The Book of Fires

by Jane Borodale

  Mrs. Blight does not eat heartily for several days. She has complained all morning of a worm in her tooth, holding her jaw from time to time between rolling the pastry and stoking the fire. “I needs seeing to,” she grumbles.

  “Mr. Blacklock will not have a doctor set foot inside the house,” Mary Spurren declares.

  “Not even if she pays for it?” I query.

  She shakes her head with vehemence. “I know he won’t.”

  So Mrs. Blight sends me out to the apothecary to buy some proprietary drops she thinks will stop the ache. I don’t mind—perhaps today will be the day I catch sight of Lettice Talbot.

  As I walk I think how Mrs. Blight’s teeth are black and yellow at the edges. I am afraid of their looseness, that one day a tooth will turn up in the soup or under a piece of buttered sea kale; a tough, yellowing lump like a bad nut. Lettice Talbot’s teeth were good and white, I think, pushing open the door. The air filling the apothecary’s shop is pungent with chemicals, herbs, oils of plants and minerals, dried unrecognizable bits of things.

  Mr. Jennet is busy standing on a step to dust big glass bottles on a high shelf. He peers through the rounds of his spectacles and grunts, and makes me wait. The shoulders of his frock coat are chalky with powder from his ancient wig.

  On the counter I see something in a jar labeled Liquid Bloom of Roses. I remember Lettice Talbot’s perfect rosiness and wonder whether this was how she made herself so beautiful. There is some part of me that would like to try it for myself; if only I could make myself a little prettier, Cornelius Soul’s attention might be more keen. I must do all that I can, if I am to make sure that he becomes obliged to marry me. And as Mr. Jennet’s back is turned I pick up a little gallipot and prize up the china lid to see inside.

  He will not see, I think, and furtively I press my finger into it. A red paste, the consistency of goose grease, lines the inside. I rub a smear of it onto the skin of my hand above the knuckles; it does not smell at all of roses, but has a cheap fattiness to it. It is not how I imagined. Disappointed, I put the gallipot back upon the counter and try to rub the Bloom of Roses off. It is tacky and persistent; it spreads about until my stained hands look like the butcher boy’s at Saul Pinnington’s. When at last Mr. Jennet climbs stiffly down and turns to serve me, I tuck them into my skirts and put what Mrs. Blight owes to him upon account.

  Walking home I feel branded like a strayed sheep marked with ochre, or as though I were sporting evidence of a careless, vulgar murder I had committed somewhere. It takes a great amount of soapy scrubbing to get it off when I am back inside the house, and even then faint dots of scarlet seem to be embedded in my pores like tiny, gory freckles.

  Mrs. Blight’s temper improves once she has swallowed twenty drops of what I bring, and her conversation becomes rambling and animated for some time.

  “My husband was in the business of needles and pins.” She leans on the mixing bowl unsteadily and makes sure I’m listening.

  “Three children I bore him. All dead by four or five.” The chicken sizzles on the spit. “By the third death I thought perhaps that is enough of trying now, and then Mr. Blight suffered an apoplectic fit and expired where he stood, so that were a dead loss all round. My father put the blame upon my marrying into unsound blood, and told me Blight by name means blight by nature.” She looks oddly small, her fleshy hands pressed together.

  “So I took the imbursement that the Guild had given out as Mr. Blight had overseen the drawing-out of pins and needles for twenty-seven years. He would have gone round the world seven times over should those pins have been laid end to end, but I may have recalled that figure wrongly.” She shakes her head and hiccups sadly. “He had such a terrible fondness for the chocolate house on Lombard Street. Then I had attentions put upon me by a wax-chandler by the name of Thomas Veare, or was it Veasey? By then I was accustomed to putting the shape and shine and victuals back into other persons’ houses, and had no cause to sit about amongst the deadwood of my own effects, knowing what glumness that can bring. He looked abjectly shocked at my refusal, and then a hard smile froze up his face, and he went away. My father said I was a wrong-headed fool, and then the next week, dying himself of a sharp blow to the back of his neck on the way home from trading, he could have no more to say on the subject. On my birthday that were, the eleventh of May.”

  “And they say it’s the thirteenth that’s unlucky for some,” Mary Spurren remarks.

  “But I’ll not reach my dotage neither,” Mrs. Blight adds. “My plan being to eat so many pies that I die comfortably of being fat.” And she opens her toothy mouth wide and laughs loudly at the ceiling. “Don’t listen to my tales, not without salt, nor common sense of your own.” She glances at the little clock on the mantelpiece above the fire, slides the chicken from the spit with a flourish and lays it to rest on a warm plate. She claps her hands, “Knives, Mary, knives, knives!” Mrs. Blight cuts the bird up neatly until it is an oily pile of cooked meat.

  “Life is brief, Agnes Trussel, and I spends it wisely,” she says. I nod and swallow. Why do I feel that already I have squandered mine? The fluttering sound of the clock over the fireplace is like a creature caught in a trap.

  But I agree because I have to keep her sweet, I am sure of it. I know that, on a whim, she could cause me damage.

  I return to the workshop to charge rockets in the afternoon, and find that Mr. Blacklock has been making something while I was gone. He is not in the room, nor is Joe Thomazin. But there is a mess of spilt powder and chemicals left over the bench, as though something in the center of all the activity had been snatched away when it was done. I am put in mind of the ring of feathers about the place of a killing by a hawk: a perfect circle of plucked, blooded quills and under-feathers and plumage. What was he doing?

  At the back of the workshop I see there is apparatus propped up on a trestle. A group of new glass vessels strapped together, bulbous and gleaming, and a clean pipkin. They have not been used for anything.

  I set up the spindle and pick up the drift. My sides ache with bending and scrubbing. It is calm in the workshop, and my thoughts can roam freely. A draft blows in under the door to the street. When I knock at the drift with the mallet, the thing inside me flutters my belly as though feeling its strike. Surely it must be time for Cornelius Soul to come!

  If my plan fails, what kind of life would this creature have, if I should carry it to term? I would lose my position here at Blacklock’s instantly. I think of myself walking the streets, taking poor lodging in a St. Giles tenement or begging at Seven Dials. I think of a gray, dry scarcity of work, a thin suckling child strapped to my chest.

  I make myself picture its big eyes hollow with hunger. The skin on its head as tight and as fleshless as the shell of a nut. Its brittle fingers too weak to grip at me. No suck in its mouth, nor maybe milk enough to suck at.

  And then a bloodied cough would come, or flux, and it would ebb away in a tiny agony.

  I put down the drift and rock back and forth as though this could make an ounce of difference to the thing inside me. That would be my doing, my weakness causing so much pain. I close my eyes tight shut and press hard upon the lids until I see stars and colors flashing there. Oblivion is surely better. Perhaps death in this case for something so small and helpless would be warm and dark. Not death, I think, just not being born.

  That night my anxiety is tenfold in the dark when I blow the out candle beside the bed. I can hear mice gnawing at something in the cupboard under the washstand, and cannot sleep.

  There is a place in the north of town, in the open fields above Gray’s Inn, where some unwed mothers can desert their children. At first on hearing this from Mrs. Spicer in the natural course of conversation I grew hopeful and asked her more about it, tentatively, so as not to rouse suspicion.

  “They say that the mother’s character is scrutinized, so that no bad blood can unsettle the tidy atmosphere,” she said at once. I kept my face turned away and put my hand into a s
ack of dried meal on the floor as if testing the quality. “They say that only one child in a hundred or more is admitted to this hospital, but when they are, that it is good.” I brushed my fingers free of dust and went straight from the shop.

  I walked up over Holborn Bridge and up Gray’s Inn Lane, right to the new gates, and peered inside before the porter saw me loitering. A group of boys in brown serge coats were running on the grass. After a while I could not see them anymore, as my eyes were filled with tears that would not stop, and so I turned away. I could feel it in my bones that this would never happen to the child I carry. It is too great a risk to wait for. I am not of good character, as I have stolen money from a corpse. I am a criminal, and should that subsequently come to light, would they turn out the child? I do not know.

  Thief, thief, a voice in my head whispers, over and over.

  There is a glimmer of light outside, as though a scrap of moon were being blown about, and a breeze is twisting at the fabric of the curtains. Everything is unsteady. Sometimes it feels as though there were eyes at every crack. You will be found out, the voice says, an icy whisper. In the darkness I reach under my mattress and touch the coins where I keep them at night. They are still there, as hard as stones, as cold as death.

  It is almost too late.

  There is no time, no time for indecision. My head hurts with it.

  I turn and turn on my bed through the night, trying to find rest. I hear Mr. Blacklock slam the front door when he returns. I hear the watchman on the street outside call three and then four o’clock before I sleep.

  “Cease to be,” I advise it in a whisper, rubbing at my belly over and over.

  18

  Mr. Blacklock does not dine with us at noon today, but remains in the workshop for a reason that he does not choose to share. He has been in a grim mood all morning. Mary Spurren is boiling pickle at the hob.

  Returning to my bench, I pull up short outside the closed door, my hand frozen at the latch.

  “Bastards!” he is shouting. “Damn those bastards! Damn their . . .” and then his voice drops to an ominous murmur and I cannot catch what he is saying. I shrink from the door in shock. I can hear his footsteps crunching on broken glass. After some moments, my concern becomes anxiety that he may find me standing here, eavesdropping on his solitary rage.

  I inch back to the kitchen and close the door again. The smell of vinegar is choking. Mary Spurren is wiping the rims of filled pickle pots with a rag.

  She cannot think what might have caused his outburst, she says, when I tell her, her big head tilted loftily. “And yet, I knows his patterns. I knows he feels things more than a man should, and that this creates in him a confined storminess that must get out.” She shrugs. “Daresay it will pass.”

  She begins stretching leather over the pots.

  It is only later that I remember that Mr. Blacklock was not alone. Joe Thomazin was sitting there beside the stove at the back of the room, as he almost always is. Joe Thomazin must understand John Blacklock more than any other being does. He must know his moods, his habits, his breaking points, his wishes. He is like his shadow or familiar, always beside him, always silent, taking things in. If he could speak, how much he could say!

  I do not know John Blacklock, not at all.

  “It does not do,” Mrs. Blight says, shaking her head so that her chin wobbles, “to talk unguarded in the company of your employer.” She takes a handful of herrings left over on a plate and gobbles them down. “I’ve been hearing all sorts.”

  “Why should that be? ” I ask, uneasily. I think of the time that I asked Mr. Blacklock about his wife, and I am sure he did not mind. “You have heard what sort of things? ”

  Mrs. Blight shakes her head and laughs, her open mouth filled with fish. “She who treats her words with a certain economy must also possess a mark of efficiency in household matters. Doesn’t chatter: therefore doesn’t waste soap nor candles. ’Tis logic.” She stops chewing to push out a fishbone between her teeth.

  “Don’t overstep no marks nor boundaries. That’s the rules. Right, Mary?” Mary Spurren looks over slyly then, and Mrs. Blight licks herring from the corner of her lips. “Though there are some who might find it of benefit to speak out a little more at table.” I do not reply to this, though I know she finds my silence an irritation to her.

  “A funny setup it is here,” she goes on. “All together at noon like we were a family. It’s not right. I gets uneasy over it.” She lowers her voice and bares her discolored teeth.

  “John Blacklock is eccentric,” she hisses. “Only yesterday I was speaking out with Mrs. Spicer in the shop and she told me how she sees his lights just going on burning for most of every night.” She taps her head significantly. “And what can he be doing! She sees it, she says, when she gets up to use the pot or fetch a compress for Mr. Spicer, who has his ailment still.”

  “What is it to do with her?” I ask hotly. “His business is his own, whatever time of night it is.”

  Mary Spurren looks up.

  “Must be them chemicals,” Mrs. Blight goes on. “Since I got here I’ve always said you should watch out with them, they was not healthy. Only have to look at the ends of his fingers to know that. And God knows what they does to his insides; just hear him coughing of a morning.” She glances at my fingers suddenly. “Mind you, Agnes has got yellow skin, too, now. Look at that!” She grabs at my hand with her wet fingers and holds it up. “Devil’s toys, those squibs and rockets! Not natural. Though I see you take to them well enough.”

  Mary Spurren slams the door when she goes out to the pump in Mallow Square, though I cannot see why. Without thinking, I press at my stomach in discomfort.

  “Indigestion again, is it, Agnes?” Mrs. Blight says, but I don’t reply.

  “By the by, I brought ’em in for you,” she adds, nodding at a stack of pamphlets on the high dresser.

  “Thank you,” I say. I doubt that I will read them.

  19

  It is not far from springtime, even in London. I see in the yard the linden tree has new buds now, and the milder weather means great drenches of rain between the sunshine. The clouds roll over the rooftops.

  At home in Sussex the great tit will be sawing at his endless, tuneless song from the edge of the apple tree. Spikes of bulbs will be breaking into crocus cups and the fingery spread of anemones. There will be the crack of squirrels in the dry branches, and the earthy sap smell of spring about, as distinctive as the scent of a small child: a smell that quickens the step and causes songs to loosen in the throat. The magpie and jay and jackdaw will be flying across open spaces with twigs in their beaks, or scraps of yellowing wool from the backs of sheep. The babies will be outside playing in the mud and dabbling wet fingers in the water trough. There will be eggs for cooking with again, and the prospect of fresh butter not too far away. The water in the pail will not freeze nor need to be broken for the pig to drink from it, though there may yet be some frosts.

  And then I remember that this year there is to be no pig. And I begin to worry again. How I long for some word of my family, of Ann and Lil, of little William, who will be taller and advancing in his boyhood.

  “At home we use saltpeter for curing pork, sir,” I say, when Mr. Blacklock puts a dark glass jar in front of me. “One spoonful mixed into half a peck of common salt is enough to keep the meat from spoiling.”

  “Indeed, saltpeter, not a common salt, has many qualities,” Mr. Blacklock says. “There are many kinds of salt; for instance baker’s salt, salt of lemon, salt of hartshorn, salt of wormwood, Glauber’s salt, Epsom salt, salt ash, salt of amber, salt of lead, salt of crab’s eye, salt of oxbone, salt of lime, digestive salt of Sylvius.” He stops to cough.

  “Saltpeter, being potassium nitrate, is more usually known in the trade as niter.”

  I think of how my hands become sore with rubbing the salt on the meaty flitches of ham. Wet and fractious under the skin of my palms, the sharpness of the salt dissolves steadily into a
briny, bloody liquor in the base of the trough. The kimmelling tub was what my grandmother called it, though I never knew why. That tub must be four times older than I am.

  Excessive use of saltpeter turns a pickling salt green and the resulting meat will be dark and hard.

  “Pig meat is fresh pork,” I remember telling William. “But pork means salt pork, strictly speaking. Sometimes the meaning of a word can shift with what we say or how we say it.”

  “What a trouble it is then, not to make a mistake!” William had said. His face was thoughtful.

  The hatted man called Mr. Torré comes to talk of business, and he emerges with Mr. Blacklock from the study after an hour, just as I pass down the corridor with a message from another customer. The empty study smells of coffee. Mr. Torré turns at the front door on his way out.

  “By the by, Blacklock,” he says, like an afterthought, “those Roman candles you supplied last week were of exceptional quality. Exceptional.”

  Mr. Blacklock sees me standing as I wait to speak to him and he nods his head in my direction. “My new assistant made that batch from start to finish,” he says.

  Mr. Torré’s eyes widen, and he looks at me closely. “Those were good works, Blacklock, good works.” I glance quickly at my boots to hide the small flicker of pride I feel. How grubby they are.

  The wind makes the door shut loudly as he leaves.

  “I am sorry for him,” Mr. Blacklock remarks when he is gone. “It is hard not to take on something of his loneliness after a morning in his company.”

  I am puzzled.

  “What do you mean, sir? He has a wife!” I say. “I saw him walking with her once on Sunday, toward the park. She wore a shawl under her hat, as though feeling the wind would give her an earache.”