The Book of Fires (24 page)

He scowls. “Indeed no, Joe Thomazin will do. The timber yard is crawling with rogues and foul-mouthed scoundrels; it is no place for a decent woman to hear talk. That extra powder is due from Mr. Soul this morning,” he adds.

When he is gone, I make sure my cap is on straight. I have scrubbed my fingers very clean. I work diligently for a while, but my mind begins to wander and then I cannot help but scan the room for clues, just an inkling of what Mr. Blacklock is about. His bench today is uncommonly tidy and tells me nothing. The tools are laid in a row, only a worn-down sash-brush out of place. There are five one-ounce cases waiting to be filled, a short discarded length of quick match, a pot of dried-up paste. There are no scraps of paper with mysterious plans sketched out, nor unusual apparatus. But then I look again more closely at his bench, and notice a faint, bright shadow on its surface, as if a large amount of reddish powder had been brushed hastily away. I don’t dare to touch, and when I sniff it cautiously, there is no particular smell I recognize.

Outside, the church clocks strike ten. I can hear the mild rasp of someone scrubbing nearby.

Turning my attention to the shelves, I climb upon a stool and lift down the dirty jars of chemicals one by one, carrying them into the light to examine them.

They are newly opened.

When I first arrived at Blacklock’s Pyrotechny, all these jars of substances were sat unused, untouched for years, covered in filthy cobwebs. And suddenly, perhaps this week, the seals are broken, corks taken out, some jars left carelessly unstoppered. Others lie empty, on their sides. Almost every single jar is opened now.

When did he do this? I look over at the apparatus on the far trestle. He has been using them in his experiments. He has been using all of them.

I find rose vitriol, and manganese. I find king’s yellow or orpiment.
A sulfide of arsenic
, a note in Mr. Blacklock’s writing says. There is yellow ochre, which is iron oxide and clay; there is telluric ochre and tungstic ochre and yellow prussiate, none of which I know and which sound like foreign diseases of the flesh.

Holding my breath, I pick up the dark jar of yellow orpiment and take out a piece upon a spoon to look at it closely. The orpiment is greasy and pearly, and brown on the outside where the air has got to it. The side that has been cut is yellower, fresher. Just looking at it tells me nothing.

“Poison, that is.” Cornelius Soul’s sudden voice makes me jump. “Dead in a day or so, you would be, should you have swallowed it, with a terrible purging and a sweat.”

“I know,” I lie quickly. “How did you get in? ”

He grins. “The housemaid gave me entrance by the front door as she was there washing the step. Don’t lick your fingers,” Cornelius Soul says, chuckling. “Clots the blood in your heart right up. Though I daresay you’ve a little pink tongue I shouldn’t mind a glimpse of. Very wholesome, I’d imagine.” And he comes up closer and tries to fondle me about the waist.

“Oh no!” I say, stepping backward in embarrassment and knocking the stool over with a clatter.

“Good for a man to see that kind of tongue,” he says, as I bend with difficulty to put it upright. “Very nourishing indeed.”

I keep my mouth tight shut and do not reply, even when he asks where he should put the powder that we need. He looks at my face.

“Don’t mind me, Miss Trussel,” he says, and puts it anywhere. “Forgive my manners. I am a lout,” he says at the door. But he does not mean it.

I do not move until I hear his horse’s hooves start up. Then I return the array of jars to their places and wipe the dirt crossly from my fingers before I go to the filling-box. Why did I push him away like that? I have an uncomfortable sense inside when I think of how I am cheating him. Perhaps I had not expected him to like me. I had not thought that the plan could be effective. But it surely must. And when he finds out my condition, it will be after the marriage vows are said and done. They are all I need to save me from ruin. He will know that the child is not his—but that is another thing to think of, later.

I must work swiftly now; there is much to be done if we are to fulfill our orders. And I cannot put aside the thought of all those opened jars of chemicals. I charge eight rockets of a quarter-pound bore. I hear Mary Spurren cursing to herself as she slips on the wet doorstep when she leaves for the fruit market. The house is silent when she is gone, no sound from any other quarter. Mrs. Blight is on her half day. A fly buzzes dryly against the windowpane. I can smell the leather of Mr. Blacklock’s working apron lying flat in a patch of sunlight where he left it on his bench. I charge two more rockets, until I can bear it no longer and go back to the shelves and stare at the opened jars again, as if they might tell me something. And then there is a knock at the door. A harsh, demanding kind of rapping, made with the head of a cane or stick.

My heart hammers almost as loudly in my mouth.

I do not go to answer it.

 

 

When Mr. Blacklock returns he shows me how to boil the sawdust in a kind of soup with saltpeter, then drain it of liquor with a slatted spoon. The stink it makes clams up my throat.

I do not say a word about the knocking.

Again Mr. Blacklock does not take supper in the kitchen this evening but instead goes into the study. An oblong of light from the lamp he has on the table falls under the shut door. When I pass as I retire at ten o’clock to bed I can just hear the scratching of a pen upon paper, and the chink of the nib touching the rim of the inkpot. I mean to tap and ask if he would like a bite or a glass of wine to see him through, yet somehow I cannot. The nib seems to pause as though I had already broken in upon his thinking.

At the stairs, something makes me turn around and I see that the study door is open a crack and Joe Thomazin has slipped out into the hallway. He is watching me without a sound.

“What is it, Joe?” I whisper, but his great dark eyes do not answer me.

 

After some days, I spread out the damp sawdust, sprinkle over equal measures of mealpowder and sulfur and stir it about.

“Now fill those candles and your flowerpots, and you have a red shower,” Mr. Blacklock says. “A large enough quantity, I think, for Mr. Torré.”

“A red shower?” I ask, surprised. “Really red, sir?” He nods without looking up from the bench. I close my eyes and imagine a light, brushing kind of scarlet rain, a fine drift of crimson sparkles turning on the air, flurrying out of the sweep of the sunset on the horizon’s light westerly breeze, almost like snowflakes in their shape and beauty. I imagine the sweet scent of their burning, winking out as they touch the ground, and the soft resinous warmth of the smoke that would linger on their wake.

I have a fright when I open my eyes again, and see Mr. Blacklock staring at me. Most probably he cannot believe the cheek of it, just drifting off in my own dreaminess in the middle of work. His black eyes are quite fixed upon me.

“So sorry, sir,” I mumble, and bend my head over my work and try to seem industrious. “Those dogs kept me awake half the night with their barking; did you hear them yourself, sir? Strays, probably. Such a racket.” He does not reply. He does not like chatter, I remind myself, nor excuses. Sometimes I think it must be the child growing inside me that makes my head so apt to slide off sideways these days into its own little place of nonsense. And then again I wonder if it is the thought of fireworks. They promise so much glitter, so much magic, it is surely no surprise that they make me dreamy.

For the rest of the day I make sure my ramming at the filling-box is efficient, and when the church bells strike six I do not even look up from my bench, until Mr. Blacklock announce himself that the day’s work is done.

“You must watch a full display before too long,” he says, when the workshop is locked up and we are walking down the gloom of the corridor to the steamy kitchen. “To demonstrate quality.”

I feel a surge inside.

I almost choke with the effort to keep my composure. “That would be useful, sir,” I manage to mumble, but cannot help a smile creeping over my face as we sit down to eat the boiled beef and greens that Mrs. Blight sets on the table.
A display! Rockets, candles, squibs!
I can hardly believe it.

“Sawdust can also be used in cautious measures for silver rains and golden rains,” he adds later, his mouth full of beef. “But there is no need for boiling.”

I nod happily and pour some ale, and Mr. Blacklock leans over and points into my mug abruptly. “Do you see how the colors change and spin over the surface of those bubbles? ”

I hold the mug up to my gaze, and with delight I can see this. “The colors are shivering across almost like rainbows, sir! ”

“I thought that would please you,” he says, gruffly.

Mary Spurren stares at me, and then at Mr. Blacklock. Nobody speaks after that; there is just the scraping of knives and forks against the plates. I do not have to look up to know that Mary Spurren’s scowl is darkening at the far end of the table.

I
t makes me proud to see the stack of rockets growing in the open crate. Mr. Blacklock allowed me to finish the batch and I’d held my breath as he examined one or two, turning them over in his hands and peering through his eyeglasses to check for flaws or weaknesses, but he gave a short grunt of approval and went out to Child’s to meet with Mr. Torré. It appears he trusts me with more tasks as each week passes; increasingly he lets me work unsupervised, once he has shown me what to do. I have a good memory for all the chemicals. Each name is like a taste in my mouth that I cannot forget.

Beginning a new order, I choose two-ounce cases, set them ready and pick up the drift.

And this time, when I hear the great noise of the knock at the door, my hands become still over the filling-box. I hold my breath. We are not expecting anyone.
Suppose it is important business, and Mr. Blacklock finds out that I did not answer it. What would he think?
The knock comes again, a brisk, insistent kind of rapping, and now I put down the drift and step down the corridor toward the hall as though I were tugged by invisible string.

I open the door.

I can hardly hear what the man is saying. It is bright outside, so that I have to squint to see at first.

It is a constable, in a scruffy overcoat.

“I have come for an Agnes Trussel,” he is demanding. He passes his baton from hand to hand. “Will I find her here? ”

“Yes,” I say, faintly.

“She is summoned on a matter of urgency concerning”—he puts the baton under his arm and consults his pocket-book—“coinage and unlawful goods.” The skin on his nose is burnt and peeling, as if he had been in the sun without his hat.

“Unlawful goods? Coinage, you say?” I have been waiting so long for this question that I should be practiced, hardened to the thought of hearing it at last. He does not mention any warrant. My thief’s fingers grip the door handle. They do not fly to press at Mrs. Mellin’s coins, hidden in my stays.

“Let me fetch my shawl,” I say, and then in a daze I go with the constable.

This is it, I think. It is happening now, and I am found out. It is Mrs. Blight’s doing, surely it is.

And with discovery comes something of release, so that I am very calm and unperturbed, as though I were floating above myself as we go swiftly down the street. I hear my steps tapping on the cobbles. The constable swings his baton at his side, and whistles through his rotten teeth. He does not grip my arm cruelly, as I thought he would.

Will I go straight to jail? Perhaps this is my last walk in the sunshine before truth shows up the darkness of my fate. I watch my shadow running smoothly down there, ahead of me. Even my shadow does not care. What is that noise? It is my breath, quick and shallow, like the agonized breath of the mouse I once found caught just by the tail in the trap at home in the back chamber. We’d heard its squeaking from the kitchen, it was so loud, and in I went. Its tail proved mostly unharmed, but the mouse sat unmoving even though I held the rusty lever free for it to run, its sides going in and out with panting.

“Did you flatten its wretched skull with the shovel?” my mother had called from the kitchen, clanging the spoon on the side of the pot. “How I hate those little beasts when they dirty my flour.”

“Yes, yes, all dead,” I’d called, holding it in my palm to feel its quickening softness for a moment before I tipped it, scuttling, from the open window. I knew it was foolish. Outside in the hedge the catkins shivered from the alder like loose little fingers hanging down.

I am too soft.

“Er . . .” The constable’s rough voice breaks into my stupor. “Perhaps you should clear up . . . er, describe . . . before we arrive at the roundhouse, what you know of Mr. Soul’s hand in this affair?”

I stop dead in my tracks and blink at him.

“Mr. Soul? Dear God! None!” And I see a doubt flicker over his sunburnt face when he hears that.

“What has he to do with this? ” I ask, bewildered. “Why are you taking me? I have to say, I do not know what you are talking about.” He clears his throat.

“You are called by Justice Philips to speak for Mr. Cornelius Soul, to speak up for his character.”

“His character!” I say.

 

 

The roundhouse is filthy and stinks of urine. The constable tells me where to stand. When my eyes are accustomed to the dinginess, I see him addressing the ear of a bulky man in a satin frock coat, whom I assume to be the justice. Cornelius Soul is there, and another man I do not know.

“Remind me again, Mr. Constable, what is the problem that we have before us?” the justice bellows.

“My name’s Williams, sir, Tom Williams,” the constable mutters peevishly. The judge has large, grayish lips that he presses together when others speak.