“There is something in the matter of your marriage and its secrecy, I can’t say what, that seems a puzzle.” One after the other she drags up artichokes, drains a spool of oil back to the pot and lays them glistening on a dish.
“There are folks out there who cannot comprehend the need for such concealment, nor what purpose did it serve. Does it even cast a doubtful light on its authenticity? It is just that it confounds them.” She looks at me. “I hope you do not mind me speaking frankly, Mrs. Blacklock.”
“No, no,” I say, biding for time.
“It’s just that the very abruptness of his death caused some tongues to wag. You are excessively”—she pauses—“big with child, after all. Folks do not like to feel misled in what is what.”
“How do you mean? ” I ask.
“Discovery of hidden facts gives them excitement, and a crossness that they did not know the facts themselves. They fret that other folks might have heard before them, not liking to be the fool who has not heard the news. And then, of course, disclosure causes them to rub their hands together with the flavor of their knowledge. Aggrieved by the existence of other people’s secrets when they come to light, their chatter springs up like flames from a tinderbox when the flint has struck.”
“Faster than that,” I say ruefully. “Like quick match!”
“Well, they feel hoodwinked by the not knowing of a whole affair, as though it were their right to have the details of a body’s business, and it must be said that that fuels a certain speed to its delivery from mouth to ear.” Mrs. Spicer pushes back the wide cork.
The child kicks and my hand goes to my belly. I look hard at the bottles on the shelf above the counter, my eye lingers on the syrup glow of empress peaches and, may God forgive me, a neat little lie comes out of my mouth.
“It was for the sake of Mr. Blacklock’s relative,” I say. Mrs. Spicer puts her webbed hands on her hips.
I pitch my voice as if in confidence. “I’m sorry to say that his aunt is stubborn. It was the conditional nature of his inheritance. In her old age she has become a little shaky in her grasp on the customary ways of things, and announced John Blacklock should not remarry if he was to receive her legacy. It was as if she laid the blame for his first wife’s death at his feet, though she did not say so. She has theories brewing in her head about the world and the way it should be run.”
Mrs. Spicer digests this, weighs it up. “In short, she is a little odd but well-to-do; and he complied with an old woman’s unreasonable request.”
I shrug, as if to say I did not disagree with what he did. May all concerned forgive me. There is a need for these untruths.
“I do recall he had an aunt,” Mrs. Spicer admits, wiping her oily fingers on her apron. “More than once I have been occasioned to pack up a crate of oranges for carriage, or Rhenish wines. A solicitous nephew, I always thought, sending gifts to his old aunt to brighten the darkness of her days, her twilight days in the heart of winter. How lonely that can be in old age, and how long.
“And yet it was the money all along. Still, I don’t know, to keep a thing like that, like marriage, under wraps.” She shakes her head. “I did not have him down as a man of such cupidity, putting material wants before vital matters of the heart. Before matters of decency.”
Then her face clears, and she glances at my belly in relief.
“Yet of course, I am forgetting that he had the future of his child to think of. His progeny. I daresay he did not care for the muddification of it all himself, but he suffered it for his child’s safekeeping. How restrained of him, and how forbearing.”
“He was an honorable man,” I say.
“Of course he was,” she says. “There is a lot of talk. I must say, I do not care for it.” She shakes her head. “Pay on account, at the end of the month when your affairs are settled. The chatter will pass, Mrs. Blacklock, like a shower in summer. Plenty of other things for them to think about soon enough, when someone else’s life takes a twist and turn out of the ordinary. I should not trouble yourself overmuch on its account.” And she puts an additional package on the counter. “Here is a little titbit for you to savor for yourself. A gift, we shall call it, toward the concentration of your strength.” Her brow wrinkles in sympathy. “You must promise you will eat it, mind. Cakes is good for you.”
“You are a kind woman, Mrs. Spicer,” I say as I go out. She did not suggest that it might have been wiser to enjoy a spot of married life before his time in this world was up. Of course she did not. No one can see into the future like that. If we could, how differently we would all conduct ourselves.
42
My confinement must be days away. The baby is huge inside me. It does not kick now very often, it is so squeezed up in there. It seems, as I am, to be simply waiting.
The kitchen is quiet this morning. The kettle of tea I have just made is steaming lightly as it brews beside the hob. I look about the room. My kitchen, my house, now, and it hardly seems possible. I put a finger to the objects on the table, a spoon, a pair of bowls laid out for breakfast. I pour some tea, blow on it gently, and take a sip. I turn to the high dresser, and my eye falls on Mrs. Blight’s stack of pamphlets there. I shuffle through them; there are a variety of publications—Last Dying Speeches, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts.
I remember the conversation we had only a month ago, on the evening she said that I should read some myself to gain some understanding of the wicked world. Uncomfortably, I went to them and picked one up.
“What is the Ordinary? ” I asked.
“The prison chaplain,” Mrs. Blight said, warming at once to her favorite topic. “Put upon to give spiritual care to those condemned to death. His perquisite being the right to publish their final confession at the scaffold, with accounts of their lives. I like the Ordinary’s Accounts best,” she’d said, nodding at the one I held, “as it gives the unfortunates a little bit of a chance to put their side of things.”
Some of these are from many years past, I note. She has been collecting them a long time. I thumb the yellowing pages idly. But this one, for instance, that I hold in my hand, is very new. The Ordinary of Newgate. His ACCOUNT of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words of the MALEFACTORS Who Were Executed at TYBURN, on FRIDAY the 25th of MAY, 1753.
Just two weeks ago; I must have heard the bell myself for this very execution. I take another sip of tea. I turn the pages absentmindedly, and am not prepared for the great and icy shock that I receive from it. A chill spreads through me, like a drench of cold water.
“Oh God, no,” I whisper, my flesh creeping with a sudden understanding. And I read: . . . indicted for stealing one Diamond Locket, 13th November 1752.
LETTICE TALBOT, aged 23, was born in the parish of St Anne, Westminster ; of Genteel and Pious Parents, possessing handsome Property in the City and beyond; she was afforded the best Education available, the particulars of either not proper to mention; and seemed to be set upon a Life gliding along the esteemed paths of Virtue and reputable Content. The seed of her Undoing lay in her great Beauty, attracting as it did the attentions of many; including those of one wealthy Baronet owning a sizable manse near Chelmsford in the County of Essex, and whom with more innocence than wise counsel her Parents had thought eligible. At the first opportunity he proved untrustworthy; violating her most shamefully and lewdly, and she became with Child. When she could no longer conceal her vulnerable Condition she was turned out by her mortified Family and, though soon afterwards she suffered a Miscarriage, was forced to accept support extended by her seducer’s associate the notorious Courtesan Sally Bray, and fell quickly into a Life of Vice. Claiming some of the most learned and respected Gentlemen among her Voluptuaries and Admirers, she could command high prices for her debauched and particular Services and lived in a style of fashionable Elegance. She claims as her final Downfall a singular intimacy with one Charles Kettering, of Dorking in Surrey, Husband to the prosecutrix Elizabeth Kettering, and declares that
her Error was to have succumbed to the temptation of Love itself, and its unreliable and wily accomplice Trust. In this incautious state of illicit Love, she maintains herself to have been in receipt of the Gift of a Diamond Locket, val. thirty-five guineas, from the said Charles Kettering, proven subsequently to be the Property of the prosecutrix Elizabeth Kettering his Wife, who made the discovery that her Loss was adorning the neck of her Husband’s Mistress and ran to him with the threat of public Disclosure, whereupon he denied all acquaintance and falsely accused the defendant a Thief.
Lettice Talbot denied to the last the Fact for which she was Convicted; not blaming the court, but imputing it to her Lover Charles Kettering for such a weak and dishonest Betrayal.
As the executioner tied her to the fatal Tree, she cried out to the crowd that her Heart was full of Grief, and that she would not Rest. And then the Cart was drawn from under her, and the Execution was done with as little Noise and Disturbance as the Nature of so tragical a Scene may be.
A hot coal slips in the grate and a small, bluish flame starts to play over the surface of the embers.
I take a breath. Lettice Talbot is dead. She has been dead for days.
43
My sister Ann has come, brimming with questions that I will not answer yet.
But pieces of news arrive with her. I have a new sister, as my mother’s child is born.
“She is called Clemmie, she came on time, slipping out readily like an easy calving,” Ann says. “Nevertheless,” she goes on, “Mother has put her foot down firmly and says it is the last one. ‘No more babies I am having, Thomas,’ she announced to Father, with Clemmie hanging off her milky pap as she stirred at the pot. ‘Not one! ’” Ann giggles. “His face was such a mixed-up sight, not knowing if she was saying this in full solemnity.
“But look at you, look at you!” she says, reaching for my hand and rubbing it. Her eyes glisten with tears in the candlelight. “Lil said that Father was too angry to speak when you disappeared. All through December with barely a word from him, even when I turned up at home on my half day from Wiston. Much later on your brother Ab went all the way to London looking for you. He asked around everywhere but had to come back empty-handed, and they said it near broke Father’s heart, he missed you so sore. And old Mrs. Mellin died!” she exclaims. “It was about the time that you left when the corpse of a traveling man was found all twisted on the lane outside her cottage. He was dead from being beaten about the head—it was a horrid sight, they said. There were signs of a scuffle in the muddy path and his bale of fabrics was unfolding and flapping round him. It was thought that he was attacked for a quantity of gold it seems he must have had upon his person, an amount having gone missing from Mrs. Mellin’s cottage, or so they said. There was no gold upon his corpse, of course, so how could this be proven? At least that was what we said when we heard of it, considering how mean she lived, but it turns out she had quite a hoard according to Amos Cupper who knew her husband well enough when he was alive. Mind you, some people said that Amos Cupper was sporting a new overcoat made of good woollen stuff all of a sudden, but I have not seen it.”
I cannot remember who Amos Cupper is, but I do not say so; I am too busy thinking that the traveling man’s misfortune means that the finger of blame for the theft of Mrs. Mellin’s coins will never point at me.
“What is it?” Ann has stopped her talking and looks at me. “Are you surprised to hear of so much incident in so short a space of time? I thought you might be sorry to have missed it!” She laughs.
“And the Common!” I look up quickly at this. “The scrubby common is to stay. So William lets out a big fat porker every day to snout up roots and the crisp white tubers of earthnuts. A fatting hog. He finds a sheltered spot. William goes to sleep when it is sunny and returns to the house covered in bits of gorse and dried mosses. It is such a big pig.”
Ann cannot stop talking.
And then another tightening comes and I am closing my eyes and awash with an agony that rises and rises like a spring tide rushing in. There is nothing now but the swell of the water. Then it is draining away and I remember that I must breathe again.
All is quiet.
The old woman who is the midwife sits down with a creak on the wooden chair beside my bed in Mr. Blacklock’s chamber. She takes a sip of something she has in a jug. She tries to put more brandy to my lips, but I turn my head away as another tightening comes and I cannot bear the jug to touch my mouth.
All through the night Ann tells me over and over that I must not be afraid, but I am not and she need not say so. She touches my forehead, my hand. She puts a wettened rag across my lips, which are hot and dry. The tightenings are faster now, and fiercer. I cry out under my breath. I must not cry louder. I must save up my vigor. When I close my eyes the pain is a thing pressing inside me: a thing made of chalk and flint and the mineral whiteness of the bones of the earth that we are all made of, our flesh wrapping around it. And the pain is the weight of the earth upon me, the earth that is made up of bodies, our bodies, my body; my own body is squeezing me open. Hours and hours go by like this, gathering pace. Bones. Hours.
And they say, “It is coming, it is crowning, here is the head!”
Pushing against the rim of myself, it is almost free. It could be anything, any creature being born in the field. I wait till the agonizing thing rises again inside me, redder and redder when I close my eyes, and then I push again. I am pushing uphill, it seems, and then turning inside out. I am split. I am ruptured, broken, burnt. I can take no more of it. I shout out from the redness and my voice is strange and harsh, but they do not hear.
And yet it is over, it is out of me. There is just the dripping of some fluid on the floorboards. They tell me they are cutting the cord. They say that the child I have carried all these months is a daughter. She cries once, thank God, a healthy cry quavering with shock and life.
“Bring her,” I say, in my strange voice.
She is dried of blood and put to me.
I am astonished at her heaviness. She is all weighty, softened limbs. Her bluish eyes are open as she stares at me, the most open they could be, and how strange and how familiar her gaze seems, coming from a damp, ancient place where the light is different. Her hair is dark with a waxy substance from the womb, as though she had some vestige of the darkness that she has come from clinging to her still. Her eyes squeeze tightly shut. Her mouth moves. Her lips are fine and supple, and they part and then contract again around her tiny, perfect tongue, as if tasting the air about her for the first time. Her fingers flex. And then she turns in my arms and finds the breast blindly and sucks from me, forcefully knocking her mouth against the teat as though she had come from a desperate hunger of nine months’ length, as though there were no time to lose. And there is not.
“That is a big baby, Agnes,” Ann says. “For one come so early.”
“It is,” I say, and when I look at her, I see she knows enough.
But she does not know the wholeness of the story, how I have acted like a woman half-asleep. Nobody does, though one day I may have the chance to fully share my secrets. There is one person in particular to whom I owe an explanation: someone who may understand, even if not quite forgive. I know nothing of the future, but for today at least I am grateful to be safely delivered of my child. My mother always said that childbirth is the closest a living woman comes to death within her lifespan, if she is lucky.
The baby calms and sucks more slowly now.
Mary Spurren sits falling asleep on a chair by the window. Her head tips forward onto her chest from time to time.
It is close to the height of summer. At home on the Downs the sunrise would break over the forest at this point of the year, a liquid pink spilling out and broadening across the milky sky and unfurling slow, brilliant beams of light that warm the eastern sides of the hill and burn up the night mists that have collected in the dips and valleys. Sometimes then the sun will slip up behind a blanket of cloud and proceed conceale
d by it for a good part of the day, and only later will it burst out low in the sky to the west, casting a golden clarity on everything.
One by one Ann puts out the candles that have gone on burning unattended as the blue daylight grows brighter. The smell of smoking wick travels about the chamber like an incense; it is so sweet, I am almost drunk with it. She asks if I need to sleep, whether she should take the baby from me and place her in the cradle, but I will not leave her for a second, despite her strength and her regular breath as she lies, sleeping now in the world for the first time. My body is alight with a fierceness of purpose, needing to hold my child and begin to know her.
“What is she to be called? ” Ann asks me, into the silence.
I look down at her, my chance-born daughter in my arms, finished at the breast and gone furled up and tightly snug like a snail or a fresh shoot, and the early sunshine begins to spill into the chamber as I speak.
“Her name is Lucy,” I say. “For light, for newness, for nothing that has gone before. She is the beginning.”
And how new she is, I think; so new that I can see her heartbeat pulsing in her head.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first debt of gratitude is to my agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, for her support and enthusiasm, and who I’m so sorry isn’t here to see this to fruition. I was also very lucky to have had such rigorous, insightful and sensitive editing from Sarah Ballard, now also my agent; Clare Smith and Essie Cousins at Harper Press; and Pamela Dorman at Viking U.S. I would like to thank Sophie Goulden, Becky Morrison, Anne O’Brien, Taressa Brennan and everyone at Harper Press; also Zoë Pagnamenta, Carol MacArthur and Julie Miesionczek. I am grateful for funding from South West Arts, and indebted to the Royal Society of Literature—in particular to Maggie Fergusson, Julia Abel Smith and Piers Paul Read—for the time and space in which to write. Among the many books, places and people I was able to consult during research, certain resources were invaluable and I am particularly grateful to the staff at the British Library, and to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex. Special thanks to the expert pyrotechnician Maurice Evans for taking the time to talk to me about his work, and to the science historian Dr. Simon Werrett at the University of Washington for so kindly showing me chapters of his forthcoming history of fireworks. Other people I would like to thank for their help in a variety of ways are Chloë Hill, Jon Hill, Valerie Hill, Annie Hunt, Sam Hunt, Peter Beatty, Marie-Thérèse Please, Paddy Greaves, Sidney Greaves, Lillian and Maurice Hill, Alice Oswald, Peter Oswald, Christopher Burns, Dr. Tom Hutchison, Robert and Maria Pulley, Helen Whittle at Storrington Museum, Danae Tankard, the late Vincent Woropay, Tom Widger, Catherine Beckwith-Moore and John Eric Drewes at American Fireworks News. Last and heartfelt thanks to my husband, Sean, for being my anchor light and litmus test. This is to him and the boys, for their love and patience.
The Book of Fires Page 34