The Book of Fires (33 page)

I steal a glance sideways at Cornelius Soul, when I think he is not looking. His nose is small and sharp, and his silky white hair moves about in the lightest of breezes as we walk. Is it really trickery, I wonder, this trying to catch a man’s attention?

“Does Blacklock treat you tolerably?” Cornelius Soul asks. He shakes a coin on his palm, flips it into the air and catches it. “Your conditions are adequate? Your victuals? Your arrangements?”

“He is a fair employer,” I say. “Look at those women strolling! Their dresses are so elegant! ”

“And trade is good?”

“It is,” I say. I can see brocades, satins, watered silks.

“And your new supplier is a worthier man than I?” I cannot help but laugh when he says this.

“Is your trade elsewhere so bad you must be bitter?” I answer, mocking him, and he grins quickly then and takes my hand up and puts it beneath his arm. I do not pull away. I can feel his warmth inside the velvet. I see that the coat is worn at the cuffs, as though he has owned it a long time. His arm is slender for a man’s, yet there is a wiry strength to it. I remember the gentle calmness of his mother, the loaf cut into five.

“I dislike losing any deal or battle. Show me a man that doesn’t,” he says. The ground crunches dry under our boots, and they scuff up dust. The May air is warm, and the tightly coiled springs inside my chest are unwinding like green shoots of bindweed in the sunshine. A sound of music comes faintly through the trees; then it stops and there is a drifting patter of applause. Am I in love? I am not dizzy with it. No, I know I am not, although when I think of it my stomach clenches in a nervous state of agitation at the thing that I am planning.

“You cannot pick them!” I protest to Cornelius Soul when he leans over the clipped hedge to snap off a bloom, and holds it out to me. I do not know its name—a city plant.

“I do not like those flowers,” I say, shaking my head. “They have something of the smell of fresh blood about them.”

“Take it!” he insists.

I laugh, but I will not take the flower from him, so finally he pushes the stalk through his own coat’s buttonhole.

“That was no defeat,” he says, shrugging. “The gain is mine, all mine ! ”

The late sun casts a bronze sheen over everything, and the shadows are long on the ground. When we stop at a fountain purling a soft jet of water, I see how it catches the light and the droplets sparkle in colors. The water looks fresh and clear.

I imagine jumping in feet first, sinking, letting the skin of the water meet and close above my head, feeling my hair floating upward like a brown silky weed. The heaviness of my swelling body would dissolve into the pool, and if I opened my eyes into the wetness of the water, all I would see, stretching on and on above me, would be the vault of the high blue evening sky.

“There is a star!” I say, pointing.

Cornelius Soul leans back against the fountain and breathes in deeply. I dip my hand near the star’s reflection, and stir it about.

“Did you know, Miss Trussel,” he asks, “that nightingales sing here?”

I take my hand out of the water and dry it on my skirts. “Nightingales?” I say, perturbed. “In birdcages? ”

Cornelius chuckles. “No, they perch in the cherry trees, singing their hearts out to the punters until closing time.” He buys sugared almonds from a booth, though I say I am not hungry. He opens the bag and holds it out, bending closer.

“There was a woman had a passion for nightingales, they say.” He speaks quietly into my ear.

“What woman?” I ask, slipping the unwanted sweet about in my palm, like a pebble.

“Used an oil made from the pressed tongues of nightingales to perfume her wrists,” he goes on, the sugar cracking between his teeth. “Think of that! They say she said it made the sounds of love come all the sweeter.” His voice is warm, and smells of almonds. He has let out the words slowly, so that each one slides agreeably into my head. He leans away again.

“Now such cruelty would seem barbaric, wouldn’t it,” he declares lightly, in a different tone, as though I had imagined how he spoke before. I put the sweet into my mouth and suck its smoothness. As we walk on, his words turn over slowly in my mind, as even a slight trickle of water down from the leat will turn the mill wheel round on its axle. His hand arrives at the small of my back; his fingers climb the ridge of my spine, pressing over the crests of the bone and the flesh between.

“I hope you do not mind me complimenting you upon your healthy form,” he says in a low voice. “Quite a spare and bony miss you were the first time I clapped my eye on you, and yet now you have a goodly contour. Clearly they did not feed you in the countryside.” He laughs at me. “And a full blush rises in your cheek so easily! I like a rosy girl.”

The sunlight dips lower and lower and then is gone, leaving only a trace of a deep redness in the sky to the west. As the air grows blue with twilight it is tinged with expectation. Hundreds of lamps, strung between the trees, begin to glitter in the branches eerily, like marsh lights, unearthly baubles. Beneath them I have never seen so many people thronged and circling together. The unfolding scene is like a tangled, many-colored cloth weaving and unweaving itself at once in front of me, the threads of their paths moving through the light and shadow, so that I grow dizzy watching them. The noise of the crowd is like the hum of a hive. Everyone is talking, laughing. I know this world is not quite real.

He pulls me in a little closer.

“Cornelius Soul!” I say, laughing, almost losing my balance, and put him away from me.

We are swept along with the crowd to see the gentry eating in the supper boxes.

“How loud and boastful they appear,” he says cheerfully. “Basking stupidly in our attention, like sheep will laze about in sunshine, plumply satisfied with their taste of the world.” I watch two gentlemen cutting at cooked chickens, brandishing the pieces. They raise up bumpers of wine to each other noisily. A lady picks at salad on her plate, her wig and feathers trembling as she turns her head to listen to the shuttle of their conversation.

“Let’s go to the rotunda and hear a song or two to free our spirits!” Cornelius says, winking. We find a bench. “Sit here,” he says, and fetches arrack punch in a pair of thick glasses.

“What is this? ” I ask him, tipping the glass to see its color.

“Rum made tasty with grains of benjamin flower,” he says. I sip at its sweetness until the lights in the supper boxes begin to spin.

A woman sings like a bird from the rotunda, her voice trembling, soaring as she reaches the edge of her melody. I feel the child loop once in my belly as if it were listening, and see the glisten of a tear slip down the cheek of someone in front of me. I remember the cracked hands of Mrs. Nott.

“Imagine making a living with your own skill and magnificence, like her,” I say in excited wonder when she takes her last bow and the clapping dies down.

Cornelius Soul nods. “She has a gift,” he says.

The punch has made my head hot and peppery. “But I expect, Mr. Soul,” I tease him a little, “you do not think a woman’s place can be in serious professions, but is concerned with suckling babies and making sure of a meal on a white-scrubbed table for her husband’s weary return from his work?” I have another sip of my drink. “And when she has done with mending shirts and washing the grease from the pots, if she has a head for figures, no doubt she could save herself from idle moments by totting the accounts held with the butcher, or the seed merchant, or the collector of taxes.”

Cornelius Soul is frowning now.

“Wrong, Miss Trussel! There is no reason that I know of that should prevent a woman being occupied by business, if she has the head and stomach for it,” he declares.

“What kind of business?”

“A man I know called Walter Johns, who owns the Abbey powder mills in Essex, inherited the business from his mother, Pip, who ran it for years as a strong concern. In peacetime that woman oversaw production of six thousand barrels of powder annually, and four times the quantity would have been needed if there was war, and no doubt she’d have had that admirably in hand.” He leans forward. “It is the trading classes with the power to change things,” Cornelius Soul says, defiantly. “You did not expect that, did you?” he adds. And I shake my head in frank astonishment at his ideas.

“I did not,” I say. How John Blacklock would recoil at their outlandishness. “And your own mother—what does she do?” I ask.

“My mother . . . manages. She holds the house together in its shabbiness, in its falling apart.” He takes out a coin again and flicks it in the air. “Heads or tails, Miss Trussel?”

“Heads,” I say.

“Heads it is!”

I smile at him. How well this seems to be going. The gold tooth glints in his mouth as he grins back. The orchestra begins to play. Cornelius Soul orders ham, and a boy brings it over. And then, clean from the blue, something makes me turn my head aside and I find my gaze meets that of Lettice Talbot.

As startled as I am, she stops in her tracks for a moment, and her eye goes straight for my belly, although I try to hold my shawl to cover it. She looks at Cornelius Soul, and back to me. The gem at her neck sparkles colors in the bright light. I had forgotten how beautiful, how radiant, she is. Yet as I get up eagerly, she shakes her head, and turns stiffly away from me when I raise my hand in greeting. I am certain that I see her mouth say,
No!

I am baffled.

She is escorted by a middle-aged man in a military uniform. She tucks her hand under his elbow, the tassels of his epaulettes gleaming and dangling like glossy catkins at his shoulders. A younger girl is clinging to his other arm. I hear her giggling, and they all move off down the walk together. Lettice Talbot giggles, too. She is pretending that she has not seen me.

Cornelius looks to see what I am doing. “You know that tart?” he exclaims, following my stare. “You do not want to associate with a woman sold to whoredom like herself!” he says in a loud voice. “How is it that you know such baggage? ”

I watch Lettice Talbot’s silky slippers stepping away so neatly on the gravel. It is a wonder that she does not attract more attention than she does, she is so beautiful. “We were traveling together once by chance,” I say, and turn to look again at the orchestra. I blink. “But her journey was a different one to mine.”

“I should hope so!”

Lettice Talbot and her companions disappear behind the bandstand. Then he shrugs.

“Pricey whore, cheap whore—all the same.” He tips punch into his mouth and swallows. “You can dress a dog up in fine flounces and ruffles and charge highly for its services; yet still it has the bones of a dog, fur of a dog, foul breath of a dog.” He looks down at the table in front of him. His face has a look of distaste upon it, as though he has found something rotting on his plate instead of ham.

I do not feel like eating anymore. I feel sick. I do not think this thin ham is worth the shilling he has paid for it, but do not say a word. I do not like him speaking of her in that way, no matter what she does to make her living. I can see the pattern of the china clearly through the ham’s pinkness ; it is like a piece of skin upon the plate. Why did she not want to talk to me just now? Cornelius folds the last slice and chews it down. He orders more punch for both of us, although I cannot finish mine, it is so strong.

“A poor way to earn a livelihood,” he says with contempt.

“Perhaps that is the point,” I rejoin, timidly. “It is a livelihood, not a mortal choice. God knows, we slip into our paths unchosen.”

“You don’t get as good as she if that way of life is not your vocation.” And he changes the subject, as though it disgusts him to speak of Lettice Talbot any more. Right inside, a soft part of me I did not know I had has toughened up. The orchestra strikes up a march, and he taps his foot. The brisk, exacting notes drum in my ears. “Watch your pockets ! ” a man bellows nearby. A woman squeals above the thrum of the milling crowd about us.

“It is almost time for the fireworks,” Cornelius Soul says. “If we take ourselves a small distance away from the crush we will have a good view. If we go now, we may even hear the nightingales before the first flight of rockets goes up. Shall we proceed, Miss Trussel?” he says, pressing me forward.

And as I go with him I have a sudden image of my uncle paddling the big pig down the lane with the flat of his ash stick, the pig breaking into a stubborn trot because it did not know where they were headed. Somehow it seems to matter whether I can remember if there was a dawning of terror in its eye as it shambled along, its view hooded by the
flap, flap
of its ears that were pink with the low winter sun shining through them, on its way to be slaughtered.

Why should I find it hard to submit willingly? It is what I wanted.

We stand away from the crowd, and wait for the fireworks. Leaves rustle in the elms behind us.