Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  “What’s that sound?” Maisie said.

  Anne Kellaway heard a chop-chop-chopping next door. “Tha’ be Mrs. Blake with her hoe,” she said in a low voice.

  “No, not that. There it be again—someone knocking on Miss Pelham’s door.”

  “Go on and see who it is,” Anne Kellaway said. “It may be tickets for the circus.” She’d heard that the program was to change again soon, and Mr. Astley had sent them tickets every time it did. She had already begun to anticipate a knock on the door and another set of tickets thrust at her. Anne Kellaway knew that she was becoming greedy for the circus, and was perhaps relying too readily on Mr. Astley’s continuing generosity with complimentary tickets. “Seats for seats!” he’d said once, delighted with the chairs Thomas Kellaway had made him.

  As she went to answer the door, Maisie was smoothing her hair, biting her lips, and pulling at her dress to make it sit properly over her stays. Although a circus boy usually brought them the tickets, Maisie nursed a fantasy that John Astley himself might deliver them. She’d had a special thrill the last time the Kellaways went to the circus, when John Astley had played the Harlequin in Harlequin’s Vagaries, and Maisie had been treated to a whole half hour of gazing at him as he sang, courted Columbine—played by newcomer Miss Hannah Smith—and danced upon his chestnut mare. Maisie had watched him with a lump in her throat—a lump that got stuck when at one point she was certain he looked at her.

  When she was thinking sensibly, Maisie knew very well that John Astley was not a man she could ever expect to be with. He was handsome, cultured, wealthy, urbane—as different as could be from the sort of man she would marry in the Piddle Valley. Although she loved her father and brothers—especially Jem—they were awkward and dull next to John Astley. Besides, he provided a distraction from London, which still scared her, and from her brother Tommy’s death, which she seemed to feel more acutely four months on. It had taken that long for her to acknowledge that he was not still in Piddletrenthide and might appear at any time at Miss Pelham’s door, whistling and boasting of the adventures he’d had on the road to London.

  For a brief moment, Maisie stood by the front door of no. 12 Hercules Buildings and listened to the knock, which had grown persistent and impatient, and wondered if it could be John Astley.

  It was not, but rather a woman she had not seen before. She was of medium height, but seemed taller because of her bulk; for though she was not fat, she was well endowed, and her arms were like legs of lamb. Her face was round, with bright cheeks that looked as if they’d seen too much heat. Her brown hair had been shoved under a cap, from which it had escaped in several places without the woman appearing to have noticed. Her eyes were both lively and tired; indeed, she yawned in front of Maisie without even covering her gaping mouth.

  “Hallo, duck,” she said. “You’re a lovely one, an’t you?”

  “I-I’m sorry, but Miss Pelham an’t here,” Maisie stuttered, flustered by the compliment but disappointed that the woman wasn’t John Astley. “She’ll be back in a week.”

  “I don’t want to see any Miss Pelham. I’m after my daughter—Maggie, that is—and wanted to ask you lot about her. Can I come in?”

  2

  “Ma, this be Mrs. Butterfield,” Maisie announced, arriving back in the garden. “Maggie’s mother.”

  “Call me Bet,” the woman said. “It’s Maggie what I come about.”

  “Maggie?” Anne Kellaway repeated, half rising from her seat and clutching the buttons she had made. Then she realized whom Bet meant and sank back down. “She’s not here.”

  Bet Butterfield did not seem to have heard. She was staring into Anne Kellaway’s lap. “Are them buttons?”

  “Yes.” Anne Kellaway had to fight the urge to cover the buttons with her hands.

  “We do buttony,” Maisie explained. “We used to make ’em all the time back in Dorsetshire, and Ma took some of the materials with us when we came here. She thinks maybe we can sell ’em in London.”

  Bet Butterfield held out her hand. “Let me see.”

  Anne Kellaway reluctantly dropped into Bet’s rough, red hand the delicate buttons she had made so far that morning. “Those be called Blandford Cartwheels,” she couldn’t resist explaining.

  “Lord, an’t they lovely,” Bet Butterfield murmured, pushing them around with a finger. “I see these on ladies’ nightgowns and am always careful with ’em when I wash ’em. Is that a blanket stitch you’ve used on the rim?”

  “Yes.” Anne Kellaway held up the button she was working on. “Then I wrap the thread across the ring to make spokes for the wheel, and then backstitch round and round each spoke, so the thread fills in the space. At the end I gather it in the center with a stitch, and there be your button.”

  “Lovely,” Bet Butterfield repeated, squinting at the buttons. “Wish I could make summat like this. I an’t bad at repairs and that, but I don’t know as I could manage summat this small and delicate. I’m better at washin’ what’s already made than makin’ it. Is these the only kind of buttons you make?”

  “Oh, we do all sorts,” Maisie broke in. “Flat ones like these—the Dorset Wheels—we do in cartwheel, crosswheel, and honeycomb patterns. Then we do the High Tops, and the Knobs—those are for waistcoats—and the Singletons and Birds’ Eyes. What others do we do, Ma?”

  “Basket Weaves, Old Dorsets, Mites and Spangles, Jams, Yannells, Outsiders,” Anne Kellaway recited.

  “Where you going to sell ’em?” Bet Butterfield asked.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “I can help you with that. Or my Dick can. He knows everybody, could sell eggs to a chicken, that man could. He’ll sell your buttons for you. How many you got ready?”

  “Oh, four gross at least,” Maisie replied.

  “And how much you get per gross?”

  “It depends on what sort and how good they be.” Maisie paused. “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Butterfield?” She gestured to her own chair.

  “I will, duck, thanks.” Bet Butterfield lowered herself onto the hoop-back Windsor chair that, even after ten years of daily use, did not creak when her substantial mass met its elm seat. “Now, there’s a nice chair,” she said, leaning back against the spindles and running her finger along the smooth curved arm. “Plain, not fussy, and well made—though I never seen chairs painted blue before.”

  “Oh, we paint all our chairs back in Dorsetshire,” Maisie declared. “That’s how folk like ’em.”

  “Mags told me Mr. Kellaway’s a bodger. He make this one, Mrs.—?”

  “Anne Kellaway. He did. Now, Mrs. Butterfield—”

  “Bet, love. Everybody calls me Bet.”

  “Like Bouncing Bet!” Maisie exclaimed, sitting down on one of Miss Pelham’s cold stone benches. “I’ve just thought of it. Oh, how funny!”

  “What’s funny, duck?”

  “Bouncing Bet—it be what we call soapwort. Back in Dorsetshire, at least. And you use soapwort for your washing, don’t you?”

  “I do. Bouncing Bet, eh?” Bet Butterfield chuckled. “I’d not heard o’ that one. Where I’m from we called it Crow Soap. But I like that—Bouncing Bet. My Dick’ll start calling me that if I tell him.”

  “What were it you’ve come for?” Anne Kellaway interjected. “You said it were something to do with your daughter.”

  Bet Butterfield turned to her soberly. “Yes, yes. Well, you see, I’m lookin’ for her. She an’t been round for a while and I’m startin’ to wonder.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Two weeks! And you’re only now looking for her?” Anne Kellaway couldn’t imagine losing Maisie for one night in this city, much less two weeks.

  Bet Butterfield shifted in her chair. This time it creaked. “Well, now, it an’t as bad as that. Maybe it’s been a week. Yes, that’s right, just a week.” At Anne Kellaway’s continuing look of horror, she blustered on. “And maybe not even that long. I’m often not at home,
see; what with my washing, I work sometimes through the night at people’s houses and sleep during the day. There’s days go by I don’t see my Dick or Charlie or no one ’cause I’m out.”

  “Has anyone else seen her?”

  “No.” Bet Butterfield shifted in the chair again; again it creaked. “I’ll tell you truly, we had a bit of a row and she run off. She’s got a temper on her, has Mags—like her father. She’s a slow fuse but once she goes off—watch out!”

  Anne and Maisie Kellaway were silent.

  “Oh, I know she’s round,” Bet Butterfield added. “I leave food out for her and that disappears right enough. But I want her back. It an’t right for her to stay away so long. Neighbors are startin’ to ask questions, and look at me funny—like you lot are doing.”

  Anne and Maisie Kellaway bowed their heads and began stitching at their Blandford Cartwheels.

  Bet Butterfield leaned forward to watch their fingers at work. “Mags has been spendin’ a lot of time with your boy—Jem, is it?”

  “Yes, Jem. He’s helping his father.” Anne Kellaway nodded toward the house.

  “Well, then, I come to ask if he—or any of you—has seen Maggie in the last while. Just round the streets, or by the river, or here, if she’s come to visit.”

  Anne Kellaway looked at her daughter. “Have you seen her, Maisie?”

  Maisie was holding her button and letting the thread dangle, with the needle on the end of it. The motion of the stitching tended to twist the thread so much that now and then she had to stop and let it unwind itself. They all watched as the needle spun, then slowed, and finally stopped, swinging lightly at the end of the thread.

  3

  On the other side of the wall, Maggie was lounging on the steps of the Blakes’ summerhouse, looking through Songs of Innocence, when she heard her mother next door and sat up as if a whip had been cracked. It was a shock to hear Bet Butterfield’s town crier of a voice after being lulled by the Kellaway women’s Dorset accents and dull talk about the Piddle Valley.

  She felt peculiar eavesdropping when the talk was about Maggie herself. Bet Butterfield sounded like someone in the market comparing the price of apples, and it took Maggie a few minutes to realize that the Kellaways and her mother were discussing her. She wrapped her arms around her knees and pulled them to her chest, resting her chin on them and lightly rocking back and forth in the entrance of the summerhouse.

  Maggie was still surprised that the Blakes hadn’t thrown her out of their garden, as she was sure her own parents would do if they found a stray girl in theirs. Indeed, Maggie tried hard to hide the first days she was there. She had a miserable time of it, though. The night she first pitched over the wall, she didn’t sleep at all, shivering back among the brambles she’d tumbled into, even though it was a balmy night, and jumping at every rustle and snap as rats and foxes and cats went about their business around her. Maggie was not afraid of the animals, but their sounds made her think that people might be about, even though the Blakes’ garden was well removed from the shouts from the pubs, the comings and goings around Hercules Hall, the drunken quarrels, the ruttings up against the back wall. She hated not having four walls and a roof to protect her, and toward the end of the night she crept into the summerhouse, where she slept fitfully until dawn, waking with a yelp when she thought someone was sitting in the doorway. It was only a neighbor’s cat, however, watching her curiously.

  The next day she went across Westminster Bridge and dozed in the sun in St. James’s Park, knowing the Butterfields were unlikely to go there. That night she hid in the summerhouse, this time with a blanket she’d stolen from home when no one was in, and slept much better—indeed, so well that she woke late, with the sun in her eyes and Mr. Blake sitting out on the steps of the summerhouse, a bowl of cherries beside him.

  “Oh!” Maggie cried, sitting up and pushing her tangled hair from her eyes. “Sorry, Mr. Blake! I—”

  One look from his bright gray eyes silenced her. “Would you like some cherries, my girl? First of the season.” He set the bowl next to her, then turned to look back out over the garden.

  “Thanks.” Maggie tried not to gobble them, though she had eaten little the last two days. As she reached toward the bowl for the fourth time, she noticed that Mr. Blake had his notebook on his knee. “Was you goin’ to draw me?” she asked, trying to recover some of her spirit under awkward circumstances.

  “Oh no, my girl, I never draw from life if I can help it.”

  “Why not? An’t it easier than to make it up?”

  Mr. Blake half turned toward her. “But I don’t make it up. It’s in my head already, and I simply draw what I see there.”

  Maggie spat a stone into her hand to join the others she held, hiding her disappointment behind the gesture. She would have liked Mr. Blake to draw her. “So what d’you see in your head, then? Children like them pictures in your book?”

  Mr. Blake nodded. “Children, and angels, and men and women speaking to me and to each other.”

  “An’ you draw ’em in there?” She pointed at the notebook.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Of course.” Mr. Blake held out his notebook. Maggie threw the cherry stones into the garden and wiped her hand on her skirt before she took the notebook, knowing without having to be told that it was important to him. He confirmed this by adding, “That is my brother Robert’s notebook. He allows me to use it.”

  Maggie leafed through it, paying more attention to the drawings than the words. Even if she had been able to read, she would have found it hard to make out his scrawl, full of words and lines scratched out and written over, verses turned upside down, sometimes written so quickly they seemed more like black marks than letters. “Lord, what a mess,” she murmured, trying to untangle the jumble of words and images on a page. “Look at all that crossin’ out!”

  Mr. Blake laughed. “What comes out first is not always best,” he explained. “It needs reworking to shine.”

  Many of the drawings were rough sketches, barely recognizable. Others, though, were more carefully executed. On one page a monstrous face carried a limp body in its mouth. On another a naked man stretched across the page, calling out anxiously. A bearded man in robes and with a mournful expression spoke to another man bowing his head. A man and woman stood side by side, naked, and other naked bodies were drawn twisted and contorted. Maggie chuckled at a sketch of a man peeing against a wall, but it was a rare laugh; mostly the pictures made her nervous.

  She stopped on a page filled with small drawings, of angels with folded wings, of a man carrying a baby on his head, of faces with bulging eyes and gaping mouths. At the top was a striking likeness of a man with beaded eyes, a long nose, and a crooked smile, his curly hair mussed about his head. He looked so different from the other figures—more concrete and unique—and the drawing done with such care and delicacy that Maggie knew immediately he was someone real. “Who’s this, then?”

  Mr. Blake glanced at the page. “Ah, that’s Thomas Paine. Have you heard of him, my child?”

  Maggie dredged up memories of evenings half-asleep with her family at the Artichoke. “I think so. My pa talks about him at the pub. He wrote summat what got him into trouble, didn’t he?”

  “The Rights of Man.”

  “Hang on—he supports the Frenchies, don’t he? Like—” Maggie cut herself off, remembering Mr. Blake’s bonnet rouge. She had not seen him wear it recently. “So you know Tom Paine?”

  Mr. Blake tilted his head and squinted at the grapevine snaking along the wall. “I have met him.”

  “Then you do draw real people. This an’t just from your head, is it?”

  Mr. Blake turned around to look at Maggie fully. “You’re right, my girl. What is your name?”

  “Maggie,” she replied, proud that someone like him wanted to know.

  “You’re right, Maggie, I did draw him as he sat across from me. That was indeed one instance of drawing from life.
Mr. Paine seemed to demand it. I suppose he’s that sort of fellow. But I don’t make a practice of it.”

  “So—” Maggie hesitated, not sure she should push such a man as Mr. Blake. But he looked at her inquiringly, eyebrows raised, his face open to her, and she felt that here, in this garden, she could ask things she wouldn’t elsewhere. It was the beginning of her education. “In the Abbey,” she said, “you was drawin’ summat you saw for real. That statue—except without the clothes.”

  Mr. Blake gazed at her, small movements in his face accompanying his thoughts from puzzlement to surprise to delight. “Yes, my girl, I did draw the statue. But I was not drawing what was there, was I?”

  “No, that’s certain.” Maggie chuckled at the memory of his sketch of the naked statue.

  Lesson over, Mr. Blake picked up his notebook and stood, shaking his legs as if to loosen them.

  The rasping scrape of a window being opened made Maggie look up. Jem was hauling up the back window next door. He saw her and Mr. Blake and froze, staring. Maggie raised a finger to her lips.

  Mr. Blake did not look up at the sound the way most people would, but started toward the door. He seemed to Maggie to be interested in the world around him only when he chose to; and now he had lost interest in his garden, and in her. “Thanks for the cherries, Mr. Blake!” Maggie called. He lifted a hand in reply but did not turn around.

  When he was inside, Maggie beckoned to Jem to join her. He frowned, then disappeared from the window. A few minutes later his head appeared above the wall—he had climbed up Miss Pelham’s bench and was standing on its back. “What you doing there?” he whispered.