The Book of Fires

39
The stench in the street tells me how close to the Rules of the Fleet I must be. A cluster of children are scooping for fishes in the Ditch, the putrid channel that flows sluggishly along the edge of Ludgate Hill, discharging itself into the Thames at Blackfriars. It runs fitfully, and scarcely at all in the summer: a runnel of excrement and bloody butchers’ waste from the Smithfield slaugterhouses. They say, among the comfortable, that there is much talk of the need to cover it over, but in the meantime the resourceful poor make what use of it they can. I heard of a man who skinned dead dogs in the Ditch for their pelts, but who drowned down there, caught out by the tide.
As I turn toward Fleet Lane, a movement catches the corner of my eye. It has been two days since something solid passed my lips. I must be faint, I think. I go to a barrow woman selling pies on the corner.
“Excuse me, madam,” I say. Why do I call her madam? She will think me odd as I wear a fine dress and look like a person of some means at least, but no matter. “I am looking for a Parson Speke . . . Did I see a pig?” I add. She looks stonily at me. “Give me one of your pies,” I say.
The barrow woman becomes promptly genial. “You may have caught a glimpse; there can be hogs, down on the slime. They feed on what they find there, God help them, then come up out the Ditch and run amok from time to time.” Her voice is rough but easy. She leans on the handles of her barrow.
“Are they . . . wild? ” I ask stupidly. She looks more closely at me and then scornfully up and down Mrs. Blacklock’s mourning dress in a way that shows me that she has no more regard for ladies in good dresses than for others. Being a little too long for me it has soaked up dirt and damp from the gutter. She cannot see my shoes.
“Wild? They are as owned as you or I.” She nods up the street. “Speke’s wedding place is just up there, past the Hand and Pen. Business, is it?” she pries. “Or something more . . . personal? ”
“A private matter,” I reply.
“Ah,” says the woman as though she knows, and she does not.
“He is dead. My husband is dead,” I retort, to shut her up. “He is to be buried today.” The ridiculous words fly from my mouth and the space that they leave behind in there floods over with a bitter taste.
There is a lull in the carriages rattling by. The coins all look the same inside my palm. When I look up I see in her face just a morsel of pity, and that is worse; it brings her too close, and lends her satisfaction. She wraps the pie and puts Mrs. Mellin’s coin up to her mouth to bite at and examine it. Her teeth are black and stumpy.
“Ah well, then,” she concludes with a shrug. “Some say that better off we are without a master.” Mrs. Mellin’s coin makes a yellow glint as it slips into her pouch.
I do not wait for any change from this woman. How heartless and exact is her presumption, and how I wish it were not so.
I do not see the pigs again. Turning the corner, I discard the revolting pie at once, shaking the contents of the packet out into the street, and rub my fingers against each other to remove the grease. Two rooks fly down noisily to fight and pull at the crust of the pie and the cooked stale meat. How I hate rooks and their black feathers dropping out. I hurry on until I see on my left the mouth of a mean alley and a faded sign that bears the image of a pair of stiff hands clasped together by the fingers. The lettering reads Marriages Performed Within.
Inside, the shop is badly lit by windows of thick and grubby glass.
“Parson Speke?” I call into the musty gloom, and presently an old man scuffs forward into the pool of better light coming through the open door, and looks up at me with his eyes screwed tight. His spine is bent, perhaps from a lifetime inscribing the fate of others deep into ledgers with the sharp pen I can make out in the inkpot upon his table. His wig is matted, and I see that he is troubled with a skin complaint. Clearly the business of performing Fleet marriages is not a prosperous one.
“I suppose you to be in need of my services,” he rasps. “And which is it that you require?” He pushes the door shut, and inches toward his desk.
“Not a service, sir, but a confirmation of one already done, I believe.” I clear my throat.
I seem to have woken him, and he will not reply until he has scrabbled about in a drawer at his desk for a candle, which he takes to light from a stove at the back of the shop. It is a poor candle, and the flame flares higher than it should, smoking and guttering alarmingly, and filling the room with the stink of sheep fat. I draw up the chair he gestures at and sit down gingerly.
“I am here to ascertain a certain point,” I begin.
“If it’s an annulment that you require”—his voice is thin and wheezing—“I am afraid you can be trotting on your way, my little lady; no longer can I undertake such things, the law discovers me too easily, I fear.” He pretends to look cowed by the law, and coughs weakly, then snips the greedy guttering wick at last with a pair of blackened trimmers that he has beside him. The flame steadies and compacts. He clearly has not seen my belly.
“No, no,” I say, “I am looking for a grasp of certainty.”
“Aren’t we all, young lady!” He coughs. “Aren’t we all.”
“Within the last month I have been made a wife,” I say, “and I am unsure on which day . . .” I select my words with care. “On what date this was occasioned.”
“Don’t know the date?” He gathers his worn stick toward him and goes stiffly to the shelf of registers.
I look down at my gloves, my good gloves that Mr. Blacklock bought for me. I want my fate to be buried among the other weddings there, and then to come to light as if by chance, by someone other than myself: unearthed with the objective rigor of a stranger.
“And the name is . . . ?”
“Blacklock,” I say, as if hearing it said for the first time.
“Two shillings, two shillings,” he chants under his breath in a wheezing delight as he runs his crabbed hand along the volumes. Seventeen fifty-three sits at the end of the row. He takes it down and splits it open at the middle. The page is thick and stiff and does not lie flat easily. He works forward down the columns with his grimy forefinger and reads aloud. “February, April. No Blacklocks yet.” He turns a page. “We have systems and filings and records in here.” He taps his skull. “I can find Flintlock, Blackalphington, Blackshaw, Blackbennett. Ah! Clue, I need.” He picks up the candlestick and casts the yellow light into my eyes to examine me. I blink. He puts it down again, shaking his head. “I have a memory for countenances yet I do not recall your face. Instruct me more as to the gentleman in question.”
“He is . . . was a dark man, lean, with a . . . a fine look to him. He was distinguished, imposing,” I say, my throat tightening.
“Ah, May,” he says eventually. “He wore no wig.” The parson screws his face up as if in pain as he struggles to remember. “There was an air about him. Yes, a smell I could not place. Not far from vinegar, the smell of him was, very sour and odd. I put it down to being some drops or physic he must be taking for that condition causing him to cough prodigiously our conversation through. Wicked deep, twisty cough, it was; the kind of cough the Devil gives you to suffer on a damp day in boggy country without spirits in your flask.
“Ha! It is here.” With effort, Parson Speke pushes the volume around to face me and holds a finger against the entry so that I may see.
At first I can make neither head nor tail of the swarms of letters arranged in rows across and down the page, there are so many lines. And then it detaches itself from the others; the meaning floats toward me like smoke as the letters unfurl and become clear. The thing is there, in a black ink that slopes and curls along the page. With amazement I read John Blacklock, widower, and beneath it is written Agnes Trussel, spinster.
“That is not my hand,” I say plainly to the parson.
“It is not,” he verifies, and he indicates an inky cross beside it on the page. “That is your mark.”
I look at it.
“After all, you cannot write.” He says this as a fact, not as a query.
“I cannot.” I look again at the mark on the page that I am said to have made. It is a mark altering my course of life, and yet what a black, shaking, twig of a shape it is, lying there on the white page. It is like a mark made by a bird’s foot on a path, after a thin powdering of snow has fallen on a cold day and frozen there. I touch its raised surface as though I were blind. The ink must have flowed thickly from the nib as it pressed onto the paper. I begin to believe that I could have made it. I shall choose to believe it.
I put one of Mrs. Mellin’s coins onto the desk and he gropes for it blindly and drops it into a box in a drawer beneath the table. He must think it’s a florin, and gives me nothing back.
“The law is changing,” he remarks. “In a month I will no longer be able to undertake such matrimonial joinings as that.” He pauses. “The more costly joining requiring more than the customary benediction. I mean the riddlesome, make-no-bones, ask-no-questions sort of matrimony that brings in a little supplementary benefit for me.”
“You mean that he bribed you?”
The parson shrugs. “I did inquire if the lady concerned was absent due to some grave illness or indisposition,” he says, as if to defend the strangeness of the settlement. “But he replied that no, she was not ill. And said nothing more about it.
“Well, I did think, here’s a situation. And then I took his guineas like they was quite, quite, ordinary.” He shrugs. “What could I do? I have an earning to be made. There is no crock of gold to dig for under rainbows.” He narrows his eyes at me as if he expects me to say otherwise, then wheezes with regret. “I should have taken on more darkly business. Life would have been most profitable should I have had more requests that were lacking a bride.”
A spark flies from the candlewick into the dark.
“There will be a flurry of business like the brief falling of leaves in autumn toward the end of the year, a little gold finding its way into the pot, and then I shall close my door for the final time; unlawful this, unlawful that. Banns will need to be read before any wedding can take place. It will mean the end of all Fleet marriages.
“I recall your gentleman quite clearly now. When he left I followed him to the door, and saw him leave. He had ordered no carriage and walked solitary down the street. I watched him till he turned the corner toward Holborn Bridge.”
A great ache washes through me.
For a moment I am too sad to stand up, although I know I must be on my way.
A coach rumbles by. Parson Speke talks on through the noise. “It was an odd business, that day. Very odd. I said so to my wife in the evening when the shop was shut up and the dinner dishes was laid out on the table.”
“You believe in marriage for yourself!” I say, relieved. “Are you a religious man?” I ask hopefully.
A sad, uncomfortable look passes over his face, like a man who has remembered the loss of something dear to him. “I was a full-fledged churchman once. They do say that once the faith is planted in you it will grow and sweeten healthily, with time becoming easier, then effortless. I did not find it so. Occurrences transpired to my disadvantage and I found a need to continue my endeavors here in a different district of the city. I have discovered little magic since.
“Do I consider myself a religious man?” He leans on his stick and looks down at his dirty vestment. “I wear the cloth still.” He seems perturbed by such a question.
“I looked for things to demonstrate the purpose of it all to me, young lady; occurrences evoked by prayer or distinctive stillness in my thought. Not miracles or tricks, but something that once I would have called religious change.”
His eye lights upon my belly as I stand up to leave. He seems to rouse himself, blinks behind his spectacles, bows and stands aside. “I see you are about to be congratulated, madam, on a delicate matter. I wish you well.”
I think of the slight, uncertain mark where I made my cross by proxy in his ledger.
“The greatest thing of wonder can come out of the smallest changes, Parson,” I say, and I cannot help but smile at him as I go out, because a bubbling strangeness of content has begun to realize and open up inside me.
“How glad I am to hear it, Mrs. Blacklock. There is much refreshment in that thought.” He glances at my belly once again, as though he cannot help himself, and a puzzled look is dawning in his face as he bids me goodbye. I can feel his gaze upon me as I walk down the street.

I hardly know how I find my way home; my feet move of their own bidding, and my heart goes above them as though a bird is flying in its place. Not with the heavy, suspicious, greedy flight of crows or ravens, but fluttering and soaring like a wood lark.
Thoughts tumble through me: I am a grieving widow carrying a child that is to be born into wedlock. I have no need to conceal the grotesque swelling of my shape, and I have no need to be ashamed. Indeed, the sudden loss of shame surprises me. The relief I feel is something like the physical shock upon straining to lift a heavy basket and finding it as light as an empty wicker. My great burden has been removed, and every day can come now as it will.
I look down at the good dress I am wearing. I must go to the cobbler’s shop, as my mended country boots look strange and dirty when I lift its hem.

As I walk to St. Mary the Virgin for Mr. Blacklock’s funeral, the bell begins to toll. Outside the church the undertaker’s bier is already empty.
Beyond the porch the nave is black with mourners, so that I stumble on the step in fright to see so many gathered, like a sea of crows. Who can they be? I catch a glimpse of Mrs. Spicer at the back, in a black crape hat, and the merchant from Cannon Street with his wife. Other clients must be here, I realize, distinguished-looking people, colleagues, acquaintances. Mr. Boxall takes my elbow and guides me to a pew at the front of the church. A dry flutter of sidelong glances follows me along the aisle, and I feel the sharp beadiness of their gaze fixed on the back of my neck throughout the sermon, which I can scarcely hear. Surely they do not know already? It is all I can do to sit up straight, my mother would have told me to. Behind me Mary Spurren sniffs into her handkerchief. And I cannot take my eyes from the sleek coffin that four strong men carry away from the altar and through the great door toward the light.
Outside, the bright air is filled with the buzzing of insects and swifts screaming over the crooked rows of tombstones. The grass is tangled with daisies and speedwell, like an uncut meadow around the rawness of the open grave.
“Ashes to ashes,” the rector says, firmly and smoothly, because he buries people every week. And John Blacklock’s body is lowered back to the earth where all things come from. I watch the old sexton take gritty spadefuls from the mound like a slow workman, and the steady, falling soil crackles on the coffin’s lid.
When the ceremony is over, the man at my side turns to me and starts to speak, and it is Mr. Torré, though I hardly recognize him without his hat.
“When they say that Prometheus himself brought fire to the people packed in a fennel stalk, I think they meant John Blacklock, madam,” he says. I do not know how to reply. Most of the mourners have dispersed to the street, gone off already to their lives and occupations, though a huddle are stood talking by the gate, and their pale faces glance across at me from time to time.
“He was a brilliant man, a thinker. London is a poorer place for the loss of him,” Mr. Torré says. He takes his wife’s arm and turns to leave.
“I would be pleased to offer my advice,” he adds. “Let me know what I can do to help once you are ready.” And I smile ruefully at his kindness through my tears, because I can almost hear John Blacklock objecting how that man had always itched to get his hands upon his business.

I look back once when I get to the lich-gate, at the old man bent over the weight of his piled-up spade, and at the space between the headstones where the body of John Blacklock lies. The breeze is mild, and I see that there is a clear view of the sky above the graves.
There is no wake.