The Book of Fires (22 page)

Bray. Mrs. Bray
. I cannot think where I have heard the name before.

Saul Pinnington serves me and I take the pound of mutton.

“Bray,” I say, aloud this time, out on the street. What is that name? It niggles at me. I am perplexed as to the nature of the jokes he made, but it is clear he was suggesting, as no idle insult, that the girl worked in the kitchen of a bawdy house or brothel, and neither did she make a fight about it.

I turn to Lamb’s Conduit Street toward the herb market to get some early onions from the skinny market woman there, whom Mrs. Blight declares the only garden trader worth the shilling. “Her things is fresh and firm, that’s all I asks for in a vegetable.”

The market woman has a large baby with her. It sits propped up beneath the trestle on a grubby blanket spread over the ground, playing with a spoon tied to a string. The baby’s nose is running.

“I shall have to tether him, too, soon as he gains the use of his legs.” The market woman laughs. Though she is young, her face is so thin that when she laughs the skin around her mouth looks stretched. Her fingernails are stained and rough, and the silver coin I give her looks bright in her palm.

Mrs. Blight had said today as I picked up the basket, “No wasting your coinage on the first barrow boy that shoves his radishes at you. Their flavors is bound to be tainted with smoke from sea coal. Nasty, that is. You can’t trust everyone, Agnes Trussel, most particularly in the way of purchases.”

I go stiff with recollection.

“You cannot trust a soul,” I was told, when I arrived here.

It was Lettice Talbot who had tried to send me in the way of Mrs. Bray’s establishment. Mrs. Bray who must be a madam, or a procuress. Lettice Talbot’s eyes were wide and blue when she spoke. Lettice Talbot’s teeth were good and white. She looked nothing like a prostitute. Not like dirty Martha Cote, back home, with her long lank hair, who would lie with anyone in the fields for fourpence. Surely Lettice Talbot did not think that I could work with her?

“Get on, will you!” A woman pokes me sharply in the back where I am stopped on the pavement. I look about. The street is seething with people I do not know.

 

As I turn into the dead end, toward Blacklock’s, I see with relief that the cart is not there. Perhaps Mr. Soul has not been yet.

I am not sure why, but at the front door something makes me turn and look back to the archway. I am surprised to see a man there, standing in the shadows. And though his head is not turned directly to me, I have the sharp sensation that it is me he looks at.

Why would that be?

I shield my eyes with my palm, against the brightness. His back is turned now, and his feet shift about as though uncomfortable or lacking patience.

How hot it is.

I blink, the sweat making my sight swim for a moment, so that I put down the basket and rub my eyes with the heel of my hand. And when I look again, the man is gone.

I let myself in and as I pass the workshop door I see two new tubs of gunpowder on the floor already. I have missed Mr. Soul.

Despite the heat, a shivery chill goes through me when I think of that strange man again. His dark clothing, the oddness of his stance, his very ordinary appearance being somehow the reverse of what it seemed.

He was a pale-skinned man taking shelter from the harshness of the sun, I reason. Or stopping heedlessly to attend to failing embers in his tobacco pipe. Or waiting to chance upon a hackney carriage. Or he mistook me fleetingly for someone else before he realized his mistake.

And yet the chill persists, even as I try to cook the meat, and only when Mrs. Blight waddles back, in the unsteady temper that tells me she has sat out an hour or more drinking at the Star, can I begin to shake it off.

“I want that oak white scrubbed, d’you hear!” She points at the table strewn with peelings.

“Beech,” I say, without thinking, and bite my tongue. I do not want to provoke her crossness any more today.

“Pardon me?” She turns to make sure that Mary Spurren is looking over, and puts her hand on her hip.

“It’s beech,” I mutter, and try to make my voice sound sorry about it. “The tabletop is made of beechwood.”

“You little—” she begins, but I do not get to hear what she has to say about me, as Mr. Blacklock has walked abruptly into the kitchen.

“Oh! Mr. Blacklock, sir, I thought you was—”

“I returned by an earlier coach from Southwark,” he interrupts. “What is Agnes doing in the kitchen today? She had clear instructions to finish an order.” He glares at the squat little clock over the fireplace that Mrs. Blight does her timings for meat by. “It is late.”

I leave the bowl of muddy peelings at once and go in haste down the corridor. And I hear her saying, in the shrill tone that she saves for moments of crisis, “. . . just does as she fancies, sir, whatever shall I do? ” But I cannot hear how he replies.

Mrs. Blight has begun to keep a bottle of gin at the back of the cupboard, which she thinks is a secret.

My own secret has grown fourfold this month. I begin to feel its weight inside me.

I
n the morning Mary Spurren does not look so well. “I feel sickly,” she groans, rubbing her head.

Mrs. Blight is slouched beside the hob and flicks the greasy pages of her recipe. “A big joint like that needs to be got early, to be cooked for noon,” she says loudly. “Agnes, you’ll go for the meat today.”

“Again?” I say in dismay. “But I have to—”

“You’ll squeeze it in,” she says, in a hard voice. “Just don’t expect Mr. Pinnington to be so robust with you today.”

“Why? ”

“The hanging. You’ll have heard the bell last night? They say George Nigh was his acquaintance of some long standing, fell on hard times. Served their apprenticeships together side by side like kinsmen, and shared a stall at Smithfield for close on a year before they parted company. Seems that while Pinnington’s Meats to the Nobility became a fixture in the high-class victuals trade, George Nigh’s luck fell on the other side of the fence and he slid into the mire of debts and turned to crime.” She tuts. “Robberies is always bound to get found out. Violence like that, on the king’s highway.” She quivers with relish. “ ’Tis bound to want punishing in the end.”

“But if the man had debts,” I venture, “what could he do? ”

“Seems a shame, I must say, when a man has to make his way by stripping well-off, middling folks of what they has and causing bodily fear.”

“And did he kill a man or do injury to anyone?” I ask.

“Not as is heard of,” she says. “But ’tis the principle, and besides, there’s no smoke without some kind of thing ablaze somewhere. Thrusting his pistol into carriages and making threats. Loaded, no doubt, with shot supplied by the likes of your Mr. Cornelius.”

“He is not . . .”

“And two unmarried women to swing alongside George Nigh and his crowd this morning; should in all be quite a gathering. Pleaded their bellies, but when matrons examined them they found them both to be without child.” She heaves herself onto her feet.

“I’ve heard someone’s been stealing plate from churches over Westminster way. Very low, that is. You’re not going to tell me that shouldn’t go unpunished, neither! Crime’s everywhere. These days even God has to resort to lock and key to protect what’s rightly his, and that’s not in the Bible, is it?
Thou shalt lock up the churches at six o’clock?
On cutting him down,” she adds, “they’ll take this one away to the Surgeon’s Hall to be anatomized, quite took apart in the name of science. Dissecting him up to strike fear of the law throughout all of the populace.” She shakes her head with a show of regret. “Disgrace for his family.”

I go to the butcher’s in dread.

Saul Pinnington is not there behind the counter. The shop is packed with customers and the boy is full of his story, his face flushed with talking as he tries to serve.

“Mr. Pinnington’s not here, ma’am, he’s off to the hanging, to lend his weight and pull on his legs to hasten the end. George Nigh’s not a big man now, is he? I’ve seen a hanging, quite a sight.” He flusters about.

“You’re making a mess of that hog’s cheek, young man,” a woman calls impatiently. My back aches. The boy raises his piping to be heard over the hum of chatter and gossip in the shop.

“Lord, the prayers they mouth before they pull the cart from under them. I went to a hanging once, did I say that? Oh, Mr. Pinnington was in a terrible way through yesterday. Cursing and kicking the cats about all day, he was. Kept saying, ‘The foolish son of a bitch’ . . .”

An old woman pushes forward to the counter. “You hold your tongue,” she chastens him, jerking her crooked finger at his chest. The hubbub in the shop dies down and people turn to stare. “That’s someone’s father swinging on the tree this morning,” she spits. “You’ll speak respectful of him, if you speak at all.” And she turns and pushes her way angrily toward the door.

Behind the counter the boy’s face is drained of color, and I see that his hands shake as he wraps the joint for Mrs. Blight. He cannot be more than twelve years old, and looks as if he might cry, though with great effort he does not. He rubs the back of his hand on his white forehead, leaves a streak of blood. “That’s one shilling and tuppence,” he says in a small voice, not looking at me. The joint is as thick as a man’s leg, and I feel sickened at the thought of eating it at noon.

 

“Lessons it is, I’d say,” Mrs. Blight makes clear later, sucking her teeth. She has grown boisterous and unsteady since I saw her this morning. “They says drink leads to crime. Hah! I’m not averse to knocking back a glass or two of orange shrub,” she cackles. “But you don’t find me going off like a delinquent.” She looks at me and hiccups. “Lessons for all of us to keep on the straight and narrow. Should be requisite to go to hangings. Should be the law.”

I shift uncomfortably.

Mrs. Blight snorts. “Look at her.” She points at me. “So worried someone’ll make her go and see the next.” She tries to explain: “It’s more the . . . atmosphere you goes for. The final act itself doesn’t last so long.” The smell of roasting pork is everywhere.

“Sometimes there’s a bit of ruckus when they cuts them down, the families fighting for the corpse to take for burial against the surgeons hoping for a bit of flesh to practice on, but ’tis never so bad as you’d think. Once you’ve seen a couple, well”—she shrugs—“you’ve seen them all. Sometimes, like today, they does a cluster all at once, say six or seven punished side by side. Daresay that would be a comfort, a bit of company in your final moments.”

I put the knife into the round of the bread upon the board and slice up the whole loaf steadily. I am quite light-headed. Mary Spurren’s cold is worsening and I can hear her sniffing to herself, hunched over the scullery sink, scrubbing at a dirty pot.

Mrs. Blight frowns at me.

“Hope you’re hungry, madam,” she comments sharply. “Wasting all that bread.”

“Oh, yes, very hungry. I suppose I could be starving; any of us could, given a wrong turn here, a wrong turn there,” I retort, putting the knife down. “Even Mr. Blacklock says the city’s gutter is always but a step away.”

Mary Spurren comes out of the scullery, wiping her nose on a crumpled handkerchief. “Don’t much hold with crowds,” she says congestedly, and I nod my head.

“You needs hardening up,” Mrs. Blight opines. “You’ve been shielded from certain things in life. I don’t mean you have not felt the bite of hardship or the gall of someone else’s wrong, but you don’t know how badness makes up half the world and how it follows that we’ll rub shoulders with it in the natural flow of life.”

She gestures advice broadly with an empty bottle.

“Keep out the way of trouble and lift your chin when it finds you, as it no doubt will from time to time. Evil’s not something that’ll be brought to account. Much of it, nigh on all of it’ll slip by unnoticed, doing its willful business in due course as it fancies.”

“Don’t you have faith in justice? ” I ask. “Why do you like your pamphlets so much?”

“Justice!” She chuckles. “Hear how the girl speaks! What is this justice?” Her eye narrows at me.

“What of divine justice, then? ” I say.

“It’s a whipsaw world,” she goes on, “cutting both ways, and sometimes there is redress, sometimes there isn’t. And you know my feelings about the Lord’s House; I’ve said before it’s not for me. Anything that’s built with bricks and mortar’s made by man and can’t represent a higher cause. Each man to himself.”

She taps her head. “I’ve me own counsel,” she says.

“As I have a conscience,” I reply, under my breath.

F
rom what you tell me,” I say to Mr. Blacklock, when we come to talk of the third ingredient of gunpowder, “sulfur is a kind of latent earth.” I look for his approval, to see that I have understood his meaning fully, and repeat slowly, in my own words, what he has already told me. “It is something waiting under the crust of the earth: a bright yellow under the darkness of the soil. It is old, as old as the hill that hides it. You say that sulfur comes from places where the very earth itself has bubbled out molten in cracks and craters.”