The Book of Fires

37
The squint-eyed undertaker comes with his measuring ribbon to draw up the size of the coffin. The knocker at the front door is muffled with crape, and the date for the funeral decided upon. “Having some measure also of the household, I have presumed there will be no need for the disbursement of gloves for the attendants,” the undertaker says.
Mary Spurren blinks at that. “Plain and respectful, that’ll do. He did not have much time for piety, not of the kind imposed upon one. Who will be there, I do not know; no chief mourners to speak of, no blood relatives to come and mourn his passing, save an aged aunt too infirm for travel.”
I cannot speak for sadness when she says this. But ceremony, I think, he had a sense of ceremony, and also tenderness. I remember once during the planning of a display how passionate he became. Mr. Torré had been there, and a spotted clerk struggling to make notes with a badly cut quill. “It must be majestic at that juncture,” Mr. Blacklock had insisted. “Those big gerbes need a dignity in presentation, their spitting has a height and trajectory worthy of substantial deference.” He stood up as he spoke; he seemed like a dark giant against the light from the window. The spotted clerk, with something close to awe upon his face as he looked up at him, forgot to scratch down what was said. On their departure Mr. Blacklock sat still for a moment or two with an expressionless face, observing the yard. Then he had turned and picked up a box of tight little crackers on the bench beside him, cradled it almost in his big hands, and looked inside. I do not think he knew that I was in the workshop with him. I had to smile when I heard him softly, absentmindedly speak to them.
“Little darlings,” he’d said, under his breath, as though it were a box of chicks he held.

With some shame I look down at my skirts when the undertaker is gone. In truth I had not noticed how worn they had become, and how stained with chemicals and paste and gunpowder.
“What will you wear?” I ask Mary Spurren, bleakly.
“Most every girl has a moth-eaten mourning dress, there are that many deaths in a family over a year, aren’t there? Mine is tighter than it was when my mother died, of course, but still, if I keep my shawl on over the gape at the back, who’s to know?” She looks at me. “You’re not going to wear your rough skirts? You know that those not wearing black beside the grave can be seen by the dead? ”
“I did not,” I say. “Can that be so bad? ”
“At the burial the spirit takes a leap for a body that’s living, if it can see one. I’d not take a chance,” she replies, with a shudder.
“Out of respect for the dead,” I say, disbelieving, and go to Paternoster Row to buy a dress.


At first the draper will not serve me, as if he does not consider me to have the money for what I need, until I show him the shine of Mrs. Mellin’s coins inside my hand. The draper makes his eyes go round in mock surprise. “And what thievery did you perform to come by such a sum?” he asks, his scornful tone made louder to ensure that his lounging apprentices can take in every word he says.
I show no response. I shall have a dress. I count spools of braid that I can see in an open drawer on my left. There are two in a bright blue and three in various shades of red, crimson, vermilion. My heart is beating with an anxiety that I will not show to him. I cannot go to Mr. Blacklock’s funeral without a dress that warrants the occasion. There will be tradesmen of the higher sort, and artisans and merchants in attendance. I imagine my rough linsey-woolsey garment walking beside them to the churchyard and I am ashamed. The draper makes some kind of calculation from a piece of paper at his counter.
“We cannot do it in the given time,” he drawls finally, arriving at the bottom of the page and looking up.
There being no customer at present within sight and both his tailors leaning idle at the back of the shop gossiping, I presume his meaning is more that he will not. A brief and pointless rage goes through me as the edge of a smile stirs his ridiculous mustache. He has won.
His shears lie neatly on the counter. I expect they are quite sharp, for cutting other people’s lengths of fabric.
What can I do but keep my back straight as I walk across the carpet to the door, which I don’t take any trouble to close behind me as I leave, with Mrs. Mellin’s coins all jostled in my stays where I have thrust them. I curse the meanness of drapers.

Back at the house I am in no doubt as to what I can do. I let myself into Mr. Blacklock’s chamber. It is warm and deserted, save for one fly buzzing at the window; Mr. Blacklock’s body was taken away to the undertaker’s shop this afternoon. I did not stay around for that. I did not want to see Mr. Blacklock’s body being lumped down the stairs like a sack of meal. It is not the way I would choose to remember him.
I lift the lid of the chest with care.
Inside is a musty, shut-in smell of old lavender and tansy and laid-away fabrics. When I lift the packets of clothes out one by one and lay them on the floorboards around me, I find I am touching them gently, as though they were the clothes of someone that I had known and loved myself. Shriveled bits of herbs fall away from the paper in which they are wrapped.
The clothes I take out, one by one, are the shape of the body of Mrs. Blacklock. When they are almost all out of the chest, the room looks as though I were unpacking a traveling chest after a long journey away from home.
I am puzzled by the shape of the last two dresses I unwrap. They are the same length as the other gowns but are cut loosely and pleated at the shoulders, as if for a different, larger person.
And then I see that there is another dress with its sides unpicked, as though to make adjustments that were never completed. The bodice is in pieces, broken threads hanging down from the open seams. And I understand that they were made to clothe the swollen shape of a woman close to her confinement.
I rub my own belly uneasily where the child is pressing at it, then bend again to take out the last things at the bottom of the chest. Her pretty shoes are glossy with satin and well-kept buckles. They are too small, and I am glad of this. I would not like to wear a dead woman’s shoes.


“Oh yes,” Mary Spurren says, red-eyed, when she comes up to find me. “Did I not tell you? Terrible it was. I dare not give you all the details; turn your stomach now, it would. Suffice it to say that the chit was lodged within her when her time came to push it out. They couldn’t deliver her. ‘Too much force and pulling, perhaps,’ the last doctor said that came. Too much use of tools and other new ideas, and the end result was a nasty mess. She didn’t stop bleeding and the life ran away from her. Never saw blood so bright nor plentiful.”
“And the child?” I ask.
“Obstructed, like I said. Never saw the daylight.”
I look out at the sky through the crisscross of the window. The leaves on the linden tree move about in a small breeze we cannot feel in here.
“Don’t you begin worrying yourself, though,” she says. She stares at my belly openly. “I shall run for the physician just as soon as your time begins.” Of course she knows my condition. Everyone knows it.
“I doubt I shall need a doctor,” I say, folding the clothes.
“Well, in the meantime then, no carrying of heavy buckets, nor standing about too long at the market fussing over vegetables.”
We can pretend that life at Blacklock’s will go on as usual for as long as possible, I think to myself, for the next few days. And then what?
“You would do well to find a midwife,” she adds, after a pause. And when she leaves the room I try on Mrs. Blacklock’s good black dress.
Wearing it, I find it trails a little on the floorboards, covering my worn boots wholly, but otherwise it fits. So she was not tiny, as he had said; indeed, she was a good inch taller than myself. Perhaps it was more that he had made her so, packed her away as tiny in his heart. Tiny she would have lodged there, but persistent, shrunk to a dense dot of pain inside his chest that agonized him if he touched upon it accidentally.
I do not take the dress off when I go to my bed for the last hours of the night. I cannot bear to. Instead I lie down and sleep in it, the silk falling all over the floor, it is so full. Wearing it, thank God, I dream of nothing.
How I dread the funeral tomorrow afternoon.


I have barely spoken to anyone since the day of the storm. Mary Spurren sits at the kitchen table surrounded by the chaos of unwashed pots and piles of linen she has brought down for laundering. Her eyes are red and puffed up with crying.
“What shall I do now?” she says to me four or five times over, her head sunk into her shoulders. I do not really know why she should be despondent; she will not have trouble finding a situation somewhere as a chambermaid or housemaid soon, whereas I, with my swollen belly, will have no such choice.
“You will be fine; the world is calling out for servants,” I say. Her white face stares at me.
“But with no reference,” she points out, “it will not be easy. Four years unaccounted for on paper.”
“Mrs. Spicer at the shop might write something for you,” I say.
“She might,” Mary Spurren says doubtfully. “But it will not carry weight.”
“She can ask about for you, though, surely? ”
Mary Spurren doesn’t reply.
Heavily I climb the stairs to my chamber, where a half hour of silence turns into an hour. The mice gnaw, undisturbed, at something beneath the washstand as if I were already gone. I have been sitting motionless upon the made bed in my chamber for quite some time. I am ready to leave after the funeral this afternoon. My belongings are packed once more into the oilcloth; the dress that was my sister’s that no longer fits me, my small linen, my Bible with the strip of grass between the pages keeping mark of where I am.
I have scrubbed at my boots with the blackening brush.
I have combed my hair and tied it neatly beneath my cap. Everything is washed. The lid of my hand salve is pushed in tightly so it cannot leak.
I will not take off Mrs. Blacklock’s good black dress after the service, I decide; somehow I cannot. I am owed one week’s wages, and though four shillings would scarcely pay for this garment’s cuffs, let alone the silky fabric or the stitching of it, I reason that it was not new.
I look at the bundle. I suppose I am in a kind of shock that my life here is all over. Outside, someone whistling passes down the street. The early morning sun is shining out there.
All my learning in the art of pyrotechny, pointless now, I think, angrily. All his endeavor to advance the art toward a blaze of color, lost, wasted. I feel ill with unhappiness when I think that I will never put a taper to my own perfect rockets, candles, gerbes. My stupid face flushes to think I ever imagined I could have the luck to be engaged in such skilled enterprise. For nigh on six months I had forgotten who I am, thought myself better than I really am: a country peasant girl, the daughter of laborers. I blink to see more clearly through the tears. Self-pity, I say viciously inside my head, kicking my heels against the bed. Who did you think you were, behaving in that way as if you were better than you are, than you deserve?
My heart beats in sharp rushes of blood until I feel faint. Lying down, I do not sob but grit my teeth together as if my life depended on it.
Here on the bed my head booms with nothing.
What shall I do?
I can’t turn about, return home now, the great bulk of my body brimming with impending motherhood. If I stay here I will not find work. No one will take me.
In truth, I can scarcely believe it.
Glancing up to see if the latch is tight on the closed door, I pour Mrs. Mellin’s coins out upon the blanket and push them about, as if they might harbor some ideas.
But St. Mary’s or St. Dunstan’s strikes ten. I should go down. And before I do, I hide the orpiment that I have taken from the workshop, the little jar of yellow poison.
In the kitchen I look about the shelves and pantry, but know there is no food prepared, and we have found that Mrs. Blight also took with her the ham that was kept in the meat safe. But there is fat, and flour. I am ashamed to think of eating on the morning of a funeral but a hunger gnaws inside me, and soon Joe Thomazin will be sidling in like a shadow. I go to Mary Spurren and touch her arm.
“Make us a pudding,” I suggest, because I cannot think what else to say. “When it is cooked we can arrive at a plan. It would be better to take stock of our predicament with a filled stomach, as the plans we make will prove less desperate, not so impetuous.” We should eat what we can, I think; it is not stealing to make the best of what we have. It is not stealing to take a dead man’s victuals, as after all the dead cannot eat them for themselves.
The muffled thump at the door startles us both.