Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  At last Mr. Smart set off, calling “Good luck an’ God bless’ee!” as he pulled away from no. 12 Hercules Buildings, muttering under his breath, “an’ God help’ee too.” Maisie waved a handkerchief at him even though he didn’t look around. As the cart turned right at the end of the road, slipping in among other traffic, Jem felt his stomach twist. He kicked at some dung the horse had left behind, and though he could feel Maggie’s eyes on him, he didn’t look up.

  A few moments later, he sensed a subtle shift in the sounds of the street. Although it continued to be noisy with horses, carriages, and carts, as well as the frequent cries of sellers of fish and brooms and matches, of shoe blackeners and pot menders, there seemed to be a quiet pause and a turning of attention that wound its way along Hercules Buildings. It reached even to Miss Pelham, who fell silent, and Maggie, who stopped staring at Jem. He looked up then, following her gaze to the man now passing. He was of medium height and stocky, with a round, wide face, a heavy brow, prominent gray eyes, and the pale complexion of a man who spends much of his time indoors. Dressed simply in a white shirt, black breeches and stockings, and a slightly old-fashioned black coat, he was most noticeable for the red cap he wore, of a sort Jem had never seen, with a peak flopped over; a turned-up rim; and a red, white, and blue rosette fixed to one side. It was made of wool, which in the unusual March heat caused sweat to roll down the man’s brow. He held his head slightly self-consciously, as if the hat were new, or precious, and he must be careful of it; and as if he knew that all eyes would be on it—as indeed, Jem realized, they were.

  The man turned in at the gate next to theirs, stepped up the path, and hurried inside, closing the door behind him without looking around. When he had disappeared, the street seemed to shake itself like a dog caught napping, and activity was renewed all the more vigorously.

  “Do you see—that is why I must speak with Mr. Astley immediately,” Miss Pelham declared to John Fox. “It’s bad enough living next door to a revolutionary, but then to be forced to take in strangers from Dorsetshire—it’s too much, really!”

  Maggie spoke up. “Dorsetshire an’t exactly Paris, ma’am. I bet them Dorseters don’t even know what a bonnet rouge is—do you, Jem, Maisie?”

  They shook their heads. Though Jem was grateful to Maggie for speaking up for them, he wished she wouldn’t rub his nose in his ignorance.

  “You, you little scamp!” Miss Pelham cried, noticing Maggie for the first time. “I don’t want to see you round here. You’re as bad as your father. You leave my lodgers alone!”

  Maggie’s father had once sold Miss Pelham lace he claimed was Flemish, but it unraveled within days and turned out to have been made by an old woman just down the road in Kennington. Though she hadn’t had him arrested—she was too embarrassed that her neighbors would find out she’d been duped by Dick Butterfield—Miss Pelham spoke ill of him whenever she could.

  Maggie laughed; she was used to people berating her father. “I’ll tell Pa you said hallo,” she simpered, then turned to Jem and Maisie. “Bye for now!”

  “Z’long,” Jem replied, watching her run along the street and disappear into an alley between two houses. Now she was gone, he wanted her back again.

  “Please, sir,” Maisie said to John Fox, who was just setting out with the circus boys to return to the amphitheatre. “What’s a bonnet rouge?”

  John Fox paused. “That’ll be a red cap like what you just saw your neighbor wearing, miss. They wears it what supports the revolution over in France.”

  “Oh! We did hear of that, didn’t we, Jem? Tha’ be where they let all those people out of the Bastille, weren’t it?”

  “That’s the one, miss. It don’t have much to do with us here, but some folks like to show what they think of it.”

  “Who be our neighbor, then? Is he French?”

  “No, miss. That’ll be William Blake, born and bred in London.”

  Miss Pelham cut in. “You leave him be, you children. You don’t want to get in with him.”

  “Why not?” Maisie asked.

  “He prints pamphlets with all sorts of radical nonsense in them, that’s why. He’s a stirrer, that man is. Now, I don’t want to see any bonnets rouges in my house. D’you hear me?”

  5

  Maggie came to see the Kellaways a week later, waiting until she judged they were well settled into their rooms. She had passed along Hercules Buildings a number of times, and always looked up at their front window, which they had quickly learned to keep shut so that the dust from the road wouldn’t get inside. Twice she had seen Anne Kellaway standing at the window, hands pressed to her chest, looking down at the street. When she caught sight of Maggie, she stepped back, frowning.

  This time no one was looking out. Maggie was about to throw a pebble at the window to get their attention when the front door opened and Maisie came out carrying a brush and dustpan. She opened the front gate and with a twist of her wrist emptied the pan full of wood shavings onto the road, looking around as she did. On spotting Maggie, she froze, then giggled. “Ar’ernoon, Maggie! Is’t all right just to throw it in the road like that? I do see others throw worse.”

  Maggie snorted. “You can chuck what you like in the gutter. But what you doing throwin’ out wood shavings? Anyone else’d burn them in the fire.”

  “Oh, we’ve plenty for that—too much, really. I throw away most of what I sweep up. Some of this be green too an’ don’t burn so well.”

  “Don’t you sell the extra?”

  Maisie looked puzzled. “Don’t reckon we do.”

  “You should be sellin’ that, you should. Plenty could do with shavings to light their fires with. Make yourself a penny or two. Tell you what—I could sell it for you, and give you sixpence out of every shilling.”

  Maisie looked even more confused, as if Maggie were talking too fast. “Don’t you know how to sell things?” Maggie said. “You know, like that.” She indicated a potato seller bellowing, “Lovely tatties, don’t yer want some tatties!” vying with a man who was crying out, “You that are able, will you buy a ladle!”

  “See? Everybody’s got summat to sell.”

  Maisie shook her head, the frills on her mop cap fluttering around her face. “We didn’t do that, back home.”

  “Ah, well. You got yourself sorted out up there?”

  “Mostly. It do take some getting used to. But Mr. Astley took Pa and Jem to a timber yard down by the river, so they’re able to start work on the chairs he wants.”

  “Can I come up and see?”

  “Course you can!”

  Maisie led her up, Maggie keeping quiet in case Miss Pelham was hovering about. At the top of the stairs, Maisie opened one of two doors and called out, “We’ve a visitor!”

  As they entered the back room that served as his workshop, Thomas Kellaway was turning a chair leg on a lathe, with Jem at his side, watching. He wore a white shirt and mustard-colored breeches, and over that a leather apron covered with scratches. Rather than frowning, as many do when they are concentrating, Thomas Kellaway was smiling a small, almost silly smile. When at last he did look up, his smile broadened, though to Maggie it seemed he was not sure what he was smiling at. His light blue eyes looked her way, but his gaze seemed to fall just beyond her, as if something in the hallway behind caught his attention. The lines around his eyes gave him a wistful air, even as he smiled.

  Jem, however, did look directly at Maggie, with an expression half-pleased, half-suspicious.

  Thomas Kellaway rolled the chair leg between his hands. “What’d you say, Maisie?”

  “D’you remember Maggie, Pa? She held Mr. Smart’s horse while we was unloading our things here. She lives—oh, where do you live, Maggie?”

  Maggie shuffled her feet in the wood shavings that covered the floor, embarrassed by the attention. “Across the field,” she mumbled, gesturing with her hand out of the back window, “at Bastille Row.”

  “Bastille Row? There be an odd name.”

&nb
sp; “It’s really York Place,” Maggie explained, “but we call it Bastille Row. Mr. Astley built the houses last year with money he made off a spectacle he put on of the storming of the Bastille.”

  She looked around, astonished at the mess the Kellaways had managed to make in the room after only a few days. It was as if a timber yard, with its chunks and planks and splinters and shavings of wood, had been dumped indoors. Scattered among the wood were saws, chisels, adzes, augers, and other tools Maggie didn’t recognize. In the corner she could see tin pots and troughs, filled with liquid. There was a smell in the air of resin and varnish. Here and there she could find order: a row of elm planks leaning against the wall, a dozen finished chair legs stacked like firewood on a shelf, wood hoop frames hanging in descending size from hooks.

  “Didn’t take you long to make yourself at home! Does Miss Pelham know what you’re doin’ up here?” she asked.

  “Pa’s workshop were out in the garden back home,” Jem said, as if to explain the disorder.

  Maggie chuckled. “Looks like he thinks he’s still outside!”

  “We keep the other rooms tidy enough,” replied Anne Kellaway, appearing in the doorway behind them. “Maisie, come and help me, please.” She was clearly suspicious of Maggie.

  “Look, here be the seat for the chair Pa’s making specially for Mr. Astley,” Maisie said, trying to put off leaving her new friend. “Extra wide to fit him. See?” She showed Maggie an oversized, saddle-shaped seat propped against other planks. “It has to dry out a bit more; then he’ll add the legs and back.”

  Maggie admired the seat, then turned to look out of the open window, with its view over Miss Pelham’s and her neighbors’ back gardens. The gardens of Hercules Buildings houses were narrow—only eighteen feet across—but they made up for this deficiency with their length. Miss Pelham’s garden was a hundred feet long. She made the most of the space by dividing it into three squares, with a central ornament gracing each: a white lilac in the square closest to the house, a stone birdbath in the central square, and a laburnum tree in the back square. Miniature hedges, graveled paths, and raised beds planted with roses created regular patterns that had little to do with nature but were more concerned with order.

  Miss Pelham had made it plain that she did not want the Kellaways hanging about in her garden other than to use the privy. Every morning, if it wasn’t raining, she liked to take a teacup full of broth—its dull, meaty smell visiting the Kellaways upstairs—and sit with it on one of two stone benches that faced each other sideways, halfway along the garden. When she got up to go inside again, she would dump the remains over a grapevine growing up the wall next to the bench. She believed the broth would make the vine grow faster and more robust than that of her neighbor’s, Mr. Blake. “He never prunes his vine, and that is a mistake, for all vines need a good pruning or the fruit will be small and sour,” Miss Pelham had confided to Jem’s mother in a momentary attempt to reconcile herself to her new lodgers. She soon discovered, however, that Anne Kellaway was not one for confidences.

  Apart from Miss Pelham’s broth times and the twice-weekly visit from a man to rake and prune, the garden was usually deserted, and Jem went into it whenever he could, even though he could see little use for one like this. It was a harsh, geometrical place, with uncomfortable benches and no lawn to lie on. There was no space in which to grow vegetables, and no fruit trees apart from the grapevine. Of all the things Jem expected from the outdoors—fertile soil, large vibrant patches of growth, a solidity that changed daily and yet suggested permanence—only the varied ranges of green he craved were available in Miss Pelham’s garden. That was why he went there—to feast his eyes on the color he loved best. He stayed as long as he could, until Miss Pelham appeared at her window and waved him out.

  Now he joined Maggie at the window to look out over it.

  “Funny to see this from above,” she said. “I only ever seen it from there.” She indicated the brick wall at the far end of the garden.

  “What, you climb over?”

  “Not over—I an’t been in it. I just have a peek over the wall every now and then, to see what she’s up to. Not that there’s ever much to see. Not like in some gardens.”

  “What’s that house in the field past the wall?” Jem indicated a large, two-story brick house capped with three truncated towers, set alone in the middle of the field behind the gardens of the Hercules Buildings houses. A long stable ran perpendicular to the house, with a dusty yard in front.

  Maggie looked surprised. “That’s Hercules Hall. Didn’t you know? Mr. Astley lives there, him an’ his wife an’ some nieces to look after ’em. His wife’s an invalid now, though she used to ride with him. Don’t see much of her. Mr. Astley keeps some of the circus horses there too—the best ones, like his white horse and John Astley’s chestnut. That’s his son. You saw him riding in Dorsetshire, didn’t you?”

  “I reckon so. It were a chestnut mare the man rode.”

  “He lives just two doors down from you, the other side o’ the Blakes. See? There’s his garden—the one with the lawn and nothin’ else.”

  Hurdy-gurdy music was now drifting over from Hercules Hall, and Jem spotted a man leaning against the stables, cranking and playing a popular song. Maggie began to sing along softly:

  One night as I came from the play

  I met a fair maid by the way

  She had rosy cheeks and a dimpled chin

  And a hole to put poor Robin in!

  The man played a wrong note and stopped. Maggie chuckled. “He’ll never get a job—Mr. Astley’s got higher standards’n that.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “People’s always coming to perform for him over there, hopin’ he might take ’em on. He hardly ever does, though he’ll give ’em sixpence for tryin’.”

  The hurdy-gurdy man began the song again, and Maggie hummed along, her eyes scanning the neighboring gardens. “Much better view here than at the back,” she declared.

  Afterward Jem couldn’t remember if it was the sound or the movement that first caught his attention. The sound was a soft “Ohh” that still managed to carry up to the Kellaways’ window. The movement was the flash of a naked shoulder somewhere in the Blakes’ garden.

  Closest to the Blakes’ house was a carefully laid out, well-dug kitchen garden partially planted, a garden fork now stuck upright in the rich soil at the end of one row. Anne Kellaway had been following its progress over the last week, watching with envy the solid, bonneted woman next door double-digging the rows and sowing seeds, as Anne Kellaway would be doing herself if she were in Dorsetshire or had any space to plant a garden here. It had never occurred to her when they decided to move to London that she might not have even a small patch of earth. However, she knew better than to ask Miss Pelham, whose garden was clearly decorative rather than functional; but she felt awkward and idle without her own garden to dig in springtime.

  The back of the Blakes’ garden was untended, and filled with brambles and nettles. Midway along the garden, between the orderly and the chaotic, sat a small wooden summerhouse, set up for sitting in when the weather was mild. Its French doors were open, and it was in there that Jem saw the naked shoulder and, following that, naked backs, legs, bottoms. Horrified, he fought the temptation to step back from the window, fearing it would signal to Maggie that there was something he didn’t want her to see. Instead he pulled his eyes away and tried to direct her attention elsewhere. “Where’s your house, then?”

  “Bastille Row? It’s across the field—there, you can’t quite see it from here, what with Miss Pelham’s tree in the way. What is that tree, anyway?”

  “Laburnum. You’ll be able to tell easier in May when it flowers.”

  Jem’s attempt to distract her failed, however, with the second “Ohh” confirming that the sound came from the same place as the movement. This time Maggie heard it and immediately located the source. Jem tried but couldn’t stop his eyes from being drawn back to the s
ummerhouse. Maggie began to titter. “Lord a mercy, what a view!”

  Then Jem did step back, his face on fire. “I’ve to help Pa,” he muttered, turning away from the window and going over to his father, who was still working on the chair leg and hadn’t heard them.

  Maggie laughed at his discomfort. She stood at the window for a few moments more, then turned away. “Show’s over.” She wandered over to watch Jem’s father at the lathe, a heavy wooden frame with a half-carved leg clamped to it at chest height. A leather cord was looped around the leg, the ends attached to a treadle at his feet and a pole bent over his head. When Thomas Kellaway pumped the treadle, the cord spun the leg around and he shaved off parts of the wood.

  “Can you do that?” Maggie asked Jem, trying now to smooth over his embarrassment, tempted though she was to tease him more.

  “Not so well as Pa,” he replied, his face still red. “I practice making ’em, an’ if they be good enough he’ll use ’em.”

  “You be doing well, son,” Thomas Kellaway murmured without looking up.

  “What do your pa make?” Jem asked. The men back in Piddletrenthide were makers, by and large—of bread, of beer, of barley, of shoes or candles or flour.

  Maggie snorted. “Money, if he can. This an’ that. I should find him now. That smell’s making my head ache, anyway. What’s it from?”

  “Varnish and paint for the chairs. You get used to it.”

  “I don’t plan to. Don’t worry, I’ll see myself out. Bye for now, then.”

  “Z’long.”

  “Come again!” Maisie called out from the other room as Maggie clattered down the stairs.

  Anne Kellaway tutted. “What will Miss Pelham think of that noise? Jem, go and see she be quiet on the way out.”

  6

  As Miss Pelham came up to her front gate, having spent a happy day visiting friends in Chelsea, she caught sight of some of the wood shavings Maisie had scattered in front of the house and frowned. At first Maisie had been dumping the shavings into Miss Pelham’s carefully pruned, O-shaped hedge in the front garden. Miss Pelham had had to set her straight on that offense. And of course it was better the shavings were in the street than on the stairs. But it would be best of all if there were no shavings at all, because no Kellaways were there to produce them. Miss Pelham had often regretted over the past week that she’d been so hard on the family who’d rented the rooms from her before the Kellaways. They’d been noisy of a night and the baby had cried constantly toward the end, but at least they didn’t track shavings everywhere. She knew too that there was a great deal of wood upstairs, as she’d watched it being carried through her hallway. There were smells as well, and thumping sometimes that Miss Pelham did not appreciate at all.