The Book of Fires (45 page)

Some of these are from many years past, I note. She has been collecting them a long time. I thumb the yellowing pages idly. But this one, for instance, that I hold in my hand, is very new.
The Ordinary of Newgate. His ACCOUNT of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words of the MALEFACTORS Who Were Executed at TYBURN, on FRIDAY the
25th of MAY, 1753.

Just two weeks ago; I must have heard the bell myself for this very execution. I take another sip of tea. I turn the pages absentmindedly, and am not prepared for the great and icy shock that I receive from it. A chill spreads through me, like a drench of cold water.

“Oh God, no,” I whisper, my flesh creeping with a sudden understanding. And I read:
. . . indicted for stealing one Diamond Locket,
13th November 1752.

A hot coal slips in the grate and a small, bluish flame starts to play over the surface of the embers.

I take a breath. Lettice Talbot is dead. She has been dead for days.

M
y sister Ann has come, brimming with questions that I will not answer yet.

But pieces of news arrive with her. I have a new sister, as my mother’s child is born.

“She is called Clemmie, she came on time, slipping out readily like an easy calving,” Ann says. “Nevertheless,” she goes on, “Mother has put her foot down firmly and says it is the last one. ‘No more babies I am having, Thomas,’ she announced to Father, with Clemmie hanging off her milky pap as she stirred at the pot. ‘Not one! ’” Ann giggles. “His face was such a mixed-up sight, not knowing if she was saying this in full solemnity.

“But look at you, look at you!” she says, reaching for my hand and rubbing it. Her eyes glisten with tears in the candlelight. “Lil said that Father was too angry to speak when you disappeared. All through December with barely a word from him, even when I turned up at home on my half day from Wiston. Much later on your brother Ab went all the way to London looking for you. He asked around everywhere but had to come back empty-handed, and they said it near broke Father’s heart, he missed you so sore. And old Mrs. Mellin died!” she exclaims. “It was about the time that you left when the corpse of a traveling man was found all twisted on the lane outside her cottage. He was dead from being beaten about the head—it was a horrid sight, they said. There were signs of a scuffle in the muddy path and his bale of fabrics was unfolding and flapping round him. It was thought that he was attacked for a quantity of gold it seems he must have had upon his person, an amount having gone missing from Mrs. Mellin’s cottage, or so they said. There was no gold upon his corpse, of course, so how could this be proven? At least that was what we said when we heard of it, considering how mean she lived, but it turns out she had quite a hoard according to Amos Cupper who knew her husband well enough when he was alive. Mind you, some people said that Amos Cupper was sporting a new overcoat made of good woollen stuff all of a sudden, but I have not seen it.”

I cannot remember who Amos Cupper is, but I do not say so; I am too busy thinking that the traveling man’s misfortune means that the finger of blame for the theft of Mrs. Mellin’s coins will never point at me.

“What is it?” Ann has stopped her talking and looks at me. “Are you surprised to hear of so much incident in so short a space of time? I thought you might be sorry to have missed it!” She laughs.

“And the Common!” I look up quickly at this. “The scrubby common is to stay. So William lets out a big fat porker every day to snout up roots and the crisp white tubers of earthnuts. A fatting hog. He finds a sheltered spot. William goes to sleep when it is sunny and returns to the house covered in bits of gorse and dried mosses. It is such a big pig.”

Ann cannot stop talking.

And then another tightening comes and I am closing my eyes and awash with an agony that rises and rises like a spring tide rushing in. There is nothing now but the swell of the water. Then it is draining away and I remember that I must breathe again.

All is quiet.

The old woman who is the midwife sits down with a creak on the wooden chair beside my bed in Mr. Blacklock’s chamber. She takes a sip of something she has in a jug. She tries to put more brandy to my lips, but I turn my head away as another tightening comes and I cannot bear the jug to touch my mouth.

All through the night Ann tells me over and over that I must not be afraid, but I am not and she need not say so. She touches my forehead, my hand. She puts a wettened rag across my lips, which are hot and dry. The tightenings are faster now, and fiercer. I cry out under my breath. I must not cry louder. I must save up my vigor. When I close my eyes the pain is a thing pressing inside me: a thing made of chalk and flint and the mineral whiteness of the bones of the earth that we are all made of, our flesh wrapping around it. And the pain is the weight of the earth upon me, the earth that is made up of bodies, our bodies, my body; my own body is squeezing me open. Hours and hours go by like this, gathering pace. Bones. Hours.

 

And they say, “It is coming, it is crowning, here is the head!”

Pushing against the rim of myself, it is almost free. It could be anything, any creature being born in the field. I wait till the agonizing thing rises again inside me, redder and redder when I close my eyes, and then I push again. I am pushing uphill, it seems, and then turning inside out. I am split. I am ruptured, broken, burnt. I can take no more of it. I shout out from the redness and my voice is strange and harsh, but they do not hear.

And yet it is over, it is out of me. There is just the dripping of some fluid on the floorboards. They tell me they are cutting the cord. They say that the child I have carried all these months is a daughter. She cries once, thank God, a healthy cry quavering with shock and life.

“Bring her,” I say, in my strange voice.

She is dried of blood and put to me.

I am astonished at her heaviness. She is all weighty, softened limbs. Her bluish eyes are open as she stares at me, the most open they could be, and how strange and how familiar her gaze seems, coming from a damp, ancient place where the light is different. Her hair is dark with a waxy substance from the womb, as though she had some vestige of the darkness that she has come from clinging to her still. Her eyes squeeze tightly shut. Her mouth moves. Her lips are fine and supple, and they part and then contract again around her tiny, perfect tongue, as if tasting the air about her for the first time. Her fingers flex. And then she turns in my arms and finds the breast blindly and sucks from me, forcefully knocking her mouth against the teat as though she had come from a desperate hunger of nine months’ length, as though there were no time to lose. And there is not.

“That is a big baby, Agnes,” Ann says. “For one come so early.”

“It is,” I say, and when I look at her, I see she knows enough.

But she does not know the wholeness of the story, how I have acted like a woman half-asleep. Nobody does, though one day I may have the chance to fully share my secrets. There is one person in particular to whom I owe an explanation: someone who may understand, even if not quite forgive. I know nothing of the future, but for today at least I am grateful to be safely delivered of my child. My mother always said that childbirth is the closest a living woman comes to death within her lifespan, if she is lucky.

 

The baby calms and sucks more slowly now.

Mary Spurren sits falling asleep on a chair by the window. Her head tips forward onto her chest from time to time.

It is close to the height of summer. At home on the Downs the sunrise would break over the forest at this point of the year, a liquid pink spilling out and broadening across the milky sky and unfurling slow, brilliant beams of light that warm the eastern sides of the hill and burn up the night mists that have collected in the dips and valleys. Sometimes then the sun will slip up behind a blanket of cloud and proceed concealed by it for a good part of the day, and only later will it burst out low in the sky to the west, casting a golden clarity on everything.

One by one Ann puts out the candles that have gone on burning unattended as the blue daylight grows brighter. The smell of smoking wick travels about the chamber like an incense; it is so sweet, I am almost drunk with it. She asks if I need to sleep, whether she should take the baby from me and place her in the cradle, but I will not leave her for a second, despite her strength and her regular breath as she lies, sleeping now in the world for the first time. My body is alight with a fierceness of purpose, needing to hold my child and begin to know her.

“What is she to be called? ” Ann asks me, into the silence.

I look down at her, my chance-born daughter in my arms, finished at the breast and gone furled up and tightly snug like a snail or a fresh shoot, and the early sunshine begins to spill into the chamber as I speak.

“Her name is Lucy,” I say. “For light, for newness, for nothing that has gone before. She is the beginning.”

And how new she is, I think; so new that I can see her heartbeat pulsing in her head.

My first debt of gratitude is to my agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, for her support and enthusiasm, and who I’m so sorry isn’t here to see this to fruition. I was also very lucky to have had such rigorous, insightful and sensitive editing from Sarah Ballard, now also my agent; Clare Smith and Essie Cousins at Harper Press; and Pamela Dorman at Viking U.S. I would like to thank Sophie Goulden, Becky Morrison, Anne O’Brien, Taressa Brennan and everyone at Harper Press; also Zoë Pagnamenta, Carol MacArthur and Julie Miesionczek. I am grateful for funding from South West Arts, and indebted to the Royal Society of Literature—in particular to Maggie Fergusson, Julia Abel Smith and Piers Paul Read—for the time and space in which to write. Among the many books, places and people I was able to consult during research, certain resources were invaluable and I am particularly grateful to the staff at the British Library, and to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex. Special thanks to the expert pyrotechnician Maurice Evans for taking the time to talk to me about his work, and to the science historian Dr. Simon Werrett at the University of Washington for so kindly showing me chapters of his forthcoming history of fireworks. Other people I would like to thank for their help in a variety of ways are Chloë Hill, Jon Hill, Valerie Hill, Annie Hunt, Sam Hunt, Peter Beatty, Marie-Thérèse Please, Paddy Greaves, Sidney Greaves, Lillian and Maurice Hill, Alice Oswald, Peter Oswald, Christopher Burns, Dr. Tom Hutchison, Robert and Maria Pulley, Helen Whittle at Storrington Museum, Danae Tankard, the late Vincent Woropay, Tom Widger, Catherine Beckwith-Moore and John Eric Drewes at
American Fireworks News
. Last and heartfelt thanks to my husband, Sean, for being my anchor light and litmus test. This is to him and the boys, for their love and patience.

This is a work of fiction, but many contemporary and later publications helped me toward a fuller understanding of fireworks and their chemistry and history, including
The History of Fireworks
, Alan St. Hill Brock, Harrap, London, 1949;
Fireworks: A History and Celebration
, George Plimpton, Doubleday, New York, 1984;
The Chemistry of Fireworks
, Michael S. Russell, Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 2000;
The Incompleat Chymist
, Jon Eklund, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., 1975;
The Pyrotechnist’s Treasury: The Complete Art of Firework-Making
, Thomas Kentish, American Fireworks News, Pennsylvania, 1993;
Artificial Fireworks: Improved to the Modern Practice
, Robert Jones, London, 1776;
The Great Art of Artillery
, Kazimierz Siemienowitz, trans. George Shelvocke, London, 1729;
The Art of Making Fireworks
, Frederick Bruhl, London, 1844;
Pyrotechnia, or A Discourse of Artificiall Fireworks
, John Babington, London, 1635.