The Book of Fires

27
The solution is close now, though it is not within my sight. Like watching a still pond, where the bank with its flaggy irises, starworts and water parsnip is reflected in the water, and you see a push, a rippling disturbance that does not break the surface. You know it is a fish under the pond’s skin, a trout maybe, or perch or tench, turning its big slippery body about in the water, pushing at the water as it turns and making nothing but a fleeting ripple, but you cannot see it. You know the signs, the indications, which is enough. You do not need to see something to feel its presence there.
I say this to myself, over and over.
Mr. Blacklock counts out my wages. How many more weeks before he stops that and turns me out instead? I am seven months gone, and I have come to my senses. I begin to feel an agitation so strong that I can almost hear it rushing in my ears.
“You must fetch new apparatus from the apothecary’s shop,” Mr. Blacklock says. “I have to meet with Mr. Torré to discuss his needs for Marylebone next month and so I cannot go myself. You are aware of Mr. Jennet’s tendency toward a bending of the honesty of things. Keep your eyes open while you are there.”
I nod. And I shall go also to the herb market on my own business, I think, but I say nothing of this.
“I need new pipkins.” Mr. Blacklock writes an order for me to carry. “I have broken so many. A new receiver. Some spirit of niter, manganese. Some clean spills of wood, I have no time to cut my own.” In this household, spills of wood are tipped with sulfur to touch the spark in the tinderbox, though Mary Spurren does not like to use them.
“Devil’s fire,” she always says, pressing her pale lips together crossly.
The front door closes behind me. Out on the street with my shawl about me I have a sense that I am watched, and glance upward uneasily. Nothing at the windows, no movement, no white face staring down at me behind a scrap of curtain. And then I see a red kite circling far above the city, waiting for prey. Its forked tail is just visible against the sky.
At the shop Mr. Jennet almost snatches the order from my hand, with a tut of disapproval. His enormous wig quivers as he bends down behind the counter to reach the stacks of apparatus.
“What’s he up to now that he needs so much of late?” he grumbles. “Business must be prosperous, is it? The world’s gone mad, I say.” He wraps the receiver and looks at the list again. “And what does he want with so much manganese? A funny purchase for an artificer.”
“Just working hard, Mr. Jennet,” I reply, watching him.
When I am done at the apothecary’s shop I do not go back to the house with my heavy basket. At the herb market in Lamb’s Conduit Street I buy a large bundle of sage. Because I am certain that the skinny market woman senses that there is something strange about my purchase, I ask her for a quantity of parsley for my basket, too. Her baby is asleep in a crate beside her. I do not look at it.
I go into a side street and I throw the parsley in the gutter, like a mad-woman. It is so fresh and green. The sage, which I keep, is very soft. The tender purplish leaves are like skin or new fur. It does not seem like something that could kill a child. I secrete the sage inside my shawl, and walk back to the house. Crushed against my body, the muffled, bitter pepper smell of sage is all about me.
On my way I am surprised to see a pair of drovers with a flock of unkempt sheep heading out toward Lincoln’s Inn Fields. As they bundle past I breathe in their wool smell, their savory dung smell, and I am flooded with sickness for home.
“Crabs ! Periwinkles!” a boy cries out in my ear as he passes. I smell the weedy salt of his basket. The traffic closes around the sheep and then I lose sight of them as the road bends to the right. They are gone. I am desolate and the stone steps to the grocer’s are steep and regular. My legs ache with taking regular steps sometimes.
There is no one whom I recognize inside the shop. The women seem tall and grimy, filling it up with their baskets and loud voices asking for cheese and rice and fuller’s earth. One of them turns when she hears my voice, and flicks a look at my belly. I almost run home and I am glad of the strange smell of the hallway as I enter.
Home. I called this place home. That was a mistake, as I know that home is a long way southward at the back of the swell of the hills on the edge of the trees, before the sea. This can never be home, surely, with its strange odors and complicated maze of corridors and outbuildings, with its old, wide, beaten-up stairways covered in city polish and city dirt. How can I call it home, when there are rooms here that I don’t even know about?
When I get to the kitchen I hide the sage at the back of the cupboard.
If I think carefully about it, I find that I feel the loss of home very deep down inside, hardly noticeable now, like a tiny sob at the end of a long tunnel.