The Book of Fires

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.