The Book of Fires (40 page)

His ribs!
I think, and when Mary Spurren goes out of the room to bring fresh water, I cannot help but put down the cloth and touch his wet, supple skin with my bare fingertips. It is marked with the physician’s weals and incisions, but the inside, I sense, is still dark and tough.

We rinse the suds and blood away.

I imagine the inside of Mr. Blacklock to be like the dense untouchable wood at the heart of oak, which goes into the fire with the other fuel but the flames cannot reach it. The fire flickers around and barely touches that wood, as though the flames were made of cold instead of heat and have no strength in its presence. When eventually it chooses to catch light, it smolders on and on into the night and beyond, burning a clean smoke with unending slowness, giving out a penetrating, steadfast warmth to those at the hearth. The embers of such wood are highly prized.

There is one guilty matter that cannot be resolved, and in some ways this gives me some relief: John Blacklock will never know I lied to him about my loss of kin. Sometimes, of course, I am anxious that perhaps the dead know everything, see everything, but it is better not to think of that.

Mrs. Mellin, the man on the gibbet, the baby boy on the street, and now John Blacklock, all dead; and how easily these lives have slipped away from us. The complexity of their living was with us, was part of our own. And yet at that moment of change, and forever afterward, death is a terrible simplicity.

What I feel is like an uneven wind blowing through me: sometimes a sweet, uncomfortable hurt that seems to have settled inside like a mild dust or infection, and then at once it is a fierce, sick ache that comes at me so fast and unexpected it is like being struck in the face with something hard.

“What was it, between you?” Mary Spurren asks sadly, with her big head bowed.

“I can’t say, Mary.” And my eyes fill with tears. I look down at his body on the bed.

Where have you gone?
I whisper when Mary Spurren leaves the chamber again, the bowl spilling soapy scum against her apron. I want to knock on his chest, press my ear to the place where his heart should be beating inside it.

And then I think of the fresh pig’s heart in my uncle’s open hand, how quickly we had cooked and eaten it.

 

Later we dress Mr. Blacklock’s body, and sit in turns beside his corpse all through the night that follows, never allowing the flame of the candles to go out.

How the struts and supports of the house creak at night. It would be unthinkable to fall asleep. Now that I have seen what damage it can wreak, I am more afraid of the wind outside returning than I am of sitting here beside his body. Inside his shape laid out beside me two worlds are briefly overlapping, the now and the past, and already this moment is moving on, breaking down. I hope his soul has already left his corpse in peace, untrammeled by the doctor’s clumsy cutting and prodding, unwound itself into a silvery and dusty shape above the bed and dispersed like a dry frost to another place. But of course I cannot know for sure.

Mary Spurren brings me a bowl of steaming caudle to drink before she goes off to get some sleep, but it sits untouched and cooling on the table at my elbow. I feel I am protecting him, sitting here in the guttering darkness with the night beating at the panes. It is the very least I could do. How sorry I am that John Blacklock died without me in the house.

“Did you call for me?” I begin to ask out loud, but my voice quavers in the dark and I stop. He knows what it is that I should have said; I know it also. How late, how late it is. I rub my belly as it tightens almost for a count of thirty, so that I wonder if my time has come, and then that passes and I breathe again. Downstairs I hear the study clock strike four.

 

 

In the morning Mrs. Blight does not appear. She has stolen the clock from the study and, strangely, the last of the coffee. On the kitchen table she has left the key to the cupboard in which the beans are kept, and the key to the meat safe, and the key to the door of the house. I look at them, all laid out, with a puzzled, blind relief that she has gone. How could she condemn so many for their thievery, and then help herself to Mr. Blacklock’s clock as if it were her own? But it is the silence in the corridor outside the study that disturbs me most. It is like a holding of breath, not knowing the time. I do not have the patience to strain my ears to listen to the bells outside today. Mrs. Blight has taken the passing of time away from the house. But she must have gone off in a hurry, because she has left behind her stack of gruesome pamphlets on the high dresser.

T
he squint-eyed undertaker comes with his measuring ribbon to draw up the size of the coffin. The knocker at the front door is muffled with crape, and the date for the funeral decided upon. “Having some measure also of the household, I have presumed there will be no need for the disbursement of gloves for the attendants,” the undertaker says.

Mary Spurren blinks at that. “Plain and respectful, that’ll do. He did not have much time for piety, not of the kind imposed upon one. Who will be there, I do not know; no chief mourners to speak of, no blood relatives to come and mourn his passing, save an aged aunt too infirm for travel.”

I cannot speak for sadness when she says this. But ceremony, I think, he had a sense of ceremony, and also tenderness. I remember once during the planning of a display how passionate he became. Mr. Torré had been there, and a spotted clerk struggling to make notes with a badly cut quill. “It must be majestic at that juncture,” Mr. Blacklock had insisted. “Those big gerbes need a dignity in presentation, their spitting has a height and trajectory worthy of substantial deference.” He stood up as he spoke; he seemed like a dark giant against the light from the window. The spotted clerk, with something close to awe upon his face as he looked up at him, forgot to scratch down what was said. On their departure Mr. Blacklock sat still for a moment or two with an expressionless face, observing the yard. Then he had turned and picked up a box of tight little crackers on the bench beside him, cradled it almost in his big hands, and looked inside. I do not think he knew that I was in the workshop with him. I had to smile when I heard him softly, absentmindedly speak to them.

“Little darlings,” he’d said, under his breath, as though it were a box of chicks he held.

 

With some shame I look down at my skirts when the undertaker is gone. In truth I had not noticed how worn they had become, and how stained with chemicals and paste and gunpowder.

“What will you wear?” I ask Mary Spurren, bleakly.

“Most every girl has a moth-eaten mourning dress, there are that many deaths in a family over a year, aren’t there? Mine is tighter than it was when my mother died, of course, but still, if I keep my shawl on over the gape at the back, who’s to know?” She looks at me. “You’re not going to wear your rough skirts? You know that those not wearing black beside the grave can be seen by the dead? ”

“I did not,” I say. “Can that be so bad? ”

“At the burial the spirit takes a leap for a body that’s living, if it can see one. I’d not take a chance,” she replies, with a shudder.

“Out of respect for the dead,” I say, disbelieving, and go to Paternoster Row to buy a dress.

 

 

At first the draper will not serve me, as if he does not consider me to have the money for what I need, until I show him the shine of Mrs. Mellin’s coins inside my hand. The draper makes his eyes go round in mock surprise. “And what thievery did you perform to come by such a sum?” he asks, his scornful tone made louder to ensure that his lounging apprentices can take in every word he says.

I show no response. I shall have a dress. I count spools of braid that I can see in an open drawer on my left. There are two in a bright blue and three in various shades of red, crimson, vermilion. My heart is beating with an anxiety that I will not show to him. I cannot go to Mr. Blacklock’s funeral without a dress that warrants the occasion. There will be tradesmen of the higher sort, and artisans and merchants in attendance. I imagine my rough linsey-woolsey garment walking beside them to the churchyard and I am ashamed. The draper makes some kind of calculation from a piece of paper at his counter.

“We cannot do it in the given time,” he drawls finally, arriving at the bottom of the page and looking up.

There being no customer at present within sight and both his tailors leaning idle at the back of the shop gossiping, I presume his meaning is more that he will not. A brief and pointless rage goes through me as the edge of a smile stirs his ridiculous mustache. He has won.

His shears lie neatly on the counter. I expect they are quite sharp, for cutting other people’s lengths of fabric.

What can I do but keep my back straight as I walk across the carpet to the door, which I don’t take any trouble to close behind me as I leave, with Mrs. Mellin’s coins all jostled in my stays where I have thrust them. I curse the meanness of drapers.

 

Back at the house I am in no doubt as to what I can do. I let myself into Mr. Blacklock’s chamber. It is warm and deserted, save for one fly buzzing at the window; Mr. Blacklock’s body was taken away to the undertaker’s shop this afternoon. I did not stay around for that. I did not want to see Mr. Blacklock’s body being lumped down the stairs like a sack of meal. It is not the way I would choose to remember him.

I lift the lid of the chest with care.

Inside is a musty, shut-in smell of old lavender and tansy and laid-away fabrics. When I lift the packets of clothes out one by one and lay them on the floorboards around me, I find I am touching them gently, as though they were the clothes of someone that I had known and loved myself. Shriveled bits of herbs fall away from the paper in which they are wrapped.

The clothes I take out, one by one, are the shape of the body of Mrs. Blacklock. When they are almost all out of the chest, the room looks as though I were unpacking a traveling chest after a long journey away from home.

I am puzzled by the shape of the last two dresses I unwrap. They are the same length as the other gowns but are cut loosely and pleated at the shoulders, as if for a different, larger person.

And then I see that there is another dress with its sides unpicked, as though to make adjustments that were never completed. The bodice is in pieces, broken threads hanging down from the open seams. And I understand that they were made to clothe the swollen shape of a woman close to her confinement.

I rub my own belly uneasily where the child is pressing at it, then bend again to take out the last things at the bottom of the chest. Her pretty shoes are glossy with satin and well-kept buckles. They are too small, and I am glad of this. I would not like to wear a dead woman’s shoes.

 

 

“Oh yes,” Mary Spurren says, red-eyed, when she comes up to find me. “Did I not tell you? Terrible it was. I dare not give you all the details; turn your stomach now, it would. Suffice it to say that the chit was lodged within her when her time came to push it out. They couldn’t deliver her. ‘Too much force and pulling, perhaps,’ the last doctor said that came. Too much use of tools and other new ideas, and the end result was a nasty mess. She didn’t stop bleeding and the life ran away from her. Never saw blood so bright nor plentiful.”

“And the child?” I ask.

“Obstructed, like I said. Never saw the daylight.”

I look out at the sky through the crisscross of the window. The leaves on the linden tree move about in a small breeze we cannot feel in here.

“Don’t you begin worrying yourself, though,” she says. She stares at my belly openly. “I shall run for the physician just as soon as your time begins.” Of course she knows my condition. Everyone knows it.

“I doubt I shall need a doctor,” I say, folding the clothes.

“Well, in the meantime then, no carrying of heavy buckets, nor standing about too long at the market fussing over vegetables.”

We can pretend that life at Blacklock’s will go on as usual for as long as possible, I think to myself, for the next few days. And then what?

“You would do well to find a midwife,” she adds, after a pause. And when she leaves the room I try on Mrs. Blacklock’s good black dress.

Wearing it, I find it trails a little on the floorboards, covering my worn boots wholly, but otherwise it fits. So she was not tiny, as he had said; indeed, she was a good inch taller than myself. Perhaps it was more that he had made her so, packed her away as tiny in his heart. Tiny she would have lodged there, but persistent, shrunk to a dense dot of pain inside his chest that agonized him if he touched upon it accidentally.

I do not take the dress off when I go to my bed for the last hours of the night. I cannot bear to. Instead I lie down and sleep in it, the silk falling all over the floor, it is so full. Wearing it, thank God, I dream of nothing.

How I dread the funeral tomorrow afternoon.

 

 

I have barely spoken to anyone since the day of the storm. Mary Spurren sits at the kitchen table surrounded by the chaos of unwashed pots and piles of linen she has brought down for laundering. Her eyes are red and puffed up with crying.

“What shall I do now?” she says to me four or five times over, her head sunk into her shoulders. I do not really know why she should be despondent; she will not have trouble finding a situation somewhere as a chambermaid or housemaid soon, whereas I, with my swollen belly, will have no such choice.

“You will be fine; the world is calling out for servants,” I say. Her white face stares at me.

“But with no reference,” she points out, “it will not be easy. Four years unaccounted for on paper.”

“Mrs. Spicer at the shop might write something for you,” I say.

“She might,” Mary Spurren says doubtfully. “But it will not carry weight.”