The Book of Fires

34
The sunlight creeps around the chamber. By the time the clock has struck three, it has slid itself as a bright yellow patch onto the washstand, curved itself over the cracked jug and basin, crinkled over the blanket at the foot of the bed and then straightened out into a deep brownish yellow on the boards of the floor. It doesn’t reach the other side of the room, as it rounds the corner before the church bells strike six. By seven I can still see the spires of St. Alban and St. Mary the Virgin golden with light if I raise my head, though I am weak. There is a taste in my mouth that I do not know.
I am surprised to find that my head is empty. My eyes follow the plaster cracks in the wall by the side of the bed, and I hear the sounds of things that arrive in the bedroom. The sun is silent, but there is sometimes the thin whine of flies, a carriage rumbling on the dry dirty cobbles outside, a man’s shout and a reply through the warm air. Occasionally a dog barks persistently nearby like the sound of a handsaw going through wood; it becomes muffled for a while, as though a door has been shut, and then it stops. There is a spill of water onto the bricks in the courtyard below, and the clank of something being stirred in a bucket.
What is it? I remember something, but incompletely, as if the thought were behind a screen and only parts of it visible. When it becomes more whole, more clear to me, I make sure that the thought is held at arm’s length, so that it slips in gradually. I look about.
There are stains on the bed, the sheet is dark with them, and there is a faint brown-sweet smell of blood around me. The pain was bad, like a wrench squeezing it all dead inside and then pushing it out in bursts. I think I remember that, though I cannot be sure. What is that taste in my mouth? I cannot imagine what it could be. It is sweet, almost like honey.
The quiet is a nothingness. It is the feeling now that the pain has stopped, the feeling of no pain, and is it, could it also be, a quietness inside me? I hold my lungs still and listen hard, as you might if you had to check that a creature was still breathing.
Nothing.
There is nothing inside me, I think, and the emptiness is long and gray as a sky.
I do not even know what day it is.
“What is the day?” I whisper to Mrs. Blight when she comes into the room with warm water and cloths. “Did the parish men find me when I fell?”
Mrs. Blight squeezes a cloth out. When she looks up from the basin, her teeth are all covered up.
“Did who find you? It was Mary Spurren picked you up from the front step when she went out to sweep it. Half-delirious you have been these past two days,” she says. “Muttering about all sorts, like a girl possessed.” She tips me, and drags the dirty sheet from under me.
“God only knows how I tried to get the doctor to you, but Mary Spurren was determined that Blacklock would not have it. Just as well, as it turned out, when I saw what your trouble was. And thank God, I thought, when the fever ceased pouring out of you and I could get back to my own bed for a snatch of sleep.” She unfolds a clean sheet and, grunting, tips me up again and spreads it out beneath me.

Later Mary Spurren brings me more damp cloths and a bowl of water as though she has been told to. She goes to the window and looks out at the roofs. Her head is big against the evening light.
“Mr. Blacklock has come back from Hertfordshire on the six o’clock mail,” she says.
“Oh?” I say. “Does he . . . ?”
“Turned out almost a needless journey, he said, as the health of his aunt had improved to a great degree by the time he’d got there.
“He has said he will not get a doctor to you.” Mary Spurren turns around and looks at me triumphantly when she tells me this, as though she suspects that I am begging for attention.
“I know,” I say, and the words come slowly from me. “I do not need a doctor. I have no fever,” I say. “I . . . ate bad meat.”
“You ate what I ate that day,” Mary Spurren accuses me, with truth, and hazily I see her shake her head. “You’ll want to pull your weight a fraction harder round here, I think, before the week is through.”
I do not answer this. She seems to shut the door with force on her way out.
A sparrow chirps outside. Perhaps when I feel better I shall walk and walk until I reach hedgerows. What will Mr. Blacklock think of me? Follow them deep into the countryside, follow their length like a guide leading the way. But how could I do this, with the tarnish of Mrs. Mellin’s coins staining my fingers, and parish men in lawful pursuit of me?
Thief! Thief! I imagine them calling. They are not here now.
I close my eyes.
I am like a woman I read of in the Evening Post, who stood on the parapet of Westminster Bridge and jumped, and halfway through falling knew that she needed to live and did not die when she hit the iron surface of the Thames but was dragged out by a ferryman, sopping wet, and with both legs broken.


When I wake, Mrs. Blight is back in the chamber, putting some items down on the washstand. Though she is at my side, how far away she seems, and how fast and then how slow, like great red butterflies, her hands move about their business.
I cannot speak at all. When Mrs. Blight says something to me, I turn to her and stare because I cannot hear her very well. She tries again, coming up huge to the bed and bending down above me.
“You are all stiffened up with being anxious,” she advises. “Being stiff is bad for any girl in your condition. Drink this.” She holds a cup of some steaming liquid to my lips, which I swallow obediently in warm, bittersweet mouthfuls. Why is she being nice to me? I look at her and nod, but I am not anxious. She is wrong, I think vaguely. The liquid makes me sleepy, and gives me slippery, unformed thoughts. I am not stiff or taut beneath the shell I have created for myself. I am discovered, and my shell has been prized away to show how I am gone soft and pappy like an uncooked oyster underneath it. The room spins around and I find it is not a simple thing to keep my mind fixed into one attentive shape. I am opened up, my thoughts gone loose and soft, as when the twist in spun cord is gone, and the threads can unravel. Sleep comes easily to me then.
I dream long winding dreams of Sussex, my legs in the flow of the river Stor on a summer’s day and the warm water slipping round the bareness of my legs as though I were rooted there, like willows.
It is raining when I wake again.
Mrs. Blight is stirring powder into wine and honey for me once more. The steam curls up into the morning’s cool air. “Snakeweed,” she reassures me this time, as though I might be afraid that she is trying to poison me. The noise of the spoon circling inside the cup is soothing.
“To staunch the flow,” she says. “It works a treat. You nearly lost that baby, bleeding on and on like that.”
“Nearly?” I say. And I hold my breath again. Of course, I think, the weight of it. The weight of it is still upon me.
“No need for disquiet,” she says. “There’s not a soul I’ve told and Mary thinks it’s but flux and idleness. You will be better off going through with your confinement than doing away with yourself so heedlessly, and then you can leave it, if it should prove healthy, with the foundlings at the hospital in Bloomsbury Fields.”
“I know of that place,” I say, touching my belly with both hands under the roughness of the blanket, holding it tight. I have been wrong about so many things. Perhaps Mrs. Blight is not so bad, after all. And though she knows of my trouble now, I am sure I can trust her with my secret. Can’t I?
But there is one thing that worries me. Though they seem untouched, and she has not mentioned anything about them, did she discover my coins when she loosened my stays?