The Book of Fires

9
I go down at first light and the kitchen is empty, though the coals in the hob grate are smoking briskly. Through a small window at the back of the house I can see the rain streaming over roofs, pouring and splashing into the yard. The glass of the panes is thick and greenish, like ice lifted from ponds in winter, but I can make out weeds growing through cracks in the brick paving, and a spindly tree that might be a linden. The thick glass makes these things far off and crooked. High up, a bird stands hunched and small by a cluster of chimney pots. How sick I feel. I look down at my familiar hands in these strange surroundings. The curious smell pervades the house; it is everywhere. I see that my fingertips are blackened with grimy circles from touching the sill; the dirt is an odd, gritty layer on the furniture, the banisters, the cups and plates.
Mary Spurren comes into the kitchen with a dustpan and broom.
“Late for breakfast, you are, but you can take small beer from there.” She points and clatters. “I’d get on. Mr. Blacklock will be shortly in to fetch you. There is a loaf. Mrs. Blight is new here and is gone to make her face known about with shops and traders. I’ve told her Saul Pinnington’s for beef and mutton. Spicer’s always for soap and grocer goods. She said she’d see the worth and value before she’d buy a thing.” Her voice is clogged and hard to understand, as though she is not used to speaking much.
“What kind of business is it here that Mr. Blacklock has?” I ask her timidly, pouring from the jug.
“Fireworks, he makes,” she says.
“Fireworks!” I am astonished. “He makes them?”
She rubs her nose on her sleeve. “That’s what I said. All kinds of pyrotechnicals. Exotic fires. Godless explosions for the summer is what I calls them. For the pleasure gardens, and assemblies for the quality. What I think about it I don’t know, but it makes dust and as long as there is dust there is a place for me. Even burning money makes ash, and what is ash but dust?” She shuts her large mouth tight and glances at me doubtfully as if I might disagree.
So fireworks are made by hand, in the same way as hurdles are, or pipes or horseshoes; they are not freakish works of nature nor of witch-craft, as I’d thought when I was little. I have read of fireworks in the yellowing, thumbed newspapers that pass about the village after the rector has read them through himself. And my brother Ab saw some himself, once, as he was passing Wiston House.
“I have heard how they are like fizzing, white blossoms, a cold kind of devil’s fire,” I say eagerly. She shrugs.
“Never seen ’em. Close-up, properly. Nigh on three shilling it is to get into most gardens for the night. Better drains there are to pour your wages down, such as they are.”
“So Blacklock is a chemist then, or alchemist?” I press.
“Just a maker of fireworks. Pyrotechnist. Never heard of such a thing before I got here.” She looks at the kitchen floor. “Dirtiest place I’d ever seen.” She puts a cloth in a bucket and swills it about.
“And now there’s Mrs. Blight to take the load off, not to mention Mrs. Nott to do the laundry, when she turns up, that is.” She scowls, as if a thought had come to her. “Why are you here? ”
“I don’t know,” I begin to say, and Mary Spurren makes a noise of disapproval through her teeth and scrubs hard at the table. Her cuffs are rolled up, showing how bony and red her wrists are. She scratches a lot, though whether from nervous habit or because her lice are very bad I cannot say, and her round face has no color to it at all, like a plant that has been sprouting accidentally inside a cupboard for a long time.
The coals splutter. By the hot grate, the clothes from my bundle steam damply on the rack.
“I’ll tell you what,” she croaks under her breath, cracking the back of her brush against the step to loosen the dirt from the bristles. “He has a temper that you may not like. He’s inconstant in his habits. He can go this way or that way in his needs and wants.” She looks defensively at me, her mouth open a crack.
“Have you been here for quite some time?” I ask, swallowing the beer. She nods her big head.
“I’ve been constant here, four years in all,” she says. “I goes along with it. When I were ten years old my mother said, ‘There is a steadiness to you, young lady.’ I stuck to that—I’m here for good.” She laughs with a hoarse, difficult wheezing sound that is alarming and I prefer it when she stops. Her mouth is so wide when she laughs it seems as though her head were split in half. Her tongue is pale, like a sheep’s.
Mr. Blacklock summons me from the hall.
“Come!” he barks, going ahead of me down the corridor. He unlocks a door.
“The workshop runs perpendicular to the lie of the house,” he says. “This in case of fire means the workshop is as disconnected from the house as it could be in this situation. I do not need to stress the perils of a blaze beyond control. This you know.” The door is thick and swings open heavily. “Fire has no conscience, none at all.”
Behind my back I cross my fingers, and don’t say a thing.
The darkness shrinks away as he creaks the shutters open, one by one, and soon gray morning light shows me a long high room with a sloping ceiling hung with a variety of strange tools and loops of threads. Faintly, I can hear rain drumming on the roof. The smell of substances I do not know is so strong in here that something flickers in my head. The windows facing the yard cast a fair quantity of daylight onto two broad workbenches ranged with further tools and apparatus; implements that Mr. Blacklock proceeds to identify at random, straightening articles and boxes on the benches as he strides about.
“The beamscales,” he says. “The spigot. The file. The pestle. The filling-box. The burette for liquors.” He points. “Alembic, pelican, condenser, retort, roller, funnel, nipping-engine, pipkin, nipperkin.”
“A nipperkin?” I ask.
“A measure for liquor a half pint or less. I am hoping that your mind is as quick and firm as your fingers claim to be,” he says. “I do not care to have to say the same thing twice.”
He goes to the side of the workshop, his legs moving stiffly as if talking makes him uncomfortable. The shelves are ranged with quantities of bottles and canisters of differing heights and thicknesses: a disorder of great glass tubs that bend each shelf with weight, a mass of dusty jars as big as my fist, vessels as squat as the tea caddy at Mrs. Porter’s, and tiny corked phials.
He reads some labels out, his back to me.
“Sulfur, antimony, orpiment, charcoal, ambergris, oil of turpentine.” His voice is dark and rough with coughing. “Brassdust, steel filings, niter. Gum resin, pitch.” He reaches the end of the first shelf and then turns sharply to make sure that I am paying attention.
“I can read, sir,” I say, trying to be helpful. The jars are filthy, and many of the labels are faded and hard to read in the gloomy light, but I say some aloud to show him—cadmia, red bole, camphor, crocus of Mars.
“The words come slowly, sir, but once learnt, I find I do not easily forget them. Though I should be ashamed to say I do not write,” I add. He nods, and seems strangely satisfied with this. He stares at me intently for a moment. His eyes are unblinking, and I see there is a yellow ring about the darkness of his pupils, like a hawk’s. I look away quickly, at the shelf.
“What is crocus of Mars, sir? ”
“Powdered calx, a reddish solid,” he says.
“There are so many jars,” I breathe, gazing at them. It is clear from the grime and the cobwebs that many have sat untouched for quite some time, their waxy seals unbroken, as if the contents had no purpose here. “But you don’t use them all,” I add.
“What?” he says abruptly.
“Unopened, sir. What are they for?”
“Six years ago I had objectives of a different kind,” he says shortly.
“And what did you use them for?” I ask, but he seems not to hear. “A waste!” he mutters angrily, as if to himself, and I am sorry that I mentioned it.
“Until this day I have had no females in my workshop. They bring friction and trouble. Their emotions are liable to set off sparks. They have a chemistry that goes against the smoothness of my practice.” He clears his throat. “My attendant must be tranquil and nonplussed by nothing, at all times.”
I grasp at that. Attendant to Mr. Blacklock, pyrotechnist. I have a flush of excitement at such a thing, and narrow my eyes to hide from him the sudden leap I feel inside.
“The atmosphere must be as still as pond water in here,” he says, and it is a good thing he cannot see inside my head.
“No flighty, sudden movements. It has been a male domain. But still, most rules are there to be unmade.” He coughs again, into his fist. “Tie up your hair and make a habit of keeping your clothes tight about you.” He hands me a leather apron. “Fasten this, always at the back. No trimmings. No lacy bits or ribbons. I want no tools from this bench to be mixed with tools from the bench over there. Only ram with wood, never copper.”
Clearly these are the rules that are not to be unmade, and I imagine with good reason. The very air itself in here could probably explode without a moment’s notice. I vow never to generate a spark by so much as feeling strongly. Then I undo this hasty thought; vows themselves being dangerous things.
He is beginning to cast about for things to say when I see a movement in the darkness at the back of the workshop. A scrawny, ill-clad boy with dark or dirty skin sidles almost noiselessly out of the shadows and comes to stare at me. His eyes are huge in his head.
“Joe Thomazin sweeps and keeps a presence here when I am absent,” Mr. Blacklock says. “He does not speak, or rather, he has not been known to. Not quite an apprentice yet, but perhaps one day.”
He is about the same height as William, though as thin as a deer. Joe Thomazin does not smile back at me. There is a look about him that makes me think so far his life has not been filled with warmth. It is not a slowness or a hunger that I see there, more a stiffness, a halt in what he gives away, although his great dark eyes are wide open, getting the size of me, so that in the end it is I who drop my gaze and he edges back to the end of the workshop and begins to ready the stove for lighting.
“You will commence today by oiling tools and replacing them precisely where you found them and, when you are done with that, by observing what I do,” Mr. Blacklock says. “I am behind in preparation of Mr. Torré’s urgent order for his display at Marylebone, which should comprise four hundred rockets, Roman candles and maroons, if I have so much in stock, and I expect a silence, now, to work in.”
And he turns away and begins to consult a piece of paper.
I do not like to ask another thing, so I embark upon a long search for oil and rags. It is a good thing that I know what to do, having watched my father oiling his coppice tools every winter that I can remember.
It is quiet and still in the workshop. I find a sticky, dirty bottle of linseed oil among the chemicals, and take it down. Mr. Blacklock counts out package after package into crates spread out upon the floor, crossing off the items on a list. I notice he uses his left hand more readily than his right. Devil’s fist, my mother would have said. His fingers make black prints on everything.
The woody smell of linseed fills my head as I rub at the metal tools and wonder what their purpose is. Some I can guess, like the steel shears that hang beside the cabinet stacked inside with paper. Others are evil-looking riddles, more like instruments of torture might be.
Outside in the yard the rain falls ceaselessly all morning.


Mrs. Blight is there in the kitchen when we dine at twelve. Her large brimming form is bound together capably with enormous stays, like a roll of pork tied up for roasting. She bustles about, too busy to notice me.
“I am aggrieved I cannot cook a decent meal until all this shocking mess is quite in hand, Mr. Blacklock, sir,” she declares, picking up a fork and wiping it pointedly on a corner of her apron before she sits down to eat. Her hands are very large and fleshy. “Took half the morning just to find my way about the place. No order at all, sir, not yet.”
“Not enough pepper, Mrs. Blight,” Mr. Blacklock grunts, chewing the meat.
“I cannot abide food hot in that way, Mr. Blacklock,” she says breezily, as though there was nothing to be done about it. Mary Spurren glowers from the table’s end.
Mrs. Blight does not speak to me until Mr. Blacklock goes into his study to drink the coffee that Mary Spurren takes to him.
“Ship-smart we wants it here, my girl,” she says, breathing noisily as she watches me putting plates on the stack of dirty crockery beside the wooden bowl for washing. She smells of drink.
“If I asks you to get down on your whirlbones and scrub and this and that, I shall expect as such. Standards—that’s my indication all is well within the body of a house, and there’s a sight to be done here, I must say, before we’ve reached that particular state of bliss.” And then she pushes her sleeves over her broad white forearms, takes up a sack of potatoes propped at the back door by the barrow boy, and bears it to the kitchen table as if it were no weight at all.
“And by the by,” she adds, “there’s one other thing I’ll not abide, and that is thievery. D’you hear? ”
“Of course,” I say meekly.


It rains all afternoon. In the workshop, while I oil the tools, I cast my eye occasionally, as I was instructed, to see what Mr. Blacklock does. His long, tough back is bent over his work in silence. I have never seen a man from eastern Europe, but I imagine he might look like that; tall and lean, like a hunter. I feel safer when he is not looking at me. His gaze is sharp and goes on for too long.
It is cold inside the workshop, and increases in coldness as the evening draws near. The dirty boy Joe Thomazin brings a lighted lamp into the gloom. Mr. Blacklock does not seem to feel the draft at all, but when I rub my fingers together to try to warm the stiffness out of them, he glances up at me.
“You may go to the stove to warm yourself from time to time but you must not wear your apron by the fire lest it harbor combustive matter of some kind, and you must brush your sleeves of chemicals. Never shake a substance from yourself with overbriskness. Entire establishments have been lost in blasts caused by such small errors.”
As I go by he appears to think of something and bends abruptly down. “Let me see the sole of your boot!” he barks. Obediently I raise my foot and show him in the yellow lamplight. I am ashamed of the holes and patching there. “Too many tacks!” he says to my surprise, so that I do not drop my foot immediately but instead look baffled at the nailheads flashing in the pitted leather. They were Ann’s boots before they were my own and have been mended so many times over that the original fabric of the boot is largely gone.
He turns back to his bench. “However, you cannot work in stockings so you must continue as you are until you can afford to purchase another pair. The shoemaker at Aldersgate will tack them very deeply so that they do not strike a spark. It is not a hazard here upon the boards, but in the outhouse the floor is brick.” He gives a brief dry cough. “Therefore, until that day arrives, you will step cautiously. In this business one must remind oneself that it is not if an accident will happen but when. Never forget that.”
I nod gravely.
Inside my head I picture smoky bursts of fire as harsh as gunshot caused by something that I did unknowingly, and wonder how it was that Mr. Blacklock came to maim his hand and have the purple mark of a burn across his face. It is not a disfiguring mark, but it looks painful and provokes unease to look at it. Holding my hands over the heat of the stove, I think how the day I can put on a pair of new-made boots unworn by any but me will be a day worth waiting for, if it should ever happen. Joe Thomazin, his scrawny elbows showing through his coat, stares at me blankly until I move away. I keep my footsteps mild back to my bench and watch Mr. Blacklock binding what seem to be empty tubes together into blocks until the church clock somewhere close strikes six, when we are done for the day.
“If you have silk,” he finishes while fastening the thick door on our way out, “you cannot wear it; it, too, can create sparks.” There is no trace of humor in his voice; his face is alarming in the lamplight when he catches my eye.
“Remember that,” he says again. “In here there will be no silk and no bare candles.”
I do not laugh aloud about this as we go down the corridor to take our supper of cold beef and pudding in the kitchen, but smile later to myself in my dark cold bedchamber, taking off my outer clothes before I climb into bed. I do not think that I have so much as touched a scrap of silk in all my life. The candle gutters as I look about. My thick useful petticoat hangs dry from the hook at the back of the door. My other belongings look small in the chest at the foot of the bed: my Bible, with a blade of grass between the pages of St. John to keep my place, my good dress that was my sister’s, my small linen.
I am so tired that I forget to pray. On the brink of sleep I have a sudden thought of Lettice Talbot going away from me down the street, holding the hem of her fine tabby silk gown up high above the dirty pavement; but then I do not dream at all that night.