At first I work on, in the hope that I am wrong, that the quantity will stretch to the twelfth rocket’s garniture. Then, when I have used up the last little bit and my task is not done, I stand in front of the list again and stare at it, hoping perhaps that it asks for just eleven Caduceus rockets, or even ten, but no, one dozen is what it says. There is no time to grind up more. I have failed, I think, miserably. It matters so much; why did I measure out so carelessly?
I finish the others. I cut up yards of cord, and wax them thoroughly. One by one I bind the finished rockets to their sticks, and all the time the last pair of empty cases is on the bench. In a rising desperation I cast my eye about the workshop, and I see the mixing box that Mr. Blacklock has just left unattended. What is that? It holds a quantity of composition. Of course, I remember, at first he had said that he was going to make these rockets up—this mixture must have been for them.
I sniff at it. Does it seem . . . ? Perhaps I should not use it, a voice of caution says. But there is so much; he will not even notice if I remove a little bit, just to finish up this job. I can replace it later. The church bell strikes the quarter now, and I know I have no choice. Quickly and gently I tip scoops of fresh mixture into the last two heads, and put in common stars. I add blowing charge, and just as I paste both heads firmly shut, I hear the front door open and then Mr. Blacklock strides into the workshop. “All done?” he asks. Hastily I push the last Caduceus rocket’s unassembled parts to the back of the bench near the windowsill and hope he does not notice. I can finish it first thing tomorrow morning, before the order is picked up.
“All done, sir,” I say. “Though—”
“Good,” he says. “Because Mr. Torré’s boy was passing by, and has come on the chance that the order is ready. He is waiting outside on the cart.”
“Oh ! ” I say.
“Is there a problem? ”
“No, sir,” I say. The order will have to be short, I think. In a fluster I pack up the crate, and Mr. Blacklock beckons the sulky boy to come in and he takes it away before I have a chance to think twice.
“You are proving yourself to be reliable,” Mr. Blacklock says later, unexpectedly, as we stop work for the day before supper. I look at the floor. “I hardly deserve that, sir,” I say, blushing. “Shall I close up the shutters?” The days are long at this point of the year, and it is easy to forget to close them.
“I may return to work,” Mr. Blacklock says. “Leave them open; the evening will be light enough to work by.”
“Mrs. Blight has taken her half day,” I remind him, as we go up the corridor. “She has left a cold piece of lamb in the meat safe and she says we must have more candles before the week is out.”
Nobody speaks much at supper. Although Mary Spurren cuts the lamb and lays it out upon the plate, nobody eats much. It is too hot for greasy meat like this, though the flies persist in crawling on it. Mr. Blacklock seems in a state of some disorder, and gets up frequently to fill the jug of small beer at the barrel in the scullery. The bark of his cough has worsened over the last few days, as if there were a great hollow inside him, and could it be that he is thinner, leaner than he was? His skin is so white it is almost bluish.
“Have you seen a doctor, sir?” I ask uneasily.
“The burn has healed now,” he replies brusquely.
“I did not mean about the burn, sir,” I begin, but he ignores me. It must be the way the light is falling on his face that makes it seem so gaunt, I think, waving the flies away from the meat again. He goes to his study while we clear the plates. I can hear him coughing. Mary Spurren lights the fire for him in there, when he calls for it.
“Never known a man who must so always have a fire beside him of late,” she grumbles, clattering the empty coal bucket down when she comes back to the kitchen. “It is so hot, yet there he is, hunched over his books and papers by the hearthside as if it were midwinter.” She wipes her neck. “I’d swear he were shivering.”
“Really?” I say, looking up. “But Mr. Blacklock doesn’t feel the draft in even a cold room. He sits in his shirtsleeves and jerkin, rain or shine.” She shrugs.
“It is not so hot as it was,” I say, swallowing. Or at least, the sun has gone behind a haze of cloud. But the weather is close, sticky, almost unbearable. The air has a greenish tint to it, as if a storm were brewing.
Much later, toward twilight, when Mary Spurren is up in her chamber, I go out into the yard to empty a pot into the drain. How hot it is. The air presses down.
Looking across at the workshop windows, I notice that Mr. Blacklock has returned to his bench. I can just see his head bent over his work; the lamp upon the sill is catching the side of his face, and casting a lattice of shadows into the dimming yard. I cannot see his hands. What is he making? I step a little closer toward the yellow lamplight. How I wish that I knew. I draw nearer still, until I am almost at the glass itself, and watch his dark, lean face absorbed in something, something that he thinks is secret, unobserved. I do not want to trespass on his privacy, and yet . . . There is the clink of a tool as he puts something down. He presses his head with his fingers, rubbing his temples. His mouth is moving; he is muttering something that I cannot hear through the glass. His eyes glitter brightly, blackly, almost as though his eyes are filled with tears.
It looks like a lonely place to be.
As if he has heard my thought, he looks up at the window; he seems to be staring at me across the gap that has opened up between us now. My heart contracts and I shrink out of the pool of light, though I do not look away. But of course he cannot see out into the darkening twilight. He would not see me standing there; the crooked glass is between us, so he would see nothing but the room reflected back at him, and his own stricken face.
Putting his fist to his chest, he coughs deeply, as if it is causing discomfort. He mutters again, and then abruptly he gets up, pushes his stool to one side and goes out of the workshop, leaving the yellow lamp burning unattended at the bench. Now is my chance, I think, and like a thief or a spy I upturn a bucket and climb upon it to get a clearer view. I have to stand unsteadily on tiptoe, and cling to the rough brickwork with my fingertips. But what I see down there is not what I expect. It puzzles me greatly. His bench is empty, save for his usual tools laid out. Mr. Blacklock was sitting there and doing nothing. What can be occupying his mind so much that he seems so agitated?
My own place at the bench seems different from out here, as though it belongs to someone else’s life and not my own. I see the last, unfinished Caduceus rocket, the two halves unbound, lying there so close upon the sill. How will I explain it to Mr. Blacklock? I hope that he does not find it before I have had a chance to tell him why I let an uncompleted order leave his premises.
Disappointed, I step off the bucket and creep back across the yard. At the back door the baby moves inside me and I stop to rub my belly. I look uneasily at the blackening sky above the roofs. It is as if the air has clamped itself around us, tight and thick. A dog barks, a distance away, and the bark sounds flat and strange, and I sense a gathering restlessness that makes me clutch my shawl about me, as though sudden, unknown changes that I cannot see are happening. There is a kind of crackling sickness on the air. “Watch out,” my grandmother used to say, waggling her crabby finger at us when there was a turn in the weather, “for something afoot. You mark my words.” And of course there was always an occurrence, because a hail would come, or a deluge, or a thaw. I go into the house again, bolting the door shut, and go to my chamber.
When I take off my boots, there is a flicker at the window outside, as though lightning is flashing far away. I unlace my skirts. I unpin my hair and begin to comb it, teasing out the knots until it fans out in a soft mass upon my shoulders. I pick up a handful and brush its smoothness across my lips. I look at my hair in the dirty looking glass and turn my head so that the candlelight shines glossily upon it. I am not so plain, I think for the first time in my life, and something makes me smile at the glass and my lik
eness there smiles back at me. There is another white spasm of lightning at the window, and then this time, a few seconds later, I hear a growl of thunder, as if the storm is fast approaching. The curtain begins to blow about as the breeze strengthens and I go and shut the casement to stop it banging on its hinges.
Lightning flashes again. And suddenly a wind bears down upon us, moaning at first and then screaming, and a rain is come, the hardest rain I have ever heard, lashing the panes. As if from nowhere, a great summer storm has got up and beats about the house.
The candle gutters. Despite the heat, I shiver. The folds of the curtain suck in and out with the violent rushes of air through the chinks between glass and leadwork. The wind howls outside in a sea of noise, pouring and crashing over the roof, as though we were the one lonely house upon the street and the wind were singling it out to be its victim. I put my boots under the washstand, and abruptly, before I am ready to extinguish it, the candle flame is blown out by a draft.
The shock of the sudden darkness makes the blackness of the night seem blacker than it is.
I grope my way to the bed, the noise of the wind and a strange smell in the air muddling me, until I find it. I think of such winds I have encountered at home, mashing the blackness of the holly trees in the thickets and whipping the hedges about like rope. After the great storm four years ago, beech trees were tipped over and scattered like dry spills of wood against the hillside. The roots of beechwoods reach remarkably shallow, and the pull and bluster of that night upturned the trees with ease, chalky great scabs ripped from the earth. That was the kind of wind that blows fishes clean out of the rivers. Men found them afterward and gathered them up so nothing was wasted; they were dead on the banks where the steep unnatural tides had left them.
A crack of lightning shows the room starkly.
I think of Mr. Blacklock sitting at his bench alone in the night, doing nothing, the despair on his face. Was it grief for his wife? Lying back in bed, my hands on the warm mound of my belly under my shift, I remember Mary Spurren’s remark about the night he did not return home till morning, and a niggling unpleasant thought comes back to me. Where had he been? Lightning flashes again, and then thunder rolls.
Outside the wind batters the side of the house, and gradually drags me into a restless sleep.
I toss and turn.
A crash somewhere outside wakens me, and I lie with my heart beating and beating, my face wet with tears. Lightning and a crack of thunder seem to tear the world apart. I sob aloud. A madness that I do not recognize is boiling in my body.
I listen as the house shudders and creaks. I close my eyes. I rub at the ache in my heart, turning over and pressing my face into the mattress. It is a storm with a terrible force. Lightning blinks on and off, the thunder rumbles, but even as I listen it is passing, and now from time to time the wind drops to a light, uneven hum between gusts, as if it were taking breath.
I begin to wade through a whole riverful of dreams. It is after dusk, and the Spring Gardens are teeming with a crowd of a thousand souls or more. Their murmuring is like the noise of the wind.
Little bits of dreams lap around me.
The wind has dropped. A bell rings thinly, as sharp as a star. And at once the crowd begins to pour toward the scaffold from all directions, a dark mass chattering and bobbing among itself.
There is a pause, precisely timed like a beat of silence in music, and the first Caduceus rocket is fired.
Its tip of crackling flame splits the black sky apart, making a raw, unbearable tear inside me, and at the same time its wake stitches the wound up again with two burning threads of scrolling fire, twisting and twisting behind in an expanding helix that dissolves and opens out into the sky.
The Caduceus rocket slows further until it seems to hang above us, pauses, and explodes, bursting bits of itself out brightly across the dark and liquid sky.
It is immaculate.
The witchery that exists in fire escapes and fizzes down over the crowd.
The upturned illuminated faces are tilted into the light like flat pebbles on a riverbed, their dark mouths open and their bodies in shadow. They are tiny and similar, made perfectly still by the excitement of the spectacle, content to yield and stand and stare, drinking it in. It leaves only the memory of what they have seen on the back of their eyelids like a dark purple scar, almost the opposite of light.
Then in my dream the flat crowd disperses.
I wake to a deep and penetrating silence.
The wind has ceased and there seems to be no sound at all from any quarter. Even the house itself is strangely quiet. When I go down the stairs and walk along the hallway to the kitchen, the ticking of the clock echoes loudly out of the study, as though it were ticking in an empty room.
Mrs. Blight arrives late, and she enters the kitchen brimming with dismal tales of horror caused by last night. She can hardly speak for excitement as she unties the hat from her head.
“A great many spires and weathercocks there are blown off churches, and the masonry falling all about killing persons in their chambers, barges lost in the Thames, a wherry full with meal for Queenhithe Market was overturned and broken up at Essex Stairs . . .” She lists disasters she has already heard of, taking the newest of her horrible pamphlets out of her basket and fanning her cheeks energetically with it. I listen to her stories part in dread and part in excitement, and it is in this unsettled state of mind that I rush to put on my cloak and slip out to consider the wreckage for myself. I have a sense of fear and hope and restlessness stirred up inside me by my dream last night. I make sure that the door closes soundlessly behind me as I leave; I cannot be long, there is too much to do, as we must finish the order for Ranelagh today. I shall not be missed, as Mr. Blacklock has not yet appeared, kept up by the wind all night, no doubt, and overslept. When I return to the house I will tell him what I saw.
At the front of the house I am dismayed to see that the walnut tree has been brought down, its roots torn and stiffly grasping at nothing, a hole ripped out of the stones at the edge of the pavement. I stare at it lying there with its green leaves and unripe walnuts dashed against the ground.
The street is littered with broken tiles and pieces of glass and bricks. Bits of leaves and dirt and straw are everywhere, and the air is still and dusty, so that the light has a yellow cast to it, as when a thick snow begins to fall from the sky. My footsteps falter as I make my way toward the river, crunching on fragments. There are no carriages, and the people that I pass have a dazed, excited look upon their faces, as though a war had started.
Ancient Fire
36
A child is picking the green walnuts out of the limbs of the fallen tree outside the house when I return, making a small pile in a piece of grubby calico she has spread on the ground. She points at the house as I approach. “They have been shouting, in there,” she pipes defensively, as though I am about to chase her off. Her eyes are big with being hungry.
“Shouting?” I say, and I know that something bad has happened.
When I beat at the front door Mary Spurren opens it at once, as if she had been waiting in the hallway for my return. There is a foreign smell in the house, as though a stranger were here. Mary Spurren’s face is flushed and her mouth is moving, her long neck hunched into her shoulders. She has a cloth in her hands that she twists about.
“What! What is it? What has happened? ” I have to ask her urgently, to make her speak.
“Gone,” she says with difficulty. “He is gone, and what ill luck it is for all of us.”
“Who?” I ask.
Her voice sounds strange and shrill and inside out, as though it were coming from another corner of the room. She gulps. “What was I thinking of, tempting fate like that? I’d only gone to ask if he would like a bite to eat, seeing as it was so late into the day and Mrs. Blight wanted to get the breakfast plates all cleared so she could lay the dough out for it to prove. There was no answer when I knocked at the door of his chamber, so
in I went.”
“Gone? Do you mean Mr. Blacklock? At this hour of the day? But we have to finish up the order. Did he say when he would be—”
“No!” Mary Spurren gasps.
“He did not come to look for me ? I was not out for an undue length of time, I was—”
“He is gone! Quite gone!” she interrupts, and her eyes are too big, glistening like jelly.
I stare at her. A thin crack of fear opens inside me.
“Where?” I whisper, though even as she speaks, I know.
“Mr. Blacklock—he is dead!”
I am dizzy.
I look at his hat lying there on the sideboard. He does not go out without his hat.
“Is it his chest? His cough? ” I ask her. She looks at me stupidly.
“Mary!” I urge. “Is it the coughing?” I want to shake her, she is so slow. “Is he here? In his chamber? We must call for the doctor. At once! ” I turn and run up the stairs.
Mary Spurren’s voice babbles on and on behind me. “Not the coughing, no, no, it was not, though he was choking well enough and I thought so myself for a moment as I entered the room. He didn’t know me when I went to him, he stood all bent by the side of the bed. There was something amiss, he clutched at his chest and his left arm, all doubled up, then he fell over like this, all curled up sideways and choking, he was.” She tugs at my arm and tries to show me. A patch of wetness reaches down the side of her dress as though she has spilled water on it. She pulls my arm harder.
“Let me go, Mary,” I say. “Let me go to him!” Why does she stand there?
The Book of Fires Page 29