The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

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.