The Book of Fires (37 page)

What is it? I remember something, but incompletely, as if the thought were behind a screen and only parts of it visible. When it becomes more whole, more clear to me, I make sure that the thought is held at arm’s length, so that it slips in gradually. I look about.

There are stains on the bed, the sheet is dark with them, and there is a faint brown-sweet smell of blood around me. The pain was bad, like a wrench squeezing it all dead inside and then pushing it out in bursts. I think I remember that, though I cannot be sure. What is that taste in my mouth? I cannot imagine what it could be. It is sweet, almost like honey.

The quiet is a nothingness. It is the feeling now that the pain has stopped, the feeling of no pain, and is it, could it also be, a quietness inside me? I hold my lungs still and listen hard, as you might if you had to check that a creature was still breathing.

Nothing.

There is nothing inside me, I think, and the emptiness is long and gray as a sky.

I do not even know what day it is.

“What is the day?” I whisper to Mrs. Blight when she comes into the room with warm water and cloths. “Did the parish men find me when I fell?”

Mrs. Blight squeezes a cloth out. When she looks up from the basin, her teeth are all covered up.

“Did who find you? It was Mary Spurren picked you up from the front step when she went out to sweep it. Half-delirious you have been these past two days,” she says. “Muttering about all sorts, like a girl possessed.” She tips me, and drags the dirty sheet from under me.

“God only knows how I tried to get the doctor to you, but Mary Spurren was determined that Blacklock would not have it. Just as well, as it turned out, when I saw what your trouble was. And thank God, I thought, when the fever ceased pouring out of you and I could get back to my own bed for a snatch of sleep.” She unfolds a clean sheet and, grunting, tips me up again and spreads it out beneath me.

 

Later Mary Spurren brings me more damp cloths and a bowl of water as though she has been told to. She goes to the window and looks out at the roofs. Her head is big against the evening light.

“Mr. Blacklock has come back from Hertfordshire on the six o’clock mail,” she says.

“Oh?” I say. “Does he . . . ?”

“Turned out almost a needless journey, he said, as the health of his aunt had improved to a great degree by the time he’d got there.

“He has said he will not get a doctor to you.” Mary Spurren turns around and looks at me triumphantly when she tells me this, as though she suspects that I am begging for attention.

“I know,” I say, and the words come slowly from me. “I do not need a doctor. I have no fever,” I say. “I . . . ate bad meat.”

“You ate what I ate that day,” Mary Spurren accuses me, with truth, and hazily I see her shake her head. “You’ll want to pull your weight a fraction harder round here, I think, before the week is through.”

I do not answer this. She seems to shut the door with force on her way out.

A sparrow chirps outside. Perhaps when I feel better I shall walk and walk until I reach hedgerows. What will Mr. Blacklock think of me? Follow them deep into the countryside, follow their length like a guide leading the way. But how could I do this, with the tarnish of Mrs. Mellin’s coins staining my fingers, and parish men in lawful pursuit of me?

Thief! Thief!
I imagine them calling. They are not here now.

I close my eyes.

I am like a woman I read of in the
Evening Post
, who stood on the parapet of Westminster Bridge and jumped, and halfway through falling knew that she needed to live and did not die when she hit the iron surface of the Thames but was dragged out by a ferryman, sopping wet, and with both legs broken.

 

 

When I wake, Mrs. Blight is back in the chamber, putting some items down on the washstand. Though she is at my side, how far away she seems, and how fast and then how slow, like great red butterflies, her hands move about their business.

I cannot speak at all. When Mrs. Blight says something to me, I turn to her and stare because I cannot hear her very well. She tries again, coming up huge to the bed and bending down above me.

“You are all stiffened up with being anxious,” she advises. “Being stiff is bad for any girl in your condition. Drink this.” She holds a cup of some steaming liquid to my lips, which I swallow obediently in warm, bittersweet mouthfuls.
Why is she being nice to me?
I look at her and nod, but I am not anxious. She is wrong, I think vaguely. The liquid makes me sleepy, and gives me slippery, unformed thoughts. I am not stiff or taut beneath the shell I have created for myself. I am discovered, and my shell has been prized away to show how I am gone soft and pappy like an uncooked oyster underneath it. The room spins around and I find it is not a simple thing to keep my mind fixed into one attentive shape. I am opened up, my thoughts gone loose and soft, as when the twist in spun cord is gone, and the threads can unravel. Sleep comes easily to me then.

I dream long winding dreams of Sussex, my legs in the flow of the river Stor on a summer’s day and the warm water slipping round the bareness of my legs as though I were rooted there, like willows.

It is raining when I wake again.

Mrs. Blight is stirring powder into wine and honey for me once more. The steam curls up into the morning’s cool air. “Snakeweed,” she reassures me this time, as though I might be afraid that she is trying to poison me. The noise of the spoon circling inside the cup is soothing.

“To staunch the flow,” she says. “It works a treat. You nearly lost that baby, bleeding on and on like that.”

“Nearly?” I say. And I hold my breath again. Of course, I think, the weight of it. The weight of it is still upon me.

“No need for disquiet,” she says. “There’s not a soul I’ve told and Mary thinks it’s but flux and idleness. You will be better off going through with your confinement than doing away with yourself so heedlessly, and then you can leave it, if it should prove healthy, with the foundlings at the hospital in Bloomsbury Fields.”

“I know of that place,” I say, touching my belly with both hands under the roughness of the blanket, holding it tight. I have been wrong about so many things. Perhaps Mrs. Blight is not so bad, after all. And though she knows of my trouble now, I am sure I can trust her with my secret. Can’t I?

But there is one thing that worries me. Though they seem untouched, and she has not mentioned anything about them, did she discover my coins when she loosened my stays?

W
ithin a week, an appearance of normality settles on my life again like a fine skin; the kind of new and tender skin that grows quickly on the surface of a wound. Beneath the skin, though, everything is changing, transforming.

My belly is huge now under my loose clothing. I can scarcely believe that Mr. Blacklock does not see this, except that now he does not look at me directly. He is absorbed with something and does not speak freely with me as he used to; indeed he barely speaks at all once the tasks for the day have been decided upon.

“Should I begin on the half-pound rockets, sir, or the stars for Ranelagh?” I say, holding out the latest order lists for him to check. There is much to do, and I need to know which has more urgency. We are slipping behind with our stock.

“Yes, yes, the stars, then the rockets,” he replies, and I know that he has barely heard.

“And then you will do the Caduceus rockets, sir, for Mr. Torré? You agreed that you would, yesterday. It says they want a dozen.”

“The Caduceus, do those first, they are to be collected tomorrow,” he says, changing his mind.

“Tomorrow!” I say. “I did not—”

“Quiet now!” he interrupts. “I must think, I am . . . preparing something.”

That is all he ever says. Why won’t he tell me what he is doing? It is as though he has withdrawn all unnecessary conversation. Nothing is the same. I am aware that these are the last few days of this new life here at Blacklock’s that I have become accustomed to, that I value so much. What will happen now? I do not know. Even time itself is not as it was. The clock’s tick that I hear in the study as I pass down the corridor becomes slower and slower, until every day is like a lifetime.

Mr. Blacklock did not come to see me on my sickbed upstairs. Of course I did not expect him to. And when I came down to the workshop, unsteady on my legs and too scared to meet his eye at first, he’d made very little mention of my illness.

“You are recovered?”

“Yes, sir,” I’d said, afraid of what he knew of it. “Good, good,” he said, brusquely, and did not speak of it again, and neither did he say a word about that night before he went away. What did I expect? It is as I had thought it would be. He does not remember.

When I stand for too long in this heat I grow dizzy. This morning I staggered on the way to the filling-box, and looked hastily at Mr. Blacklock, but his back was to me and he did not notice. He was bent, coughing, as he so often is now, over the smolder and stink of a chemical experiment he will not talk about, smoke pouring gray from a pipkin as he held a lighted taper to its contents. All the time he scratches down notes as he works, in the thin battered book he keeps inside his frock coat. I am sure there is something that Mr. Blacklock does not choose to share with me. Sometimes I have seen a flash of fire catch the corner of my eye and, though he mutters to himself about it, he does not call me over to show me what he has been doing.

Once I stood before the apparatus on his bench when he left the workshop to fetch an invoice from the study. I picked up a vessel and peered at the residue inside, turning it about in the light to get a better view, and did not hear that he had come back into the workshop. He was furious.

“How dare you touch my work!” he’d barked, and I’d jumped so much I had dropped the vessel on the ground. Broken glass was everywhere.

“Sorry, sir, so sorry,” I’d mumbled, picking up the little pieces coated in substance with my fingers.

After that I strove even harder to show that I was of use to him.

I lower a fresh case onto the spindle, and tamp in a scoop of dry clay. Today I have a dozen Caduceus rockets to charge and to prepare for firing, headed with fiery rain, and stars. A dozen Caduceus means twice that quantity in cases, made as they are in a pair twined together.

I turn the mallet in my sticky palm. How hot it is, a damp, pressing kind of heat. I pour in the lifting charge and tap at the drift, which seems heavier than usual. I find that now when I charge rockets the child kicks at the sound of the thump of the mallet. Yesterday it pressed its fists or feet under my ribs unbearably, and then with a contorting lurch seemed to upend itself inside me. I could not help but cry out, it was so startling.

Mr. Blacklock glanced up at that, a dish of fulminating silver in his hand.

“Are you ill again, Agnes?” he asked me. His question was distracted, as though it had pulled him from a well of thought.

“I am not ill,” I said, evenly, and went on working.

At night in my bed I have to lie on my side with one knee raised, as though I were scaling the side of a great white cliff. It is too hot to sleep right through the night. I cannot breathe, my lungs constricted by the growth inside me, and the thick air does not seem to satisfy my need for breath. In the workshop I have to hide my yawning, I am so tired.

Mr. Blacklock puts on his hat.

“Are you going out, sir?” I ask.

“I am,” he says.

I glance doubtfully at the list pinned on the order board again.

“I am worried, sir, we may not complete . . .”

“You will manage,” he says dismissively.

“But, sir—”

“Enough!” he barks, and the door slams behind him. He did not say where he was going.

I ease the filled case from the spindle and tap the hollow drifts to clear them of powder before I begin another. Three thousand grains troy is the weight these heads will carry. I have almost filled the eighth rocket of the batch. I yawn again. Despite the rush, I have to rest, just for a moment. I put down the tools and rub at my belly. I am quite alone; even dirty little Joe Thomazin is not in the workshop.

It is so quiet in the heat.

Sweat gathers at the back of my dress, and beneath my sleeves. At the open door I see a crimson moth or butterfly hesitate and flutter in, then out again. Outside above the yard the swifts scream, muffled in the hazy, overheated sky. How tired I am. I close my eyes, just for a moment.

I wish that . . .

And before I know it, I am jerking awake in alarm.
God help me!
I say, on hearing the clocks strike. An hour has passed. I must concentrate. Swiftly I calculate how much longer I have to complete the cases waiting to be filled, and I find I do not need to panic. If I hurry, the rockets will be done in time.

Smoothly I finish the eighth rocket, and its pair. I assemble all the boxes for the garniture, fetch common stars. The ninth, the tenth. It is going well. The first half of the eleventh. And now the mixture for the heads. Quick, quick!
Work faster, Agnes
, I say to myself.
Fulfill the order skillfully, on time. You do not want to displease John Blacklock.
All the time my ears are straining for the sound of his feet coming down the corridor. But even as I pick up the second in the pair of the eleventh rocket and put my scoop into the mixture, a sinking realization comes upon me with full force. There is not enough fiery rain to finish the batch. I have miscalculated.

At first I work on, in the hope that I am wrong, that the quantity will stretch to the twelfth rocket’s garniture. Then, when I have used up the last little bit and my task is not done, I stand in front of the list again and stare at it, hoping perhaps that it asks for just eleven Caduceus rockets, or even ten, but no,
one dozen
is what it says. There is no time to grind up more. I have failed, I think, miserably. It matters so much; why did I measure out so carelessly?