Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  Jem felt an ache, looking at her now. He wanted to reach over and run his finger through the mustard dust on her arm.

  Finally he whispered her name.

  Maggie sat up with a shout. “What? What is it?” She looked around wildly.

  “Shhh.” Jem tried to calm her, cursing himself for frightening her. “Miss Pelham be close by. I just saw you here, from our window, and thought—well, I wanted to see if you was all right.”

  Maggie rubbed her face, recovering her composure. “Course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason. It’s just—shouldn’t you be at the factory?”

  “Oh, that.” She sighed, a grown-up sound Jem hadn’t heard from her before, and ran her fingers through tangled curls. “Too tired. I went this morning, then run off at dinnertime. All I want is a little sleep. You got anything to eat on you?”

  “No. Did you not get any at the factory?”

  Maggie laced her fingers together and stretched so that her shoulders humped back. “Nah, left while I could. Never mind, I’ll eat later.”

  They sat awhile in silence, listening to the snipping of Miss Pelham at work on her roses. Jem’s eyes kept straying to Maggie’s arm, which was now hugging her knees.

  “What you lookin’ at?” she said suddenly.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I just wondered—what it tastes like.” He nodded at the dusty smear on her arm.

  “Mustard? Like mustard, fool. Why—d’you want to lick it?” Maggie teasingly held it out.

  Jem turned red, and Maggie pressed her advantage. “Go on,” she murmured. “I dare you.”

  Though he wanted to, Jem didn’t want to admit it. He hesitated, then leaned over and ran the flat of his tongue a few inches through the mustard dust, the soft hairs that grew on her arm tickling his tastebuds. He felt dizzy with the sensation of tasting her warm, musky skin for just a moment before the harsh mustard exploded in his mouth, prickling at the back of his throat and making him cough. Maggie laughed, a sound he hadn’t heard enough of these days. He sat back, so ashamed and aroused that he didn’t notice the hairs on Maggie’s arms standing on end.

  “Did you hear? Mr. Blake’s ma died,” he said, trying to find his way back to solid ground.

  Maggie shivered, wrapping her arms around her knees again. “Has she? Poor Mr. Blake.”

  “Funeral be tomorrow. Bunhill Fields, Miss Pelham said.”

  “Really? I been there once, with Pa. Shall we go to it? Tomorrow’s Sunday, so we’re not workin’.”

  Jem looked sideways at his friend. “We can’t do that—we didn’t even know her.”

  “Don’t matter. You’ve not been over that way, have you?”

  “Where?”

  “Past St. Paul’s, by Smithfield’s. The older bit of London.”

  “Don’t reckon I have.”

  “You even been across the river?”

  “Course I have. Remember when we went to Westminster Abbey?”

  “That’s all? You been here six months and you been across the river just once?”

  “Three times,” Jem corrected. “I went back to the Abbey once. And I’ve been across Blackfriars Bridge.” He didn’t tell Maggie that he’d gone across but not got off the bridge on the other side. He had stood and watched the chaos of London, and couldn’t bring himself to step into it.

  “Go on—you’d like it,” Maggie persisted.

  “What—the way you’d like the countryside?”

  “Hah! It’s not the same.” When Jem continued to look dubious, Maggie added, “C’mon, it’ll be an adventure. We’ll follow Mr. Blake, like we’ve always wanted to do. What, you afraid?”

  She sounded so much like her old self that Jem said, “All right. Yes.”

  3

  Jem did not tell his parents or Maisie where he was going. Anne Kellaway would forbid him to go so far into London; Maisie would want to come along. Normally Jem didn’t mind if his sister was with him and Maggie. Today, however, he was nervous, and didn’t want to be responsible for Maisie too. So he simply said he was going out, and though he didn’t meet Maisie’s eye, he could feel her pleading gaze.

  Perhaps it was because she’d had extra sleep the previous day, but Maggie was more sparkling than she had been for many a Sunday. She had washed herself, hair as well, so that, except for the creases in her hands, her skin was a more normal color. She had put on a clean shift over her gown, tied a light blue neckerchief around her neck, and even wore a slightly crumpled straw hat with a broad brim, trimmed with a navy blue ribbon. Her shape was different too—her waist and chest sharper, more defined—and Jem realized she was wearing stays for the first time.

  She took Jem’s arm with a laugh. “Shall we step into town, then?” she said, sticking her nose up in the air.

  “You look nice.”

  Maggie smiled and smoothed her shift over her stays, a gesture Maisie often made but that clearly was new to Maggie, as it had little effect on the wrinkles and bunches under her arms and at her waist. Jem suppressed an urge to run his own hands down her sides and squeeze her waist.

  He glanced down at his patched, dusty breeches, coarse shirt, and plain brown coat that had once been his brother Sam’s. It hadn’t occurred to him to keep on his good church clothes for going into London; apart from worrying that they would be damaged or get dirty in the city, he would have had to explain to his family why he was wearing them. “Should I put on a better coat?” he asked.

  “Don’t matter. I just like to dress up when I get the chance. Neighbors’d make fun of me if I wore this round here. C’mon, we’d best get back to the Blakes’. I been keeping an eye on the house but no one’s come out yet.”

  They set themselves up to wait across from no. 13 Hercules Buildings, behind the low hedge that separated the field across the road from the road itself. It was not as sunny as the day before; still warm, but hazy and close. They lay in the grass, and now and then one of them would pop up to look over and see if there was any sign of Mr. Blake. They saw Miss Pelham leave with a friend, heading for the Apollo Gardens on Westminster Bridge Road, as she often did on a Sunday afternoon, to drink barley water and look at the flower displays. They saw John Astley ride out on his horse. They saw Thomas and Anne Kellaway and Maisie leave no. 12 and walk past them on their way down to the Thames.

  Just after the Kellaways passed, the door to no. 13 opened and Mr. and Mrs. Blake stepped out, turning into Royal Row to make their way through back streets to Westminster Bridge. They were dressed as they always were: Mr. Blake wore a white shirt, black breeches buckled at the knee, worsted stockings, a black coat, and a black broad-brimmed hat like a Quaker’s; Mrs. Blake wore a dark brown dress with a white neckerchief, her creased bonnet, and a dark blue shawl. Indeed, they looked more like they were going for a Sunday afternoon stroll than to a funeral, except that they walked a little more quickly than usual, and with more purpose, as if they knew exactly where they were going, and that end point was more important than the journey there. Neither looked grim or upset. Mrs. Blake’s face was perhaps a little blank, and Mr. Blake’s eyes more firmly fixed on the horizon. As they seemed so ordinary, no one said anything or took off a hat as people might have done had they known the Blakes were mourners.

  Maggie and Jem scrambled over the hedge and began to follow them. At first they stayed well behind them. But the Blakes never looked back, and by the time they crossed Westminster Bridge, the children had drawn close enough that they would be able to hear them speak. The Blakes did not talk, however; only Mr. Blake hummed to himself, and occasionally sang snatches of songs in a high-pitched voice.

  Maggie nudged Jem. “Those an’t hymns, like what you’d expect him to be singing today. I think those are his songs what he’d got in his book. Them Songs of Innocence.”

  “P’raps.” Jem was paying less attention to the Blakes and more to the scenery around him. They had passed Westminster Hall and the Abbey—w
here crowds were milling about after the end of one service or before the beginning of another—and continued straight along the road from the bridge. Soon it ran into a large green space dotted with trees, with a long narrow body of water in the middle.

  Jem stopped to gape. People were strolling along the raked gravel paths dressed in far finer clothing than anything he had seen in Lambeth. The women wore gowns so structured that the clothes seemed almost to be alive themselves. Their wide skirts were in bright colors—canary yellow, burgundy, sky blue, gold—and sometimes striped or embroidered, or decorated with tiers of ruffles. Elaborately trimmed petticoats filled out the women’s figures, while their hair, piled high on their heads like towers and capped with huge creations in cloth that Jem was reluctant to call hats, made them look like top-heavy ships that might blow over easily with a passing wind. These were the sorts of clothes that you could never wear if you wanted to do any work.

  If anything the men’s clothes surprised him more, for they were meant to be closer to what Jem himself wore; there was a nod toward utility, though clearly these men did no work either. He studied a man passing by, who wore a coat of brown and gold silk that cut away elegantly to reveal breeches of the same pattern, a cream and gold waistcoat, and a shirt with ruffles at the neck and cuffs. His stockings were white and clean, the silver buckles on his shoes highly polished. If Jem or his father wore these clothes, nails would snag the silk, wood shavings would be caught in the ruffles, the stockings would get dirty and torn, and the silver buckles would be stolen.

  In such well-dressed company, Jem felt even more ashamed of his patched breeches and frayed coat sleeves. Even Maggie’s attempts at dressing up—her battered straw hat, her wrinkled neckerchief—looked ludicrous here. She felt it too, for she smoothed down her dress once more, as if defying others to look down on them. When she lifted her arms to straighten her hat, her stays creaked.

  “Wha’ be this place?” Jem said.

  “St. James’s Park. See, there’s the palace over there, what it’s named for.” She pointed across the park to a long, redbrick building, crenellated towers flanking its entrance and a diamond-shaped clock suspended in between that read half-past two. “C’mon, the Blakes will get away from us.”

  Jem would have liked to linger longer to take in the scene—not only the costume parade, but the sedans being carried about by footmen wearing red; the children dressed almost as lavishly as their parents, feeding ducks and chasing hoops; the dairy maids calling out, “A can of milk, ladies! A can of milk, sirs!” and squirting milk into cups from cows tethered nearby. Instead he and Maggie hurried to catch up.

  The Blakes headed north, skirting the east side of the park. At the beginning of a wide avenue planted with four rows of elms—“The Mall,” Maggie explained—which ran down past the palace, they veered into a narrow lane that led out to a street lined with shops and theatres. “They’ll be going up the Haymarket,” Maggie said. “I’d best take your arm.”

  “Why?” Jem asked, though he didn’t pull his elbow away when she tucked her hand into it.

  Maggie chuckled. “We can’t have London girls taking advantage of a country lad.”

  After a minute he saw what she meant. As they walked up the wide street, women began to nod at him and say hello, when no one had paid him any attention before. These women were not dressed as the women in St. James’s Park had been, but were in cheaper, shinier gowns, with more of their bosom revealed, and their hair bundled under feathered hats. They were not as rough as the whore he had met on Westminster Bridge, but that may have been because it was daylight and they were not yet drunk.

  “An’t you a lovely lad,” said one, walking arm in arm with another woman. “Where you from, then?”

  “Dorsetshire,” Jem replied.

  Maggie yanked his arm. “Don’t talk to her!” she hissed. “She’ll get her claws into you and never let go!”

  The other whore wore a floral print gown and matching cap, which could have looked elegant if she didn’t have so much cleavage on show. “Dorsetshire, eh?” she said. “I know a girl or two round here from Dorsetshire. Want to meet ’em? Or would you rather have London-bred?”

  “Leave him alone,” Maggie muttered.

  “What, got your own already?” the floral one said, grabbing Maggie’s chin. “Don’t think she’ll give you what I can.”

  Maggie jerked her chin away and let go of Jem’s arm. The whores laughed, then turned to latch on to a better prospect while Maggie and Jem stumbled off, silent with embarrassment. The haze had grown thicker, and the sun had disappeared, poking through only briefly now and then.

  Luckily Haymarket was a short street, and they soon passed into quieter, narrower lanes, where buildings were crowded, making the way darker. Though the houses were closer together, they were not shabby, and the people in the streets were a little more prosperous than Jem and Maggie’s Lambeth neighbors.

  “Where are we?” Jem asked.

  Maggie skirted some horse dung. “Soho.”

  “Is Bunhill Fields near here?”

  “No, it’s a ways yet. They’ll be going to his mam’s house first, and take her from there. Look, they’ve stopped. There.” The Blakes were knocking at the door of a shop where black cloth had been hung in the windows.

  “James Blake, Haberdasher,” Jem read aloud from the sign above the shop. The door opened and the Blakes stepped inside, Mr. Blake turning to lock the door behind him. Jem thought he glanced up for a moment, but not long enough to recognize them. Nonetheless, they backed down the street until they were out of sight of the shop.

  There were no carriages waiting near the door, or any sign of movement inside once the Blakes had disappeared. After leaning against the side of some stables a few doors down and attracting sharp looks from the people passing in and out of nearby houses, Maggie pushed herself off of the wall and began to walk back toward the shop. “What you doing?” Jem said in a low voice as he caught up with her.

  “We can’t stand there waitin’—attracts too much attention. We’ll walk round and keep an eye out for the undertaker’s carriage.”

  They walked past the shop windows and up and down the neighboring streets, soon finding themselves at Golden Square, whose name a posy seller told them. As London squares go, it was not particularly elegant, but the house fronts were wider, and it was lighter than the surrounding streets. The square itself was fenced off with iron railings, so Jem and Maggie strolled all around the outside of it, studying the statue of George II in the center.

  “Why’d they do that to me?” Jem asked as they walked.

  “Who do what?”

  “Those…women in the Haymarket. Why’d they ask me those things? Can’t they see that I be young for—for that?”

  Maggie chuckled. “Maybe boys start earlier in London.”

  Jem turned red and wished he hadn’t said anything, especially as Maggie seemed to relish teasing him about it. She was smiling at him in a way that made him kick at the gravel path. “Let’s go back,” he muttered.

  By the time they arrived, a cart was stopped in front of the shop and the door was open. Neighbors began to open their own doors and stand in the street, and Jem and Maggie hid among them. Mr. Blake appeared with the undertakers and two brothers—one of them the man Jem had seen at Hercules Buildings the day before. Mrs. Blake followed with another woman who had the same thick brow and chunky nose as the Blake men, and must be a sister. As the men carried the coffin out of the door and placed it in the cart, the gathered crowd in the street bowed their heads and the men removed their hats.

  When the coffin had been loaded, two of the undertakers climbed onto the box seat and, touching the horses with their reins, set off slowly, the mourners following on foot, with the neighbors behind them. The procession moved up the street until it narrowed; there the neighbors stopped, and stood watching until the cart doglegged into an even smaller street and disappeared.

  Jem halted. “P’raps we should go
back to Lambeth,” he suggested, swallowing to try to move the lump lodged in his throat. Seeing the coffin in the cart and the neighbors removing their hats had reminded him of his own brother’s funeral, where neighbors had stood in their doorways with heads bowed as the cart carrying his coffin passed, guided to the graveyard by the tolling of a single bell at the Piddletrenthide church. People had openly cried, for Tommy had been a popular boy, and Jem had found it hard to make that short walk between cottage and church in front of everyone. Though he thought of his brother less now, there were still moments when he was ambushed by memories. London had not completely buried Tommy, for any of the Kellaways. At night Jem still heard his mother crying sometimes.

  Maggie did not stop with Jem, however, but ran up the street the moment the neighbors turned away to go back to their houses. At the intersection where the procession had disappeared she looked back at Jem and gestured urgently. After a moment, he followed.

  4

  They soon arrived at Soho Square, a little larger than Golden Square, but with similar iron railings, grass plots, gravel walks, and a statue of Charles II on a pedestal in the center. Unlike Golden Square, it was open to the public, and while the funeral procession passed around the north side, Jem and Maggie walked directly through it, mingling with other Londoners out looking for a bit of fresh air and light—though the air was thicker here than in Lambeth, and full of the smells of people living close together: coal fire smoke, sour, mildewed clothes, boiled cabbage, fish on the turn. And although Soho Square was much more open than the surrounding streets they had walked through, the sky had clouded over completely now, so that there was no longer any golden September light, but a weak, diffuse gray that made Jem think of endless November afternoons. It seemed late, almost evening, and he felt he had been away from Lambeth for hours; yet he had not heard the bells strike four o’clock.