The Book of Fires (17 page)

All the rest of the birds melted away. The rowans, near bare of fruit, shook a little in the breeze of their departure and were still. It was a calm scene before the window, just the lane and fields, not a thing to show of any kill, save one soft feather drifting down toward the muddy lane: that and the sudden sharpness to the air, a quickening absence that made the blood run faster.

 

 

Mr. Soul came while I was out.

“Said he was thirsty, he did,” grumbles Mrs. Blight, putting another kettle on the heat for Mrs. Nott, the washerwoman. “Come peering in, right into my kitchen, and said there was no one in the workshop and here was a note about supply. Fidgeting, he was. Kept looking round.”

“Like he was looking for someone,” Mary Spurren says, and a glance sidles between them. Mary Spurren sniggers.

“That glass of beer you give him got drunk that quickly when he saw it was just us in here.”

“Only small beer.”

“Hoping for something better.”

Mary Spurren sniggers again, more loudly this time. “Then we couldn’t get rid of him, hanging about, fiddling with the spoons, tapping his foot.”

“Never stops moving, that one,” Mrs. Blight says. “Gives me a headache, all that coming and going with his hands.”

I take my cloak off and hang it up on the hook in the scullery. Cornelius Soul is like a wagtail, always dipping and turning, his coattails gray as cloud, as smoke, as gray as gunpowder. I turn to go back to the workshop.

“Seemed like he were . . . expecting something,” Mary Spurren says, and gives another look at Mrs. Blight as if that had some kind of meaning that I’d missed. “How very frequent he seems to come these days,” she comments to the air in general.

I pause at the door. The kitchen is thick with steam and the smell of soap. The washerwoman is going back and forth with kettles of water to the yard.

“Hello, Mrs. Nott,” I say when she nods at me. She stops and puts the kettle down to show her swollen, cracked hands to me.

“Worst in wintertime, it is,” she mutters, turning them over ruefully. Her nails are flaked and brittle as oyster shells, and the skin is pale to the elbow, and covered in an encrusting kind of scale, as though she had fallen asleep with her arms in a bucket of lye. Her skin’s color is deadened to naught, except where the rawness of the red patches shows through beneath. She grimaces when she puts her hands into water at the start of her day, a hiss escaping between her teeth, but she rarely complains, and she sings like a jenny wren.

“Must get on,” she says. “Lagging a bit. Should’ve been an’ gone half an hour since, and they’ll be waiting, up the road.”

Out in the yard, squatting over the tubs, working the crown soap into the bedsheets and linen, pouring the gray, grubby water away into the drain; it is hard to believe that the great strong voice that pours from her mouth can be hers. Mrs. Nott seems as small as a badly fed chicken, yet on clear frosty days when she sets up her tubs on the bricks outside, the yard seems to throb with the strength of her voice. I like it when she comes. It is as though my spirit were feeding on her songs.

“Will you see to the fire before you go to the workshop, Agnes!” Mrs. Blight says. “Coal dust everywhere.” She nods into the yard at Mrs. Nott. “I knew her sister Lizzie Beal last year over near St. Paul’s. Now there’s a miserable tale.” She sorts garments from a pile of last week’s dry laundry, holds up a crumpled petticoat and casts her eye over it in the light from the open door.

“See you got that bloodstain out, Mary.” She smirks. “Told you that bucking would work a treat. Never would’ve got it out with that useless ordinary boil you’d started. Can’t think where you learnt your cleaning.” Mary Spurren scowls and says nothing in reply. How Mrs. Blight likes to be right, I begin thinking, and am quite unguarded when she turns, mid-cackle, her hand over her mouth, and looks at me sharply, as if a thought had come to her.

“Haven’t had any rags from you yet, have we, Miss Trussel?” Mrs. Blight says.

“Rags?” I ask, puzzled.
Oh God!
My stomach churns in alarm.

“Your morbid flux. You’ve brought nothing down for the bucking pot since you was here, and that is surely more than four weeks now.” I cannot see her mouth.

“No,” I say, and my voice is too loud in the horrible pause that seems to grip the kitchen as at the back Mary puts down the scrubbing sticks and doesn’t appear to be working at all. “I . . .”

“Bit proud, are we?”

“Oh no,” I say again, and with a struggle I add as quickly, lightly as I can, “I am waiting, of course, but I can feel it not far off. I have a bad ache here.” I give a vague prod at my apron. “It was probably the journey, the jolting of the cart, that set me out.” I bend over the hearthstone and sweep up the dust as she asked me to.

Mrs. Blight’s lizard eyes are still upon me, but I can’t look up. “No need to be made so red-faced by talk of women’s stuff, is there?” she says. “We’re all big girls here, aren’t we, Mary, after all! ”

“I’m accustomed to being inside a family,” I mutter, my cheeks burning. “Not speaking of private things out loud like that to just anyone that asks. I don’t like to.”

“Needn’t be so touchy, neither,” Mrs. Blight says, turning away. “Quite the precious little hermit, aren’t we! Probably the sort to go around in half-washed rags done in cold water in your chamber sooner than muck in with others. I’m right, aren’t I? Could do with a bit of humility, your sort, considering.” Mary Spurren snorts. And Mrs. Blight goes on, “Jack-in-the-cellar was all she had by the time he’d done with her.”

“Done with whom? ” I say faintly.

“With Mrs. Nott’s sister, Lizzie Beal—are you not listening to anything today?” As I stand up again she gives a sideways glance at my belly. Wretchedly, as if I were feeling the cold air coming in, I pull my shawl tightly about me.
Mrs. Blight surely cannot know my trouble. It cannot be that plain to see.
“And the man in question but a baker-legged tanner with no intentions of marrying her, as he rightly should’ve, despite the chit she was bearing to term. Disgrace, it was.” She flicks a shirt savagely. “Spent his time telling great whisking lies in the tavern on the corner of Milk Street, and all the time carrying on as if nothing was changed. Ran off, he did, of course, before the parish could put demands on him for money.”

She spits on the flat iron.

Intentions of marrying her
. And quite suddenly an idea comes toward me in pieces, a collective swell like a rush of droplets brought down in the wind from trees above.

It is a half-formed plan, yet ingenious in its simplicity. Not a trap, I make clear to myself when later I have a flicker of doubt. Not a trap, but morsels of bait set up along a certain path. I plan to lay that bait with all the cunning I possess. Which is why, on Friday next, when Cornelius Soul brings a tub of powder, I ensure that I meet his eye a little, and, as he takes his leave, I give him just the slightest glimmer of a smile.

Nothing more than that. I do not find it difficult.

Mrs. Mellin is in the dream I have tonight.

She has looked up from polishing her coins, her fingers black with a paste made from ashes.

T
here was a girl on a farm at Thakeham or Chiltington, I forget which. She arrived from nowhere, it seemed, to work in the April of the previous year. Her belly grew as the year swelled and grew older, and she ate more to show off her appetite, taking large pieces of cheese at the table when everyone ate. Her mother was fat, she declared; how like her she was becoming. Her stays became tighter. A particular day came.

After the milking she returned to the dairy and churned for two hours. From time to time her knuckles whitened over the wooden handle, but she kept the cream churning. She scrubbed out three pails after the butter was done, fetching the salt from the back of the dairy. She became unwell; she said her head was beating and beating and making her sick. To prove it, she vomited into the gutter outside the dairy and rinsed the vomit away. She put the pails to dry and took off her apron and hung it up on a hook. She went up to the attic. Someone heard furniture scraping heavily over the floorboards as she wedged the door tight. She was not down for supper and the cook put the meat on her plate back into the meat safe. Night passed. The sun rose and she came down from the attic pale but better. Her headache was gone. She went out to the cows and hulked the brimming pails back into the dairy. She churned the butter, drained it, pressed it into the molds and salted eight pats of butter. She worked more slowly than usual, blinking uneasily from time to time. At eleven o’clock she clutched at the side and tipped up a setting bowl, spilling ounces of cream. The skimmer fell to the floor with a clatter. At three o’clock she dropped quietly down on the floor as though the bones had gone from her body, and lay in a heap until somebody came who knew what to do, pulling her loose limbs aside so they could press on her heart. She let out a red pool of blood between her legs that spread out over the flagstones and darkened quickly as it cooled. The blood was the brightest thing that had ever been seen in the dairy, which is in general a pale, white place. After an hour they agreed that her heart had become too cool and still to revive, and laid her down on the marble slab by the cheeses until Dr. Twiner could come and confirm this for them. When later they went to the attic and searched through her baggage for items of value to send back to her family, they found a dead blue baby folded up under her petticoat, a bruised stripe around its tiny, flopping neck, like a collar.

I have gone through this story again and again. And today, for some reason, it rolls around my head all the time like a fruit in an empty barrow, although at last Mr. Blacklock is to show me how to charge the rocket cases.

“Listen hard to what I say,” he barks. “The method is complex and I shall not show you twice.”

I see how the case sits over a spindle in the box, which penetrates it deeply, so that the composition is compressed about what will be a hollow cone-shaped space when the rocket is done, which gives air to the burning.

“Twelve light blows with the mallet to consolidate the dry clay powder at the choke, which is the constricted mouth at the base of the rocket,” he says. “Then fusepowder, with further blows on the hollow rammer or drift. Continue with scoops of powder, using first that drift with the large hollow inside it and then the medium, and, nearing the top of the spindle as it fills, use the drift with the smallest hollow inside it.” Mr. Blacklock turns his head away to cough. “Then the solid rammer above the spindle, with dry clay, until the case is full, then twist the rocket from the spindle. Finally push a length of quick match inside the rocket’s hollow core and paste it at the mouth.

“Manufacture and attachment of a rocket head, with a variety of appended garnitures of stars and fiery rains and so on, we will cover on a further occasion,” he says. “Likewise the stick, which is necessary for balance and guidance in flight like a rudder or tail.” He holds up the half-finished shape. “This is an honorary sky rocket, which carries no head; small and plain, with strong composition.

“The smaller the case, the quicker the mixture used to fill it.” He passes it to me. I hold such a remarkable thing gingerly.

“Quicker?” I ask.

“Fiercer. More instantly combusting. Smaller rockets will contain mealpowder, which you will remember to be gunpowder ground exceedingly fine.” He gets up and motions me to sit before the filling-box.

“Do not mistake the degree of roaring of a rocket upon ignition to be an indication of the fierceness of its powder,” he says. “The loud roar depends upon the quantity of surface that is available to burn. And a rocket that is insufficiently rammed will simply explode upon ignition. Indeed, any poorly made firework is in danger of explosion if held in an ungloved hand, for instance.”

The filling-box is deep with washed river sand and stands securely on a block of oak.

“Brace yourself,” Mr. Blacklock says, clearing his throat. “You must put your legs apart.” He demonstrates.

I try. “No, wider,” he says. “You must be braced and comfortable. You cannot charge a rocket ill at ease.”

He stands back and considers my posture. “Adjust your skirts above your knee.”

Obediently I tug at the woollen fabric until my legs are free to move about unencumbered by my skirts or petticoat.

“There!” he exclaims.

I do not believe that he is looking at my legs above the ankle, which are naked now, inside my stockings, but know it must be possible, should he choose to do so. My cheeks are flushed with the thought of it.

“Make your back long and upright,” he suggests. He is looking at my face, I am sure, though I do not turn to look at him. He does not take his gaze away. I can hear him breathing.

I try to sit up straight.

“Are you at ease?” he demands at last.

“I am, sir,” I say, sitting there with my legs apart. “It feels . . . natural like this.”

“Then, so stationed,” Mr. Blacklock says, “you can begin. Soon you will be adept at filling rockets, lances, gerbes.”

“Gerbe?” I say. “What is that?”

“It is the French for
sheaf
,” he replies.

“Oh!” I say, with a start of recognition. “Like a sheaf of corn, a sheaf of wheat?”

“Precisely so,” Mr. Blacklock says. “It burns like a spray of ears of wheat, and is named accordingly—”

“Stooked up in the field, the shining ears spurting out, like a fountain of gold,” I interrupt eagerly, a smile growing inside me.

“You can picture it now?” he asks.

“I can picture it very well,” I reply.

 

My first attempts are clumsy. I am left alone to make mistakes with quantities of powder, spilling the scoops as I tip them in. The hollow rammer jams with compacted powder, so that I have to beat hard to loosen it and much is wasted. It is impossible to strike the mallet with even, satisfactory beats. I hold the tools so tightly in my anxiety that my bare hands chafe and become sore.