Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  John Fox leaned against the barrier that separated the pit seats from the circus ring, and continued to chew on something so that his long mustache wriggled. His eyelids were so low that he seemed to be asleep where he stood; he could also conveniently avoid eye contact with anyone. John Astley was sitting in the pit with some of the other horsemen, his riding boots—cleaned and polished daily by one of his cousins—propped up on a railing, as he picked at a thumbnail.

  “Fox, is everyone here? Good. Now, friends, listen to me.” Philip Astley batted his hands up and down to quiet the noises of discontentment. “Boys and girls, first I would like to say that you have been doing an impressive job—a most impressive job. Indeed, I believe this season will go down as one of our very best. For sheer professionalism as well as dazzling entertainment, no one can touch us.

  “Now, my friends, I must share some news with you that will affect us all. As you are aware, these are trying times. Dangerous times, we might say. Revolutionary times. Over the summer there has been growing turbulence in France, has there not? Well, good people of the circus, it may well be reaching a bloody climax. Perhaps some of you have heard the news today from Paris, where there are reports of twelve thousand citizens killed. Twelve thousand royalists, friends—people loyal to king and family! People like you and me! Not twelve, not twelve hundred, but twelve thousand! Do you have any idea how many people that is? That is twelve nights’ audience, sir.” He gazed at the singer Mr. Johannot, who stared back at him with wide eyes. “Imagine twelve audiences piled up in the streets around us, ladies.” Philip Astley turned toward a group of seamstresses who had been giggling in their seats, and who froze when he glared at them. “Slaughtered mercilessly, men, women, and children alike—throats cut, bellies slashed open, their blood and entrails pouring down the gutters of Westminster Bridge Road and Lambeth Marsh.” One of the girls burst into tears, and two others followed.

  “Well may you cry,” Philip Astley continued over their sobs. “Such actions so close to our own shores pose a grievous threat to us all. Grievous, dear colleagues. The imprisonment of the French king and his family is a challenge to our own royal family. Watch and weep, friends. It is an end to innocence. England cannot let this challenge to our way of life pass. Within six months we will be at war with France—my instincts as a cavalryman tell me so. Kiss your fathers and brothers and sons good-bye now, for they may soon be off to war.”

  During the pause that followed as Philip Astley let his words sink in, irritated looks and grumbles were replaced with solemn faces and silence, apart from the weeping from the costume bench. Thomas Kellaway looked around in wonder. The revolution in France was certainly discussed more in London pubs than at the Five Bells in Piddletrenthide, but he had never thought it would ever affect him personally. He glanced at Jem, who had just turned thirteen. Though too young for cannon fodder, his son was old enough to feel the threat of being press-ganged into the army. Thomas Kellaway had seen for himself a press-gang in action at a Lambeth pub, drawing in a gullible youth with promises of free pints, and then frogmarching him to a nearby barracks. Tommy would have been a prime target, Thomas Kellaway thought. It should be Tommy he’d be concerned about rather than Jem. But then, if Tommy were alive to worry about, they’d still be a close, loving family safely tucked away in the Piddle Valley, far from the danger of press-gangs. Thomas Kellaway had not considered such threats when he and his wife decided to come to London.

  “I have been taking the measure of our audiences,” Philip Astley continued, and Thomas Kellaway pulled himself out of his thoughts to listen. “Public entertainers must be ever vigilant to public moods. Vigilant, my friends. I am aware that, though audi-ences like to be kept abreast of the state of the world, they also come to the amphitheatre to forget—to laugh and rejoice at the superlative wonders before their eyes, and to put out of their minds for one evening the worries and threats of the world. This world”—he gestured around him, taking in the ring, the stage, the seats, and the galleries—“becomes their world.

  “Even before today’s terrible news, I had reached the inevitable conclusion that the current program places perhaps too much emphasis on military spectacle. The splendid and realistic enactment of soldiers striking camp at Bagshot Heath, and the celebration of peace during the East India Military Divertissement—these are scenes of which we can be justly proud. But perhaps, friends, given the present state of affairs in France, they are de trop—particularly for the ladies in the audience. We must think of their sensitive natures. I have seen many members of the gentler sex shudder and turn away from these spectacles; indeed, three have fainted in the last week!”

  “That were from the heat,” the carpenter next to Thomas Kellaway muttered, though not loud enough for Philip Astley to hear.

  “And so, boys and girls, we are going to replace the Bagshot Heath spectacle with a new pantomime I have penned. It will be a continuation of the adventures of the Harlequin my son played earlier this season, and will be called Harlequin in Ireland.”

  A groan arose from the assembled company. Astley’s Circus had been playing to good crowds and, after several changes in program, had settled down into a happy routine that many had expected would take them right through early October to the end of the season. They were tired of change, and content to repeat themselves each night without learning a new show, which would require a great deal of unexpected extra work. Saturday afternoon off would certainly be canceled, for a start.

  Even as Philip Astley reiterated that Harlequin in Ireland would be a tonic for revolution-weary audiences, the carpenters were already heading backstage to ready themselves for immediate set building. Thomas Kellaway followed more slowly. Even three months into his job with the circus, he found working with so many others overwhelming at times, and sometimes longed for the quiet of his workshop in Dorsetshire or at Hercules Buildings, where there had only been him and his family to make noise. Here there was a constant parade of performers, musicians, horses, suppliers of timber and cloth and oats and hay, boys running in and out on the endless errands supplied by Philip Astley, and general hangers-on creating chaos along with the rest of them. Above all there was Philip Astley himself, bellowing orders, arguing with his son about the program or Mrs. Connell about ticket sales or John Fox about everything else.

  Noise was not the only thing Thomas Kellaway had had to adjust to in his new position. Indeed, the work couldn’t be more different from his chairs, and he sometimes thought he ought to tell Philip Astley that he was not suitable for the demands made on him, and admit that he had really taken the job only to satisfy his circus-obsessed wife.

  Thomas Kellaway was a chairmaker—a profession which required patience, a steady hand, and an eye for the shape wood would best take. Building the sorts of things needed for Astley’s Circus was a completely different use of wood. To expect Thomas Kellaway to be able do such work was like asking a brewer to trade jobs with a laundress, simply because both used water. In making chairs, the choice of wood used for each part was critical in creating a strong, comfortable, long-lasting chair. Thomas Kellaway knew his elm and ash, his yew and chestnut and walnut. He knew what would look and work best for the seat (always elm), the legs and spindles (he preferred yew if he could get it), the hoop for the back and arms (ash). He understood just how much he could bend ash before it splintered; he could sense how hard he had to chop at an elm plank with his adze to shape the seat. He loved wood, for he had been using it all his life. For scenery, however, Thomas Kellaway had to use some of the cheapest, poorest wood he had ever had the misfortune to handle. Knotty oak, seconds and ends of beech, even scorched wood salvaged from house fires—he could barely stand to touch the stuff.

  Harder even than that, though, was the idea behind what he was meant to make. When he made a chair, he knew it was a chair—it looked like one, and it would be used as one. Otherwise there was no reason for him to make it. The scenery, however, was not what it was meant to be. He constructed
sheets of board cut into the shapes of clouds, painted white, and hung up in the “sky” so that they looked like clouds—yet they were not clouds. He was building castles that were not castles, mountains that were not mountains, Indian pavilions that were not Indian pavilions. The only function of what he now made was to resemble something else rather than to be it, and to create an effect. Certainly it looked good, from a distance. Audiences often gasped and clapped when the curtain went up and the carpenters’ creations set the scene—even if up close they were clearly just bits of wood nailed together and painted for effect. Thomas Kellaway was not used to something looking good from far away but not up close. That was not how chairs worked.

  His first weeks at Astley’s were not the disaster they so easily could have been, however. Thomas Kellaway was rather surprised by this, for he had never in his life worked as part of a group. The first time he appeared at the amphitheatre, the day after Philip Astley hired him, carrying his tools in a satchel, no one even noticed him for an hour. The other carpenters were busy building a shed at the back in which to store the few bits and pieces that had been salvaged from the laboratory fire. Thomas Kellaway watched them for a time; then, noting one of the carpenters going around the gallery of the theatre, tightening handrails, he found some nails and bits of wood, took up his tools, and set about making repairs in the boxes. When he’d finished, having gained in confidence, he went back to the half-built shed and quietly inserted himself into the scrum of men, handing over the right-sized plank just when it was needed, scrounging up nails when no one else could find any, catching a loose board before it hit a man. By the time the last plank for the slanted roof had been hammered into place, Thomas Kellaway had become a natural part of the team. To celebrate his arrival, the carpenters took him at noon to their favored pub, the Pedlar’s Arms, just across the road from the timber yards north of Westminster Bridge. They all got drunk except for Thomas Kellaway, drinking toasts to their late head carpenter, the unfortunate John Honor. He left them to it, finally, and returned to work alone on a wood volcano that was to spew fireworks as part of the drama Jupiter’s Vengeance.

  Since then Thomas Kellaway had spent the summer keeping quiet and working hard. It was easier, keeping quiet, for when he did open his mouth the men laughed at his Dorset accent.

  Now he began to sort through his tools. “Jem, where be our compass saw?” he called. “One o’ the men needs it.”

  “At home.”

  “Run and get it, then, there’s a good lad.”

  2

  When needed, as today, Jem helped his father in the amphitheatre; other times he joined the other circus boys hanging about to run errands for Philip Astley or John Fox. Usually they were to places in Lambeth or nearby Southwark. The few times he was asked to go farther afield—to a printer’s by St. Paul’s, or a law office at Temple, or a haberdasher’s off St. James’s—Jem passed on the honor to other boys, who were always looking for the extra penny that came with trips across the river.

  Often Jem didn’t know where he was meant to go. “Run to Nicholson’s Timber Yard and tell them we need another delivery of beech, same size as yesterday’s,” John Fox would say, then turn away before Jem could ask him where the yard was. It was then that he most missed Maggie, who could have told him in a flash that Nicholson’s was just west of Blackfriars Bridge. Instead he was forced to ask the other boys, who teased him equally for his ignorance and his accent.

  Jem didn’t mind being sent home; indeed, he was pleased to get out of the amphitheatre. September was a month he associated with being outside even more than the summer months, for it was often balmy but not stifling. September light in Dorsetshire was glorious, the sun casting its gold aslant across the land rather than beating straight down as it did in midsummer. After the frantic haying that kept the countryside constantly moving in August, September was quieter and more reflective. Much of his mother’s garden was ready to eat, and the flowers—the dahlias, the Michaelmas daisies, the roses—flourished. He and his brothers and Maisie gorged on blackberries till their fingers and lips were stained bright purple—or until Michaelmas at the end of September, when the devil was meant to have spat on brambles and the berries went sour.

  Yet beneath all of the golden September abundance, an inevitable current was also pulling the other way. There might still be plenty of green about, but the undergrowth was slowly accumulating dried leaves and withered vines. The flowers were at their brightest, but they also faded quickly.

  September in London was less golden than in Dorsetshire, but it was still very fine. Jem would have lingered if he could; but he knew that if he delayed fetching the compass saw, the waiting carpenter would go to the pub, and then would be unable to work, leaving more for him and his father to do. So he hurried through the back streets between Astley’s Amphitheatre and Hercules Buildings without stopping to enjoy the sunshine.

  Miss Pelham was hovering in the front garden of no. 12 Hercules Buildings, wielding a pair of pruning shears, the sun lighting up her yellow dress. Next door at no. 13, a man was leaving William Blake’s house whom Jem had not seen before, though he seemed familiar, leaning forward as he walked with his hands tucked behind his back, his gait deliberate and almost flat-footed, his wide brow furrowed. It was only when Miss Pelham whispered, “That’s Mr. Blake’s brother,” however, that Jem recognized the family resemblance. “Their mother’s died,” she continued in her hiss. “Now, Jem, you and your family are not to make noise, do you hear? Mr. Blake won’t want you hammering and banging and moving whatnot about. You be sure to tell your parents.”

  “Yes, Miss Pelham.” Jem watched Mr. Blake’s brother walk up Hercules Buildings. That must be Robert, he thought—the one Mr. Blake had mentioned a few times.

  Miss Pelham snipped savagely at her box hedge. “The funeral’s tomorrow afternoon, so don’t you get in the way.”

  “Will the procession be going from here?”

  “No, no, from across the river. She’s to be buried at Bunhill Fields. But you stay out of Mr. Blake’s way anyway. He won’t want you or that girl hanging about in his moment of sorrow.”

  In fact, Jem had seen nothing of Mr. Blake all summer, and little enough of Maggie either. It seemed a year since Maggie had hidden at the Blakes’, their lives had changed that suddenly.

  This made it even more surprising when a few minutes later Jem spied her, of all places, in the Blakes’ garden. He had looked out of the back window to see if his mother was in Mr. Astley’s kitchen garden. Indeed she was, showing an Astley niece how to tie tomato plants to stakes without damaging the stems. Thomas Kellaway had got up his courage to ask Philip Astley if his wife might use a bit of the field for her own vegetable patch in return for helping out the Astley niece, who seemed not to know a turnip from a swede. Anne Kellaway had been overjoyed when he agreed, for though it was mid-June by then, and too late to plant much, still she had managed to put in some late lettuces and radishes, as well as leeks and cabbage for later in the year.

  Jem was about to turn away to head downstairs, compass saw in hand, when a flash of white inside the Blakes’ summerhouse caught his eye. At first he feared he might be seeing a repeat of the naked display he’d witnessed a few months back, and which still made him blush when he thought of it. Then he saw a hand flung out in the shadow of the doorway, and a boot he recognized, and gradually he made out Maggie’s still form.

  No one else was in the Blakes’ garden, though Miss Pelham was now in her back garden, deadheading her roses. Jem hesitated briefly, then clattered downstairs, hurried along Hercules Buildings, into the alley leading to Hercules Hall, and then left at the end to skirt along the back garden walls. Anne Kellaway was still with her tomato plants, and Jem crept past her. He reached the Blakes’ back wall, where an old crate was still hidden under a clump of long grass from the two weeks when Maggie climbed back and forth over it rather than trampling through the Blakes’ house. He stood by it, watching his mother’s back. Then, in a
rush, he climbed the wall and hopped over.

  Picking his way quickly through the wild back garden, Jem stole toward Maggie, keeping the summerhouse between him and the Blakes’ windows so that they wouldn’t see him. Once next to her, he could see her shoulders and chest moving up and down with her breath. Jem looked around, and when he was certain the Blakes were not in sight, he sat down to watch Maggie as she slept. Her cheeks were flushed, and there was a smear of yellow along her arm.

  Since the fire, Maggie had vanished. Jem and his father worked hard at Astley’s, but they did not put in the hours that Maggie did at the mustard manufactory, where she started at six in the morning and worked until evening, six days a week. On Sundays, when the Kellaways were at church, Maggie was still asleep. Sometimes she slept all of Sunday. When she did that, Jem didn’t see her from one week to the next.

  If she did get up on a Sunday afternoon, they would meet by the wall in Astley’s field, and go down to the river together—sometimes by Lambeth Palace, other times to walk over Westminster Bridge. Often they didn’t do even that, but simply sat against the wall. Jem watched as Maggie’s liveliness drained from her; with each passing Sunday she looked more exhausted, and thinner, the curves that attracted him hardening. The lines on her palms and fingers and the spaces under her nails were seamed with yellow. A fine dust settled on her skin as well—on her cheeks, her neck, her arms—that did not wash away entirely, a yellow ghost lingering. Her dark hair went dull gray because of the powdered mustard dust it collected. At first Maggie had washed it out every day, but she soon gave up—washing took up time when she could be sleeping, and why bother to have clean hair when the next morning it would just go mustardy again?

  She smiled less. She talked less. Jem found that for once he was leading the conversation. Most of the time he entertained her with stories of the goings-on at Astley’s: the fight between Philip Astley and Mr. Johannot over the bawdy words in “The Pieman’s Song” that brought the house down each night; the disappearance of one of the costume girls, later found at Vauxhall Gardens, drunk and pregnant; the night when Jupiter’s volcano was knocked over by the force of the fireworks ignited from it. Maggie loved these stories, and demanded more.