The Book of Fires

by Jane Borodale

  Mrs. Blight had been in good cheer that morning over breakfast. She had just finished reading the latest printed pamphlet of The Ordinary of Newgate, which depicts the dying words of those faced with their fate at Tyburn. She’d read the conclusion aloud to me with relish. It rarely happens, that a Man who will dare to be wicked does escape, though Punishment may not immediately tread upon his Heels.

  “Have a loan of it,” she’d said, looking at me closely. “Go on.” And then pressed it upon me as I went to the workshop.

  Mr. Blacklock is out.

  When Cornelius Soul brings his delivery, it is the first chance that we have had to speak at liberty since his unfruitful arrest. He puts down his box of gunpowder, and winks at me as he hands me the invoice, as though we have a new conspiracy together now.

  “That man bore a grudge against you,” I say, in a low voice lest someone should overhear.

  “Jim Smith has enough temper to share out between five men,” he replies cheerfully.

  “What did you do to provoke him like that? ”

  “He hates to see my growing success,” Cornelius Soul says, with a shrug. “I’ve known him for years.” He goes to the window and looks out, up and down the street. “I detest the smugness of a wealthy merchant as much as any man, but why should Jim Smith’s aversion to my steps to prosperity call a halt to them so easily? We should use every trick in the book to get where we can be.”

  “Then you are one of those that you despise,” I say, going on with my grinding.

  “I am not a wealthy merchant yet, and I will not take their notion of the law, which exists to protect property over human welfare.” The stove ticks in the distance at the back of the workshop; my pestle crunches the mixture softly inside the mortar. “And I do not feel a moral duty to abide by it,” he says.

  I stop the pestle and lean on it. “So you would forgive a breach of the law,” I say, my face hidden from him, “if it was not a crime against a person’s being.”

  “I do not hold with violence,” he agrees. “But other crimes? They’re altered by who does the telling. One person’s crime could be another’s justice.”

  “Isn’t it just to do with finding out the truth, and measuring it against the law?” I say.

  “But the law itself is made by individuals, each with his own motives.”

  “These laws are ancient! ”

  “And their interpretation is as various as the times they occupy, Miss Trussel.”

  I put the pestle down. “My father had no wish to give his strips of land up to the landowner that bought them, but he had no choice in the face of the law,” I admit. “Misery and damage has been done to many families like our own, though no crime was committed.”

  Cornelius Soul picks up Mrs. Blight’s pamphlet, propped open on the bench, and flicks through it. He stops at a page and flourishes it at me.

  “To kill a man of nineteen, watch him swing by the neck, with the ghastly strength of moral certainty. Or the act of trying to steal a bite to eat. Which is the more chilling? ” he asks. I do not need to reply.

  “If the poor had the vote, things would be different,” he adds, then breaks off and laughs. “You must stop me, Miss Trussel, if you find me tedious. Besides,” he says, winking, “a man amounts to more than just his politics.”

  “Does he? ” I say. “I am not so sure. His core is his beliefs.”

  Cornelius Soul grins. “The change must come from beneath—like a rising tide.”

  I count out twenty wobbling drops of oil from the end of the pipette into the mortar, and then frown.

  “But how can the poor have a will to win, Mr. Soul, when with every step they know they have not eaten enough bread to even carry them strongly to the end of the street?” I say very quietly, remembering what I saw when I came to the city. “At home we wouldn’t keep cattle the way I’ve seen people living here. My brother Ab would be appalled. Bellies yawning for food unless numbed with gin, and their children not growing or dead of neglect or sickness. Dignity of work is not a choice they have been offered.”

  “I had not realized how very angry you are, Miss Trussel,” he says, as if surprised.

  “I’ve got eyes in my head as I walk about,” I say. He does not reply. I hope he is not disappointed in me. Our conversation lulls, and he flicks his fingers at the tools hanging from the wire at my bench, so that they clink and judder.

  I try again.

  “You speak so roundly of how you are part of an upsurge from the city’s underbelly, but if you succeed, won’t you just be like them? ” I spill some sulfur as I measure more scoops into the pan of the beamscales.

  “And you disapprove,” he says, and something has changed. I have said too much.

  I look up and try to catch his bright eye, but he will not look at me. Out in the yard Mary Spurren tips a stream of greasy water from the bowl into the drain, wipes her wrist upon her apron and goes back inside the scullery. A bird calls in the linden tree.

  “I am undecided,” I say at length, trying to be honest. Then more words come out of my mouth before I have time to check them. “I do not know . . . what kind of man you are,” I say, as though it matters.

  He turns to face me.

  “You are very direct,” he says. He is not laughing, though I wish that he would. His gaze is level, but the blueness of his eyes is somehow shielded by their narrowness, as though he does not want me to know his thinking.

  We hear the front door open and steps coming down the corridor, and John Blacklock strides into the workshop.

  “I see you take the risk of leaving your premises unattended far more of late, Blacklock.” Cornelius Soul takes up his tone of banter promptly.

  Mr. Blacklock does not reply at first. He takes off his hat and puts it on the nail.

  “Indeed,” he says, coolly.

  When Cornelius Soul takes his leave this time, he kisses his own hand and presses my cheek roughly with it. I look round hastily, but Mr. Blacklock does not see, thank God for that. It was not a caress but a challenge, I think, as though his fingertips have branded me as punishment for what I said.

  My cheeks burn hotly. I have a sudden gape of shame and dismay opening inside me. How do I dare to hold forth on principles or moral ground, I with my stash of stolen guineas tucked in my stays even as I sit before him, and the lies in my heart spreading out like a canker. No, he is right to grab his chances; it is each man for himself, though it should not be. My head reels with complication.

  “If that man is bothering you, you need not engage him in debate,” Mr. Blacklock comments dryly.

  “He was not,” I say.

  “But I see you are some way behind with your quota today,” he adds, with a glance at the half-filled crate of rockets over by the filling-box, as he has every right to do. My guilty feeling worsens.

  23

  The back door of the workshop is open to the morning air. The piping of birds drifts in, and a smell of soap from the drain outside the scullery where Mrs. Nott has emptied her buckets. It is almost May.

  Mr. Blacklock has a copy of the London Evening Post from yesterday spread out on the bench, and is scanning the pages urgently for an account of the opening season’s fireworks at Marylebone Gardens. “How irksome!” he exclaims, finding it. Scornfully, he reads aloud:

  “Prodigious height! Salutes that deafened the ear for hours subsequent! Glorious climactic eruption, when scarcely an inch of sky was left unemblazoned with brilliance!

  “Why do these engineers inspire such hyperbole? ” he asks. “Why do they pander to it? Reducing as it does the art of pyrotechny to a common battering of senses, like a blast in a tin mine. There is no room for subtleties or shaping when expectations can be predicted thus.” A fly circles above his newspaper, then settles on it. He brushes it off impatiently. “Perfection of form should always take precedence over height or spread. Mere quantity is not impressive.” He snorts in distaste. “Would you not say?” he demands.

  “I would not
know, sir,” I remind him, surprised, “having never properly seen a firework.”

  Mr. Blacklock says nothing to this, and his face is thoughtful, as if he had not thought of that for some time.

  He closes the paper, puts it aside and leaves his bench. He goes to the back door of the workshop and stares out at the yard. Mary Spurren is hanging the washed linen out to dry in the warm air. I see him looking up at the blue sky as if to judge the weather, and then he returns inside, clears a space at his table and writes quickly on a sheet of paper, which he folds and seals and gives to Joe Thomazin to deliver to an address in the Haymarket, to the west of the city.

  He brings down a bundle of lengths of deal, cut into thin sticks at the carpenter’s shop, and begins tying them to rockets from the box he puts at his feet.

  “The display at St. James’s Square is to be fired tonight,” he mentions later.

  “Tonight, sir? ” I say politely, choosing a hollow drift at the filling-box. Of course, the crates for that order were sent out last week.

  “And I have sent word to Mr. Torré, to expect us to attend.” My drift pauses over the rocket’s mouth. “Most of the works he intends to fire have been supplied by Blacklock’s, and it would be of benefit to check the consistency in quality.” I swallow. Did I hear him correctly? Did he mean . . . ?

  “His cascades are on the whole of exceptional class, and also something he is apt to call the Forge of Vulcan,” he goes on. “The display will be staged from a scaffold or machine outside the house, and the party in question, a private assembly, will enjoy the spectacle from within the ballroom darkened for the purpose. There would be no difficulty for us to gain entrance to the garden, to oversee the practical application of our product.”

  “Do you mean, sir, that I am to go as well?” I ask, and hold my breath.

  He coughs into his fist. “Can you walk a distance?” he demands. “If the evening remains pleasant we shall depart at eight o’clock on foot.” I squeeze my hands tightly together, so that he cannot see my fingers trembling.

  “I can, sir.”

  “Good, good.” He flicks through a box of dusty invoices and takes one out to read it. “Two hundred honorary rockets, eighteen Caduceus, twenty girandoles, forty-five gerbes, petard rockets with brilliant fire, cascades, candles with various stars, fixed fires including Chinese fire and ancient fire, maroons et cetera.” He waves his hand. “Also one red shower. You remember making that? ”

  He stops reading and looks at me over his eyeglasses. “That is what you can expect. Make of it what you will.” And he puts the paper down and says no more on the subject, even in the face of questions that I dare to beg of him from time to time.

  The day passes with a painful slowness.

  At six when I go to the kitchen I find it full of smoke, and Mrs. Blight cursing and flapping at the air.

  “Open that casement at once, Agnes!” she orders, coughing dramatically, as if it is my fault that she has burnt the meat, and she scrapes the lump forcefully away from the spit.

  “Clock’s broken,” Mary Spurren says gloomily. The charred cinder of our supper lies on the hearthstone, smoking miserably.

  “What in God’s name, woman, is happening in here? ” Mr. Blacklock says, striding into the room. The smell of burning is everywhere.

  “Wretched object,” Mrs. Blight laments, rolling her eyes at the mantelpiece. “Deplorable useless bit of mechanics.” She raps at its wooden case. “Should never have got reliant on it. Never had a clock before to cook by, makes your cooking eye go blind, that does, having a clock to lean on, timewise. I’ll vouch that someone’s overwound it or dropped it and broken some bit of innards, but no one’s owning up, sir.” She shrugs, her chin wobbles with regret. “There’s no one here’ll say they did it.”

  He gestures at the smoke. “See to it,” he says curtly.

  “Have to go back to smelling when it’s done,” Mrs. Blight says, when he has gone. “Besides, timings is no use at all. When it’s done, it’s done, and that’s exact enough. Proper time is only as long as something takes.”

  Mary Spurren sniffs. “That clock were handy.”

  “What for?” Mrs. Blight demands.

  “For telling just how late Mrs. Nott is turning up these days, for one thing,” Mary Spurren replies, grumpily. “Latest woman I ever knowed.”

  Once Mr. Blacklock and I set out for St. James’s, the world seems different, walking along beside him to the fireworks. Past the great bulk of St. Paul’s, past the churchyard, past the Temple, past Clifton’s chophouse, past St. Clement’s in the center of the street with the traffic pouring past to either side of it. I feel shy and exhilarated, walking fast to keep up with him. The Strand is bright and glassy with shopfronts; women in striped silks buying hats and Florence cordials and anchovies, gentlemen pressing tobacco into their pipes and examining swords and traveling trunks, painted blowsy women plying their trade at the mouths of courtyards, beggar boys with dirty fingers, and all the world staring at each other, this way and that, for what variety of reasons I could not say. And for all the bustle about us, I find myself glancing sidelong at Mr. Blacklock from time to time. It is a curious thing how a familiar face can appear so altered by new surroundings. How fiercely he glares at the crowd. He is taller without his leather jerkin, wearing instead a dark frock of fustian over his waistcoat, and I notice how people seem to shrink from his path as he walks through them. His long face cannot be comfortable with itself, as though thoughts and visions were constantly exploding behind his eyes. His eyes are almost too dark to see into, as if he has made them so after suffering trouble, and with his need for silence.

  Away from the shops, the light fails quickly into dusk. One carriage goes by as we enter St. James’s Square; the horses’ hooves are crisp on the road. Mr. Blacklock stops suddenly and raps at a side door in a high wall, and presently we are admitted into the grounds of a large house that stands in the shadows beyond. The walking has tired me and I long to sit down. My belly is heavy and drags at my backbone, though the child lies still and does not push about.

  It is cool and quiet in the garden. The air is blue with early darkness; bats flicker and circle unsuspecting above the tall spindly scaffold that I can just make out. There is a low, thrilling hum of preparation; shadowy figures of many men moving about, muttering. A brief flare of a taper lights up a face and is extinguished. Mr. Blacklock gruffly motions me to sit, and goes to speak to Mr. Torré. The low wall is damp under my skirts, but I am glad to rest. I rub at my back when he is gone. How hungry I am already. A bright, thin quarter moon hangs over the rooftops.

  The punch of the first volley of rockets startles me, and the child begins kicking and kicking. I stand up.

  It has begun.

  It is so close that I can hear the hiss of the quick match rush to the lifting charge of each flight of rockets, before the pound and roar of the ignition, and then the burst, and the sky is riddled with twists of fire, feathers of fire, billhooks of light, snakes of fire and smoke. The breaks are a spill of prickling white light across my eye, crackling the glaze of the sky into bitter shards. I blink. I cannot breathe for whiteness everywhere. I am blinded by it. The sky is burnt with purple shadows when the whiteness is done, when there is a pause for darkness, though the smoke swirls about, and then more gerbes start up, pulsing sheaves of orange sparks, with stars shooting out like grains of polished light that lift, drift, stop, then fall slowly, smooth as glass, winking out into the darkness. The world is either fire, or water, or darkness, nothing else. An unformed sob gathers in my chest.

  The shape of Mr. Blacklock looms out of nowhere. “The cascade!” he shouts, huge beside me.

  It is a white froth of sparks and smoke that pours down the scaffold as though it will never stop. My face is hot with it. When I turn to the house the glass of the windows is white with the light caught there, as though the house, too, is maddened with fire. In the ballroom behind the reflection the white faces of the guests at the as
sembly throng, unmoving.

  Mr. Blacklock bends down and speaks into my ear: “. . . niter, antimony.” His voice is close and thrums in my head. I nod at him, speechless.

  “Tourbillion!” his voice says, and I am giddy with it. Above us the tourbillion rotates wildly like a glittering muscle of fire.

  There is a burst of maroons like an attack. The child inside me goes stiff with the shock of the noise. I should like to rub my belly, but I dare not. Instead I find myself clenching my hands tightly over it, as if to shield it from the flashes and blasting. The smell of gunpowder and the white clouds of sulfurous smoke fill the leafy garden to the brim.

  It is over. I can hardly believe what I have seen, my heart pounding in the sudden hush.

  After the display we do not speak. Mr. Blacklock crosses beneath the scaffold to talk again with Mr. Torré. The air is damp. As the smoke clears slowly I can see inside the house, where the chandeliers are lit again and the musicians have begun to play. I can just see the gleam of silk skirts turning in the candlelight as the guests start to dance. An upper window closes, as though a servant had been watching. I cannot hear Mr. Blacklock’s conversation—his back is turned to me—but Mr. Torré seems to look across once to where I stand and I see his hat nodding, as though agreeing strongly with something that was said. I avert my gaze quickly when he does that.

  “You are chilled,” Mr. Blacklock notices when he returns to me, and we leave the garden. He adds, “Torré felt the works were good.”

  Pall Mall is quiet; a single horse and trap go by, then a linkboy hastening, his torch flaming dirtily behind him as he runs into a lighted doorway.

  We pass Suffolk Street and turn toward the thoroughfare. Mr. Blacklock stops abruptly on the corner.

  “Let us take a glass inside this drinking place; then we can make our way toward Charing Cross to hail a hackney cab,” he says. And as he opens the door onto the noise of the tavern and stands aside to let me pass, I realize that there was something missing from the display.