The Book of Fires (18 page)

After paying so much attention to my person, Mr. Blacklock barely seems to notice me for the remainder of the morning. I am so afraid the rockets will explode in front of me I hardly let my breath come naturally.

“Do not rush,” he says once, without looking up from his bench. “The flow of work will come when eventually you manipulate the tools adroitly, but it should never be a frenzy.”

And because the orders are fulfilled he goes off to Child’s coffeehouse to talk of business matters, and is not back to take the midday meal with anyone.

The tool sits uncomfortably in my hand and my back aches in a new way.

At the end of the day, when the gloom becomes too thick to properly see what I am doing, he returns to check what I have done.

“It looked so simple when you showed me,” I say. I am disappointed with my progress. I remember the first time I was permitted to milk a cow at Roker’s Farm, when I was six years old. I took the teats expectantly and found that they did not behave at all as I imagined they would. It took days of practice before the milk drenched regularly into the pail, my fingers using a movement that was neither a tug nor a stroke, but rather something in between.

I am tired. My palms are stinging and blistered with effort.

“You will do the same exercise until you have it right,” Mr. Blacklock says, with no further comment.

But the next day, he surprises me again.

“It is apparent that you have an aptitude for what we do here—and any energy that I expend in divesting specific areas of knowledge upon you may not be a waste.” He stops to cough. “I will be frank: in the past I have not achieved much in the way of success with the training of assistants. But there is something receptive about your ear, which pleases me, and which indicates that thorough learning may bear good results.”

A flicker of hope kindles something inside me. And then I think perhaps I should not flatter myself that this is due to any special quality I possess. Already I had been told by Mary Spurren about his last apprentice.

“Davey Halfhead was a squat youth covered in boils,” she’d said. “With such a temper. I breathed more natural when he was gone. Ate a lot of fat, he did. Wouldn’t touch loaves. Said they gave him a cramp in his leg.” Mary Spurren had drawn breath at the very thought of it. “Mr. Blacklock’s not a man to have assistants,” she’d said.

“Are there other men like you, sir?” I ask.

“Like me?” He looks amused. “We are a various breed. Our compass ranges from plain artisans making batches by the ten thousand to i mpresarios like Torré who do not lay a finger in the mixture and are concerned only with spectacle. There are philosophers with ideas of
nature
to convey, and entire families traveling between cities across Europe with their fire-working mastery.”

“And all these people make a living from this . . . trade? ”

“The appetite for artificial fireworks cannot be sated, or so it seems. Once it was the private pleasure of kings, but now the common man is glad to pay to see these things we offer. And we all want to find the most novel, the most dazzling, the biggest, best, newest creation. Competition is rife. We are a cutthroat lot, among ourselves.”

“But how does anybody ever learn anything then, sir? ”

He looks at me. “A keen question. The knowledge is passed on strictly by word of mouth between interested parties. Neither formulae nor tricks of the trade are shared in the public eye. If anything is written down, it will be in manuscript form and locked away. It is a secretive business, pyrotechny.”

“Do you write your recipes down, sir? How do you remember them ? ”

“I have never done so,” Mr. Blacklock says. “They are safer inside my head than out.”

“But what if something were to happen to you?” I am asking too many questions now.

“The world would manage, if it were deprived of a record of my labors,” he says. For a moment his face is stone-still, and then a flicker passes over it. He clears his throat. “And there is much to learn,” Mr. Blacklock says. “How can one know a thing about the quality of substances without an understanding or experience of how it is derived, composed, originated? ” He uncorks a jar of flowers of sulfur and knocks a little out into a dish. “The same could be more broadly said of life,” he says.

“Mrs. Blight says that life is all suffering,” I find myself replying, without intending to at all. “
All suffering
, she says.”

The sulfur is soft and yellow in the dish. Mr. Blacklock looks up and then back at the tool in his hand, turns it over.

“Indeed, there seems to be a quantity about,” he says. His voice is quiet. Perhaps he is thinking of his dead wife. My aunt always said that my mother’s raw grief for her mother was never healed because she would not speak of it, and left it trapped up inside her.

“What was Mrs. Blacklock like?” I venture, watching his face. He fixes his eyes upon me, unspeaking, for a moment.

“She was tiny,” he says, turning around to the work on the bench. His jerkin is smooth and worn at the back. I wonder whether he is trying to reach her with fireworks. Or maybe not. Maybe he is trying to punish God; there is a violence in these devices. I have seen something like a black fire far back inside his eyes.

“And your own misfortune? ” he asks me, unexpectedly. At first with a jolt I think he means the child inside me, and then regretfully I remember the fire that I claimed had burnt up my family in one night.

“You were at home?” he asks.

I nod.

“Did you try to put it out? ”

“Oh yes,” I say. What can I tell him?“It was early,” I murmur, putting my hand to my face. “Some of them were still asleep upstairs. I expect it was a small fire at first. I had no idea. There must have been a spark . . .” I falter. “And the heaped wool caught quickly at the bottom of the stairs.” Mr. Blacklock looks at me.

I stop. I can’t go on, and I fold my arms over my stomach in a kind of agony of untruth and missing home. It feels as though I have killed them with my story.

M
y weaver’s hands are changing. The nails are blackening and the tips are sore from touching the dry chemicals. There are painful cracks beginning to open up between my fingers. At first I tried to work with the great leather gloves that sat upon the filling bench, but they are large and stiff, the size of a man’s hand. They make me clumsy. And so instead I let my bare fingers do the work rapidly; I can fill twenty casings before the bell on the thin steeple of St. Mary the Virgin strikes midday. At night I rub yellow salve into my skin before I sleep. But I find I no longer suffer waves of sickness on rising each morning, as I had before. Indeed I begin to feel quite well again, as though a fresh kind of vigor had taken hold in me.

 

 

It is the darkest part of the year.

Christmas Day passes with little note, and although I hear the bells calling the faithful to church all over London, I do not go myself. Mrs. Blight cooks plum porridge. The fires draw quickly. At first it is too cold to snow heavily. Fine, powdered flakes fall outside the house, a bitter wind scuttering them about. When the wind drops, the snow ticks on the ground—as embers tick as they cool in the grate when a fire has gone out.

If we sit too far from the stove in the workshop our breath drifts in clouds about us.

“I know about charcoal, sir,” I point out, when Mr. Blacklock lays some pieces on the bench. “Men take good green wood and let it burn slowly in a clamp of soil and on the fifth day or thereabouts, they stop the gaps and smother the hot coals where they lie.”

“That is so,” Mr. Blacklock says. “And it chars quietly by itself, the contained fire eating at the pithy underwood until it is as brittle and as strong as glass. It is the fuel in gunpowder.”

“Up in the Weald the charcoal men use hazel from the coppices, also willow and sometimes alder,” I say. I do not add that you can see small white-bellied birds, tree-creepers, inching up the alders by the Stor. The leaves of alder are stiff and make a dense kind of shade, so that a river beneath them flows without warmth or sunshine. The wind hisses through alders. The leaves of hazel are as thick and napped as cloth. But they are more sparse on the branches, and allow for sunshine to break through and dapple the woodland floor.

There is a big warren on the edge of the hazel coppice under Black-patch Hill. My father had been known to trap wild rabbit in those woods on his journey back from over Findon way, his sharp billhook strapped to his back.

And a thought comes to me: it is said that, at the rarest of times, a rabbit who has conceived of babies can absorb her young back into herself, when it is too cold, when food is scarce or conditions are too harsh for her to nurture them with adequacy. No waste. There is something clean about this, their tiny unsuitable souls dissolving back into the warmth and darkness of her body.

Outside the window the snow spins in dizzying columns, like icy dancing flecks of flies. When Joe Thomazin comes close to me to bring a box of cases, I see he is shivering.

“Are you cold? ” I ask him, and put out my hand to touch his face. He winces, as though he expected me to hurt him. I look at him in consternation, but he has gone to the stove.

“He does not like to be touched,” Mr. Blacklock says, though his back is turned. I remember what Mr. Blacklock told me, outside his earshot, when I arrived.

“His mother, no doubt being a tippler, a whore or an unfortunate, gave up Joe Thomazin to the whim and obligation of the parish,” he says. “And never returning for him, he was deserted. Or perhaps she is dead.” Mr. Blacklock shrugs as he says this, although spreading his hands as if to bear the great weight of his not knowing. “Joe Thomazin knows about endurance. Most parish children do not achieve the age of six, but die a wretched, sickly death for want of milk or cleanliness.”

I glance over to the stove, where Joe Thomazin squats on his heels picking up bits of fallen coals with his grubby fingers. How small he looks. And he has not forgiven me for hiding my secret from him.

“Stars, for instance,” Mr. Blacklock says, breaking into my thoughts, “can be improved with charcoal.”

“What are they like, sir? ”

“Globes of light, little planets of sharp fire. Stars with far-reaching tails of lengthy duration are achieved with an excess of charcoal. They burn out slowly, gravity pulling them down in a trail of amber, making a drooping shape, like the branches of willows reaching toward water.” He shows me some already finished.

“They just look like broken pastilles,” I say, holding one up.

“There is much yet that you do not know about,” he says, and his eyes glitter so blackly as they meet mine that I cannot look away. “Fire so white it hurts to look at it. Sparks like ice. Burning grains of fire, plumes, fountains. Our fire is like the noble metals at the very birth of their existence, the hot mouths of the gods spitting gold and silver into life. We can only make white fire, tinted with warmth or coldness as we please, but its range of purity is so rare, so transforming, that these limitations do not matter.” His dark face flashes with joy. I have never seen him smile like that before. It must be because at last his burn is healing and does not give him so much pain. “Maroons! Gerbes! Metallic rain! Cascades! Bengal lights! Tourbillions! Serpents!” The thing inside me that I cannot name seems to move about in excitement as he speaks.

I know about serpents, though. Up on the Downs on a hot day the adders stretch out with their dry flanks panting as they soak up the sunshine. It is as well to be noisy as you step through the grasses, so that they slither away.

An adder’s fat is the cure for its poisonous bite, they say.

We stop at twelve to dine. It is Mrs. Blight’s day off, and in the kitchen Mary Spurren has let the fire go out, so that the sweep could clean the chimney, and he has just packed up his brushes and gone.

“That lowers my spirits,” says Mary Spurren, staring at it gloomily. “Nothing colder than a fire that is out.” She is right. It is a sobering prospect.

She cuts at the cold mutton she has taken from the meat safe.

A fire that is out is a desolate space in the grate. Mrs. Mellin’s fire had been out for days when I came upon it. I don’t know if the fire was a lit and blazing comfort when she died, warming Mrs. Mellin’s body at the very point when her heart gripped her in a squeeze of its own choosing and clutched itself to death, or if she sat before a dwindling smoky heap, uncomfortable as the chill of winter settled already in her bones.

We eat the cold meat almost in silence. Mr. Blacklock’s cough has worsened with the weather. Mary Spurren has relit the hob and it roars with a yellow blaze of kindling.

“Know the date? ” Mary Spurren whispers to me when he has left the kitchen. “Epiphany was the day she died. ’Tis hard to say if he has taken note of it this year. Last year he drank a mortal quantity of brandy and slept in the study as he had no use of his legs. It’s the snow out there, reminds me of it.” She lifts the hod and tips on bigger coals.