The Book of Fires

17
Mrs. Nott the laundrywoman has not come again, though she was due, and there is a great pile of crumpled dirty sheets to wash.
“Mrs. Nott is undependable, but so is everyone, I find,” Mary Spurren grumbles, scrubbing at the linen, with her big head nodding. “Time and time again, turns out you can’t put your trust in no one nor nothing. Except for death, that is,” she adds, looking over at Mrs. Blight’s new pamphlet lying on the table. “Wouldn’t catch me sitting idle with my feet up on the fender.”
I say nothing.
“Death always turns up in the end,” she goes on. She works up the lather with a grim satisfaction. “No doubt better that we never see it coming.”
“I would like to,” I say. “I would much rather see my fate approaching.”
“Not a chance of that,” she points out. And despite the steamy warmth filling the kitchen I feel a shiver passing over me, as though her words presage something unpleasant.

Mrs. Blight does not eat heartily for several days. She has complained all morning of a worm in her tooth, holding her jaw from time to time between rolling the pastry and stoking the fire. “I needs seeing to,” she grumbles.
“Mr. Blacklock will not have a doctor set foot inside the house,” Mary Spurren declares.
“Not even if she pays for it?” I query.
She shakes her head with vehemence. “I know he won’t.”
So Mrs. Blight sends me out to the apothecary to buy some proprietary drops she thinks will stop the ache. I don’t mind—perhaps today will be the day I catch sight of Lettice Talbot.
As I walk I think how Mrs. Blight’s teeth are black and yellow at the edges. I am afraid of their looseness, that one day a tooth will turn up in the soup or under a piece of buttered sea kale; a tough, yellowing lump like a bad nut. Lettice Talbot’s teeth were good and white, I think, pushing open the door. The air filling the apothecary’s shop is pungent with chemicals, herbs, oils of plants and minerals, dried unrecognizable bits of things.
Mr. Jennet is busy standing on a step to dust big glass bottles on a high shelf. He peers through the rounds of his spectacles and grunts, and makes me wait. The shoulders of his frock coat are chalky with powder from his ancient wig.
On the counter I see something in a jar labeled Liquid Bloom of Roses. I remember Lettice Talbot’s perfect rosiness and wonder whether this was how she made herself so beautiful. There is some part of me that would like to try it for myself; if only I could make myself a little prettier, Cornelius Soul’s attention might be more keen. I must do all that I can, if I am to make sure that he becomes obliged to marry me. And as Mr. Jennet’s back is turned I pick up a little gallipot and prize up the china lid to see inside.
He will not see, I think, and furtively I press my finger into it. A red paste, the consistency of goose grease, lines the inside. I rub a smear of it onto the skin of my hand above the knuckles; it does not smell at all of roses, but has a cheap fattiness to it. It is not how I imagined. Disappointed, I put the gallipot back upon the counter and try to rub the Bloom of Roses off. It is tacky and persistent; it spreads about until my stained hands look like the butcher boy’s at Saul Pinnington’s. When at last Mr. Jennet climbs stiffly down and turns to serve me, I tuck them into my skirts and put what Mrs. Blight owes to him upon account.
Walking home I feel branded like a strayed sheep marked with ochre, or as though I were sporting evidence of a careless, vulgar murder I had committed somewhere. It takes a great amount of soapy scrubbing to get it off when I am back inside the house, and even then faint dots of scarlet seem to be embedded in my pores like tiny, gory freckles.

Mrs. Blight’s temper improves once she has swallowed twenty drops of what I bring, and her conversation becomes rambling and animated for some time.
“My husband was in the business of needles and pins.” She leans on the mixing bowl unsteadily and makes sure I’m listening.
“Three children I bore him. All dead by four or five.” The chicken sizzles on the spit. “By the third death I thought perhaps that is enough of trying now, and then Mr. Blight suffered an apoplectic fit and expired where he stood, so that were a dead loss all round. My father put the blame upon my marrying into unsound blood, and told me Blight by name means blight by nature.” She looks oddly small, her fleshy hands pressed together.
“So I took the imbursement that the Guild had given out as Mr. Blight had overseen the drawing-out of pins and needles for twenty-seven years. He would have gone round the world seven times over should those pins have been laid end to end, but I may have recalled that figure wrongly.” She shakes her head and hiccups sadly. “He had such a terrible fondness for the chocolate house on Lombard Street. Then I had attentions put upon me by a wax-chandler by the name of Thomas Veare, or was it Veasey? By then I was accustomed to putting the shape and shine and victuals back into other persons’ houses, and had no cause to sit about amongst the deadwood of my own effects, knowing what glumness that can bring. He looked abjectly shocked at my refusal, and then a hard smile froze up his face, and he went away. My father said I was a wrong-headed fool, and then the next week, dying himself of a sharp blow to the back of his neck on the way home from trading, he could have no more to say on the subject. On my birthday that were, the eleventh of May.”
“And they say it’s the thirteenth that’s unlucky for some,” Mary Spurren remarks.
“But I’ll not reach my dotage neither,” Mrs. Blight adds. “My plan being to eat so many pies that I die comfortably of being fat.” And she opens her toothy mouth wide and laughs loudly at the ceiling. “Don’t listen to my tales, not without salt, nor common sense of your own.” She glances at the little clock on the mantelpiece above the fire, slides the chicken from the spit with a flourish and lays it to rest on a warm plate. She claps her hands, “Knives, Mary, knives, knives!” Mrs. Blight cuts the bird up neatly until it is an oily pile of cooked meat.
“Life is brief, Agnes Trussel, and I spends it wisely,” she says. I nod and swallow. Why do I feel that already I have squandered mine? The fluttering sound of the clock over the fireplace is like a creature caught in a trap.
But I agree because I have to keep her sweet, I am sure of it. I know that, on a whim, she could cause me damage.


I return to the workshop to charge rockets in the afternoon, and find that Mr. Blacklock has been making something while I was gone. He is not in the room, nor is Joe Thomazin. But there is a mess of spilt powder and chemicals left over the bench, as though something in the center of all the activity had been snatched away when it was done. I am put in mind of the ring of feathers about the place of a killing by a hawk: a perfect circle of plucked, blooded quills and under-feathers and plumage. What was he doing?
At the back of the workshop I see there is apparatus propped up on a trestle. A group of new glass vessels strapped together, bulbous and gleaming, and a clean pipkin. They have not been used for anything.
I set up the spindle and pick up the drift. My sides ache with bending and scrubbing. It is calm in the workshop, and my thoughts can roam freely. A draft blows in under the door to the street. When I knock at the drift with the mallet, the thing inside me flutters my belly as though feeling its strike. Surely it must be time for Cornelius Soul to come!
If my plan fails, what kind of life would this creature have, if I should carry it to term? I would lose my position here at Blacklock’s instantly. I think of myself walking the streets, taking poor lodging in a St. Giles tenement or begging at Seven Dials. I think of a gray, dry scarcity of work, a thin suckling child strapped to my chest.
I make myself picture its big eyes hollow with hunger. The skin on its head as tight and as fleshless as the shell of a nut. Its brittle fingers too weak to grip at me. No suck in its mouth, nor maybe milk enough to suck at.
And then a bloodied cough would come, or flux, and it would ebb away in a tiny agony.
I put down the drift and rock back and forth as though this could make an ounce of difference to the thing inside me. That would be my doing, my weakness causing so much pain. I close my eyes tight shut and press hard upon the lids until I see stars and colors flashing there. Oblivion is surely better. Perhaps death in this case for something so small and helpless would be warm and dark. Not death, I think, just not being born.

That night my anxiety is tenfold in the dark when I blow the out candle beside the bed. I can hear mice gnawing at something in the cupboard under the washstand, and cannot sleep.
There is a place in the north of town, in the open fields above Gray’s Inn, where some unwed mothers can desert their children. At first on hearing this from Mrs. Spicer in the natural course of conversation I grew hopeful and asked her more about it, tentatively, so as not to rouse suspicion.
“They say that the mother’s character is scrutinized, so that no bad blood can unsettle the tidy atmosphere,” she said at once. I kept my face turned away and put my hand into a sack of dried meal on the floor as if testing the quality. “They say that only one child in a hundred or more is admitted to this hospital, but when they are, that it is good.” I brushed my fingers free of dust and went straight from the shop.
I walked up over Holborn Bridge and up Gray’s Inn Lane, right to the new gates, and peered inside before the porter saw me loitering. A group of boys in brown serge coats were running on the grass. After a while I could not see them anymore, as my eyes were filled with tears that would not stop, and so I turned away. I could feel it in my bones that this would never happen to the child I carry. It is too great a risk to wait for. I am not of good character, as I have stolen money from a corpse. I am a criminal, and should that subsequently come to light, would they turn out the child? I do not know.
Thief, thief, a voice in my head whispers, over and over.
There is a glimmer of light outside, as though a scrap of moon were being blown about, and a breeze is twisting at the fabric of the curtains. Everything is unsteady. Sometimes it feels as though there were eyes at every crack. You will be found out, the voice says, an icy whisper. In the darkness I reach under my mattress and touch the coins where I keep them at night. They are still there, as hard as stones, as cold as death.
It is almost too late.
There is no time, no time for indecision. My head hurts with it.
I turn and turn on my bed through the night, trying to find rest. I hear Mr. Blacklock slam the front door when he returns. I hear the watchman on the street outside call three and then four o’clock before I sleep.
“Cease to be,” I advise it in a whisper, rubbing at my belly over and over.