The Book of Fires

by Jane Borodale

  I look at him confusedly.

  “Sir,” I say, and then squeeze my mouth shut. I dare not even lick my lips in nervousness. His requirement, I understand, is for the presence of a quiet character that does not fluster. Inside myself I vow I could be that.

  He picks up a tub by the hob and shakes out pieces of black coal onto the embers, and the fire begins to hiss. I have seen coal before, but never burnt or cooked upon it. Perhaps it is coal that makes the atmosphere smell so strangely bitter. I glance at the book upon the table. I can see dark pictures and words stretching over the yellow pages, but even when I frown with concentration the swarming letters make no sense at all.

  “Italian,” he says, suddenly towering above me, and presses at the page. His hands are lithe and knuckly, with long spreading fingers, though with a jolt I see that on the right hand he has only a damaged stump where the forefinger should be. Without warning he reads aloud, fiercely, “. . . this power alone makes metals grow and revives half-dead bodies. Half dead!” He snorts. “Perhaps.”

  I look up and his black eyes are fixed on me. He has an intent, seeking kind of look that is hard to hide from.

  “What is your name?” he asks abruptly.

  “Agnes, sir, Agnes Trussel.”

  “They are all making claims, Agnes Trussel. The world is awash with claims for knowledge.” He smiles grimly. “Knowledge is like time: it forges a way forward but must look back over its shoulder to remember where it has come from. The only certain way to forge new understanding is to carry out investigations for oneself.” I jump as he snaps the book shut.

  “Where have you come from, Agnes Trussel? ”

  I hesitate before I answer. “Sussex, sir,” I say. The room has a chill to it despite the fire, and I am trying to conceal from him that I am shivering. I can barely hear, I am so faint and tired now.

  “And what are your circumstances?” he asks, sharply.

  I think rapidly of what to say. A hot piece of coal falls with a tick through the grate onto the stone flags. It glows fiery red and then cools and fades.

  “I have no family,” I reply. “They . . . died in a fire, sir, just a few months ago.” It is the truth indeed that they are lost to me now, I think, as though this makes my lying any better than it is.

  There is a silence.

  “Do you need a bite or drink?” Mr. Blacklock asks.

  “I am as parched as tinder, sir,” I say. He nods and stands up. Our interview is over. Somewhere in the house a clock chimes into the stillness. I don’t add that my clothes are wet and an ache in my head is mingling with the ache in my heart, making a sickness.

  Mr. Blacklock takes the book under his arm. “I will call for housemaid Mary—Mary Spurren,” he says. “Good night.”

  “Good night, sir,” I say.

  He leaves the room, and I hear him talking in a low voice to someone outside in the hallway. Then the door opens again and Mary Spurren enters the kitchen. Her gait suggests a girl possessing some ill-humor: drooping shoulders over a long, bony figure bent into a shape resembling a kind of pothook. Clearly she is not pleased to be roused, and mutters to herself while she cuts at something in the meat safe and slaps a slice of cold boiled beef onto a plate for me. She looks suspiciously at the floor by my feet while I try to eat as she waits to clear the table. Her neck is drawn out and hangs forward, as though the weight of her head were too much to carry. Her mouth is large, and makes a tutting noise from time to time. The meat she has served has an unpleasant flavor, but I am more than glad of the ale, which helps a small warmth grow back into the pit of my stomach. My ears buzz with strangeness and traveling. Then she takes a new candle out of a box and lights it for me with a spill of wood at the hob.

  “Keep it upright as you walk upstairs and blow it out as soon as you’re in bed; it’ll need to last all week and there won’t be another.” Her mouth is a ridge of disapproval.

  Out in the hallway she points up to where I am to sleep and then she leaves me, her disappearing back making a thin shadow briefly before she turns the corner. I carry my juddering ball of candlelight and my damp bundle into the chamber, and the latch flicks shut behind me.

  I hold the candlestick high to see about the room. There is no bolt on the back of the door. The room is full of the kind of still, slow cold that builds when no one has been in it for a long time, and has a sharp odor of mice. When I open the cupboard under the washstand I see a pile of chewed cloth and droppings. The bed looms solitary in the corner; it must have been made up months ago, and the sheet and blanket are damp and dusty under my fingertips. There is a hole where moths or mice have nibbled away at the wool. The bed creaks as I sit on it heavily to remove my wet boots.

  I take off my outer garments and my stays, and spread out the rest of my belongings over the furniture in the hope they will dry in the night, but it is shivery cold in here. Perhaps tomorrow I will hang them in front of the grate downstairs. I nearly cry when I find that my second petticoat is quite dry, having sat at the bottom of my bundle under the other things, and I press my face into it to breathe in the smell of home.

  “No,” I whisper aloud, and put it aside.

  I will not think of home.

  There is a plain chair by the bed. I am in a strange house with strangers; I could move the chair before the door to stop intruders coming in while I am sleeping, but what use would it serve? It is flimsy and light. Instead, I climb into the bed half-clothed and lie uneasily.

  The journey spins around in my head like a jolting sickness still, as though it were not quite over yet, as though my spirit were still out there traveling along the turnpike, straining to catch up with me. How disappointed the lovely Lettice Talbot will be to find my absence at the lodging house, and what a shame it is to lose a special friend so soon. What would she think of me for walking into any stranger’s house upon the street, and going to sleep there when I had promised to be careful? At the earliest prospect I must go to look for Lettice Talbot. I shall seek her out and tell her where I am.

  What is this place?

  The flame of the candle bends and flickers in the draft. Outside, the rain is drumming at the windowpane. The curtain shifts.

  There is a noise above me, and some powdery dust falls down from a crack in the ceiling and onto the bedcover. I pull up the cover and squeeze my eyes tight shut. I pray that my mother won’t work herself into an illness without me, now I have left her, and that Lil is not fretting and crying the night away. I can’t pray, though, that the trouble I hold inside me now will dissolve away and leave me be. I can’t even think of that. I won’t. And I can’t help that tears come out and run down the sides of my face into my ears. The coins are a lump in my underskirts as I turn in the bed to blow out the flame.

  Later I dream that John Glincy is pushing gold into my mouth with his dirty fingers, and I am choking on it: choking on the waste it is to swallow Mrs. Mellin’s coins.

  9

  I go down at first light and the kitchen is empty, though the coals in the hob grate are smoking briskly. Through a small window at the back of the house I can see the rain streaming over roofs, pouring and splashing into the yard. The glass of the panes is thick and greenish, like ice lifted from ponds in winter, but I can make out weeds growing through cracks in the brick paving, and a spindly tree that might be a linden. The thick glass makes these things far off and crooked. High up, a bird stands hunched and small by a cluster of chimney pots. How sick I feel. I look down at my familiar hands in these strange surroundings. The curious smell pervades the house; it is everywhere. I see that my fingertips are blackened with grimy circles from touching the sill; the dirt is an odd, gritty layer on the furniture, the banisters, the cups and plates.

  Mary Spurren comes into the kitchen with a dustpan and broom.

  “Late for breakfast, you are, but you can take small beer from there.” She points and clatters. “I’d get on. Mr. Blacklock will be shortly in to fetch you. There is a loaf. Mrs. Blight is new here a
nd is gone to make her face known about with shops and traders. I’ve told her Saul Pinnington’s for beef and mutton. Spicer’s always for soap and grocer goods. She said she’d see the worth and value before she’d buy a thing.” Her voice is clogged and hard to understand, as though she is not used to speaking much.

  “What kind of business is it here that Mr. Blacklock has?” I ask her timidly, pouring from the jug.

  “Fireworks, he makes,” she says.

  “Fireworks!” I am astonished. “He makes them?”

  She rubs her nose on her sleeve. “That’s what I said. All kinds of pyrotechnicals. Exotic fires. Godless explosions for the summer is what I calls them. For the pleasure gardens, and assemblies for the quality. What I think about it I don’t know, but it makes dust and as long as there is dust there is a place for me. Even burning money makes ash, and what is ash but dust?” She shuts her large mouth tight and glances at me doubtfully as if I might disagree.

  So fireworks are made by hand, in the same way as hurdles are, or pipes or horseshoes; they are not freakish works of nature nor of witch-craft, as I’d thought when I was little. I have read of fireworks in the yellowing, thumbed newspapers that pass about the village after the rector has read them through himself. And my brother Ab saw some himself, once, as he was passing Wiston House.

  “I have heard how they are like fizzing, white blossoms, a cold kind of devil’s fire,” I say eagerly. She shrugs.

  “Never seen ’em. Close-up, properly. Nigh on three shilling it is to get into most gardens for the night. Better drains there are to pour your wages down, such as they are.”

  “So Blacklock is a chemist then, or alchemist?” I press.

  “Just a maker of fireworks. Pyrotechnist. Never heard of such a thing before I got here.” She looks at the kitchen floor. “Dirtiest place I’d ever seen.” She puts a cloth in a bucket and swills it about.

  “And now there’s Mrs. Blight to take the load off, not to mention Mrs. Nott to do the laundry, when she turns up, that is.” She scowls, as if a thought had come to her. “Why are you here? ”

  “I don’t know,” I begin to say, and Mary Spurren makes a noise of disapproval through her teeth and scrubs hard at the table. Her cuffs are rolled up, showing how bony and red her wrists are. She scratches a lot, though whether from nervous habit or because her lice are very bad I cannot say, and her round face has no color to it at all, like a plant that has been sprouting accidentally inside a cupboard for a long time.

  The coals splutter. By the hot grate, the clothes from my bundle steam damply on the rack.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she croaks under her breath, cracking the back of her brush against the step to loosen the dirt from the bristles. “He has a temper that you may not like. He’s inconstant in his habits. He can go this way or that way in his needs and wants.” She looks defensively at me, her mouth open a crack.

  “Have you been here for quite some time?” I ask, swallowing the beer. She nods her big head.

  “I’ve been constant here, four years in all,” she says. “I goes along with it. When I were ten years old my mother said, ‘There is a steadiness to you, young lady.’ I stuck to that—I’m here for good.” She laughs with a hoarse, difficult wheezing sound that is alarming and I prefer it when she stops. Her mouth is so wide when she laughs it seems as though her head were split in half. Her tongue is pale, like a sheep’s.

  Mr. Blacklock summons me from the hall.

  “Come!” he barks, going ahead of me down the corridor. He unlocks a door.

  “The workshop runs perpendicular to the lie of the house,” he says. “This in case of fire means the workshop is as disconnected from the house as it could be in this situation. I do not need to stress the perils of a blaze beyond control. This you know.” The door is thick and swings open heavily. “Fire has no conscience, none at all.”

  Behind my back I cross my fingers, and don’t say a thing.

  The darkness shrinks away as he creaks the shutters open, one by one, and soon gray morning light shows me a long high room with a sloping ceiling hung with a variety of strange tools and loops of threads. Faintly, I can hear rain drumming on the roof. The smell of substances I do not know is so strong in here that something flickers in my head. The windows facing the yard cast a fair quantity of daylight onto two broad workbenches ranged with further tools and apparatus; implements that Mr. Blacklock proceeds to identify at random, straightening articles and boxes on the benches as he strides about.

  “The beamscales,” he says. “The spigot. The file. The pestle. The filling-box. The burette for liquors.” He points. “Alembic, pelican, condenser, retort, roller, funnel, nipping-engine, pipkin, nipperkin.”

  “A nipperkin?” I ask.

  “A measure for liquor a half pint or less. I am hoping that your mind is as quick and firm as your fingers claim to be,” he says. “I do not care to have to say the same thing twice.”

  He goes to the side of the workshop, his legs moving stiffly as if talking makes him uncomfortable. The shelves are ranged with quantities of bottles and canisters of differing heights and thicknesses: a disorder of great glass tubs that bend each shelf with weight, a mass of dusty jars as big as my fist, vessels as squat as the tea caddy at Mrs. Porter’s, and tiny corked phials.

  He reads some labels out, his back to me.

  “Sulfur, antimony, orpiment, charcoal, ambergris, oil of turpentine.” His voice is dark and rough with coughing. “Brassdust, steel filings, niter. Gum resin, pitch.” He reaches the end of the first shelf and then turns sharply to make sure that I am paying attention.

  “I can read, sir,” I say, trying to be helpful. The jars are filthy, and many of the labels are faded and hard to read in the gloomy light, but I say some aloud to show him—cadmia, red bole, camphor, crocus of Mars.

  “The words come slowly, sir, but once learnt, I find I do not easily forget them. Though I should be ashamed to say I do not write,” I add. He nods, and seems strangely satisfied with this. He stares at me intently for a moment. His eyes are unblinking, and I see there is a yellow ring about the darkness of his pupils, like a hawk’s. I look away quickly, at the shelf.

  “What is crocus of Mars, sir? ”

  “Powdered calx, a reddish solid,” he says.

  “There are so many jars,” I breathe, gazing at them. It is clear from the grime and the cobwebs that many have sat untouched for quite some time, their waxy seals unbroken, as if the contents had no purpose here. “But you don’t use them all,” I add.

  “What?” he says abruptly.

  “Unopened, sir. What are they for?”

  “Six years ago I had objectives of a different kind,” he says shortly.

  “And what did you use them for?” I ask, but he seems not to hear. “A waste!” he mutters angrily, as if to himself, and I am sorry that I mentioned it.

  “Until this day I have had no females in my workshop. They bring friction and trouble. Their emotions are liable to set off sparks. They have a chemistry that goes against the smoothness of my practice.” He clears his throat. “My attendant must be tranquil and nonplussed by nothing, at all times.”

  I grasp at that. Attendant to Mr. Blacklock, pyrotechnist. I have a flush of excitement at such a thing, and narrow my eyes to hide from him the sudden leap I feel inside.

  “The atmosphere must be as still as pond water in here,” he says, and it is a good thing he cannot see inside my head.

  “No flighty, sudden movements. It has been a male domain. But still, most rules are there to be unmade.” He coughs again, into his fist. “Tie up your hair and make a habit of keeping your clothes tight about you.” He hands me a leather apron. “Fasten this, always at the back. No trimmings. No lacy bits or ribbons. I want no tools from this bench to be mixed with tools from the bench over there. Only ram with wood, never copper.”

  Clearly these are the rules that are not to be unmade, and I imagine with good reason. The very air itself in here could pro
bably explode without a moment’s notice. I vow never to generate a spark by so much as feeling strongly. Then I undo this hasty thought; vows themselves being dangerous things.

  He is beginning to cast about for things to say when I see a movement in the darkness at the back of the workshop. A scrawny, ill-clad boy with dark or dirty skin sidles almost noiselessly out of the shadows and comes to stare at me. His eyes are huge in his head.

  “Joe Thomazin sweeps and keeps a presence here when I am absent,” Mr. Blacklock says. “He does not speak, or rather, he has not been known to. Not quite an apprentice yet, but perhaps one day.”

  He is about the same height as William, though as thin as a deer. Joe Thomazin does not smile back at me. There is a look about him that makes me think so far his life has not been filled with warmth. It is not a slowness or a hunger that I see there, more a stiffness, a halt in what he gives away, although his great dark eyes are wide open, getting the size of me, so that in the end it is I who drop my gaze and he edges back to the end of the workshop and begins to ready the stove for lighting.

  “You will commence today by oiling tools and replacing them precisely where you found them and, when you are done with that, by observing what I do,” Mr. Blacklock says. “I am behind in preparation of Mr. Torré’s urgent order for his display at Marylebone, which should comprise four hundred rockets, Roman candles and maroons, if I have so much in stock, and I expect a silence, now, to work in.”

  And he turns away and begins to consult a piece of paper.

  I do not like to ask another thing, so I embark upon a long search for oil and rags. It is a good thing that I know what to do, having watched my father oiling his coppice tools every winter that I can remember.