The Book of Fires (15 page)

I wake with a pressure on my chest and a trouble niggling inside, and the sickness is worse than usual this morning, so that I have to breathe deeply when I stand up and go to the basin.

Downstairs at breakfast I find Mrs. Blight and Mary Spurren muttering agreement about this and that. Their voices drop when they look over at me, though I can hear them still, as if that were intended. I have begun to sense that they talk about me behind my back, though I don’t know why. I do not understand people very well. They are perplexing.

“I’d had enough of her malapert sauciness,” Mrs. Blight is saying. I know they do not mean myself, but still I am uncomfortable. “Ended up over Seven Dials way among the gin shops, she did. Drunken discharged soldiers and seamen. Lots of trade there. Hardly of the kind she had expected. Though even among the cream of society you find the murkiest of morals, making games of what should be left twixt man and wife.”

Mary Spurren snickers.

“Like after their goose and gooseberries, after the cards and the white brandy has been put to one side . . .” Mrs. Blight pauses for effect. “Then they starts up! Best amusement east of the bathing houses? Debauched, I call it.” Mrs. Blight rattles the teeth in her head with a succulent indignation. “The things girls has to do for money now,” she laments.

“What do they do?” I interrupt, unhappily.

Mrs. Blight leans over, her bosom quivering over the floured pastry, and inside her pocket her little hip flask clunks against the chair.

“In company! Not a stitch on!” she hisses. “She’s trussed up, on her back on a huge silver platter! Like a great juicy chicken!” My mouth drops open. “Spun round and round she is, a plump little whirligig on the table, in the middle of the jostling.” She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “And the winner, blindfold, gets the lemon right in! ” She is beside herself. Mary Spurren snorts, her white cheeks flushed.

There is a sharp click as the door opens suddenly and Mr. Blacklock enters the room. I see how Mrs. Blight and Mary Spurren slip so easily into a semblance of work.

“Yes, Mr. Blacklock, your coffee will be along in just a moment. Agnes will do it.” Her voice is bland and occupied with kitchen affairs. I keep my face turned into the cupboard and bend about as though I were looking for something small and tucked away. Could he have heard us? I am mortified. The door bangs as he leaves the room. I pour a handful of beans into the mill as I have seen Mary do, and begin turning the handle.

“I have a grievous headache,” Mrs. Blight says plaintively, dabbing at the edge of her forehead with her sleeve. She lifts the pastry up on the rolling pin, then lays and unfolds it over the plate of chicken. She slices at the edge and it drops away in slow, fatty loops onto the marble top. Her skill makes her quiet for a moment, and she breathes heavily as she seals the edges of the pie closed with deft pinches.

In the silence, as I turn from the hob to pour water on the ground beans, I distinctly hear my coins clink against each other inside my stays. I stand stock-still. Could Mrs. Blight have heard it, too? That unmistakable, slithering click of metal, letting slip the certainty that I have money hidden on my person. And even as she is looking up at me, I burst out absurdly, “I like it!”

“Like what?” Mrs. Blight narrows her eyes.

I point at the pie. “The . . . fresh kind of leaf smell of pastry, before it’s cooked.”

“Leaf smell? Leaves! Listen to her!” Mrs. Blight’s mocking laughter rings in my head. She lowers her voice.

“More like a man’s fluids, that smell is,” she breathes, with a wink at Mary Spurren.

“A man’s what? A—” My cheeks flush. “I don’t know what you mean,” I say. Mary Spurren snorts again. And Mrs. Blight looks triumphant, as if she is on the way to catching me out.

She is a coarse kind of woman, and it is a relief to take up the coffeepot and escape across the corridor into the study. I set out the cups and sugar, then pin the shutters back so that the cold sun falls in across a corner of the desk. I look about. On the far wall there is a cabinet, bearing a range of books upright on its middle shelves. I look more closely, and see the volume that Mr. Blacklock was reading on the evening I arrived. Perhaps I have spent too long in here already, but I pause, just to touch the spines and look.

I make the letters out on each.
Pirotechnia. Metallurgy. De Re Metallica. The Book of Fires.
I spell out the strange and lovely words, and then, holding my breath, I reach out and take a volume down. It is so heavy. The leather binding is pale and shiny with use, and the rag corners of the pages are softened and dirty from being touched. It is a workingman’s book. Within are stiff drawings of contraptions and devices that have been sliced through to show the inside of processes and apparatus. Short men in long boots and old-fashioned breeches work at flames that look like wriggling blades of grass, and smoke that is drawn streaky, like the grain of elm.

I freeze.

Mr. Blacklock’s footsteps are coming down the corridor. I can hear voices at the door as his client greets him: the Italian pyrotechnic engineer called Mr. Torré, who does not take his hat off when he goes into a room. I push the volume swiftly onto the shelf and leave the study as it should be.

After their meeting I hear them in the hall.

“A pleasure to be working with you on this performance,” the hatted man is saying. “You’re an oddity, Blacklock, neither trader nor gentleman; or rather both.” And he slaps Mr. Blacklock on the shoulder as he turns to leave.

Mr. Blacklock barks out a short laugh. “Throw any insult, call me anything, but do not call me
artificer
, Mr. Torré.”

“True, your mind is too innovative for that, signor. Delighted to sign a contract with you.”

“I was preparing to join forces with your fellow countrymen.”

“The Ruggieri brothers?” Torré laughs easily. “One day I will outstrip them! Despite their claims that they will make pyrotechnic splendor for us, the like of which we have never seen before.”

Mr. Blacklock holds the door ajar.

“We are all searching for something new, Mr. Torré,” he says, quietly.

 

Soon after this I am bitten by an earwig, and Mrs. Blight, on seeing me sucking my finger like a child, thinks I am putting currants in my mouth.

“No, no!” I protest, and try to show her, but she is too busy to pay much heed to what I say.

“I’ve warned you afore, no helping yourself, no greedy-gutsing,” she says. “No liberties! Thieving little miss, you are.” She bends over, panting. The sickly sweetness of liquor on her breath is everywhere, but at first I don’t retort. I have noticed that the level inside the new bottle of Madeira wine—bought from the housekeeping money so that, she said, she can make up a tolerable sauce for boiled duck—has been dropping over the week like the line of high tide when the moon is waning.

Mary Spurren comes in. “Doing it again, she is,” Mrs. Blight says savagely.

“I took nothing!” I say, taken aback at first, and then indignant. “Besides, how can you say that, drinking Mr. Blacklock’s wine!”

Mrs. Blight smirks. “What wine? ”

“The Madeira.”

“Oh no.” She denies it flatly.

“It’s going down quite steadily,” I say, my face flushed, and I go to the dresser and point at the half-filled bottle for her to see, my fingers shaking, but she doesn’t miss a beat.

“Evaporation, that is,” she agrees. “These foreign wines are misreliant.” She sucks in her teeth regretfully and shakes her head so that the crop quivers under her jaw. “Terrible waste it is, terrible, all that good spirit leaking out into the atmosphere without effective stoppage,” she says. “No man has invented yet the cork that will bring to bear the containment of these foreign liquors.” She picks unconcernedly at her teeth. “Haven’t touched that bottle since Tuesday last,” she says. There is a wet runnel of liquor about its neck, and even as we look, a drop slips down its length and makes a sticky patch on the surface of the shelf.

And I look sideways at Mary Spurren, but she does not catch my eye.

 

As I go to bed that evening, something causes me to forget this disagreeable dispute.

“Agnes!” Mr. Blacklock shouts out, looming from his study into the corridor. His face is stern in the poor light cast by my candle. I swallow. Mrs. Blight must have told him that I have been thieving from his kitchen.

“Yes, sir?” I say. My voice is an anxious whisper. But it is worse.

“You have touched my books!” His displeasure glares down at me.

I nod, ashamed. How I wish I could vanish.

“Should you touch them in future you will ensure that your fingers are clean,” he barks.

I blink in surprise.

“And you must bring your reading matter to discuss further with me,” he goes on. “There are inaccuracies in those volumes that would need to be identified.” He returns to the study. Of course I will not do such a thing; he must not be bothered with trifles, I think, turning away. Yet the idea of the books is stored inside me like a pleasure that I go back to just before I sleep.
Your reading matter to discuss
. So much I could learn.

But pleasure is a weakness, and I guard against it where I can. I have begun to reason that receiving unkindness should make one grow harder, which is in turn a fair protection against being foolishly soft and vulnerable. But when by chance a person says a gentle thing to me, my heart does an undue gallop, like it does on the day that Mrs. Spicer looks at me over her counter as she weighs out raw chestnuts.

“Remarkable pale, you are,” she says, folding the packet over and passing it to me.

“I do not sleep so well,” I begin to confess, then check myself.

“Do they treat you proper at that house?” she probes. “Or should I say, in those infernal regions, God only knows!”

“Oh yes,” I say hastily. “It is only that I sometimes do not sleep so well, as many don’t indeed.” She puts her head to one side in sympathy. I hold the packet to my chest.

“Still, your cheek is whiter than it should be, than it was when you first came.” She will not let up. “The consequence of being apart from home, no doubt. Unnatural, it is, to be so far from native soil, poor love.”

“It is nothing,” I reply, and my voice does not shake. I go quickly from the shop into the rain on the street.

When I get back to the house there is nobody in.

I go to the scullery and sob and sob. I am wanting my mother, like a child does. I long for home; for the woods, empty of leaves, and the wind rattling the sound of winter around among the trees. I long for open space and for a good flat breeze blowing across my ears. I long to see how the dangling sycamore seeds are stiffening into winter at the ends of the branches. “Kit keys! Kit keys!” I can hear in my mind William’s delighted voice, running toward me with a bunch held up tightly in his little fist.

Then I hear the front door opening and Mrs. Blight’s footsteps marching unsteadily all down the corridor as I rush to dry my eyes and scold myself for behaving with indulgence. She stares at my hot face suspiciously when she comes into the kitchen.

“Short of something to do?” she demands. “Why is that fire nearly out when I am about to cook that neck of veal upon it?”

“I did not notice,” I say feebly.

“There are plenty in town these days that are not from here,” Mrs. Blight says harshly, as she rakes out the dull coals. I can smell the liquor on her, which means that she must have come past the Star on her way back from market. “No point whindling for what is gone and nevermore. Mostly life is suffering what’s dealt to you, and red-eye weepy sorrowing will get you nowhere, my girl, unless your aim is to achieve an ugliness as bad as persons maimed by inveterate distemper.” She slams the hod on the hearthstone angrily and picks up the bellows. She is right, of course, but I hate her for this.

“I know that,” I say, gritting my teeth. “Best to let time swallow up the worst of any suffering.”

“Life is all suffering, my girl, and time does not eat up anything,” she says bitterly, puffing with the bellows. “You’ll find that out.”

The coals redden.

And of course I do not contradict her, or explain why she is wrong. I do not trust that woman one little bit. She is waiting for my mistake to show itself to her, to everybody, I am certain of it.

“Arse-prickle,” she adds, the syrupy smell of liquor all about her. “A contagion of arse-prickle I am suffering from, and do I get sympathy for such affliction? I do not.” She bangs the spoon against the stewing pan.

London is not so vast a place. Lettice Talbot’s lodging surely cannot be so far away? Why do I not encounter her upon the street in the normal course of errands, while carrying packets of antimony back from the apothecary, say, or going with a basket to the herbwoman’s market barrow near the Leadenhall for swedes or turnips? I glance at the clock. Mr. Blacklock will be here any moment.