The Book of Fires (30 page)

“What are you doing?” A voice brings me to my senses. Mary Spurren is standing at the back door. She is shielding her eyes with her hand and staring at me. I am panting with effort; there is dust all over my skirt. My heart beats and beats. What am I doing?

“A game, a country game,” I say, weakly.

“It don’t look much like fun to me,” Mary Spurren says, doubt in her voice. She continues to stare at me. “More like the Devil was in you. For a trice my blood went quite cold on seeing it. Don’t do it again, it’s kicking up dust. I should not have to close the windows.”

“I am just being silly,” I say, leaning my whole spinning weight on the wall to catch my breath. “It is nothing but a country game we play, as children. The sunshine has got into my head and made me foolish.” I try to laugh. “The moment has passed now. I am going to the safe to fetch more gunpowder.” I hold up the key to show her. My fingers are shaking.

“What’s it called? ” she says.

“What is what called?”

“The game you are playing,” she says, losing interest, turning back to the scullery.

“I don’t know, I cannot remember,” I say, and as I go to the outhouse, I am sure I see movement at an upstairs window of the house, at Mr. Blacklock’s chamber, though when I look there is nothing.

When I get to the outhouse, I sob and sob, rubbing my belly. Something has to be done.

S
mall portfires are the hardest, dullest work. Now that I am swift and better skilled at making them, I charge them in bundles of thirty-seven cases at a time, a kind of six-sided honeycomb of tubes, all mouths to the ceiling. The air outside is blue with smoke and a fine, blustery rain. There is a whistling, breathing sound in the chimney, as if the wind were putting its mouth to the pot on the roof, though it cannot come in.

The workshop is filled with the smell of Mr. Blacklock’s experiment, and he is staring fixedly into a jar that is strapped to a glass vessel, connected to a retort over a smoking brazier. “I will have something to show you,” he says, in a strange, choked voice, and I recognize the same powerful smell from the day the color was bleached out of the flower inside the air from aqua regia.

“What is that black powder?” I ask, peering at the opened pot beside the retort, but he does not reply.

“What is inside the jar, Mr. Blacklock?” I can feel a tightening of excitement about my throat that is not just from the yellow fumes leaking out.

“Stand back for the moment, Agnes Trussel, and within the hour I will show you something that I think is going to change our lives forever,” he says hoarsely. “This is the third occasion on which I have been able to produce it, and I am confident that my discovery is not a stone overturned by chance.”

 

 

Later, when the smell is gone from the room at last, he brings a pipkin. “See inside here,” he says. “Look here and see these shiny, eager little crystals.” His hand is shaking.

“What are they, sir?” I ask.

“I do not know!” He laughs, and his face is transformed. “I shall call this substance . . .” He considers. “The vital agent.”

“And does it . . . ?”

He looks at me.

“I have begun to experiment with this vital agent. It seems to act as enabler or go-between, coaxing the colors out of substances when they burn.”

“How, sir? ”

“I do not yet know.” He coughs. “The acid has driven out the air from the alkali and then I have captured it in crystal form. It is seemingly charged with the principle of inflammability. Added to powder in the place of niter, it gives astounding fierceness to the burn. It is important. I believe it is the key to my endeavor. I do not know yet if it can be controlled sufficiently to use in pyrotechny, but I intend to find out.”

“Is it safe to use? ” I ask. He shakes his head.

“In my experiments I have found it unstable, dangerous. It can ignite spontaneously upon exposure to friction or to unchecked sunshine. It goes rapidly from lying in a quiet state to sudden violent action.”

“A snake of a thing!” I say, thinking again of the soft brown adders that soak up the hot sun on the Downs. Lying in the grasses, they begrudge disturbance from a trance and, chanced upon, they can rear up with a spiteful poison to their bite. Mrs. Porter’s youngest daughter, Sarah, was bitten by an adder and did not survive a second night, although they put on adder’s fat and the rector prayed for her safekeeping.

“It is capricious,” he stresses. “Once coupled with sulfur, it can spring to life without warning, so that it is no simple task to establish formulations with any accuracy. This agent is highly volatile,” Mr. Blacklock warns. “Never cause a tap or knock about it. Never allow any grit to be introduced inadvertently within the mortar’s cavity when grinding a composition that contains it. Never even expose it to the warmth of the sunshine.” He pulls at his neckcloth to loosen it. I see his neck as he does this; I cannot help it. Again I am surprised at how young it seems: the skin of his neck is smooth and supple beneath the dark stubble on his jaw. I look away quickly. “Of course, most pyrotechnic formulae should be treated with respect,” he is saying. “But any containing this new substance I have created should be treated with something approaching fearfulness.”

We hear the church clock strike.

“And how . . . ?”

“It is noon. Let us eat.”

T
he solution is close now, though it is not within my sight. Like watching a still pond, where the bank with its flaggy irises, starworts and water parsnip is reflected in the water, and you see a push, a rippling disturbance that does not break the surface. You know it is a fish under the pond’s skin, a trout maybe, or perch or tench, turning its big slippery body about in the water, pushing at the water as it turns and making nothing but a fleeting ripple, but you cannot see it. You know the signs, the indications, which is enough. You do not need to see something to feel its presence there.

I say this to myself, over and over.

Mr. Blacklock counts out my wages. How many more weeks before he stops that and turns me out instead? I am seven months gone, and I have come to my senses. I begin to feel an agitation so strong that I can almost hear it rushing in my ears.

“You must fetch new apparatus from the apothecary’s shop,” Mr. Blacklock says. “I have to meet with Mr. Torré to discuss his needs for Marylebone next month and so I cannot go myself. You are aware of Mr. Jennet’s tendency toward a bending of the honesty of things. Keep your eyes open while you are there.”

I nod. And I shall go also to the herb market on my own business, I think, but I say nothing of this.

“I need new pipkins.” Mr. Blacklock writes an order for me to carry. “I have broken so many. A new receiver. Some spirit of niter, manganese. Some clean spills of wood, I have no time to cut my own.” In this household, spills of wood are tipped with sulfur to touch the spark in the tinderbox, though Mary Spurren does not like to use them.

“Devil’s fire,” she always says, pressing her pale lips together crossly.

The front door closes behind me. Out on the street with my shawl about me I have a sense that I am watched, and glance upward uneasily. Nothing at the windows, no movement, no white face staring down at me behind a scrap of curtain. And then I see a red kite circling far above the city, waiting for prey. Its forked tail is just visible against the sky.

At the shop Mr. Jennet almost snatches the order from my hand, with a tut of disapproval. His enormous wig quivers as he bends down behind the counter to reach the stacks of apparatus.

“What’s he up to now that he needs so much of late?” he grumbles. “Business must be prosperous, is it? The world’s gone mad, I say.” He wraps the receiver and looks at the list again. “And what does he want with so much manganese? A funny purchase for an artificer.”

“Just working hard, Mr. Jennet,” I reply, watching him.

When I am done at the apothecary’s shop I do not go back to the house with my heavy basket. At the herb market in Lamb’s Conduit Street I buy a large bundle of sage. Because I am certain that the skinny market woman senses that there is something strange about my purchase, I ask her for a quantity of parsley for my basket, too. Her baby is asleep in a crate beside her. I do not look at it.

I go into a side street and I throw the parsley in the gutter, like a mad-woman. It is so fresh and green. The sage, which I keep, is very soft. The tender purplish leaves are like skin or new fur. It does not seem like something that could kill a child. I secrete the sage inside my shawl, and walk back to the house. Crushed against my body, the muffled, bitter pepper smell of sage is all about me.

On my way I am surprised to see a pair of drovers with a flock of unkempt sheep heading out toward Lincoln’s Inn Fields. As they bundle past I breathe in their wool smell, their savory dung smell, and I am flooded with sickness for home.

“Crabs ! Periwinkles!” a boy cries out in my ear as he passes. I smell the weedy salt of his basket. The traffic closes around the sheep and then I lose sight of them as the road bends to the right. They are gone. I am desolate and the stone steps to the grocer’s are steep and regular. My legs ache with taking regular steps sometimes.

There is no one whom I recognize inside the shop. The women seem tall and grimy, filling it up with their baskets and loud voices asking for cheese and rice and fuller’s earth. One of them turns when she hears my voice, and flicks a look at my belly. I almost run home and I am glad of the strange smell of the hallway as I enter.

Home. I called this place home. That was a mistake, as I know that home is a long way southward at the back of the swell of the hills on the edge of the trees, before the sea. This can never be home, surely, with its strange odors and complicated maze of corridors and outbuildings, with its old, wide, beaten-up stairways covered in city polish and city dirt. How can I call it home, when there are rooms here that I don’t even know about?

When I get to the kitchen I hide the sage at the back of the cupboard.

If I think carefully about it, I find that I feel the loss of home very deep down inside, hardly noticeable now, like a tiny sob at the end of a long tunnel.

A
t last, Mary Spurren has left the house to get fish from the market at Billingsgate. She will be gone for half an hour or more, and Mrs. Blight is out. I do not have much time for what I need to do.

The sage has wilted and the leaves hang limply from the stalks. I have so little time. My heart is racing with the consequence of what I am doing.

If I boil it for too long, it will fail in its purpose. Perhaps the nature of its properties will be destroyed by overheating? Or will it be increased in strength? I do not know. I can only remember bits of what my grandmother told me about herbs. Why did I not listen to her with more attention ? Why does the kettle not reach the boil more rapidly! The fire is too low. I stoke the fire. I riddle the fire. I wait again. Then the water bubbles and my hands are shaking as I lift the heavy kettle away from the heat and pour. If the leaves sit for too short a time within the water, how can its qualities leak out into the brew?

I steep it for as long as I dare and pour it out hastily into a white cup. Much of the liquid spills and splashes on the table.

The water is a clouded greenish brown, like the water in ponds. Will it taste of nothing, or of all it is, boiled leaves? I begin to drink it down quickly in one gulping draft as I have so little time. It is too hot and burns my tongue and lips, which I am glad of. It is strongly bitter, acrid, unpleasant.

There is a noise at the door! I splutter and stop.

Already someone is back, turning the key, coming in down the corridor. It is a rarity for Mary Spurren to accomplish anything at speed, yet here she is, all out of breath with walking hastily, and her chest rises and falls at a pace. She sets her parcel of fish upon the kitchen table and glances about, as though the quickness of her blood beating round had made her more than usually alert.

“Mackerel, I got,” she says. “Made her gut it for me, but left the heads and tails on. I like a fish to seem a fish.” She trails off and sniffs. “What odd smell is that?” she asks. Her big head faces me.

I make myself look blank and busy. I look up from the sink, where I have tipped the infusion away. I dry the china cup and put it away in the back of the cupboard. “A downdraft of coal smoke?” I suggest, my heart beating. “The wind does eddy and bluster down the chimney when it comes from the northeasterly direction.”

I fold a linen cloth over the drying rack before the hob. “Or perhaps Mr. Blacklock has some strong tobacco. He went to the tobacco merchant only yesterday. Mind you”—I make myself look at her—“I can smell nothing.”

And Mary Spurren gives me a suspicious stare when I say this.