The Book of Fires

by Jane Borodale

  “It is something that bends to suit their purpose in describing it. I do not know precisely what it consists of, nor do they. It is what they describe loosely as a combustible principle.” He snorts. “An elastic fluid that has no actual matter attributed to it.”

  “Mr. Jennet did seem rude, sir,” I say nervously. Mr. Blacklock’s temper is rising.

  “Rude? He is an ignorant chemist and his attitude disgusts me. As if they alone could have its secrets! Fire is for all who give it due regard.” He stops walking.

  “We have the properties of fire at our disposal, and yet we do not understand its nature, none of us. We never shall.”

  He blinks.

  “I would like to see the craft of manipulating, celebrating fire given some respect, that is all,” he adds more quietly still. He takes his hat off, turning it about heedlessly before him.

  “Has your time in my workshop not given you some sense of this?” he mutters. “Have you not learnt to care for fire?” I cannot tell if he is asking me a question, so that I hesitate before replying.

  “My liking for fire was there from the start,” I say.

  “Despite your family . . . ?” and he turns to me and frowns with recollection.

  “Despite that,” I say. “However that may seem. I cannot explain.”

  He seems satisfied with the plainness of my answer, and holds his dark gaze steadily with mine.

  When he goes into the shop to buy tobacco, I stand outside. A woman selling birch brooms laid out on the paving has begun to pack up her goods into a tatty basket. She starts talking to me as she does it. At first I can barely hear her over the thoughts in my head.

  “I’ve five sons . . . they are a great help to me . . . my husband died, you see. That happens, don’t it? ”

  I murmur something.

  “How long’ve you got before it comes?” she asks. I look startled at her face. Is my condition so clear to anybody now? Surely not. She has a fresh graze or sore across one cheek, like a scarlet patch. Her skin is wrinkled deeply. I do not reply.

  I look away up the street, past the women selling cornflowers from their baskets, past a spaniel eating something in the gutter, past a saddle horse, and the fish girl weaving through the crowd with a wide creel of slippery flounders on her head, and I notice a tall, slender woman talking with another girl, standing with her back to me. She is like . . . As I look she makes a gesture as she speaks, the bright silk of her sleeve catching the sunlight, and I hear a peal of laughter that seems familiar. Is that Lettice Talbot there? Can it be? I narrow my eyes and try to see more clearly. This woman has her bearing, her elegance of style in dressing. Her neck is pale and long. Is it she? Turn about, Lettice Talbot, so that I might see your face, I think. My heart beats in fear and hope. If I had more courage I would sail past and glance directly at her, but somehow I cannot. I stay faltering and rooted to the spot and wait for her to notice me. What will I say to her? Should I call out? Will she remember me? Will she explain that she did not want to do me harm? How could I have doubted her, even for a moment! I am certain she would help me. The acquaintance pulls her arm as if to show her something in the milliner’s. And then at last she turns and it is not Lettice Talbot at all; it is just a girl of ordinary plainness wearing a pretty cap under her hat and chewing her lip, as though deciding what new thing to buy as she stares through the shop glass.

  “. . . tiny little footprints, so provoking,” I hear her say as they come toward me, “such a squirrel!” And she giggles to her friend. Why am I always mistaken like that? A moment later I hear the silk of her skirts whisper past me, though I do not look at her again, and gradually my disappointed heart stops pounding. I am shadowed, haunted by the lack of Lettice Talbot.

  25

  I saw a dead child on a rubbish heap today.

  It turned my stomach to see it lying there in the early morning sunshine. Its softness, its smallness, was twisted up and soiled as though someone, some woman, had tumbled it out of a blanket in haste, in the dark perhaps, and left it alone for the dawn to chance upon it. Though the shock made me stop, I could not bring myself to stoop to look at it too closely, and I thanked God I could not see its face. The heap it lay on steamed slightly in the coolness of the air.

  How could a woman leave a baby boy unclothed and dead, its waxy, bloodied limbs a muddle of perfect flesh against the darkness of the filth, one tiny arm flung sideways so that its five still little fingers were opened out as if catching something falling? The umbilical stump looked fresh at the belly. I started to shake when I saw that, and ran to a woman nearby and pulled at her sleeve.

  “’Tis common enough,” she said, when she saw where I pointed.

  “Though we may not like to see it.” I saw that her shawl was riddled with moth-holes when she pulled it about her.

  “A newborn, was it?” she asked.

  I nodded. “It seemed so.”

  “Ah well,” she said. She shrugged with a measure of sadness and began to move off.

  “What shall we do?” I asked.

  “Do?” The woman was puzzled.

  “Who should we tell, what authority? So that it can be buried, so that dogs and rats cannot eat away at the corpse. So that somebody knows, so that somebody does something.”

  “People knows, all right,” the woman said, over her shoulder. “ ’Tis not the knowing that’s the problem, is it? I’d say it were the stopping of it. But where would they start? ”

  For a moment I stood in the glare of the sunshine.

  I was not brave enough to take it up and carry its dead little stranger’s shape to a priest or to a constable. Indeed, they would think it were mine, as they would if I went off and brought them upon it. And so to my shame, I do what everyone else has done on this green spring morning with the birds singing all about them and the smell of fresh meat pies coming from the bakehouse, and the chandler’s clanging. That is to say, I walk straight on, up Cornhill, as though I had never cast my eyes upon it, or as if I had but did not care. By the time I reached the corner of Gracechurch Street a ballad girl had set up outside the Two Bells, two women had quarreled on the pavement and the clock had chimed the half hour once more.

  And I do not want to think about the sight of it again, nor the grief of its mother.

  At night my lolling breasts leak milk, so that my linen shift is wet in patches when I wake. It is the rich, yellow kind of milk that comes first and quenches the thirst of a new baby in tiny swallows.

  Mr. Blacklock did not come to breakfast.

  And now when I go to the workshop I can see he has been working in here for hours. There is a chaos round him. Discarded all about are glass retorts and china pipkins discolored with chemical residues, traces of one frenzied experiment after another. There are opened jars everywhere, burnt piles of substances on tiles.

  “What are you doing, sir?” I ask.

  “Verdigris or acetate of copper is a salt of copper and produces a greenish flame,” Mr. Blacklock replies, without looking up from the bench. “Copper filings have even less effect than this on burning; the color of their sparks in a fiery rain or star is disappointing.” He picks out a jar and holds it up. “Steel filings for rayonet or brilliant fire. They intensify the sparks with some success, but I find little more can be achieved with them.” He rubs at his face as though he has not slept. “Powdered zinc is promising,” he mutters. Then he breaks off suddenly and resumes his inquiry. I try to work quietly lest I should disturb his progress. Yet even from this distance where I sit, his method seems to me to be disorderly. My fingers itch to go to his assistance.

  “But what are you doing, what is your purpose? ” I ask again, but he doesn’t respond.

  Joe Thomazin feeds the stove once, twice that morning, using the bellows to whiten the coals to a roaring temperature as Mr. Blacklock heats up pots and crucibles.

  After almost four hours of clattering and silence, Mr. Blacklock turns round at the bench and looks at me directly.

&nb
sp; “Agnes, I shall be frank,” he says. “Your suspicions were correct. For some time now I have been engaged upon a search for pyrotechnic color.”

  “You have, sir?” I burst out, and a relief runs through my body like a gulp of fresh, cool water. “And have you found it?”

  “I am looking for the sharpest kind of color,” Mr. Blacklock says. “The colors that we will make one day must have the clarity and transparence of the color one sees in droplets in sunshine. The vivid green, the purple, the orange of light going through water.”

  “Can this be achieved?” I ask.

  “Metal salts,” he replies, shaking his head as though to sort and clarify his thoughts inside it. “I cannot tell,” he says. “I have been looking again at the work of Hanzelet and this prompts me to think that there may be something in the application of metal salts.” He indicates the little piles of burnt substance on the tiles in front of him. “They are struggling. There is something smothered about the way they burn. The colors latent in those metals are locked in; they should be freed during combustion but they are not. It is as though they need something—more air, more encouragement, more vigor—at that point. What could provide that?”

  He looks at me grimly over his eyeglasses. “You are not to repeat a word of this to anyone outside this house.”

  “I shall not, sir,” I say, trying to temper my excitement.

  “An urgency to life and its developments has been made clear to me, and so I have decided to devote to it a greater portion of my endeavor.” He coughs. “There are parallels I have discovered in my experiments with a great variety of substances, which make me think that it is no goose chase, but a path worth following.”

  “What kind of parallels? ” I say.

  He does not reply but instead goes to the coal tub beside the stove and takes up a large piece of coal, which he saws in half. On the flat, black surface he places a pinch of copper filings. He lights a wax candle, draws in a deep breath and uses a blowpipe to direct the flame of the candle upon them. I hold my breath. The provoked flame roars quietly over the filings, until they are red-hot. He puts down the blowpipe.

  “But I saw nothing of note,” I say, unable to keep the disappointment from my voice. “We have tried so many methods with copper filings already, and no color results from them.”

  “Ha!” Mr. Blacklock raises his blackened finger triumphantly. “We are not done! ” He takes another pinch of filings from the jar marked copper and lays them on the coal. Then he adds something else to them that I cannot see.

  “Sal ammoniac!” he says, like a conjurer, and blows the candle flame again.

  The flame is a perfect blue.

  It is as though we have found the elixir of life. Mr. Blacklock blows the flame until the air is spent. I feel wonder at the strangeness and the calm of it. It is like catching an unexpected glimpse of a rare wild bird in a winter hedgerow. Or drinking down a great sweet draft after a long journey.

  “It is only a beginning,” Mr. Blacklock says. He coughs a little so that I do not see his pride.

  “There seems much promise in this,” he says. “It seems to work with any of the salts of copper. But there are an infinite number of combinations I must yet try.”

  He spreads out his four good fingers on his right hand and looks musingly at the stump of the one that was lost. “When the atmosphere is damp I sometimes sense my finger twitching and flexing there,” he says. The wind gets up.

  “So have you found what you need to make the colors work?” I ask.

  “No! I have not! I am leagues from arriving at an answer to this question. A rainbow of colors is not at my fingertips. Look!” He gestures at the cluttered bench, the tables. “Spread about me are broken vessels and unsatisfactory fulminations that I cannot measure or assess because I do not have sufficient evidence.” He rubs at his eyes.

  “I am in despair most of the time. I cannot sleep for thinking of it. And then a crack of hope opens itself in the form of nothing but a brief success. I cannot always reproduce good results. I cannot always remember to keep notating as I work. I am impatient. My methods are clumsy. I work with a minutiae of quantities as I am afraid of accidents, of losing eyes or further digits.” He coughs. “I am fatigued. I breathe in fumes that make me gag with sickness, and fumes that bite my throat. My fingers burn in patches where I pick up a white-hot dish that has been in the stove.” He looks out at the yard. “And I am afraid that I am too old or past the peak of life to be embarking on ambitious ventures. Still no answers come to me.”

  “You are not old, sir, but of course I can help you,” I say eagerly. “You know that it exists, your solution, though you can’t find it yet.” I search for words with which I might encourage him. “It is only that you must find the way to explain it to yourself.” My mind works wildly.

  “You are like a jackdaw carrying a long stick in its beak to make a nest!” I say. “It tries to enter the hole in a hollow tree but the stick prevents it. After many attempts, the bird turns the stick sideways, and enters easily. After that, the nest is quick to build.”

  “You put these natural philosophers to shame,” he says, wryly.

  “In the same way, once the means is discovered, the construction of your idea might be straightforward. From what you say, measurements and stability and precision of the method are going to matter further, but, Mr. Blacklock, sir, it seems the essence of your work is already made.”

  There is a flicker in his black eyes as he looks at me.

  “It may not happen in my lifetime,” he says suddenly. “But it may be within yours.”

  We are expecting a small consignment of gunpowder this afternoon. It has begun to rain, and each time I hear the rumble and hiss of wheels on the wet street outside, my heart leaps in a panic and then falls when the wheels do not stop before the workshop. My ears strain. Now that I have set my mind to what I have to do, I am impatient to see Cornelius Soul again. There is so little time. What will happen when he finds out he has been tricked, I cannot think about. Perhaps he will not. Meanwhile, everything, it seems, is falling into place. He is a good man; I have seen him with his family. He would be kind with me, I am sure of it. And perhaps, just perhaps . . . No! I do not dare to think that somehow I could go on working here at Blacklock’s. When the knock at the door finally comes, my heart flutters like a fresh leaf caught by a breeze. He is here! I put down my mallet and push my stool away from the filling-box. Four large Roman candles sit inside it, half completed. The knock comes again, louder this time. Mr. Blacklock looks up from the trestle at the back of the workshop and frowns.

  “Agnes! The door!” he barks, and I go quickly. My hand tries to find out if my hair is tidy before I reach it. The bolt is stiff where the door has swelled in the damp weather.

  I am startled to see a squat man with a sprout of ginger beard upon his chin. Red and puffed, his face is that of a man who eats too much. He comes inside, as though he was expected, and Mr. Blacklock does not seem surprised by his arrival. The man takes off his hat and shakes the drips from it, and scratches at his beard as he talks. I do not hear much of what he says, once he has unwrapped the box of gunpowder and placed it carefully upon the floor.

  When he is gone back out into the rain and the door has closed on the noise of the street, I ask, baffled, who the man could be. “Is Mr. Soul ill or indisposed that he did not come himself? Has he a new partnership that he has not thought to mention to us?”

  Mr. Blacklock does not turn around from his apparatus, putting together vessels in a way that I have not seen him do before. His back is stiff.

  “We have changed supplier,” he says. “Mr. Hewitt is a chandler from Wapping. He has a recommended source for all grades of powder and his speed of delivery is as good as any man’s.”

  “Why, sir?” I ask, my insides turning over, plummeting. “Is it because—” Mr. Blacklock interrupts me promptly.

  “I began to find the quality of Mr. Soul’s commodities a little lacking. I began
to tire of it. To tire of it,” he repeats, louder, as though I might not have heard him. Mr. Blacklock coughs briefly, and then there is nothing but a long silence. Could he have found out about Cornelius Soul’s arrest? I hope he does not know of my involvement; surely he would have mentioned it.

  Roman candles are deceptively difficult to fill.

  I am clumsy today. I break stars as I knock at the drift with the mallet. I pour in too much dark fire and have to tip it out, again and again. I am distracted. At first I cannot bring myself to say a thing about the gunpowder, and then I must.

  “This powder is no good,” I hazard, blinking back my tears, opening the box and looking at it.

  Mr. Blacklock’s reply is curt. “One can hardly ascertain the quality of powder purely by observation.”

  I know this. It is just that I want it to be bad powder.

  “But it seems . . . coarse,” I suggest in desperation.

  Mr. Blacklock does not look at the powder. He says, unmoving, as though it bores him to speak of it, “Mr. Hewitt’s stock comes highly recommended to me. The intention to change supplier has been made upon a firm basis that does not need to be discussed today.”

  I am put in my place.

  The anxiety eats at me now. I see the timing of my plans ebbing away from me.

  Days go by.

  The weather is changeable, and moves from damp to warm again. I am crossing the yard to the outhouse with the key for the safe. The sun is bright for the end of April, and beats down.

  Mrs. Blight has taken herself to Saul Pinnington’s to purchase sausage meat. Mary Spurren is washing pots in the scullery; I can hear the clank of copper against the sink through the open door into the yard. A wren sings from an elder bush against the hot bricks of the outhouse. Mr. Blacklock is out with the merchant in Cannon Street, which is something of a blessing because of late he has been conducting very strange experiments, sitting unflinching before small explosions at his bench. He is getting little work done toward the orders, but instead spends his time scratching notes down in the book he keeps inside his waistcoat, and muttering to himself.