The Book of Fires

42
My confinement must be days away. The baby is huge inside me. It does not kick now very often, it is so squeezed up in there. It seems, as I am, to be simply waiting.
The kitchen is quiet this morning. The kettle of tea I have just made is steaming lightly as it brews beside the hob. I look about the room. My kitchen, my house, now, and it hardly seems possible. I put a finger to the objects on the table, a spoon, a pair of bowls laid out for breakfast. I pour some tea, blow on it gently, and take a sip. I turn to the high dresser, and my eye falls on Mrs. Blight’s stack of pamphlets there. I shuffle through them; there are a variety of publications—Last Dying Speeches, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts.
I remember the conversation we had only a month ago, on the evening she said that I should read some myself to gain some understanding of the wicked world. Uncomfortably, I went to them and picked one up.
“What is the Ordinary? ” I asked.
“The prison chaplain,” Mrs. Blight said, warming at once to her favorite topic. “Put upon to give spiritual care to those condemned to death. His perquisite being the right to publish their final confession at the scaffold, with accounts of their lives. I like the Ordinary’s Accounts best,” she’d said, nodding at the one I held, “as it gives the unfortunates a little bit of a chance to put their side of things.”
Some of these are from many years past, I note. She has been collecting them a long time. I thumb the yellowing pages idly. But this one, for instance, that I hold in my hand, is very new. The Ordinary of Newgate. His ACCOUNT of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words of the MALEFACTORS Who Were Executed at TYBURN, on FRIDAY the 25th of MAY, 1753.
Just two weeks ago; I must have heard the bell myself for this very execution. I take another sip of tea. I turn the pages absentmindedly, and am not prepared for the great and icy shock that I receive from it. A chill spreads through me, like a drench of cold water.
“Oh God, no,” I whisper, my flesh creeping with a sudden understanding. And I read: . . . indicted for stealing one Diamond Locket, 13th November 1752.
LETTICE TALBOT, aged 23, was born in the parish of St Anne, Westminster ; of Genteel and Pious Parents, possessing handsome Property in the City and beyond; she was afforded the best Education available, the particulars of either not proper to mention; and seemed to be set upon a Life gliding along the esteemed paths of Virtue and reputable Content. The seed of her Undoing lay in her great Beauty, attracting as it did the attentions of many; including those of one wealthy Baronet owning a sizable manse near Chelmsford in the County of Essex, and whom with more innocence than wise counsel her Parents had thought eligible. At the first opportunity he proved untrustworthy; violating her most shamefully and lewdly, and she became with Child. When she could no longer conceal her vulnerable Condition she was turned out by her mortified Family and, though soon afterwards she suffered a Miscarriage, was forced to accept support extended by her seducer’s associate the notorious Courtesan Sally Bray, and fell quickly into a Life of Vice. Claiming some of the most learned and respected Gentlemen among her Voluptuaries and Admirers, she could command high prices for her debauched and particular Services and lived in a style of fashionable Elegance. She claims as her final Downfall a singular intimacy with one Charles Kettering, of Dorking in Surrey, Husband to the prosecutrix Elizabeth Kettering, and declares that her Error was to have succumbed to the temptation of Love itself, and its unreliable and wily accomplice Trust. In this incautious state of illicit Love, she maintains herself to have been in receipt of the Gift of a Diamond Locket, val. thirty-five guineas, from the said Charles Kettering, proven subsequently to be the Property of the prosecutrix Elizabeth Kettering his Wife, who made the discovery that her Loss was adorning the neck of her Husband’s Mistress and ran to him with the threat of public Disclosure, whereupon he denied all acquaintance and falsely accused the defendant a Thief.
Lettice Talbot denied to the last the Fact for which she was Convicted; not blaming the court, but imputing it to her Lover Charles Kettering for such a weak and dishonest Betrayal.
As the executioner tied her to the fatal Tree, she cried out to the crowd that her Heart was full of Grief, and that she would not Rest. And then the Cart was drawn from under her, and the Execution was done with as little Noise and Disturbance as the Nature of so tragical a Scene may be.
A hot coal slips in the grate and a small, bluish flame starts to play over the surface of the embers.
I take a breath. Lettice Talbot is dead. She has been dead for days.