Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  Mr. Blake saw all of this in him. He took it in, and he nodded to Jem, and Jem felt different—harder and clearer, as if he were a stone that had been burnished by sand.

  “The world,” he said. “What lies between two opposites is us.”

  Mr. Blake smiled. “Yes, my boy; yes, my girl. The tension between contraries is what makes us ourselves. We have not just one, but the other too, mixing and clashing and sparking inside us. Not just light, but dark. Not just at peace, but at war. Not just innocent, but experienced.” His eyes rested for a moment on the daisy Maisie still held. “It is a lesson we could all do well to learn, to see all the world in a flower. Now, I must just speak with Robert. Good day to you, my children.”

  “Z’long, sir,” Jem said.

  They watched him thread his way through the graves. He did not stop at the funeral party as they’d expected, however, but continued on until he knelt by a grave.

  “What were that all about?” Maisie asked.

  Jem frowned. “You tell her, Maggie. I’ll be back in a minute.” He picked his way through stone slabs until he could crouch behind one near Mr. Blake. His neighbor was looking very animated, his eyes glinting, though there was little light to make them so—indeed, the clouds had grown thicker, and Jem felt a raindrop on his hand as he hid and listened.

  “I feel it pushing at me from all sides,” Mr. Blake was saying. “The pressure of it. And it will get worse, I know it, with this news from France. The fear of originality will stifle those who speak with different voices. I can tell only you my thoughts—and Kate, bless her.” After a pause, he continued, “I have seen such things, Robert, that would make you weep. The faces in London streets are marked by Hell.”

  After another, longer pause, he began to chant:

  I wander through each chartered street

  Near where the chartered Thames does flow

  And mark in every face I meet

  Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

  In every cry of every man

  In every infant’s cry of fear

  In every voice, in every ban

  The mind-forged manacles I hear.

  “I’ve been working on that one. I am writing all new, for things have changed so. Think on it, until we meet again, my brother.” He got to his feet. Jem waited until he had gone back to the group in black, then went around to look at the headstone Mr. Blake had knelt by. Doing so confirmed what he had begun to suspect about the brother Mr. Blake spoke of so much: The stone read “Robert Blake, 1762–1787.”

  7

  The undertakers with their cart moved off in one direction, the Blakes in the other, down the long tree-lined avenue that led to the street. The infrequent spots of rain were beginning to fall more persistently. “Oh dear,” Maisie said, pulling her shawl closely around her shoulders. “I never thought it would rain when I came out. And we be such a long way from home. What do we do now?”

  Maggie and Jem did not have a plan beyond reaching Bunhill Fields. It was enough to have done that. Now it was dim with rain, and there was no longer a goal to reach, other than getting home.

  Out of habit, Maggie followed the Blakes, with Jem and Maisie falling in behind her. When the family reached the street, they did not turn down it and retrace their steps. Instead, the group got into a carriage that sat waiting for them. It set off briskly, and though the children ran after it, it soon left them behind. They stopped running and stood in the street, watching the carriage race far away from them until it turned right and disappeared. The rain was coming down faster now. They hurried along the street until they came to the crossroads, but the carriage could not be seen. Maggie looked about. She didn’t recognize where they were; the carriage was taking a different route back.

  “Where are we?” Maisie asked. “Shouldn’t we try to follow them?”

  “Don’t matter,” Maggie answered. “They’ll just be goin’ back to Soho when we want Lambeth. We can find our own way back. C’mon.” She set out as confidently as she could, without telling the others that in the past she’d always come to this part of London with her father or brother, and had let them lead the way. However, there were plenty of landmarks Maggie had been to and could surely find her way back from: Smithfield’s, St. Paul’s, the Guild-hall, Newgate Prison, Blackfriars Bridge. It was just a matter of finding one of them.

  For example, ahead of them and across a green was a massive U-shaped building, three stories high and very long, with towered sections in the middle and at the corners where the wings began.

  “What’s that?” Maisie said.

  “Dunno,” Maggie answered. “Looks familiar. Let’s see it from the other side.”

  They walked parallel to the railings that enclosed the green and then past one wing of the building. At the back a high, crumbling stone wall covered with ivy ran alongside, and another, even higher wall had been built closer to the building, clearly designed to keep people in.

  “There be bars on the windows,” Jem announced, squinting up through the rain. “This a jail?”

  Maggie peered at the windows high up in the walls. “Don’t think so. I know we’re not near Fleet, nor Newgate neither—I been there for hangings and it don’t look like this. There’s not this many criminals in London, not behind bars.”

  “You’ve seen someone hanged?” Maisie cried. She looked so horrified that Maggie felt ashamed to confirm it.

  “Just the once,” she said quickly. “That was enough.”

  Maisie shuddered. “I couldn’t bear to see someone killed, no matter what they’ve done.”

  Maggie made a garbled noise. Jem frowned. “You all right?”

  Maggie swallowed hard, but before she could say anything, they heard a wail from one of the high barred windows. It began low in pitch and volume, then ascended the scale, growing louder and higher until it became a scream so forceful it must have torn its owner’s throat. The children froze. Maggie felt goose bumps sweep up and down her.

  Maisie clutched Jem’s arm. “What’s that? Oh, what is’t, Jem?”

  Jem shook his head. The sound stopped suddenly, then began again in its low range, to climb higher and higher. It reminded him of cats fighting.

  “A lying-in hospital, maybe?” he suggested. “Like the one on Westminster Bridge Road. Sometimes you hear screams coming from it, when the women are having their babies.”

  Maggie was frowning at the ivy-covered stone wall. Suddenly her face shifted with recognition and disgust. “Oh Lord,” she said, taking a step back. “Bedlam.”

  “What’s—” Jem stopped. He was remembering an incident one day at Astley’s. One of the costume girls had seen John Astley smiling at Miss Hannah Smith and begun to cry so hard that she sent herself into a fit. Philip Astley had thrown water in her face and slapped her. “Pull yourself together, my dear, or it’s Bedlam for you!” he’d said before the other costume girls led her away. He’d turned to John Fox, tapped his temple, and winked.

  Jem looked up at the windows again and saw a hand fluttering between the bars, as if trying to grasp at the rain. When the scream began the third time, he said, “Let’s go,” and turned on his heel to walk what felt like west to him, toward Soho and, eventually, Lambeth.

  Maggie and Maisie followed. “That’s London Wall, you know,” Maggie said, gesturing at the stone wall to their right. “There’s bits of it all round. It’s the old wall to the city. That’s what made me recognize Bedlam. Pa brought me past here once.”

  “Which way do we go, then?” Jem said. “You must know.”

  “Course I do. This way.” Maggie turned left at random.

  “Who…who stays at Bedlam?” Maisie faltered.

  “Madmen.”

  “Oh dear. Poor souls.” Maisie stopped suddenly. “Wait—look!” She pointed at a figure in a red skirt ahead of them. “There’s Rosie! Rosie!” she called.

  “Maisie, we’re nowhere near St. Giles,” Maggie said. “She won’t be over here.”

  “She might be!
She said she works all over. She could’ve come here!” Maisie broke into a run.

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Maggie called after her.

  “Maisie, I don’t think—” Jem began.

  Jem’s sister was not listening, but running faster, and when the girl turned suddenly into an alley, Maisie dived after her and disappeared.

  “Damn!” Maggie ran, Jem matching her stride for stride.

  When they reached the turning, both Maisie and the red skirt were gone. “Dammit!” Maggie muttered. “What a silly fool!”

  They hurried down the alley, looking at each turning for Maisie. Down one they saw a flash of red in the doorway of a house. Now that they could see her face, it was clear that indeed the girl was not Rosie, or a whore either. She shut the door behind her, and Jem and Maggie were left alone among a few houses, a church, a copper shop, and a draper’s.

  “Maisie must have kept going,” Maggie said. She ran back to the original alley, Jem at her heels, and continued along it, ducking into other alleys and lanes. At a dead end, they turned; at another they turned again, getting wound more and more tightly into the maze of streets. Jem said little, except to stop Maggie once and point out that they’d come in a circle. Maggie thought he must be furious with her for getting them so lost, but he seemed to show neither anger nor fear—just a grim determination.

  Maggie tried not to think beyond finding Maisie. When for a moment she let her mind picture the three of them, lost in these tiny streets in an unknown part of a huge city, with no knowing how to get home, she began to feel so breathless with fear that she thought she would have to sit down. She had only ever felt this frightened once before, when she’d met the man in what would become Cut-Throat Lane.

  As they ran along another alley, they passed a man who turned and leered at them. “What you runnin’ from, then?”

  Maggie shrieked, and shied like a spooked horse, startling Jem and the man, who shrank back and disappeared into a passageway.

  “Maggie, what is’t?” Jem grabbed his friend by the shoulders, but she threw him off with a shudder and turned away, her hand against the wall, trying to steady herself. Jem stood watching her and waiting. At last she took a deep, shaky breath and turned back to him, rain dripping from her crushed straw hat into her eyes. Jem searched her unhappy face and saw there a distant, haunted look that he had caught a few times before—sometimes when she didn’t know he saw it, others like now when she desperately tried to hide it. “What is’t?” he said again. “What happened to you?”

  She shook her head; she would not say what it was.

  “It be about that man in Cut-Throat Lane, don’t it?” Jem guessed. “You was always funny about that. You went funny back at Smithfield’s too.”

  “It was Maisie what looked sick, not me,” Maggie retorted.

  “You did too,” Jem insisted. “You looked sick because you saw so much blood back in Cut-Throat Lane. Maybe you even—” Jem paused. “You saw it happen, didn’t you? You saw him get killed.” He wanted to put his arm around her to comfort her, but knew she wouldn’t let him.

  Maggie turned her back on him and started down the alley again. “We have to find Maisie,” she muttered, and would say nothing more.

  Because of the rain, there were few people about. As they searched, the rain fell even harder in a last attempt to drench anyone outside, then suddenly stopped altogether. Immediately doors began to open. It was a close, cramped area of London, with small, dark houses that had survived change from fire and fashion and poverty only because they were so solid. The people who emerged were similarly sturdy and settled. There were no Yorkshire or Lancashire or Dorsetshire accents here, but the sound of families who had lived for many generations in the same place.

  In such a neighborhood, strangers stick out like early-budding crocuses. Hardly had the streets begun to fill with Sunday evening strollers than a woman passing pointed behind herself. “You’ll be wanting the girl with the frilly cap, will you? She’s back there, by Drapers’ Gardens.”

  A minute later they came out into an open space where there was yet another enclosed garden, and saw Maisie standing by the iron railings, waiting, her eyes shiny with tears. She said nothing, but threw her arms around Jem and buried her face in his shoulder. Jem patted her gently. “You be all right now, do you, Maisie?”

  “I want to go home, Jem,” she said, her voice muffled.

  “We will.”

  She pulled back and looked in his face. “No, I mean back to Dorsetshire. I be lost in London.”

  Jem could have said, “Pa makes more money working for Mr. Astley than he ever did as a chairmaker in Piddletrenthide.” Or, “Ma prefers the circus to Dorset buttons.” Or, “I’d like to hear more of Mr. Blake’s new songs.” Or even, “What about John Astley?”

  Instead he stopped a boy his own age, who was whistling as he passed. “Excuse me, sir—where be the Thames?”

  “Not far. Just there.” The boy pointed, and the children linked arms before heading in the direction he’d indicated. Maisie was trembling and Maggie was pale. To distract them, Jem said, “I know a new song. D’you want to learn it?” Without waiting for them to reply, he began to chant:

  I wander through each chartered street

  Near where the chartered Thames does flow

  And mark in every face I meet

  Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

  They had chanted the two verses he knew three times together when they slipped into a stream of traffic heading onto London Bridge. “It be all right now,” Jem said. “We’re not lost. The river will lead us back to Lambeth.”

  PART VI

  October 1792

  1

  Maisie watched John Astley rehearse from her favorite seat. She had tried all of the different seats in the amphitheatre, and knew which she liked best. When they attended shows, the Kellaways normally sat in the pit, close to the ring where the horses ran, the armies marched, the tumblers tumbled, and Miss Laura Devine spun and swooped. However, for those who wanted a view from above, the boxes were the best seats. Located on either side of the stage over the pit, they raised their viewers above the action of both circus and audience.

  Today Maisie was sitting in a box to the right of the stage. She liked it there because it was snug and private, and she had a clear view of everything John Astley did, whether with his horse in the ring or with Miss Hannah Smith on stage. Miss Smith was petite, with the turned-out feet of a trained dancer, fair hair, and a deli-cate face like an orchid. She had played a fetching Columbine opposite John Astley’s Harlequin, and was popular with audiences. Maisie hated her.

  This afternoon John Astley was rehearsing on horseback with Miss Smith for a surprise finale that would mark the end of the season. At the moment they were sitting together on their horses—he on his chestnut mare and wearing a bright blue coat, she in a white gown that stood out against her black stallion—discussing some part of their act. Maisie sighed; though she hated Miss Smith, she could not take her eyes off of her or John Astley, for they seemed to fit perfectly together. After a few minutes of watching, Maisie found she was grinding her fists in her lap.

  She did not leave, however, though her mother could have done with her help at home, where she was pickling cabbage. Soon Maisie would not see John Astley at all: The day after the last performance of the season, the company would travel directly by coach to Dublin, to spend the winter season there and at Liverpool. The rest of the show—the scenery, the props, the cranes and pulleys and hoists, the horses—would follow by ship. Her father and brother were even now rushing to pack up scenery from the earlier shows in the season, readying it for transport that had not even been secured yet. Maisie knew this because Philip Astley was sitting in the box next to hers, conducting business, and she had just heard him compose with John Fox an advertisement for a newspaper:

  WANTED, A VESSEL TO CARRY MACHINERY TO DUBLIN

  She must sail the 13th, 14th, or 15th instant.

  Ap
ply to Mr. Astley, Astley’s Amphitheatre,

  Westminster Bridge Rd.

  Maisie knew little about shipping, but even she was sure they needed more than three days to find passage to Ireland. It made her catch her breath and squeeze her hands together in her lap. Perhaps during the delay Mr. Astley would at last ask Thomas Kellaway and his family to travel to Dublin, as she had been praying he would during the last month.

  Applause broke out from all around the amphitheatre, for Miss Hannah Smith was now standing on one foot on the saddle of her horse, the other leg held out behind her. They all had stopped what they were doing to watch. Even Jem and Thomas Kellaway had come out from backstage along with the other carpenters and were clapping. Not wanting her silence to stand out, Maisie clapped too. Miss Smith smiled tightly, trying not to let her extended leg wobble.

  “Brava, my dear!” Mr. Astley shouted from his box next to Maisie’s. “She reminds me of Patty,” he said to John Fox. “I must get the wife along to the finale to see this. Shame so few women are willing to perform on horseback.”

  “They got more sense’n men,” John Fox pointed out. “Looks like she’s lost hers.”

  “That girl will do anything for John,” Philip Astley said. “That’s why she’s up there now.”

  “Anything?”

  “Well, not anything. Not yet.” Both men laughed.

  “She knows what she’s doing,” Philip Astley continued. “She’s handling him as well as any horse. Brava, my dear!” he shouted out once more. “We’ve got our grand finale now!”