The Book of Fires

by Jane Borodale

  Why would that be?

  I shield my eyes with my palm, against the brightness. His back is turned now, and his feet shift about as though uncomfortable or lacking patience.

  How hot it is.

  I blink, the sweat making my sight swim for a moment, so that I put down the basket and rub my eyes with the heel of my hand. And when I look again, the man is gone.

  I let myself in and as I pass the workshop door I see two new tubs of gunpowder on the floor already. I have missed Mr. Soul.

  Despite the heat, a shivery chill goes through me when I think of that strange man again. His dark clothing, the oddness of his stance, his very ordinary appearance being somehow the reverse of what it seemed.

  He was a pale-skinned man taking shelter from the harshness of the sun, I reason. Or stopping heedlessly to attend to failing embers in his tobacco pipe. Or waiting to chance upon a hackney carriage. Or he mistook me fleetingly for someone else before he realized his mistake.

  And yet the chill persists, even as I try to cook the meat, and only when Mrs. Blight waddles back, in the unsteady temper that tells me she has sat out an hour or more drinking at the Star, can I begin to shake it off.

  “I want that oak white scrubbed, d’you hear!” She points at the table strewn with peelings.

  “Beech,” I say, without thinking, and bite my tongue. I do not want to provoke her crossness any more today.

  “Pardon me?” She turns to make sure that Mary Spurren is looking over, and puts her hand on her hip.

  “It’s beech,” I mutter, and try to make my voice sound sorry about it. “The tabletop is made of beechwood.”

  “You little—” she begins, but I do not get to hear what she has to say about me, as Mr. Blacklock has walked abruptly into the kitchen.

  “Oh! Mr. Blacklock, sir, I thought you was—”

  “I returned by an earlier coach from Southwark,” he interrupts. “What is Agnes doing in the kitchen today? She had clear instructions to finish an order.” He glares at the squat little clock over the fireplace that Mrs. Blight does her timings for meat by. “It is late.”

  I leave the bowl of muddy peelings at once and go in haste down the corridor. And I hear her saying, in the shrill tone that she saves for moments of crisis, “. . . just does as she fancies, sir, whatever shall I do? ” But I cannot hear how he replies.

  Mrs. Blight has begun to keep a bottle of gin at the back of the cupboard, which she thinks is a secret.

  My own secret has grown fourfold this month. I begin to feel its weight inside me.

  20

  In the morning Mary Spurren does not look so well. “I feel sickly,” she groans, rubbing her head.

  Mrs. Blight is slouched beside the hob and flicks the greasy pages of her recipe. “A big joint like that needs to be got early, to be cooked for noon,” she says loudly. “Agnes, you’ll go for the meat today.”

  “Again?” I say in dismay. “But I have to—”

  “You’ll squeeze it in,” she says, in a hard voice. “Just don’t expect Mr. Pinnington to be so robust with you today.”

  “Why? ”

  “The hanging. You’ll have heard the bell last night? They say George Nigh was his acquaintance of some long standing, fell on hard times. Served their apprenticeships together side by side like kinsmen, and shared a stall at Smithfield for close on a year before they parted company. Seems that while Pinnington’s Meats to the Nobility became a fixture in the high-class victuals trade, George Nigh’s luck fell on the other side of the fence and he slid into the mire of debts and turned to crime.” She tuts. “Robberies is always bound to get found out. Violence like that, on the king’s highway.” She quivers with relish. “ ’Tis bound to want punishing in the end.”

  “But if the man had debts,” I venture, “what could he do? ”

  “Seems a shame, I must say, when a man has to make his way by stripping well-off, middling folks of what they has and causing bodily fear.”

  “And did he kill a man or do injury to anyone?” I ask.

  “Not as is heard of,” she says. “But ’tis the principle, and besides, there’s no smoke without some kind of thing ablaze somewhere. Thrusting his pistol into carriages and making threats. Loaded, no doubt, with shot supplied by the likes of your Mr. Cornelius.”

  “He is not . . .”

  “And two unmarried women to swing alongside George Nigh and his crowd this morning; should in all be quite a gathering. Pleaded their bellies, but when matrons examined them they found them both to be without child.” She heaves herself onto her feet.

  “I’ve heard someone’s been stealing plate from churches over Westminster way. Very low, that is. You’re not going to tell me that shouldn’t go unpunished, neither! Crime’s everywhere. These days even God has to resort to lock and key to protect what’s rightly his, and that’s not in the Bible, is it? Thou shalt lock up the churches at six o’clock? On cutting him down,” she adds, “they’ll take this one away to the Surgeon’s Hall to be anatomized, quite took apart in the name of science. Dissecting him up to strike fear of the law throughout all of the populace.” She shakes her head with a show of regret. “Disgrace for his family.”

  I go to the butcher’s in dread.

  Saul Pinnington is not there behind the counter. The shop is packed with customers and the boy is full of his story, his face flushed with talking as he tries to serve.

  “Mr. Pinnington’s not here, ma’am, he’s off to the hanging, to lend his weight and pull on his legs to hasten the end. George Nigh’s not a big man now, is he? I’ve seen a hanging, quite a sight.” He flusters about.

  “You’re making a mess of that hog’s cheek, young man,” a woman calls impatiently. My back aches. The boy raises his piping to be heard over the hum of chatter and gossip in the shop.

  “Lord, the prayers they mouth before they pull the cart from under them. I went to a hanging once, did I say that? Oh, Mr. Pinnington was in a terrible way through yesterday. Cursing and kicking the cats about all day, he was. Kept saying, ‘The foolish son of a bitch’ . . .”

  An old woman pushes forward to the counter. “You hold your tongue,” she chastens him, jerking her crooked finger at his chest. The hubbub in the shop dies down and people turn to stare. “That’s someone’s father swinging on the tree this morning,” she spits. “You’ll speak respectful of him, if you speak at all.” And she turns and pushes her way angrily toward the door.

  Behind the counter the boy’s face is drained of color, and I see that his hands shake as he wraps the joint for Mrs. Blight. He cannot be more than twelve years old, and looks as if he might cry, though with great effort he does not. He rubs the back of his hand on his white forehead, leaves a streak of blood. “That’s one shilling and tuppence,” he says in a small voice, not looking at me. The joint is as thick as a man’s leg, and I feel sickened at the thought of eating it at noon.

  “Lessons it is, I’d say,” Mrs. Blight makes clear later, sucking her teeth. She has grown boisterous and unsteady since I saw her this morning. “They says drink leads to crime. Hah! I’m not averse to knocking back a glass or two of orange shrub,” she cackles. “But you don’t find me going off like a delinquent.” She looks at me and hiccups. “Lessons for all of us to keep on the straight and narrow. Should be requisite to go to hangings. Should be the law.”

  I shift uncomfortably.

  Mrs. Blight snorts. “Look at her.” She points at me. “So worried someone’ll make her go and see the next.” She tries to explain: “It’s more the . . . atmosphere you goes for. The final act itself doesn’t last so long.” The smell of roasting pork is everywhere.

  “Sometimes there’s a bit of ruckus when they cuts them down, the families fighting for the corpse to take for burial against the surgeons hoping for a bit of flesh to practice on, but ’tis never so bad as you’d think. Once you’ve seen a couple, well”—she shrugs—“you’ve seen them all. Sometimes, like today, they does a cluster all at once, say six
or seven punished side by side. Daresay that would be a comfort, a bit of company in your final moments.”

  I put the knife into the round of the bread upon the board and slice up the whole loaf steadily. I am quite light-headed. Mary Spurren’s cold is worsening and I can hear her sniffing to herself, hunched over the scullery sink, scrubbing at a dirty pot.

  Mrs. Blight frowns at me.

  “Hope you’re hungry, madam,” she comments sharply. “Wasting all that bread.”

  “Oh, yes, very hungry. I suppose I could be starving; any of us could, given a wrong turn here, a wrong turn there,” I retort, putting the knife down. “Even Mr. Blacklock says the city’s gutter is always but a step away.”

  Mary Spurren comes out of the scullery, wiping her nose on a crumpled handkerchief. “Don’t much hold with crowds,” she says congestedly, and I nod my head.

  “You needs hardening up,” Mrs. Blight opines. “You’ve been shielded from certain things in life. I don’t mean you have not felt the bite of hardship or the gall of someone else’s wrong, but you don’t know how badness makes up half the world and how it follows that we’ll rub shoulders with it in the natural flow of life.”

  She gestures advice broadly with an empty bottle.

  “Keep out the way of trouble and lift your chin when it finds you, as it no doubt will from time to time. Evil’s not something that’ll be brought to account. Much of it, nigh on all of it’ll slip by unnoticed, doing its willful business in due course as it fancies.”

  “Don’t you have faith in justice? ” I ask. “Why do you like your pamphlets so much?”

  “Justice!” She chuckles. “Hear how the girl speaks! What is this justice?” Her eye narrows at me.

  “What of divine justice, then? ” I say.

  “It’s a whipsaw world,” she goes on, “cutting both ways, and sometimes there is redress, sometimes there isn’t. And you know my feelings about the Lord’s House; I’ve said before it’s not for me. Anything that’s built with bricks and mortar’s made by man and can’t represent a higher cause. Each man to himself.”

  She taps her head. “I’ve me own counsel,” she says.

  “As I have a conscience,” I reply, under my breath.

  Aurora

  21

  From what you tell me,” I say to Mr. Blacklock, when we come to talk of the third ingredient of gunpowder, “sulfur is a kind of latent earth.” I look for his approval, to see that I have understood his meaning fully, and repeat slowly, in my own words, what he has already told me. “It is something waiting under the crust of the earth: a bright yellow under the darkness of the soil. It is old, as old as the hill that hides it. You say that sulfur comes from places where the very earth itself has bubbled out molten in cracks and craters.”

  He nods gravely.

  “But I cannot picture this at all,” I say. “It means nothing to imagine the innards of the living earth.”

  Mr. Blacklock raises his eyebrows. “Indeed?” he says, scratching his head. “Then consider the earth’s shape to be round like that of a kernel, filled to the skin with minerals and unimaginable liquid fire.”

  “But how can I be sure of what you say, sir? These things seem likely when you are describing them, yet . . .”

  Mr. Blacklock looks at me intently.

  He goes to the study and brings back a book, and shows me on the yellow page the diagrams of little round black balls like walnuts circling the sun on strings. And I pore over them with curiosity, as one would look at marks in the mud on the edge of a pond showing that certain birds had been there, or water rats, or the dogs of poachers, yet somehow not believing in them absolutely.

  “I have a thirst for useful knowledge, Mr. Blacklock, sir,” I say.

  We go on filling gerbes with common stars and silver rain. Later Mr. Blacklock looks at me. “You are right in some ways to raise questions.” He clears his throat. “But you must narrow your eyes and squint into the bright light of the world’s knowledge if you are to advance in understanding what I have to teach you. Do you want to learn from me?” he asks quietly. His dark face is very serious.

  I blink at him. “I do, sir.”

  “Then sometimes you must accept as fact some things that you cannot verify for yourself entirely.” He gives his head a light tap. “Take that leap forward. Have a trust in some sources.”

  “I want to learn, sir,” I say.

  And it is true. Lately, the need to know has begun to burn inside me like a small fire.

  Soon after the church clock has struck two that afternoon, at last Cornelius Soul’s painted cart pulls up outside the door.

  “Roll brimstone differs from flowers of sulfur,” Mr. Blacklock is saying. “It can be used for making stars, as it lacks the sulfuric acid that is present after sublimation, but it is quite a labor to crush and sift.” I cannot help but glance up expectantly, and Cornelius Soul opens the door and breezes into the workshop. “Can you think of anything particular about the properties of sulfur that should not be ignored, Mr. Soul?” Mr. Blacklock barks.

  “It is the yellowest thing I can think of,” Cornelius Soul affirms, and winks at me as he puts a tub of powder on the floor.

  I try to contest his flippancy by thinking of something that is yellower. A range of yellow things runs through my head: a buttercup, the yolk of an egg slimy cap fungus, one kind of rowanberry, yellow feathers on goldfinches, wagtails, yellowhammers, the tip of the beak of a dabchick, a grain of ready wheat in summer, various caterpillars and centipedes, half the stripes of wasps, a melted butter sauce, the general sense inside a beepot, the flowers of penny rattle, and then I have it.

  “The sun!” I exclaim. I am triumphant. “The sun is yellower! ” I am laughing. “It is so yellow that we cannot even look at it!”

  Cornelius Soul pretends to consider this. “Our own luminary,” he says, stroking his jaw as though this could make him think more clearly. His pale stubble rasps. And then he counters, “But we do not know that it is not made entirely out of sulfur anyway!”

  He yawns. “You see, we are undone by knowing nothing at last. I like to know nothing.” He pushes at his hair. “Knowing nothing leaves so much space around one, for doing other things. I like a lot of space. I am a big fellow, am I not?” And he winks at me again, a sharp, dirty wink this time that makes my skin prickle with a kind of flush.

  Mr. Blacklock stands up. “Sulfur has a bad, eggish smell that worsens upon ignition,” he says crisply. “That is a portion of its ugliness. No doubt you must be done with us now, Mr. Soul. Your schedule for delivery—or should that be deliverance, God help you—must be pressing at this juncture of the day.”

  Joe Thomazin sits untwisting some kind of cotton for quick match.

  “What is this? ” I ask, holding up a length, to fill the silence when the rumble of Mr. Soul’s cart has faded away.

  “Nothing but common cotton, of the kind used as a wick by candle-makers,” Mr. Blacklock says sharply.

  I cannot understand what can have made him angry. I wonder why he finds Mr. Soul so vexing; he is too confident, perhaps, too full of life.

  “And pay no heed to his licentious filthy tongue,” he adds, but I do not know what he means by that at all.

  Mrs. Mellin’s coins inside my stays are yellow, but somehow different. I think of her face reflected tiny on the surface of each coin she handled.

  How mild this sunshine is for April, and how late it shines on in the afternoon. My woollen shawl seems almost too warm about my shoulders as I go around the house, but I dare not take it off; it is covering my shape. My bodice is let out to its furthest span, but the ribbons will go no further and soon I fear I must leave off my stays. When that day comes, my condition will be clear to anyone who casts an eye upon me.

  “God damn my carelessness!” Mr. Blacklock says suddenly, under his breath, and he sweeps the invoice aside on the dusty desk.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “When I made out Mr. Soul’s last order
for gunpowder, I failed to calculate for Mr. Torré’s display at St. James’s. As a consequence we have only one box of powder left, which will not be enough.”

  “No,” I say. The long list of works needed is pinned up on the wall. “We have not even started on the Roman candles.” Mr. Blacklock begins to scribble on a scrap of paper.

  “It is almost four and I have an appointment here with a new client in half an hour that I cannot miss,” he says. He looks about distractedly.

  “Joe! Joe Thomazin!” he shouts. “Where is that boy!”

  “He is just out, sir, on messages already.”

  “Damnation twice!” he says. “There is an urgency to this!”

  “Shall I go at once to Mr. Soul’s lodgings and ask for more myself?” I suggest. Mr. Blacklock stands and glowers at the list as if lost in thought, and does not seem to hear me. I begin to speak again.

  “Should I—”

  “It is hard to say where he may be,” Mr. Blacklock interrupts. “He moves between a number of places, I believe, and I admit I do not have a fixed address for him. He draws his stock from several warehouses, so there is no point in chasing him about the town.” He coughs heavily into his fist. “Most likely he could be found at Child’s, but I am unwilling . . .” He hesitates, clears his throat, then seems to change his mind. “No. You must go there at once and explain our position, or I will not rest easy this afternoon, knowing as I do how low that barrel’s going to be.”

  The coffeehouse is a fug of smoke and shouting, full of men. Nobody pays any attention to me and I cannot see Cornelius Soul in among them anywhere. The only woman in here is a wan girl listlessly wiping at a table with a cloth, and I go to ask her for his whereabouts.

  “Who’s asking?” she says, without interest.

  “Mr. Blacklock, Mr. John Blacklock,” I say, and with an effort she slopes to the back of the shop and leans on the jamb. The door is ajar on to the yard.