The Book of Fires

15
There was a girl on a farm at Thakeham or Chiltington, I forget which. She arrived from nowhere, it seemed, to work in the April of the previous year. Her belly grew as the year swelled and grew older, and she ate more to show off her appetite, taking large pieces of cheese at the table when everyone ate. Her mother was fat, she declared; how like her she was becoming. Her stays became tighter. A particular day came.
After the milking she returned to the dairy and churned for two hours. From time to time her knuckles whitened over the wooden handle, but she kept the cream churning. She scrubbed out three pails after the butter was done, fetching the salt from the back of the dairy. She became unwell; she said her head was beating and beating and making her sick. To prove it, she vomited into the gutter outside the dairy and rinsed the vomit away. She put the pails to dry and took off her apron and hung it up on a hook. She went up to the attic. Someone heard furniture scraping heavily over the floorboards as she wedged the door tight. She was not down for supper and the cook put the meat on her plate back into the meat safe. Night passed. The sun rose and she came down from the attic pale but better. Her headache was gone. She went out to the cows and hulked the brimming pails back into the dairy. She churned the butter, drained it, pressed it into the molds and salted eight pats of butter. She worked more slowly than usual, blinking uneasily from time to time. At eleven o’clock she clutched at the side and tipped up a setting bowl, spilling ounces of cream. The skimmer fell to the floor with a clatter. At three o’clock she dropped quietly down on the floor as though the bones had gone from her body, and lay in a heap until somebody came who knew what to do, pulling her loose limbs aside so they could press on her heart. She let out a red pool of blood between her legs that spread out over the flagstones and darkened quickly as it cooled. The blood was the brightest thing that had ever been seen in the dairy, which is in general a pale, white place. After an hour they agreed that her heart had become too cool and still to revive, and laid her down on the marble slab by the cheeses until Dr. Twiner could come and confirm this for them. When later they went to the attic and searched through her baggage for items of value to send back to her family, they found a dead blue baby folded up under her petticoat, a bruised stripe around its tiny, flopping neck, like a collar.
I have gone through this story again and again. And today, for some reason, it rolls around my head all the time like a fruit in an empty barrow, although at last Mr. Blacklock is to show me how to charge the rocket cases.
“Listen hard to what I say,” he barks. “The method is complex and I shall not show you twice.”
I see how the case sits over a spindle in the box, which penetrates it deeply, so that the composition is compressed about what will be a hollow cone-shaped space when the rocket is done, which gives air to the burning.
“Twelve light blows with the mallet to consolidate the dry clay powder at the choke, which is the constricted mouth at the base of the rocket,” he says. “Then fusepowder, with further blows on the hollow rammer or drift. Continue with scoops of powder, using first that drift with the large hollow inside it and then the medium, and, nearing the top of the spindle as it fills, use the drift with the smallest hollow inside it.” Mr. Blacklock turns his head away to cough. “Then the solid rammer above the spindle, with dry clay, until the case is full, then twist the rocket from the spindle. Finally push a length of quick match inside the rocket’s hollow core and paste it at the mouth.
“Manufacture and attachment of a rocket head, with a variety of appended garnitures of stars and fiery rains and so on, we will cover on a further occasion,” he says. “Likewise the stick, which is necessary for balance and guidance in flight like a rudder or tail.” He holds up the half-finished shape. “This is an honorary sky rocket, which carries no head; small and plain, with strong composition.
“The smaller the case, the quicker the mixture used to fill it.” He passes it to me. I hold such a remarkable thing gingerly.
“Quicker?” I ask.
“Fiercer. More instantly combusting. Smaller rockets will contain mealpowder, which you will remember to be gunpowder ground exceedingly fine.” He gets up and motions me to sit before the filling-box.
“Do not mistake the degree of roaring of a rocket upon ignition to be an indication of the fierceness of its powder,” he says. “The loud roar depends upon the quantity of surface that is available to burn. And a rocket that is insufficiently rammed will simply explode upon ignition. Indeed, any poorly made firework is in danger of explosion if held in an ungloved hand, for instance.”
The filling-box is deep with washed river sand and stands securely on a block of oak.
“Brace yourself,” Mr. Blacklock says, clearing his throat. “You must put your legs apart.” He demonstrates.
I try. “No, wider,” he says. “You must be braced and comfortable. You cannot charge a rocket ill at ease.”
He stands back and considers my posture. “Adjust your skirts above your knee.”
Obediently I tug at the woollen fabric until my legs are free to move about unencumbered by my skirts or petticoat.
“There!” he exclaims.
I do not believe that he is looking at my legs above the ankle, which are naked now, inside my stockings, but know it must be possible, should he choose to do so. My cheeks are flushed with the thought of it.
“Make your back long and upright,” he suggests. He is looking at my face, I am sure, though I do not turn to look at him. He does not take his gaze away. I can hear him breathing.
I try to sit up straight.
“Are you at ease?” he demands at last.
“I am, sir,” I say, sitting there with my legs apart. “It feels . . . natural like this.”
“Then, so stationed,” Mr. Blacklock says, “you can begin. Soon you will be adept at filling rockets, lances, gerbes.”
“Gerbe?” I say. “What is that?”
“It is the French for sheaf,” he replies.
“Oh!” I say, with a start of recognition. “Like a sheaf of corn, a sheaf of wheat?”
“Precisely so,” Mr. Blacklock says. “It burns like a spray of ears of wheat, and is named accordingly—”
“Stooked up in the field, the shining ears spurting out, like a fountain of gold,” I interrupt eagerly, a smile growing inside me.
“You can picture it now?” he asks.
“I can picture it very well,” I reply.

My first attempts are clumsy. I am left alone to make mistakes with quantities of powder, spilling the scoops as I tip them in. The hollow rammer jams with compacted powder, so that I have to beat hard to loosen it and much is wasted. It is impossible to strike the mallet with even, satisfactory beats. I hold the tools so tightly in my anxiety that my bare hands chafe and become sore.
After paying so much attention to my person, Mr. Blacklock barely seems to notice me for the remainder of the morning. I am so afraid the rockets will explode in front of me I hardly let my breath come naturally.
“Do not rush,” he says once, without looking up from his bench. “The flow of work will come when eventually you manipulate the tools adroitly, but it should never be a frenzy.”
And because the orders are fulfilled he goes off to Child’s coffeehouse to talk of business matters, and is not back to take the midday meal with anyone.
The tool sits uncomfortably in my hand and my back aches in a new way.
At the end of the day, when the gloom becomes too thick to properly see what I am doing, he returns to check what I have done.
“It looked so simple when you showed me,” I say. I am disappointed with my progress. I remember the first time I was permitted to milk a cow at Roker’s Farm, when I was six years old. I took the teats expectantly and found that they did not behave at all as I imagined they would. It took days of practice before the milk drenched regularly into the pail, my fingers using a movement that was neither a tug nor a stroke, but rather something in between.
I am tired. My palms are stinging and blistered with effort.
“You will do the same exercise until you have it right,” Mr. Blacklock says, with no further comment.
But the next day, he surprises me again.
“It is apparent that you have an aptitude for what we do here—and any energy that I expend in divesting specific areas of knowledge upon you may not be a waste.” He stops to cough. “I will be frank: in the past I have not achieved much in the way of success with the training of assistants. But there is something receptive about your ear, which pleases me, and which indicates that thorough learning may bear good results.”
A flicker of hope kindles something inside me. And then I think perhaps I should not flatter myself that this is due to any special quality I possess. Already I had been told by Mary Spurren about his last apprentice.
“Davey Halfhead was a squat youth covered in boils,” she’d said. “With such a temper. I breathed more natural when he was gone. Ate a lot of fat, he did. Wouldn’t touch loaves. Said they gave him a cramp in his leg.” Mary Spurren had drawn breath at the very thought of it. “Mr. Blacklock’s not a man to have assistants,” she’d said.
“Are there other men like you, sir?” I ask.
“Like me?” He looks amused. “We are a various breed. Our compass ranges from plain artisans making batches by the ten thousand to i mpresarios like Torré who do not lay a finger in the mixture and are concerned only with spectacle. There are philosophers with ideas of nature to convey, and entire families traveling between cities across Europe with their fire-working mastery.”
“And all these people make a living from this . . . trade? ”
“The appetite for artificial fireworks cannot be sated, or so it seems. Once it was the private pleasure of kings, but now the common man is glad to pay to see these things we offer. And we all want to find the most novel, the most dazzling, the biggest, best, newest creation. Competition is rife. We are a cutthroat lot, among ourselves.”
“But how does anybody ever learn anything then, sir? ”
He looks at me. “A keen question. The knowledge is passed on strictly by word of mouth between interested parties. Neither formulae nor tricks of the trade are shared in the public eye. If anything is written down, it will be in manuscript form and locked away. It is a secretive business, pyrotechny.”
“Do you write your recipes down, sir? How do you remember them ? ”
“I have never done so,” Mr. Blacklock says. “They are safer inside my head than out.”
“But what if something were to happen to you?” I am asking too many questions now.
“The world would manage, if it were deprived of a record of my labors,” he says. For a moment his face is stone-still, and then a flicker passes over it. He clears his throat. “And there is much to learn,” Mr. Blacklock says. “How can one know a thing about the quality of substances without an understanding or experience of how it is derived, composed, originated? ” He uncorks a jar of flowers of sulfur and knocks a little out into a dish. “The same could be more broadly said of life,” he says.
“Mrs. Blight says that life is all suffering,” I find myself replying, without intending to at all. “All suffering, she says.”
The sulfur is soft and yellow in the dish. Mr. Blacklock looks up and then back at the tool in his hand, turns it over.
“Indeed, there seems to be a quantity about,” he says. His voice is quiet. Perhaps he is thinking of his dead wife. My aunt always said that my mother’s raw grief for her mother was never healed because she would not speak of it, and left it trapped up inside her.
“What was Mrs. Blacklock like?” I venture, watching his face. He fixes his eyes upon me, unspeaking, for a moment.
“She was tiny,” he says, turning around to the work on the bench. His jerkin is smooth and worn at the back. I wonder whether he is trying to reach her with fireworks. Or maybe not. Maybe he is trying to punish God; there is a violence in these devices. I have seen something like a black fire far back inside his eyes.
“And your own misfortune? ” he asks me, unexpectedly. At first with a jolt I think he means the child inside me, and then regretfully I remember the fire that I claimed had burnt up my family in one night.
“You were at home?” he asks.
I nod.
“Did you try to put it out? ”
“Oh yes,” I say. What can I tell him?“It was early,” I murmur, putting my hand to my face. “Some of them were still asleep upstairs. I expect it was a small fire at first. I had no idea. There must have been a spark . . .” I falter. “And the heaped wool caught quickly at the bottom of the stairs.” Mr. Blacklock looks at me.
I stop. I can’t go on, and I fold my arms over my stomach in a kind of agony of untruth and missing home. It feels as though I have killed them with my story.