“Perhaps.” Why does she keep on so?
“But if the death were not natural causes. If it were crime, say!” Mary Spurren’s face is pink. “You’d need the law on your side! ”
“The law is not always enough,” I say, uncomfortably. A thought comes into my head, and I hear myself declare, “The law is man’s poor answer to irregularities of fate.” My brother Ab would speak like this.
She blinks at me.
I realize my mistake. My mother would say that that is the kind of talk to raise up trouble. I quickly add, as if to justify my unguarded words, “I mean that God is the authority.”
“God?” She scratches her head in confusion. “Sweet Jesus!” She wipes her nose again, looks sidelong at Mrs. Blight and sniggers. “She’s never seen a body.”
“On my way up to London I did see a man hung up from a gibbet,” I say, as if I had just remembered it. “Just the bits of him left, hanged by the law. Later I dreamt of him walking along by the carrier,” I add. “At least, I think that’s who it was. He was angry, and he had a red, chafed neck.”
“Most probably did have,” Mary Spurren says, gloomy now. “The unsettled dead will travel the old roads in search of something.”
“In search of what? ”
“Dunno,” she says. “Peace for their guilty souls, most likely. Something restful to latch on to.” And I shiver.
“I saw my first body when I were but a slip of a girl,” Mrs. Blight says, from her chair by the hob. “They sat me by him laid out all through the night, but more in terror I was of my grandfather in life than the mere corpse of him.” Mrs. Blight goes on. “A great gangling bully of a relative, with pinching fingers if he had a mind to it, like when his mood should take an unexpected dip upon hearing my catechism recited wrongly.” She snorts. “Wouldn’t catch me in church on Sundays now. Regular passive sinner, I am. No prayers, nothing! No point in going on poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick, unless you needs to, is there?” And she laughs more loudly than she need do, as if she had a point to prove, or as if she hoped that God might overhear.
“Churchgoer, are you?” she asks me.
“No,” I say, looking away. “Not anymore.” But I would like to go into the church of St. Stephen, I think, the one behind the house. It looks peaceful in there.
That night I do not blow out the candle immediately when I retire to my chamber, but sit shivering on the edge of my bed as I unpick the red thread from my skirts turned inside out. How the hem is becoming dirty. There is something about the red thread I do not like; it is too thick, too insistent, like the worms we found last week in a piece of white fish that Mary Spurren bought at Billingsgate. I pull the last wriggling strand out away through the weave with some relief, and push the coins back into my stays again. They feel safer there, less evident.
In the morning Joe Thomazin’s eyes search my skirt’s fabric for the red thread, over and over, and he puts a look upon his face as if to ask, Where is the secret gone?
I shrug lightly and then turn away, so that I do not see his hurt.
As the days and then the weeks go by, I begin to slip into some kind of working pattern. And it is almost December when, for the first time, I am left alone in the workshop. Mr. Blacklock has gone out on business up to Threadneedle Street, near the Exchange, and Joe Thomazin is running errands for him all afternoon.
I am stood at the mortar, grinding a mixture with antimony and boiled oil added to the powder. For every ounce of dry ingredient I must add twenty-four drops of linseed oil. My grinding skill is improving daily now, I think with a little outward breath of pleasure. I stop and take a look about me. The fed stove glows at the back of the room. On Mr. Blacklock’s bench the jar of antimony sits with its cork half open. On the boards under his stool there are dust and footprints, where charcoal was dropped and trodden on yesterday and has not been swept up. Out in the street a horse and cart pull up by the back door of the workshop, and the room darkens. There is a hubbub of laughter, and someone shouting.
And then abruptly the back door opens and a lean man enters without knocking, blocking the sudden gray light from the street. I stand up hastily. Cold air swirls in.
“Blacklock!” he shouts out, and doesn’t see me. The man bends and puts down a tub onto the floor, goes out to the cart and comes back with another. My boots scrape on the boards, so that he turns around and sees me in the shadows.
“Mr. Blacklock is out,” I say, keeping my back straight. “He won’t be back before three o’clock.” A brief look of curiosity opens up his face as he sees the tools in my hand. I put down the pestle and tuck my stained fingers into my skirt. “I am Mr. Blacklock’s assistant,” I say stiffly, in case he thinks I am doing something that I shouldn’t.
“So it is true, then! ” the man exclaims. “There was talk about his new subordinate being in skirts! I heard it, and thought it must be idle chittle. There we are.” He looks closely at me.
“I have the samples he expects.” The man’s speech is quick and pattering. He indicates the wooden tubs that he placed so carefully upon the floor. “Our supplies are changing, for the better is the truth of it, and these are what we have to choose from. The mills are a farther drive, but every mile is worth the horses. The mealpowder is as good, I feel, or better, and the grain is even and reliable.”
I look at his boxes, and back at him.
“Cornelius Soul on your premises, madam,” he says with a sudden change in manner, and he bends at the waist, bowing his trim figure mockingly toward me. “Seller of gunpowder and explosive accoutrements to the gunnery and blasting trades.” He likes saying that; he enjoys its satisfactory ring. There is something of the brashness of the city in his intonation, as though he is accustomed to making himself heard above the noise of busy streets and taverns and markets. He wears no wig. Although he is a young man, his hair is as fine and white as zinc, and tied in a tail. His eyes are blue and bright and move fast in his head, and his nose is small and sharp. There is a gleaming, vigorous paleness about his person, and he wears a gray velvet frock coat that gives his movements as he speaks a kind of silver sheen. Only his hands, I see, show any traces of the blackness of his trade.
“Not a stranger to irregular and small deliveries for the artisans in this field, within which your good man Blacklock holds his own so admirably.” He turns and bows again and grins. Mr. Blacklock has returned and takes off his hat as he enters the workshop.
“Stop talking like a weasel, Mr. Soul,” he says, putting his hat down.
“I have introduced myself to the new and striking element in the establishment,” the man says. His eyes dart between us. “My invoice,” he adds.
Mr. Blacklock picks up the paper that Cornelius Soul has flourished on the bench before him and narrows his eyes at it. “That gold tooth glinting in your skull indicates your dealing cannot be so bad this year,” he says dryly. “You have a shrewdness when it comes to business matters. Still, there is a promptness that I like about your service.” He pauses. “If a certain—flashiness—about your distribution methods.” It is the first time that I have heard him make a joke. Cornelius Soul chuckles, his gray coat shimmering.
“You are referring to my fine new cart you passed out there. Just a short spell at the sign painter’s for a lickabout with a fresh coat of color and the old is young again. And that mare you see before it, who pisses yellow in your gutter there, ahem, with no respect for your stretch of pavement, is now also mine to thrash.” He draws a breath.
“I have at length and after deep deliberation purchased every ounce and morsel of my partner’s business. We no longer trade as Soul and Tibbet but Souls alone. Which means I am a free man now to make my own advancements.”
Mr. Blacklock’s dark eyebrows rise. “Then you are to be congratulated upon your liberation. I wish you luck, and caution with it.” He counts out and pushes a small stack of gold toward him. “Tibbet was a mouse of a man, to be sure, but he had a nose for the place where sense a
nd money meet.”
Cornelius Soul drops the coins into a leather pouch tied about his waist beneath his coat. “Spanks and rhino, what a rarity! These days of shortage, one may never bank on who may not drop dead or be snapped up in the debtor’s prison.” He turns and says to me, “What a marvel! Can there be a sweeter sound than the click of coinage?” He looks up at the ceiling as if in thought. “Ah, but I omit one sound perhaps that is a little sweeter even still.” He lowers his voice to a dramatic whisper. “That of a good woman at the peak of her fulfillment!” I do not understand him; indeed I am confused by his direct manner.
He pats the cloth of his gray coat and grins and turns to wink his blue eye shut at me, then he ducks out of the doorway and is gone, rather in the way that a bird within one’s sight will take flight suddenly. When his horse pulls away from the window, a strip of late sunshine falls in upon the bench. I see dust spinning in the brightness it makes.
“Mr. Soul is a scoundrel and a dramatist,” Mr. Blacklock says, as if in irritation. “Pay no heed to him at all.”
I take up the pestle and return at once to the work on the block. I bend over the mortar and fix my attention to the task before me until my neck aches. Joe Thomazin is back from his errands. The noise of him sweeping the floor at the back of the workshop is quiet but insistent, like the sound of a light wind blowing through dry beech leaves in winter. He sweeps for an hour until the boards are clean.
12
Tonight I dream of an overcast sky waiting to rain. I am walking down a long white track between two hills. The air is warm and thick; flies swim about on it and bother the cattle. The endless road seems to dissolve ahead of me in the far distance, where the clouds are heaviest. I bite into a good apple and chew. The fruit is crisp and sweet as summer in my mouth. And then I look before I take another bite and see the worm, dark in the wet flesh.
I wake with a pressure on my chest and a trouble niggling inside, and the sickness is worse than usual this morning, so that I have to breathe deeply when I stand up and go to the basin.
Downstairs at breakfast I find Mrs. Blight and Mary Spurren muttering agreement about this and that. Their voices drop when they look over at me, though I can hear them still, as if that were intended. I have begun to sense that they talk about me behind my back, though I don’t know why. I do not understand people very well. They are perplexing.
“I’d had enough of her malapert sauciness,” Mrs. Blight is saying. I know they do not mean myself, but still I am uncomfortable. “Ended up over Seven Dials way among the gin shops, she did. Drunken discharged soldiers and seamen. Lots of trade there. Hardly of the kind she had expected. Though even among the cream of society you find the murkiest of morals, making games of what should be left twixt man and wife.”
Mary Spurren snickers.
“Like after their goose and gooseberries, after the cards and the white brandy has been put to one side . . .” Mrs. Blight pauses for effect. “Then they starts up! Best amusement east of the bathing houses? Debauched, I call it.” Mrs. Blight rattles the teeth in her head with a succulent indignation. “The things girls has to do for money now,” she laments.
“What do they do?” I interrupt, unhappily.
Mrs. Blight leans over, her bosom quivering over the floured pastry, and inside her pocket her little hip flask clunks against the chair.
“In company! Not a stitch on!” she hisses. “She’s trussed up, on her back on a huge silver platter! Like a great juicy chicken!” My mouth drops open. “Spun round and round she is, a plump little whirligig on the table, in the middle of the jostling.” She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “And the winner, blindfold, gets the lemon right in! ” She is beside herself. Mary Spurren snorts, her white cheeks flushed.
There is a sharp click as the door opens suddenly and Mr. Blacklock enters the room. I see how Mrs. Blight and Mary Spurren slip so easily into a semblance of work.
“Yes, Mr. Blacklock, your coffee will be along in just a moment. Agnes will do it.” Her voice is bland and occupied with kitchen affairs. I keep my face turned into the cupboard and bend about as though I were looking for something small and tucked away. Could he have heard us? I am mortified. The door bangs as he leaves the room. I pour a handful of beans into the mill as I have seen Mary do, and begin turning the handle.
“I have a grievous headache,” Mrs. Blight says plaintively, dabbing at the edge of her forehead with her sleeve. She lifts the pastry up on the rolling pin, then lays and unfolds it over the plate of chicken. She slices at the edge and it drops away in slow, fatty loops onto the marble top. Her skill makes her quiet for a moment, and she breathes heavily as she seals the edges of the pie closed with deft pinches.
In the silence, as I turn from the hob to pour water on the ground beans, I distinctly hear my coins clink against each other inside my stays. I stand stock-still. Could Mrs. Blight have heard it, too? That unmistakable, slithering click of metal, letting slip the certainty that I have money hidden on my person. And even as she is looking up at me, I burst out absurdly, “I like it!”
“Like what?” Mrs. Blight narrows her eyes.
I point at the pie. “The . . . fresh kind of leaf smell of pastry, before it’s cooked.”
“Leaf smell? Leaves! Listen to her!” Mrs. Blight’s mocking laughter rings in my head. She lowers her voice.
“More like a man’s fluids, that smell is,” she breathes, with a wink at Mary Spurren.
“A man’s what? A—” My cheeks flush. “I don’t know what you mean,” I say. Mary Spurren snorts again. And Mrs. Blight looks triumphant, as if she is on the way to catching me out.
She is a coarse kind of woman, and it is a relief to take up the coffeepot and escape across the corridor into the study. I set out the cups and sugar, then pin the shutters back so that the cold sun falls in across a corner of the desk. I look about. On the far wall there is a cabinet, bearing a range of books upright on its middle shelves. I look more closely, and see the volume that Mr. Blacklock was reading on the evening I arrived. Perhaps I have spent too long in here already, but I pause, just to touch the spines and look.
I make the letters out on each. Pirotechnia. Metallurgy. De Re Metallica. The Book of Fires. I spell out the strange and lovely words, and then, holding my breath, I reach out and take a volume down. It is so heavy. The leather binding is pale and shiny with use, and the rag corners of the pages are softened and dirty from being touched. It is a workingman’s book. Within are stiff drawings of contraptions and devices that have been sliced through to show the inside of processes and apparatus. Short men in long boots and old-fashioned breeches work at flames that look like wriggling blades of grass, and smoke that is drawn streaky, like the grain of elm.
I freeze.
Mr. Blacklock’s footsteps are coming down the corridor. I can hear voices at the door as his client greets him: the Italian pyrotechnic engineer called Mr. Torré, who does not take his hat off when he goes into a room. I push the volume swiftly onto the shelf and leave the study as it should be.
After their meeting I hear them in the hall.
“A pleasure to be working with you on this performance,” the hatted man is saying. “You’re an oddity, Blacklock, neither trader nor gentleman; or rather both.” And he slaps Mr. Blacklock on the shoulder as he turns to leave.
Mr. Blacklock barks out a short laugh. “Throw any insult, call me anything, but do not call me artificer, Mr. Torré.”
“True, your mind is too innovative for that, signor. Delighted to sign a contract with you.”
“I was preparing to join forces with your fellow countrymen.”
“The Ruggieri brothers?” Torré laughs easily. “One day I will outstrip them! Despite their claims that they will make pyrotechnic splendor for us, the like of which we have never seen before.”
Mr. Blacklock holds the door ajar.
“We are all searching for something new, Mr. Torré,” he says, quietly.
Soon after t
his I am bitten by an earwig, and Mrs. Blight, on seeing me sucking my finger like a child, thinks I am putting currants in my mouth.
“No, no!” I protest, and try to show her, but she is too busy to pay much heed to what I say.
“I’ve warned you afore, no helping yourself, no greedy-gutsing,” she says. “No liberties! Thieving little miss, you are.” She bends over, panting. The sickly sweetness of liquor on her breath is everywhere, but at first I don’t retort. I have noticed that the level inside the new bottle of Madeira wine—bought from the housekeeping money so that, she said, she can make up a tolerable sauce for boiled duck—has been dropping over the week like the line of high tide when the moon is waning.
Mary Spurren comes in. “Doing it again, she is,” Mrs. Blight says savagely.
“I took nothing!” I say, taken aback at first, and then indignant. “Besides, how can you say that, drinking Mr. Blacklock’s wine!”
Mrs. Blight smirks. “What wine? ”
“The Madeira.”
“Oh no.” She denies it flatly.
“It’s going down quite steadily,” I say, my face flushed, and I go to the dresser and point at the half-filled bottle for her to see, my fingers shaking, but she doesn’t miss a beat.
“Evaporation, that is,” she agrees. “These foreign wines are misreliant.” She sucks in her teeth regretfully and shakes her head so that the crop quivers under her jaw. “Terrible waste it is, terrible, all that good spirit leaking out into the atmosphere without effective stoppage,” she says. “No man has invented yet the cork that will bring to bear the containment of these foreign liquors.” She picks unconcernedly at her teeth. “Haven’t touched that bottle since Tuesday last,” she says. There is a wet runnel of liquor about its neck, and even as we look, a drop slips down its length and makes a sticky patch on the surface of the shelf.
And I look sideways at Mary Spurren, but she does not catch my eye.
As I go to bed that evening, something causes me to forget this disagreeable dispute.
The Book of Fires Page 11