The Book of Fires

11
On 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.
“What makes you suppose her to be here, wench?” he says, rudely. His voice is hoarse, and a smell of strong drink comes away from him. “There is a quantity of travelers pass through the Cross Keys any day you care to name.” He jabs his thumb at the busy yard as though I were slow-witted.
“But this is all I know of her,” I say, at a loss to describe her any further. Then I touch my neck above my collar.
“She has a gem here; not a diamond,” I say, and something like a grin goes over the man’s face, and he bends and says something that I cannot hear to the child, who giggles and runs away unsteadily into the street. Then he goes inside. Did he mean me to wait while the child went to find her? I sit on the mounting block in the freezing, bustling yard and pull my cloak about me; I wait until I am almost fainting with the cold, and still there is no sign of the child. Nobody speaks to me, and St. Dunstan’s clock strikes nine before I realize that she will not come. I am late for work now.
As I pass out of the yard, I look into the stables. It is rank and musty in there. I hear a whinny and the ring and clip of hooves. A boy is grooming a great coach horse, reaching up to pull his brush over the bulk of its flank. And as he glances up and meets my eye I see it is the coachman’s boy who took my guinea here before, and to my amazement he seems to recognize my face, and halts his brushing to shout for someone I cannot see inside the stable.
“Mr. Haines! Mr. Haines!” he calls, and shakes his hand out urgently as if to try to stop me.
In alarm I turn and hasten from the yard and then do not stop running down the street till I can go no farther. The air is so sharp that my quick breathing gives me a pain in my side. I look about, and thank God that no one has followed.
On my way back to the house I have a sense that I am watched, but when I look up I see only the fanned-out shape of a red kite hovering high in the sky above the streets, and I can almost feel its shadow crossing over me. There are so many eyes in the city.
I have missed breakfast, and how hungry I am, but there is no time for it now. As Mrs. Blight is not looking, I run my finger around inside the porridge pot and lick it clean.
“Lateness is an irritation I do not tolerate,” Mr. Blacklock says coldly, without turning around, when I try to slip into the workshop unnoticed. “You will not appear so tardily tomorrow, nor the next day, nor indeed any day henceforth in my employ.”
“I will not, sir,” I say. My heart pounds with awkwardness. I try to explain. “I was looking for . . .” Mr. Blacklock raises his hand.
“Spare me,” he snaps.
At the bench my ears strain for the sound of knocking at the door.
Why has nobody come looking for me?
Perhaps they have. My brother Ab? John Glincy? Or the headborough of the parish of Washington, having wind of the theft of Mrs. Mellin’s coins? I must be alert to any danger of discovery. But I fear I shall not know it when it comes.


Mrs. Blight is a talker. She fills the kitchen with noise as she works. Her teeth must be loose from the acid of her stream of words; it is a wonder that they do not fall out more readily. It is a relief when she nods off beside the fire in the early part of the afternoon. Her mouth drops open and I can almost hear her teeth rattling as she snores. She is quite fat, but like dough that has been proving for too long and sunk back into itself. Her chin hangs from her jawbone and has a life separate from the remainder of her face.
While we clear the plates, I ask Mary Spurren if she knows why Mr. Blacklock isn’t married.
She gives a slow blink.
“Mr. Blacklock had a wife four years ago.” She doesn’t look up from the sink. “She died.”
“She died!” I say.
“He had the doctors to her.”
“What did she have?”
Mary Spurren shakes her big head slowly. “There was blood, so much blood. I rinsed it away down the drain out there.” She nods into the yard. “At the end he was holding her up over the sheets and crying so loud it made your toes curl to hear it. Her arms was loose and hung out over the bed. I left the room until he stopped.” She sniffs and wipes her nose across her cuff. “When my mother died we just covered her up until the body could be buried.” A coal spits in the fire. “My father went to work the same as usual and then after a year or two had passed he married Alice Ebbs, who was next door a widow.”
I can’t help wondering whether they have discovered Mrs. Mellin’s body yet, sitting all cold in front of a cold grate. Perhaps she has flopped forward onto the floor. I swallow.
“I’m sorry that your mother died,” I say. Mary Spurren doesn’t reply; she swills the water over a pot and turns it upside down to drain. There is a silence, and then Mrs. Blight’s chair gives a little creak. When I glance at the shape of her beside the hob I see that her breathing is shallow and too quick for someone sleeping. Her eyes are open a slit and watching our movements around the kitchen. I must be careful about what I say in front of her. She is like a lizard, a fat cold lizard wanting gossip and particulars to feed on. I am glad to go back to the workshop when we are done, away from her nosiness.
“Completed fireworks are kept in the safe,” Mr. Blacklock says as I go in. “Come!” he barks, and I follow him out across the yard to a low brick building behind the spindly linden tree. Mr. Blacklock opens the door with a large key. It is gloomy inside. “Step carefully,” he warns.
“The safe is lined with lead,” Mr. Blacklock says, and unlocks a huge cabinet as tall as myself. The door is like a well-oiled jaw dropping wide. At first I do not understand what I am peering at. It is as ordered as a bee’s nest: lined with rows and rows of square compartments like a honeycomb and filled with packets. He opens another safe with the same great key.
“Rockets,” Mr. Blacklock says. It is bristling with sticks.
“A bouquet can be as much as six hundred rockets in a display, or even more for royalty or particular occasions. In Green Park three years ago, the Ruggieris’ pyrotechnic show to celebrate the peace sent up flights amounting to a figure greater than ten thousand rockets.” I am amazed, although I do not fully understand what it is a rocket does.
“In favorable conditions, a six-pound rocket will reach its apex at two hundred feet,” Mr. Blacklock says.
“Does it burn as it goes?” I ask, trying to picture it.
“A sudden upward rush of sparks and flame,” he says. “Which eases to a coasting to the high point of its flight, then, dependent on the garniture within it, a break of common stars with a report, or tailed stars, or fiery rain, and then a natural fall to earth, as all things fall, sparks fading and winking out: the equilibrium of the propulsion and burn demonstrating a remarkable balance of forces between release and tension.” He coughs.
“The gunpowder lies in the third safe. We receive delivery of powder from Soul and Tibbet about twice a month. There is not much; powder should be fresh.” He returns to the first safe and reaches for a large, tubular package.
“This is a Roman candle,” he says, placing it upon my palm. “A Roman candle does not leave the ground when fired, but breaks into a plume of sparks and is charged with stars that spit out like vivid balls of fire into the sky.”
It is twice as long as my hand.
“See how neat and perfectly it is bound,” says Mr. Blacklock. “How every work should be. The innards, too, the garniture, are flawless: precisely measured and evenly packed, whole stars layered with bursting charge and blowing powder and dark fire, which is a fire that burns invisibly to give pause and space within a burning time.” I don’t say a word, but I nod when he looks at me. The packet is curiously light for such complexity. It is dry and dangerous, like touching the body of a very large dead wasp: a papery crisp cylinder with a sting in its tail.
I look closely at the small printed image in an oval shape placed on the outer paper of the firework, about as large as a florin. The figure of a woman holds a prickling light like a bright thistle up against an inky darkness.
“Who is this? ” I ask Mr. Blacklock as he shuts the second safe.
“Barbara is the patron saint of firework makers. It is judicious to acknowledge her.” Smoothly he turns the key in the lock.
“Do you go to church on Sundays, sir?” I ask.
“I do not,” he replies brusquely. “St. Barbara comes from the print-shop by the thousand, to be glued onto each packet with a dab of boiled rabbit skin, sealing it up at the very last.”
How many times has she been propelled into the blackness, I wonder, with a tail of sparks behind her before she is burnt up or exploded apart? Perhaps there have been times when she has stayed undamaged, fluttering to earth like a printed petal. Mr. Blacklock motions me to put the firework back. “There is much to do,” he says. As we cross the yard to the workshop, a striped cat runs by with a damp rat stuffed into its jaw.
“Tell me,” Mr. Blacklock asks suddenly, later that day. “Do you find the smell in here disturbs you? ”
I am measuring sulfur into the beamscales as I have been shown. I let weights drop out of my fingers and click into the copper pan until it balances and swings free. Six ounces troy. “I’m not sure, sir,” I reply, with hesitation. I try to find the words to say just what I mean.
“It is like that particular smell of boiling a hen’s egg in a pot on the fire,” I suggest. “No, it is almost like that, but more powerful.” I am thinking hard. The sulfur is a dirty, sharp yellow against the polished warmth of the copper and the broken-up lumps are uneven.
I have explained it badly, and he is looking at me as though my answer is not enough.
“The smell in here leaves a dark, backward taste in my mouth,” I say.
I don’t try to add that the smell sets off ripples on the hairs on my arms, that it makes my mouth into a cavernous place where whole shapes of tastes explode and fade as I breathe in.
I realize that still he is looking at me. Why does he look at me so hard? His eyes seem to burn right through me. What a stupid thing I must have said, and my fingers go hot and big with clumsiness as they tip the sulfur out of the pan and into the mortar. Some of the pieces fall over the rim and onto the bench. He turns back to his work and his face, when I glance at it again, is flat with concentration.
Mrs. Blight comes to the door of the workshop and peers in.
“Mr. Blacklock, sir?” she warbles. “Can I borrow Agnes to run to the shop for me as I needs butter and with Mary being out all afternoon I’m up to my elbows, sir, quite frantic, and I shan’t want supper to be late.” She refuses to step inside.
Mr. Blacklock scowls. “Be quick then.” He jerks his head at me. “But don’t make a habit of it, woman.”
“Oh, thank you, sir,” she simpers.
Spicer’s Grocery is just across Mallow Square and around the corner, but the weather is cold and I am glad of my cloak. The shop is busy and crammed with goods.
“Just butter, please,” I ask shyly, looking about. Mrs. Spicer is large and neat, with reddish, webbed hands, like a goose.
“Working at Blacklock’s, aren’t you?” she says, friendly enough, waddling to the slab to cut the butter.
“I am,” I say.
“Half a pound? ” she asks. I nod.
“Always spot a new face around here, we do,” she says, wrapping it up. “See everyone going by and hear all the gossip. No chance for tedium! On account for Mr. Blacklock, and bought by . . . let me see if I can remember . . . Agnes!”
“That’s right,” I say uneasily, taking the packet. I am surprised that someone knows my name already.
“Eccentric, that man,” she says, wanting to chat. “Though talk has it he was an ambitious man four years ago, then when his poor wife died like that, so sudden . . . the spark seemed to go right out of him.”
It is true there are many eyes in the city. But as I turn to go, something occurs to me.
“Do you know a girl called Lettice? Lettice Talbot?” I ask, hopefully. “I am looking for her.”
Mrs. Spicer frowns. “Lettice Talbot. No, I don’t think so, love. Wait a minute. Spicer!” she shouts out suddenly, and a small man appears from a door at the back. “Do we know of any girl called Lettice Talbot? ”
Mr. Spicer pushes his spectacles further up his nose and shakes his head. “Not Talbot, no,” he replies. “There’s the Tallets, up by Cripple-gate, but they haven’t got daughters.”
“I thought not,” Mrs. Spicer says. “More than a ten-year we’ve been here, and know most people roundabouts. Never heard that name, love.” She smiles at me and turns to serve another customer.
“Good afternoon,” I say politely then, and leave the shop.

At the end of each day I am exhausted. My right arm aches like a heavy load from my shoulder as I spoon the supper into my bowl. Sometimes Mr. Blacklock prefers to take his evening meal after we have brushed the crumbs away and left him by the fireplace. He reads his heavy, leather-covered books, often without turning the pages. Once, as I stood up to leave, he looked up as if startled to see me there. The hallway seemed a lonely space outside as I walked through it to the stairs. Sometimes he stays in his study and we do not see him.
In the night I am often woken from a deep sleep by the sound of his footsteps creaking the tread of the stair outside my room, a weak circle of candlelight stretching under the gap in the door as he passes.
Other noises wake me, too. I hear the church bells about the house, each of their various clamors becoming known to me now.
But I freeze with terror when one night a strange deep bell tolls out above the others as they begin to chime midnight. It is like an omen. God help us, I am muttering as I scramble from bed and pull my shawl about me. What can it mean? At home when the church bell tolls unexpectedly at night it can only portend disaster of one kind or other. I rush from my chamber and fly up the crooked attic stairs to rap at Mary Spurren’s door.
“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.