably been fascinated by the fireworks and at this point it seems appropriate for me to mention a book without which it could never have been written. Casimir Simienowicz’s treatise on military and recreational fireworks, The Great Art of Artillery, was first published in Latin in 1650. I first encountered the 1729 English translation many years ago when I found a decrepit facsimile edition on the shelves of the public library I used to run. Who was responsible for the purchase of so esoteric a work I have no idea, but I was instantly transfixed by its possibilities and regret to admit that when I left the job I weeded it out of the collection. (My only excuses are that no one else ever borrowed it, and that I couldn’t risk leaving it behind.) Simienowicz was the Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance to the King of Poland and a notable seventeenth century expert on artillery and firepower. Modern lovers of fireworks tend to forget that the benign shells and rockets they are used to have more sinister near relations, and not surprisingly Simienowicz’s work concentrates heavily on military fireworks. Nevertheless, its lovingly detailed period diagrams and explanations of the construction of shells, rockets, perfumed water globes and set pieces provided me with most of the information I needed to bring Simeon and his profession to life (and incidentally provided the names for the two main characters).

  In conclusion, several people who helped with the book need to be mentioned: my husband Peter, for giving me the precious hours in which to write it; my dear friend, Maria Letters, who unwitt
ingly uttered a note of encouragement at a point when I was thinking of giving up; the unknown lady at the CBC Conference in Brisbane in 1996 who came up to me when I had given up and begged me to finish it on the strength of the first two paragraphs (I hope she finally does get to read it, and that the wait has been worth it); and my friend Linda Miller, for her ongoing help with maps and diagrams. One person, for whose opinions I have enormous respect, believed in this book far more than I did myself. Her ongoing care and interest in it over many years have done more than anything to ensure that it finally saw daylight. Finally, and most importantly, I must thank the midwives: my agent, Margaret Connolly, editors, Sandra Davies and Emma Kelso, and publisher Lisa Berryman for loving the book so much and working so hard to convince me that HarperCollins were the right people to publish it. I trust the end result has justified the faith of everyone who believed.

  Natalie Jane Prior

  April 2001

  GLOSSARY OF FIREWORK TERMS

  blind A firework which fails to explode.

  catherine wheel A spiral shaped firework that spins around on a central pin, spitting out sparks.

  composition See gunpowder.

  cracker A small firework, usually red in colour, which explodes with a loud ‘crack’ and a characteristic jump.

  fuse The ‘wick’ used to ignite a firework. Fuses are made either by rolling tissue paper around gunpowder, or by impregnating cotton cords with gunpowder grains. By joining many fuses into a ‘train’ it is possible to set off several fireworks at once.

  girandole A type of firework like a wheel, which spins horizontally on a pole. In the past, girandoles were sometimes allowed to ‘take off’ like fiery flying saucers.