The Book of Fires

40
My dearest Ann,
Please come at once. There is too much to say. My husband is dead Please come at once. There is too much to say. My husband is dead and the time of my lying-in cannot be long now. I will repay your fare on your arrival in London. Forgive my haste.
I am taken aback when Mrs. Spicer suggests, and writes, With deepest regard, Agnes Blacklock. I look at the new shape of it upon the page. Mrs. Spicer’s hand shakes with a trace of palsy, and little spots of blackness speckle the page.
“All very extraordinary it is, too,” Mrs. Spicer says, admiring her work and shaking the castor over it to soak up the ink. “There’s no lack of gossip, mind, but I’ve no time for that.” She smiles kindly at me then, and leans out and puts her shaking hand over mine for a moment.
And she folds the page until it is small and square, with my sister’s name at Wiston House faced out on the top surface and a hardening waxy seal holding its edge fast. I am shocked at the letter when it is done, at seeing the facts laid out so baldly upon the page. It is not a selfish letter. My proposition to her is a good one, I believe.
“And the postage is threepence,” Mrs. Spicer says, waiting patiently for me to come to my senses and leave the shop.

I find that the light-headedness I feel is also a curious, misplaced kind of anger. I have no right to be angry, I say. I reason that this ingratitude will do no good, yet I do not understand why he has done this. I am angry because he is dead, because he did this thing and did not tell me, did not ask me. Why did he not shout for me instead of dying? Why did he die when we had so much work to do together?
I suppose there was a point in time when the shape of life could have unfolded differently.
I do not think I loved John Blacklock. I do not know what it is to be in love. I do not know what it was that John Blacklock felt for me. And yet I have a sense that there was something not quite arrived at, not quite formed, nor spoken of, nor finished. This something, this unformed love, is within me still: a kind of bright, unhappy warmth that may dim slowly as the years go by, or it may not.
At the moment I am so sad that I can taste sadness in my mouth; when I breathe, I breathe in the smell of sadness.


Mary Spurren just looks at me when I tell her I am married, and to whom. “You are not surprised,” I say. She blinks.
“I rarely find surprise in anything,” she replies. “Only sometimes what my poor mother called perplexity.” She sighs. “Besides, I knew it. I knew it from the very first. He was different from the day you came here, all sodden with rainwater. I must say, it made me mad.” She wipes her nose across her cuff. “Little spots of color started up on his cheekbones and didn’t die down.”
“What did you know?” I ask.
She looks at my belly openly again. “It accounts for things. I did suspect it, not in this peculiar way, but there was something afoot. How could a body not notice! My mother always said I were not stupid, though there’s plenty of folks may have said otherwise.
“At dinner he would sit and stare at you, stare at your hands as you ate. He’d never talk no more at table, just kept glancing, over and over. Mrs. Blight said that you should act upon it, very slow she thought you were, cool as custard you sat there, shoving your spoon in and looking at your platter saying nothing like you was an untouched milkmaid. Clever, Mrs. Blight said at first; playing at being all unawares and fresh up from the country.
“And then it became clear your belly had more inside it than Mrs. Blight’s loaves and gravies. Not so clever then, she said. Agnes Trussel is quick with child, if I am a day. She said in truth that she were sorry for you. I was not, though I was surprised at Mr. Blacklock. I wanted you gone. Easier it was before you came, with your distraction. He had had a kind of gratitude toward me I were happy with. I was here the day his wife died, after all. I was here when he had trouble with his business and with his apprentice Davey Half head, who had a rage on him like a mad dog in a crate, and here when Davey Half head ran away. And then Mr. Blacklock did not take on any other people. It was for a long time very plain and simple, just the way he liked it. I could get on steady as I pleased. Then all of a sudden came Mrs. Blight one day, and the next day you, too, was there, though I could not for the life of me think why.”
“He stared at me?” I say. I am baffled by this. Her watery eye meets mine and holds it briefly.
“Like . . . like you was gold dust come to the table.” She sniffs. “So angry he was when Cornelius Soul began to pay you more attention than he should have. Mind you, plenty of us foresaw disaster lying there.” She scratches the back of her head and shakes it, as if to dislodge something of her confusion. “But marriage in May! And nobody knowing, I can’t fathom it all quite,” she says.
“When were you wed?” she asks.
“On the eleventh of May.”
She frowns. “Why does that stick in my mind as a date of note? ” I can see the thought struggling to the surface of her face, and at last she breaks out with a burst of recognition. “Oh, yes, the day that Mrs. Blight won on the lottery.” She rubs her head. “That were a funny evening, now that I comes to think of it again. What with her making all that good sauce and it going to waste as no one came to eat it. Mr. Blacklock not turning up at all, and you not coming neither . . .” She trails off.
“Ah,” she says. “I gets it.”
She blinks.
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head again. “There is a missing bit, I don’t know what.”
I do not tell her that I did not know myself; it is something that I will not tell a soul.
I am a widow before I am a bride, I think.
There is a silence as we spoon in broth that Mary Spurren has made.
“Do you miss your home? ” she asks me. “Can you go back to where it is? Your fortunes have changed so; you could do anything! ”
I cannot answer straightaway. I think of Sussex, and the lane to the cottage flooding over with whiteness when the rains pour down the slope of the scarp onto the clay. I imagine the wind blowing the green leaves of the beech about. I imagine bits of myself caught all about there, in the way that the sheep leave scraps of wool on the thorns where they rub or push through, going from patch to patch of ground.
“No,” I say. “I will not go back to live in Sussex.” And then I laugh aloud and say, “I have come to like the taste of water from the pump in Mallow Square too much! ” And she smiles at this, her big pale head grinning open with the thought of it.
“What will you do yourself?” I ask. “You know you can stay here, with the same arrangement as before.”
She nods. “Plenty of dirt still,” she says. “And what is dirt but work, and where there is dirt there is work for me or anybody.” She takes her bowl to the scullery and knocks about in the cupboard there. “Talking makes my head hurt,” she mutters, rubbing at it. She pauses by the door.
“Pushed me out, she did,” she says.
“I’m sorry? ”
“Alice Ebbs. That woman whom my father married, after my mother died. I heard her once, nagging my father in his own kitchen: That great girl, eating and eating. I had to leave.”
“Where did you go?” I ask curiously, thinking of my own flight.
“Came straight here, I did. Never been nowhere else except my father’s place and here. Dirty, it was then. Till I came.” And she looks about her with a touch of pride.
“I’ll get on now,” she says. And she goes off up the corridor with her dustpan and brush.
The kitchen is quiet when she has gone. A fly comes in through the open door from the yard and settles on my emptied dish. I can hear the brush knocking the risers of the stairs as Mary Spurren sweeps. I push back my chair and go to the workshop for the first time in seven days.

Joe Thomazin looks up, startled, as I enter.
“Good morning,” I say to him, and he nods his head shyly, though he does not look at me. He is perched on a stool close to the lit stove, despite the warmth of the day. I sit down heavily before the filling-box and look about, touching my belly. The baby is asleep inside me. Sunshine is flooding the sills and benches, and when Joe Thomazin gets up and begins sweeping beneath the benches, dust spins in the beams of light. The hiss of his brush is regular against the boards.
“Joe Thomazin,” I say. “You will stay with me.” The sweeping pauses and then goes on, as if that was expected. In time, I think, he will be more than useful. He has watched John Blacklock at his work for years.
How hot the sunshine is, streaming in through the windows, all over the benches. Little beads of sweat run down my face. It is almost midsummer. Shouldn’t this baby be born before midsummer? The summer is making it lazy. How warm it is. I shall open the door to the yard, I think, and I get up slowly, turning my back on the sun.
The blast shatters the window.
A searing crackle rips the air, and shards of glass are everywhere, a taste in my mouth . . . and a plume of choking, blood-red smoke begins to pour from the bench. The ground vibrates. I gag, panicking for breath as white and fiery explosions pepper the air, a river of redness streaming over the bench, overturned stools, scattered . . . it is a violent, pulsing arc of fire.
“What in God’s name! Help, somebody, help!” I scream.
I wade retching in sparks and colored fire and smoke, bent doubled up, and then I see half of the Caduceus rocket, my unfinished Caduceus rocket, trapped and fizzing against the floor in a corner like a dying, furious animal.
“Joe!” I cry. “Joe Thomazin!”
The second head of the rocket explodes and leaps up and recoils beneath the bench and is trapped again, miraculously, kicking violently and spewing a rush of sparks out sideways into the middle of the room. I am astounded. It is the pulsing red of the back of the eyelids closed against the sun. It is the red of passion, rage, of fear. It is a haze of crackling insects. The smell of the red is everywhere. And Joe Thomazin is lying on the floorboards.
Abruptly, it seems, the drowning is over. The hiss of sparks, dying down, gives out a last spurt of fizzling and comes to an end. The dim, ruby, choking air quivers with silence.
“Are you hurt? Where are you hurt? What were you doing?” I shout, the sulfur, the red smoke catching my throat. “It is over! There is no fire!” I am shaking him. And, thank God, he is not hurt. He struggles free and jumps in distress from foot to foot, tears streaming runnels through the blackness on his face. There is a strange noise coming from somewhere close. It is not the smoking carcass of the rocket’s parts. I have to stop and look. When I see that the noise comes from him, my own breath stops for a moment as I strain to hear it.
“I didn’t, I didn’t,” he is saying, over and over, in a hoarse, thin wheeze. “I didn’t. Didn’t touch.” His blackened lips hardly move as he says the words.
“You didn’t touch?” I say, in astonishment.
“Didn’t touch,” he says. And I believe him. I pick him up and he clings to me, his scrawny knees bent into my side, his head pressed into my neck. His body shakes with the force of his sobs, long after the crying is over. It is so calm, and so desolate. I collapse onto the scorched boards with my legs out and hold Joe Thomazin against the bigness of my belly. My ears are ringing. They are hearing the boom of the explosion’s echo again and again, the tinkle of jars breaking, the rolling tools in disarray. The air is loosening now, slackening. And the red smoke has vanished around us like a mist eaten up by sunrise, leaving barely a trace, as if it had never existed, and through the broken window I see Mary Spurren running from the scullery across the yard.
“Agnes!” she pants. “Are you in there? I heard a . . .” Her big head stops by the window and stares in. “What is it? I heard . . . I thought something bad had happened, I thought . . . I thought we had exploded.” I can hear her feet crunching the glass. “Has it finished?” She coughs. “Oughtn’t you to come away from there? ” she adds uneasily. “Your face is bleeding.”
“It is lost,” I say, sat there on the floor, quite unmoving.
“Lost? What is? ” she says, bewildered.
“The knowledge is lost, Mary . . . all gone. He did not trust me.”
“Trust you with what? ”
“He discovered the color. He knew how to make it. He did not share his precious secret with me.”
It has gone to the grave, buried with him. And still the crickets go on chirping in his yard; fresh summer air drifts in.