The Book of Fires (36 page)

“You can pay me, I take it?” She turns her back as she wipes her long hands on a piece of rag and puts it aside. “I do not talk to girls unless I can be sure. Mrs. Bray’s girls, they gets reduced rates. Put the coins on the table and then we can begin,” she directs. There are buckets with cloths soaking by the door. “How many months? ”

“It is hard to be sure,” I lie. “Perhaps six?” If I tell her how close I really am to my time, I know she will not treat me with her medicine. I am good at lying now. I do not even blink.

I place six shillings on the tabletop, saved from my wages. As she gathers them up she bites each one. Her teeth are short, as though she had spent a lifetime doing that, or eating stones instead of bread. I do not like this woman. I am glad I do not like her.

“There are cheaper remedies to purchase—powders,” she says. “But frankly they achieve little. They cause a bellyache that may lead you to believe yourself to be undergoing the required treatment. By all means try them, if you will, but I sense you will not find them efficacious.” She eyes my belly, then unlocks a chest and takes out a squat blue bottle. She draws a quantity of liquid deftly from it with a burette, and releases the drops into a small phial. She counts under her breath, and stops when she reaches the fortieth drop.

“Oil of savine.” She raises the phial and checks the level. “It is a potent stuff. I assume you do not take it lightly. Three drops, three times a day, on a good piece of sugar. Clear?” Unexpectedly, she stands up and reaches out and presses her fingers proprietarily into my belly. I do not like her doing this; indeed I am repulsed by her and have to try hard not to pull away. “Six months? I would say seven, at least,” she says. “But I am guessing. You look a healthy girl.”

“I have been fortunate.” I mean to say that I am fortunate about my health. She looks at me and makes a tutting noise between her tongue and ground-down teeth.

“I would say you have been careless or unlucky, girl. Yet,” she adds, “let’s not beat about, your misfortune is my gain.” And she expects me to join in as her jutting chin quivers briefly with laughter.

“I have no sugar,” I say stupidly.

“Buy some, beg some, steal some,” Dilly Martinment advises. “It will be a bitter thing to swallow, lacking it.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. I think of the tall white conical loaf of the sugar on the high dresser. I imagine rasping off what I need with the tongs, under the nose of Mrs. Blight, and carrying a brazen bowlful of pieces right through the house to my room. It would be unthinkable.

“It would be missed,” I say.

“It will be bitter, with no sweetness to offset the edge, like a dry knife at the back of the throat,” Dilly Martinment cautions me. She rubs at her neck and grimaces, her chin jutting out. “Little steely raspings.” And at that moment another paneled door, which I had not noticed previously, opens a crack.

“Well enough to leave us now?” she says to the small bony girl who emerges unsteadily from the back chamber.

The girl looks distinctly unwell. A strange smell has accompanied her into the chamber. Her face is as white as wax and clammy with perspiration, as though she is on the brink of a fainting fit. She grasps the back of a chair.

“Still I do not feel quite as I should.” I can barely hear what she is saying. She removes one hand from the chair to touch her hair. Her fingers are red and small, and make a poor attempt at tying the ribbons of her bonnet when Dilly Martinment passes it to her.

“Wait,” she says, “I am faint again,” and she grips at the chair and leans over it. Her eyes are wide and blank, as though her mind were somewhere else.

“I cannot touch my stomach,” she whispers. My hand strays to my belly under my cloak; it is firm and full and moves about.

“You will not need to,” Dilly Martinment says, glancing over her shoulder at me.

“Wicked, I am,” the girl whispers.

“I believe in neither hell nor damnation,” Dilly Martinment remarks briskly. How much easier for her to say this than it is for us. “We must make the best use of what comes to us.” She continues talking, but I do not listen as I am looking past her with a dawning kind of horror into the back room. I can make out a table and a pile of cloths upon it, dark with fluids. The lamplight shines upon some kind of metal instrument.

“You will find now that things will take their course,” Dilly Martinment calls after the girl. “I do not ever ask for names,” she mutters to me. She shuts the door, and eyes my belly again. “It has a good hold in there,” she says. “It may be more difficult to dislodge than you imagine. Of course, there are other ways yet.” She taps the glass of the phial with a sharp, discolored fingernail. “But the oil is a successful provoker of the catamenia, that monthly scarlet discharge that you lack and will remember now with something like a fondness, I am supposing, despite its inconvenience and accompanying aches and miseries.”

“Does it take long?” I say, not being able to ask what I really need to know.

She looks at me.

“It does not.”

I go away from there with a sense that it is all bad. All bad. At home in my chamber I find a strange comfort in the familiar smell of mice, a thin, pungent smell that bites at the nostrils.

I hide the oil at the back of the chest where my small linen and my Bible lie, and at night I take it out and look at it before I sleep. The baby drums on inside me, its limbs drumming and drumming at the skin of my belly. I turn the blue phial between my forefinger and thumb and watch the oil slowly coat the inside of the glass. It gleams poisonously by candlelight.

I know I cannot wait a moment longer. I take up the spoon that I have hidden for this purpose, and pour a little of the oil of savine into the spoon’s bowl.

It is long after dark. Mrs. Blight has gone to her lodging and Mary Spurren is in her chamber above me. I can hear the creak of her bed as she settles.

My hand does not shake and I do not spill a drop. I put the spoon to my mouth and swallow the liquid down. It is so dryly resinous, disagreeable and bitter that my throat clamps shut. I clench my teeth and rock backward and forward in the effort not to vomit. Then I pour another spoonful and swallow it. And then another.

I climb into my bed then and I do not move or speak a word out loud, but inside me every fiber of my being shouts with rage.

Murderer
, the voice inside me whispers back.

 

In the morning before I go to breakfast, I do the same, though it is vile and taints the flavor of the bread and ale.

Mrs. Blight notices the absence of the spoon, and my cheeks redden as I look with her into the cutlery box. I know she thinks that I have stolen it, but she does not say a word to me. Instead she exercises sarcasm to the air in general when, by the afternoon, the spoon has reappeared again.

“Would you look at this,” she says, holding it up. “Always the silver ones what disappear, isn’t it, Mary? Remarkable swift how they come and go, I always find,” she says. She mimics the bleat of a young girl.

“Oh, madam, I cannot think how that came to fall into the pocket of my apron. How shiny it is! How lucky we found it before ’twas lost at the laundry!” She bends and whispers viciously at me over the table. “Little thief! And I can’t help thinking, Mary, that there is something here that Mr. Blacklock ought to know of.”

How right she is. Alone in my chamber that night I drink the oil directly from the phial, and again in the morning, tears squeezing from my eyes, it is so bitter.

I
dream of a jester performing a trick before a crowd, and the crowd is jeering. Lettice Talbot is there, too, and a man whose face I cannot see strokes the back of her white neck, and she is turning to him, her head falling back and her lovely eyes half-lidded, and then I feel a wrenching tug as if from some danger I had forgotten, and someone cries out, “Agnes, Agnes!” until my ears are ringing with distress. I wake with a gasp.

Mary Spurren is banging on the door. “Agnes?” she shouts, grumpily. I touch my face. My cheeks are burning as though I have stood too long at a bonfire. What is the matter with me? “Get up!” Mary Spurren calls through the door. “I won’t say it again.”

“Coming,” I reply, and then I hear her stamping down the stairs. At first I do not remember that Mr. Blacklock is away, and when I do, it is a sobering thought and the house seems different.

“Feeling slow today, are we?” Mrs. Blight says, when I go to the kitchen.

How sick the oil of savine makes me feel. My mind is quite displaced with thinking of it.

“You must go to Spicer’s for me,” Mrs. Blight says. “I need this and that. Been rushed off my feet these last few days.” I am too tired to argue that I have a pile of rocket cases to complete. Besides, Mr. Blacklock’s bench would be empty beside me. I can catch up later. He would not even know.

I fetch my cloak and wrap it about me before I venture onto the street. When I pass the pump in Mallow Square, the women gathered to draw water stop their chatter and the girl at the splashing pump stills the squeak of the handle to turn to look at me. It is too warm under my cloak. It is almost summer and the square is filled with the quick flight of swallows catching flies above the water running in the open drains.

I have to walk quite slowly; the ground is not so even underfoot. Perhaps Mr. Blacklock will not be gone as long as planned. Perhaps he will be back tonight, and we can all take supper around the table as if all were well, as if nothing could ever change but could go on forever as it has been. I have to stop at a corner and cling onto the railings while I catch my breath.

When I reach the grocer’s shop I find I cannot recall what it was that Mrs. Blight had needed. I put my basket down and hang back from the queue in the hope that it will come to me. The shop is full. In a daze I watch the housekeeper from the smart brick house on the high street select a piece of cheese, and the kitchen boy from the Star picks up a parcel and scuttles out again.

“Two strange men came into the shop this morning, Agnes Trussel,” Mrs. Spicer shouts across, on seeing me. “I thought of you.”

“Oh?” I say, and a flicker of alarm sounds, as though very far off, through the warm and sickly fog in me. “Two men?”

She wraps a chunk of cheese and hands it to the housekeeper. A slow thought struggles its way toward me as she speaks. “Up recently from Sussex, or so they said to Mr. Spicer—did not speak with them myself, as I was serving.” She holds her palm out for the housekeeper’s shilling. “What part of the county were they from?” she shouts at her husband. He shrugs. “Lewes? Cuckfield?” He shakes his head. “They were looking for someone, a thin maid. Like this, like that.” She goes on. “Mr. Spicer sent them away with a flea in the ear, didn’t you!” She looks across at him. “Nosy buggers. He does not care for too many inquiries upon his business premises. No call for poking round a district, he says, looking for trouble, stirring things up. Like I say, I thought of you, though, remembering your family was from down that way. Parish men, they could’ve been. Broad hats.”

I am faint.

I look about me. Only the shoppers going by on the street. One dog sniffing about by the step. How large the cheese looks, and with that gaping hole cut into it there on the slab. How my heart gallops blood about my chest.

I think of Mrs. Mellin’s coins pushed into my stays. I think of John Glincy’s yellow hair blocking the sun above me, and the sickening, thrusting weight of him. I think of the traveling man and his bags bound up with dirty scraps of fabric. I think of Cornelius Soul spitting on the ground before me, and Dilly Martinment’s ground-down teeth biting hard on the coins I gave to her. A bag of panic comes down over me, so that I cannot properly see inside the shop. It is too dark in here. Too full of strangers.

“Are you quite well, Agnes?” I can just hear Mrs. Spicer saying. Her voice is weak and faraway. “Very pale, you are.” And it is hard to see as I push my way out of the shop, push my way against the light flooding through the open door. I know that I am bumping into things and people are turning around to stare as I run down the street. Out in the white light the air is warm and thick and curdled to run through. Past the orange seller, across the stretch of the endless square, left, right, and I am at the front steps of the house when I remember my basket. I have left my basket on the counter.

It is so hot.

I am doubled up, panting and panting, but the lungfuls of warm air are not enough. My legs quiver with effort. And then I feel a spread of wetness down the inside of my legs under my skirt and a twisting pain feels all wrong in the base of my belly. I hold my hand out for the railing. I can hardly stand in this heat. I can’t. The stone step is heading toward me.

T
he sunlight creeps around the chamber. By the time the clock has struck three, it has slid itself as a bright yellow patch onto the washstand, curved itself over the cracked jug and basin, crinkled over the blanket at the foot of the bed and then straightened out into a deep brownish yellow on the boards of the floor. It doesn’t reach the other side of the room, as it rounds the corner before the church bells strike six. By seven I can still see the spires of St. Alban and St. Mary the Virgin golden with light if I raise my head, though I am weak. There is a taste in my mouth that I do not know.

I am surprised to find that my head is empty. My eyes follow the plaster cracks in the wall by the side of the bed, and I hear the sounds of things that arrive in the bedroom. The sun is silent, but there is sometimes the thin whine of flies, a carriage rumbling on the dry dirty cobbles outside, a man’s shout and a reply through the warm air. Occasionally a dog barks persistently nearby like the sound of a handsaw going through wood; it becomes muffled for a while, as though a door has been shut, and then it stops. There is a spill of water onto the bricks in the courtyard below, and the clank of something being stirred in a bucket.