The Book of Fires

Cyphers

16
My weaver’s hands are changing. The nails are blackening and the tips are sore from touching the dry chemicals. There are painful cracks beginning to open up between my fingers. At first I tried to work with the great leather gloves that sat upon the filling bench, but they are large and stiff, the size of a man’s hand. They make me clumsy. And so instead I let my bare fingers do the work rapidly; I can fill twenty casings before the bell on the thin steeple of St. Mary the Virgin strikes midday. At night I rub yellow salve into my skin before I sleep. But I find I no longer suffer waves of sickness on rising each morning, as I had before. Indeed I begin to feel quite well again, as though a fresh kind of vigor had taken hold in me.


It is the darkest part of the year.
Christmas Day passes with little note, and although I hear the bells calling the faithful to church all over London, I do not go myself. Mrs. Blight cooks plum porridge. The fires draw quickly. At first it is too cold to snow heavily. Fine, powdered flakes fall outside the house, a bitter wind scuttering them about. When the wind drops, the snow ticks on the ground—as embers tick as they cool in the grate when a fire has gone out.
If we sit too far from the stove in the workshop our breath drifts in clouds about us.
“I know about charcoal, sir,” I point out, when Mr. Blacklock lays some pieces on the bench. “Men take good green wood and let it burn slowly in a clamp of soil and on the fifth day or thereabouts, they stop the gaps and smother the hot coals where they lie.”
“That is so,” Mr. Blacklock says. “And it chars quietly by itself, the contained fire eating at the pithy underwood until it is as brittle and as strong as glass. It is the fuel in gunpowder.”
“Up in the Weald the charcoal men use hazel from the coppices, also willow and sometimes alder,” I say. I do not add that you can see small white-bellied birds, tree-creepers, inching up the alders by the Stor. The leaves of alder are stiff and make a dense kind of shade, so that a river beneath them flows without warmth or sunshine. The wind hisses through alders. The leaves of hazel are as thick and napped as cloth. But they are more sparse on the branches, and allow for sunshine to break through and dapple the woodland floor.
There is a big warren on the edge of the hazel coppice under Black-patch Hill. My father had been known to trap wild rabbit in those woods on his journey back from over Findon way, his sharp billhook strapped to his back.
And a thought comes to me: it is said that, at the rarest of times, a rabbit who has conceived of babies can absorb her young back into herself, when it is too cold, when food is scarce or conditions are too harsh for her to nurture them with adequacy. No waste. There is something clean about this, their tiny unsuitable souls dissolving back into the warmth and darkness of her body.
Outside the window the snow spins in dizzying columns, like icy dancing flecks of flies. When Joe Thomazin comes close to me to bring a box of cases, I see he is shivering.
“Are you cold? ” I ask him, and put out my hand to touch his face. He winces, as though he expected me to hurt him. I look at him in consternation, but he has gone to the stove.
“He does not like to be touched,” Mr. Blacklock says, though his back is turned. I remember what Mr. Blacklock told me, outside his earshot, when I arrived.
“His mother, no doubt being a tippler, a whore or an unfortunate, gave up Joe Thomazin to the whim and obligation of the parish,” he says. “And never returning for him, he was deserted. Or perhaps she is dead.” Mr. Blacklock shrugs as he says this, although spreading his hands as if to bear the great weight of his not knowing. “Joe Thomazin knows about endurance. Most parish children do not achieve the age of six, but die a wretched, sickly death for want of milk or cleanliness.”
I glance over to the stove, where Joe Thomazin squats on his heels picking up bits of fallen coals with his grubby fingers. How small he looks. And he has not forgiven me for hiding my secret from him.
“Stars, for instance,” Mr. Blacklock says, breaking into my thoughts, “can be improved with charcoal.”
“What are they like, sir? ”
“Globes of light, little planets of sharp fire. Stars with far-reaching tails of lengthy duration are achieved with an excess of charcoal. They burn out slowly, gravity pulling them down in a trail of amber, making a drooping shape, like the branches of willows reaching toward water.” He shows me some already finished.
“They just look like broken pastilles,” I say, holding one up.
“There is much yet that you do not know about,” he says, and his eyes glitter so blackly as they meet mine that I cannot look away. “Fire so white it hurts to look at it. Sparks like ice. Burning grains of fire, plumes, fountains. Our fire is like the noble metals at the very birth of their existence, the hot mouths of the gods spitting gold and silver into life. We can only make white fire, tinted with warmth or coldness as we please, but its range of purity is so rare, so transforming, that these limitations do not matter.” His dark face flashes with joy. I have never seen him smile like that before. It must be because at last his burn is healing and does not give him so much pain. “Maroons! Gerbes! Metallic rain! Cascades! Bengal lights! Tourbillions! Serpents!” The thing inside me that I cannot name seems to move about in excitement as he speaks.
I know about serpents, though. Up on the Downs on a hot day the adders stretch out with their dry flanks panting as they soak up the sunshine. It is as well to be noisy as you step through the grasses, so that they slither away.
An adder’s fat is the cure for its poisonous bite, they say.
We stop at twelve to dine. It is Mrs. Blight’s day off, and in the kitchen Mary Spurren has let the fire go out, so that the sweep could clean the chimney, and he has just packed up his brushes and gone.
“That lowers my spirits,” says Mary Spurren, staring at it gloomily. “Nothing colder than a fire that is out.” She is right. It is a sobering prospect.
She cuts at the cold mutton she has taken from the meat safe.
A fire that is out is a desolate space in the grate. Mrs. Mellin’s fire had been out for days when I came upon it. I don’t know if the fire was a lit and blazing comfort when she died, warming Mrs. Mellin’s body at the very point when her heart gripped her in a squeeze of its own choosing and clutched itself to death, or if she sat before a dwindling smoky heap, uncomfortable as the chill of winter settled already in her bones.
We eat the cold meat almost in silence. Mr. Blacklock’s cough has worsened with the weather. Mary Spurren has relit the hob and it roars with a yellow blaze of kindling.
“Know the date? ” Mary Spurren whispers to me when he has left the kitchen. “Epiphany was the day she died. ’Tis hard to say if he has taken note of it this year. Last year he drank a mortal quantity of brandy and slept in the study as he had no use of his legs. It’s the snow out there, reminds me of it.” She lifts the hod and tips on bigger coals.
“He has all her gowns and petticoats still.” Her voice is hoarse.
“Says he does not know what to do with them, but I think he keeps them all for company. I hear the lid of the chest banging shut from time to time, as though he’s been gazing at them in there, taking a look. Full up it is, that chest. Every bit of garment you can imagine, still there. All folded up flat, laid out regular with bits of herbs to keep out moths. A blue quilted petticoat. Stockings, hats, aprons, garters. Very neat, it is.”
“Poor man,” I say. Thick smoke pours up the chimney.
“I offered once I could package it up and take it to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital for charity. Plenty of folks would fall upon those things like they was starving for fabrics, good stuff like that. But he wouldn’t. Just shook his head as though he was only hearing half of what I said.” She shrugs her bowed shoulders. “None of my business, anyway. Got enough to do, no need to chaff away at other people’s matters.” She turns to the table and begins to scrape the bones and gristle from the plates into the stockpot.
Out in the hall Mr. Blacklock puts on his greatcoat and vanishes into the cold street for a good part of what is left of the day. An icy draft blows under the workshop door, and the coals in the stove glow red-hot. And Cornelius Soul, when he comes with his batch of mealpowder, does not seem inclined to leave. He warms his hands, then comes to lean on the bench beside me and fiddles with the tools.
“Saw Blacklock out there on the street,” he says, chuckling. “In a temper, was he? Scarcely raised his hand, though he saw me clear enough! ”
“Perhaps he did not feel like talking,” I say. “Or he was thinking of something else.”
“Bad-humored blood runs through his veins, more like,” he says. “Never knew a man so coiled up by his own ill-temper.”
“He is not a bad man,” I say.
“Irritable, discourteous . . .”
“It is four years today since Mrs. Blacklock died,” I say, to stop him.
“Ah,” he says.
He moves away toward the window to glance out and up the street, as if checking for something.
“How long has it been since you lost your father? You said he was a weaver,” I ask. If my plan is to work, I must be interested in everything he has to say.
He looks around. “Oh no, he is not lost,” he says, after a moment. “It is only his pride in his workmanship has deserted him. Down on the dock now, lumping coal. There seemed to be no overlie between the need for ready labor and his long-standing aptitude with warp and weft. He took what he could, and sold up the loom to pay off his overdue rent.”
He stills the tool in his palm, and adds, almost bitterly:
“Priced out by master weavers putting out to garner further income for themselves.”
He scratches at his scalp, at his fine silver hair that must be soft as feathers, and shakes his head. “I do not like it. I do not like the way the wind blows lately so much in the money spinners’ favor.”
He seems to brighten.
“Which is why”—he rubs his merchant’s hands together—“I am going to work the system. Employ what means I will to climb the ladder headed for the pinnacle. And if that means I bend the spine of the law a bit this way, a bit that, as I go, then so be it.”
He picks up my mallet again, and spins it about on the bench.
“You are a good girl,” he says, no longer serious. “You will think badly of me if I go on in this way!”
“It makes no difference how you talk.” I shrug. “And will you leave that mallet! I do not like the order of my tools all jumbled. I like to put out my hand and know what it will fall on, without looking.” I make sure he can see the smile I pretend to hide from him.
“You may be crisp with me,” he says, laughing as he puts the mallet back on its head and out of place on purpose. “But I’ll warn you, sharp Miss Trussel, that my soft heart beats on regardless. While you were at home, weaving your sackcloth with the cluck of chickens all about you, I was out there”—he sweeps a gesture at the window—“marshaling my certainty of freedom.”
I am busy with my task and do not look at him. “Worsted,” I counter. “It was worsted we made, a sturdy cloth.”
And he laughs and bends close to me before he makes his way toward the door. “I hear that you have quite a talent for this pyrotechnia,” he whispers in my ear.
“You heard that? Where? ” I ask him, disconcerted, but he just grins and goes out into the snow.

It is dark so early at this time of year. By four o’clock in the afternoon Mr. Blacklock has come back, resuming his place at the bench quite cheerfully, and Joe Thomazin brings in the lighted lamp for us to work by.
Mr. Blacklock is almost jovial tonight, like a man who has been thinking out some bother and has arrived at a solution. He takes a shilling from his waistcoat with his blackened fingers and directs Joe Thomazin to run to the pie shop and back.
“Why should we not eat supper here where we sit, as we are peckish and an immediate sating of appetite is perfectly possible!” he says. He claps his hands together to urge Joe Thomazin faster up the street. The pies Joe Thomazin brings back are hot and full of pork and potatoes. He takes one out to Mary Spurren in the kitchen, and I sit with Mr. Blacklock before the heat of the stove in pleasant silence. The meat juices have bubbled and gone to black sugar at the edge of the crusts. I lick my fingers and consider my good fortune.
“Palatable?” Mr. Blacklock asks, glancing round at me with the glint of a smile in his eye. “The world seems a more congenial place with a hot baker’s pie in one’s hands! They are peppery enough, aren’t they? Not like the bland, buttery rubbish that woman serves up.” He is tall beside me. What can have happened to make him so lively?
“There is something in the work of a chemist called Hales that I find interesting,” he says suddenly, as if reading my mind. “He measured the various airs he gained from the action of acid working on metals; he observed them carefully, though he has not concluded much from his inquiries.”
“What is an air, sir?”
“What Van Helmont would have called a gas is known latterly as air, and there are many different kinds. Fixed air, for example, given off when a substance such as charcoal burns.” He pauses, and then takes another bite. “This afternoon at Child’s there was talk of a man from Edinburgh doing significant work in this direction.”
I nod, and do not say a thing. A hopeful warmth that does not come from the stove is flooding through me. And looking up at him while he is talking, unexpectedly I see his neck, the skin beneath his jaw, and see it is firm and smooth above his collar. I realize that his age cannot be more than thirty-five; not as old as I had thought.
How he must miss his wife.
Up in my chamber that night I stare at the candle for quite some time, like someone in a dream. It is a round purple flame that rolls about, gathering itself inside the hot and waxy cavity. It is a little ball of purple flame that leaps up suddenly, like an idea, as it gathers strength and begins to suck the oils up from the wick.
I snuff the candle before I sleep. I am good at this, having had so much practice at it. If you lick your fingers and pinch the flame out quickly, there is no smoke.