The Book of Fires

‘Fireworks, he makes,’ she says.

‘Fireworks!’ I am astonished. ‘He makes them?’ She rubs her nose on her sleeve.

‘That’s what I said. All kinds of pyrotechnicals. Exotic fires. Godless explosions for the summer is what I calls them. For the pleasure gardens, and assemblies for the quality. What I think about it, I don’t know, but it makes dust and as long as there is dust there is a place for me. Even burning money makes ash, and what is ash but dust?’ She shuts her large mouth tight after such a mouthful and glances at me doubtfully as if I might disagree.

So fireworks are made by hand, I think, in the same way as hurdles are, or pipes or horseshoes; they are not freakish works of nature nor of witchcraft, as I’d thought when I was little. I have read of fireworks in the yellowing, thumbed newspapers that pass about the village after the Rector has read them through himself. And my brother Ab saw some himself, once, as he was passing Wiston House.

‘I have heard how they are like fizzing, white blossoms, a cold kind of devil’s fire,’ I say eagerly. She shrugs.

‘Never seen ’em. Close-up, properly. Nigh on three shilling it is to get into most gardens for the night. Better drains there are to pour your wages down, such as they are.’

‘So Blacklock is a chemist then, or alchemist?’ I press.

‘Just a maker of fireworks. Pyrotechnist. Never heard of such a thing before I got here.’ She looks at the kitchen floor. ‘Dirtiest place I’d ever seen.’ She puts a cloth in a bucket and swills it about.

‘And now there’s Mrs Blight to take the load off, not to mention Mrs Nott to do the laundry, when she turns up, that is.’ She scowls, as if a thought had come to her. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I don’t know,’ I begin to say, and Mary Spurren makes a noise of disapproval through her teeth and scrubs hard at the table. Her cuffs are rolled up, showing how bony and red her wrists are. She scratches a lot, though whether from nervous habit or because her lice are very bad I cannot say, and her round face has no colour to it at all, like a plant that has been sprouting accidentally inside a cupboard for a long time.

The coals splutter. By the hot grate, the clothes from my bundle steam damply on the rack.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she croaks under her breath, cracking the back of her brush against the step to loosen the dirt from the bristles, ‘he has a temper that you may not like. He’s inconstant in his habits. He can go this way or that way in his needs and wants.’ She looks defensively at me, her large mouth open a crack.

‘Have you been here for quite some time?’ I ask, swallowing the beer. She nods her big head.

‘I’ve been constant here, four years in all,’ she says. ‘I goes along with it. When I were ten years old my mother said, “There is a steadiness to you, young lady.” I stuck to that–I’m here for good.’ She laughs with a hoarse, difficult wheezing sound that is alarming and I prefer it when she stops. Her mouth is so wide when she laughs it seems as though her head is split in half. Her tongue is pale, like a sheep’s.

Mr Blacklock summons me from the hall.

‘Come!’ he barks, going ahead of me down the corridor. He unlocks a door.

‘The workshop runs perpendicular to the lie of the house,’ he says. ‘This in case of fire means the workshop is as disconnected from the house as it could be in this situation. I do not need to stress the perils of a blaze beyond control. This you know.’ The door is thick and swings open heavily. ‘Fire has no conscience, none at all.’

Behind my back I cross my fingers, and don’t say a thing.

The darkness shrinks away as he creaks the shutters open, one by one, and soon enough grey morning light shows me a long high room with a sloping ceiling hung with a variety of strange tools and loops of threads. Faintly, I can hear rain drumming on the roof. The smell of substances I do not know is so strong in here that something flickers in my head. The windows facing the yard cast a fair quantity of daylight on to two broad workbenches ranged with further tools and apparatus; implements which Mr Blacklock proceeds to identify at random, straightening articles and boxes on the benches as he strides about.

‘The beamscales,’ he says. ‘The spigot. The file. The pestle. The filling-box. The burette for liquors.’ He points. ‘Alembic, pelican, condenser, retort, roller, funnel, nipping-engine, pipkin, nipperkin.’

‘A nipperkin?’ I ask.

‘A measure for liquor a half-pint or less. I am hoping that your mind is as quick and firm as your fingers claim to be,’ he says. ‘I do not care to have to say the same thing twice.’

He goes to the side of the workshop; his legs moving stiffly as if talking makes him uncomfortable. The shelves are ranged with quantities of bottles and canisters of differing heights and thicknesses; a disorder of great glass tubs that bend each shelf with weight, a mass of dusty jars as big as my fist, vessels as squat as the tea caddy at Mrs Porter’s, and tiny corked phials.

He reads some labels out, his back to me.

‘Sulphur, antimony, orpiment, charcoal, ambergris, oil of turpentine.’ His voice is dark and rough with coughing. ‘Brassdust, steel filings, nitre. Gum resin, pitch.’ He reaches the end of the first shelf and then turns sharply to make sure that I am paying attention.

‘I can read, sir,’ I say, trying to be helpful. The jars are filthy, and many of the labels are faded and hard to read in the gloomy light, but I spell some aloud to show him–Cadmia, Red Bole, Camphor, Crocus of Mars.

‘The words come slowly, sir, but once learnt, I find I do not easily forget them. Though I should be ashamed to say I do not write,’ I add. He nods, and seems strangely satisfied with this. He stares at me intently for a moment. His eyes are unblinking, and I see there is a yellow ring about the darkness of his pupils, like a hawk’s. I look away quickly, at the shelf.

‘What is Crocus of Mars, sir?’

‘Powdered calx, a reddish solid,’ he says.

‘There are so many jars,’ I breathe, gazing at them. It is clear from the grime and cobwebs that many have sat untouched for quite some time, their waxy seals unbroken, as if the contents had no purpose here. ‘But you don’t use them all,’ I add.

‘What?’ he says abruptly.

‘Unopened, sir. What are they for?’

‘Six years ago I had objectives of a different kind,’ he says shortly.

‘And what did you use them for?’ I ask, but he seems not to hear. ‘A waste!’ he mutters angrily, as if to himself, and I am sorry that I mentioned it.

‘Until this day I have had no females in my workshop. They bring friction and trouble. Their emotions are liable to set off sparks. They have a chemistry that goes against the smoothness of my practice.’ He clears his throat. ‘My attendant must be tranquil and nonplussed by nothing, at all times.’

I grasp at that. Attendant to Mr Blacklock, pyrotechnist. I have a flush of excitement at such a thing, and narrow my eyes to hide from him the sudden leap I feel inside.

‘The atmosphere must be as still as pondwater in here,’ he says, and it is a good thing he cannot see inside my head.

‘No flighty, sudden movements. It has been a male domain. But still, most rules are there to be unmade.’ He coughs again, into his fist. ‘Tie up your hair and make a habit of keeping your clothes tight about you.’ He hands me a leather apron. ‘Fasten this, always at the back. No trimmings. No lacy bits or ribbons. I want no tools from this bench to be mixed with tools from the bench over there. Only ram with wood, never copper.’

Clearly these are the rules that are not to be unmade, and I imagine with good reason. The very air itself in here could probably explode without a moment’s notice. I vow never to generate a spark by so much as feeling strongly. Then I undo this hasty thought; vows themselves being dangerous things.

He is beginning to cast about for things to say when I see a movement in the darkness at the back of the workshop. A scrawny, ill-clad boy with dark or dirty skin sidles almost noiselessly out of the shadows and comes to stare at me. His eyes are huge in his head.

‘Joe Thomazin sweeps and keeps a presence here when I am absent,’ Mr Blacklock says. ‘He does not speak, or rather, he has not been known to. Not quite an apprentice, yet, but perhaps one day.’

He is about the same height as William, I think, though as thin as a deer. Joe Thomazin does not smile back at me. There is a look about him which makes me think so far his life has not been filled with warmth. It is not a slowness or a hunger that I see there, more a stiffness, a halt in what he gives away, although his great dark eyes are wide open, getting the size of me, so that in the end it is I who drops my gaze and he edges back to the end of the workshop and begins to ready the stove for lighting.