The Book of Fires (39 page)

At the front of the house I am dismayed to see that the walnut tree has been brought down, its roots torn and stiffly grasping at nothing, a hole ripped out of the stones at the edge of the pavement. I stare at it lying there with its green leaves and unripe walnuts dashed against the ground.

The street is littered with broken tiles and pieces of glass and bricks. Bits of leaves and dirt and straw are everywhere, and the air is still and dusty, so that the light has a yellow cast to it, as when a thick snow begins to fall from the sky. My footsteps falter as I make my way toward the river, crunching on fragments. There are no carriages, and the people that I pass have a dazed, excited look upon their faces, as though a war had started.

A
child is picking the green walnuts out of the limbs of the fallen tree outside the house when I return, making a small pile in a piece of grubby calico she has spread on the ground. She points at the house as I approach. “They have been shouting, in there,” she pipes defensively, as though I am about to chase her off. Her eyes are big with being hungry.

“Shouting?” I say, and I know that something bad has happened.

When I beat at the front door Mary Spurren opens it at once, as if she had been waiting in the hallway for my return. There is a foreign smell in the house, as though a stranger were here. Mary Spurren’s face is flushed and her mouth is moving, her long neck hunched into her shoulders. She has a cloth in her hands that she twists about.

“What! What is it? What has happened? ” I have to ask her urgently, to make her speak.

“Gone,” she says with difficulty. “He is gone, and what ill luck it is for all of us.”

“Who?” I ask.

Her voice sounds strange and shrill and inside out, as though it were coming from another corner of the room. She gulps. “What was I thinking of, tempting fate like that? I’d only gone to ask if he would like a bite to eat, seeing as it was so late into the day and Mrs. Blight wanted to get the breakfast plates all cleared so she could lay the dough out for it to prove. There was no answer when I knocked at the door of his chamber, so in I went.”

“Gone? Do you mean Mr. Blacklock? At this hour of the day? But we have to finish up the order. Did he say when he would be—”

“No!” Mary Spurren gasps.

“He did not come to look for me ? I was not out for an undue length of time, I was—”

“He is gone! Quite gone!” she interrupts, and her eyes are too big, glistening like jelly.

I stare at her. A thin crack of fear opens inside me.

“Where?” I whisper, though even as she speaks, I know.

“Mr. Blacklock—he is dead!”

I am dizzy.

I look at his hat lying there on the sideboard. He does not go out without his hat.

“Is it his chest? His cough? ” I ask her. She looks at me stupidly.

“Mary!” I urge. “Is it the coughing?” I want to shake her, she is so slow. “Is he here? In his chamber? We must call for the doctor. At once! ” I turn and run up the stairs.

Mary Spurren’s voice babbles on and on behind me. “Not the coughing, no, no, it was not, though he was choking well enough and I thought so myself for a moment as I entered the room. He didn’t know me when I went to him, he stood all bent by the side of the bed. There was something amiss, he clutched at his chest and his left arm, all doubled up, then he fell over like this, all curled up sideways and choking, he was.” She tugs at my arm and tries to show me. A patch of wetness reaches down the side of her dress as though she has spilled water on it. She pulls my arm harder.

“Let me go, Mary,” I say. “Let me go to him!” Why does she stand there?

“I shrieked for Joe Thomazin, we took him into his bed as best we could, dragged him in, but I knew he was gone before we lain him down. There was no breath coming from him, nor beating in his wrists or neck. I came over something shivery and Joe ran out to the Three Bells to call for help. Mrs. Blight was nowhere to be found. My palms they sweated and sweated before they came back with Dr. Kitstone.” Her teeth are chattering.

“Mr. Blacklock does not care for doctors,” I say faintly, my hand on the latch.

“He had been Dr. Kitstone’s patient for some weeks now,” Mary Spurren says, unaccountably.

I have never been to the end of the corridor up here. When I open the door into his room the foreign smell is strong. On the floor by the bed is a white bowl filled with blood, and another holding dirty water and rags soaking in it. A man is here, a doctor, here already, moving about by the bed where the outline of Mr. Blacklock lies stretched out, covered with some linen to his shoulders. I cannot say a thing. In disbelief I look and look. John Blacklock’s face is shut, the skin of the lids of his eyes is purple and dark.

His pale hand is open, palm upward, on the cover of the bed, his long fingers in a cupped shape as if clasping an object.

Where have you gone?
I think, disoriented.
I had so much faith in you.
It seems impossible and yet it is clear to me that Mr. Blacklock is not there inside his body. There is the smell of fresh blood in here and something bad I cannot place. I go to the casements to let in air. I open them all, counting them inside my head.
One. Two. Three. Four.
This is the largest room upstairs in the house. I breathe at the air drifting in over the sill. I can see St. Paul’s Cathedral. I did not know that Mr. Blacklock could see St. Paul’s from his window. How large it is. Only after some moments staring out at the pale sky do I see the faint white rind of a moon appear over the dome, and then the yellow haze covers it again.

“Agnes,” Mary Spurren is saying to me. “The doctor was speaking.” He is collecting his instruments and tools, which are ranged along Mr. Blacklock’s dressing table in a row. He wipes a lancet with a piece of cloth, wraps it in leather and drops it into a bag that is gaping on the bed. He presses a cork into the neck of a bottle, and cleans the rim of liquid. I am watching his hands. His face is perfectly blank.

“. . . bloodletting and draining the system of bad energy,” he says, “if there was to be a cure. However, in this case . . .” And he shrugs, leaving an emptiness behind his words.

“What do you believe the cause of death to be, Doctor?” I ask. I am quite light-headed.

He looks beyond me in the direction of the door, as if seeking a higher-ranking member of the household to hear his diagnosis, and, finding none, returns his cold blue gaze to me.

“Mr. Blacklock has suffered from an acute pulmonic disorder for some time now, as you may know, but I would surmise that his death was caused by a type of shock or blockage to the heart. Mortality is an unsteady thing, and never more so than when the body is under duress of any kind . . .” He waffles on. How shiny the buttons on the front of his jacket are. He is so expanded with improving the lives of others in some way. How I wish he would leave us alone now. I return to Mr. Blacklock’s window and turn my back.

I imagine his coughs racking all night, but nobody coming, because no one could hear him against the wind. Would he have coughed up dark stuff into the washbowl beside the bed, as that wind howled like a great black animal against the casements and needled shudders of air between the panes? Did he draw back, exhausted, and lean on the bolsters, unable to cough because a choke was squeezing him? Was he fighting to breathe, feeling the wind taking over the air about him, pushing it away from his mouth, so that all the life began leaching away from his body?

Drop by drop, my body is absorbing the knowledge of the new world as it is now. Outside it is not so clear which part is sky and which is the space between trees, between houses. The world has slipped. Inside, a sick, sore feeling has spread sharply through my bones.

“John Blacklock is dead,” I say aloud, and turn away from the window back into the chamber. Mary Spurren blinks. Dr. Kitstone breaks off his speech at last and, finding no inducement to continue, moves away onto the landing to leave us here. His hat is under his arm and he carries his physician’s bag with ease as he descends the stairs.

“Pass on my bill to his executors,” he calls smoothly from the hall. “The release of the certificate will not be complicated, in a case like this one.”

A case like this
, I think, angrily. It is a bread-and-butter day for him.

 

 

By six Mrs. Blight is drunk. She staggers about in the kitchen, sobbing with relish and stirring a pot of mutton stew that no one will eat. How I hate her for this. The brief understanding between us is over. What gives her the right to weep in that manner? Her teeth are very much in evidence. When she lurches for the gin she knocks at it and the bottle falls and spills out on the table. The overboiling pot on the hob spits and burns. I cannot bear it. There is a knock at the back door, and Mrs. Nott the washerwoman comes in to say she will not come again, under the circumstances. How swiftly news travels.

“There’ll be no more work here, and I came by to offer my respects.” She eyes Mrs. Blight’s bottle of gin, but Mrs. Blight does not offer her a glass, and she turns to leave.

At the door, Mrs. Nott twists around and nods in my direction.

“No doubt she is more than particular saddened,” she says, as though I cannot hear.

“Who?” Mary Spurren says, wiping her eyes again.

The washerwoman points.

“Agnes? Why she?” Mary Spurren looks aggrieved. I step forward.

“What are you . . . ?”

“Being his lover, and all,” she says.

“His lover!” I say. “Whatever in heaven . . .”

“Oh, but I seen you,” she says accusingly. “Yourself and Blacklock, inflagrantic, it were.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, weakly.

“I seen you, with my very own eyes,” she says brightly. “Through the winder, that time I forgot my tub was in the yard here and was in need of it early that morning and had to drag myself back for it, though ’twere the middle of the night and pitch black with it.” She checks around the room to make sure of our interest. “I seen them through the lighted winder.” Her boldness grows now as she watches my face. “Drinking wine they was, together. In an embrace. Very firm.” She gives a little sigh. “Like I say, it must have struck her hardest.”

Mrs. Blight and Mary Spurren are staring at me.

“I can explain,” I say.

Their staring makes my head spin. I will not tell another lie, surely I cannot. “I had good cause!” I burst out finally. “There is much you do not know!” And in a fluster I take up a ladle and hardly see it, my cheeks burning.

“I’d say,” says Mrs. Blight, dryly, “that much seems evident.” Mary Spurren looks sidelong at her in some kind of knowing incredulity. There is nothing but the silence of their expectation in the room.

“You can see, but you do not always understand the whole nature of what your eye just falls upon,” I protest quietly. “And your judgments should not shape proceedings if you do not know the story.”

“The world is full of riddles . . . is it not?” Mrs. Blight remarks, reaching for her bottle, taking a sip. The air is alive with disbelief. The kitchen door opens a crack and Joe Thomazin slips into the room.

What must they think? I sit bolt upright in my misery and will not speak another word about it. Joe Thomazin holds out his mug for a drink from the jug on the high dresser. They can think what they will. I have admitted it, though they do not know the truth of what she saw. My hand shakes as I pour, and splashes ale upon the table. No doubt they can hear the hammering of my heart, and gain some kind of pleasure from the discomfort of the circumstances I find myself approaching. They must all see it, as I do, looming ahead of me, casting a long, desperate shadow over the muddle of my life. My reputation is plainly lost now, anyway. It would seem there is no end to the complexity of my disgrace.

“Little whore,” Mrs. Blight mutters under her breath, as though she’d known that all along. At the end of the table Mary Spurren fixes me with her dead-eye stare.

 

 

Later I go upstairs to Mr. Blacklock’s room to make it orderly, and find that Mary Spurren has stripped all the clothes from Mr. Blacklock’s body.

“What are you doing?” I ask, appalled.

“What the doctor ordered us to do, Agnes. Can’t you start on the head and work your way downward? I need it over with.”

And so we wash his body between us, sharing the dreadful intimacy. Neither of us speaks a word. Mr. Blacklock’s tallness ends in long pale limbs that reach to the foot of the bed. We use a new cake of pressed good soap, and the lather runs over his skin and soaks into the linen on the mattress as we work. My belly aches with tenderness to see so closely how the life has gone from him, his arms stiff, the stubble darkened on his face as if he were only sleeping here in front of us, with his eyelids pressed shut for the last time over the dark glitter of his gaze.