The Book of Fires (32 page)

“Are you ill?” I venture.

“Not in my person,” she says, indistinctly. “And where was you last night? My neck’s stiff enough to be halfway to dead.” She rubs at it gingerly. “Not ill, though not . . . well, neither.”

Then she presses herself up out of the chair with an effort and stands, swaying. A smell of liquor seeps from her.

“Mary,” I say anxiously, “the fire is out. Mr. Blacklock is not down yet, is he? He will be angry if he sees this chaos. If I begin to clear the mess with you, perhaps we can have the kitchen clean as soon as possible!” I try to sound encouraging, and add lightly, as if I do not care, “And whereabouts is Mrs. Blight?”

But she frowns, as though I have reminded her of something she is trying to remember. She waves a forefinger. “Blacklock, Mr. Blacklock . . .” she exclaims thickly. “Now there’s a man who’ll . . . not be down so early as he might for breakfast.”

“No?” I say, beginning hastily to clear the table.

“He did not . . .” She stops to hiccup. “He did not come back last night neither.” She smirks unevenly at me and slouches back down into the chair.

“How do you mean?” I say, placing a bottle with particular care into the gape of the sack. “But there are robbers, cutthroats, abroad at night—do you know he is safe?”

“Oh, I daresay he’s safe enough, if you could call it that.” Her head falls back and her bleary eyes watch me with some kind of triumph. “But he did not come to supper. Let us say he appeared to have another engagement all of a sudden, rushing in when I thought it was you come back with the meat, swapping his hat for his best one and hurrying out again without a word.”

“And he did not come back?” I ask.

“No, he did not. A fine way to enjoy Mrs. Blight’s lottery on the day of her birthday, no joint of meat going cold on the table, and all the sauces stiffening in their dishes.”

She likes it that she has my attention now.

“Fairly striding, he was, they say.” She sniffs. “Very eager, no doubt. But perhaps you would know more about that than me.”

“What do you mean?”

She hiccups again, and rubs her neck. “I believe I shall join them Methodists this very forenoon. No!” She raises a forefinger. “Don’t speak to me or I shall fall down in a faint like a lady’s maid.” I hear the clock chime nine times from the study. How late it is.

I go on alone with the thankless task. And before I can get the kitchen clean there are footsteps and Mr. Blacklock’s sudden shadow blocks the sunshine falling through the back door wide open to the yard.

I look up. Mr. Blacklock has the unshaven, unkempt appearance of a man who has not slept all night, and there is a cast of something almost wild-eyed in his face. It is most peculiar.

He clears his throat before speaking.

“I must discuss a matter with you,” Mr. Blacklock says, soberly.

“Me?” I whisper.

My heart begins thumping. It has happened. He has found out. He has discovered my crime or my secret and he has to discharge me. But even as he begins speaking, Mrs. Blight bursts in, as if she has been waiting for this moment outside the door.

“Morning, Mr. Blacklock, sir!” she interrupts. “A lovely day.”

“I am sorry to have missed the celebration,” Mr. Blacklock says distractedly. “I trust you did not wait for me.”

“No, we did not, sir. Some of us indeed most certainly did not.” Mrs. Blight’s eyes flash spitefully at me. She is wearing a brand-new straw hat on her head, covered in carnations. “Pert little madam!” she says, smiling at me, and her dislike is polished up and glinting in her gaze.

She unties her hat, takes it off and simpers at it. “Was that Mr. Soul keeping you under lock and key that you could not return all night?” she adds.

“No, no!” I begin to explain in some alarm. “By a twist of fate I became—”

“We did so miss your presence last night, Mr. Blacklock, sir,” Mrs. Blight cuts in, sweetly.

“Forgive me,” he mutters abruptly, turning his back as he leaves the room. I must be brave I think, and speak up then before he closes the door. “But, Mr. Blacklock, when would you wish to talk with me?”

“Another time, another time,” he says, walking away.

I can feel Mary Spurren’s big head still facing me, though I do not look. “But where is that joint of meat then, Agnes Trussel? ”

The pork! Left on the pew. It will be long gone now.

“I lost it,” I say lamely. They will never believe me.

“Lost it? Jesus!” She pulls a face.

“You’ll pay for that out of your wages, my girl, once I tell Mr. Blacklock,” Mrs. Blight says, viciously. She comes up very close to me and her breath smells of fish. “There’s something about the way you comport yourself about, Agnes Trussel, that gets on my nerves.”

Then I slip into the workshop behind Mr. Blacklock and try to begin my day as though all is well. My hands shake as I work, as I wait for dismissal. I am faint with lack of sleep.

“Agnes, I must speak frankly with you,” Mr. Blacklock starts to say again, putting his work to one side of the filling-box. And then when I look up at him, still he says nothing, and instead picks up the mallet again.

Perhaps he has financial trouble of a serious nature, and he has decided that I must go to save him money. Four shillings a week plus all my board and washing, candles; that must add up to something that might be better saved. He has been pacing the streets and has resolved that savings must be made in expenditure.

I remember when Mr. Fitton did something akin to that, and my brother Ab, who had been hoping to become herdsman’s boy and learn a trade, instead found there was no longer a place for him at all with the dairy herd, as the new herdsman from upcountry had brought his own boy with him. He was told to look for work elsewhere.

It changed something in him, that discharge, which he took like a blow to the stomach that he never stopped feeling. Of course, he did not shrink nor double up—he was the sort to shoulder his new status like the burden it was—but there was a fury glistening in his eye. So when my mother said he always was an angry boy she was not right to say so. Our troubles shape our characters directly and in many ways.

Could it be another matter altogether? But there is something in John Blacklock’s manner that makes me think that what he has to say to me is something quite unpleasant, and I become certain of this when for a second time he lets himself be interrupted, this time by Mary Spurren entering the workshop.

“Ah, Mary,” he says, with relief.

“It’s the coal, sir—will you want it for tomorrow as usual, only the cart-boy is here and he says there is some ill judgment with supply . . .”

I stop listening and sit in wretchedness.

Or perhaps, God help me, and I suppose I knew this all along, he has guessed my condition and cannot continue my employment under any circumstances for a moment longer. Has his eye been lingering on my belly as he speaks to me these past few weeks?

 

In the kitchen after supper, when he has gone to his study, Mary Spurren sidles up close and regards me suspiciously.

“I know where you was yesterday,” she says.

“Do you?” I say.

I see her face smirking at me then.

“You do not,” I say flatly.

“With Mr. Blacklock,” she announces.

“Mr. Blacklock?” I frown. “Why would I have been with him? He was gone away on business, I suppose.”

“Odd business it is that causes him to leave his order book idle on the desk, which leads him to go out sporting his best hat, as though he had a cause to further by it.”

“You have been prying!” I exclaim.

“Not more than is needed for a simple explanation,” she says indignantly, without a doubt that this is justified. She blinks at me.

“But think, Mary,” I explain, more patient with her. “Why should I be with him? Mr. Blacklock does not need to take me on a business visit anywhere; my presence would never justify the fare. No,” I say, “I imagine that he enjoys the solitude of journeys inside the hackney cab, his feet stretched out comfortably, sucking on his pipe and turning over ideas for formulae, uninterrupted, in his mind. Why would he want me there? ”

She shrugs, as though nothing I say will dislodge her strange suspicion.

“He were seen,” she persists.

“Oh?”

“At Covent Garden.” She is triumphant. “And if he weren’t with you, who were he with, I’d ask!”

“Why would he have to be with anyone?”

“Men go to Covent Garden for three reasons only.” She counts on her thin fingers, holding them up. “One, the theater, two, the market, and three”—he lowers her voice to a hoarse whisper—“to lie with prostitutes.”

“Prostitutes?” I retort. “Mr. Blacklock is not that sort of man.”

Mary Spurren sniggers. “What kind of innocent are you? You know nothing of men!”

Mrs. Blight comes into the room. “Men? They’re all the same, that way,” she confirms, with relish. “Any man will go with a whore as he needs to.”

“Mr. Blacklock would not,” I repeat. “He is not that kind.”

 

But her chance remark has set a worrying fleck of misgiving deep in my mind. It is the kind of thought that begins to fester and inflame, as the smallest of splinters can lodge in a tender skin and go bad with infection.

Why should it trouble me that he has spent the night abroad and has not told us his intentions? A man has needs; surely I heard my father slur those words enough times when my mother inclined away from the range of his unsteady grasp just back from the alehouse, forgetting for a moment her wifely duties. “Not now, Thomas,” she would hiss, motioning us to get to bed at once.

And Mr. Blacklock’s wife is dead. Of course he has a right to want some comfort. To choose some solace from his loneliness.

I
am to go to the Gardens today, with Cornelius Soul.

The sky is a clear blue. Outside the city I imagine the sudden flush of growth, a silvery gray sheen on the leaves of the poplars, the soft punch of the cuckoo’s call over the May blossom and cow parsley frothing like yeast in the greening hedgerows. In the meadows many buttercups must be open in the grass like yellow flour sprinkled there, in drifts.

Here inside the city walls we have the high hum of bees at the linden flowers in the yard, and the stickiness of the bricks beneath the insects’ speckled misty ooze of honeydew. These days it almost seems to me as if the sap were rising in my own limbs, too.

He is late to fetch me.

“There’s plenty of dogs goes barking up the wrong tree,” Mrs. Blight says, sharing her unwanted opinions freely as she lifts the stockpot away from the fire. A fat, dry housefly pads up and down the table. There is a strong smell of boiling chicken bones filling the kitchen.

I pull myself up straight and act affronted. Mrs. Blight laughs out loud at me then, showing her teeth, so that I go and wait for Cornelius Soul in the hallway instead. I smooth the edge of the cap under my hat once more. It was a temptation to spend some of Mrs. Mellin’s coins on new lace to trim it with, but in the end I had satisfied both vanity and conscience by washing it instead, and by pressing my clean clothes with the flat iron last night when everyone had gone to bed. I don’t sit down now lest I crease my garments overmuch, and my legs begin to ache with nerves.

Joe Thomazin sidles into the hall while I wait. At first I think he has something to say, he stares at me so much. But then he sits hunched up on the bottom stair and scuffs his feet together, as if upset. “What?” I ask him. But of course he says nothing, and Cornelius Soul has come at last. I turn to wave goodbye to Joe Thomazin, but he has suddenly gone. The hallway is empty.

And then we are out of the house and hailing a hackney carriage out on the street. I can hardly look at Cornelius Soul, I am so shy. The cab is musty inside; the window is small, so that it is hard to see where we are going.

“Here,” he says, grinning, “I’ve brought you gingerbread from Tiddy-Doll’s in Mayfair.” It is flat and gleaming like a brass plate, a baked shape of a woman.

“It’s golden!” I exclaim.

“Gilded.” He chuckles, turning it over. “Look, it’s very thin. Go on,” he says, “eat it.” And I break off the head and pass it to Cornelius Soul. He chews and swallows it down. We eat the rest of the body between us, breaking the skirt and the bodice up into pieces. It is firm and delicious, and leaves a warm spicy taste in my throat.

The carriage rolls and jerks along.

“Where are we now?” I say. Cornelius Soul puts his head out, blocking the light.

“Gone over the river by the new bridge at Westminster,” he says, sitting back on the seat in front of me. “Just going through the thicket beyond the turnpike gate.” I can hear a gull crying, over the roar and chatter of wheels. “There was a robbery here of late that I saw in the papers. But you have a stout fellow beside you, no call for unease,” he says, winking at me, and he holds out his hand when we climb down from the carriage. I am wearing the new kid gloves that I have never worn for working in, the ones that Mr. Blacklock gave to me.

A gaudy woman snatches Cornelius Soul’s shillings from him at the gate. She is so whitely painted up and powdered I cannot see her face at all behind it. “When you’re done staring, get through the turnstile,” she yelps at me, rolling her eyes at the people behind us. Only when I turn away from her do I think that she must be a man dressed otherwise. How confusing the world is.

And we are here in the open air, walking beneath an avenue of elm trees so neatly ordered I can scarcely believe it. To either side of us are graveled, dusty walks, stonework, grand arches and pavilions. It is like a foreign place. A sparrow chirps.

Stretching as far as the eye can see in the evening light are beds of early roses and twisting sweet peas in pinks and whites. The earth is pale and sandy. I can see asparagus, gooseberries. Bees knock about between the blossoms and a musky, creamy scent of flowers fills my head like a spell.