Maggie suspected they would have finished their business at the timber yard by now, and would round out the visit with a drink at a pub, where Dick Butterfield would no doubt take as many pints off of Thomas Kellaway as he could. She slipped out of the crowd to the road, and ducked first into the Royal Oak, the nearest pub to the gathering. As expected, it was jammed with people come in from the meeting to warm up, but her father and the Kellaways were not there. She then headed toward Lambeth, calling in at the White Lion and the Black Dog before finding them sucking pints at a table in a corner of the King’s Arms. Her heart pounded harder when she spotted Jem, and she took the moment before they saw her to study his hair curling around his ears, the pale patch of skin visible at the back of his neck, and the strong span of his shoulders that had broadened since they first met. Maggie was so tempted to go up behind him, put her arms around his neck, and nuzzle his ear that she actually took a step forward. Jem looked up then, however, and she stopped, her nerve lost.
He started at the sight of her. “Ar’ernoon. You all right?” Though he said it casually, he was clearly pleased to see her.
“What you doin’ here, Mags?” Dick Butterfield said. “Beaufoy catch you nickin’ a bottle of vinegar and send you packing?”
Maggie folded her arms over her chest. “Hallo to you too. I suppose I’m going to have to get my own beer, will I?”
Jem gestured to his own seat and mug of beer. “Take it—I’ll get another.”
“No, Pa, I did not get the boot from Beaufoy,” Maggie snapped, dropping onto Jem’s stool. “If I wanted to steal his poxy vinegar I know how to do it without getting caught. No, we had the afternoon off to go to that loyalist meeting down the road.” She described the gathering at Cumberland Gardens.
Dick Butterfield nodded. “We saw ’em when we was passing. Stopped for a minute, but we’d worked up a thirst by then, hadn’t we, sir?” He aimed this at Jem’s father. Thomas Kellaway nodded, though his pint was barely touched. He was not much of a daytime drinker.
“’Sides, those meetings don’t mean nothing to me,” Dick Butter field continued. “All this talk about the threat from France is nonsense. Them Frenchies has their hands full with their own revolution without tryin’ to bring it over here too. Don’t you think, sir?”
“Dunno as I understand it,” Thomas Kellaway answered—his usual response to such questions. He had heard talk of the French revolution when he worked with the other carpenters at the circus, but, as when serious matters were discussed at the Five Bells in Piddletrenthide, he usually listened without supplying his own opinion. It was not that Thomas Kellaway was stupid—far from it. He simply saw both sides of an argument too readily to come down on one side or the other. He could accept that the King was a concrete manifestion of the English soul and spirit, uniting and glori-fying the country, and thus essential to its well-being. He could also agree when others said King George was a drain on the country’s coffers, an unstable, fickle, willful presence that England would be better off without. Torn by conflicting views, he preferred to keep quiet.
Jem came back with another drink and a stool, and squeezed in next to Maggie so that their knees were touching. They smiled at each other, at the rarity of sitting together in the middle of a Monday afternoon, and remembering too the first time they had been to a pub together, when Jem met Dick Butterfield. His stool-finding and pub presence had improved greatly in the nine months since.
Dick Butterfield watched this exchange of smiles with a small cynical smile of his own. His daughter was young to be locking eyes with this boy—and a country boy at that, even one who was learning a good trade.
“You sell your chairs, then?” Maggie asked.
“Maybe,” Jem said. “We left one with him. And he’s going to get us some yew cheaper than we had from the other yard, in’t he, Pa?”
Thomas Kellaway nodded. Since Philip Astley’s departure to Dublin, he had been making Windsor chairs again, but had fewer commissions now that the circus man was no longer around to send customers his way. He filled his days making chairs anyway, using leftover bits of wood scrounged from the circus. Their back room was filling with Windsor chairs that awaited buyers. Thomas Kellaway had even given two to the Blakes, a gift for helping Maisie on that foggy October afternoon.
“Oh, you’ll do much better with this man at Nine Elms, lad,” Dick Butterfield put in. “I could have told you that months ago when you went to see that friend of Astley’s about wood.”
“He were all right for a time,” Jem argued.
“Let me guess—until the circus left town? Astley’s little deals only last while he’s got his eye on ’em.”
Jem was silent.
“That’s always the way with him, boy. Philip Astley showers you with attention, gets you customers, bargains, jobs, and free tickets—until he leaves. And he’s gone five months—that’s almost half the year, boy, half your life where he pulls out and leaves you stranded. You notice how quiet Lambeth is without him? It’s like that every year. He comes and helps you out, brings in business, gets people settled and happy, and then comes October and poof!—in a day he’s gone, leaving everybody with nothing. He builds a castle for you, and then he tears it down again. Grooms, pie makers, carpenters, coachmen, or whores—it happens to ’em all. There’s a great scramble to pick up work, then people drift off—the whores and coachmen go to other parts of London; some of the country folk go back home.” Dick Butterfield brought his beer to his lips and took a long draw. “Then come March it’ll start all over again, when the great illusionist builds his castle once again. But some of us knows better than to do business with Philip Astley. We know it don’t last.”
“All right, Pa, you made your point. He do go on, don’t he?” Maggie said to Jem. “Sometimes I fall asleep with my eyes open when he’s talkin’.”
“Cheeky gal!” Dick Butterfield cried. Maggie dodged and laughed as he swatted at her.
“Where’s Charlie, then?” she asked as they settled back down.
“Dunno—said he had summat to do.” Dick Butterfield shook his head. “Someday I’d like that boy to come home and tell me he’s done a deal, and show me the money.”
“You may be waitin’ a long time, Pa.”
Before Dick Butterfield could respond, at the bar a tall man with a broad square face spoke up in a deep, carrying voice that silenced the pub. “Citizens! Listen, now!” Maggie recognized him as one of the plainer speakers at the Cumberland Gardens rally. He held up what looked like a black ledger book. “The name’s Roberts, John Roberts. I’ve just come from a meeting of the Lambeth Association—local residents who are loyal to the King and opposed to the trouble being stirred up by French agitators. You should have been there as well, rather than drinking away your afternoon.”
“Some of us was!” Maggie shouted. “We already heard you.”
“Good,” John Roberts said, and strode over to their table. “Then you’ll know what I’m doing here, and you’ll be the first to sign.”
Dick Butterfield kicked Maggie under the table and glared at her. “Don’t mind her, sir, she’s just bein’ cheeky.”
“Is she your daughter?”
Dick Butterfield winked. “For my sins—if you know what I mean.”
The man showed no sign of a sense of humor. “You’d best see that she controls her tongue, then, unless she fancies a bed in Newgate. This is nothing to laugh about.”
Dick Butterfield raised his eyebrows, turning his forehead into its field of furrows. “Perhaps you could trouble to tell me what the matter is that I’m not to laugh at, sir.”
John Roberts stared at him, puzzling over whether or not Dick Butterfield was making fun of him. “It is a declaration of loyalty to the King,” he said finally. “We’re going from pub to pub and house to house asking the residents of Lambeth to sign it.”
“We need to know what we’re signin’, don’t we?” Dick Butterfield said. “Read it to us.”
The pub was s
ilent now. Everyone watched as John Roberts opened the ledger. “Perhaps you would like to read it aloud, for everyone’s benefit, since you’re so interested,” he said, sliding it toward Maggie’s father.
If he thought his demand would humiliate the other man, however, he had miscalculated; Dick Butterfield pulled the book to him and read reasonably fluidly, and even with feeling that he may not have actually felt, the following:
We, the Inhabitants of the Parish of Lambeth, deeply sensible of the Blessings derived to us from the present admired and envied Form of Government, consisting of King, Lords and Commons, feel it a Duty incumbent on us, at this critical Juncture, not only to declare our sincere and zealous Attachment to it, but moreover to express our perfect Abhorrence of all those bold and undisguised Attempts to shake and subvert this our invaluable Constitution, which the Experience of Ages has shewn to be the most solid Foundation of national Happiness.
Resolved unanimously,
That we do form ourselves into an Association to counteract, as far as we are able, all tumultuous and illegal Meetings of ill designing and wicked Men, and adopting the most effectual Measures in our Power for the Suppression of seditious Publications, evidently calculated to mislead the Minds of the People, and to introduce Anarchy and Confusion into this Kingdom.
When Dick Butterfield finished reading, John Roberts set a bottle of ink on the table and held out a pen. “Will you sign, sir?”
To Maggie’s astonishment, Dick Butterfield took the pen, uncorked the ink, dipped it in, and began to sign at the bottom of the list of signatures. “Pa, what you doing?” she hissed. She hated the hectoring attitude of John Roberts and her employer, Mr. Beaufoy, indeed of all of the men who’d spoken at the meeting, and had assumed her father would as well.
Dick Butterfield paused. “What d’you mean? What’s wrong with signing? I happen to agree—though them words is a bit fancy for my taste.”
“But you just said you didn’t think the Frenchies were a threat!”
“This an’t about the Frenchies—it’s about us. I support old King George—I done all right by him.” He applied pen to paper again. In the silence, the entire pub concentrated on its scratching across the page. When he finished, Dick Butterfield looked around and feigned surprise at the attention. He turned to John Roberts. “Anything else you want?”
“Write down where you live as well.”
“It’s no. 6 Bastille Row.” Dick Butterfield chuckled. “But p’raps York Place’d be better for such a document, eh?” He wrote it next to his name. “There. No need to visit, then, eh?”
Now Maggie recalled several crates of port that had appeared from nowhere a few days earlier and were hidden under her parents’ bed, and smiled: Dick Butterfield had signed so readily because he didn’t want these men paying any visits to Bastille Row.
Once he had captured Dick Butterfield’s details, John Roberts slid the open book across to Thomas Kellaway. “Now you.”
Thomas Kellaway gazed down at the page, with its carefully composed declaration—its rhetoric-laden, almost incomprehensi-ble wording decided on at an earlier, smaller meeting, its messengers with their books fanning out across Lambeth’s pubs and markets even before the Cumberland Gardens meeting was over—and its ragtag signatures, some confident, others wavering, along with several Xs with names and addresses scrawled after them in John Roberts’s hand. It was all too complicated for him. “I don’t understand—why must I sign this?”
John Roberts leaned over and rapped his knuckles on the table next to the ledger. “You’re signing in support of the King! You’re saying you want him to be your King, and you’ll fight those who want to get rid of him.” He peered at the chairmaker’s puzzled face. “What, are you a fool, sir? Do you not call the King your King?”
Thomas Kellaway was not a fool, but words worried him. He had always lived by a policy of signing as few documents as possi-ble, and those only for business. He did not even sign the letters Maisie wrote to Sam, and discouraged her from writing anything about him. This way, he thought, there was little trace of him in the world, apart from his chairs, and he would not be misunderstood. This document before him, he felt with a clarity that surprised him, was open to misunderstanding. “I am not sure the King be in danger,” he said. “There be no French here, do there?”
John Roberts narrowed his eyes. “You would be surprised at what an ill-informed Englishman is capable of.”
“And what d’you mean by publications?” Thomas Kellaway continued without appearing to have heard John Roberts. “I don’t know anything about publications.”
John Roberts looked around. The goodwill that Dick Butterfield’s signature had garnered with the rest of the pub was rapidly diminishing with every ponderous word Thomas Kellaway uttered. “I haven’t time for this,” he hissed. “There are plenty of others here waiting to sign. Where do you live, sir?” He flipped to another page and waited with pen poised to note down the address. “Someone will visit you later to explain.”
“No. 12 Hercules Buildings,” Thomas Kellaway replied.
John Roberts stiffened. “You live at Hercules Buildings?”
Thomas Kellaway nodded. Jem felt a knot tighten in his stomach.
“Do you know a William Blake, who is a printer in that street?”
Jem, Maggie, and Dick Butterfield caught on at the same time, partly thanks to Thomas Kellaway’s mention of publications. Maggie kicked Thomas Kellaway’s stool and frowned at him, while Dick Butterfield feigned a coughing fit.
Unfortunately, Thomas Kellaway could be a bit of a terrier when it came to making a point. “Yes, I know Mr. Blake. He’s our neighbor.” And, because he did not care for the unfriendly look on John Roberts’s face, he decided to make his feelings clear. “He be a good man—he helped out my daughter a month or two back.”
“Did he, now?” John Roberts smiled and slammed shut the book. “Well, we were planning to pay a visit to Mr. Blake this evening, and can call on you as well. Good day to you.” He scooped up the quill and ink bottle and went on to the next table. As he made his way around the pub collecting signatures—Jem noticed that no one other than his father refused to sign—John Roberts glanced over now and then at Thomas Kellaway with the same sneer. It made Jem’s stomach turn over. “Let’s go, Pa,” he said in a low voice.
“Let me just finish my beer.” Thomas Kellaway was not going to be rushed by anyone, not when he had half a pint left to finish, even if the beer was watery. He sat squarely on his stool, hands resting on the table on each side of his mug, his eyes on its contents, his mind on Mr. Blake. He was wondering if he had got him into trouble. Though he did not know him well the way his children seemed to, he was sure Mr. Blake was a good man.
“What should we do?” Jem said in a low voice to Maggie. He too was thinking about Mr. Blake.
“Leave it be,” Dick Butterfield butted in. “Blake’ll probably sign it,” he added, glancing sideways at Thomas Kellaway. “Like most people.”
“We’ll warn him,” Maggie declared, ignoring her father. “That’s what we’ll do.”
2
“Mr. Blake is working, my dears,” Mrs. Blake said. “He can’t be disturbed.”
“Oh, but it’s important, ma’am!” Maggie cried, in her impatience darting to one side as if to get around her. But Mrs. Blake comfortably blocked the doorway, and did not move.
“He is in the middle of making one of his plates, and he likes to do that all in one sitting,” Mrs. Blake explained. “So we mustn’t stop him.”
“I’m afraid it be important, ma’am,” Jem said.
“Then you may tell me, and I’ll pass it on to Mr. Blake.”
Jem looked around, for once wishing there were a deadening fog about that would hide them from curious passersby. Since their earlier encounter with John Roberts, he’d felt as if there were eyes on them everywhere, watching them as they walked up the road. He expected any moment that Miss Pelham’s yellow curtains would twitch. As it
was, a man driving past on a cart loaded with bricks glanced at the little group in the doorway, his gaze seeming to linger.
“Can we come in, ma’am? We’ll tell you inside.”
Mrs. Blake studied his serious face, then stood aside and let them pass, shutting the door behind them without looking around, as others might. She put her finger to her lips and led them down the passage, past the front room with the printing press, past the closed door of Mr. Blake’s workroom and down the stairs to the basement kitchen. Jem and Maggie were already familiar with the room, for they had sat there with Maisie to warm her up after her encounter with John Astley. It was dark and smelled of cabbage and coal, with only a bit of light coming in from the front window, but the fire was lit and it was warm.
Mrs. Blake gestured for them to sit at the table; Jem noted that the chairs were his father’s Windsors. “Now, what is it, my dears?” she asked, leaning against the sideboard.
“We heard something in the pub,” Maggie said. “You’re to have a visit tonight.” She described the meeting at Cumberland Gardens and their encounter with John Roberts, leaving out that her father had signed the declaration.
A deep line appeared between Mrs. Blake’s eyebrows. “Was this meeting run by the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers?” She rattled off the name as if she were very familiar with it.
“They was mentioned,” Maggie answered, “though they just called the local branch the Lambeth Association.”
Mrs. Blake sighed. “We’d best go up and tell Mr. Blake, then. You were right to come.” She wiped her hands on her apron as if she had just been washing something, though her hands were dry.
Mr. Blake’s workroom was very tidy, with books and papers in various stacks on one table, and Mr. Blake at another table by the room’s back window. He was hunched over a metal plate the size of his hand, and did not look up immediately when they came in, but continued dabbing a brush in a line from right to left across the surface of the plate. While Maggie went to the fire to warm herself, Jem stepped up and watched him at work. It took him a minute to make out that Mr. Blake was writing words by painting them with the brush onto the plate. “You’re writing backwards, an’t you, sir?” Jem blurted out, though he knew he shouldn’t interrupt.
Burning Bright Page 23
