Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  By the time they reached Henry VII’s Lady Chapel at the other end of the Abbey, and Maggie triumphantly announced, “Elizabeth I,” Jem had stopped listening to her altogether and openly gaped. He had never imagined a place could be so ornate.

  “Oh, Jem, look at that ceiling,” Maisie breathed, gazing up at the fan vaulting, carved of stone so delicate it looked like lace spun by spiders, touched in several places with gold leaf.

  Jem was not studying the ceiling, however, but the rows of carved seats for members of the royal court along both sides of the chapel. Over each seat was an eight-foot-high ornamental tower of patinated oak filigree. The towers were of such a complicated interlocking pattern that it would not have been a surprise to hear carvers had gone mad working on them. Here at last was wood worked in a way the Kellaways would never see the likes of in Dorsetshire, or Wiltshire, or Hampshire, or anywhere in England other than in Westminster Abbey. Jem and Thomas Kellaway gazed in awe at the carving, like men who make sundials seeing a mechanical clock for the first time.

  Jem lost track of Maggie until she rushed up to him. “Come here!” she hissed, and dragged him away from the Lady Chapel to the center of the Abbey and the Chapel of Edward the Confessor. “Look!” she whispered, nodding in the direction of one of the tombs surrounding Edward’s massive shrine.

  Mr. Blake was standing alongside it, staring at the bronze effigy of a woman that lay along the top of it. He was sketching in a small sand-colored notebook, never looking down at the paper and pencil, but keeping his eyes fastened on the statue’s impassive face.

  Maggie put a finger to her lips, then took a quiet step toward Mr. Blake, Jem following reluctantly. Slowly and steadily they rounded on him from behind. He was so concentrated on drawing that he noticed nothing. As the children got closer, they discovered that he was singing under his breath, very soft and high, more like the whining of a mosquito than of a man. Now and then his lips moved to form a word, but it was hard to catch what he might be saying.

  Maggie giggled. Jem shook his head at her. They were close enough now that they were able to peek around Mr. Blake at his sketch. When they saw what he was drawing, Jem flinched, and Maggie openly gasped. Though the statue on the tomb was dressed in ceremonial robes, Mr. Blake had drawn her naked.

  He did not turn around, but continued to draw and to sing, though he must have known now that they were just behind him.

  Jem grabbed Maggie’s elbow and pulled her away. When they had left the chapel and were out of earshot, Maggie burst out laughing. “Fancy undressing a statue!”

  Jem’s irritation outweighed his impulse to laugh too. He was suddenly weary of Maggie—of her harsh, barking laughter, her sharp comments, her studied worldliness. He longed for someone quiet and simple, who wouldn’t pass judgment on him and on Mr. Blake.

  “Shouldn’t you be with your family?” he said abruptly.

  Maggie shrugged. “They’ll just be at the pub. I can find ’em later.”

  “I’m going back to mine.” Immediately he regretted his tone, as he saw hurt flash through her eyes before she hid it with hard indifference.

  “Suit yourself.” She shrugged and turned away.

  “Wait, Maggie,” Jem called as she slipped out a side entrance he had not noticed before. As when he first met her, the moment she was gone, he wished she was back again. He felt eyes on him then, and looked across the aisle and through the door to Edward’s Chapel. Mr. Blake was gazing at him, pen poised above his notebook.

  5

  Anne Kellaway insisted that they arrive early, so they found seats right at half past five, and had to wait an hour for the amphitheatre to fill and the show to begin. With tickets for the pit, they could at least sit on benches, though some in the pit chose to stand crowded close to the ring where the horses would gallop, the dancers dance, the soldiers fight. There was plenty to look at while they waited. Jem and his father studied the wooden structure of the boxes and the gallery, decorated with moldings and painted with trompe l’œil foliage. The three-tiered wagon-wheel chandelier Thomas Kellaway had seen on his first day was now lit with hundreds of candles, along with torches around the boxes and gallery; a round roof with open shutters high up also let in light until night fell. At one side of the ring a small stage had been built, with a backdrop painted with mountains, camels, elephants, and tigers—the oriental touch Philip Astley had referred to in describing The Siege of Bangalore pantomime.

  The Kellaways also studied the audience. Around them in the pit were other artisans and tradesmen—chandlers, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, printers, butchers. The boxes held the middling sorts—merchants, bankers, lawyers—mostly from Westminster across the river. In the galleries stood the rougher crowd: the soldiers and sailors, the men who worked at the docks and in the warehouses along the Thames, as well as coalmen, coachmen, stablehands, brickmakers and bricklayers, nightsoil men, gardeners, street sellers, rag-and-bone men, and the like. There were also a fair number of servants, apprentices, and children.

  Thomas Kellaway disappeared while they were waiting, then returned and, with a sheepish smile, held out four oranges. Jem had never had one: They were rare enough in London, and nonexistent in Piddletrenthide. He puzzled over the skin, then bit into it like an apple before realizing the peel was inedible. Maisie laughed at him as he spat out the peel. “Silly,” she murmured. “Look.” She nodded at those sitting nearby who deftly peeled their oranges and dropped the bits on the floor. As they trampled and shuffled over the remains throughout the evening, the peel released its sharp acid scent in waves, cutting through the various smells of horse dung, sweat, and smoke from the torches.

  When the music struck up and Philip Astley stepped out onto the stage to address the audience, he stood for a moment, scanning the pit. Finding Anne Kellaway, he smiled, satisfied that with his charm he had turned an enemy into a friend. “Welcome, welcome to the Royal Saloon and New Amphitheatre for the 1792 season of Astley’s Circus! Are you ready to be dazzled and distracted?”

  The audience roared.

  “Astonished and amazed?”

  More roaring.

  “Surprised and scintillated? Then let the show begin!”

  Jem was happy enough before the show, but once it began he found himself fidgeting. Unlike his mother, he was not finding the circus acts a welcome distraction. Unlike his sister, he was not smitten with any of the performers. Unlike his father, he was not content because those around him were happy. Jem knew he was meant to find the novelty acts astonishing. The jugglers throwing torches without burning themselves, the learned pig who could add and subtract, the horse who could boil a kettle and make a cup of tea, Miss Laura Devine with her twirling petticoats, two tightrope walkers sitting at a table and eating a meal on a rope thirty feet above the ground, a horseman drinking a glass of wine as he stood on two horses galloping around the ring—all of these spectacles defied some rule of life. People should tumble from standing on ropes strung up high or on galloping horses’ backs; pigs shouldn’t know how to add; horses can’t make cups of tea; Miss Devine should become sick from so much spinning.

  Jem knew this. Yet instead of watching these feats in awe, with the wide eyes and open mouth and cries of surprise of the people around him—his parents and sister included—he was bored precisely because the acts weren’t like life. They were so far removed from his experience of the world that they had little impact on him. Perhaps if the horseman stood on the back of one horse and simply rode, or the jugglers threw balls instead of burning torches, then he too might have stared and called out.

  Nor did the dramas interest him, with their oriental dancers, reenactments of battles, haunted houses, and warbling lovers—apart from the scenery changes, where screens of mountains and animals or rippling oceans or battle scenes full of soldiers and horses were suddenly whisked away to reveal starry night skies or castle ruins or London itself. Jem couldn’t understand why people would want to see a replica of the London skyline when they
could go outside, stand on Westminster Bridge, and see the real thing.

  Jem only brightened when, an hour into the show, he noticed Maggie’s face up in the gallery, poking out between two soldiers. If she saw him, her face showed no sign of it—she was enrapt by the spectacle in the ring, laughing at a clown who rode a horse backward while a monkey on another horse chased him. He liked watching her when she didn’t know it, so happy and absorbed, the hard, shrewd veneer she cultivated dropped for once, the pulse of anxiety that drove her replaced by innocence, even if only temporarily.

  “I’m just going out to the jakes,” Jem whispered to Maisie. She nodded, her eyes fixed on the monkey, who had jumped from its horse to the horse carrying the clown. As Jem began to push through the dense crowd, his sister was laughing and clapping her hands.

  Outside he found the entrance to the gallery around the corner, separating the rougher crowd from the more genteel audience in the pit. Two men stood in front of the staircase leading up. “Sixpence to see the rest of the show,” one of them said to Jem.

  “But I just been in the pit,” Jem explained. “I’m going up to see a friend.”

  “You in the pit?” the man repeated. “Show me your ticket, then.”

  “My ma has it.” Anne Kellaway had tucked the ticket stubs back into her stays, to be kept and admired.

  “That’ll be sixpence to see the rest of the show, then.”

  “But I don’t have any money.”

  “Go away with you, then.” The man turned away.

  “But—”

  “Get out or we’ll kick you all the way to Newgate,” the other man said, and both laughed.

  Jem went back to the main entrance, but he wasn’t allowed in there either without a ticket stub. He stood still for a moment, listening to the laughter inside. Then he turned and went out to stand on the front steps between the enormous pillars framing the entrance. Lining the street in front of the amphitheatre, near where he and his family had waited in Mr. Smart’s cart the day they arrived in London, were two dozen carriages, waiting to take members of the audience home after the show, or down to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens a mile south to continue their evening’s entertainment. The coach drivers slept in their seats or gathered together to smoke and talk and flirt with the women who had wandered over to them.

  Otherwise it was quiet, except for the occasional roar of the audience. Though the street outside the amphitheatre was well lit with torches and lamps, the roads led away into darkness. Westminster Bridge itself was a shadowy hump over which two rows of lamplights marched. Beyond them London hung like a heavy black coat.

  Jem found himself drawn back to the bridge and the river. He walked up it, following the lamps from pool to pool of light. At the apex of the bridge he stopped and leaned over the balustrade. It was too high to see directly below, and so dark that he could make out little anyway. Even so, he sensed that the Thames was a different river from what the Kellaways had seen earlier. It was full now; Jem could hear it slopping and slurping and sucking at the stone piers that held up the bridge. It reminded him of a herd of cows in the dark, breathing heavily and squelching their hooves in the mud. He took a deep breath—like cows, the river smelled of a combination of fresh grass and excrement, of what came in and what went out of this city.

  Another scent enveloped him suddenly—like the orange peel from his fingers, but far stronger and sweeter. Too sweet—Jem’s throat tightened at the same time as a hand gripped his arm and another reached into his pocket. “Hallo, darling, looking for your destiny down there? Well, you’ve found her.”

  Jem tried to pull away from the woman but her hands were strong. She wasn’t much taller than him, though her face was old under its paint. Her hair was bright yellow, even in the dim light, her dress dirty blue and cut low. She pushed her chest into his shoulder. “Only a shilling for you, darling.”

  Jem stared down into her exposed, creased bosom; a surge of desire and disgust coursed through him.

  “Leave off him!” called a voice out of the dark. Maggie darted to them and in a quick movement peeled off the hand clamped on his arm. “He don’t want you! ’Sides, you’re too old and rank, you poxy cow—and you charged him too much!”

  “Little bitch!” the whore shouted and struck out at Maggie, who easily dodged the blow and threw her off balance. As she staggered, Jem recognized the smell of gin mingled with the rancid orange. She reeled about, and he reached a hand out to try to help her regain her balance. Maggie stopped him. “Don’t—she’ll just latch on to you again! Rob you blind too. Probably already has. D’you have anything on you?”

  Jem shook his head.

  “Just as well—you’d never get it off her now. She’d have hidden it by her snatch.” Maggie looked around. “There’ll be more of ’em when the show lets out. That’s their best time for business—when everybody’s happy from the show.”

  Jem watched the woman totter into the dark along the bridge. In the next pool of light she grabbed on to another man, who threw her off without a glance. Jem shuddered and turned back to the river. “Tha’ be what I hate about London.”

  Maggie leaned against the balustrade. “But you’ve got whores down in Piddle-dee-dee, don’t you?”

  “In Dorchester, yes. But they an’t like that.”

  They stood still, looking out over the water. “Why’d you leave the show?” Maggie asked.

  Jem hesitated. “I were poorly and come out for air. It were stuffy in there.”

  Her expression told him that Maggie didn’t believe him, but she said nothing, only picked up a stone at her feet and let it drop over the side of the bridge. They both listened for the plop, but a carriage passed at that moment and its clatter obliterated the sound.

  “Why’d you leave?” Jem asked when the carriage was gone.

  Maggie made a face. “There’s just the Tailor of Brentford left, and then the finale. I seen the Tailor too many times already. Fi-nale’s better from outside, anyway, what with the fireworks on the river.”

  From the amphitheatre they heard a roar of laughter. “That’ll be them laughin’ at the Tailor now,” she said.

  When the laughter died down it was quiet. No carriages passed. Jem stood awkwardly with Maggie by the balustrade. Though she had clearly been hurt earlier in the Abbey, she did not show it now. He was tempted to say something, but didn’t want to ruin the fragile truce that seemed to have been established between them.

  “I can show you some magic,” Maggie said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Go in there.” She pointed to one of the stone alcoves that stood above the piers all along the bridge. The recess was semicircular and about seven feet high, designed so that passersby might shelter there out of the rain. A lamp was attached to the top of the alcove, and shone down around the recess, making it dark inside. To please Maggie, Jem stepped inside the dark space and turned to face her.

  “No, stand with your back to me, with your face right up to the stone,” Maggie ordered.

  Jem obeyed, feeling foolish and vulnerable with his back to the world and his nose close to the cold stone. It was damp in the recess, and smelled of urine and sex.

  He wondered whether Maggie was tricking him. Perhaps she had gone to get one of the whores and thrust her on him in the alcove where he wouldn’t be able to get away. He was about to turn around and accuse her when he heard her seductive voice in his ear: “Guess where I’m talkin’ from.”

  Jem whirled around. Maggie wasn’t there. He stepped out of the alcove and searched around it, wondering if he had imagined the voice. Then she stepped out of the darkness of the alcove opposite his, on the other side of the road. “Go back in!” she called.

  Jem stepped into the alcove again and turned to the wall, thoroughly confused. How could she have whispered in his ear and then run across the road so fast? He waited for her to do it again, thinking he would catch her at it this time. A carriage passed by. When it was quiet he again heard in his ear, “H
allo, Jem. Say summat nice to me.”

  Jem turned around again, but she wasn’t there. He hesitated, then turned back to the wall.

  “C’mon, Jem, an’t you going to say nothing?” Her voice whispered around the stone.

  “Can you hear me?” Jem asked.

  “Yes! In’t it amazing? I can hear you and you can hear me!”

  Jem turned around and looked across at the other alcove. Maggie shifted slightly and he caught a flash of the white shawl over her shoulders.

  “How’d you do that?” he said, but there was no answer. “Maggie?” When she still didn’t answer, Jem turned to face the wall. “Can you hear me?”

  “I can now. You have to face the wall, you know. It don’t work otherwise.”

  Two carriages passed and drowned out the rest of what she said.

  “But how can it be?” Jem asked.

  “Dunno. It just works. One of the whores told me about it. The best is if you sing.”

  “Sing?”

  “Go on, then—sing us a song.”

  Jem thought, and after a moment he began:

  The violet and the primrose too

  Beneath a sheltering thorny bough

  In bright and lively colors blow

  And cast sweet fragrance round.

  Where beds of thyme in clusters lay

  The heathrose opens its eyes in May

  And cowslips too, their sweets display

  Upon the heathy ground.

  His voice was still high, though it would break before too long. Maggie, her face turned toward her own curved wall, was glad to be alone and in the dark so that she could listen to Jem’s singing without feeling obliged to smirk. Instead she could smile, listening to his simple song and clear voice.