Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  When he was done they were both silent. Another carriage passed. Maggie could have made a clever remark—teased him about singing about flowers, or accused him of missing the Piddle Valley. With others around, it would be expected of her. But they were alone, cupped in their standing stones, sheltered from the world on the bridge yet connected by the sounds bouncing back and forth, twisting into a cord that bound them together.

  So she did not make a smart comment, but sang back her response:

  What though I be a country clown,

  For all the fuss you make,

  One need not be born in town

  To know what two and two make.

  Then don’t ye be so proud, d’ye see,

  It weren’t a thing that’s suiting;

  Can one than its opposite better be,

  When both are on a footing?

  She heard Jem chuckle. “I ne’er said the country were better’n the city,” he said. “Dunno as they be opposites exactly, either.”

  “Course they are.”

  “Dunno,” Jem repeated. “There be lanes in Lambeth where you find the same flowers as in the Piddle Valley—cowslip and celandine and buttercups. But then I’ve ne’er understood opposites anyway.”

  “Simple.” Maggie’s voice floated around him. “It’s the thing exactly different from t’other. So the opposite of a room pitch black is a room lit bright.”

  “But you still have the room. That stays the same in both.”

  “Don’t think of the room, then. Just think of black and white. Now, if you’re not wet, you’re what?”

  “Dry,” Jem said after a moment.

  “That’s it. If you’re not a boy, you’re a—”

  “Girl. I—”

  “If you’re not good you’re—”

  “Bad. I know, but—”

  “And you won’t go to Heaven but to—”

  “Hell. Stop! I know all that. I just think—” A coach rumbled past, drowning out his words. “It’s hard to talk about it like this,” Jem said when it was quieter.

  “What, on opposite sides of the road?” Maggie’s laughter rang around Jem’s stone chamber. “Come over to me, then.”

  Jem darted across the road as Maggie came out of her alcove. “There,” she said. “Now we’re a boy and a girl on the same side of the road.”

  Jem frowned. “But that’s not opposite us,” he said, waving at where he’d just come from. “That’s just t’other side. It don’t mean it’s different. This side of the road, that side of the road—they both be part of the road.”

  “Well now, my boy, they are what make the road the road,” said one of two dark figures walking toward them from the Westminster side of the river. As they came into the pool of light, Jem recognized Mr. Blake’s broad forehead and wide eyes that penetrated even in the darkness.

  “Hallo, Mr. Blake, Mrs. Blake,” Maggie said.

  “Hallo, my dear,” Mrs. Blake replied. Catherine Blake was a little shorter than her husband, with a similar stocky build. She had small, deep-set eyes, a broad nose, and wide, ruddy cheeks. The old bonnet she wore had a misshapen rim, as if someone had sat on it while it was wet with rain. She was smiling patiently; she looked tired, as if she were indulging her husband with a walk out at night rather than going because she wanted to herself. Jem had seen that look on other faces—usually women’s, sometimes without the smile, waiting while their men drank at the pub, or talked to other men in the road about the price of seed.

  “You see,” Mr. Blake continued without even saying hello, for he was concentrated on making his point. “This side—the light side—and that side—the dark side—”

  “There, that’s an opposite,” Maggie interrupted. “That’s what Jem and me were talkin’ about, weren’t we, Jem?”

  Mr. Blake’s face lit up. “Ah, contraries. What were you saying about them, my girl?”

  “Well, Jem don’t understand ’em, and I was tryin’ to explain—”

  “I do understand them!” Jem interrupted. “Of course bad’s the opposite of good, and girl the opposite of boy. But—” He stopped. It felt strange talking to an adult about such thoughts. He would never have such a conversation with his parents, or on the street in Piddletrenthide, or in the pub. There the talk was about whether there would be frost that night or who was next traveling to Dorchester or which field of barley was ready for harvest. Something had happened to him since coming to London.

  “What is it, my boy?” Mr. Blake was waiting for him to continue. That too was new to Jem—an adult seemed to be interested in what he thought.

  “Well, it be this,” he began slowly, picking his way through his thoughts like climbing a rocky path. “What’s funny about opposites be that wet and dry both has water, boy and girl be about people, Heaven and Hell be the places you go when you die. They all has something in common. So they an’t completely different from each other the way people think. Having the one don’t mean t’other be gone.” Jem felt his head ache with the effort of explaining this.

  Mr. Blake, however, nodded easily, as if he understood and, indeed, thought about such things all the time. “You’re right, my boy. Let me give you an example. What is the opposite of innocence?”

  “Easy,” Maggie cut in. “Knowing things.”

  “Just so, my girl. Experience.” Maggie beamed. “Tell me, then: Would you say you are innocent or experienced?”

  Maggie stopped smiling so suddenly it was as if she had been physically struck by Mr. Blake’s question. A wild, furtive look crossed her face that Jem recalled from the first time he met her, when she was talking about Cut-Throat Lane. She frowned at a passerby and did not answer.

  “You see, that is a difficult question to answer, is it not, my girl? Here is another instead: If innocence is that bank of the river”—Mr. Blake pointed toward Westminster Abbey—“and experience that bank”—he pointed to Astley’s Amphitheatre—“what is in the middle of the river?”

  Maggie opened her mouth, but could think of no quick response.

  “Think on it, my children, and give me your answer another day.”

  “Will you answer us summat else, Mr. Blake?” Maggie asked, recovering quickly. “Why’d you draw that statue naked? You know, in the Abbey.”

  “Maggie!” Jem hissed, embarrassed she’d acknowledged their earlier spying. Mrs. Blake looked from Maggie to Jem to her husband with a puzzled expression.

  Mr. Blake didn’t seem bothered, however, but took seriously her question. “Ah, you see, my girl, I wasn’t drawing the statue. I can’t bear to copy from nature, though I did so for several years in the Abbey when I was an apprentice. That exercise taught me many things, and one of them was that once you know the surface of a thing, you need no longer dwell there, but can look deeper. That is why I don’t draw from life—it is far too limiting, and deadens the imagination. No, earlier today I was drawing what I was told to draw.”

  “Who told you?”

  “My brother Robert.”

  “He was there?” Maggie didn’t remember seeing anyone with Mr. Blake.

  “Oh, yes indeed, he was. Now, Kate, if you’re ready, shall we go on?”

  “Ready if you are, Mr. Blake.”

  “Oh, but—” Maggie cast about for something to keep the Blakes with them.

  “Did you know about the echo in the alcoves, sir?” Jem interjected. He too wanted Mr. Blake to remain. There was something odd about him—distant yet close in his attention, an adult and yet childlike.

  “What echo is that, my boy?”

  “If you stand in the opposite alcoves, facing the wall, you can hear each other,” Maggie explained.

  “Can you, now?” Mr. Blake turned to his wife. “Did you know that, Kate?”

  “That I didn’t, Mr. Blake.”

  “D’you want to try it?” Maggie persisted.

  “Shall we, Kate?”

  “If you like, Mr. Blake.”

  Maggie stifled a giggle as she led Mrs. Blake into the alcov
e and had her stand facing the wall, while Jem led Mr. Blake to the alcove opposite. Mr. Blake spoke softly to the wall, and after a moment he and Mrs. Blake laughed. That much Jem and Maggie heard, but not the conversation—mostly one-sided, with Mrs. Blake occasionally agreeing with her husband. Their isolation left the children standing in the road on either side of the bridge, feeling a little foolish. Finally Jem wandered over to Maggie. “What do you think they be talking about?”

  “Dunno. It won’t be about the price of fish, that’s sure. Wish they’d let us back in.”

  Did Mrs. Blake hear her? At that moment she stepped out and said, “Children, come and stand inside with me. Mr. Blake is going to sing.”

  Jem and Maggie glanced at each other, then squeezed into the alcove with Mrs. Blake. At close range she smelled of fried fish and coal dust.

  They faced the wall once again, Jem and Maggie giggling a little at being so squashed together, but not trying to move apart either.

  “We’re ready, Mr. Blake,” Mrs. Blake said softly.

  “Very good,” they heard his disembodied voice say. After a pause he began to sing in a high, thin voice very different from his speaking voice:

  When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy

  And the dimpling stream runs laughing by,

  When the air does laugh with our merry wit,

  And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.

  When the meadows laugh with lively green

  And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene.

  When Mary and Susan and Emily

  With their sweet round mouths sing Ha, Ha, He.

  When the painted birds laugh in the shade

  Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread

  Come live and be merry and join with me,

  To sing the sweet chorus of Ha, Ha, He.

  When he finished they were silent.

  “Ha, ha, he,” Maggie repeated then, breaking the spell. “Don’t know that song.”

  “It’s his own,” Mrs. Blake explained. Jem could hear the pride in her voice.

  “He makes his own songs?” he asked. He had never met anyone who wrote the songs people sang. He’d never thought about where songs came from; they were just about, to be pulled from the air and learned.

  “Poems, and songs, and all sorts,” Mrs. Blake replied.

  “Did you like that, my boy?” came Mr. Blake’s disembodied voice.

  Jem jumped; he’d forgotten that Mr. Blake could hear them. “Oh, yes.”

  “It’s in a book I made.”

  “What’s it called?” Jem asked.

  Mr. Blake paused. “Songs of Innocence.”

  “Oh!” Maggie cried. Then she began to laugh, and Mr. Blake joined in from his alcove, then Mrs. Blake, and lastly, Jem. They laughed until the stone walls rang with it and the first fireworks of the circus finale rocketed up and exploded, burning bright in the night sky.

  PART III

  May 1792

  1

  Though she was meant to be ironing sheets and handkerchiefs—the only ironing her mother trusted her with—Maggie left the back door open and kept an eye out on Astley’s field, which was just behind the house the Butterfields had rooms in. The wooden fence separating their garden from the field would normally block much of the view; it was old and rotting, though, and Maggie had slipped through it so often as a shortcut that she’d knocked it sideways and a gap had opened up. Every time the iron cooled, she shoved it into the coals in the fire and popped outside to poke her head through the gap so that she could watch the rehearsals taking place in Astley’s yard. She also looked out for Jem, whom she was meant to meet in the field.

  When she came back into the kitchen for the third time, she found her mother, barefoot and in a nightdress, standing over the ironing board and frowning at the sheet Maggie had half-finished. Maggie rushed to the fire, picked up the iron, wiped the ash from its surface, and stepped up to the sheet, nudging her mother with the hope that she would move aside.

  Bet Butterfield paid no attention to her daughter. She continued to stand, flat-footed, her legs a little splayed, arms crossed over her substantial bosom that, free from stays at the moment, was slung low and wobbled under her nightdress. She reached out and tapped part of the sheet. “Look here, you scorched it!”

  “It was there already,” Maggie lied.

  “Be sure and fold it so it’s hidden, then,” her mother said with a yawn and a shake of her head.

  Bet Butterfield often declared that her blood ran with lye, for her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother had all been laundresses in Lincolnshire. It had not occurred to her to do anything different in her life, not even when Dick Butterfield—young enough then that the map of wrinkles was not yet etched into his forehead—passed through her village on his way from Yorkshire to London and charmed her into following him. She arrived in Southwark, where they first lived, completely unimpressed by novelty, and insisted first thing—even before marrying—on buying a new washtub to replace the one she still regretted leaving back home. Bet didn’t mind the low pay, or the hours—she started her regular customers’ monthly washes at four in the morning and sometimes didn’t finish till midnight—or even the state of her hands, reduced to pigs’ trotters by the time she was twenty. Laundry was what she knew. Suggesting that she do something else would be like saying she could change the shape of her face. She continued to be astonished that not only was Maggie not very good at laundry, she was also not interested in learning to do it.

  “Where’ve you been, then?” Bet Butterfield said suddenly, as if she had just woken up.

  “Nowhere,” Maggie said. “Here, ironing.”

  “No, just now you were out back, while the iron was heating.” It was surprising, the little things Bet Butterfield noticed when so often she seemed to be paying no attention.

  “Oh. I was just in the garden for a minute, lookin’ at Astley’s people.”

  Bet Butterfield glanced at the pile of sheets still to do; she’d agreed to take them home to iron for an extra shilling. “Well, stop spyin’ and get ironin’—you only done two.”

  “And a half.” Maggie banged her iron across the sheet on the board. She only had to weather Bet Butterfield’s scrutiny for a little longer before her mother would lose interest and shut off her probing questions.

  Indeed, Bet Butterfield’s eyes suddenly dropped and her whole face went slack, like a fist unclenching. She reached out for the iron. Maggie set it down and her mother took it up and began ironing so naturally she might have been walking or brushing her hair or scratching her arm. “Bring us some beer, would you, duck,” she said.

  “None here,” Maggie announced, delighted with the errand, and the timing—for Jem was just now peering through the gap in the back fence. “I’ll just pop to the Pineapple.” She picked up a tankard from the sideboard and headed for the back door.

  “Don’t push on that fence! Go round!” Bet Butterfield called.

  But Maggie had already squeezed through the gap.

  2

  “Where you been?” she greeted Jem. “I been waitin’ for you for hours!”

  “We was just bending a chair arm. It be easier with two. Anyway, I’m here now.”

  Since the night on Westminster Bridge, Jem and Maggie had spent much of their free time together, with Maggie introducing Jem to her favorite places along the river and teaching him how to get about on the streets. While she irritated him sometimes with her superior knowledge, he knew that Maggie was also giving him the confidence to explore and extend the boundaries of his world. And he found he wanted to be with her. Growing up in the Piddle Valley he had played with girls, but never felt about them the way he had begun to about Maggie—though he would never tell her so.

  “You know we missed Miss Devine,” Maggie remarked as they crossed Astley’s field.

  “I saw a bit of it. Ma were watching from our window.”

  “She didn’t fall, did she?”

/>   “No—and just as well, as there weren’t a net or cushion. How do she do it, anyway? Walk up a rope like that, and so smooth?”

  Miss Laura Devine’s act included, apart from her celebrated twirls and swings, a walk up a rope left slack rather than pulled tight. She made it look as if she were strolling through a garden, pausing now and then to admire the flowers.

  “D’you know, she’s never fallen,” Maggie said. “Not once. Everybody else made mistakes in their acts—I even saw John Astley fall off his horse once! But not Miss Devine.”

  They reached the wall at the bottom of Miss Pelham’s garden, a sunny spot where they often met to sit and watch the goings-on around Philip Astley’s house. Maggie set down the tankard and they squatted with their backs against the warm bricks. From there they had a perfect view of the circus acts.

  Occasionally, when the weather was good, Philip Astley had his performers rehearse in the yard in front of Hercules Hall. It was a way not only of emptying the amphitheatre so that it could be cleaned, and refreshing stale acts by rehearsing them in a new location, but also of giving his neighbors an impromptu thanks for putting up with the disruption the circus’s presence inevitably caused the area. The day was never announced, but the moment jugglers wandered into the field and began tossing flaming torches back and forth, or a monkey was placed on a horse’s back and sent galloping around the yard, or, as today, a rope was strung between two poles and Miss Laura Devine stepped out onto it, word went out, and the field quickly filled with onlookers.

  As Maggie and Jem settled into place, tumblers began turning backflips across the yard and building a human pyramid, first kneeling, then standing on one another’s shoulders. At the same time, horses were led out into the field and several riders—not John Astley, however—began practicing a complicated maneuver in which they jumped back and forth between saddles. Jem enjoyed watching the acts in these informal surroundings more than at the amphitheatre, for the performers were not trying quite so hard, and they stopped to rework moves, breaking the illusion he had found so hard to accept during a performance. They also made mistakes he found endearing—the boy at the top of the human pyramid slipped and grabbed a handful of hair to stop himself, making the owner of the hair yelp; a rider slid right off the back of his saddle and landed on his bum; the monkey jumped from its horse and climbed to the roof of Hercules Hall, where it refused to come down.