The Book of Fires

Girandole

29
How I wish that Cornelius Soul would bring us gunpowder again. I was not attempting to ensnare him, I remind myself. It is more that I was trying to channel the natural force of his intentions.
But if I do not see him? My thoughts were so full of fire and chemicals. Perhaps I should have prayed for a chance to present itself.
I had almost forgotten my purpose. In another week it will be too late. I have reached eight months now. I touch my belly; perhaps it is too late already. I keep waiting for a rush of blood, or waters, anything. In truth I know there is little chance that the sage will work, but, God only help me, I must try everything.
So when I open the door unknowingly and find that Cornelius Soul is stood there on the step in his gray coat, winking at me, I am both relieved and newly anxious.
“Good day, Mr. Soul,” I say. I do not dare to ask why he is here. Perhaps . . .
“Just passing.” He grins.
He does not come across the threshold, though his eyes dart beyond me into the workshop from time to time. He spins his hat in the air and catches it.
“You have a new hat, Mr. Soul,” I say, looking at its gilt braid.
“Finest on Cheapside!” he replies. “And . . . I have an evening free next Tuesday and, alas, no lovely lady like yourself to spend it with.”
“Don’t you?” I say faintly, and a wave of nerves goes through me. The next moment comes swiftly.
“Could I have the pleasure of your company at the Spring Gardens, Miss Trussel?” he says, and my hand flies to my throat as if to cover it.
“The Gardens!” I say.
Behind me inside the workshop I hear Mr. Blacklock putting a tool down and pushing his chair back. Strangely, I open my mouth to decline.
“You could, but . . .” I hesitate. The Spring Gardens are a public, crowded place across the river. My heart flutters when I think of being alone there with him, in the throng of people with my baby huge inside me and due so close. But perhaps this is my only chance. I must agree.
“You could,” I say, and with an effort I look up and meet his eye directly.
“Until next week, then!” he declares. “It is a gala night, there will be fireworks.”
And a mixture of terror and delighted thoughts creeps quickly up on me, though I keep up a coolness to my manner until Cornelius Soul has turned smartly on his heel and gone away down the street.
“Fireworks!” I say under my breath, turning excitedly to Mr. Blacklock, and I see that he has left the room. Just dirty little Joe Thomazin sat there in the corner, always looking and listening, taking things in. His heels kick the back of the stool.
“What!” I ask him, but he doesn’t reply; he just looks at me. His dark eyes are big in his thin face. When I go to the kitchen I find that I am not the only woman in the household to be beside myself with excitement; Mrs. Blight has won the lottery.


Mr. Blacklock does not seem to fully hear when Mrs. Blight waves her ticket beneath his nose at noon and squeals again, “And on my birthday! The eleventh of May for once has had an auspicious bent!” She is pink with pleasure.
“Would you, sir, be so good as to allow me to prepare the household with some especial kind of supper spread tonight?” she asks. “Nice joint of beef, perhaps, sir? A bit of topside? Saddle of lamb?”
“Yes, yes,” he says, but as if he has not fully heard her.
“Tonight, sir?” she repeats as he puts on his hat.
“Yes, yes, tonight,” he barks, and goes away down the corridor. When the front door bangs shut, Mrs. Blight rolls her eyes to the ceiling.
“That man,” is all she says, getting on with her pastry. “Godly ungracious.”
Later she makes a great show of fishing about inside her wallet and holding up a shiny guinea piece, as though she were some kind of duchess. “We’ll have the beef,” she announces grandly. Mary Spurren ignores her and slips out of the room. Mrs. Blight turns and tuts at me. “You’ll have to go.”
Perhaps the rest of the day starts to go wrong from here, at Saul Pinnington’s. There is no beef topside ready, and I have to buy instead a loin of pork.
“No matter,” I say, when the butcher’s boy tries to explain their shortage. “It’s the end of the day, miss,” he calls after me, as if worried that I might get him into trouble. The streets are heaving with people and on my way back a coachman curses when I stumble in front of his horse and nearly fall.
“I could’ve killed you, silly bitch,” he shouts down at me. “Can’t you look and see what’s coming?” I want to shout back angrily, “Childbirth, death, the gallows, Bridewell, take your pick!” But I clench my teeth and do not. The noise of the city is too much sometimes, I think, choking with rage. And today as I pass the church of St. Stephen on Cole-man Street just behind the house, I make up my mind to slip inside for a moment’s peace.
Under the great carving of the Last Judgment in the porch, I have an odd sensation, and hesitate and turn about, as though somebody is watching me from across the street. But when I look, nobody is there.
Inside, the church is dim. My footsteps echo up the aisle. Mrs. Blight’s joint of pork is heavy in my basket, and with some relief I sit down and rest it on the pew beside me. I breathe the smell of stone in deeply, as if it could give me strength. Just one more minute, I think, looking toward the candles burning yellow at the altar. Outside, the world seems far away.
How close I am, it seems, to the fulfillment of my plan. Soon I will have the chance to ensure that Cornelius Soul becomes obliged to marry me. He is an honest, handsome, willful man my mother would be proud to call a son. But why is it that I feel a strong unease each time I dwell on it? Surely, in the eyes of the world, at birth it will appear to be Cornelius’s child come early, conceived before the nuptials had taken place. I am not showing much, and after all, my mother always had small babies; even Hester was just a little scrap at birth.
How can that work? The voice in my head is still whispering. Cornelius Soul will know otherwise. But he is a good man, I reason, and perhaps if he knew my story then he might begin to understand? It is my only chance. Yet if it were a good solution surely I should have a growing sense of calm, with completion drawing near. But I do not; indeed, I fear that he will hate me for it.
I have begun to think that I should have another plan laid out. Something else to turn to, if everything else I try has failed.
At the altar, one candle gutters blackly, contracts and then winks out. It is a kind of drawing in of breath, a sudden shocking inward suck into the darkness.
If I were gone, I think, extinguished from my family’s lives, then they would be blameless. Better by far that they shall never know. And in the moment of calm that I am hoping to find, I remember the orpiment. The deadly yellow poison offers me a ready answer. It will still be there if all else fails. But it is a sin to take a life! the voice inside me whispers urgently. It is too late now, though, to think of that. One sin leads straight toward another, and there is nothing to be done about it.
They say you do not need to swallow much.
I hear the sound of feet on stones outside the porch, and a sudden voice booms, “Anyone in? ”
A hot shameful panic grips me, that someone might find me sitting here before God with my belly swollen like this, and instinctively I freeze and hold my breath. But then I hear a trundling scrape as the great door is pulled shut, and a key turns in the lock.
“No, no! There is somebody in here! I am still in here!” I call out, embarrassed, as I scramble to the porch and rap against the door. “Please come back! I am here!” But the footsteps fade away. Somewhere above me in the tower the church clock whirrs into life and I count the strokes as the bell sounds the hour. Six o’clock! How did it become so late?
A clergyman, someone, has locked up the church for the night against thieves, just as Mrs. Blight said they did. How stupid I am not to remember. I go to the north door to see if this is fastened, too, and rattle at it. I am quite locked in. It is hopeless, I think, nursing my sore knuckles. I will be here until morning. Miserably, I think of Mrs. Blight’s special supper and how she will not have her joint of meat. What will they think? The household sitting down together, raising a toast, no meat, and my place at the table unaccountably deserted. The house is so close to the church, and yet I cannot even call to them.
At first there is a glow of colored light about the stained-glass windows, and then that fades. When I become thirsty I go to the font for baptisms and drink the holy water gleaming there. It tastes of stone, or something else I cannot place. I think of the fingers of priests scooping and pouring handfuls onto the crowns of infants as they are blessed and named for this world. Perhaps if I were to confess my troubles to a priest, I would feel lighter, almost forgiven.
By now, I think unhappily, they will have finished supper. I shiver with cold and as I pull my skirts tighter about me I touch a wetness, a patch of wetness on my skirt where it lies over the pew, and I feel that the pew is pooling with some kind of liquid, and then I realize that in my basket the raw meat must be seeping through the paper it is wrapped in. I almost laugh with relief. Mrs. Blight’s wet butcher’s meat is dripping on the consecrated flagstones.
Then I clench my knees with my arms as best I can around my belly and press my face into the cloth of my skirt. I barely hear the strokes of three and four o’clock, which means that I must somehow have slept.

I am woken abruptly.
It is light. I hear the door being unlocked from the outside and I struggle, stiff and guilty, to my feet. A minister or curate enters and closes the door behind him with a brisk flourish. He comes down the aisle with his black vestments flapping as he walks, and stops, as I knew he would, when he sees me standing there between the pews.
“In heavens, child!” he exclaims. His voice is lilting. “What are you doing there?”
“Just sitting, sir. I—”
“Sitting! Have you been there all night? ”
“I have. I . . . needed to think.”
“Did you now!” he says. “And you thought for a long time. I’m afraid I have resorted to locking the church doors at nightfall; there have been thefts over Westminster way, you see. Was it cold? Were you waiting for me?” he asks. “God’s guidance can sometimes be slow in coming.”
I shake my head, and he smiles kindly. “Well, child, if you change your mind, God waits for us in patience.” The bell whirrs and clangs. “Unlike parishioners! If you’ll excuse me now. But if you should need to talk about your trouble, you can find me here. Reverend Lindsay is my name.”
“Thank you, Reverend,” I say, and he goes into the vestry. I wonder if God might forgive me more readily if I admit to another living person what I have done. But he is busy, I reason. Starlings are chirping in the eaves. The stained glass is brighter and more richly colored by the minute with the rising sun; I make out saints walking clearly upon the stained-glass flowers between the leaded panes, St. Genevieve with her stained-glass hands pressed together in prayer. St. Genevieve was a holder of keys, like St. Peter. And I remember how, though the Devil extinguishes her candle always, an angel lights it again and the flame burns on strongly. The nave is flooded with light and color.
I step upon the stones marking the separate graves of Henry Nicholas Cuff and Catherine Pelham in the floor of the aisle as I leave the church. The stones are new and freshly laid there, the cut letters quite unworn. How close the dead are. I am glad of the sunrise.
And I am hungry. I think of telling Mrs. Blight and Mary Spurren of the key turning in the lock, and how they will laugh at me. Yet they will not know that I am not the same girl I was yesterday, when I went in. The sage has not worked, but all of me, every last drop of blood, fat, flesh, all changed, now I have remembered that there is the yellow orpiment.
I have a final choice. God help me if I have to take it, but I will, for the sake of my family.
Out on the street, chimneys are pouring the smoke of fresh-lit fires. The air is still and the smoke pours upward in bluish columns all down the street. A crowd of swifts scream past.
It is early as I approach the house and cross the yard to the scullery door, but I know that Mary Spurren will be up riddling the grate and grudgingly might flick the bolt across to let me in, if it is not indeed already open, and if the floor is not wet with mopping.
The scrape of my boots on the bricks echoes horribly about the silent yard. I glance anxiously at the upper windows of the house to see if Mr. Blacklock has risen, but the sun is blinding them with such a sheet of early golden light that I cannot tell if the curtains are still drawn or have been parted.
I am relieved to find the back door is ajar, and edge in cautiously. No one is there; both the kitchen and the scullery are empty. I look about for signs of life, for Mrs. Blight. There is an unfamiliar smell in the darkened kitchen. As my eyes accustom to the gloom I do not see anything remarkable at first: a folded pile of aired washing waiting for the flat iron, as Mrs. Nott was here yesterday; a bundle of untrimmed rhubarb wilting on the side. And then I see the bottles. A stack of empty bottles and a half-eaten knuckle of pork from the meat safe lying uncovered on the table, and beneath it a great sticky spill of liquor and broken glass where a bottle has crashed to the floor. I go back to the scullery and see unwashed plates and cutlery. And the fire is out.
I take in these details one by one. I do not know what to make of this at all. Then there is movement in a chair beside the hob and with a start I watch the shape of Mary Spurren snort into wakefulness. She looks about her in some confusion, her large, froggish eyes bulging. She is a sorry sight. Her big head appears swollen with an ache that seems almost too much weight for her neck to bear. She gives out a kind of moan.
“Are you ill?” I venture.
“Not in my person,” she says, indistinctly. “And where was you last night? My neck’s stiff enough to be halfway to dead.” She rubs at it gingerly. “Not ill, though not . . . well, neither.”
Then she presses herself up out of the chair with an effort and stands, swaying. A smell of liquor seeps from her.
“Mary,” I say anxiously, “the fire is out. Mr. Blacklock is not down yet, is he? He will be angry if he sees this chaos. If I begin to clear the mess with you, perhaps we can have the kitchen clean as soon as possible!” I try to sound encouraging, and add lightly, as if I do not care, “And whereabouts is Mrs. Blight?”
But she frowns, as though I have reminded her of something she is trying to remember. She waves a forefinger. “Blacklock, Mr. Blacklock . . .” she exclaims thickly. “Now there’s a man who’ll . . . not be down so early as he might for breakfast.”
“No?” I say, beginning hastily to clear the table.
“He did not . . .” She stops to hiccup. “He did not come back last night neither.” She smirks unevenly at me and slouches back down into the chair.
“How do you mean?” I say, placing a bottle with particular care into the gape of the sack. “But there are robbers, cutthroats, abroad at night—do you know he is safe?”
“Oh, I daresay he’s safe enough, if you could call it that.” Her head falls back and her bleary eyes watch me with some kind of triumph. “But he did not come to supper. Let us say he appeared to have another engagement all of a sudden, rushing in when I thought it was you come back with the meat, swapping his hat for his best one and hurrying out again without a word.”
“And he did not come back?” I ask.
“No, he did not. A fine way to enjoy Mrs. Blight’s lottery on the day of her birthday, no joint of meat going cold on the table, and all the sauces stiffening in their dishes.”
She likes it that she has my attention now.
“Fairly striding, he was, they say.” She sniffs. “Very eager, no doubt. But perhaps you would know more about that than me.”
“What do you mean?”
She hiccups again, and rubs her neck. “I believe I shall join them Methodists this very forenoon. No!” She raises a forefinger. “Don’t speak to me or I shall fall down in a faint like a lady’s maid.” I hear the clock chime nine times from the study. How late it is.
I go on alone with the thankless task. And before I can get the kitchen clean there are footsteps and Mr. Blacklock’s sudden shadow blocks the sunshine falling through the back door wide open to the yard.
I look up. Mr. Blacklock has the unshaven, unkempt appearance of a man who has not slept all night, and there is a cast of something almost wild-eyed in his face. It is most peculiar.
He clears his throat before speaking.
“I must discuss a matter with you,” Mr. Blacklock says, soberly.
“Me?” I whisper.
My heart begins thumping. It has happened. He has found out. He has discovered my crime or my secret and he has to discharge me. But even as he begins speaking, Mrs. Blight bursts in, as if she has been waiting for this moment outside the door.
“Morning, Mr. Blacklock, sir!” she interrupts. “A lovely day.”
“I am sorry to have missed the celebration,” Mr. Blacklock says distractedly. “I trust you did not wait for me.”
“No, we did not, sir. Some of us indeed most certainly did not.” Mrs. Blight’s eyes flash spitefully at me. She is wearing a brand-new straw hat on her head, covered in carnations. “Pert little madam!” she says, smiling at me, and her dislike is polished up and glinting in her gaze.
She unties her hat, takes it off and simpers at it. “Was that Mr. Soul keeping you under lock and key that you could not return all night?” she adds.
“No, no!” I begin to explain in some alarm. “By a twist of fate I became—”
“We did so miss your presence last night, Mr. Blacklock, sir,” Mrs. Blight cuts in, sweetly.
“Forgive me,” he mutters abruptly, turning his back as he leaves the room. I must be brave I think, and speak up then before he closes the door. “But, Mr. Blacklock, when would you wish to talk with me?”
“Another time, another time,” he says, walking away.
I can feel Mary Spurren’s big head still facing me, though I do not look. “But where is that joint of meat then, Agnes Trussel? ”
The pork! Left on the pew. It will be long gone now.
“I lost it,” I say lamely. They will never believe me.
“Lost it? Jesus!” She pulls a face.
“You’ll pay for that out of your wages, my girl, once I tell Mr. Blacklock,” Mrs. Blight says, viciously. She comes up very close to me and her breath smells of fish. “There’s something about the way you comport yourself about, Agnes Trussel, that gets on my nerves.”
Then I slip into the workshop behind Mr. Blacklock and try to begin my day as though all is well. My hands shake as I work, as I wait for dismissal. I am faint with lack of sleep.
“Agnes, I must speak frankly with you,” Mr. Blacklock starts to say again, putting his work to one side of the filling-box. And then when I look up at him, still he says nothing, and instead picks up the mallet again.
Perhaps he has financial trouble of a serious nature, and he has decided that I must go to save him money. Four shillings a week plus all my board and washing, candles; that must add up to something that might be better saved. He has been pacing the streets and has resolved that savings must be made in expenditure.
I remember when Mr. Fitton did something akin to that, and my brother Ab, who had been hoping to become herdsman’s boy and learn a trade, instead found there was no longer a place for him at all with the dairy herd, as the new herdsman from upcountry had brought his own boy with him. He was told to look for work elsewhere.
It changed something in him, that discharge, which he took like a blow to the stomach that he never stopped feeling. Of course, he did not shrink nor double up—he was the sort to shoulder his new status like the burden it was—but there was a fury glistening in his eye. So when my mother said he always was an angry boy she was not right to say so. Our troubles shape our characters directly and in many ways.
Could it be another matter altogether? But there is something in John Blacklock’s manner that makes me think that what he has to say to me is something quite unpleasant, and I become certain of this when for a second time he lets himself be interrupted, this time by Mary Spurren entering the workshop.
“Ah, Mary,” he says, with relief.
“It’s the coal, sir—will you want it for tomorrow as usual, only the cart-boy is here and he says there is some ill judgment with supply . . .”
I stop listening and sit in wretchedness.
Or perhaps, God help me, and I suppose I knew this all along, he has guessed my condition and cannot continue my employment under any circumstances for a moment longer. Has his eye been lingering on my belly as he speaks to me these past few weeks?

In the kitchen after supper, when he has gone to his study, Mary Spurren sidles up close and regards me suspiciously.
“I know where you was yesterday,” she says.
“Do you?” I say.
I see her face smirking at me then.
“You do not,” I say flatly.
“With Mr. Blacklock,” she announces.
“Mr. Blacklock?” I frown. “Why would I have been with him? He was gone away on business, I suppose.”
“Odd business it is that causes him to leave his order book idle on the desk, which leads him to go out sporting his best hat, as though he had a cause to further by it.”
“You have been prying!” I exclaim.
“Not more than is needed for a simple explanation,” she says indignantly, without a doubt that this is justified. She blinks at me.
“But think, Mary,” I explain, more patient with her. “Why should I be with him? Mr. Blacklock does not need to take me on a business visit anywhere; my presence would never justify the fare. No,” I say, “I imagine that he enjoys the solitude of journeys inside the hackney cab, his feet stretched out comfortably, sucking on his pipe and turning over ideas for formulae, uninterrupted, in his mind. Why would he want me there? ”
She shrugs, as though nothing I say will dislodge her strange suspicion.
“He were seen,” she persists.
“Oh?”
“At Covent Garden.” She is triumphant. “And if he weren’t with you, who were he with, I’d ask!”
“Why would he have to be with anyone?”
“Men go to Covent Garden for three reasons only.” She counts on her thin fingers, holding them up. “One, the theater, two, the market, and three”—he lowers her voice to a hoarse whisper—“to lie with prostitutes.”
“Prostitutes?” I retort. “Mr. Blacklock is not that sort of man.”
Mary Spurren sniggers. “What kind of innocent are you? You know nothing of men!”
Mrs. Blight comes into the room. “Men? They’re all the same, that way,” she confirms, with relish. “Any man will go with a whore as he needs to.”
“Mr. Blacklock would not,” I repeat. “He is not that kind.”

But her chance remark has set a worrying fleck of misgiving deep in my mind. It is the kind of thought that begins to fester and inflame, as the smallest of splinters can lodge in a tender skin and go bad with infection.
Why should it trouble me that he has spent the night abroad and has not told us his intentions? A man has needs; surely I heard my father slur those words enough times when my mother inclined away from the range of his unsteady grasp just back from the alehouse, forgetting for a moment her wifely duties. “Not now, Thomas,” she would hiss, motioning us to get to bed at once.
And Mr. Blacklock’s wife is dead. Of course he has a right to want some comfort. To choose some solace from his loneliness.