The Book of Fires (28 page)

“So we are given flowers of sulfur. The sublime made palpable.” He speaks very quietly now. He takes the jar from me and tips a quantity into the porcelain whiteness of a chafing dish. The jar clinks on the dish. He puts a big fingertip to the flowers of sulfur and seems to lose himself in thought.

“They are . . . exalted by fire,” he says, almost in a whisper.

I bend my head over them, studying them closely. I can smell his hands, the smell of skin and metal and tobacco. I look at the flowers of sulfur for some time, hardly able to breathe. Mr. Blacklock does not move away, though we are so close we are almost touching. “They are somewhere between flakes and crystals,” I say, eventually. I do not dare to say anything else, lest my voice should tremble. Mr. Blacklock nods. “Indeed they are,” he says. And we part then, and go on with our work.

The flush on my cheeks dies down. I must not misunderstand him; that leads to trouble. I must remember my place.

T
he next day Mr. Blacklock’s manner is brisk and cheerful.

“Antimony and orpiment mixed with camphor make a white flame on burning,” he tells me. “Whereas a yellow flame, or,” he says wryly, “what I would call a yellow flame, is made by mixing amber and cinnabar. You must understand that substances can become quite changed on becoming part of something else. For instance, arsenic presents itself in white or citrine colors, and is easily broken and powdered. But when mixed with orpiment, through sublimation they make realgar—a different, reddish substance with its own distinct properties. And in the residue of this sublimation they leave a regulus: very white like silver but more brittle than glass.”

“But silver is not white,” I say. “It is . . . silvery.” I can think of no other word for what it is.

“You are mistaken,” Mr. Blacklock says. “That is its nature only when polished. And by then you are no longer seeing the metal itself but simply what it is reflecting on its surface.”

“I see,” I say.

I think of Mrs. Mellin’s shining coins.

I think of silverweed, growing abundantly on the lane’s edge by the cottage.

“What other thoughts do you have today?” Mr. Blacklock asks me then, unexpectedly. “Was there anything else that you would find fault with, in what you saw on Mr. Torré’s scaffold? ” I cannot tell if he is asking me in earnest or in sarcasm, and so I answer truthfully.

“I have thought of little else since then, Mr. Blacklock, sir,” I say.

“And?”

“Well, I have wondered why it had to be so overwhelming, with the loudness nearly ceaseless.” Mr. Blacklock’s eyebrows rise, as if he had not expected me to say that. “I would have liked to see some separate strokes of fire, sir, a chance to enjoy the rockets trailing away to nothing in the sky. To see the dipping and the darkening perhaps may have made the sense of awe I felt much stronger. I couldn’t think, while it was happening. I was . . . battered by it. It was . . . too much at once, I felt, like listening to a song well-sung but bellowed out without a pause.”

“Despite the efforts Mr. Torré undertook to ensure the shape of his display was built to reach a conclusion of dramatic proportion at its end,” Mr. Blacklock says, dryly.

“Yes,” I say, “and yet I felt there was no warning to the burst of that finishing shape. I was not prepared for it, did not have a chance to draw breath with the pleasure of the thought of things to come.”

“And just how would you have shaped it, then?” he mocks. “Miss Agnes Trussel, near-six-month novice pyrotechnical assistant at Mr. Blacklock’s workshop, perhaps proving to possess more than a little talent in this field? How would you shape it? ”

I think about this.

“Perhaps its force could simply weaken, change and fall,” I suggest. “When the ash tree drops its leaves, still green, in October without first turning ruddy, without browning, there is less delight, less feeling of wholeness than when watching the slow golden turn of the oak, say, or of the maple,” I say. “A shape like this would be more . . . rounded, like the usual way of nature is.”

“Perhaps you should suggest it to him,” Mr. Blacklock says. Can it be that he is laughing? “Your ideas may be as quick as your fingers seem to be.”

He beckons me closer and bids me watch as he pours something into a small glass vessel. “I am making aqua regia,” he says. “Strong spirit of niter with strong muriatic acid; it must be freshly mixed, as it quickly loses potency.” And to my surprise he drops in two shining guineas and corks the vessel up.

“Gold?” I say. There is a tube sticking from the vessel’s second aperture into another jar, and even as I speak a yellowish tumbling kind of steam or air begins to pour through the tube into the jar. There is a disagreeable, choking smell that catches at the back of my throat and makes my eyes water. “Do not breathe too deeply; it is highly corrosive,” Mr. Blacklock warns me.

“The coins have disappeared, sir,” I say, looking at the liquid in concern. “This experiment must cost a lot.”

“No. The gold, though invisible to the eye, remains within the solution, and can, with a degree of bother, be retrieved at will.” He coughs. “But
this
is the substance of interest.” And he holds up the jar of greenish yellow air he has collected.

He waves his hand impatiently toward the yard. “Bring me one of those little flowers out there.”

“Flowers, sir? You mean the violets?” I am surprised he has noticed them, tucked away, late-blooming, between the warmth of the bricks of the outhouse. I go and pick one carefully and bring it in.

He tears the green stalk away and takes the head of petals up in a pair of pincers, which he dips inside the jar, removes and holds toward me. “See ? ”

“The color is quite sucked out of it, sir!” I say, shocked. The stench is overpowering.

The violet looks disturbingly dead, an eerie blanched scrap hanging limply from his grip. One petal drops to the bench, as though a piece of the skin of a ghost had peeled away.

“Where has the color gone? ”

“Intriguing, isn’t it,” he says, staring down at it, quite lost in thought.

 

The church clock has already struck four when we are walking from the apothecary’s shop with six packets of fresh chemicals he thinks too valuable for Joe Thomazin to bring back unaccompanied.

“Three pounds and twelve shillings and tuppence I shall add to your bill, Mr. Blacklock, sir,” Mr. Jennet had calculated in a grudging wheeze, nodding his powdered wig heavily as we gathered the packets up. I saw how he had found it difficult to conceal his irritation at Mr. Blacklock’s request to observe their freshness and the quality of goods in person, before they were weighed and wrapped. “I am accustomed to sending the boy out when goods are ready,” he complained through his long nose, as Mr. Blacklock tilted and sniffed at the contents of each jar. “Whatever it is that you plan to do with them,” he had added, with disdain.

“Another rogue, that man,” Mr. Blacklock mutters when we quit the shop. “Too many times he has sold me inferior substances. He nurses a belief that it is only men of science who should be provided with those prized secrets that nature gives up to his kind in the form of chemicals. He thinks that usage such as mine should be abolished, on grounds of waste: a populist defiling of the purity of their knowledge, stained by the gaze of the common mob.” We skirt a stack of barrels on the pavement.

“And he is not the only one. It is a view held by many of his kind. But they do not see fire for what it is.”

“What is it, really, sir?” I ask.

“Many things to many people,” he replies. “To us, to pyrotechny, it provides exhilaration, a soaring pleasure, during a display. And pain, debt, guilt, grief, all these troubles, we have momentary respite from. What a gift that is.” He raises his hat grimly to someone across the street.

“It transports the senses far above the moment, above happiness itself; it provides a very pure kind of change or space inside us. It quenches a thirst for rapture that we might not even know we had.”

He laughs bitterly. “These men of science would not know that. And moreover,” he adds, “their thoughts on fire are bound up largely in the pursuit of a nonsensical inflammatory agent they call phlogiston.”

“What is that?” I ask. I have to break into a run from time to time to keep abreast of his stride.

“It is something that bends to suit their purpose in describing it. I do not know precisely what it consists of, nor do they. It is what they describe loosely as a combustible principle.” He snorts. “An elastic fluid that has no actual matter attributed to it.”

“Mr. Jennet did seem rude, sir,” I say nervously. Mr. Blacklock’s temper is rising.

“Rude? He is an ignorant chemist and his attitude disgusts me. As if they alone could have its secrets! Fire is for all who give it due regard.” He stops walking.

“We have the properties of fire at our disposal, and yet we do not understand its nature, none of us. We never shall.”

He blinks.

“I would like to see the craft of manipulating, celebrating fire given some respect, that is all,” he adds more quietly still. He takes his hat off, turning it about heedlessly before him.

“Has your time in my workshop not given you some sense of this?” he mutters. “Have you not learnt to care for fire?” I cannot tell if he is asking me a question, so that I hesitate before replying.

“My liking for fire was there from the start,” I say.

“Despite your family . . . ?” and he turns to me and frowns with recollection.

“Despite that,” I say. “However that may seem. I cannot explain.”

He seems satisfied with the plainness of my answer, and holds his dark gaze steadily with mine.

When he goes into the shop to buy tobacco, I stand outside. A woman selling birch brooms laid out on the paving has begun to pack up her goods into a tatty basket. She starts talking to me as she does it. At first I can barely hear her over the thoughts in my head.

“I’ve five sons . . . they are a great help to me . . . my husband died, you see. That happens, don’t it? ”

I murmur something.

“How long’ve you got before it comes?” she asks. I look startled at her face. Is my condition so clear to anybody now? Surely not. She has a fresh graze or sore across one cheek, like a scarlet patch. Her skin is wrinkled deeply. I do not reply.

I look away up the street, past the women selling cornflowers from their baskets, past a spaniel eating something in the gutter, past a saddle horse, and the fish girl weaving through the crowd with a wide creel of slippery flounders on her head, and I notice a tall, slender woman talking with another girl, standing with her back to me. She is like . . . As I look she makes a gesture as she speaks, the bright silk of her sleeve catching the sunlight, and I hear a peal of laughter that seems familiar. Is that Lettice Talbot there? Can it be? I narrow my eyes and try to see more clearly. This woman has her bearing, her elegance of style in dressing. Her neck is pale and long. Is it she?
Turn about, Lettice Talbot, so that I might see your face
, I think. My heart beats in fear and hope. If I had more courage I would sail past and glance directly at her, but somehow I cannot. I stay faltering and rooted to the spot and wait for her to notice me.
What will I say to her? Should I call out? Will she remember me? Will she explain that she did not want to do me harm?
How could I have doubted her, even for a moment! I am certain she would help me. The acquaintance pulls her arm as if to show her something in the milliner’s. And then at last she turns and it is not Lettice Talbot at all; it is just a girl of ordinary plainness wearing a pretty cap under her hat and chewing her lip, as though deciding what new thing to buy as she stares through the shop glass.

“. . . tiny little footprints, so provoking,” I hear her say as they come toward me, “such a squirrel!” And she giggles to her friend. Why am I always mistaken like that? A moment later I hear the silk of her skirts whisper past me, though I do not look at her again, and gradually my disappointed heart stops pounding. I am shadowed, haunted by the lack of Lettice Talbot.

I
saw a dead child on a rubbish heap today.

It turned my stomach to see it lying there in the early morning sunshine. Its softness, its smallness, was twisted up and soiled as though someone, some woman, had tumbled it out of a blanket in haste, in the dark perhaps, and left it alone for the dawn to chance upon it. Though the shock made me stop, I could not bring myself to stoop to look at it too closely, and I thanked God I could not see its face. The heap it lay on steamed slightly in the coolness of the air.

How could a woman leave a baby boy unclothed and dead, its waxy, bloodied limbs a muddle of perfect flesh against the darkness of the filth, one tiny arm flung sideways so that its five still little fingers were opened out as if catching something falling? The umbilical stump looked fresh at the belly. I started to shake when I saw that, and ran to a woman nearby and pulled at her sleeve.

“’Tis common enough,” she said, when she saw where I pointed.

“Though we may not like to see it.” I saw that her shawl was riddled with moth-holes when she pulled it about her.

“A newborn, was it?” she asked.

I nodded. “It seemed so.”

“Ah well,” she said. She shrugged with a measure of sadness and began to move off.

“What shall we do?” I asked.

“Do?” The woman was puzzled.

“Who should we tell, what authority? So that it can be buried, so that dogs and rats cannot eat away at the corpse. So that somebody knows, so that somebody does something.”

“People knows, all right,” the woman said, over her shoulder. “ ’Tis not the knowing that’s the problem, is it? I’d say it were the stopping of it. But where would they start? ”

For a moment I stood in the glare of the sunshine.