The room is crowded. The fire in the grate seems yellow and mild and ordinary compared with the fierceness of what I have seen. The girl brings our brandy. It is hot in my throat.
“Not as poor as I had feared,” Mr. Blacklock is saying, his face lively. “Mr. Torré begins to grasp the matters at his fingertips very well, and can conceive a satisfactory pattern for the eye. Things are improving. I could find fault only with the firing by the operators, which was erratic at a point when precision was necessary. Perhaps the headed rockets with the brilliant fire broke a little low. Perhaps the cascade burnt on too tediously after the gerbes played.” He shrugs as though on balance these things were not significant, and swallows his brandy.
“It was astonishing,” I say. “But—”
He coughs into his fist. “It was not a remarkable nor singular display, but I grant it was neat and satisfactory and well made. There was nothing to disgrace either the trade of engineer or maker of fireworks.”
“What drew you to your trade?” I ask, with sudden curiosity. Mr. Blacklock leans back on the bench and looks at the fire.
“As a child I liked the clang and heat and rattle of the blacksmith’s shop, but my family would not hear of such an occupation for their only son. And when I came to England at the age of ten, I studied with a Russian man of what is known as natural philosophy. My education was thorough; I received instruction in mathematics, physics, chemistry, metallurgy.”
“Where had you lived before? ” I ask timidly.
“My mother was Polish,” he replies. “When she died, we left Poland and came to the damp tumult of Clerkenwell to live with my father’s cousin and his wife.” Mr. Blacklock’s voice is low, as if he were talking to himself. “Surrounded by my father’s books, I sat at his desk and looked out the window in a childish terror. Highways stretched as far as the mind could imagine, never-ending, filled with the darkness of houses, of poverty. It was a hard, miserable place I had arrived at. Only the fires of vagrants down there on the dirty streets suggested any kind of welcome. At night I would push open the window and lie awake, drinking in the smell of all the smoking fires about us, crying for my mother.”
He coughs and falls silent, studying the hearth. His eyes glitter in his head, as though they held traces of burning.
The warmth travels through me as I finish my glass: the brandy, the fire, the easy noise of the tavern about us. Inside my head, too, the bright fireworks go on fizzing and dissolving in the dark.
“But as a wise man once said, nature abhors a vacuum. And I read the Ancients,” Mr. Blacklock says. “Aristotle, Plato, Pliny. I read Theophilus, Paracelsus. I read Agricola, Biringuccio and the great man of artillery, Siemienowitz. I read Bacon, Bate, Boyle. I vowed I would be Firemaster. And then gradually I became most occupied with the way in which fireworks themselves are made. The point of source and cultivation. I purchased chemicals, tools, tutelage. As I grew older I began to experiment with new materials, to make attempts toward refining and advancing specific inquiries within the art of pyrotechny. And I kept my ear open for the merest trifle of fresh chemical knowledge that might prove expedient for my endeavor.”
“Is that your practice even now, sir?” I ask anxiously. I do not want to hear that it is not. I watch the girl pouring ale for the gentlemen beside us; her arms are strong and thick. I hear her laughing as she goes into the back room, pushing the curtain aside with her red hands. The fire smokes in the draft.
“I like the stillness at the center of a firework,” he says, turning the glass in his hand. “There is so much compacted silence within them; the bright flame shooting a slit of fire up into the sky, then the first silence and blackness before the sharp report and then the burst.” I smile and nod, understanding what he means now that I have seen it for myself. And then he adds almost in a murmur, “The second stillness will spread from the center of all the colors—like the vast stillness at the heart of flowers.”
I frown. “From all the colors? ” I exclaim, remembering now how the fireworks display had lacked one thing. The brandy and the strangeness of the night make me bold. “But I saw no colors there at all. They were so white! Only whiteness and brightness. Throughout Mr. Torré’s display I waited, as they went up, for the red shower, the red shower that we made with the deal.” I pause. “I saw none of that. Only whiteness and brightness. Which in itself was magnificent, do not mistake me, but not as powerful as what I’d imagined. Indeed, I was hoping, sir, I had expected . . .” and then I stop.
Mr. Blacklock looks at me. “You are disappointed,” he says. His voice is tight.
“Oh no, sir! ” I say. “It is only that I am surprised. You see, sir, some of the explosions inside my head were rich in color. I did not know what to expect.”
The girl interrupts to ask if we will take more brandy, but Mr. Blacklock shakes his head.
“It was part of the cascade,” he says.
“Sir? ”
“The red shower, it was the vital heart of the cascade, the volcanic eruption. Its ruddy tint was not very strong, but clearly visible. How did you not see it? ”
We return to the house. In the musty hackney cab he jerks the window open and stares out at the night. “I suspect we have misunderstood each other,” he says stiffly, after some time. “Or perhaps the failure is all mine.” The coolness of the air makes me sober. I have offended him.
And the silence worsens overnight.
“Morning, sir,” I say anxiously as I slip onto my stool. Mr. Blacklock does not reply, and he says nothing for almost an hour, except once when he drops a jar on the floor and lets out a curse under his breath, making me flinch.
At last I can bear it no longer, and I go to stand beside him at his bench. He continues working.
“When you say ‘red shower,’ sir, I think of the fiery redness of the roots of dock, or the gloss of a currant, or the bright reddle that marks sheep,” I say to him, swallowing. “I’m sorry, sir.” Mr. Blacklock does not look up. “I think of things that are red, such as red hair, the iron ore that goes to make up that star we are making and even blood. That’s what I meant by what I said, sir, just how lovely a fire like that would be! I did not mean . . .”
I know he is listening, although he says nothing, and continues to grind at the sulfur for stars so that I have to speak up above the noise. “Why not violet match, sir? I see the purple hue of violets in my head, of scabious, vetch, of . . . bruises. Could you make that?” Unwelcomely I see Mrs. Mellin’s purple tongue stuck from her mouth.
“Purple is the nearest to darkness and blackness. It is too difficult. It has never been done,” Mr. Blacklock spits out, grimly. “Anything else? ”
“Well . . . what about a green fire, sir? As green and poisonous as the feathered woodpecker in the pear tree at home, the unearthly bigness of its head tipping and battering at the bark for grubs. Or as green as soap made with Barbary wax, or early gooseberries with the June sun going through them. I’d want to see yellow! Scarlet, sir! ”
He coughs.
“But last night what I saw was white fire. Majestic fire, like magic. But white was its limit. I’d hoped, I’d thought . . .” Again I stop.
Mr. Blacklock lets the pestle sit idly in the mortar.
There is an agitated feeling in my stomach. Perhaps he has not been seeking new kinds of possibility, after all. No new, unrivaled recipes he has been working on in secret. Surely I cannot have been mistaken.
“Dissatisfaction breeds carelessness and bad workmanship,” Mr. Blacklock says curtly. “Look at what you have, understand its benefits and work with that.”
“I would like to see a blue,” I persist, suddenly near to tears in my frustration. “I’m sorry, sir, but a blue as blue as milkwort, as cornflowers, as the blue sea from a distance on a bright day. A blue firework shooting up into the night sky like a . . . like a joyful spark of daylight.”
“You imagine colors vividly,” he says.
“I do, sir,” I reply. “It is . . . al
most as though I feel them as a sense of touch or taste when I am looking.”
He looks up at me beside him. I am startled to see how his eyes are tight with excitement. A hope flares up in me.
“Have you attempted a blue, Mr. Blacklock? ” I whisper.
And he leans forward as though on impulse, his eyes narrow.
“When I first saw you,” he says, “there on the step in the pouring rain, I thought that perhaps you were someone else. I looked more closely at your face, and there was something of somebody else within it. Not in its shape, but in its look, in its intensity.”
The discontinuity of his thought surprises me. “There was something that I recognized,” he goes on. “I’ll admit, you reminded me of someone very close.”
“Did I?” I say, and a curious feeling twists over inside me. Confused, I turn back to the bench. Did he mean that I provoked a freshness of grief in him, or did he like my face for it?
“Flowers of sulfur are soft, like a yellow soot,” I say hastily, touching the jar, picking it up.
“That is because they are remade in air,” Mr. Blacklock replies after a pause, as if struggling to listen properly, and when he looks at me the yellow glinting in his eyes is like shards of brightness in a pool. “Imagine the change to which they have been subjected. When the sulfur was prized out of the earth, it had been packed solid between rocks, crushed with weight and time and pressure. Then, abruptly, we have freed it from density by the application of heat, which does not reduce the substance to a liquid but gives it the freedom of an air to shape itself again.” He indicates the jar in my hand.
“So we are given flowers of sulfur. The sublime made palpable.” He speaks very quietly now. He takes the jar from me and tips a quantity into the porcelain whiteness of a chafing dish. The jar clinks on the dish. He puts a big fingertip to the flowers of sulfur and seems to lose himself in thought.
“They are . . . exalted by fire,” he says, almost in a whisper.
I bend my head over them, studying them closely. I can smell his hands, the smell of skin and metal and tobacco. I look at the flowers of sulfur for some time, hardly able to breathe. Mr. Blacklock does not move away, though we are so close we are almost touching. “They are somewhere between flakes and crystals,” I say, eventually. I do not dare to say anything else, lest my voice should tremble. Mr. Blacklock nods. “Indeed they are,” he says. And we part then, and go on with our work.
The flush on my cheeks dies down. I must not misunderstand him; that leads to trouble. I must remember my place.
24
The next day Mr. Blacklock’s manner is brisk and cheerful.
“Antimony and orpiment mixed with camphor make a white flame on burning,” he tells me. “Whereas a yellow flame, or,” he says wryly, “what I would call a yellow flame, is made by mixing amber and cinnabar. You must understand that substances can become quite changed on becoming part of something else. For instance, arsenic presents itself in white or citrine colors, and is easily broken and powdered. But when mixed with orpiment, through sublimation they make realgar—a different, reddish substance with its own distinct properties. And in the residue of this sublimation they leave a regulus: very white like silver but more brittle than glass.”
“But silver is not white,” I say. “It is . . . silvery.” I can think of no other word for what it is.
“You are mistaken,” Mr. Blacklock says. “That is its nature only when polished. And by then you are no longer seeing the metal itself but simply what it is reflecting on its surface.”
“I see,” I say.
I think of Mrs. Mellin’s shining coins.
I think of silverweed, growing abundantly on the lane’s edge by the cottage.
“What other thoughts do you have today?” Mr. Blacklock asks me then, unexpectedly. “Was there anything else that you would find fault with, in what you saw on Mr. Torré’s scaffold? ” I cannot tell if he is asking me in earnest or in sarcasm, and so I answer truthfully.
“I have thought of little else since then, Mr. Blacklock, sir,” I say.
“And?”
“Well, I have wondered why it had to be so overwhelming, with the loudness nearly ceaseless.” Mr. Blacklock’s eyebrows rise, as if he had not expected me to say that. “I would have liked to see some separate strokes of fire, sir, a chance to enjoy the rockets trailing away to nothing in the sky. To see the dipping and the darkening perhaps may have made the sense of awe I felt much stronger. I couldn’t think, while it was happening. I was . . . battered by it. It was . . . too much at once, I felt, like listening to a song well-sung but bellowed out without a pause.”
“Despite the efforts Mr. Torré undertook to ensure the shape of his display was built to reach a conclusion of dramatic proportion at its end,” Mr. Blacklock says, dryly.
“Yes,” I say, “and yet I felt there was no warning to the burst of that finishing shape. I was not prepared for it, did not have a chance to draw breath with the pleasure of the thought of things to come.”
“And just how would you have shaped it, then?” he mocks. “Miss Agnes Trussel, near-six-month novice pyrotechnical assistant at Mr. Blacklock’s workshop, perhaps proving to possess more than a little talent in this field? How would you shape it? ”
I think about this.
“Perhaps its force could simply weaken, change and fall,” I suggest. “When the ash tree drops its leaves, still green, in October without first turning ruddy, without browning, there is less delight, less feeling of wholeness than when watching the slow golden turn of the oak, say, or of the maple,” I say. “A shape like this would be more . . . rounded, like the usual way of nature is.”
“Perhaps you should suggest it to him,” Mr. Blacklock says. Can it be that he is laughing? “Your ideas may be as quick as your fingers seem to be.”
He beckons me closer and bids me watch as he pours something into a small glass vessel. “I am making aqua regia,” he says. “Strong spirit of niter with strong muriatic acid; it must be freshly mixed, as it quickly loses potency.” And to my surprise he drops in two shining guineas and corks the vessel up.
“Gold?” I say. There is a tube sticking from the vessel’s second aperture into another jar, and even as I speak a yellowish tumbling kind of steam or air begins to pour through the tube into the jar. There is a disagreeable, choking smell that catches at the back of my throat and makes my eyes water. “Do not breathe too deeply; it is highly corrosive,” Mr. Blacklock warns me.
“The coins have disappeared, sir,” I say, looking at the liquid in concern. “This experiment must cost a lot.”
“No. The gold, though invisible to the eye, remains within the solution, and can, with a degree of bother, be retrieved at will.” He coughs. “But this is the substance of interest.” And he holds up the jar of greenish yellow air he has collected.
He waves his hand impatiently toward the yard. “Bring me one of those little flowers out there.”
“Flowers, sir? You mean the violets?” I am surprised he has noticed them, tucked away, late-blooming, between the warmth of the bricks of the outhouse. I go and pick one carefully and bring it in.
He tears the green stalk away and takes the head of petals up in a pair of pincers, which he dips inside the jar, removes and holds toward me. “See ? ”
“The color is quite sucked out of it, sir!” I say, shocked. The stench is overpowering.
The violet looks disturbingly dead, an eerie blanched scrap hanging limply from his grip. One petal drops to the bench, as though a piece of the skin of a ghost had peeled away.
“Where has the color gone? ”
“Intriguing, isn’t it,” he says, staring down at it, quite lost in thought.
The church clock has already struck four when we are walking from the apothecary’s shop with six packets of fresh chemicals he thinks too valuable for Joe Thomazin to bring back unaccompanied.
“Three pounds and twelve shillings and tuppence I shall add to your bill, Mr. Bl
acklock, sir,” Mr. Jennet had calculated in a grudging wheeze, nodding his powdered wig heavily as we gathered the packets up. I saw how he had found it difficult to conceal his irritation at Mr. Blacklock’s request to observe their freshness and the quality of goods in person, before they were weighed and wrapped. “I am accustomed to sending the boy out when goods are ready,” he complained through his long nose, as Mr. Blacklock tilted and sniffed at the contents of each jar. “Whatever it is that you plan to do with them,” he had added, with disdain.
“Another rogue, that man,” Mr. Blacklock mutters when we quit the shop. “Too many times he has sold me inferior substances. He nurses a belief that it is only men of science who should be provided with those prized secrets that nature gives up to his kind in the form of chemicals. He thinks that usage such as mine should be abolished, on grounds of waste: a populist defiling of the purity of their knowledge, stained by the gaze of the common mob.” We skirt a stack of barrels on the pavement.
“And he is not the only one. It is a view held by many of his kind. But they do not see fire for what it is.”
“What is it, really, sir?” I ask.
“Many things to many people,” he replies. “To us, to pyrotechny, it provides exhilaration, a soaring pleasure, during a display. And pain, debt, guilt, grief, all these troubles, we have momentary respite from. What a gift that is.” He raises his hat grimly to someone across the street.
“It transports the senses far above the moment, above happiness itself; it provides a very pure kind of change or space inside us. It quenches a thirst for rapture that we might not even know we had.”
He laughs bitterly. “These men of science would not know that. And moreover,” he adds, “their thoughts on fire are bound up largely in the pursuit of a nonsensical inflammatory agent they call phlogiston.”
“What is that?” I ask. I have to break into a run from time to time to keep abreast of his stride.
The Book of Fires Page 21