Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

  “Shhh!” Maggie hissed. Passersby were beginning to take note of them, and Maggie didn’t want to draw attention to yet another pregnant girl.

  No one, however, could shush Miss Pelham. “Are you telling me to be quiet, you little guttersnipe?” she cried, her voice rising almost to a song. “I’ll have you taken away and beaten till you’re sorry you’re alive! I’ll have you—”

  “I was only saying shush, ma’am,” Maggie interrupted loudly, and thinking fast, “because you won’t want to draw more attention to yourself than you already have. I just heard someone telling another that you’d a visitor—your niece.” She nodded at Rosie Wightman. A man in the road carrying a basket of shrimps on his head broke his stride at Maggie’s words and leered at Miss Pelham and Rosie. “She looks just like you, ma’am!” he said, to Maggie’s delight and Miss Pelham’s horror. The latter gazed fearfully about to see if anyone else had heard, then jumped inside and slammed the door.

  Turning away in satisfaction, Maggie contemplated her latest surprise and sighed. “Lord a mercy, Rosie Wightman, what we goin’ to do with you?”

  Rosie stood complacent. It was enough for her to have got herself this far, even if ten months later than Jem and Maisie had expected her. As with the men she went with, once a course of action was set in motion, she was content to surrender. “Have you anything to eat?” she yawned. “I be so hungry.”

  “Oh Lord,” Maggie sighed again, before taking Rosie by the arm and leading her to no. 13 Hercules Buildings.

  5

  It was rare for the Butterfields to sit down of an evening and eat together at home. To Maggie it was a miracle that this happened the night before she was to leave on the Weymouth coach. It was what she might have planned if she had thought she could manage it. As it was, she had expected simply to go to bed early and sneak out before dawn to pick up the girls. She had prepared several lies, if she needed them, for why she couldn’t accompany her mother to a night wash (a vinegar girl had asked her to fill in the next day) or her father to the pub (she had a bellyache). In the end she didn’t need either: Bet Butterfield did not have a wash to go to, and Dick Butterfield announced that he was staying in and expected a steak and kidney pie for supper.

  Pie brought Charlie sniffing, and pulled them to the table to sit around the plate Bet Butterfield set down in the center. For a few minutes there was no sound as they tucked in. “Ah,” Dick Butterfield sighed after several bites. “Perfection, chuck. You could be cooking for the King.”

  “I’d settle for washin’ his sheets,” Bet Butterfield replied. “Think what a lot o’ money them palace laundresses must earn, eh, Dick?”

  “What’s the matter, Mags—you’re not eatin’ the pie your mam’s taken such trouble over. Is that gratitude?”

  “Sorry, Mam, I’ve a bit of a bellyache.” Maggie used up one of her lies anyway. She was finding it hard to swallow, her stomach jittery with nerves about the next day. Her mother’s talk of money made her feel even worse: She kept shooting glances at Charlie, who still hadn’t given her the spoon money. She was hoping to pull him aside later. Now he was enjoying ignoring her as he reached for another helping of pie.

  “Well, now, that’s a shame,” Dick Butterfield said. “Maybe you’ll feel better later.”

  “Maybe.” Maggie looked at Charlie again. He was sucking at a piece of beef fat, the grease glistening on his lips. She wanted to slap him.

  Charlie smiled at her. “What’s the matter, Mags? Not making you sick, am I? You’re not feeling poor, are you?”

  “Shut up,” Maggie muttered, wondering now at Charlie’s mood, which was not the sort in which he was likely to keep promises.

  “What’s this, what’s this?” Dick Butterfield said. “Stop it, you two. Let’s eat in peace.”

  When they’d finished, Dick Butterfield sat back and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I’m going up to Smithfield’s tomorrow,” he announced. “Goin’ to see someone about some lambs comin’ in from—where was they comin’ in from, Charlie?”

  “Dor-set-shire,” Charlie answered, drawing out each syllable.

  Maggie’s throat closed so that she couldn’t speak.

  “You want to come, Mags?” Dick Butterfield’s eyes rested on her. “It’s easier to let Dorsetshire come to you rather’n you go to Dorsetshire, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Charlie, you bastard!” Maggie managed to get out, realizing now that he had never intended to give her the spoon money.

  “Now, Mags,” Dick Butterfield interjected, “don’t blame him. He’s just lookin’ out for you. You don’t think he’s goin’ to let you go off on a country adventure without tellin’ me.”

  “I—Please, Pa. I’m just tryin’ to help her.”

  “The best help you can give is to your mam with her laundry, not runnin’ round Dorsetshire looking for that boy, under the ruse of helping his sister.”

  “I’m not doing that! I just want to take her home, where she wants to be, out of this—this cesspit!”

  Dick Butterfield chuckled. “You think this is a cesspit, gal, wait till you get to the countryside. Things happen out there just as bad as here—worse, sometimes, as there an’t so many people watchin’ out for you. You forget that your mam and me is from the countryside—we knows what we’re talkin’ about, don’t we, Bet?”

  Maggie’s mother had remained quiet throughout this exchange, concentrating on clearing the table. She looked up briefly from the last bit of pie she was moving to the sideboard. “That’s right, duck,” she agreed, her voice flat. Maggie studied her mother’s face, and found in her frown a spark of hope, even as her father was saying, “You’ll be staying here with us, Mags. You’re a London girl, you know. You belong here.”

  Maggie lay awake most of the night, thinking of ways she might still get the money she needed for the journey. This included selling one of Mr. Blake’s gifts, if they were valuable, though she hated the idea.

  Then hope arrived. After a short doze, Maggie awoke to find Bet Butterfield sitting by her bed. “Shh. We don’t want to wake no one. Get yourself dressed and ready for your journey. Quiet, now.” Her mother gestured toward the other bed, where Charlie was sleeping on his stomach, his mouth open.

  Maggie quickly changed and gathered the few things she would need, making sure above all that Mr. Blake’s packages were safe in her pocket.

  When she joined her mother in the kitchen, Bet Butterfield handed her a sack filled with bread and the remnants of the pie, and a handkerchief knotted around a bulge of coins. “This should get you to Dorsetshire,” she whispered. “It’s bits and bobs I’ve set aside these past months—all my button money, and other things too. Since you’ve helped me with ’em, some of it’s yours. That’s how I see it.” She said this as if already rehearsing her side of the argument she would have the next day with her husband when he discovered Maggie and the money were gone.

  “Thanks, Mam.” Maggie hugged her mother. “Why you doin’ this for me?”

  “I owe that girl somethin’ for lettin’ her get in the state she’s in. You get her home safe, now. And come back, will you.”

  Maggie hugged Bet Butterfield again, breathing in her smell of pie and laundry, then crept out while her luck still held.

  6

  Maggie remembered every moment of the journey to Dorsetshire, and long afterward liked to travel through it again in her mind. Bet Butterfield’s money extended only to two passages inside the coach, and it took a great deal of persuasion for the coachman to agree to let Maggie sit up beside him for the reduced third fare. He was convinced at last by the state of Maisie and Rosie, with Maggie claiming she was a midwife and if she didn’t go along the coachman might have to deliver the babies himself.

  Maisie and Rosie caused a sensation everywhere they went together—at the inns where the horses were changed, at the dinner tables, in the streets where they took a turn to stretch their legs, in the coach itself, crowded with the other passengers. One pregnant girl was com
mon enough, but with two together the double dose of fertility directed attention their way, offending some, delighting others. Maisie and Rosie were so happy to have each other’s company that they barely noticed the tuts and smiles, but snuggled together in the coach, and whispered and giggled in the street. It was just as well, then, that Maggie sat on top of the coach. Besides, from there she had a much better view of the vivid, unfamiliar landscape of southern England.

  The first stage was not so surprising, as the coach passed through a string of villages that shadowed the Thames and looked back to London for their vitality—Vauxhall, Wandsworth, Putney, Barnes, Sheen. Only after Richmond and the first change of horses did Mag gie feel they had truly left London behind. The land opened out into long, rolling hills in a physical rhythm unknown to someone accustomed to the chopped-up streets of a big city. At first Maggie could only look ahead over the layered hills to the horizon, which was farther away than she’d ever witnessed. After coming to terms with that spacious novelty, she was then able to focus on the landscape closer to hand, to take in the fields segmented by hedgerows, the sheep and cows sprinkled about, and the thatched houses, whose shaggy curves made her laugh. By the time they stopped for dinner in Basingstoke, she was even asking the coachman for the names of roadside flowers she had never taken any interest in before.

  It would all have been overwhelming for a London girl if she weren’t perched on the rattling box, detached from what she saw, passing by but not engaging with the countryside. Maggie felt safe where she was, squeezed between coachman and groom, and loved every minute on the road—even when it began to rain midafternoon and the coachman’s hat dripped directly onto her head.

  They stayed the night at an inn in Stockbridge. Maggie got little sleep, for it was noisy, with coaches arriving till midnight and the inn serving far later. Sharing a bed with two pregnant girls meant that one or the other was always getting up to use the chamber pot. Then too, Maggie had never slept anywhere other than at home and, briefly, in the Blakes’ summerhouse. She wasn’t used to such a public place for sleeping, with three other beds in the room, and women coming and going all night long.

  Lying still after a day on the move gave Maggie time at last to think about what she was doing, and to fret. For one thing, she had little money left. The inn meals had been half a crown each, with another shilling to the waiter, and extra costs kept appearing—sixpence expected by the chambermaid who showed them to their room and gave them a sheet and blankets, tuppence for the boy who told them he must clean their boots, a penny for the porter who insisted on carrying their bags upstairs when they could easily have done so themselves, for they had few things. With her meager fund of pennies and shillings rapidly eroding, Maggie would have nothing left by the time she reached the Piddle Valley.

  She thought too about her family: how angry her father would be to discover she had escaped, how much grief her mother would have to suffer from him for helping Maggie. Above all, she wondered where Charlie was right now, and whether he would find her one day and punish her for the revenge she took on him. For that morning, when she and the girls had reached the White Hart in the Borough High Street where the Weymouth coach started, Maggie had spied a soldier, taken him aside, and told him there was a young man at no. 6 Bastille Row full of enough piss to take on the French. The soldier had promised to visit the house first thing—the army was always looking for likely young lads to send to war—and had given her a shilling. It was nothing like the amount of the spoon money she never got off her brother, but it was every bit as satisfying—and even more satisfying to think of Charlie shipped off to France.

  In the morning, though still damp from the previous day’s rain, Maggie was keen to start—keener, indeed, than Maisie and Rosie, who were tired, flea-bitten, and sore from the previous day’s bumping about in the coach. Maisie in particular was silent over the hurried bread and ale breakfast, and stayed in the coach at the changes of the horses. She ate little of her dinner at Blandford—which was just as well, for Maggie had only enough money for two dinners, split between the girls while she ate her mother’s pie.

  “You all right?” she said as Maisie pushed her plate to Rosie, who happily ate her way through the untouched potatoes and cabbage.

  “Baby’s heavy,” Maisie replied. She swallowed. “Oh, Maggie, I can’t believe I’ll be home in a few hours. Home! It do feel like I han’t seen Piddletrenthide in years, though it be only a year and a bit.”

  Maggie’s gut twisted. Until now she’d been enjoying the trip so much that she’d managed to push from her mind what it was leading to. Now she wondered what it would be like actually to see Jem again, for he knew her deepest secret and had shown what he thought of it. She was not sure he would want to see her. “Maisie,” she began, “p’raps—well, it’s not far now, is it?”

  “No, not far. They’ll leave us at Piddletown—tha’ be six miles from here. We can walk from there—another five miles or so.”

  “P’raps, then, you two could go on without me. I’ll stay here and catch the coach on its way back.” Maggie hadn’t told Maisie of her money troubles, but looking around Blandford—a busy town, the largest they’d been through since Basingstoke—she thought she could find work briefly somewhere and earn her fare back. It couldn’t be that hard to be a chambermaid in a coaching inn, she decided.

  Maisie, however, clutched at Maggie. “Oh, no, you can’t leave us! We need you! What would we do without you?” Even the passive Rosie looked over in alarm. Maisie lowered her voice. “Please don’t abandon us, Maggie. I…I do think the baby’s coming soon.” Even as she said it she winced, her body tense and rigid, as if trying to contain a deep pain.

  Maggie’s eyes widened. “Maisie!” she hissed. “How long has this been goin’ on?”

  Maisie gazed at her fearfully. “Since this morning,” she said. “But it an’t bad yet. Please can we go on? I don’t want to have it here!” She looked around her at the noisy, busy, dirty inn. “I want to get home.”

  “Well, at least you an’t at the yelling stage,” Maggie decided. “You could be hours yet. Let’s see how we get on.”

  Maisie squeezed her hand gratefully.

  Maggie did not enjoy that last leg of the coach journey, worrying about Maisie down below but reluctant to ask the coachman to stop so she could check on her. She could only assume that Rosie would rap on the ceiling if something were wrong. And the surrounding landscape—despite the greenness of the fields, the pleasing movement of hills and valleys, the bright blue sky, and the sun lighting up the fields and hedgerows—looked threatening to her now that she knew she’d soon be out in the middle of it. She began to notice how few houses there were. What are we going to do? she thought. What if Maisie has the baby out in a field somewhere?

  7

  Piddletown was a large village, with several streets lined with thatched houses, a handful of pubs, and a market square, where the coach let them down. Maggie said good-bye to the coachman, who wished her well, then laughed and cracked his whip at the horses. When the coach was gone, taking with it the clopping and jangling and rattling they had lived with for the last day and a half, the three girls stood silent in the street. Unlike London, where most passersby wouldn’t even notice the girls, here it felt to Maggie as if every person was staring at the new arrivals.

  “Rosie Wightman, look a’ wha’ you been doin’,” remarked a young woman leaning against a house with a basket of buns. Rosie, who’d had many reasons to cry in the two years since she’d left the Piddle Valley but never had, burst into tears.

  “You leave her be, you bandy little bitch!” Maggie shouted. To her amazement, the woman guffawed. Maggie turned to Maisie for a translation.

  “She can’t understand you,” Maisie explained. “They’re not used to London ways. Don’t.” She pulled at Maggie’s sleeve to keep her back from the laughter that had spread to others. “It don’t matter. Piddletowners has always been funny with us. Come on.” She led them up the str
eet, and in a few minutes they were out of the village and on a track heading northwest.

  “You sure you want to leave town?” Maggie asked. “If you need to stop and have your baby, now’s the time to say.”

  Maisie shook her head. “Don’t want to have it in Piddletown. An’ I be all right. Pain’s gone.” Indeed, she stepped eagerly along the track, taking Rosie’s hand and swinging it as they entered the familiar landscape of hills that would take them down into the Piddle Valley. They began to point out landmarks to each other, and to speculate once again about various residents of their village, as they had done constantly over the past few days.

  At first the hills were long and gently rolling, with a wide sky above them like an overturned blue bowl and a view for miles of green and brown ridges divided by woods and hedgerows. The track led straight alongside a tall hedgerow, with misty banks of shoulder-high cow parsley flanking the way. It was hot and still, and with the sun beating down, insects invisibly whirring and ticking, and the cow parsley floating her along, Maggie began to feel as if she were in a dream. There were no sheep or cows in the nearby fields, and no people about. She spun all the way around and could see neither a house nor a barn nor a plow nor a trough nor even a fence. Other than the rutted track, there was nothing to indicate that people even existed, much less lived, here. She had a sudden vision of herself in this land as a bird might see her from high above, a lone speck of white among the green and brown and yellow. The emptiness frightened her: She could feel fear gripping her stomach and working its way up her chest to her throat, where it held tight and threatened to throttle her. She stopped, gulped, and tried to call to the girls, who were getting farther and farther away from her down the track.

  Maggie shut her eyes and took a deep breath, in her mind hearing her father say, “Pull yourself together, Mags. This won’t do at all.” When she opened her eyes she saw a figure coming down the hill in front of them. The relief that flooded her was tempered by new concern, for as Maggie knew too well, a lone man could be the danger that made the emptiness so threatening. She hurried to catch up with the girls, who had also spotted the man. Neither seemed worried—in fact, they quickened their pace. “Tha’ be Mr. Case!” Maisie cried. “He’ll be comin’ from the Piddles. Ar’ernoon!” She waved at him.