Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  Maggie was down near the bottom of the garden, picking through a mass of brambles, nettles, thistles, and grasses. Her cap had got caught on a loop of bramble well off the ground and was signaling to her like a flag of surrender. She jerked it free and hurried back toward the house, stumbling over a bramble and scratching her leg. As she reached out to steady herself, she brushed against a nettle and stung her hand. “Damn these plants,” she muttered, and slashed at the nettle with her cap, stinging her hand even more. “Damn damn damn.” Sucking her hand, she stomped out of the wildness and into the patch of garden near the house, where there were orderly rows of seedlings planted—lettuce, peas, leeks, carrots, potatoes—and Jem inspecting them.

  He looked up. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

  “Damned nettle stung me.”

  “Don’t suck it—that don’t help. Did you find some dock leaf?” Jem didn’t wait for her answer, but pushed past and picked through the undergrowth to a bank of nettles growing near the summerhouse, where two chairs had been set just inside its open doors. “Look, it’s this plant with the broad leaf—it grows next to nettles. You squeeze it to get some juice, then put it on the sting.” He applied it to Maggie’s hand. “Do that feel better?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, both surprised that the dock leaf worked and pleased that Jem had taken her hand. “How’d you know about that?”

  “Lots of nettles in Dorsetshire.”

  As if to punish him for his knowledge, Maggie turned to the summerhouse. “Remember this?” she said in a low voice. “Remember what we saw them doin’?”

  “What’ll we do now?” Jem interrupted, clearly discomfited by any talk of that day they saw the Blakes in their garden. He glanced at Mrs. Blake, who was standing in the grass by the back door, hands in her apron pockets, waiting for them.

  Maggie gazed at him, and he went red. She paused a moment, enjoying the power she held over him even if she wasn’t entirely sure what that power was, or why she had it with him and no one else. It made her stomach flutter.

  Mrs. Blake shifted her weight from one hip to the other, and Maggie looked around for something that might keep them from having to leave. There was nothing unusual about the garden, however. Apart from the summerhouse, there was a privy by the door and an ash pit for the coal ash from the grates. The grapevine Miss Pelham was competing with grew rampant along the wall. Next to it was a small fig tree with broad leaves like hands.

  “Does your fig bear any fruit?” Maggie asked.

  “Not yet—it’s too young. We’re hoping next year it will,” Mrs. Blake answered. She turned to go inside, and the children reluctantly followed.

  They passed by the closed door of the back room, and again Jem wished he could go in. The open door of the front room was more inviting, however, and he paused so that he could peek in once more at the printing press. He was just summoning up the courage to ask Mrs. Blake about it when Maggie said, “Mrs. Blake, could we see that song book of Mr. Blake’s you told us about up on the bridge? We’d like to see it, wouldn’t we, Jem?”

  Jem started to shake his head but it came out as a nod.

  Mrs. Blake stopped in the hallway. “Oh, would you, my dear? Well, now, let me just ask Mr. Blake if that will be all right. Wait here—I’ll just be a moment.” She went back to the closed door and tapped on it, waiting until she heard a murmur before she opened the door and slipped inside.

  4

  When the door opened again, Mr. Blake himself appeared. “Hallo, my children,” he said. “Kate tells me you want to see my songs.”

  “Yes, sir,” Maggie and Jem answered in unison.

  “Well, that is good—children understand them better than everyone else. ‘And I wrote my happy songs / Every child may joy to hear.’ Come along.” Leading them into the front room with the printing press, he went over to a shelf, opened a box, and brought out a book not much bigger than his hand, stitched into a mushroomcolored wrapper. “Here you are,” he said, laying it on the table by the front window.

  Jem and Maggie stood side by side at the table, but neither reached for the book—not even Maggie, for all her boldness. Nei-ther had much experience with handling books. Anne Kellaway had been given a prayer book by her parents when she married, but she was the only family member to use it at church. Maggie’s parents had never owned a book, apart from those that Dick Butterfield had bought and sold, and Bet Butterfield couldn’t read—though she liked having her husband read old newspapers to her when he brought them back from the pub.

  “Aren’t you going to look at it?” Mr. Blake said. “Go on, my boy—open it. Anywhere will do.”

  Jem reached out and fumbled with the book, opening it to a place near the beginning. On the left-hand page was a picture of a large burgundy and mauve flower, and inside its curling petals sat a woman wearing a yellow dress with a baby on her lap. A girl stood next to them in a blue dress with what looked to Maggie like butterfly wings sprouting from her shoulders. There were words set out in brown under the flower, with green stems and vines twined around them. The right-hand page was made up almost entirely of words, with a tree of leaves growing up the right margin, vines snaking up the left, and birds flying here and there. Maggie admired the pictures, though she couldn’t read any of the words. She wondered if Jem could. “What do it say?” she asked.

  “Can’t you read them, child?”

  Maggie shook her head. “I only went to school a year, and forgot it all.”

  Mr. Blake chuckled. “I didn’t go to school at all! My father taught me to read. Didn’t your father teach you?”

  “He’s too busy for that.”

  “Did you hear that, Kate? Did you?”

  “I did, Mr. Blake.” Mrs. Blake was standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb.

  “I taught Kate to read, you see. Her father was too busy as well. All right, my boy, what about you? Can you read the song?”

  Jem cleared his throat. “I’ll try. I only had a little schooling.” He placed a finger on the page and began slowly to read:

  I have no name

  I am but two days old.—

  What shall I call thee?

  I happy am

  Joy is my name—

  Sweet joy befall thee!

  He read in such stops and starts that Mr. Blake took pity on him and joined in, strengthening and quickening his voice so that Jem was trailing him, echoing his words almost like a game:

  Pretty joy!

  Sweet joy but two days old,

  Sweet joy I call thee;

  Thou dost smile,

  I sing the while

  Sweet joy befall thee.

  From the picture Maggie worked out that the song was about a baby, and Mr. Blake sounded like a doting father cooing, repeating phrases and sounding daft. She wondered that he would know this was how fathers sounded when he had no children of his own. On the other hand, he clearly knew little about babies or he’d not have one smiling when only two days old; Maggie had helped with enough babies to know the smile didn’t come for several weeks, until the mother was desperate for it. She didn’t tell him this, however.

  “Here’s one you’ll remember.” Mr. Blake turned over a few pages, then began to recite, “When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,” the song he’d sung to them on the bridge. This time he didn’t sing it, but chanted quickly. Jem tried to follow along with the words on the page, chiming in here and there with a word he was able to read or could remember. Maggie frowned, annoyed that he and Mr. Blake shared the song in a way she couldn’t. She looked at the picture that accompanied it. A group of people were sitting around a table with glasses of wine, the women in blue and yellow dresses, a man colored in mauve with his back turned, raising a cup of wine. She did remember one part of the song, so that when Mr. Blake and Jem got to the line, she joined in to shout “Ha, ha, he!” as if she were in a pub singing along with others.

  “Did you make this book, sir?” Jem asked when they’d finished.r />
  “From start to finish, my boy. Wrote it, etched it, printed it, colored it, stitched and bound it, then offered it for sale. With Kate’s help, of course. I couldn’t have done it without Kate.” He gazed at his wife and she gazed back. To Jem it felt as if they were holding the ends of a rope and pulling it tight between them.

  “Did you use this press?” he persisted.

  Mr. Blake put a hand on one of the handles. “I did. Not in this room, mind. We were living in Poland Street then. Across the river.” He gripped the handle and pulled it so that it moved a little. Part of the wood frame groaned and cracked. “The hardest part of moving to Lambeth was getting the press here. We had to take it apart, and get several men to move it.”

  “How do it work?”

  Mr. Blake beamed with the look of a man who has found a fellow fanatic. “Ah, it’s a beautiful sight, my boy. Very satisfying. You take the plate you’ve prepared—have you ever seen an etched plate? No? Here’s one.” He led Jem to one of the shelves and picked up a flat rectangle of metal. “Run your finger over it.” Jem felt raised lines and swirls on the smooth, cold copper. “So. First we ink the plate with a dauber”—he held up a stubby piece of wood with a rounded end—“then wipe it, so that the ink is only on the parts we want printed. Then we put the plate on the bed of the press—here.” Mr. Blake set the plate down on the table part of the press, near the rollers. “Then we take the piece of paper we’ve prepared and lay it over the plate, and then blankets over them. Then we pull the handles towards us”—Mr. Blake pulled the handle a little and the rollers turned—“and the plate and paper get caught up and pass between the rollers. That imprints the ink onto the paper. Once it’s gone through the rollers, we take it out—very carefully, mind—and hang it to dry on those lines above our heads. When they’re dry we color them.”

  While Jem listened intently, touching the different parts of the press as he had been longing to, and asking Mr. Blake questions, Maggie grew bored and turned away to flip through the book once more. She had not looked much at books—since she couldn’t read, she had little use for them. Maggie had hated school. She’d gone when she was eight to a charity school for girls in Southwark, just over from Lambeth, where the Butterfields had lived before. To her it had been a miserable place, where the girls were crowded into a room together to trade fleas and lice and coughs, and where beatings occurred daily and indiscriminately. After roaming the streets, she had found it hard to sit still in a room all day, and could not take in what the schoolmistress was saying about letters and figures. It was all so much duller than being out and about in Southwark that Maggie either wriggled or fell asleep, and then was beaten with a thin stick that cut through skin. The only cheering sight in the school was the day Dick Butterfield came to school with his daughter after finding yet another set of welts on her back that he had not made himself, and walloped the schoolmistress. Maggie never went back after that, and until Jem and Mr. Blake recited the song together, she had never regretted not being able to read.

  Mr. Blake’s book of songs surprised her, for it didn’t look like any book she had ever seen. Most books contained words with the odd picture thrown in. Here, though, words and pictures were entwined; at times it was hard to tell where the one ended and the other began. Maggie turned page after page. Most of the pictures were of children either playing or with grown-ups, and all of them seemed to be in the countryside—which according to Mr. Blake was not the big, empty, open space that she’d always imagined, but contained, with hedgerows as boundaries and trees to shelter under.

  There were several pictures of children with their mothers—the women reading to them, or giving them a hand up from the ground, or watching them as they slept—their childhoods nothing like Maggie’s. Bet Butterfield of course could never have read to her, and was more likely to shout at Maggie to pick herself up than reach out a hand to her. And Maggie doubted she would ever wake to find her mother sitting by her bed. She looked up, blinking rapidly to rid her eyes of tears. Mrs. Blake was still leaning in the doorway, her hands in her apron. “You must have sold a lot o’ these to stay in this house, ma’am,” Maggie said, to hide her tears.

  Maggie’s statement appeared to bring Mrs. Blake out of a reverie. She pushed herself off of the doorjamb and ran her hands down her skirt to straighten it. “Not so many, my dear. Not so many. There’s not many folk understand Mr. Blake, you see. Not even these songs.” She hesitated. “Now I think it’s time for him to work. He’s had a fair few interruptions today, haven’t you, Mr. Blake?” She said this tentatively, almost fearfully, as if frightened of her husband’s response.

  “Of course, Kate,” he answered, turning away from the printing press. “You’re right, as ever. I’m always getting distracted by one thing or another, and Kate’s always having to pull me back.” He nodded to them and stepped out of the room.

  “Damn,” Maggie said suddenly. “I forgot Mam’s beer!” She left Songs of Innocence on the table and hurried to the door. “Sorry, Mrs. Blake, we’ve to go. Thanks for showing us your things!”

  5

  After fetching the tankard where she’d left it by the wall in Astley’s field, Maggie ran to the Pineapple at the end of Hercules Buildings, Jem at her side. As they were about to go in, he looked around, and to his surprise spied his sister, pressed against the hedge across the road and stepping from one foot to the other. “Maisie!” he cried.

  Maisie started. “Oh! Ar’ernoon, Jem, Maggie.”

  “What you doin’ here, Miss Piddle?” Maggie demanded as they crossed over to her. “Weren’t you goin’ to say hallo?”

  “I’m—” Maisie broke off as the door to the Pineapple opened and Charlie Butterfield stepped out. Her bright face fell.

  “Damn,” Maggie muttered as Charlie caught sight of them and wandered over. He scowled when he recognized Jem. “What you hangin’ about for, country boy?”

  Maggie stepped between them. “We’re just gettin’ Mam some beer. Jem, would you go in and get it for me? Tell ’em it’s for the Butterfields and Pa’ll pay for it at the end of the week.” Maggie preferred to keep Jem and Charlie separate if she could; they’d hated each other from the start.

  Jem hesitated—he didn’t much like going into London pubs on his own—but he knew why Maggie was asking him. Grabbing the tankard, he ran across to the Pineapple and disappeared inside.

  When he was gone Charlie turned his attention to Maisie, taking in her guileless face, her silly frilled cap, her slim form and small breasts pushed up by her stays. “Who’s this, then?” he said. “An’t you goin’ to introduce us?”

  Maisie smiled a Piddle Valley smile. “I’m Maisie—Margaret, like Maggie. I’m Jem’s sister. Are you Maggie’s brother? You two look just alike, except that one be dark and t’other fair.”

  Charlie smiled at her in a way that Maggie didn’t trust. She could see him guzzling Maisie’s innocence. “What you doin’ in the street, Maisie?” he said. “You waitin’ for me?”

  Maisie giggled. “How could I do that when I ne’er saw you before? No, I be waiting—for someone else.”

  Her words seemed to make the pub door open, and John Astley stepped out, accompanied by a girl who made costumes for the circus. They were laughing, and his hand was giving her a little push in the small of her back. Without looking at the trio, they turned and walked down a path that skirted the Pineapple and led back to the Astley stables. Maggie knew there was an empty stall at the end where he often brought his women.

  “Oh!” Maisie gulped, and stepped into the street to follow them.

  Maggie took hold of her elbow. “No, Miss Piddle.”

  “Why not?” Maisie seemed to ask this innocently as she tried to pull her elbow free. Maggie glanced at Charlie, who raised his eyebrows.

  “C’mon, now, Maisie. They’ll be busy and won’t want you hangin’ about.”

  “He must be showing her his horse, don’t you think?” Maisie said.

  Charlie snorted. “Showin
’ her summat, that’s sure.”

  “Best leave it,” Maggie advised. “You don’t want to be spyin’ on him—he wouldn’t like that.”

  Maisie turned her large blue eyes on Maggie. “I hadn’t thought of that. D’you think he’d be angry with me?”

  “Yes, he would. You go home, now.” Maggie gave Maisie a little push. After a moment Maisie started up Hercules Buildings. “Nice to meet you,” she called to Charlie over her shoulder.

  Charlie chuckled. “Good Lord a day, where’d you find her?”

  “Leave her be, Charlie.”

  He was still watching Maisie, but flicked his eyes at his sister. “What makes you think I’m goin’ to do summat to her, Miss Cut-Throat?”

  Maggie froze. He had never called her that before. She tried not to show her panic, keeping her eyes fixed on his face, taking in the bristles on his chin and the beginnings of a skimpy blond moustache. He was her brother, though, and knew her well, catching the flash in her eyes and the sudden stillness of her breathing.

  “Oh, don’t worry.” He smiled his dubious smile. “Your secret’s safe with me. Fact is, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  Jem appeared at the pub door and started over, walking carefully so that he wouldn’t jog the full tankard. He frowned when he saw Maggie’s tense, miserable face. “What’s the matter?” He turned on Charlie. “What’d you do to her?”

  “You goin’ home now?” Charlie said, ignoring Jem.

  Maggie frowned. “What d’you care?”

  “Mam and Pa have a little surprise for you, is all.” In one movement he grabbed the tankard from Jem and pulled a long drink from it, emptying a third before he thrust it back and ran off, laughter floating behind him.

  6

  When Maggie returned, Bet Butterfield was by the fire, dumping fistfuls of chopped potatoes into a pot of water. Charlie was already at the table, his long legs spread in front of him. “Chop up the onions, would you, duck,” Bet Butterfield said, taking the tankard from Maggie without comment on its late arrival or the missing beer. “You cry less’n me.”