The Book of Fires

41
I am waking earlier and earlier as the time for this baby to be born grows near. Today I find I cannot sleep and cannot lie still, so I rise and dress, go down to the study and sit at Mr. Blacklock’s desk beside the open shutters in the first light. Looking through some papers lying there I see there is still another order to fulfill. Yesterday I had been surprised to receive a formal message of condolence from Mr. Torré, repeating that he would be pleased to offer his assistance, if he could be of service to the business at this difficult time. The world is not all bad.
Dawn begins coloring the sky long before the sun rises, and a black-bird starts to sing from the linden tree outside. The weight of the child inside me shifts about as though it is waking, too. Does an unborn child close its eyes when it sleeps? I allow myself now to imagine what its face may look like. Sometimes it pushes at my ribs so that I cannot breathe freely or sit still, so that I have to get up and pace about. Of course, now I do not wear my stays.
I think of those rocket heads, pouring out redness. What a waste of beauty, what a waste of knowledge a sudden death can inflict, like spilling something vital away into a dry soil. How will I manage here without his guidance? I do not know enough. I hope the stock we have will last awhile.
I go to the shelves and take up a book and open it at random. I turn a yellowed page. And another. And I see that great masses of written notes in Mr. Blacklock’s hand have appeared in the body of the book, notes that were not there when I looked into these same books on that day so many months ago. The notes spill all down the margins. I go to the early light from the window and try to look at them more closely. There is an urgency to their inky sprawl, unclosed pothooks, hastily crossed letters, dark threads of knowledge poured out all over the printed text, but I cannot read these scribbles, so blackly tangled that they are unreadable. I open another and find that the same has been done. I cannot read his handwriting; it makes neither head nor tail of sense. I open another, my hands trembling. Mr. Blacklock’s shelf of books on pyrotechny have all been annotated for me. I am certain of it. His secret is in here, and yet I cannot read a word of it.
And then I reach the end of the shelf and see another volume that I think, at first, I have never seen before. Smaller than the others, with a pale calfskin cover. I realize it is the battered notebook that Mr. Blacklock kept inside his coat. I look again and open it. It is more than a notebook—it is a manuscript. And as I start to read a tiny gasp comes from my throat, because I see what I am holding.
Not in my lifetime, but perhaps in yours, he had said. And it strikes me that perhaps John Blacklock knew that he was dying, and that when I turned up so strangely and so insistent on his doorstep in the rain, reminding him of something that he had known and lost, he saw a chance, a glimpse into the future that suggested a way to pass on the artistry that was his core. If he saw later that I was with child, perhaps it drove him to act with the secrecy and urgency with which he made sure I was his wife: sanctioning the birth, protecting me because I was the key to the continuity he sought so keenly. Without marriage, his plan could not work. But why did he not tell me? I suppose that he had to be sure I was capable of the task in store. It was an experiment. Haphazard, not without risk. Perhaps he was afraid I would refuse. There was so little time. He would have known that I could only gain from the arrangement, but once done, he could not bring himself to tell me of it. He must have suffered dismay when he saw how Cornelius Soul paid me attention, but perhaps he did not believe it would come to anything.
This is what he worked on, late into every night, trying to complete everything he needed to pass on to me, making these fine, swift drawings, listing formulae, assembling instructions, quantities, measurements, conversions, queries, solutions . . . discoveries. My heart leaps. I know it is for me. My book of fires.
So much of what we do in life stays unexplained. Probably I shall never understand his motive for acting as he did, though I will think of it often, but I know for certain that a strong thing had started up like fire between us.
I turn to the beginning of this precious work that I have in my hands, sit down at his desk and begin reading in earnest. There is much hard work to do ahead of me. I like that, I think. I am sure my dream of color is somewhere before me in the darkness of the future, between these pages, as though the bright thread of my story is running on ahead of me and I have only to catch up with it. It is the presence of fire that is constant, and as I have said, my liking for fire has been there from the start.
The door opens and Joe Thomazin slips into the room. He looks at the book lying open in my hands, and a wide, jagged smile breaks out across his face.
“You knew about this? ” I ask him.
“All . . . the time,” he stammers shyly.


Reading for hours, I become late for an appointment with a banking man in Lombard Street, who is to give me advice as to the nature of the investments that I now possess. My investments! I almost laugh aloud at the absurdity.
I am shown to the waiting room when I arrive, where I sit down. It is strange how the sudden wearing of a good dress makes one sit up straight and put one’s feet together. I suppose that is the power of gold and fortune, even in small quantities like those I have. It is at once mysterious, wondrous, and distasteful. Surely now would be the time to straighten out one final matter. I cannot live with something pricking at my conscience all my life, and this is why I have the rest of Mrs. Mellin’s coins wrapped up in oilcloth on my lap, in readiness to show him.
The banker is a crisp, neat man called Mr. Dunn, wearing a brown velvet coat the color of horses. His face is smooth with politeness as he discusses my affairs. I try to attend to what he says. It seems I am wealthy, having money here and there. His wig is impeccable.
“And the best for your family,” he concludes.
My child! I think, and I vow to put its welfare before all other matters. Which is why I do not feel the remorse that I should when I say in a rush, “And these gold pieces I have, can I leave with you also?” I tip them out of the piece of oilcloth in front of him like a confession, and my hands shake so much I hide them beneath the table. Mrs. Mellin’s coins shine against the polished wood.
“Certainly,” Mr. Dunn says at first. But as he picks up the first coin his mild face suddenly narrows with attention, and he reaches for an eyeglass to look at them more closely.
“Is there something wrong, Mr. Dunn?” I venture anxiously. He turns the coins over in his clean white hands as he examines them. He clears his throat, and puts the last one down. The table between us is vast.
“Have you had these long?” He lowers his eyeglass and looks at me keenly. I shake my head.
“How much . . . is there, altogether?” I ask, and my voice sounds small in the big room. Could he know that they are stolen? That is surely impossible.
He replies, very slowly, “I am afraid to say that I cannot take these for you, Mrs. Blacklock.”
“Why?” I ask, and my heart beats in my mouth.
“These are illegal coins. They have no value; they are nigh on worthless.” He puts one or two onto a small brass scale. “They are defective in weight, and have been tampered with to disguise their shortcomings.”
“Do you mean to say that they are forgeries?” I ask, swallowing. This is not at all what I imagined I would hear. Mrs. Mellin’s coins have no lawful value?
“They are not counterfeit so much as tampered with.” He pushes a coin to me. “See how the head of King George II has been added inexpertly to the original mint. This particular Spanish coin holds no value here.” He holds another up to the light from the window, and it flashes fiercely. He looks at me again, very directly. “Someone has scoured at them, to wear away at the evidence. But they are quite thin; it is clear to the experienced eye that they have been meddled with.”
“So they are not gold, even? ” I manage to say, faintly.
“They are gold, but they are not legal tender and severe penalties exist for carrying such currency. Naturally, I cannot take them.” I drop his gaze. “You are taken aback, Mrs. Blacklock. I am sorry to embarrass you, but you have been the unlucky victim of a fraud. There are many rascals out there. I am only sorry that you will have trouble getting rid of them.” I begin to gather them up. “I am not sure how I can advise you,” he goes on, “but you may be lucky. There is a shortage of good coins and no lack of unscrupulous traders who may have them off your hands for wares or services.”
I take a deep breath, and stand up to leave.
“I am sorry about your husband, Mrs. Blacklock,” the banker says. “He was a good man. Do not hesitate to call on me again, should you need to consider other business matters.” He holds the door open, and I thank him and make sure I do not run as I go out onto the brightness of the street.
I do not need to try to spend the coins, I realize as I turn toward home. My secret solution is neat and strange. At last I have the perfect end for Mrs. Mellin’s coins, knowing as I do how some freshly mixed aqua regia will dissolve the gold quite readily. In the workshop there will be one jar of liquid on the shelf that has no label, and when I glance up at it from time to time it will remind me of how very fortunate I have been this year.


And life goes on.
Not as normal, but the tilt of time keeps us rolling onward. Eating, sleeping fitfully at night, going to the butcher, the grocer.
“How are you keeping, Mrs. Blacklock?” Mrs. Spicer asks, waddling over. “In your state, these hot days must be causing you a deal of nuisance.”
“Oh, not so badly,” I reply.
“There is just one thing I meant to ask you,” she says, drawing out the lid on a glass jar. She dips the ladle and the pale heads of artichokes nod slowly in the oil as though they were drowned in there.
“There is something in the matter of your marriage and its secrecy, I can’t say what, that seems a puzzle.” One after the other she drags up artichokes, drains a spool of oil back to the pot and lays them glistening on a dish.
“There are folks out there who cannot comprehend the need for such concealment, nor what purpose did it serve. Does it even cast a doubtful light on its authenticity? It is just that it confounds them.” She looks at me. “I hope you do not mind me speaking frankly, Mrs. Blacklock.”
“No, no,” I say, biding for time.
“It’s just that the very abruptness of his death caused some tongues to wag. You are excessively”—she pauses—“big with child, after all. Folks do not like to feel misled in what is what.”
“How do you mean? ” I ask.
“Discovery of hidden facts gives them excitement, and a crossness that they did not know the facts themselves. They fret that other folks might have heard before them, not liking to be the fool who has not heard the news. And then, of course, disclosure causes them to rub their hands together with the flavor of their knowledge. Aggrieved by the existence of other people’s secrets when they come to light, their chatter springs up like flames from a tinderbox when the flint has struck.”
“Faster than that,” I say ruefully. “Like quick match!”
“Well, they feel hoodwinked by the not knowing of a whole affair, as though it were their right to have the details of a body’s business, and it must be said that that fuels a certain speed to its delivery from mouth to ear.” Mrs. Spicer pushes back the wide cork.
The child kicks and my hand goes to my belly. I look hard at the bottles on the shelf above the counter, my eye lingers on the syrup glow of empress peaches and, may God forgive me, a neat little lie comes out of my mouth.
“It was for the sake of Mr. Blacklock’s relative,” I say. Mrs. Spicer puts her webbed hands on her hips.
I pitch my voice as if in confidence. “I’m sorry to say that his aunt is stubborn. It was the conditional nature of his inheritance. In her old age she has become a little shaky in her grasp on the customary ways of things, and announced John Blacklock should not remarry if he was to receive her legacy. It was as if she laid the blame for his first wife’s death at his feet, though she did not say so. She has theories brewing in her head about the world and the way it should be run.”
Mrs. Spicer digests this, weighs it up. “In short, she is a little odd but well-to-do; and he complied with an old woman’s unreasonable request.”
I shrug, as if to say I did not disagree with what he did. May all concerned forgive me. There is a need for these untruths.
“I do recall he had an aunt,” Mrs. Spicer admits, wiping her oily fingers on her apron. “More than once I have been occasioned to pack up a crate of oranges for carriage, or Rhenish wines. A solicitous nephew, I always thought, sending gifts to his old aunt to brighten the darkness of her days, her twilight days in the heart of winter. How lonely that can be in old age, and how long.
“And yet it was the money all along. Still, I don’t know, to keep a thing like that, like marriage, under wraps.” She shakes her head. “I did not have him down as a man of such cupidity, putting material wants before vital matters of the heart. Before matters of decency.”
Then her face clears, and she glances at my belly in relief.
“Yet of course, I am forgetting that he had the future of his child to think of. His progeny. I daresay he did not care for the muddification of it all himself, but he suffered it for his child’s safekeeping. How restrained of him, and how forbearing.”
“He was an honorable man,” I say.
“Of course he was,” she says. “There is a lot of talk. I must say, I do not care for it.” She shakes her head. “Pay on account, at the end of the month when your affairs are settled. The chatter will pass, Mrs. Blacklock, like a shower in summer. Plenty of other things for them to think about soon enough, when someone else’s life takes a twist and turn out of the ordinary. I should not trouble yourself overmuch on its account.” And she puts an additional package on the counter. “Here is a little titbit for you to savor for yourself. A gift, we shall call it, toward the concentration of your strength.” Her brow wrinkles in sympathy. “You must promise you will eat it, mind. Cakes is good for you.”
“You are a kind woman, Mrs. Spicer,” I say as I go out. She did not suggest that it might have been wiser to enjoy a spot of married life before his time in this world was up. Of course she did not. No one can see into the future like that. If we could, how differently we would all conduct ourselves.