The Book of Fires

7
Nearby a church bell strikes. The noise is short and harsh, like a stick beating a cracked pan. Uneasily I put my hand on the outside of my skirt over the place where the money is sewn, and as I do this, an old woman selling oranges from a crate on the filthy paving catches my eye. Her pale face stares directly at me even as she hands oranges to a woman bending down, and pockets her payment. I shiver and hurry on, and as I pass I see with a shameful relief that she is blind, that her eyes are milky right through, like the eyes on a cooked fish.
The lodging house cannot be so far.
I stop again and study the instructions that Lettice Talbot gave to me. Turn right, take the long thoroughfare until the church, then turn the corner. But my sense of distance is becoming muddled. It is hard to measure, with no tree on the horizon, nor any silence on the road between strides. I cannot hear my steps amid the clamor of the crowd. I am invisible. The street noise is as loud as a river in full spate in winter after a week’s worth of rain. It is too much, like hearing all the songs you’ve ever known sung at once inside your head.
I am jostled and ignored. There are hatches gaping open to kitchens and cellars deep in the ground below the pavement, filled with glimpses of casks and barrels, smells of meat, steam, the sourness of drink, slops. I see some fingers wiped on an apron, someone carrying a brimming pot of something heavy up some steps and a squealing infant put to the breast. Through another hatch I see a bent, bearded man making a shoe at a bench, and his quick hammer as he knocks tacks into the leather sole sounds already like a footstep on the cobbles.
Another church bell rings the quarter, or the half hour.
I smell a butcher’s shop and see strings of songbirds: brown larks and thrushes, hung from hooks on shutters opening out onto the street. Saul Pinnington, purveyor of game and preserved meats to the nobility. A single hand freckled with dark spots of blood stretches out of the window very close to me, to unhook a shining brace of pheasant. When I peer inside I can hear the splintery chopping sound of a cleaver going through flesh and bone. I should enter the white marble darkness of the shop and ask here for directions.
I take a breath of butcher’s air.
And then a plain-looking woman comes out abruptly from the doorway, and I walk on.
I pass a smoky wax-chandler’s and a ballad seller bellowing from sheets of music, and still I do not ask directions. It begins to rain, and I duck into the porch outside a draper’s shop. Holling’s Fabrics. With flowers raised or satined. All sorts of best Spitalfield silk, water silks, galloon, chintz and Persian. Ann would be enthralled by these.
Inside the shop a thin, smart man striped like a reed looks up and glowers on seeing me, his large draper’s scissors paused mid-cut across a stretch of velvet. I am not invisible at all, I think, and move away into the street.
The pavement is uneven and poorly made, with loose slabs that squeeze out a pulp of puddle water when I tread. The hatches have been closed and the cries of the sellers are gone from the thinning crowd. I cross the kennel gutter in the middle of the street and see a dead rat lying long and draggled, its tail stretched out. Carriage wheels flick mud behind them. The smell in the air is choking now, as though the force of the rain has stirred up unspeakable things. It is getting darker.
My bundle is wet and heavier to carry with every step. And when a sedan chair sways by, I see the hook of a finger lift the curtain flap inside and a powdery white face glances out. It is as white as a corpse, as if death itself were riding by. I shiver and try to hum something.
I have plenty of time yet to find the address before dark, I am certain that I do. And, turning a corner again, I begin to look for the sign of the bootmaker’s shop beside the railings, which will show that I’m nearly there. But there are no shops at all in this street except for a place that sells liquor, where a man is slumped. The crowds have dwindled away.
This cannot be right.
The houses here are older, closer together, sometimes almost touching across the street or leaning sideways on each other for support as though they could fall down at any moment. There is a sour stench of urine and rotten things that closes the back of my throat. Along the road a woman with bare feet and a short, dirty hem is leaning inside an open doorway, her toes curled over the front of the threshold. She watches me fixedly as I approach.
“What district is this?” I venture to ask, but I see that her stare is glazed and blank.
“Is it . . .” I put my hand into my bodice to check the address on the paper again, but with a little lurch inside I find I do not have it. Where is it gone? I must have lost it farther back. And the woman doubles over suddenly at the waist, clutching at her grimy stays, and spits something dark out of her mouth onto the pavement. And as she turns inside she staggers and steadies herself with a hand on the wall and the peeling door. There is a great stain on the back of her skirt. I hear a baby crying through the crack in the door that she leaves ajar, and my heart clenches. The wailing is a newborn’s weak, persistent noise that latches onto me as I retrace my steps back to the corner.
I take the next left turn to shake it off.
I am almost retching when I breathe in. My feet are sore from stepping again and again on the uneven street. I think the Hell the Bible speaks of must be quite like this: that baby growing in so much noise and filth. At home our hunger has never been as bad. Here the ground seems tainted with it, a malignant oozing worse than the dung and waste I am stepping through. A man hisses at me, a drawn-out wheezy threat. I do not run, though I am stiff with fear, and although he does not follow I hear a jug or bottle smash behind me.
Out on the main street I take another turning in despair, knowing now that I am wholly lost.
The air is becoming murky with the approach of dusk. I see a row of broad, new houses with exact rectangular windows, and I see inside the nearest room a servant laying out glasses at a table. She holds a glass up against the light from the window and as it turns in her hands for a second it looks like silver. My chest is tight with misery. I tell myself twice over that I will not cry until I have tried just one more turning. I am so thirsty. The ringing clip-clop of a shoed horse walking on the street makes me close my eyes and think of the lane at home to Storrington, where Ann and I would sit on the flint bridge over the stream and watch the carts go by, kicking our heels.
The first time John Glincy spoke to me was on the bridge.
“Not got much to do then, Agnes Trussel!” he’d called out, and winked; he was sat on the tailgate of Mr. Fitton’s cart all piled with brassicas and greens from Hasler’s Steading, with his felt hat pushed back upon his yellow head. My stomach twisted up with good surprise, and nerves. I’d thought it over all the way home, not heeding Ann’s presence there beside me, nor the fresh spring blooms she’d picked from the bank to give to Mother; one thinks too little of these things till they are gone. I’d thought about John Glincy’s wink, though, when I couldn’t sleep that night; the recollection was like a lump or a disturbance pushing at my ribs and I did not know if it was agreeable or not. I turned and turned, trying to lie comfortably on the straw ticking in the moonlight until Lil woke up and asked me crossly to be still, and then I’d pushed it from my mind as being a childish fancy I would do well to be without.
A church bell strikes again.
The rain gets up. I walk because I cannot think what else to do. I shift my bundle from shoulder to shoulder. I am light with being thirsty. I need to rest. And without a thought I take a left turn through an archway wide enough for just one carriage at a time to pass through, and I am in a smaller cobbled street. It is a dead end. The noise on the thoroughfare outside is swallowed up and quietened behind me. The buildings on both sides here seem old, but they do not have that stench of collapse and decay about them. They are broad, with timbers crookedly spaced and small windows crisscrossed in lead punctuating the plasterwork. One house is set back slightly from the street, as if making way for the fair-sized walnut tree growing up through the paving slabs before it. I am surprised and glad to see a tree and I put my hand on the smooth cracked bark of the trunk to lean and catch my breath.
Over the front door of the house behind the walnut tree, I see that a curious sign is squeaking from an iron bracket: a painted picture of a squat man covered in leaves holding a bright star. It shines, wet with rain and catching the light. The faint squeak it makes is regular and soothing, like a bird. When my eye lights upon a small board with handwriting on it pinned to the door, my heart skips a beat. I come away from the tree and tread up onto the stone steps to be sure of what it says in the gloomy light.
J. Blacklock. Required—housekeeper for small household.
An anxious hope expands rapidly inside me, though I can just see how faded the letters are, as if they were chalked some time ago. I try to decide through the sickness if I might be suitable. Am I sufficiently old for such a position? What experience is needed? I can keep house well enough, I think, and after all I have lost the directions to Lettice Talbot’s lodging house.
The sign of the wild man creaks louder as a breath of cold air blows down the street and pushes the rain sideways for a moment. I pull my wet cloak closer about my shoulders. To walk farther seems impossible, and it is effort enough to lift my hand and rap as hard as I can on the door, with my knuckles all white as they grip at the knocker. The door is wide, with large iron studs holding it together. The sound of my knock is like the thump of an axe on wood a great distance away. Surely no one will hear it.
And yet I hear someone coming, drawing the bolts back.
I swallow in readiness. Somehow I expect a maidservant to answer, and so am startled to find the door is opened by a tall man in working boots and jerkin. His shirtsleeves are pushed up on his broad forearms as though I have interrupted him at work. Spread out on the side of his face is a raw, red mark where his skin has been burnt. He is wearing a dark wig, or perhaps his own hair, tied in a disheveled tail, and he has a long, alarming face with high cheekbones. He glares at me, then past me into the street. He is perhaps as much as forty years. I swallow again.
“I’m looking for work, sir.” I point in the direction of the notice. “I am quite used to housework and I think, sir . . .” It is hard not to be short of breath. “I’ve had the smallpox,” I add, as Lettice Talbot told me to. I have told so many lies these past few days, a lifetime’s worth.
“You think you’ve had the smallpox,” he replies sarcastically. His voice is deep and has a rough, strange flavor to it.
“I mean I have, sir.” My voice dries up into a tight swallow. “I mean, I’ve been with cows, sir, and couldn’t catch it if I tried.” I have a sense that someone is watching me and turn quickly round. A rat skitters along a drainpipe and disappears into the shadows behind some barrels, and outside on the street I hear someone shouting angrily. I realize how close it is to nightfall. The tall man in the doorway reaches out and unhooks the notice.
“The work is gone now,” he says curtly. “Yesterday a new housekeeper was engaged.”
My insides tighten up with disappointment. I can see that he is irritated to be disturbed. He has already begun to close the door, but fear and thirst give an edge to my voice.
“Are you Mr. Blacklock?” I call swiftly at the narrowing crack. “I am a good worker, sir. I’m used to working hard at weaving, and I can turn my hand efficiently to most things you could conceive of.”
The crack in the door opens again and he takes a step forward to lean out into the rain toward me. His face is older than I thought, or is made so by the lines and shadows round his eyes.
“But what qualities do you possess?” he asks. His voice is dark and the words come out abruptly from him. I don’t know what he means, and hear myself say anything that comes into my head.
“Firm fingers and quick fingers, sir,” I say. I hold them out dizzily before me in the rain as evidence. My plain cuffs are dirty, and limp with water. His eyes inch over my hands and back to my face.
“Today I could have made use of some spare quick fingers,” he says, gruffly. “God knows they are hard enough to come by. I was pressed to finish what I’d planned.”
I try to return his gaze steadily and to stand with my back straight, though the bundle drags at my shoulder like a dead weight. Still he says nothing. I want to turn around and walk the whole way back to Sussex, but I cannot.
Where will I go? I am tired. The rain that drips down from the sign above is seeping into the nape of my cloak, and suddenly a boy is rushing toward us holding a flickering light ahead for two men in coats, their voices strained and angry. A smell of burning tar comes away from the torch, and their shouts echo in the empty street. They are going to fight, I think, trying to step out of the way as one of the men starts to shove at the other, but I am roughly jolted as they pass. We hear the boy’s voice saying thinly, “It’s this way, sirs,” and they duck down an alleyway. When the brightness of his light has gone it leaves the beginning of a thick and terrifying dusk.
And then Mr. Blacklock moves his head once.
“I will decide,” he says bluntly, “how much you shall be paid after one week of working.” I am amazed. He holds the door open a little wider and stands back to let me pass.