The Book of Fires (14 page)

“What is that bell?” I say, breathless, when she opens the door a crack.

“Bell?” she says stupidly. Mary Spurren rubs her big head. I have woken her up. We strain our ears, but the bell’s horrible clang has stopped. Her shift is pale in the spill of moonlight.

“Is it midnight? ” she asks.

“It is,” I say.

“That would be St. Sepulchre’s bell, most probably. We’ll likely find out tomorrow who’s to swing.” Her head breaks into a great yawn.

“It is not a disaster, then? ” I say, uncertain of what she means by this, and shivering now.

“Not for us, no,” she says grumpily, and pushes the door closed.

I tiptoe down.

As I round the corner I hear the sudden creak of boards. Mr. Blacklock’s figure is looming before me in the corridor, and I almost shriek aloud in fright. I blink in the dazzle of the guttering candle that he holds up.

The yellow light is bright in my eyes. He stares at me and does not speak for a moment before he clears his throat, and lets me pass. “Goodnight, sir.” My voice comes out in a whisper. I grope for the latch and in the darkness of my chamber I go hot and then cold again with shame. What must he think of me, creeping about in the shadows like that, wearing only my shift and shawl, with my hair all loose and tumbled about my shoulders, in my bare unstockinged feet? I must have looked wild. It was almost as though he had never seen my face before, he stared so fiercely, blackly, at me. I must have startled him.

And then I wake to the early street noise, the clattering carts, a dog barking, St. Alban or St. Mary the Virgin or St. Stephen’s striking the hour. The brown blanket is rough on my cheek. The water that I splash on my face from the jug makes me gasp with cold. It comes from the pump in Mallow Square, tinted with the orange of rusted iron, and it tastes of mold and metal. I emerge from this sleep with a longing for home, and my legs ache as though they had been walking for miles, taking me there.

Down in the workshop, I mention the bell to Mr. Blacklock.

“Why did it sound so strange, sir?” I ask. “It was eerie.”

“It means there is a hanging; it is intended to strike fear into the hearts of men.”

“A hanging,” I say, swallowing.

“At Tyburn. You can go if you are inclined to do so. I have no reason to stop you.”

“Go?” I say, puzzled. I cannot see his face.

“To the hanging. It is a spectacle, there to be seen.”

Joe Thomazin is at my side. Though he could know nothing of the coins, he reaches out and touches the stitched patch on the outside of my skirts where the red thread shows through, and looks up at me in query.

His earnest look is so like William’s that I feel a sudden rush of tender confidence and lean and whisper to him, “I keep my secret there!” And of course he does not reply, but his fingers lightly touch the place again. Not probingly as if to find out what is underneath, but more as if he were reminding me that he is good at keeping secrets. For the rest of the day he follows me about like a shadow, so that if I turn unexpectedly I almost trip on him. Once when I smile as he hands me the sash-brush I have dropped under the bench, I am almost sure I see the glimmer of a smile in answer.

I am glad he is not in the kitchen later, to hear the turn our conversation takes.

“Dead bodies. I’ve seen a few before,” Mary Spurren says, wiping her nose upon her sleeve. “Have you, Agnes?”

I am clearing the plates from the table after the meal.

I think of Mrs. Mellin with her purple tongue sticking out. “Oh no, never,” I say, pretending to shudder.

“What would you do if you saw one?” she persists. I think of Mother’s dead babies come too early, their mild, bloodied little corpses small as pigeons. I think of the tarred and blackened body swinging from the gibbet high on Burnt Oak Gate. “What would you do?” she says again.

“I would turn and run away, perhaps,” I say shortly. I do not know why she needs to ask me.

“Run for the constable, you should, more like.”

“Perhaps.” Why does she keep on so?

“But if the death were not natural causes. If it were crime, say!” Mary Spurren’s face is pink. “You’d need the law on your side! ”

“The law is not always enough,” I say, uncomfortably. A thought comes into my head, and I hear myself declare, “The law is man’s poor answer to irregularities of fate.” My brother Ab would speak like this.

She blinks at me.

I realize my mistake. My mother would say that that is the kind of talk to raise up trouble. I quickly add, as if to justify my unguarded words, “I mean that God is the authority.”

“God?” She scratches her head in confusion. “Sweet Jesus!” She wipes her nose again, looks sidelong at Mrs. Blight and sniggers. “She’s never seen a body.”

“On my way up to London I did see a man hung up from a gibbet,” I say, as if I had just remembered it. “Just the bits of him left, hanged by the law. Later I dreamt of him walking along by the carrier,” I add. “At least, I think that’s who it was. He was angry, and he had a red, chafed neck.”

“Most probably did have,” Mary Spurren says, gloomy now. “The unsettled dead will travel the old roads in search of something.”

“In search of what? ”

“Dunno,” she says. “Peace for their guilty souls, most likely. Something restful to latch on to.” And I shiver.

“I saw my first body when I were but a slip of a girl,” Mrs. Blight says, from her chair by the hob. “They sat me by him laid out all through the night, but more in terror I was of my grandfather in life than the mere corpse of him.” Mrs. Blight goes on. “A great gangling bully of a relative, with pinching fingers if he had a mind to it, like when his mood should take an unexpected dip upon hearing my catechism recited wrongly.” She snorts. “Wouldn’t catch me in church on Sundays now. Regular passive sinner, I am. No prayers, nothing! No point in going on poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick, unless you needs to, is there?” And she laughs more loudly than she need do, as if she had a point to prove, or as if she hoped that God might overhear.

“Churchgoer, are you?” she asks me.

“No,” I say, looking away. “Not anymore.” But I would like to go into the church of St. Stephen, I think, the one behind the house. It looks peaceful in there.

That night I do not blow out the candle immediately when I retire to my chamber, but sit shivering on the edge of my bed as I unpick the red thread from my skirts turned inside out. How the hem is becoming dirty. There is something about the red thread I do not like; it is too thick, too insistent, like the worms we found last week in a piece of white fish that Mary Spurren bought at Billingsgate. I pull the last wriggling strand out away through the weave with some relief, and push the coins back into my stays again. They feel safer there, less evident.

In the morning Joe Thomazin’s eyes search my skirt’s fabric for the red thread, over and over, and he puts a look upon his face as if to ask,
Where is the secret gone?

I shrug lightly and then turn away, so that I do not see his hurt.

 

 

As the days and then the weeks go by, I begin to slip into some kind of working pattern. And it is almost December when, for the first time, I am left alone in the workshop. Mr. Blacklock has gone out on business up to Threadneedle Street, near the Exchange, and Joe Thomazin is running errands for him all afternoon.

I am stood at the mortar, grinding a mixture with antimony and boiled oil added to the powder. For every ounce of dry ingredient I must add twenty-four drops of linseed oil. My grinding skill is improving daily now, I think with a little outward breath of pleasure. I stop and take a look about me. The fed stove glows at the back of the room. On Mr. Blacklock’s bench the jar of antimony sits with its cork half open. On the boards under his stool there are dust and footprints, where charcoal was dropped and trodden on yesterday and has not been swept up. Out in the street a horse and cart pull up by the back door of the workshop, and the room darkens. There is a hubbub of laughter, and someone shouting.

And then abruptly the back door opens and a lean man enters without knocking, blocking the sudden gray light from the street. I stand up hastily. Cold air swirls in.

“Blacklock!” he shouts out, and doesn’t see me. The man bends and puts down a tub onto the floor, goes out to the cart and comes back with another. My boots scrape on the boards, so that he turns around and sees me in the shadows.

“Mr. Blacklock is out,” I say, keeping my back straight. “He won’t be back before three o’clock.” A brief look of curiosity opens up his face as he sees the tools in my hand. I put down the pestle and tuck my stained fingers into my skirt. “I am Mr. Blacklock’s assistant,” I say stiffly, in case he thinks I am doing something that I shouldn’t.

“So it is true, then! ” the man exclaims. “There was talk about his new subordinate being in skirts! I heard it, and thought it must be idle chittle. There we are.” He looks closely at me.

“I have the samples he expects.” The man’s speech is quick and pattering. He indicates the wooden tubs that he placed so carefully upon the floor. “Our supplies are changing, for the better is the truth of it, and these are what we have to choose from. The mills are a farther drive, but every mile is worth the horses. The mealpowder is as good, I feel, or better, and the grain is even and reliable.”

I look at his boxes, and back at him.

“Cornelius Soul on your premises, madam,” he says with a sudden change in manner, and he bends at the waist, bowing his trim figure mockingly toward me. “Seller of gunpowder and explosive accoutrements to the gunnery and blasting trades.” He likes saying that; he enjoys its satisfactory ring. There is something of the brashness of the city in his intonation, as though he is accustomed to making himself heard above the noise of busy streets and taverns and markets. He wears no wig. Although he is a young man, his hair is as fine and white as zinc, and tied in a tail. His eyes are blue and bright and move fast in his head, and his nose is small and sharp. There is a gleaming, vigorous paleness about his person, and he wears a gray velvet frock coat that gives his movements as he speaks a kind of silver sheen. Only his hands, I see, show any traces of the blackness of his trade.

“Not a stranger to irregular and small deliveries for the artisans in this field, within which your good man Blacklock holds his own so admirably.” He turns and bows again and grins. Mr. Blacklock has returned and takes off his hat as he enters the workshop.

“Stop talking like a weasel, Mr. Soul,” he says, putting his hat down.

“I have introduced myself to the new and striking element in the establishment,” the man says. His eyes dart between us. “My invoice,” he adds.

Mr. Blacklock picks up the paper that Cornelius Soul has flourished on the bench before him and narrows his eyes at it. “That gold tooth glinting in your skull indicates your dealing cannot be so bad this year,” he says dryly. “You have a shrewdness when it comes to business matters. Still, there is a promptness that I like about your service.” He pauses. “If a certain—flashiness—about your distribution methods.” It is the first time that I have heard him make a joke. Cornelius Soul chuckles, his gray coat shimmering.

“You are referring to my fine new cart you passed out there. Just a short spell at the sign painter’s for a lickabout with a fresh coat of color and the old is young again. And that mare you see before it, who pisses yellow in your gutter there, ahem, with no respect for your stretch of pavement, is now also mine to thrash.” He draws a breath.

“I have at length and after deep deliberation purchased every ounce and morsel of my partner’s business. We no longer trade as Soul and Tibbet but Souls alone. Which means I am a free man now to make my own advancements.”

Mr. Blacklock’s dark eyebrows rise. “Then you are to be congratulated upon your liberation. I wish you luck, and caution with it.” He counts out and pushes a small stack of gold toward him. “Tibbet was a mouse of a man, to be sure, but he had a nose for the place where sense and money meet.”

Cornelius Soul drops the coins into a leather pouch tied about his waist beneath his coat. “Spanks and rhino, what a rarity! These days of shortage, one may never bank on who may not drop dead or be snapped up in the debtor’s prison.” He turns and says to me, “What a marvel! Can there be a sweeter sound than the click of coinage?” He looks up at the ceiling as if in thought. “Ah, but I omit one sound perhaps that is a little sweeter even still.” He lowers his voice to a dramatic whisper. “That of a good woman at the peak of her fulfillment!” I do not understand him; indeed I am confused by his direct manner.

He pats the cloth of his gray coat and grins and turns to wink his blue eye shut at me, then he ducks out of the doorway and is gone, rather in the way that a bird within one’s sight will take flight suddenly. When his horse pulls away from the window, a strip of late sunshine falls in upon the bench. I see dust spinning in the brightness it makes.

“Mr. Soul is a scoundrel and a dramatist,” Mr. Blacklock says, as if in irritation. “Pay no heed to him at all.”

I take up the pestle and return at once to the work on the block. I bend over the mortar and fix my attention to the task before me until my neck aches. Joe Thomazin is back from his errands. The noise of him sweeping the floor at the back of the workshop is quiet but insistent, like the sound of a light wind blowing through dry beech leaves in winter. He sweeps for an hour until the boards are clean.

T
onight I dream of an overcast sky waiting to rain. I am walking down a long white track between two hills. The air is warm and thick; flies swim about on it and bother the cattle. The endless road seems to dissolve ahead of me in the far distance, where the clouds are heaviest. I bite into a good apple and chew. The fruit is crisp and sweet as summer in my mouth. And then I look before I take another bite and see the worm, dark in the wet flesh.