The Book of Fires

35
Within a week, an appearance of normality settles on my life again like a fine skin; the kind of new and tender skin that grows quickly on the surface of a wound. Beneath the skin, though, everything is changing, transforming.
My belly is huge now under my loose clothing. I can scarcely believe that Mr. Blacklock does not see this, except that now he does not look at me directly. He is absorbed with something and does not speak freely with me as he used to; indeed he barely speaks at all once the tasks for the day have been decided upon.
“Should I begin on the half-pound rockets, sir, or the stars for Ranelagh?” I say, holding out the latest order lists for him to check. There is much to do, and I need to know which has more urgency. We are slipping behind with our stock.
“Yes, yes, the stars, then the rockets,” he replies, and I know that he has barely heard.
“And then you will do the Caduceus rockets, sir, for Mr. Torré? You agreed that you would, yesterday. It says they want a dozen.”
“The Caduceus, do those first, they are to be collected tomorrow,” he says, changing his mind.
“Tomorrow!” I say. “I did not—”
“Quiet now!” he interrupts. “I must think, I am . . . preparing something.”
That is all he ever says. Why won’t he tell me what he is doing? It is as though he has withdrawn all unnecessary conversation. Nothing is the same. I am aware that these are the last few days of this new life here at Blacklock’s that I have become accustomed to, that I value so much. What will happen now? I do not know. Even time itself is not as it was. The clock’s tick that I hear in the study as I pass down the corridor becomes slower and slower, until every day is like a lifetime.
Mr. Blacklock did not come to see me on my sickbed upstairs. Of course I did not expect him to. And when I came down to the workshop, unsteady on my legs and too scared to meet his eye at first, he’d made very little mention of my illness.
“You are recovered?”
“Yes, sir,” I’d said, afraid of what he knew of it. “Good, good,” he said, brusquely, and did not speak of it again, and neither did he say a word about that night before he went away. What did I expect? It is as I had thought it would be. He does not remember.
When I stand for too long in this heat I grow dizzy. This morning I staggered on the way to the filling-box, and looked hastily at Mr. Blacklock, but his back was to me and he did not notice. He was bent, coughing, as he so often is now, over the smolder and stink of a chemical experiment he will not talk about, smoke pouring gray from a pipkin as he held a lighted taper to its contents. All the time he scratches down notes as he works, in the thin battered book he keeps inside his frock coat. I am sure there is something that Mr. Blacklock does not choose to share with me. Sometimes I have seen a flash of fire catch the corner of my eye and, though he mutters to himself about it, he does not call me over to show me what he has been doing.
Once I stood before the apparatus on his bench when he left the workshop to fetch an invoice from the study. I picked up a vessel and peered at the residue inside, turning it about in the light to get a better view, and did not hear that he had come back into the workshop. He was furious.
“How dare you touch my work!” he’d barked, and I’d jumped so much I had dropped the vessel on the ground. Broken glass was everywhere.
“Sorry, sir, so sorry,” I’d mumbled, picking up the little pieces coated in substance with my fingers.
After that I strove even harder to show that I was of use to him.
I lower a fresh case onto the spindle, and tamp in a scoop of dry clay. Today I have a dozen Caduceus rockets to charge and to prepare for firing, headed with fiery rain, and stars. A dozen Caduceus means twice that quantity in cases, made as they are in a pair twined together.
I turn the mallet in my sticky palm. How hot it is, a damp, pressing kind of heat. I pour in the lifting charge and tap at the drift, which seems heavier than usual. I find that now when I charge rockets the child kicks at the sound of the thump of the mallet. Yesterday it pressed its fists or feet under my ribs unbearably, and then with a contorting lurch seemed to upend itself inside me. I could not help but cry out, it was so startling.
Mr. Blacklock glanced up at that, a dish of fulminating silver in his hand.
“Are you ill again, Agnes?” he asked me. His question was distracted, as though it had pulled him from a well of thought.
“I am not ill,” I said, evenly, and went on working.
At night in my bed I have to lie on my side with one knee raised, as though I were scaling the side of a great white cliff. It is too hot to sleep right through the night. I cannot breathe, my lungs constricted by the growth inside me, and the thick air does not seem to satisfy my need for breath. In the workshop I have to hide my yawning, I am so tired.
Mr. Blacklock puts on his hat.
“Are you going out, sir?” I ask.
“I am,” he says.
I glance doubtfully at the list pinned on the order board again.
“I am worried, sir, we may not complete . . .”
“You will manage,” he says dismissively.
“But, sir—”
“Enough!” he barks, and the door slams behind him. He did not say where he was going.
I ease the filled case from the spindle and tap the hollow drifts to clear them of powder before I begin another. Three thousand grains troy is the weight these heads will carry. I have almost filled the eighth rocket of the batch. I yawn again. Despite the rush, I have to rest, just for a moment. I put down the tools and rub at my belly. I am quite alone; even dirty little Joe Thomazin is not in the workshop.
It is so quiet in the heat.
Sweat gathers at the back of my dress, and beneath my sleeves. At the open door I see a crimson moth or butterfly hesitate and flutter in, then out again. Outside above the yard the swifts scream, muffled in the hazy, overheated sky. How tired I am. I close my eyes, just for a moment.
I wish that . . .
And before I know it, I am jerking awake in alarm. God help me! I say, on hearing the clocks strike. An hour has passed. I must concentrate. Swiftly I calculate how much longer I have to complete the cases waiting to be filled, and I find I do not need to panic. If I hurry, the rockets will be done in time.
Smoothly I finish the eighth rocket, and its pair. I assemble all the boxes for the garniture, fetch common stars. The ninth, the tenth. It is going well. The first half of the eleventh. And now the mixture for the heads. Quick, quick! Work faster, Agnes, I say to myself. Fulfill the order skillfully, on time. You do not want to displease John Blacklock. All the time my ears are straining for the sound of his feet coming down the corridor. But even as I pick up the second in the pair of the eleventh rocket and put my scoop into the mixture, a sinking realization comes upon me with full force. There is not enough fiery rain to finish the batch. I have miscalculated.
At first I work on, in the hope that I am wrong, that the quantity will stretch to the twelfth rocket’s garniture. Then, when I have used up the last little bit and my task is not done, I stand in front of the list again and stare at it, hoping perhaps that it asks for just eleven Caduceus rockets, or even ten, but no, one dozen is what it says. There is no time to grind up more. I have failed, I think, miserably. It matters so much; why did I measure out so carelessly?
I finish the others. I cut up yards of cord, and wax them thoroughly. One by one I bind the finished rockets to their sticks, and all the time the last pair of empty cases is on the bench. In a rising desperation I cast my eye about the workshop, and I see the mixing box that Mr. Blacklock has just left unattended. What is that? It holds a quantity of composition. Of course, I remember, at first he had said that he was going to make these rockets up—this mixture must have been for them.
I sniff at it. Does it seem . . . ? Perhaps I should not use it, a voice of caution says. But there is so much; he will not even notice if I remove a little bit, just to finish up this job. I can replace it later. The church bell strikes the quarter now, and I know I have no choice. Quickly and gently I tip scoops of fresh mixture into the last two heads, and put in common stars. I add blowing charge, and just as I paste both heads firmly shut, I hear the front door open and then Mr. Blacklock strides into the workshop. “All done?” he asks. Hastily I push the last Caduceus rocket’s unassembled parts to the back of the bench near the windowsill and hope he does not notice. I can finish it first thing tomorrow morning, before the order is picked up.
“All done, sir,” I say. “Though—”
“Good,” he says. “Because Mr. Torré’s boy was passing by, and has come on the chance that the order is ready. He is waiting outside on the cart.”
“Oh ! ” I say.
“Is there a problem? ”
“No, sir,” I say. The order will have to be short, I think. In a fluster I pack up the crate, and Mr. Blacklock beckons the sulky boy to come in and he takes it away before I have a chance to think twice.
“You are proving yourself to be reliable,” Mr. Blacklock says later, unexpectedly, as we stop work for the day before supper. I look at the floor. “I hardly deserve that, sir,” I say, blushing. “Shall I close up the shutters?” The days are long at this point of the year, and it is easy to forget to close them.
“I may return to work,” Mr. Blacklock says. “Leave them open; the evening will be light enough to work by.”
“Mrs. Blight has taken her half day,” I remind him, as we go up the corridor. “She has left a cold piece of lamb in the meat safe and she says we must have more candles before the week is out.”
Nobody speaks much at supper. Although Mary Spurren cuts the lamb and lays it out upon the plate, nobody eats much. It is too hot for greasy meat like this, though the flies persist in crawling on it. Mr. Blacklock seems in a state of some disorder, and gets up frequently to fill the jug of small beer at the barrel in the scullery. The bark of his cough has worsened over the last few days, as if there were a great hollow inside him, and could it be that he is thinner, leaner than he was? His skin is so white it is almost bluish.
“Have you seen a doctor, sir?” I ask uneasily.
“The burn has healed now,” he replies brusquely.
“I did not mean about the burn, sir,” I begin, but he ignores me. It must be the way the light is falling on his face that makes it seem so gaunt, I think, waving the flies away from the meat again. He goes to his study while we clear the plates. I can hear him coughing. Mary Spurren lights the fire for him in there, when he calls for it.
“Never known a man who must so always have a fire beside him of late,” she grumbles, clattering the empty coal bucket down when she comes back to the kitchen. “It is so hot, yet there he is, hunched over his books and papers by the hearthside as if it were midwinter.” She wipes her neck. “I’d swear he were shivering.”
“Really?” I say, looking up. “But Mr. Blacklock doesn’t feel the draft in even a cold room. He sits in his shirtsleeves and jerkin, rain or shine.” She shrugs.
“It is not so hot as it was,” I say, swallowing. Or at least, the sun has gone behind a haze of cloud. But the weather is close, sticky, almost unbearable. The air has a greenish tint to it, as if a storm were brewing.

Much later, toward twilight, when Mary Spurren is up in her chamber, I go out into the yard to empty a pot into the drain. How hot it is. The air presses down.
Looking across at the workshop windows, I notice that Mr. Blacklock has returned to his bench. I can just see his head bent over his work; the lamp upon the sill is catching the side of his face, and casting a lattice of shadows into the dimming yard. I cannot see his hands. What is he making? I step a little closer toward the yellow lamplight. How I wish that I knew. I draw nearer still, until I am almost at the glass itself, and watch his dark, lean face absorbed in something, something that he thinks is secret, unobserved. I do not want to trespass on his privacy, and yet . . . There is the clink of a tool as he puts something down. He presses his head with his fingers, rubbing his temples. His mouth is moving; he is muttering something that I cannot hear through the glass. His eyes glitter brightly, blackly, almost as though his eyes are filled with tears.
It looks like a lonely place to be.
As if he has heard my thought, he looks up at the window; he seems to be staring at me across the gap that has opened up between us now. My heart contracts and I shrink out of the pool of light, though I do not look away. But of course he cannot see out into the darkening twilight. He would not see me standing there; the crooked glass is between us, so he would see nothing but the room reflected back at him, and his own stricken face.
Putting his fist to his chest, he coughs deeply, as if it is causing discomfort. He mutters again, and then abruptly he gets up, pushes his stool to one side and goes out of the workshop, leaving the yellow lamp burning unattended at the bench. Now is my chance, I think, and like a thief or a spy I upturn a bucket and climb upon it to get a clearer view. I have to stand unsteadily on tiptoe, and cling to the rough brickwork with my fingertips. But what I see down there is not what I expect. It puzzles me greatly. His bench is empty, save for his usual tools laid out. Mr. Blacklock was sitting there and doing nothing. What can be occupying his mind so much that he seems so agitated?
My own place at the bench seems different from out here, as though it belongs to someone else’s life and not my own. I see the last, unfinished Caduceus rocket, the two halves unbound, lying there so close upon the sill. How will I explain it to Mr. Blacklock? I hope that he does not find it before I have had a chance to tell him why I let an uncompleted order leave his premises.
Disappointed, I step off the bucket and creep back across the yard. At the back door the baby moves inside me and I stop to rub my belly. I look uneasily at the blackening sky above the roofs. It is as if the air has clamped itself around us, tight and thick. A dog barks, a distance away, and the bark sounds flat and strange, and I sense a gathering restlessness that makes me clutch my shawl about me, as though sudden, unknown changes that I cannot see are happening. There is a kind of crackling sickness on the air. “Watch out,” my grandmother used to say, waggling her crabby finger at us when there was a turn in the weather, “for something afoot. You mark my words.” And of course there was always an occurrence, because a hail would come, or a deluge, or a thaw. I go into the house again, bolting the door shut, and go to my chamber.
When I take off my boots, there is a flicker at the window outside, as though lightning is flashing far away. I unlace my skirts. I unpin my hair and begin to comb it, teasing out the knots until it fans out in a soft mass upon my shoulders. I pick up a handful and brush its smoothness across my lips. I look at my hair in the dirty looking glass and turn my head so that the candlelight shines glossily upon it. I am not so plain, I think for the first time in my life, and something makes me smile at the glass and my likeness there smiles back at me. There is another white spasm of lightning at the window, and then this time, a few seconds later, I hear a growl of thunder, as if the storm is fast approaching. The curtain begins to blow about as the breeze strengthens and I go and shut the casement to stop it banging on its hinges.
Lightning flashes again. And suddenly a wind bears down upon us, moaning at first and then screaming, and a rain is come, the hardest rain I have ever heard, lashing the panes. As if from nowhere, a great summer storm has got up and beats about the house.
The candle gutters. Despite the heat, I shiver. The folds of the curtain suck in and out with the violent rushes of air through the chinks between glass and leadwork. The wind howls outside in a sea of noise, pouring and crashing over the roof, as though we were the one lonely house upon the street and the wind were singling it out to be its victim. I put my boots under the washstand, and abruptly, before I am ready to extinguish it, the candle flame is blown out by a draft.
The shock of the sudden darkness makes the blackness of the night seem blacker than it is.
I grope my way to the bed, the noise of the wind and a strange smell in the air muddling me, until I find it. I think of such winds I have encountered at home, mashing the blackness of the holly trees in the thickets and whipping the hedges about like rope. After the great storm four years ago, beech trees were tipped over and scattered like dry spills of wood against the hillside. The roots of beechwoods reach remarkably shallow, and the pull and bluster of that night upturned the trees with ease, chalky great scabs ripped from the earth. That was the kind of wind that blows fishes clean out of the rivers. Men found them afterward and gathered them up so nothing was wasted; they were dead on the banks where the steep unnatural tides had left them.
A crack of lightning shows the room starkly.
I think of Mr. Blacklock sitting at his bench alone in the night, doing nothing, the despair on his face. Was it grief for his wife? Lying back in bed, my hands on the warm mound of my belly under my shift, I remember Mary Spurren’s remark about the night he did not return home till morning, and a niggling unpleasant thought comes back to me. Where had he been? Lightning flashes again, and then thunder rolls.
Outside the wind batters the side of the house, and gradually drags me into a restless sleep.
I toss and turn.
A crash somewhere outside wakens me, and I lie with my heart beating and beating, my face wet with tears. Lightning and a crack of thunder seem to tear the world apart. I sob aloud. A madness that I do not recognize is boiling in my body.
I listen as the house shudders and creaks. I close my eyes. I rub at the ache in my heart, turning over and pressing my face into the mattress. It is a storm with a terrible force. Lightning blinks on and off, the thunder rumbles, but even as I listen it is passing, and now from time to time the wind drops to a light, uneven hum between gusts, as if it were taking breath.
I begin to wade through a whole riverful of dreams. It is after dusk, and the Spring Gardens are teeming with a crowd of a thousand souls or more. Their murmuring is like the noise of the wind.
Little bits of dreams lap around me.
The wind has dropped. A bell rings thinly, as sharp as a star. And at once the crowd begins to pour toward the scaffold from all directions, a dark mass chattering and bobbing among itself.
There is a pause, precisely timed like a beat of silence in music, and the first Caduceus rocket is fired.
Its tip of crackling flame splits the black sky apart, making a raw, unbearable tear inside me, and at the same time its wake stitches the wound up again with two burning threads of scrolling fire, twisting and twisting behind in an expanding helix that dissolves and opens out into the sky.
The Caduceus rocket slows further until it seems to hang above us, pauses, and explodes, bursting bits of itself out brightly across the dark and liquid sky.
It is immaculate.
The witchery that exists in fire escapes and fizzes down over the crowd.
The upturned illuminated faces are tilted into the light like flat pebbles on a riverbed, their dark mouths open and their bodies in shadow. They are tiny and similar, made perfectly still by the excitement of the spectacle, content to yield and stand and stare, drinking it in. It leaves only the memory of what they have seen on the back of their eyelids like a dark purple scar, almost the opposite of light.
Then in my dream the flat crowd disperses.

I wake to a deep and penetrating silence.
The wind has ceased and there seems to be no sound at all from any quarter. Even the house itself is strangely quiet. When I go down the stairs and walk along the hallway to the kitchen, the ticking of the clock echoes loudly out of the study, as though it were ticking in an empty room.
Mrs. Blight arrives late, and she enters the kitchen brimming with dismal tales of horror caused by last night. She can hardly speak for excitement as she unties the hat from her head.
“A great many spires and weathercocks there are blown off churches, and the masonry falling all about killing persons in their chambers, barges lost in the Thames, a wherry full with meal for Queenhithe Market was overturned and broken up at Essex Stairs . . .” She lists disasters she has already heard of, taking the newest of her horrible pamphlets out of her basket and fanning her cheeks energetically with it. I listen to her stories part in dread and part in excitement, and it is in this unsettled state of mind that I rush to put on my cloak and slip out to consider the wreckage for myself. I have a sense of fear and hope and restlessness stirred up inside me by my dream last night. I make sure that the door closes soundlessly behind me as I leave; I cannot be long, there is too much to do, as we must finish the order for Ranelagh today. I shall not be missed, as Mr. Blacklock has not yet appeared, kept up by the wind all night, no doubt, and overslept. When I return to the house I will tell him what I saw.
At the front of the house I am dismayed to see that the walnut tree has been brought down, its roots torn and stiffly grasping at nothing, a hole ripped out of the stones at the edge of the pavement. I stare at it lying there with its green leaves and unripe walnuts dashed against the ground.
The street is littered with broken tiles and pieces of glass and bricks. Bits of leaves and dirt and straw are everywhere, and the air is still and dusty, so that the light has a yellow cast to it, as when a thick snow begins to fall from the sky. My footsteps falter as I make my way toward the river, crunching on fragments. There are no carriages, and the people that I pass have a dazed, excited look upon their faces, as though a war had started.