Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  While they watched, Jem answered questions about Piddletrenthide, a place that seemed to fascinate Maggie. In true city fashion, she was particularly amused by the notion that there was so little choice in the village—just one baker, one tailor, one miller, one blacksmith, one vicar. “What if you don’t like the vicar’s sermons?” she demanded. “Or the baker’s bread’s too hard? Or you don’t pay the publican in time an’ he won’t serve you any more beer?” The Butterfields had had plenty of experience with owing money and having shopkeepers banging on their doors demanding payment. There were several businesses in Lambeth—pie shops, taverns, chandlers—they could no longer go to.

  “Oh, there be more’n one pub. There’s the Five Bells, where Pa goes, the Crown and the New Inn—that be in Piddlehinton, next village along. And if you want a different sermon, there be a church in Piddlehinton too.”

  “Another Piddle! How many other Piddles are there?”

  “A few.”

  Before Jem could list them, however, a disturbance broke in on their conversation. Wandering among the various performers in the Hercules Hall yard was a boy dragging a heavy log attached to his leg, of the sort used to keep horses from straying. A cry arose near him, and when Jem and Maggie looked over they saw Mr. Blake standing over him. “Who has put this hobble on you, boy?” he was shouting at the terrified lad, for in his anger—even though it was not meant for the boy—Mr. Blake could be frightening, with his heavy brow contorted, his prominent eyes glaring like a hawk’s, his stocky body thrust forward.

  The boy could not answer, and it was left to one of the jugglers to step forward and say, “Mr. Astley done it, sir. But—”

  “Loose him at once!” Mr. Blake cried. “No Englishman should be subjected to such a misery. I would not treat a slave like this, no, nor even a murderer—much less an innocent child!”

  The juggler, similarly intimidated by Mr. Blake’s manner, melted into the crowd that had gathered, Maggie and Jem among them; and as no one else stepped forward to help, Mr. Blake himself knelt by the boy and began to fumble with the knots in the rope that attached the log to his ankle. “There you are, my boy,” he said, throwing off the rope at last. “The man who has done this to you is not fit to be your master, and a coward if he does not answer for it!”

  “Is someone calling me a coward?” boomed Philip Astley’s unmistakable circus voice. “Stand and call me that to my face, sir!” With those words he pushed through the crowd and stepped up to Mr. Blake, who rose to his feet and stood so close to the other man that their bellies almost touched.

  “You are indeed a coward, sir, and a bully!” he cried, his eyes blazing. “To do such a thing to a child! No, Kate,” he growled at Mrs. Blake, who had joined the circle of spectators and was now pulling at her husband’s arm. “No, I will not stand down to intimi-dation. Answer me, sir. Why have you shackled this innocent?”

  Philip Astley glanced down at the boy, who was in tears by now with the unwanted attention, and in fact was holding on to the rope as if he did not want to let it go. A small smile played across Philip Astley’s lips, and he took a step back, the flames of his anger quenched. “Ah, sir, it is the hobble you’re objecting to, is it?”

  “Of course I’m objecting to it—any civilized man would! No one deserves such treatment. You must desist, and make amends, sir. Yes, apologize to the lad and to us too, for making us witness such degradation!”

  Rather than reply in kind, Philip Astley chuckled—a response that made Mr. Blake bunch his fists at his side and lunge forward. “Do you think this is a jest, sir? I assure you it is not!”

  Philip Astley held up his hands in a placatory gesture. “Tell me, Mr.—Blake, is it? My neighbor, I believe, though we have not met, for Fox collects the rent from you, don’t you, Fox?” John Fox, watching the encounter from the crowd, gave a laconic nod. “Well, Mr. Blake, I should like to inquire: Have you asked the boy why he’s wearing the log?”

  “I don’t need to ask,” Mr. Blake replied. “It is clear as day that the child is being punished in this barbarous manner.”

  “Still, perhaps we should hear from the lad. Davey!” Philip Astley turned his foghorn toward the boy, who did not cower from it as he had from Mr. Blake’s twisted brow and fiery eyes, for he was used to Astley’s boom. “Why were you wearing the log, lad?”

  “’Cause you put it on me, sir,” the boy replied.

  “D’you see?” Mr. Blake turned to the crowd for support.

  Philip Astley held up a hand again. “And why did I put it on you, Davey?”

  “So’s I could get used to it, sir. For the show.”

  “Which show is that?”

  “The panto, sir. Harlequin’s Vagaries.”

  “And what part are you playing in this panto—which, by the way, will be the centerpiece of the new program and will feature John Astley as the Harlequin!” Philip Astley couldn’t resist an opportunity to promote his show, and directed this last remark at the crowd.

  “A prisoner, sir.”

  “And what are you doing now, Davey?”

  “Rehearsin’, sir.”

  “Rehearsing,” Philip Astley repeated, turning with a flourish back to Mr. Blake, who was still glaring at him. “You see, Davey was rehearsing a part, sir. He was pretending. You, sir, of all people will understand that. You are an engraver, are you not, sir? An artist. I have seen your work, and very fine it is too, very fine. You capture an essence, sir. Yes, you do.”

  Mr. Blake looked as if he did not want to be affected by this flattery but was nonetheless.

  “You create things, do you not, sir?” Philip Astley continued. “You draw real things, but your drawings, your engravings are not the thing itself, are they? They are illusions, sir. I think despite our differences”—he glanced sideways at Mr. Blake’s plain black coat as against his own red one, with its gleaming brass buttons that his nieces polished daily—“we are in the same business, sir: We are both dealers in illusions. You make ’em with your pen and ink and graver, while I”—Philip Astley waved his hands at the people around him—“I make a world out of people and props, every night at the amphitheatre. I take the audience out of their world of cares and woes, and I give ’em fantasy, so they think they are somewhere else. Now, in order to make it look real, sometimes we have to do real. If Davey here is to play a prisoner, we get him to drag a prisoner’s hobble. No one would believe in him as a prisoner if he were just dancing about, now, would they? Just as you make your drawings from real people—”

  “That is not where my drawings come from,” Mr. Blake interrupted. He had been listening with great interest, and now spoke more normally, the sting of anger drawn from him. “But I understand you, sir. I do. However, I see it differently. You are making a distinction between reality and illusion. You see them as opposites, do you not?”

  “Of course,” Philip Astley replied.

  “To me they are not opposites at all—they are all one. Young Davey playing a prisoner is a prisoner. Another example: My brother Robert, standing over there”—he pointed to an empty patch of sunlight, which everyone turned to stare at—“is the same to me as someone whom I may touch.” He reached out and flicked the sleeve of Philip Astley’s red coat.

  Maggie and Jem gazed at the empty spot, where dust from the yard was floating. “Him an’ his opposites,” Maggie muttered. Even a month later she still felt the sting of Mr. Blake’s questions on Westminster Bridge, and her inability to answer them. She and Jem had not discussed their conversation with the Blakes; they were still trying to understand it.

  Philip Astley was also not inclined to take on such heady topics. He gave the dusty spot a perfunctory glance, though clearly Robert Blake was not there, then turned back to Mr. Blake with a quizzical look, as if trying to think how to respond to this unusual observation. In the end, he decided not to probe and perhaps be drawn further into uncharted territory, which would take more time and patience than he had to navigate through. “So you see, sir,”
he said, as if there had been no digression, “Davey is not being punished with his log. I can understand your concern, sir, and how it must have looked to you. It is very humane of you. But I can assure you, sir: Davey is well looked after, aren’t you, lad? Off you go, now.” He handed the boy a penny.

  Mr. Blake was not finished, however. “You create worlds each night at your amphitheatre,” he announced, “but when the audi-ence is gone and the torches have been blown out and the doors locked, what is left but the memory of them?”

  Philip Astley frowned. “Very fine memories they are, sir, and nothing wrong with them—they see a man through many a cold, lonely night.”

  “Undoubtedly. But that is where we differ, sir. My songs and pictures do not become memories—they are always there to be looked at. And they are not illusions, but physical manifestations of worlds that do exist.”

  Philip Astley looked about himself theatrically, as if trying to catch sight of the back of his coat. “Where do they exist, sir? I have not seen these worlds.”

  Mr. Blake tapped his brow.

  Philip Astley snorted. “Then you have a head teeming with life, sir! Teeming! You must find it hard to sleep for the clamor.”

  Mr. Blake smiled directly at Jem, who happened to be in his line of vision. “It is true that I have never needed much sleep.”

  Philip Astley wrinkled his brow and stood still in thought, a pose highly unusual for him. The crowd began to shift restlessly. “What you are saying, sir, if I understand you,” he said at last, “is that you are taking ideas in your head and making them into something you can see and hold in your hand; while I am taking real things—horses and acrobats and dancers—and turning them into memories.”

  Mr. Blake cocked his head to one side, his eyes fastened on his opponent. “That is one way to consider it.”

  At that Philip Astley shouted with laughter, clearly pleased to have had such a thought all on his own. “Well then, sir, I would say that the world needs us both, don’t it, Fox?”

  John Fox’s mustache twitched. “That may well be, sir.”

  Philip Astley stepped forward and extended his hand. “We will shake hands on it, Mr. Blake, won’t we?”

  Mr. Blake reached over and took the circus man’s proffered hand. “We will indeed.”

  3

  When Mr. Blake and Philip Astley had said their farewells, Mrs. Blake took her husband’s arm and they walked toward the alley without speaking to Jem or Maggie or even acknowledging them. Maggie watched them leave with a feeling of deflation. “Could’ve said hallo, or at least good-bye,” she muttered.

  Jem felt similarly, but did not say so. He walked with Maggie to sit back against the wall where they had been before Mr. Blake arrived. There was not much to see, however—the argument between Philip Astley and Mr. Blake seemed to be a signal to the performers to take a break. The tumblers and horse riders had stopped, and there was only a troupe of dancers rehearsing a scene from the upcoming pantomime. They watched for a few minutes before Maggie stretched, like a cat rearranging itself mid-nap. “Let’s do summat else.”

  “What, then?”

  “Let’s go and see the Blakes.”

  Jem frowned.

  “Why not?” Maggie persisted.

  “You said yourself that he didn’t say hallo to us.”

  “Maybe he didn’t see us.”

  “What would he want with us, though? We wouldn’t be any interest to him.”

  “He liked us well enough when we were up on the bridge. Anyway, don’t you want to see inside? I bet he has strange things in there. Did you know he’s got the whole house? The whole house! That’s eight rooms for him and his wife. They han’t any children, nor even a maid. I heard they had one, but she got scared off by him. He do stare with them big eyes, don’t he?”

  “I would like to see the printing press,” Jem admitted. “I think I heard it the other day. A great creaking noise it made, like roof timbers when a thatcher’s climbing on them.”

  “What’s a thatcher?”

  “Don’t you—” Jem caught himself. Though he was constantly amazed by the things Maggie didn’t know, he was careful not to say anything. Once, when he teased her for thinking that cowslips referred to animals falling, she wouldn’t speak to him for a week. Besides, there was no thatch in London; how could she be expected to know what it was? “Dorset houses have thatched roofs,” he explained. “Dried straw bound together all tight and laid over timbers.”

  Maggie looked blank.

  “It’s like if you took a bundle of straw and made it even and straight, then laid it on the roof instead of wood or slate,” Jem elaborated.

  “A straw roof?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can that keep the rain out?”

  “It do well, if the straw be tight and even. Have you not been out of London?” He waved his hand vaguely south. “It’s not so far to proper countryside. There be thatched roofs just out of London—I remember when we first came. We could go out one day and see ’em.”

  Maggie jumped up. “I don’t know the way out there.”

  “But you could find the way.” Jem followed her along the wall. “You could ask.”

  “And I don’t like bein’ alone out on them little lanes, with no one round.” Maggie shuddered.

  “I’d be with you,” he said, surprised by his protectiveness toward her. He had not felt that way about anyone but Maisie—though this was not exactly that brotherly feeling. “’Tis nothing to be afraid of,” he added.

  “I an’t afraid, but I don’t fancy it. It’d be boring out there.” Maggie looked around and brightened. Stopping where the wall backed onto the Blakes’ garden, she pulled her mop cap from her wavy dark hair and threw it over the wall.

  “Why’d you do that?” Jem yelled.

  “We need an excuse to go and see ’em. Now we have one. C’mon!” She ran along the back wall and through the alley to Hercules Buildings. By the time Jem caught up with her, she was knocking on the Blakes’ front door.

  “Wait!” he shouted, but it was too late.

  “Hallo, Mrs. Blake,” Maggie said when Mrs. Blake opened the door. “Sorry to trouble you, but Jem’s thrown my cap over the wall into your garden. Is it all right if I fetch it?”

  Mrs. Blake smiled at her. “Of course, my dear, as long as you don’t mind a few brambles. It’s gone wild back there. Come in.” She opened the door wider and let Maggie slip inside. She gazed at Jem, who was hesitating on the step. “Are you coming in too, my dear? She’ll need help finding her cap.”

  Jem wanted to explain that he had not thrown Maggie’s cap, but he couldn’t get the words out. Instead he simply nodded, and stepped inside, Mrs. Blake shutting the door behind them with a brisk slam.

  He found himself in a passage that led back through an archway to a set of stairs. Jem had the odd feeling that he had been in this passage before, though it had been darker. A doorway to his left was open and threw light into the corridor. That shouldn’t be open, he thought, though he didn’t know why. Then he heard the rustle of Mrs. Blake’s skirts behind him, and the sound reminded him of another place, and he understood: This house was the mirror image of Miss Pelham’s; this was the passage, and that the set of stairs that he used every day. Hers were darker because she kept the door closed that led into her front room.

  Maggie had already disappeared. Although he knew how to get to the garden—like Miss Pelham’s, you passed through an archway, then jogged around the staircase and down a few steps—Jem felt he shouldn’t be leading the way through someone else’s house. He stepped into the doorway of the front room so that Mrs. Blake could pass, glancing inside as he did.

  This was certainly different from Miss Pelham’s, and from any room he’d seen in Dorsetshire too. On first coming to London the Kellaways had had to get used to different sorts of rooms: They were squarely built, with more right angles than an irregular Dorset cottage room, walls the thickness of a brick rather than as wide as your f
orearm, larger windows, higher ceilings, and small grates with marble mantelpieces rather than hearths with open fires. The smell of coal fires was new too—in Dorsetshire they had an abundant and free wood supply—and with it the constant smoke that fogged up the city and made his mother’s eyes go red.

  But the Blakes’ front room was different from either a snug, crooked Piddle Valley kitchen or Miss Pelham’s front parlor with its caged canary, its vases of dried flowers, its uncomfortable sofa stuffed with horsehair, and its low armchairs set too far apart. Indeed, here there was no place to sit at all. The room was dominated by the large printing press with the long star-shaped handle that Jem had seen from the street. It stood a little taller than Jem, and looked like a solid table with a small cabinet sitting on it. Above the smooth, waist-high plank hung a large wood roller, with another underneath. Turning the handle must move the rollers, Jem worked out. The press was made of varnished beech, apart from the rollers, which were of a harder wood, and was well worn, especially on the handles.

  The rest of the room was organized around the press. There were tables full of metal plates, jugs, and odd tools unfamiliar to Jem, as well as shelves holding bottles, paper, boxes, and long thin drawers like those he had seen in a print shop in Dorchester. Lines of thin rope were strung across the room, though nothing hung from them at the moment. The whole room was laid out carefully, and was very clean. Mr. Blake was not there, however.

  Jem stepped out of the front room and followed Mrs. Blake. The back room door was shut, and he sensed a muscular presence behind it, like a horse in a stable stall.