The Book of Fires

22
It makes me proud to see the stack of rockets growing in the open crate. Mr. Blacklock allowed me to finish the batch and I’d held my breath as he examined one or two, turning them over in his hands and peering through his eyeglasses to check for flaws or weaknesses, but he gave a short grunt of approval and went out to Child’s to meet with Mr. Torré. It appears he trusts me with more tasks as each week passes; increasingly he lets me work unsupervised, once he has shown me what to do. I have a good memory for all the chemicals. Each name is like a taste in my mouth that I cannot forget.
Beginning a new order, I choose two-ounce cases, set them ready and pick up the drift.
And this time, when I hear the great noise of the knock at the door, my hands become still over the filling-box. I hold my breath. We are not expecting anyone. Suppose it is important business, and Mr. Blacklock finds out that I did not answer it. What would he think? The knock comes again, a brisk, insistent kind of rapping, and now I put down the drift and step down the corridor toward the hall as though I were tugged by invisible string.
I open the door.
I can hardly hear what the man is saying. It is bright outside, so that I have to squint to see at first.
It is a constable, in a scruffy overcoat.
“I have come for an Agnes Trussel,” he is demanding. He passes his baton from hand to hand. “Will I find her here? ”
“Yes,” I say, faintly.
“She is summoned on a matter of urgency concerning”—he puts the baton under his arm and consults his pocket-book—“coinage and unlawful goods.” The skin on his nose is burnt and peeling, as if he had been in the sun without his hat.
“Unlawful goods? Coinage, you say?” I have been waiting so long for this question that I should be practiced, hardened to the thought of hearing it at last. He does not mention any warrant. My thief’s fingers grip the door handle. They do not fly to press at Mrs. Mellin’s coins, hidden in my stays.
“Let me fetch my shawl,” I say, and then in a daze I go with the constable.
This is it, I think. It is happening now, and I am found out. It is Mrs. Blight’s doing, surely it is.
And with discovery comes something of release, so that I am very calm and unperturbed, as though I were floating above myself as we go swiftly down the street. I hear my steps tapping on the cobbles. The constable swings his baton at his side, and whistles through his rotten teeth. He does not grip my arm cruelly, as I thought he would.
Will I go straight to jail? Perhaps this is my last walk in the sunshine before truth shows up the darkness of my fate. I watch my shadow running smoothly down there, ahead of me. Even my shadow does not care. What is that noise? It is my breath, quick and shallow, like the agonized breath of the mouse I once found caught just by the tail in the trap at home in the back chamber. We’d heard its squeaking from the kitchen, it was so loud, and in I went. Its tail proved mostly unharmed, but the mouse sat unmoving even though I held the rusty lever free for it to run, its sides going in and out with panting.
“Did you flatten its wretched skull with the shovel?” my mother had called from the kitchen, clanging the spoon on the side of the pot. “How I hate those little beasts when they dirty my flour.”
“Yes, yes, all dead,” I’d called, holding it in my palm to feel its quickening softness for a moment before I tipped it, scuttling, from the open window. I knew it was foolish. Outside in the hedge the catkins shivered from the alder like loose little fingers hanging down.
I am too soft.
“Er . . .” The constable’s rough voice breaks into my stupor. “Perhaps you should clear up . . . er, describe . . . before we arrive at the roundhouse, what you know of Mr. Soul’s hand in this affair?”
I stop dead in my tracks and blink at him.
“Mr. Soul? Dear God! None!” And I see a doubt flicker over his sunburnt face when he hears that.
“What has he to do with this? ” I ask, bewildered. “Why are you taking me? I have to say, I do not know what you are talking about.” He clears his throat.
“You are called by Justice Philips to speak for Mr. Cornelius Soul, to speak up for his character.”
“His character!” I say.


The roundhouse is filthy and stinks of urine. The constable tells me where to stand. When my eyes are accustomed to the dinginess, I see him addressing the ear of a bulky man in a satin frock coat, whom I assume to be the justice. Cornelius Soul is there, and another man I do not know.
“Remind me again, Mr. Constable, what is the problem that we have before us?” the justice bellows.
“My name’s Williams, sir, Tom Williams,” the constable mutters peevishly. The judge has large, grayish lips that he presses together when others speak.
“Gentleman here, Mr. James Smith, Your Honor,” the constable says, and even as he indicates the man I do not know, I begin to have a creeping sense that I have come across him somewhere before. “Has a claim against Mr. Cornelius Soul with regard to some counterfeited currency. We’ve been through this matter all morning, sir,” he reminds him quietly.
“Yes, yes, man,” the justice says. “But this woman stood before us.” He waves a silk handkerchief toward me, and I smell his musty odor of stale sweat.
“Agnes Trussel, sir,” I say, when directed. I am dizzy with fear. “Of Blacklock’s Pyrotechny, off Basinghall Street.” My voice sounds far away, like someone else’s, and the lump in my stays, where the coins lie, feels burning hot.
The justice raises his eyebrow. “John Blacklock’s place. The fireworks man. I like those toys. Saw some . . . huh! When was it? ”
“Maybe last week, Your Honor?” the constable ventures. “At the—”
“Stick to the point, man.” The constable looks at his shoes.
“How well would you say that you know this Mr. Soul?” the justice asks me.
I think of his fingers pressing my cheeks, of his hand sidling about my waist unbidden.
“I know him well enough,” I say. “He . . . comes to the premises with frequency.”
The justice presses the handkerchief to his mouth and coughs into the silk. “And would you vouch for his hitherto good character?” His large stomach growls again.
“I would, sir.” I do not dare to glance at Cornelius Soul’s face when I add, “He is a sober and industrious man, sir. I have never heard of a dishonesty connected with him.”
The justice stifles a hiccup, and I see suddenly that he is fairly in liquor, though he conceals it well.
The man called Smith spits on the floor. “You should search her!” he demands. “There’ll be evidence against him on her, I know there’ll be, if you’d only find it!”
I have to stand on my leg heavily to stop it shaking, because I have just realized that he is the man with the round, stubbled face who stared at me so oddly in the coffeehouse. Why did he follow me?
“What kind of evidence can you be meaning, James Smith?” Cornelius Soul mocks him. “You do not know! You have nothing on me, nothing—and you know it. They have searched my lodgings and found nothing.” He turns to the justice. “This man clearly has a private campaign against me. What is his motive? Perhaps, being made a cuckold of so lately, he labors under the misapprehension that I am the cock who is pleasuring his wife so rigorously.”
The justice snorts.
Cornelius Soul points provokingly at the man. “You! Known as Crooked Jim! It ought to be your own premises on Little Wild Street they should be searching with their warrants, on quite some other matter.”
“I’ll get you, Soul!” the man shouts. “You enrage me!” He is frothing at the mouth. “I’ll make sure you piss vinegar before the year’s out, you son of a bitch. I’ve got my eye on you and your friends. I have for months.” And he points at me. “Even watching where she works to get some dirt on you. Bold as brass up to the door, and you was lucky no one answered.”
Like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, something forms on the face of the justice. He holds up a finger.
“Suddenly you speak on naming terms, when I distinctly heard you say that you were unacquainted with this man before this incident? I sense a loosening of what is what.” He draws out a watch with difficulty from his pocket. “And time is short today. They are making a fool of the law, which is inadmissible,” the justice booms. “Dinnertime is pressing upon us, Mr. Constable. I have an appointment I must not overlook, and do not want more blasted paperwork.”
He clears his throat.
“I sense a personal gripe in the bowels of the prosecutor here. This will not come to trial, unless costs are no object. Mr. Smith,” he demands, “can you face an acquittal, should it reach the next assizes, man?”
The man spits on the floor.
“No response from the prosecutor, sir,” says the constable.
“As I thought.” The justice hiccups again. “Pray, how has this come so far in its proceeding, Mr. Constable? ” he asks testily.
The constable sets his jaw. “My job is to apprehend those to whom I am directed as digressers, sir, not to judge the merits of a case. I present them swiftly, and take a pride in it. And the name’s Williams, sir,” he adds hopelessly.
“Your cause has failed for today, Mr. Smith,” the justice calls across to the man with the round face, and he goes to the door and flaps his hand in our direction. “Take them away, Mr. Constable.” With deliberation he pushes his hat onto his periwig, and turns about. “I do not want to see any one of you again, unless a case is watertight. Will there be a carriage to be had from here? Damn these delays, this city runs so poorly.”
I am surprised to hear Cornelius Soul speak up as we come out into the brightness of the street. He edges closer to the justice.
“Need any fowling powder, my lord, at a special price?” he flatters him, with a wink at me. I can hardly believe it. “South coast quality fineness, this lot just in, fresh as a baby, for your sporting requirements.”
“Get out of here, man,” the justice says.
“Lead shot?”
“Are you a half-wit? ” the justice barks. I pull at Cornelius Soul’s arm to come away.
“Mr. Soul, this is a serious matter,” I say quietly. “Try to be sensible.” And thank God but a hackney carriage rolls up and the justice heaves himself in.
“Westminster!” we hear him bellow importantly, and he raps at the floor with his cane. As he drives away, the man Smith shouts from across the street.
“Damn your eyes, Soul. I’ve been following you. You’ll slip up soon enough and I’ll have you tucked up yet! I’ll make it my business.” And he turns away down an alley and is gone. What can Cornelius Soul have done to make this man dislike him so?
We are outside the Prince of Orange, and the smell of smoke and stale sweet beer drifts out as a man pushes his way inside.
“It was worse than a pigpen in there, in the roundhouse,” I say, my legs weak with relief. My fingers press at my stays to make sure the coins are secure.
“You want to see the inside of Newgate, if you think that is bad,” Cornelius Soul says.
“I do not want to see Newgate.”
“It is a mistake to have enemies,” he admits ruefully.
“It must be,” I say. That at least is one problem I do not have.
“Drink a dram with me, Miss Trussel,” Cornelius Soul suggests, touching my shoulder.
“I should get back,” I say, hesitating, and he shrugs his velvet coat and takes a step closer to the tavern’s open door.
“And that’s it, is it!” I say, nettled, now that the immediate danger seems to be gone. “You’ll just amble in there and leave me to return home at my own pace with no protection. Will you not even say sorry to me for all the trouble you have caused today? ”
“You would have come to no harm there in the roundhouse, Miss Trussel,” he says easily. “My clean little acquaintance in her neat working apron and fresh rosy cheeks come to save my bad character.”
“You do not know . . . me,” I blurt out, and stop myself. I nearly said, You do not know what I have to hide.
He grins as if he knows, but he does not. He lowers his voice, leans toward me and touches my chin lightly with his finger. “I would be obliged if you could refrain from mention of this matter to John Blacklock. He is a steadfast maverick, but I do not know if he would be tolerant of such . . . irregularities, inconclusive or otherwise.”
“He may get to hear of it,” I warn, holding his gaze. “Though not from this mouth.” There is a shrill mew of a kite overhead. “We are always watched by some sharp eye somewhere, Mr. Soul.”
“Let me make it up to you soon, Miss Trussel,” he says as I turn away and go down the street. And he calls out suddenly:
“I am indebted to you, indebted, do you hear!” And I realize that he is right, and I cannot help but smile to myself about it. It is something in my favor.
I walk alone back to the house and come to no harm, as he predicted.

That night I heave my unbalanced bulk into bed and lie back, almost choking with the weight upon me now. In my worn cotton shift I look surely like a great sow, though when I lift my shift to my chin and turn to study my bare blind swollen belly in the cracked and spotted looking glass upon the washstand, it could not be more nakedly a shocking human sight, smooth and ripe inside my skin. I see that a faint, dark line that I did not have before is creeping up from the base of my belly. I try to remember whether my mother carried such a mark when she was bearing children, but I cannot. I look and look. It is not vanity that makes me stare so concentrated at myself I am trying to believe that this thing is happening to me, as I have realized that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot take it in.
And how sharply alone I feel when I do that, staring at my own shape. I do not even know myself now: the self I knew, was sure of knowing, being lost behind me in the past, somewhere in the hills perhaps, still running up the slope with Ann that hot afternoon not long before she left, flinging ourselves down on the short nibbled grass at the top of the ridge, at the top of the Downs where I belong.
Even the air was blissful that particular day, just before the trouble started. The sheep were lazy and made scarcely a noise. The September sun was hot and baking the grasses and thyme and the flat creeping spans of thistles by our heads. At first I thought that there were no birds singing, and then I heard a lark, winding the tidy thread of its song up and down between heaven and earth. It was higher than us. We lay with our mouths open, drinking the sun in while we could.
“What are you afraid of, Agnes? What thoughts make you shrink in terror when you have them? ”
I scratched my head. The blue sky went up and up above us.
“I am afraid of the dark, and of the Devil,” I said, turning and laughing at her for asking such a question. “Why, what thing scares you? ”
Ann said, “I am afraid of childbed. I am afraid of being married, and of being someone’s wife.” She picks a stem of sorrel and twirls it about before she chews it.
“Mother is,” I said. “Somebody’s wife.”
“I know,” was all she said.
“I would like a shop,” she went on, surprisingly. “Like Mrs. Langley’s shop in Pulborough, selling ribbons and buttonhooks and yards of muslin.” I didn’t need to reply. We lay there in the sunshine on our backs, comfortable and knowing that this could never be.
“What would you like to do, in time?” Ann rolled over suddenly onto her belly and looked at me, shading her eyes against the glare of the sun.
“I don’t know,” I said, sitting up and looking toward the haze where the sea was a strip of blue in the distance. “I cannot see the future. There is no point in trying to; it will never be as one imagines. What dreams can women have in this life that are not battered down by experience?” I laid my fingers on the warm prickle of grasses, on the flat of the earth.
“Think harder,” she urged. “Picture yourself there, ahead in the unknown, doing something—what are you doing? You are so clever, Agnes, you could do anything.”
I tried this, to please her.
“No. Nothing.” I laughed aloud. “It is blank. And why are you asking me ? ”
“No proper reason,” she said, looking away.
A cloud went over the sun then, and something of the warmth of the afternoon was already gone. We picked ourselves up, brushed off the bits of mosses and made our way down the steep slope to the cottage.
At suppertime my father asked abruptly if Ann would share her intentions with the rest of the family. I had no notion of what he meant. I looked at Ann. She lifted her head and looked at the back of the room. I stared at her. There was a long red scratch on the side of her face that I hadn’t noticed earlier.
She said loudly, “I’m going away. On Monday. I am going to work at Wiston House.”
“You can’t!” I said, appalled.
Her face looked away into the fire, so that I could no longer see the scratch across her cheek.
My spoon slammed down on the trestle.
“But you did not . . . you did not say!” I stood up. “All afternoon, it was so sunny, and you did not say!” I tried to keep my fury from bubbling up. Fury that Ann was leaving me, that she was able.
“How could you hide that from me?” I shouted out, like an idiot, and looked toward my mother in despair. I jabbed my finger at Ann, but still she would not turn her face to me.
“I don’t know why you should be so upset now, Aggie love,” my mother said, almost so I couldn’t hear. “These things do happen. That’s how it is. Finish your broth.” She nodded at my half-finished bowl and wiped at spat-out broth on Hester’s chin with a piece of rag.
Hester started to cry, her mouth square with misery.
“You’re scaring the babies, Agnes,” my brother Ab said. I could tell by his voice he was angry, too. William’s eyes were huge in his head. I was ashamed. After all, I should know that nothing I could say would make a difference. The round spoon swam before me, and the flames of the fire behind grew huge and wobbling and dazzled me as I blinked back the tears and stifled them.
“You’ll get those beans in tomorrow from the bottom field,” my father commented into the silence that followed, picking at his teeth with his thumbnail.
“Beans?” I said.
“That’s right.”
“But it is a Friday!” I cried, and my voice shook. “The afternoon I have my lesson.”
My father shrugged that he did not care. “They’ll not keep, not in this heat.”


That night when we were laid down on the ticking and trying to sleep, Ann’s fingers reached out and looked for mine in the dark. How cold they were, which made her seem already far away. Selfishly, because I did not know what else to do, I pulled my hand from hers and did not speak. My unsaid thoughts rose up inside and choked me. I was afraid for her. I was afraid for all of us. I was afraid of having nobody to speak to in the way I spoke to her.
The white, fat moon shone down. The sheep bleated on the hillsides as though the brightness it was causing could be day.
Still I could not rest.
Later I turned and whispered out how sorry I was, but I knew she was sleeping and could not hear me. Her breathing was slow and even, like a vast gentle wind moving through grasses.


I am glad to go to the workshop the next morning to occupy myself in breaking stars and laying the rough little cubes to dry. Mr. Blacklock has tucked his order book into his waistcoat and gone out to Mr. Torré’s. “There has been a change in the firing schedule for the display at St. James’s, and there are details to discuss,” he had said as he left.
“A change, sir?” I asked, looking up.
He coughed. “Some minor points. A particular addition,” he said inattentively, looking for his hat.
“An addition?”
“Something over and above what we had agreed.” He presses the hat on. “What you might call . . . progress.”
I can’t help but smile in excitement when the door closes behind him. He must mean the red shower that he mentioned as if in passing! Perhaps he plans to reveal his achievement publicly.
I almost forget my hurt that he has not shared his endeavor with me. The stars on the drying rack in front of me take on a new significance; they seem part of something greater than they did yesterday when I mixed them. They are a part of Mr. Blacklock’s quest.

Mrs. Blight had been in good cheer that morning over breakfast. She had just finished reading the latest printed pamphlet of The Ordinary of Newgate, which depicts the dying words of those faced with their fate at Tyburn. She’d read the conclusion aloud to me with relish. It rarely happens, that a Man who will dare to be wicked does escape, though Punishment may not immediately tread upon his Heels.
“Have a loan of it,” she’d said, looking at me closely. “Go on.” And then pressed it upon me as I went to the workshop.
Mr. Blacklock is out.
When Cornelius Soul brings his delivery, it is the first chance that we have had to speak at liberty since his unfruitful arrest. He puts down his box of gunpowder, and winks at me as he hands me the invoice, as though we have a new conspiracy together now.
“That man bore a grudge against you,” I say, in a low voice lest someone should overhear.
“Jim Smith has enough temper to share out between five men,” he replies cheerfully.
“What did you do to provoke him like that? ”
“He hates to see my growing success,” Cornelius Soul says, with a shrug. “I’ve known him for years.” He goes to the window and looks out, up and down the street. “I detest the smugness of a wealthy merchant as much as any man, but why should Jim Smith’s aversion to my steps to prosperity call a halt to them so easily? We should use every trick in the book to get where we can be.”
“Then you are one of those that you despise,” I say, going on with my grinding.
“I am not a wealthy merchant yet, and I will not take their notion of the law, which exists to protect property over human welfare.” The stove ticks in the distance at the back of the workshop; my pestle crunches the mixture softly inside the mortar. “And I do not feel a moral duty to abide by it,” he says.
I stop the pestle and lean on it. “So you would forgive a breach of the law,” I say, my face hidden from him, “if it was not a crime against a person’s being.”
“I do not hold with violence,” he agrees. “But other crimes? They’re altered by who does the telling. One person’s crime could be another’s justice.”
“Isn’t it just to do with finding out the truth, and measuring it against the law?” I say.
“But the law itself is made by individuals, each with his own motives.”
“These laws are ancient! ”
“And their interpretation is as various as the times they occupy, Miss Trussel.”
I put the pestle down. “My father had no wish to give his strips of land up to the landowner that bought them, but he had no choice in the face of the law,” I admit. “Misery and damage has been done to many families like our own, though no crime was committed.”
Cornelius Soul picks up Mrs. Blight’s pamphlet, propped open on the bench, and flicks through it. He stops at a page and flourishes it at me.
“To kill a man of nineteen, watch him swing by the neck, with the ghastly strength of moral certainty. Or the act of trying to steal a bite to eat. Which is the more chilling? ” he asks. I do not need to reply.
“If the poor had the vote, things would be different,” he adds, then breaks off and laughs. “You must stop me, Miss Trussel, if you find me tedious. Besides,” he says, winking, “a man amounts to more than just his politics.”
“Does he? ” I say. “I am not so sure. His core is his beliefs.”
Cornelius Soul grins. “The change must come from beneath—like a rising tide.”
I count out twenty wobbling drops of oil from the end of the pipette into the mortar, and then frown.
“But how can the poor have a will to win, Mr. Soul, when with every step they know they have not eaten enough bread to even carry them strongly to the end of the street?” I say very quietly, remembering what I saw when I came to the city. “At home we wouldn’t keep cattle the way I’ve seen people living here. My brother Ab would be appalled. Bellies yawning for food unless numbed with gin, and their children not growing or dead of neglect or sickness. Dignity of work is not a choice they have been offered.”
“I had not realized how very angry you are, Miss Trussel,” he says, as if surprised.
“I’ve got eyes in my head as I walk about,” I say. He does not reply. I hope he is not disappointed in me. Our conversation lulls, and he flicks his fingers at the tools hanging from the wire at my bench, so that they clink and judder.
I try again.
“You speak so roundly of how you are part of an upsurge from the city’s underbelly, but if you succeed, won’t you just be like them? ” I spill some sulfur as I measure more scoops into the pan of the beamscales.
“And you disapprove,” he says, and something has changed. I have said too much.
I look up and try to catch his bright eye, but he will not look at me. Out in the yard Mary Spurren tips a stream of greasy water from the bowl into the drain, wipes her wrist upon her apron and goes back inside the scullery. A bird calls in the linden tree.
“I am undecided,” I say at length, trying to be honest. Then more words come out of my mouth before I have time to check them. “I do not know . . . what kind of man you are,” I say, as though it matters.
He turns to face me.
“You are very direct,” he says. He is not laughing, though I wish that he would. His gaze is level, but the blueness of his eyes is somehow shielded by their narrowness, as though he does not want me to know his thinking.
We hear the front door open and steps coming down the corridor, and John Blacklock strides into the workshop.
“I see you take the risk of leaving your premises unattended far more of late, Blacklock.” Cornelius Soul takes up his tone of banter promptly.
Mr. Blacklock does not reply at first. He takes off his hat and puts it on the nail.
“Indeed,” he says, coolly.
When Cornelius Soul takes his leave this time, he kisses his own hand and presses my cheek roughly with it. I look round hastily, but Mr. Blacklock does not see, thank God for that. It was not a caress but a challenge, I think, as though his fingertips have branded me as punishment for what I said.
My cheeks burn hotly. I have a sudden gape of shame and dismay opening inside me. How do I dare to hold forth on principles or moral ground, I with my stash of stolen guineas tucked in my stays even as I sit before him, and the lies in my heart spreading out like a canker. No, he is right to grab his chances; it is each man for himself, though it should not be. My head reels with complication.
“If that man is bothering you, you need not engage him in debate,” Mr. Blacklock comments dryly.
“He was not,” I say.
“But I see you are some way behind with your quota today,” he adds, with a glance at the half-filled crate of rockets over by the filling-box, as he has every right to do. My guilty feeling worsens.