The Book of Fires (16 page)

“Do you read? ” Mrs. Blight asks, thickly.

“I have no time, Mrs. Blight,” I say, setting the cups out in a rush, and I think of Mr. Blacklock’s books of science standing upon the shelf in the study, crowded with knowledge. How I would like to!

“Good reads can be had for fourpence if you’re down by the Globe,” she says regardless, and she picks up a printed pamphlet and waves it about. “
The Proceedings of Justice
,” she declares importantly. “All the good bits of the
Gazette
, only better, all squeezed into one.” She adds more salt and smacks her lips. “They writes up every session of the Old Bailey, most meticulous—they do not spare the details.” And I have to listen to her halting drone as she reads out, “
William Crofts . . . indicted for stealing two Gloucestershire cheeses, property of John Curtis, cheesemonger. ‘I was in my parlor and had full view of my shop. I saw the prisoner enter and take up the cheeses . . .’
” The riddled coals draw the heat more forcefully.

“So harsh a sentence!” I say, shocked.

“They gets what they deserves,” she says. “
Anne Fox, for stealing one gold ring, one pair of silver buttons, two guineas and a half, the goods of . . .
” She trails off and reads on in silence for a moment. “It seems she pawned the ring and buttons as her own. ‘
I was a hired servant to them for half a guinea for half a year. I went to demand my wages when my time was up, and he said, if I did not hold my tongue, he’ d lay me fast in Newgate
.’ ”

“We are late with dinner,” I interrupt, swallowing. I do not want to hear her going on with it.

“And also, though it’s tuppence dearer, after hangings there’s the account of dying words as they’re said to the priest—that’s most revealing.” She adds, “You should have a loan of ’em when I am done. I’ll bring ’em in. Get cozied up by the fire with your feet up on your half day. Do you good, getting a glimpse of the wicked world like that.”

“No thank you,” I say faintly.

“Suit yourself,” she sniffs.

It is not as though I were walking quite oblivious out there. Time is slipping along and I need a plan to turn to, as circumstances will become more pressing every day. I am looking, looking for Lettice Talbot all the time.

“What was the sentence meted out to that poor woman wanting wages?” I ask Mrs. Blight later, despite myself. Mrs. Blight picks up her horrid pamphlet and opens it at once, as if she had been waiting for my curiosity to rear its ugly head. She hiccups.

“Anne Fox? For greedy thievery?”

And she recites, triumphant: “
Guilty. Death
.”

 

Cornelius Soul has begun to deliver powder every week, until we have so much in stock that Mr. Blacklock is forced to tell him that we have no need for any more consignments for a while. “Your new business is too profuse in its release of goods,” Mr. Blacklock says with an irony I do not understand. Mr. Soul takes no offense, and he winks at me, as he always does.

“I hear the company you keep is of a coarser quality these days,” Mr. Blacklock says as he sits down at the block, his jaw tight with displeasure. Cornelius Soul looks keenly at him.

“Where do you hear this gossip, sir?” he asks, taking a measuring stick from the shelf and flicking it up into the air. “At your coffeehouse? Something muttered by a thin-lipped merchant used to taking refuge behind his hat to dodge the pointed bradawl of his wife’s long tongue? ”

“Slipped standards are rarely regained once lost,” Mr. Blacklock replies. “You will do damage to your business lest you keep an eye fixed on your horizons. The city’s gutter is always but a step away, as your bear-garden acquaintances may know already.”

“The gutter! What kind of damage can be caused by simple bouts of pleasure due to any man that works as hard to earn his living as I do?” Cornelius Soul demands.

Mr. Blacklock does not respond.

“You would do worse perhaps than to sample some of that yourself! ” And Cornelius Soul laughs loudly.

Mr. Blacklock turns and glowers at him. “There is no
time
for this,” he says impatiently, and then winces, putting his hand up to his face but not touching the burn. “Are you not done yet with your ferrying in and out, man—the draft is irritating.”

Mr. Soul stops to look at what I’m doing as he passes. “And what qualifies you to be so strangely employed on such a premises, Miss Trussel? They say a woman’s atmosphere will slow the powder, or rile it up with pique and petulance.” He grins.

“No special qualities,” I say, very quietly, so I do not disturb Mr. Blacklock. “But my fingers are nimble enough for the task.”

“And what kind of fingers are they?” he says, and I am sure that he would have grasped at my hand if I had not thrust it away from him.

“Weaver’s fingers,” I reply, my face flushing.

“A weaver!” He flings his arms wide. “My father was a velvet weaver! A journeyman of twenty years standing, with an unmatched quality coming off his loom you’d touch as soon as clap your eyes upon. I was his drawboy as a youngster.” He beams with pride.

“And what do they weave down there in the seaside hills? ” he teases. “Rough fustian? Do they even trouble to shear the sheep, or do they leave the fleece attached to the beast before they spin the yarns up!”

“It was good woollen stuff that we worked,” I say.

He bursts out laughing again, then looks at me and stops.

“I beg your pardon, madam,” he says. “The finest fowling powders for gentlemen’s shooting parties in the country come from down that way, their quality unmatched.”

“I am not offended,” I reply, mildly enough, never stopping my work. And then he winks at me as he ducks out the door onto the street.

Indeed, against my wish I find my thoughts returning to that wink from time to time.

His eye is too bright.

S
ometimes I cannot sleep for hours, and lie there in the dark. I hear shouts of drunken troubles in the street outside, or cats fighting. On a still night I can hear the watchman crying the hour outside on the main street. “Two o’clock!” “Three!”

My sister Ann at Wiston House is sixty miles from here. From this safe distance I whisper some things to her about my day. I tell her of sulfur, of charcoal, of saltpeter, and how they combine in extraordinary ways. I tell her how much I have learnt in the month I have been here already, and how, when my fingers are occupied with the tasks I am managing more thoroughly each day, I feel a kind of lightness in my head.
My quick weaver’s fingers serve me well, Ann. Yours would, too, if you were here.
I do not tell her anything about my belly, how it increases in roundness like an uncooked loaf. I do not say how my belly is white and perfect and dreadful to me, though there is nothing to see when I put on my clothes. I do not mention any aching inside, where my heart lies.

 

Occasionally I invent another conversation in my head, with Lettice Talbot, explaining to her the things I did not tell her on our journey, things I have never told anyone. I do not even whisper them; I mouth the words into the dark.

I tell her how I have never loved a man.

I tell her how, on the fourth of September last, a man took a chance of love from me and twisted it up viciously, like twisting the neck of a chicken before the plucking and boiling, but with less cause.

And I think of the way that there was a change in the calendar, so that the fourth of September, along with ten other days, was quite swallowed up when the nation moved to the new style of calendar to keep abreast of time in other places. Mrs. Blight is surely wrong, I think; time can swallow anything, in certain circumstances.

We did not take note of such a change until it was already in place. Four days we went, by accident, into the portion of the month that should have been removed immediately. Removed like deadwood, or unwanted cloth outside the pattern, cutting away at the year to make it fit its new shape cleanly, but we were taken by surprise. On Sunday at St. Mary’s, the Reverend Waldegrave told us of it. Long and thin, like a spoon wearing a cassock, he read solemnly from Psalm 104 to smooth anxieties that we may have harbored.

“He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down. Thou makest darkness, and it is night . . . ; the sun ariseth . . . ; Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening,
” he intoned.

“Nothing has changed,” he assured us from his pulpit. I clung to that thought gratefully; my shame was growing inside me, though I did not know it then. “Look about you,” he urged. “God’s world is unalterable in certain ways.” I loved the way he held the Good Book to his chest as though it gave him warmth.

And so we leapt with little query toward the midst of the month, going directly from the second to the fourteenth of September. Some particular days were displaced: the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, the day of the Holy Cross. There were some in the village who thought they had been robbed of something, but most took no odds on it. It was a slow realization for me at first, but I tried to hatch a sense that there was a little blessing in the loss of days for me: the fourth of September, being the day of my undoing, was quite disappeared.

It was neatly done, I told myself, over and over. There was some kind of magic in that. Surely it was a single, inadvertent kindness done to me by Parliament, I’d thought at first, so that I did not think about the consequence of what had happened to me in the bean field till it was too late.

And I am shocked when my imagined Lettice Talbot turns to me one night and says, with her beautiful red mouth shaping the words clearly:

“That is all well, Agnes Trussel, but nonetheless you have the seed of that day lodged inside you. What will you do when this thing comes? What preparations have you made?”

“I cannot think of that now,” I say to her angrily, clenching my fists, “I am asleep ! ”

Then I wake up. I must have shouted out, as I hear Mary Spurren stirring in her bed upstairs. I am shaking with misery. I cannot think, I will not think. I cannot. But the night outside is rolling on toward the morning, and what can I do to stop it? The graveness of my situation begins to dawn on me anew.

A
spiny frost coats everything outside the house. The water in the jug in my chamber is frozen hard across the top, which I have to break to pour and wash with it. The freeze has made this place seem almost unfamiliar again.

Later, carrying a pressing message to a merchant’s house in Cannon Street, I take a wrong turning and another and then find myself beside the Thames. My breath comes in clouds as I stand and stare. The wharves are heaving with barges and men landing cargoes into the warehouses and onto carts, hammering metal strappings onto barrels, cursing, working cranes. The water glints invitingly. I weave my way through the crowd along the bridge to a gap between the houses and the torn-down premises, and stand there with the chaos of the traffic at my back, looking at the great river pouring downstream till I am dizzy. I should be back at work, I think ruefully, while I have a job to go to. There are vessels gathered on the water, waiting for the high-tide bell to signal that there is sufficient draft of water to pass under the bridge.

“Don’t do it!” jokes an old man in a wide hat, walking by. He stops to rest his elbows on the rail beside me. I suppose he means I should not jump.

“A suicide was washed up only yesterday, in the steelyard at Scott’s Wharf,” he says when I do not answer. “An unfortunate woman. They said she was not poor, by the clothes she had on her, or what was left of them. And the Lord knows, it happens often enough.”

“I was hoping to see a fish, sir,” I say. It is the first thing I can think of, and besides, it would be pleasant to see an eel or a shoal of forktails swimming down against the tide. We are a long way over the water. At the edge of the Thames, on the line of the reach, we watch a handful of children gathering scruff for fuel, piling the damp sticks and bits of coal into a basket strapped to the back of the largest child.

The man is smartly dressed in wig and waistcoat; he tells me he is out to gain some exercise before he dines. “Though an icy day it is.” His voice is shaky and agreeable. “I’ll mark it may be a sign the winter will be fiercer yet this year.” I think how at home the rowan bush outside the cottage was red with fruit when I left, like a beacon. He points out the church of St. Magnus, Cocks Key and Lyons Key, and Custom House, and the Tower, and some types of boats: the colliers and lighters, a man o’war . . .

“The whole world is represented in the goods that unload at this shore,” he says, pointing into the light with his polished cane. “Olive oil, silks, tobacco, cotton, wines.”

“I would like to be on a boat heading out to sea, growing smaller and smaller until it rounds a bend and disappears,” I say. The man smiles and shakes his head.

“It is a hard life at sea,” he replies. The man thinks me to be an ordinary shopgirl airing myself on my half day, I suppose, and not one riddled with a shameful, swelling error that is not far from being apparent to anyone that cares to look. In some way I have betrayed his trust, his confidence in my respectability being so misplaced.

“Good day to you, young lady,” the man says when our conversation lulls, tipping his hat at me courteously and making his way through the crowd toward Fish Hill Street. The bell in the church tower chimes three.

There is something about this encounter that strikes me: the small, chance politeness of it, the vastness of the world converging there, a pleasing contact between strangers.

I wonder on the hardness of the weather that we have ahead. And I remember how last year it was as late as mid-December when the flocks of winter birds came down the valley, stripping the berries from the hedgerows. Plump redwings and gray, gawky fieldfares settled over the rowan tree outside the cottage so that it swayed heavily beneath their weight. They ate the rotten orange fruit at speed, stretching their necks and flapping for balance, so that the trees crawled with birds and noise. They were incautious of the sparrow hawk that burst from nowhere and knifed its way abruptly through their midst and took a single bird midair.