The Book of Fires (12 page)

He turns back to his bench. “However, you cannot work in stockings so you must continue as you are until you can afford to purchase another pair. The shoemaker at Aldersgate will tack them very deeply so that they do not strike a spark. It is not a hazard here upon the boards, but in the outhouse the floor is brick.” He gives a brief dry cough. “Therefore, until that day arrives, you will step cautiously. In this business one must remind oneself that it is not
if
an accident will happen but
when
. Never forget that.”

I nod gravely.

Inside my head I picture smoky bursts of fire as harsh as gunshot caused by something that I did unknowingly, and wonder how it was that Mr. Blacklock came to maim his hand and have the purple mark of a burn across his face. It is not a disfiguring mark, but it looks painful and provokes unease to look at it. Holding my hands over the heat of the stove, I think how the day I can put on a pair of new-made boots unworn by any but me will be a day worth waiting for, if it should ever happen. Joe Thomazin, his scrawny elbows showing through his coat, stares at me blankly until I move away. I keep my footsteps mild back to my bench and watch Mr. Blacklock binding what seem to be empty tubes together into blocks until the church clock somewhere close strikes six, when we are done for the day.

“If you have silk,” he finishes while fastening the thick door on our way out, “you cannot wear it; it, too, can create sparks.” There is no trace of humor in his voice; his face is alarming in the lamplight when he catches my eye.

“Remember that,” he says again. “In here there will be no silk and no bare candles.”

I do not laugh aloud about this as we go down the corridor to take our supper of cold beef and pudding in the kitchen, but smile later to myself in my dark cold bedchamber, taking off my outer clothes before I climb into bed. I do not think that I have so much as touched a scrap of silk in all my life. The candle gutters as I look about. My thick useful petticoat hangs dry from the hook at the back of the door. My other belongings look small in the chest at the foot of the bed: my Bible, with a blade of grass between the pages of St. John to keep my place, my good dress that was my sister’s, my small linen.

I am so tired that I forget to pray. On the brink of sleep I have a sudden thought of Lettice Talbot going away from me down the street, holding the hem of her fine tabby silk gown up high above the dirty pavement; but then I do not dream at all that night.

O
n the second day there is no rain. A patch of cold sun falls through the high casement beside the kitchen fireplace. Mary Spurren does not speak at all at breakfast, which is bitter tea and rolls. Mrs. Blight bemoans the lack of moral spine among the young in general, spreading the salty market butter abundantly and talking as she chews. Even at this hour she smells of liquor. This morning when I came into the kitchen, I spied her sipping at her hip flask, which she stoppered and put away quickly enough when she saw that I was standing there.

“Indulging in cuckoldry,” she is saying, midway through a tale of shame and recompense. “Like some brindled hog in heat.”

Mr. Blacklock puts down his bread half-eaten, abruptly pushes back his chair and leaves the room.

“You must understand the purpose of good grinding and consistency,” Mr. Blacklock says, as I follow him into the workshop. He pulls out two small barrels, each tightly capped with leather.

“Mealpowder, and another fine grade of gunpowder that we purchase from the powder merchants. Coarser black powders are of little use to us, except sometimes for maroons and loud reports. But taking scoops of powder ready from the tub will teach you nothing of its composition. Grinding is dangerous, but necessary if you are to learn.”

He looks up and pins me with his black gaze as if giving me due warning, then shows me in the light to take up a pinch and rub it in my palm.

“Niter, charcoal, sulfur,” Mr. Blacklock says. The meal is a powdered substance not quite as black as soot, like a heavy dark flour. The gunpowder is grayer and gritty, like coarse seeds against my skin. I sniff at it cautiously. It smells of eggs and earth and metals, and gives me a curious agitation in the pit of my stomach that is not unpleasant. “What does it do?” I ask.

Mr. Blacklock takes a measure of powder and tips it into a small open dish. He motions me out of the back door into the yard, where he puts the dish upon the low brick wall and lays a length of grayish cord so that its end within the dish is touching powder and the other end is hanging free. He goes inside. Up on the roof of the house a flock of starlings are whooping and cackling in a liquid crowd, flexing their speckled, oily heads in unison as they whistle in the sun.

Mr. Blacklock brings out a lighted taper from the stove.

“Stand back!” he barks, and touches the taper to the cord’s end. In an instant the flame sizzles up the cord to the dish and an astounding crack shakes the world about us. A cloud of thick bluish smoke has shot upward, and drifts sideways over the yard. I press my hands to my ringing ears. My heart is beating fast. I cannot be sure if it was noise I heard or light exploding in a way that made it seem like sound was made. The smell of the smoke is very strong.

“That is what gunpowder does,” Mr. Blacklock says dryly. “It is a powerful beast. Treat it with respect and you will find there is much you can achieve.” His dark face is alive, like that of a man who has been walking briskly uphill. “In due course you will make up coils of quick match and learn to cut and paste the cases. You will charge rockets and gerbes and tourbillions until you could do it in your sleep as easily as taking breath. But you must begin with basic comprehension of the materials you work with. Nothing good was learnt too swiftly. Knowledge should be a purposeful accumulance of observed experience, applied and tested to the full.”

“It is like a storm,” I say, watching the smoke rising to the gutter and dispersing above the roof where the starlings took flight. “All concentrated to a moment.”

It is calm now in the yard. But one strike of lightning is never enough in a storm to clear the air of thickness at the base of the Downs. I long to see the blast again but would not dare to ask.

The back door from the scullery opens a crack.

“Exceeding disquiet, Mr. Blacklock!” Mrs. Blight shouts out indignantly, shaking dirt from a cloth, and the door closes again, but Mr. Blacklock makes no sign of having heard.

 

 

I like the bench. I like measuring the chemicals in the scales, with tiny weights of an ounce or less. I have learnt that one grain troy has the same weight as a single grain of wheat taken from the mid part of the ear at its moment of ripeness.

I like the feel of the great pestle crushing wettened chemicals inside the smooth deep hollow of the mortar. As it can while working the loom at home, my mind is free to gather up thoughts and fancies, and roll them about without disturbance. I think how the wheat harvest was not so good this year, yet not as poor as the year of the drought, when the patchy crops could not reach full height and the ears were dry and empty on the stalk. I think how my uncle can stand in the field and know by the feel of the grain in his mouth if it is ready to cut.

“What are you doing, Uncle? ” William asked when he first saw him stood there chewing with such concentration upon his face.

“I squeezes the grain between my teeth,” I remember him saying, after a pause while his jaw worked up and down, looking into the blue distance toward Steyning as he spoke. “And with my tongue I finds the necessary bit of it, and I chews it up cautious.” The air was hazy with warmth and dust.

“What for, Uncle?” William asked, picking a grain carefully from the ear with his little fingers.

“I considers it,” my uncle said. “And knows when it is done.”

“But what do you tell?” William asked, earnestly chewing. “Gummy bits and hard bits. It’s not tasty.”

“Try grains from time to time each August that comes; in a ten-year you’ll have it,” my uncle said, walking away, his breeches all pale with chalk from the dry ground. I remember William’s little head standing above the wheat on the edge of Mr. Fitton’s field.

“But is it ready, this wheat, then?” he shouted after him. “Is it done?”

“It’s done,” we heard my uncle say, and he went into the barn.

William looked at the field, still tasting it. The swallows twittered and skimmed for flies across its surface as though it were a yellow pond. “Next year is a long way,” he said plaintively to me later, when we were home again and boiling a broth before my father got back.

“It is not so far,” I reassured him, stirring the pot. “Time is always less time coming than you would expect.” And how true that is. Swiftly life changes and moves along.

 

 

Grinding composition is arduous work at first; I find it difficult to get the texture as it should be.

“Finer, it must be finer,” Mr. Blacklock says sternly, looking into the mortar’s cavity to see what I have done. “I cannot work with a finished mixture less fine than the soft particles of flour: between that and pounded sugar. It must be mixed more intimately, more evenly.”

“But it is wet,” I say. “How can I tell what fineness I have reached? ”

“Experience will teach you when your pounding is enough,” he says.

He puts more into the bowl of the mortar with a little water from the flask, and grinds evenly for many minutes. The sound is small and regular as his arm works. I would like to please him, I am thinking as I watch his sleeve. I would like to take pride in reaching an evenness of texture every time.

“You may find it helpful to imagine that the purpose of your action is not to break these fragments up,” he says as he works, “but to conjoin all three substances more forcefully yet intimately together.”

“I should think of their separate properties pressing together?” I ask.

“Not just pressing,” he replies, “but becoming intrinsically combined.”

“I see,” I say. “Like a marriage of three.”

Mr. Blacklock seems to flinch. He is a striking man for his age. Why does he have no wife?

Later he shows me how to wash out receptacles once he has finished with them. I watch him stroking the dirt away with the flat of his big hands, the warm water scooped up in his palms. Then he takes me into the yard, and shakes a light dusting of mixture onto a board.

He cups a flame with his large hand against the air as though it were a living creature, touches the edge of the mixture with it and stands away as the lick of flame passes smoothly across the board. I feel a small clutch of pleasure as it moves.

“That is a clean and satisfying burn,” Mr. Blacklock confirms. “An even powder. There should be no agitation in its progress. Every pounding should bear that result. If you are unsure, test your mixtures in this way until you know by sight and by the feel of the ingredients under your pestle. Even the sound made by the particles as you grind will become familiar to you.” He puts down the tools and leaves me to practice out in the yard.

“This could take days,” I call anxiously, calculating drying time. Mr. Blacklock turns and looks at me.

“It will,” he concurs. “A lifetime could be spent in less productive occupation.” He coughs. “A rocket that is badly mixed will smoke and show a poor quality of fire. We strive for better. When engineers order works from Blacklock’s they know their quality is unsurpassed in London.”

The winter sun shines down upon the bricks. Inside the house I can hear Mary Spurren humming tunelessly as she washes something at the sink. A dog barks.

And I think of how there is something else I have not much dwelt upon these last few days. The thing inside me that I cannot name has begun to flutter and nibble at me like a shoal of fishes: tiny fishes in my belly, like minnows or young sticklebacks. It pulls me up short when it occurs, it is so occasional and so surprising, and then there is nothing for hours and hours. For three nights now I have found myself holding my breath and waiting for these moments with certainty and wonder, much as one waits for a shooting star to fall from a dark sky prickling with light. I am afraid to like it, but it is so briefly gentle, so wondrous, it is hard to reconcile the anger brewing in me with the cause itself. I am afraid instead that I am growing soft to it. Growing soft will make a ruined woman of me.

O
n the seventh day Mr. Blacklock makes no mention of my leaving, so I suppose I have employment. He hands me four shillings for one week’s work. When his back is turned I count the shillings out again with some relief, and later I hide them under the washstand in my chamber. Mary Spurren will not go in there; she says she cannot stand mice. Perhaps I will find a way to send what I can save to my family, my mind running ahead to the end of the winter months when provisions are low. And then I remember why I am here; and that it will not last.

I must find Lettice Talbot.

The reasonable place to begin my search would be where I saw her last. She is the only person who can help me when the inevitable happens and I can no longer stay at Blacklock’s. She said there would be work, that she is my friend.

And so one day when I find that I have woken very early, before the morning has fully shaken off the darkness, I pull back the bolts, slip out into the chilly gloom and walk as best I can remember back to the Cross Keys Inn to look for Lettice Talbot. I have to ask the way from time to time, but it is not so far. The streets are humming with the footsteps of laborers and shopkeepers going about their business, and there are few carriages. The church on the corner of Wood Street has not yet struck eight o’clock, but I try to relay a message for Lettice Talbot to a dirty child I find outside in the shadows of the inn’s yard, rinsing bottles and stacking them to dry over the drain. The child’s hands are red with cold. She looks blankly at me, then runs inside an outhouse, returning presently with a man who comes out wiping his hands on a piece of cloth. He does not seem to know who Lettice Talbot is, so I describe her curling brown hair and patterned shawl and leather case as best I can remember. He shakes his head and shrugs.