The Book of Fires (34 page)

“I cannot hear the nightingales,” I say, pulling my shawl about me, afraid to hear what he is about to say. Cornelius Soul seems larger in the darkness. He moves himself closer, and then closer still.

“I tell you, they’ll sing, if you can wait!” he says. And he begins: “I will be honest, Miss Trussel. It made me happy when I saw that you could find some warmth inside yourself for me.”

I swallow. “Did it?” I reply, faintly.

“And tonight is a pleasure,” he says. “Were the Gardens as you hoped they’d be?” He puts his hand around me, and runs it slowly up and down my spine.

Confused, I keep my eyes fixed on the bright lights of the rotunda in the distance. “I did not think it would be like this,” I whisper.

“When the autumn comes, Agnes,” he murmurs suddenly, “should we be married ? ” It is the first time he has called me by my name. But that is too late, far too late. What do I do? His face widens to a grin.

“Agnes?”

I can hear a woman’s voice close to us, in the shadows. “My little puggy,” she is murmuring, her voice slurred with drink or fondness. “Mmm, my little puggy.” Then a man’s voice says something that I cannot hear, and she gives out a throaty, drunken snort.

“Need we wait until . . . ?” I begin to whisper back, but my words are drowned out by the first volley of maroons and sharp reports. I turn to look, and the firework I see is like the flash of an axe falling.

Cornelius Soul pulls me toward him and kisses my neck, which I do not like. I pull away to tell him so. I feel a panic in me. The autumn is too late, I am thinking, over and over. Too late. Too late. In the light from the lamps in the trees above us, his eyes seem as though they are lidded half-shut and his teeth look long and yellow, like the teeth of a fox or scavenger.

“I am cold,” I say inaudibly against the whine and crackle of the rockets, shivering.

And then he bends suddenly and picks up the hem of my skirt, and rubs at the weave of the fabric between his thumb and forefinger. What is he doing? I know my underskirt is exposed; the chill in the air has reached the bareness of my legs. It is hard not to pull away from him. The trunk of the elm tree presses at my back. I realize that he is not the kind of man to take refusal lightly. He seems much stronger than I thought. I swallow. His big arm encircles and presses me against him harder. He is breathing fast. And then his other hand is reaching in under my skirts, pushing them back, and the air is cold on my thighs as he pulls back to unbutton his breeches. This is not what I meant. “No!” I cry, against the roar of the firing. Behind me I hear the collective pop and fizz of the Roman candles, and the admiration of the crowd.

It is happening now; I cannot stop it.

Oh, God help me, his hands are touching the roundness of my belly, the base of the undressed belly, where there can be no mistaking it for plumpness or too many garments.

“You are big with child!” he says, incredulous. His eyes in the yellow light are wide and stare at me.

And then he turns away and laughs and spits on the ground. I can see the muscles in his jaw move as he clenches it tight.

“You sly devil, Blacklock, and after all your sermonizing at me!”

“No, no—” I begin.

“Small wonder he had no appetite for whoring or gaming! He had it so cozy, so convenient at home. And what did you think, Miss Trussel, when it all went wrong and you knew you had his bastard child? That you would fob it off on to me? That I would be your saving? Did you think of this between you? As if I were some sop to be made a fool of? How he must be laughing at me, watching me take his damaged goods like the fool I am, all unawares. Damn him. Damn his eyes. Assuming it is his.”

“It is not how—”

“I have a good mind to finish what I started here, but I will not taint myself,” he says, buttoning his breeches and spitting again, as if to rid himself of a bad taste in his mouth. “Or God only knows what I may contract.” His lips are thin. He puts his hand into his coat and brings out some coins, which he drops one by one at my feet.

“Your journey home,” he says stiffly, and turns his back and in an instant disappears. I can hear the crunch of his heels on the gravel for a moment longer than I see his shape.

I am a disgrace.

I bend with difficulty and grope for the dusty shillings in the dark, for how else will I get back unless I use Mrs. Mellin’s coins?

The cold lights are dazzling as I go to the turnstile. The woman who is a man leers at me as I push my way out. “Not good enough for you then, darling?” she shouts after me. “Or did he go off with another?” and her shriek of laughter fills my head.

I have made a ruin of my life.

 

 

In the carriage I realize that I had not even heeded the close of the fireworks display. My bones feel weak with distress. I did not see the fireworks. I did not see them. I close my eyes tight shut and try to think of fire pouring silver, white. And then I hardly think of anything until the carriage slows and stops, discharging me into the night.

The noise of the hooves of horses fades. The night is as black as pitch. I cannot see my hand before my face.

I make my way to the yard at the back, and enter the house by the scullery door. It squeaks open. I grope for the tinderbox on the high dresser and strike a light. There is nobody there in the kitchen; the fire is banked up for the night and the retainer put on. Mary Spurren’s candlestick is gone from the shelf, so she must be in her bed.

I do not know how late it is, but I see that lamplight is still shining under the door of Mr. Blacklock’s study as I go past it to the stairs. I make my treading light and even as I go by; indeed I hardly breathe at all, lest he should hear me.

When Mr. Blacklock calls out, my hand jerks with surprise, so that hot wax spills and runs down my fingers. “Who’s . . . there?” he says, gruffly. His voice is strange.

“Who . . . ?” he calls again.

“Only me, Agnes,” I say quietly, my fingers burning as I hesitate outside, but because his voice is so strange and the door is ajar a little already, I push it open further and look into the room.

Mr. Blacklock has fallen to the carpet before the fire.

“What is it! Are you ill?” I say, rushing to him, and then at once I see by the flush of his face and the overturned and empty bottles by him that he is deeply in liquor. He tries to get up as I grasp his shoulders and attempt to lift him to the chair, but a drunken man is heavier than someone sober twice the height, and when I let go he slumps to the floor again. His face is wet, as though he has been weeping.

I sink into the chair before him. I cannot think what else to do.

“Fireworks?” he mutters from the floor, so thickly that I have to lean forward in the chair to hear him.

“I tell you again, they were not as good as those you promised me,” I reply bleakly. It is all I can say. Mr. Blacklock does not drink prodigious quantities like other men, yet here he is, quite full of liquor. How long can a man keep mourning for his wife and stay healthy in his soul?

I could fetch Mary Spurren and perhaps between us we could take him up the stairs and lay him in his bed, yet . . . somehow I do not want anyone to see him in this state. But I dare not leave him. He might knock his head on the hearthstone, or a spark could catch at his coat and flare up.

Instead I get up to put some lumps of coal upon the fire and rake the embers. The fire begins to liven up and pour out smoke. At the window the shutters have not been drawn, and in the crooked glass my disheveled face stares back at me. The reflection is so broken up, at first I do not recognize myself.

Outside I can hear the clatter of a rat or cat or vagrant knocking something over in the yard. I do not even care, and leave the shutters folded open as they are.

Mr. Blacklock has propped himself against a chair before the hearth. When I sit down once more and look at him, I see again the orange fire reflected in the darkness of his eyes as though it were burning inside his head. I lift the stopper from the decanter on the table next to me and pour more wine into his half-filled glass and drink from it myself. It is a red wine, dry and fruited and faintly metallic like blood. I drink another glass, until my body does not feel my own. I tip back my head and swallow more. I do not want to be alone with it, my ugly, swollen body that is not my own.

I let the tears I feel run down my cheeks, without a sound. I do not sob, but the tears come anyway. We are a sorry pair, I think. The fire bursts into flames beside us, and it stirs him, so that he raises himself up a little and, swaying, sits almost insensible before me at my feet. He looks up and meets my eye, and his face is gaunt with disappointment.

I cannot bear to see him so sad. I cannot bear it. I reach out and touch his shoulders. I touch his head. I hold his head, I lean forward and hold it tight against me and I rock him as I cry in sympathy for him and for myself and the ruin I have made of everything.

“John Blacklock, John Blacklock,” I hear myself say, over and over.

“I have made a mistake,” I whisper. “A great mistake.”

I rock and rock, his head on my chest, so close to my belly. I am almost begging him to notice what is wrong with me. But now his face is pressed into my hands. His mouth is on my fingers; I can feel the roughness of his shaven skin. I have never touched a man’s face before. It is large. He holds my fingers on his mouth, pressing them there fiercely with his own hands. When he speaks, I feel the heat and dampness of his words against them. I feel the tremor of his words rise through his throat.

“Agnes,” he mutters. He is kissing my fingers.

“You must . . .” he says, and his voice is so hoarse I can hardly hear him. “You must . . . forgive me.”

I do not loosen my hold upon him. I do not know what else to do. His head is warm and comforting against my lap. He must be quite confused with grief, I tell myself, over and over. And I go on rocking John Blacklock before the hearth until he sleeps.

 

The night moves on, and the fire dies down to embers once again.

A thin light creeps about outside in the yard and a wind stirs the leaves. His breathing is deeper now, stronger as he rests against me. How close he is to the child inside me, unmoving, too, perhaps asleep, inside my belly—but he does not know it. His eyelids are shut tight over his eyes, shadowed purple with tiredness.

How well I know the conduct of men in this condition. They drink, they talk nonsensically, sometimes with songs or rambling tales, then they become morose or ill, then they fall down in a stupor and take a corpselike slumber out of which they inch with a stiff neck and a bad humor in the morning, and they do not recollect a thing about the way the night before was passed. John Blacklock will remember nothing of this night.

Besides, it will be days now, I suppose, before my belly becomes impossible to hide beneath my shawl, and I will no longer have employment here.

I am finished.

Everything is coming to an end. So what do I have to lose now? Nothing.

His head is warm. The clock ticks. A coal falls in the grate. I hear the scratch and patter of a mouse in the wall behind the paneling. The shallow glorious glitter of the Gardens seems far away.

Mr. Blacklock slumbers soundly, unknowingly, against my lap. It does not matter that I touch his dark hair. Nobody knows. And nobody knows when I bend and kiss him, just once, gently, closing my eyes as I taste his skin.

I am exhausted by the time the fire is out.

I rise and untangle myself from Mr. Blacklock’s arms, gone slack with sleep, ease him down to the hearth rug without disturbance and lay my woollen cloak unfolded over him. He grunts but does not stir; his breathing comes and goes with labored steadiness. I turn the lamp down but do not blow it out lest he wake in a daze before dawn. And I take up what is left of my candle and go to my chamber.

The narrow bed seems so cold after the warmth I have just had, yet as I drift into sleep, I can still feel the shape and the weight of his head in my hands. It did not seem wrong to have held it. Sometimes when I look at John Blacklock, it is as though I were looking at my own dark self, as though there were no difference between us. But then a look in his face reminds me of how he remembers his dead wife, and I am still suddenly, inside, as when a wind drops and the wrinkled surface of a pond becomes smooth like glass and shows the sky.

F
or what is left of the night, I dream of nothing. When I wake, it is quiet outside. The sky is faintly blue, as when a drop of milk falls into a glass of water and spreads out gently. I am late for breakfast. Mrs. Blight is clearing the plates away and smirking, and when I go to the scullery, Mary Spurren’s face is quarrelsome. All the while I am trying to work out if Mr. Blacklock has been down already. How many plates are there on the side? Mary Spurren slops the water about in the sink and makes her apron wetter than it was.