The Book of Fires

by Jane Borodale

  “He stared at me?” I say. I am baffled by this. Her watery eye meets mine and holds it briefly.

  “Like . . . like you was gold dust come to the table.” She sniffs. “So angry he was when Cornelius Soul began to pay you more attention than he should have. Mind you, plenty of us foresaw disaster lying there.” She scratches the back of her head and shakes it, as if to dislodge something of her confusion. “But marriage in May! And nobody knowing, I can’t fathom it all quite,” she says.

  “When were you wed?” she asks.

  “On the eleventh of May.”

  She frowns. “Why does that stick in my mind as a date of note? ” I can see the thought struggling to the surface of her face, and at last she breaks out with a burst of recognition. “Oh, yes, the day that Mrs. Blight won on the lottery.” She rubs her head. “That were a funny evening, now that I comes to think of it again. What with her making all that good sauce and it going to waste as no one came to eat it. Mr. Blacklock not turning up at all, and you not coming neither . . .” She trails off.

  “Ah,” she says. “I gets it.”

  She blinks.

  “I don’t know.” She shakes her head again. “There is a missing bit, I don’t know what.”

  I do not tell her that I did not know myself; it is something that I will not tell a soul.

  I am a widow before I am a bride, I think.

  There is a silence as we spoon in broth that Mary Spurren has made.

  “Do you miss your home? ” she asks me. “Can you go back to where it is? Your fortunes have changed so; you could do anything! ”

  I cannot answer straightaway. I think of Sussex, and the lane to the cottage flooding over with whiteness when the rains pour down the slope of the scarp onto the clay. I imagine the wind blowing the green leaves of the beech about. I imagine bits of myself caught all about there, in the way that the sheep leave scraps of wool on the thorns where they rub or push through, going from patch to patch of ground.

  “No,” I say. “I will not go back to live in Sussex.” And then I laugh aloud and say, “I have come to like the taste of water from the pump in Mallow Square too much! ” And she smiles at this, her big pale head grinning open with the thought of it.

  “What will you do yourself?” I ask. “You know you can stay here, with the same arrangement as before.”

  She nods. “Plenty of dirt still,” she says. “And what is dirt but work, and where there is dirt there is work for me or anybody.” She takes her bowl to the scullery and knocks about in the cupboard there. “Talking makes my head hurt,” she mutters, rubbing at it. She pauses by the door.

  “Pushed me out, she did,” she says.

  “I’m sorry? ”

  “Alice Ebbs. That woman whom my father married, after my mother died. I heard her once, nagging my father in his own kitchen: That great girl, eating and eating. I had to leave.”

  “Where did you go?” I ask curiously, thinking of my own flight.

  “Came straight here, I did. Never been nowhere else except my father’s place and here. Dirty, it was then. Till I came.” And she looks about her with a touch of pride.

  “I’ll get on now,” she says. And she goes off up the corridor with her dustpan and brush.

  The kitchen is quiet when she has gone. A fly comes in through the open door from the yard and settles on my emptied dish. I can hear the brush knocking the risers of the stairs as Mary Spurren sweeps. I push back my chair and go to the workshop for the first time in seven days.

  Joe Thomazin looks up, startled, as I enter.

  “Good morning,” I say to him, and he nods his head shyly, though he does not look at me. He is perched on a stool close to the lit stove, despite the warmth of the day. I sit down heavily before the filling-box and look about, touching my belly. The baby is asleep inside me. Sunshine is flooding the sills and benches, and when Joe Thomazin gets up and begins sweeping beneath the benches, dust spins in the beams of light. The hiss of his brush is regular against the boards.

  “Joe Thomazin,” I say. “You will stay with me.” The sweeping pauses and then goes on, as if that was expected. In time, I think, he will be more than useful. He has watched John Blacklock at his work for years.

  How hot the sunshine is, streaming in through the windows, all over the benches. Little beads of sweat run down my face. It is almost midsummer. Shouldn’t this baby be born before midsummer? The summer is making it lazy. How warm it is. I shall open the door to the yard, I think, and I get up slowly, turning my back on the sun.

  The blast shatters the window.

  A searing crackle rips the air, and shards of glass are everywhere, a taste in my mouth . . . and a plume of choking, blood-red smoke begins to pour from the bench. The ground vibrates. I gag, panicking for breath as white and fiery explosions pepper the air, a river of redness streaming over the bench, overturned stools, scattered . . . it is a violent, pulsing arc of fire.

  “What in God’s name! Help, somebody, help!” I scream.

  I wade retching in sparks and colored fire and smoke, bent doubled up, and then I see half of the Caduceus rocket, my unfinished Caduceus rocket, trapped and fizzing against the floor in a corner like a dying, furious animal.

  “Joe!” I cry. “Joe Thomazin!”

  The second head of the rocket explodes and leaps up and recoils beneath the bench and is trapped again, miraculously, kicking violently and spewing a rush of sparks out sideways into the middle of the room. I am astounded. It is the pulsing red of the back of the eyelids closed against the sun. It is the red of passion, rage, of fear. It is a haze of crackling insects. The smell of the red is everywhere. And Joe Thomazin is lying on the floorboards.

  Abruptly, it seems, the drowning is over. The hiss of sparks, dying down, gives out a last spurt of fizzling and comes to an end. The dim, ruby, choking air quivers with silence.

  “Are you hurt? Where are you hurt? What were you doing?” I shout, the sulfur, the red smoke catching my throat. “It is over! There is no fire!” I am shaking him. And, thank God, he is not hurt. He struggles free and jumps in distress from foot to foot, tears streaming runnels through the blackness on his face. There is a strange noise coming from somewhere close. It is not the smoking carcass of the rocket’s parts. I have to stop and look. When I see that the noise comes from him, my own breath stops for a moment as I strain to hear it.

  “I didn’t, I didn’t,” he is saying, over and over, in a hoarse, thin wheeze. “I didn’t. Didn’t touch.” His blackened lips hardly move as he says the words.

  “You didn’t touch?” I say, in astonishment.

  “Didn’t touch,” he says. And I believe him. I pick him up and he clings to me, his scrawny knees bent into my side, his head pressed into my neck. His body shakes with the force of his sobs, long after the crying is over. It is so calm, and so desolate. I collapse onto the scorched boards with my legs out and hold Joe Thomazin against the bigness of my belly. My ears are ringing. They are hearing the boom of the explosion’s echo again and again, the tinkle of jars breaking, the rolling tools in disarray. The air is loosening now, slackening. And the red smoke has vanished around us like a mist eaten up by sunrise, leaving barely a trace, as if it had never existed, and through the broken window I see Mary Spurren running from the scullery across the yard.

  “Agnes!” she pants. “Are you in there? I heard a . . .” Her big head stops by the window and stares in. “What is it? I heard . . . I thought something bad had happened, I thought . . . I thought we had exploded.” I can hear her feet crunching the glass. “Has it finished?” She coughs. “Oughtn’t you to come away from there? ” she adds uneasily. “Your face is bleeding.”

  “It is lost,” I say, sat there on the floor, quite unmoving.

  “Lost? What is? ” she says, bewildered.

  “The knowledge is lost, Mary . . . all gone. He did not trust me.”

  “Trust you with what? ”

  “He discovered the color. He knew how to make it. He d
id not share his precious secret with me.”

  It has gone to the grave, buried with him. And still the crickets go on chirping in his yard; fresh summer air drifts in.

  41

  I am waking earlier and earlier as the time for this baby to be born grows near. Today I find I cannot sleep and cannot lie still, so I rise and dress, go down to the study and sit at Mr. Blacklock’s desk beside the open shutters in the first light. Looking through some papers lying there I see there is still another order to fulfill. Yesterday I had been surprised to receive a formal message of condolence from Mr. Torré, repeating that he would be pleased to offer his assistance, if he could be of service to the business at this difficult time. The world is not all bad.

  Dawn begins coloring the sky long before the sun rises, and a black-bird starts to sing from the linden tree outside. The weight of the child inside me shifts about as though it is waking, too. Does an unborn child close its eyes when it sleeps? I allow myself now to imagine what its face may look like. Sometimes it pushes at my ribs so that I cannot breathe freely or sit still, so that I have to get up and pace about. Of course, now I do not wear my stays.

  I think of those rocket heads, pouring out redness. What a waste of beauty, what a waste of knowledge a sudden death can inflict, like spilling something vital away into a dry soil. How will I manage here without his guidance? I do not know enough. I hope the stock we have will last awhile.

  I go to the shelves and take up a book and open it at random. I turn a yellowed page. And another. And I see that great masses of written notes in Mr. Blacklock’s hand have appeared in the body of the book, notes that were not there when I looked into these same books on that day so many months ago. The notes spill all down the margins. I go to the early light from the window and try to look at them more closely. There is an urgency to their inky sprawl, unclosed pothooks, hastily crossed letters, dark threads of knowledge poured out all over the printed text, but I cannot read these scribbles, so blackly tangled that they are unreadable. I open another and find that the same has been done. I cannot read his handwriting; it makes neither head nor tail of sense. I open another, my hands trembling. Mr. Blacklock’s shelf of books on pyrotechny have all been annotated for me. I am certain of it. His secret is in here, and yet I cannot read a word of it.

  And then I reach the end of the shelf and see another volume that I think, at first, I have never seen before. Smaller than the others, with a pale calfskin cover. I realize it is the battered notebook that Mr. Blacklock kept inside his coat. I look again and open it. It is more than a notebook—it is a manuscript. And as I start to read a tiny gasp comes from my throat, because I see what I am holding.

  Not in my lifetime, but perhaps in yours, he had said. And it strikes me that perhaps John Blacklock knew that he was dying, and that when I turned up so strangely and so insistent on his doorstep in the rain, reminding him of something that he had known and lost, he saw a chance, a glimpse into the future that suggested a way to pass on the artistry that was his core. If he saw later that I was with child, perhaps it drove him to act with the secrecy and urgency with which he made sure I was his wife: sanctioning the birth, protecting me because I was the key to the continuity he sought so keenly. Without marriage, his plan could not work. But why did he not tell me? I suppose that he had to be sure I was capable of the task in store. It was an experiment. Haphazard, not without risk. Perhaps he was afraid I would refuse. There was so little time. He would have known that I could only gain from the arrangement, but once done, he could not bring himself to tell me of it. He must have suffered dismay when he saw how Cornelius Soul paid me attention, but perhaps he did not believe it would come to anything.

  This is what he worked on, late into every night, trying to complete everything he needed to pass on to me, making these fine, swift drawings, listing formulae, assembling instructions, quantities, measurements, conversions, queries, solutions . . . discoveries. My heart leaps. I know it is for me. My book of fires.

  So much of what we do in life stays unexplained. Probably I shall never understand his motive for acting as he did, though I will think of it often, but I know for certain that a strong thing had started up like fire between us.

  I turn to the beginning of this precious work that I have in my hands, sit down at his desk and begin reading in earnest. There is much hard work to do ahead of me. I like that, I think. I am sure my dream of color is somewhere before me in the darkness of the future, between these pages, as though the bright thread of my story is running on ahead of me and I have only to catch up with it. It is the presence of fire that is constant, and as I have said, my liking for fire has been there from the start.

  The door opens and Joe Thomazin slips into the room. He looks at the book lying open in my hands, and a wide, jagged smile breaks out across his face.

  “You knew about this? ” I ask him.

  “All . . . the time,” he stammers shyly.

  Reading for hours, I become late for an appointment with a banking man in Lombard Street, who is to give me advice as to the nature of the investments that I now possess. My investments! I almost laugh aloud at the absurdity.

  I am shown to the waiting room when I arrive, where I sit down. It is strange how the sudden wearing of a good dress makes one sit up straight and put one’s feet together. I suppose that is the power of gold and fortune, even in small quantities like those I have. It is at once mysterious, wondrous, and distasteful. Surely now would be the time to straighten out one final matter. I cannot live with something pricking at my conscience all my life, and this is why I have the rest of Mrs. Mellin’s coins wrapped up in oilcloth on my lap, in readiness to show him.

  The banker is a crisp, neat man called Mr. Dunn, wearing a brown velvet coat the color of horses. His face is smooth with politeness as he discusses my affairs. I try to attend to what he says. It seems I am wealthy, having money here and there. His wig is impeccable.

  “And the best for your family,” he concludes.

  My child! I think, and I vow to put its welfare before all other matters. Which is why I do not feel the remorse that I should when I say in a rush, “And these gold pieces I have, can I leave with you also?” I tip them out of the piece of oilcloth in front of him like a confession, and my hands shake so much I hide them beneath the table. Mrs. Mellin’s coins shine against the polished wood.

  “Certainly,” Mr. Dunn says at first. But as he picks up the first coin his mild face suddenly narrows with attention, and he reaches for an eyeglass to look at them more closely.

  “Is there something wrong, Mr. Dunn?” I venture anxiously. He turns the coins over in his clean white hands as he examines them. He clears his throat, and puts the last one down. The table between us is vast.

  “Have you had these long?” He lowers his eyeglass and looks at me keenly. I shake my head.

  “How much . . . is there, altogether?” I ask, and my voice sounds small in the big room. Could he know that they are stolen? That is surely impossible.

  He replies, very slowly, “I am afraid to say that I cannot take these for you, Mrs. Blacklock.”

  “Why?” I ask, and my heart beats in my mouth.

  “These are illegal coins. They have no value; they are nigh on worthless.” He puts one or two onto a small brass scale. “They are defective in weight, and have been tampered with to disguise their shortcomings.”

  “Do you mean to say that they are forgeries?” I ask, swallowing. This is not at all what I imagined I would hear. Mrs. Mellin’s coins have no lawful value?

  “They are not counterfeit so much as tampered with.” He pushes a coin to me. “See how the head of King George II has been added inexpertly to the original mint. This particular Spanish coin holds no value here.” He holds another up to the light from the window, and it flashes fiercely. He looks at me again, very directly. “Someone has scoured at them, to wear away at the evidence. But they are quite thin; it is clear to the experienced eye that they have been meddle
d with.”

  “So they are not gold, even? ” I manage to say, faintly.

  “They are gold, but they are not legal tender and severe penalties exist for carrying such currency. Naturally, I cannot take them.” I drop his gaze. “You are taken aback, Mrs. Blacklock. I am sorry to embarrass you, but you have been the unlucky victim of a fraud. There are many rascals out there. I am only sorry that you will have trouble getting rid of them.” I begin to gather them up. “I am not sure how I can advise you,” he goes on, “but you may be lucky. There is a shortage of good coins and no lack of unscrupulous traders who may have them off your hands for wares or services.”

  I take a deep breath, and stand up to leave.

  “I am sorry about your husband, Mrs. Blacklock,” the banker says. “He was a good man. Do not hesitate to call on me again, should you need to consider other business matters.” He holds the door open, and I thank him and make sure I do not run as I go out onto the brightness of the street.

  I do not need to try to spend the coins, I realize as I turn toward home. My secret solution is neat and strange. At last I have the perfect end for Mrs. Mellin’s coins, knowing as I do how some freshly mixed aqua regia will dissolve the gold quite readily. In the workshop there will be one jar of liquid on the shelf that has no label, and when I glance up at it from time to time it will remind me of how very fortunate I have been this year.

  And life goes on.

  Not as normal, but the tilt of time keeps us rolling onward. Eating, sleeping fitfully at night, going to the butcher, the grocer.

  “How are you keeping, Mrs. Blacklock?” Mrs. Spicer asks, waddling over. “In your state, these hot days must be causing you a deal of nuisance.”

  “Oh, not so badly,” I reply.

  “There is just one thing I meant to ask you,” she says, drawing out the lid on a glass jar. She dips the ladle and the pale heads of artichokes nod slowly in the oil as though they were drowned in there.