The Book of Fires

23
The back door of the workshop is open to the morning air. The piping of birds drifts in, and a smell of soap from the drain outside the scullery where Mrs. Nott has emptied her buckets. It is almost May.
Mr. Blacklock has a copy of the London Evening Post from yesterday spread out on the bench, and is scanning the pages urgently for an account of the opening season’s fireworks at Marylebone Gardens. “How irksome!” he exclaims, finding it. Scornfully, he reads aloud:
“Prodigious height! Salutes that deafened the ear for hours subsequent! Glorious climactic eruption, when scarcely an inch of sky was left unemblazoned with brilliance!
“Why do these engineers inspire such hyperbole? ” he asks. “Why do they pander to it? Reducing as it does the art of pyrotechny to a common battering of senses, like a blast in a tin mine. There is no room for subtleties or shaping when expectations can be predicted thus.” A fly circles above his newspaper, then settles on it. He brushes it off impatiently. “Perfection of form should always take precedence over height or spread. Mere quantity is not impressive.” He snorts in distaste. “Would you not say?” he demands.
“I would not know, sir,” I remind him, surprised, “having never properly seen a firework.”
Mr. Blacklock says nothing to this, and his face is thoughtful, as if he had not thought of that for some time.
He closes the paper, puts it aside and leaves his bench. He goes to the back door of the workshop and stares out at the yard. Mary Spurren is hanging the washed linen out to dry in the warm air. I see him looking up at the blue sky as if to judge the weather, and then he returns inside, clears a space at his table and writes quickly on a sheet of paper, which he folds and seals and gives to Joe Thomazin to deliver to an address in the Haymarket, to the west of the city.
He brings down a bundle of lengths of deal, cut into thin sticks at the carpenter’s shop, and begins tying them to rockets from the box he puts at his feet.
“The display at St. James’s Square is to be fired tonight,” he mentions later.
“Tonight, sir? ” I say politely, choosing a hollow drift at the filling-box. Of course, the crates for that order were sent out last week.
“And I have sent word to Mr. Torré, to expect us to attend.” My drift pauses over the rocket’s mouth. “Most of the works he intends to fire have been supplied by Blacklock’s, and it would be of benefit to check the consistency in quality.” I swallow. Did I hear him correctly? Did he mean . . . ?
“His cascades are on the whole of exceptional class, and also something he is apt to call the Forge of Vulcan,” he goes on. “The display will be staged from a scaffold or machine outside the house, and the party in question, a private assembly, will enjoy the spectacle from within the ballroom darkened for the purpose. There would be no difficulty for us to gain entrance to the garden, to oversee the practical application of our product.”
“Do you mean, sir, that I am to go as well?” I ask, and hold my breath.
He coughs into his fist. “Can you walk a distance?” he demands. “If the evening remains pleasant we shall depart at eight o’clock on foot.” I squeeze my hands tightly together, so that he cannot see my fingers trembling.
“I can, sir.”
“Good, good.” He flicks through a box of dusty invoices and takes one out to read it. “Two hundred honorary rockets, eighteen Caduceus, twenty girandoles, forty-five gerbes, petard rockets with brilliant fire, cascades, candles with various stars, fixed fires including Chinese fire and ancient fire, maroons et cetera.” He waves his hand. “Also one red shower. You remember making that? ”
He stops reading and looks at me over his eyeglasses. “That is what you can expect. Make of it what you will.” And he puts the paper down and says no more on the subject, even in the face of questions that I dare to beg of him from time to time.
The day passes with a painful slowness.
At six when I go to the kitchen I find it full of smoke, and Mrs. Blight cursing and flapping at the air.
“Open that casement at once, Agnes!” she orders, coughing dramatically, as if it is my fault that she has burnt the meat, and she scrapes the lump forcefully away from the spit.
“Clock’s broken,” Mary Spurren says gloomily. The charred cinder of our supper lies on the hearthstone, smoking miserably.
“What in God’s name, woman, is happening in here? ” Mr. Blacklock says, striding into the room. The smell of burning is everywhere.
“Wretched object,” Mrs. Blight laments, rolling her eyes at the mantelpiece. “Deplorable useless bit of mechanics.” She raps at its wooden case. “Should never have got reliant on it. Never had a clock before to cook by, makes your cooking eye go blind, that does, having a clock to lean on, timewise. I’ll vouch that someone’s overwound it or dropped it and broken some bit of innards, but no one’s owning up, sir.” She shrugs, her chin wobbles with regret. “There’s no one here’ll say they did it.”
He gestures at the smoke. “See to it,” he says curtly.
“Have to go back to smelling when it’s done,” Mrs. Blight says, when he has gone. “Besides, timings is no use at all. When it’s done, it’s done, and that’s exact enough. Proper time is only as long as something takes.”
Mary Spurren sniffs. “That clock were handy.”
“What for?” Mrs. Blight demands.
“For telling just how late Mrs. Nott is turning up these days, for one thing,” Mary Spurren replies, grumpily. “Latest woman I ever knowed.”

Once Mr. Blacklock and I set out for St. James’s, the world seems different, walking along beside him to the fireworks. Past the great bulk of St. Paul’s, past the churchyard, past the Temple, past Clifton’s chophouse, past St. Clement’s in the center of the street with the traffic pouring past to either side of it. I feel shy and exhilarated, walking fast to keep up with him. The Strand is bright and glassy with shopfronts; women in striped silks buying hats and Florence cordials and anchovies, gentlemen pressing tobacco into their pipes and examining swords and traveling trunks, painted blowsy women plying their trade at the mouths of courtyards, beggar boys with dirty fingers, and all the world staring at each other, this way and that, for what variety of reasons I could not say. And for all the bustle about us, I find myself glancing sidelong at Mr. Blacklock from time to time. It is a curious thing how a familiar face can appear so altered by new surroundings. How fiercely he glares at the crowd. He is taller without his leather jerkin, wearing instead a dark frock of fustian over his waistcoat, and I notice how people seem to shrink from his path as he walks through them. His long face cannot be comfortable with itself, as though thoughts and visions were constantly exploding behind his eyes. His eyes are almost too dark to see into, as if he has made them so after suffering trouble, and with his need for silence.
Away from the shops, the light fails quickly into dusk. One carriage goes by as we enter St. James’s Square; the horses’ hooves are crisp on the road. Mr. Blacklock stops suddenly and raps at a side door in a high wall, and presently we are admitted into the grounds of a large house that stands in the shadows beyond. The walking has tired me and I long to sit down. My belly is heavy and drags at my backbone, though the child lies still and does not push about.
It is cool and quiet in the garden. The air is blue with early darkness; bats flicker and circle unsuspecting above the tall spindly scaffold that I can just make out. There is a low, thrilling hum of preparation; shadowy figures of many men moving about, muttering. A brief flare of a taper lights up a face and is extinguished. Mr. Blacklock gruffly motions me to sit, and goes to speak to Mr. Torré. The low wall is damp under my skirts, but I am glad to rest. I rub at my back when he is gone. How hungry I am already. A bright, thin quarter moon hangs over the rooftops.
The punch of the first volley of rockets startles me, and the child begins kicking and kicking. I stand up.
It has begun.
It is so close that I can hear the hiss of the quick match rush to the lifting charge of each flight of rockets, before the pound and roar of the ignition, and then the burst, and the sky is riddled with twists of fire, feathers of fire, billhooks of light, snakes of fire and smoke. The breaks are a spill of prickling white light across my eye, crackling the glaze of the sky into bitter shards. I blink. I cannot breathe for whiteness everywhere. I am blinded by it. The sky is burnt with purple shadows when the whiteness is done, when there is a pause for darkness, though the smoke swirls about, and then more gerbes start up, pulsing sheaves of orange sparks, with stars shooting out like grains of polished light that lift, drift, stop, then fall slowly, smooth as glass, winking out into the darkness. The world is either fire, or water, or darkness, nothing else. An unformed sob gathers in my chest.
The shape of Mr. Blacklock looms out of nowhere. “The cascade!” he shouts, huge beside me.
It is a white froth of sparks and smoke that pours down the scaffold as though it will never stop. My face is hot with it. When I turn to the house the glass of the windows is white with the light caught there, as though the house, too, is maddened with fire. In the ballroom behind the reflection the white faces of the guests at the assembly throng, unmoving.
Mr. Blacklock bends down and speaks into my ear: “. . . niter, antimony.” His voice is close and thrums in my head. I nod at him, speechless.
“Tourbillion!” his voice says, and I am giddy with it. Above us the tourbillion rotates wildly like a glittering muscle of fire.
There is a burst of maroons like an attack. The child inside me goes stiff with the shock of the noise. I should like to rub my belly, but I dare not. Instead I find myself clenching my hands tightly over it, as if to shield it from the flashes and blasting. The smell of gunpowder and the white clouds of sulfurous smoke fill the leafy garden to the brim.
It is over. I can hardly believe what I have seen, my heart pounding in the sudden hush.
After the display we do not speak. Mr. Blacklock crosses beneath the scaffold to talk again with Mr. Torré. The air is damp. As the smoke clears slowly I can see inside the house, where the chandeliers are lit again and the musicians have begun to play. I can just see the gleam of silk skirts turning in the candlelight as the guests start to dance. An upper window closes, as though a servant had been watching. I cannot hear Mr. Blacklock’s conversation—his back is turned to me—but Mr. Torré seems to look across once to where I stand and I see his hat nodding, as though agreeing strongly with something that was said. I avert my gaze quickly when he does that.
“You are chilled,” Mr. Blacklock notices when he returns to me, and we leave the garden. He adds, “Torré felt the works were good.”
Pall Mall is quiet; a single horse and trap go by, then a linkboy hastening, his torch flaming dirtily behind him as he runs into a lighted doorway.
We pass Suffolk Street and turn toward the thoroughfare. Mr. Blacklock stops abruptly on the corner.
“Let us take a glass inside this drinking place; then we can make our way toward Charing Cross to hail a hackney cab,” he says. And as he opens the door onto the noise of the tavern and stands aside to let me pass, I realize that there was something missing from the display.

The room is crowded. The fire in the grate seems yellow and mild and ordinary compared with the fierceness of what I have seen. The girl brings our brandy. It is hot in my throat.
“Not as poor as I had feared,” Mr. Blacklock is saying, his face lively. “Mr. Torré begins to grasp the matters at his fingertips very well, and can conceive a satisfactory pattern for the eye. Things are improving. I could find fault only with the firing by the operators, which was erratic at a point when precision was necessary. Perhaps the headed rockets with the brilliant fire broke a little low. Perhaps the cascade burnt on too tediously after the gerbes played.” He shrugs as though on balance these things were not significant, and swallows his brandy.
“It was astonishing,” I say. “But—”
He coughs into his fist. “It was not a remarkable nor singular display, but I grant it was neat and satisfactory and well made. There was nothing to disgrace either the trade of engineer or maker of fireworks.”
“What drew you to your trade?” I ask, with sudden curiosity. Mr. Blacklock leans back on the bench and looks at the fire.
“As a child I liked the clang and heat and rattle of the blacksmith’s shop, but my family would not hear of such an occupation for their only son. And when I came to England at the age of ten, I studied with a Russian man of what is known as natural philosophy. My education was thorough; I received instruction in mathematics, physics, chemistry, metallurgy.”
“Where had you lived before? ” I ask timidly.
“My mother was Polish,” he replies. “When she died, we left Poland and came to the damp tumult of Clerkenwell to live with my father’s cousin and his wife.” Mr. Blacklock’s voice is low, as if he were talking to himself. “Surrounded by my father’s books, I sat at his desk and looked out the window in a childish terror. Highways stretched as far as the mind could imagine, never-ending, filled with the darkness of houses, of poverty. It was a hard, miserable place I had arrived at. Only the fires of vagrants down there on the dirty streets suggested any kind of welcome. At night I would push open the window and lie awake, drinking in the smell of all the smoking fires about us, crying for my mother.”
He coughs and falls silent, studying the hearth. His eyes glitter in his head, as though they held traces of burning.
The warmth travels through me as I finish my glass: the brandy, the fire, the easy noise of the tavern about us. Inside my head, too, the bright fireworks go on fizzing and dissolving in the dark.
“But as a wise man once said, nature abhors a vacuum. And I read the Ancients,” Mr. Blacklock says. “Aristotle, Plato, Pliny. I read Theophilus, Paracelsus. I read Agricola, Biringuccio and the great man of artillery, Siemienowitz. I read Bacon, Bate, Boyle. I vowed I would be Firemaster. And then gradually I became most occupied with the way in which fireworks themselves are made. The point of source and cultivation. I purchased chemicals, tools, tutelage. As I grew older I began to experiment with new materials, to make attempts toward refining and advancing specific inquiries within the art of pyrotechny. And I kept my ear open for the merest trifle of fresh chemical knowledge that might prove expedient for my endeavor.”
“Is that your practice even now, sir?” I ask anxiously. I do not want to hear that it is not. I watch the girl pouring ale for the gentlemen beside us; her arms are strong and thick. I hear her laughing as she goes into the back room, pushing the curtain aside with her red hands. The fire smokes in the draft.
“I like the stillness at the center of a firework,” he says, turning the glass in his hand. “There is so much compacted silence within them; the bright flame shooting a slit of fire up into the sky, then the first silence and blackness before the sharp report and then the burst.” I smile and nod, understanding what he means now that I have seen it for myself. And then he adds almost in a murmur, “The second stillness will spread from the center of all the colors—like the vast stillness at the heart of flowers.”
I frown. “From all the colors? ” I exclaim, remembering now how the fireworks display had lacked one thing. The brandy and the strangeness of the night make me bold. “But I saw no colors there at all. They were so white! Only whiteness and brightness. Throughout Mr. Torré’s display I waited, as they went up, for the red shower, the red shower that we made with the deal.” I pause. “I saw none of that. Only whiteness and brightness. Which in itself was magnificent, do not mistake me, but not as powerful as what I’d imagined. Indeed, I was hoping, sir, I had expected . . .” and then I stop.
Mr. Blacklock looks at me. “You are disappointed,” he says. His voice is tight.
“Oh no, sir! ” I say. “It is only that I am surprised. You see, sir, some of the explosions inside my head were rich in color. I did not know what to expect.”
The girl interrupts to ask if we will take more brandy, but Mr. Blacklock shakes his head.
“It was part of the cascade,” he says.
“Sir? ”
“The red shower, it was the vital heart of the cascade, the volcanic eruption. Its ruddy tint was not very strong, but clearly visible. How did you not see it? ”
We return to the house. In the musty hackney cab he jerks the window open and stares out at the night. “I suspect we have misunderstood each other,” he says stiffly, after some time. “Or perhaps the failure is all mine.” The coolness of the air makes me sober. I have offended him.


And the silence worsens overnight.
“Morning, sir,” I say anxiously as I slip onto my stool. Mr. Blacklock does not reply, and he says nothing for almost an hour, except once when he drops a jar on the floor and lets out a curse under his breath, making me flinch.
At last I can bear it no longer, and I go to stand beside him at his bench. He continues working.
“When you say ‘red shower,’ sir, I think of the fiery redness of the roots of dock, or the gloss of a currant, or the bright reddle that marks sheep,” I say to him, swallowing. “I’m sorry, sir.” Mr. Blacklock does not look up. “I think of things that are red, such as red hair, the iron ore that goes to make up that star we are making and even blood. That’s what I meant by what I said, sir, just how lovely a fire like that would be! I did not mean . . .”
I know he is listening, although he says nothing, and continues to grind at the sulfur for stars so that I have to speak up above the noise. “Why not violet match, sir? I see the purple hue of violets in my head, of scabious, vetch, of . . . bruises. Could you make that?” Unwelcomely I see Mrs. Mellin’s purple tongue stuck from her mouth.
“Purple is the nearest to darkness and blackness. It is too difficult. It has never been done,” Mr. Blacklock spits out, grimly. “Anything else? ”
“Well . . . what about a green fire, sir? As green and poisonous as the feathered woodpecker in the pear tree at home, the unearthly bigness of its head tipping and battering at the bark for grubs. Or as green as soap made with Barbary wax, or early gooseberries with the June sun going through them. I’d want to see yellow! Scarlet, sir! ”
He coughs.
“But last night what I saw was white fire. Majestic fire, like magic. But white was its limit. I’d hoped, I’d thought . . .” Again I stop.
Mr. Blacklock lets the pestle sit idly in the mortar.
There is an agitated feeling in my stomach. Perhaps he has not been seeking new kinds of possibility, after all. No new, unrivaled recipes he has been working on in secret. Surely I cannot have been mistaken.
“Dissatisfaction breeds carelessness and bad workmanship,” Mr. Blacklock says curtly. “Look at what you have, understand its benefits and work with that.”
“I would like to see a blue,” I persist, suddenly near to tears in my frustration. “I’m sorry, sir, but a blue as blue as milkwort, as cornflowers, as the blue sea from a distance on a bright day. A blue firework shooting up into the night sky like a . . . like a joyful spark of daylight.”
“You imagine colors vividly,” he says.
“I do, sir,” I reply. “It is . . . almost as though I feel them as a sense of touch or taste when I am looking.”
He looks up at me beside him. I am startled to see how his eyes are tight with excitement. A hope flares up in me.
“Have you attempted a blue, Mr. Blacklock? ” I whisper.
And he leans forward as though on impulse, his eyes narrow.
“When I first saw you,” he says, “there on the step in the pouring rain, I thought that perhaps you were someone else. I looked more closely at your face, and there was something of somebody else within it. Not in its shape, but in its look, in its intensity.”
The discontinuity of his thought surprises me. “There was something that I recognized,” he goes on. “I’ll admit, you reminded me of someone very close.”
“Did I?” I say, and a curious feeling twists over inside me. Confused, I turn back to the bench. Did he mean that I provoked a freshness of grief in him, or did he like my face for it?
“Flowers of sulfur are soft, like a yellow soot,” I say hastily, touching the jar, picking it up.
“That is because they are remade in air,” Mr. Blacklock replies after a pause, as if struggling to listen properly, and when he looks at me the yellow glinting in his eyes is like shards of brightness in a pool. “Imagine the change to which they have been subjected. When the sulfur was prized out of the earth, it had been packed solid between rocks, crushed with weight and time and pressure. Then, abruptly, we have freed it from density by the application of heat, which does not reduce the substance to a liquid but gives it the freedom of an air to shape itself again.” He indicates the jar in my hand.
“So we are given flowers of sulfur. The sublime made palpable.” He speaks very quietly now. He takes the jar from me and tips a quantity into the porcelain whiteness of a chafing dish. The jar clinks on the dish. He puts a big fingertip to the flowers of sulfur and seems to lose himself in thought.
“They are . . . exalted by fire,” he says, almost in a whisper.
I bend my head over them, studying them closely. I can smell his hands, the smell of skin and metal and tobacco. I look at the flowers of sulfur for some time, hardly able to breathe. Mr. Blacklock does not move away, though we are so close we are almost touching. “They are somewhere between flakes and crystals,” I say, eventually. I do not dare to say anything else, lest my voice should tremble. Mr. Blacklock nods. “Indeed they are,” he says. And we part then, and go on with our work.
The flush on my cheeks dies down. I must not misunderstand him; that leads to trouble. I must remember my place.