The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

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       Nine

      I GO DOWN AT FIRST LIGHT and the kitchen is empty, though the coals in the hob grate are smoking briskly. Through a small window at the back of the house I can see the rain streaming over roofs, pouring and splashing into the yard. The glass of the panes is thick and greenish, like ice lifted from ponds in winter, but I can make out weeds growing through cracks in the brick paving, and a spindly tree that might be a lime. The thick glass makes these things far off and crooked. High up, a bird stands hunched and small by a cluster of chimney pots. How sick I feel. I look down at my familiar hands in these strange surroundings. The curious smell pervades the house, it is everywhere. I see my fingertips are blackened with grimy circles from touching the sill; the dirt is an odd, gritty layer on the furniture, the banisters, the cups and plates.

      Mary Spurren comes into the kitchen with a dustpan and broom.

      ‘Late for breakfast, you are, but you can take small beer from there.’ She points and clatters. ‘I’d get on. Mr Blacklock will be shortly in to fetch you. There is a loaf. Mrs Blight is new here and is gone to make her face known about with shops and traders. I’ve told her Saul Pinnington’s for beef and mutton. Spicer’s always for soap and grocer goods. She said she’d see the worth and value before she’d buy a thing.’ Her voice is clogged and hard to understand, as though she were not used to speaking much.

      ‘What kind of business is it here that Mr Blacklock has?’ I ask her timidly, pouring from the jug.

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ