The Book of Fires

14
A spiny frost coats everything outside the house. The water in the jug in my chamber is frozen hard across the top, which I have to break to pour and wash with it. The freeze has made this place seem almost unfamiliar again.
Later, carrying a pressing message to a merchant’s house in Cannon Street, I take a wrong turning and another and then find myself beside the Thames. My breath comes in clouds as I stand and stare. The wharves are heaving with barges and men landing cargoes into the warehouses and onto carts, hammering metal strappings onto barrels, cursing, working cranes. The water glints invitingly. I weave my way through the crowd along the bridge to a gap between the houses and the torn-down premises, and stand there with the chaos of the traffic at my back, looking at the great river pouring downstream till I am dizzy. I should be back at work, I think ruefully, while I have a job to go to. There are vessels gathered on the water, waiting for the high-tide bell to signal that there is sufficient draft of water to pass under the bridge.
“Don’t do it!” jokes an old man in a wide hat, walking by. He stops to rest his elbows on the rail beside me. I suppose he means I should not jump.
“A suicide was washed up only yesterday, in the steelyard at Scott’s Wharf,” he says when I do not answer. “An unfortunate woman. They said she was not poor, by the clothes she had on her, or what was left of them. And the Lord knows, it happens often enough.”
“I was hoping to see a fish, sir,” I say. It is the first thing I can think of, and besides, it would be pleasant to see an eel or a shoal of forktails swimming down against the tide. We are a long way over the water. At the edge of the Thames, on the line of the reach, we watch a handful of children gathering scruff for fuel, piling the damp sticks and bits of coal into a basket strapped to the back of the largest child.
The man is smartly dressed in wig and waistcoat; he tells me he is out to gain some exercise before he dines. “Though an icy day it is.” His voice is shaky and agreeable. “I’ll mark it may be a sign the winter will be fiercer yet this year.” I think how at home the rowan bush outside the cottage was red with fruit when I left, like a beacon. He points out the church of St. Magnus, Cocks Key and Lyons Key, and Custom House, and the Tower, and some types of boats: the colliers and lighters, a man o’war . . .
“The whole world is represented in the goods that unload at this shore,” he says, pointing into the light with his polished cane. “Olive oil, silks, tobacco, cotton, wines.”
“I would like to be on a boat heading out to sea, growing smaller and smaller until it rounds a bend and disappears,” I say. The man smiles and shakes his head.
“It is a hard life at sea,” he replies. The man thinks me to be an ordinary shopgirl airing myself on my half day, I suppose, and not one riddled with a shameful, swelling error that is not far from being apparent to anyone that cares to look. In some way I have betrayed his trust, his confidence in my respectability being so misplaced.
“Good day to you, young lady,” the man says when our conversation lulls, tipping his hat at me courteously and making his way through the crowd toward Fish Hill Street. The bell in the church tower chimes three.
There is something about this encounter that strikes me: the small, chance politeness of it, the vastness of the world converging there, a pleasing contact between strangers.
I wonder on the hardness of the weather that we have ahead. And I remember how last year it was as late as mid-December when the flocks of winter birds came down the valley, stripping the berries from the hedgerows. Plump redwings and gray, gawky fieldfares settled over the rowan tree outside the cottage so that it swayed heavily beneath their weight. They ate the rotten orange fruit at speed, stretching their necks and flapping for balance, so that the trees crawled with birds and noise. They were incautious of the sparrow hawk that burst from nowhere and knifed its way abruptly through their midst and took a single bird midair.
All the rest of the birds melted away. The rowans, near bare of fruit, shook a little in the breeze of their departure and were still. It was a calm scene before the window, just the lane and fields, not a thing to show of any kill, save one soft feather drifting down toward the muddy lane: that and the sudden sharpness to the air, a quickening absence that made the blood run faster.


Mr. Soul came while I was out.
“Said he was thirsty, he did,” grumbles Mrs. Blight, putting another kettle on the heat for Mrs. Nott, the washerwoman. “Come peering in, right into my kitchen, and said there was no one in the workshop and here was a note about supply. Fidgeting, he was. Kept looking round.”
“Like he was looking for someone,” Mary Spurren says, and a glance sidles between them. Mary Spurren sniggers.
“That glass of beer you give him got drunk that quickly when he saw it was just us in here.”
“Only small beer.”
“Hoping for something better.”
Mary Spurren sniggers again, more loudly this time. “Then we couldn’t get rid of him, hanging about, fiddling with the spoons, tapping his foot.”
“Never stops moving, that one,” Mrs. Blight says. “Gives me a headache, all that coming and going with his hands.”
I take my cloak off and hang it up on the hook in the scullery. Cornelius Soul is like a wagtail, always dipping and turning, his coattails gray as cloud, as smoke, as gray as gunpowder. I turn to go back to the workshop.
“Seemed like he were . . . expecting something,” Mary Spurren says, and gives another look at Mrs. Blight as if that had some kind of meaning that I’d missed. “How very frequent he seems to come these days,” she comments to the air in general.
I pause at the door. The kitchen is thick with steam and the smell of soap. The washerwoman is going back and forth with kettles of water to the yard.
“Hello, Mrs. Nott,” I say when she nods at me. She stops and puts the kettle down to show her swollen, cracked hands to me.
“Worst in wintertime, it is,” she mutters, turning them over ruefully. Her nails are flaked and brittle as oyster shells, and the skin is pale to the elbow, and covered in an encrusting kind of scale, as though she had fallen asleep with her arms in a bucket of lye. Her skin’s color is deadened to naught, except where the rawness of the red patches shows through beneath. She grimaces when she puts her hands into water at the start of her day, a hiss escaping between her teeth, but she rarely complains, and she sings like a jenny wren.
“Must get on,” she says. “Lagging a bit. Should’ve been an’ gone half an hour since, and they’ll be waiting, up the road.”
Out in the yard, squatting over the tubs, working the crown soap into the bedsheets and linen, pouring the gray, grubby water away into the drain; it is hard to believe that the great strong voice that pours from her mouth can be hers. Mrs. Nott seems as small as a badly fed chicken, yet on clear frosty days when she sets up her tubs on the bricks outside, the yard seems to throb with the strength of her voice. I like it when she comes. It is as though my spirit were feeding on her songs.
“Will you see to the fire before you go to the workshop, Agnes!” Mrs. Blight says. “Coal dust everywhere.” She nods into the yard at Mrs. Nott. “I knew her sister Lizzie Beal last year over near St. Paul’s. Now there’s a miserable tale.” She sorts garments from a pile of last week’s dry laundry, holds up a crumpled petticoat and casts her eye over it in the light from the open door.
“See you got that bloodstain out, Mary.” She smirks. “Told you that bucking would work a treat. Never would’ve got it out with that useless ordinary boil you’d started. Can’t think where you learnt your cleaning.” Mary Spurren scowls and says nothing in reply. How Mrs. Blight likes to be right, I begin thinking, and am quite unguarded when she turns, mid-cackle, her hand over her mouth, and looks at me sharply, as if a thought had come to her.
“Haven’t had any rags from you yet, have we, Miss Trussel?” Mrs. Blight says.
“Rags?” I ask, puzzled. Oh God! My stomach churns in alarm.
“Your morbid flux. You’ve brought nothing down for the bucking pot since you was here, and that is surely more than four weeks now.” I cannot see her mouth.
“No,” I say, and my voice is too loud in the horrible pause that seems to grip the kitchen as at the back Mary puts down the scrubbing sticks and doesn’t appear to be working at all. “I . . .”
“Bit proud, are we?”
“Oh no,” I say again, and with a struggle I add as quickly, lightly as I can, “I am waiting, of course, but I can feel it not far off. I have a bad ache here.” I give a vague prod at my apron. “It was probably the journey, the jolting of the cart, that set me out.” I bend over the hearthstone and sweep up the dust as she asked me to.
Mrs. Blight’s lizard eyes are still upon me, but I can’t look up. “No need to be made so red-faced by talk of women’s stuff, is there?” she says. “We’re all big girls here, aren’t we, Mary, after all! ”
“I’m accustomed to being inside a family,” I mutter, my cheeks burning. “Not speaking of private things out loud like that to just anyone that asks. I don’t like to.”
“Needn’t be so touchy, neither,” Mrs. Blight says, turning away. “Quite the precious little hermit, aren’t we! Probably the sort to go around in half-washed rags done in cold water in your chamber sooner than muck in with others. I’m right, aren’t I? Could do with a bit of humility, your sort, considering.” Mary Spurren snorts. And Mrs. Blight goes on, “Jack-in-the-cellar was all she had by the time he’d done with her.”
“Done with whom? ” I say faintly.
“With Mrs. Nott’s sister, Lizzie Beal—are you not listening to anything today?” As I stand up again she gives a sideways glance at my belly. Wretchedly, as if I were feeling the cold air coming in, I pull my shawl tightly about me. Mrs. Blight surely cannot know my trouble. It cannot be that plain to see. “And the man in question but a baker-legged tanner with no intentions of marrying her, as he rightly should’ve, despite the chit she was bearing to term. Disgrace, it was.” She flicks a shirt savagely. “Spent his time telling great whisking lies in the tavern on the corner of Milk Street, and all the time carrying on as if nothing was changed. Ran off, he did, of course, before the parish could put demands on him for money.”
She spits on the flat iron.
Intentions of marrying her. And quite suddenly an idea comes toward me in pieces, a collective swell like a rush of droplets brought down in the wind from trees above.
It is a half-formed plan, yet ingenious in its simplicity. Not a trap, I make clear to myself when later I have a flicker of doubt. Not a trap, but morsels of bait set up along a certain path. I plan to lay that bait with all the cunning I possess. Which is why, on Friday next, when Cornelius Soul brings a tub of powder, I ensure that I meet his eye a little, and, as he takes his leave, I give him just the slightest glimmer of a smile.
Nothing more than that. I do not find it difficult.
Mrs. Mellin is in the dream I have tonight.
She has looked up from polishing her coins, her fingers black with a paste made from ashes.