Free The Secrets of a Fire King by Kim Edwards

me, what you do. But you work so hard, I’m sure it will come out right.”
    She looked at me so oddly then. I pulled my hands away, suddenly embarrassed. “Excuse me,” I said, looking down. “Excuse me please, Madame.”
    She looked at her right hand then. She held it flat and turned it in front of her, examining it as if it belonged to someone else entirely. She rubbed her thumb against her fi rst finger, then all her fi ngertips, and then she turned her palm down and let her hand rest, very gently, upon my arm.
    “Not at all, Marie,” she said. “I thank you.” A Gleaming in the Darkness
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    So you see how she was, her deep kindness. Her life was conse-crated to her work, but it is not true that she lacked emotion. She was a passionate woman, I can attest to it. She loved what she loved, and if it was a strange thing for a woman to love her work, so be it.
    Except for that love, what would be the difference between herself, boiling up a kettle of her mysterious earth, and another woman stirring the cauldron of her stew? Or even myself, for I worked as hard as she did, scrubbing day after day at the dirty corners of that university. I heard the men speak of her sometimes, with wonder and derision. I cleaned their offices, their laboratories, so much nicer than she had herself, and heard them gossip.
    “She has a fi ne mind,” they would acknowledge. “And she is meticulous. But this business with the atoms—well, it is on the wrong track completely.”
    Even after Madame and Monsieur were awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of radium, I heard people say it was her husband alone who deserved the credit—his labor, his intelligence, that fueled the fascinating work. Years later, when the whole world honored her discoveries, there were still those in France who were grudging with their praise. All of Paris talked of her, of radium, but she stayed in that small rude laboratory because they would give her nothing else.
    Yet for all the difficulties, there was joy as well. When the dirt came, what joy then! Sacks and sacks of dirt, delivered to the courtyard behind the glass laboratory.
    “Pitchblende!” she exclaimed when I inquired, watching them unload it. “At last, it is beginning!” She stood outside in her worn black dress, her arms folded against the cold, a rapturous look on her face. Before the unloading was finished, she was ripping open a sack of earth and digging her hands in deeply. Over the next many months she sifted and cooked this dirt in her big kettle, separating all the residue into smaller and smaller jars of various sorts of mud. In that way she worked painstakingly through the entire vast pile.
    When I spoke of her at home, they could not believe such a woman existed. Thierry disliked to hear of her, for he knew that 46
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    she and her husband did not go to church. So I told my stories when he was not at home, and my children came to believe that she and her husband were not exactly real, but people I had made up for their amusement.
    “Tell us, Mama,” they would beg, “about that magic lady who spends all day in her laboratory.”
    “Well,” I would say, “today Madame made the things in the room blue—table, chair, door, floor—everything turned a lovely sort of bluish silver, like fog. Yet by afternoon the chairs and table and beakers and even the glass windowpanes had gone pure yellow, and best of all, in the middle of the day, around noon, everything was, just for a moment, an absolute shade of green.” My children listened, fascinated, and I talked on. We were so poor, and I was happy that I could give them something lovely that would fall into their lives like shafts of light.
    One day, however, when there was only bread for dinner, my son, then ten, complained loudly about Madame.
    “If she is so magical,” he demanded, “why doesn’t she just turn the wooden chair and table into gold, and give some to us? Why isn’t she the richest