Burning Bright
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Maggie was sitting on the stile overlooking the first valley the track passed through. Seeing her perched there was so incongruous that Jem almost laughed. Instead he swallowed the laughter and quietly said her name so as not to startle her. Maggie whipped her head around. “Jem,” she said, her mouth tight, “who’d have thought we’d meet in a place like this, eh?”
Jem stepped up to the stile and leaned against it. “It be funny,” he agreed, looking down into the valley, much of it purple with shadows now that the sun was setting.
Maggie looked back at the valley again. “I got to this point and couldn’t go no further. I been sittin’ here all this time trying to get up the nerve to go down there, but I can’t. Look, there’s not a soul anywhere about but us. An’t natural.” She shivered.
“You get used to it. I never give it any thought—except when we moved to London and I missed it. I could never get away from people in London.”
“People’s all there is, though, an’t they? What else is there?”
Jem chuckled. “Everything else. Fields and trees and sky. I could be in them all day and be happy.”
“But none of that would mean anything if there weren’t people about to be with.”
“I suppose.” They continued to look at the valley rather than at each other. “Why didn’t you come to the house?” Jem said finally. “You come all this way and then turn round at the last mile.”
Maggie answered his question with her own. “The girls get there all right?”
“Yes.”
“Maisie didn’t have her baby in the middle of the road?”
“No, she got inside.”
Maggie nodded. “Good.”
“How did you find Rosie?”
“She found us, or the old stick, anyway.” She told Jem about discovering Rosie at Miss Pelham’s.
Jem grunted. “I don’t miss her.” His emphasis made it clear that there were things he did miss. Maggie felt her chest tighten.
“Thank’ee for bringing ’em back,” he added.
Maggie shrugged. “I wanted to see this famous Piddle-dee-dee. And they needed someone to take ’em, in their state.”
“I…I didn’t know about Maisie.”
“I know. You could’ve knocked me over when I saw her, I was that surprised.” She paused. “I have to tell you something, Jem. Maisie’s Maisie Butterfield now.”
Jem stared at her in such horror that Maggie giggled. “I know Charlie’s bad,” she said, “but he’s come in handy.” She explained about the lie she’d invented, adding, “Rosie’s married to Mr. Blake.”
Jem chuckled, and Maggie joined him with the bark of laughter he’d missed over the months they’d been apart.
“How be Mr. Blake?” he asked when they’d stopped laughing. “And Mrs. Blake?”
“The Association still bullies him. Nobody can say a thing about the King or France, or anything unusual, without ’em pouncing. And you know how Mr. Blake says unusual things. He’s had a bad time of it. Maisie can tell you—she’s been around him the most.”
“Did he give me this?” Jem pulled the book from his pocket.
“He did. Well, in a way.” At a look from Jem, she added, “No, I didn’t steal it! How could you think that? I’d never take anything from Mr. Blake! No, it’s just—he gave me two of ’em, both wrapped in brown paper, and the same size. And—well, I mixed ’em up in my pocket. I don’t know which is yours and which mine.”
“They an’t the same?”
“No.” Maggie jumped down from the stile—now she was on one side, with Jem on the other—picked up her bundle, and dug out the other book. “See?” She opened it to the title page, where the two children were reading a book at a woman’s knee. “Songs of Innocence,” she said. “I remember it from before. I didn’t know what the other said, so I chose this one. What’s that one called, then?”
“Songs of Experience.” Jem opened his to the title page and showed her.
“Hah! Opposites, then.” They smiled at each other. “But which is yours, d’you think, and which mine? I mean, which do you think Mr. Blake meant us to have? He was very particular about one being specially for you and one for me.”
Jem shook his head. “You could ask him.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. He’d be disappointed I got ’em mixed up. We’ll have to decide for ourselves.”
They contemplated the books in silence. Then Maggie spoke again. “Jem, why’d you leave without saying good-bye, back in Lambeth?”
Jem shrugged. “We had to leave quick ’cause of Miss Pelham.”
Maggie studied his profile. “You could’ve found me to say good-bye. Was it ’cause you couldn’t—can’t—forgive me for—for doin’ what I did, what I told you about, at Cut-Throat Lane? ’Cause when that happened to me—well, for a time I thought the world would never be right again. Once you do summat like that, you can’t go back to the way it was before you did it. You lose it, and it’s hard to get it back. But then you and Maisie and Mr. Blake came along, and I felt better, finally, once I told you—except I’m scared of the dark, and of being alone.”
“It’s all right,” Jem answered at last. “I were surprised, is all. It made me think of you different. But it’s all right.”
They looked down at their books in the coming dark. Then Maggie leaned over the page of Jem’s book. “Is that a tiger?”
Jem nodded, and peered at the words. “‘Tyger tyger—’”
“‘Burning bright,’” Maggie joined in, to his surprise,
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
“Maisie taught me that,” she added. “I can’t read it—yet.”
“Maisie taught you?” Jem pondered this, wondering how much his sister had changed from her stay in London. “What’s ‘symmetry’?”
“Dunno—you’ll have to ask her.”
Jem closed the book and cleared his throat. “Where you going now, in the dark, all alone?”
Maggie tapped the book against her palm. “I was going to catch up to the button man in Piddletown, and offer to make buttons for him to raise my fare back to London.”
Jem wrinkled his brow. “How much do it cost?”
“A pound all in on the stage if I ride up top, less if I get a wagon.”
“Maggie, you’d have to make a thousand buttons at least to pay your fare!”
“Would I? Lord a mercy!” Maggie joined Jem’s laughter. It released something, and soon they were laughing so hard they had to clutch their stomachs.
When their laughter at last died down, Jem said, “So what were you going to do, stuck on this stile—stay here all night?”
Maggie ran her fingers over the cover of the book. “I knew you’d come.”
“Oh.”
“So if I’m on this side o’ the fence, and you’re on t’other, what’s in the middle?”
Jem put his hand on the stile. “We are.” After a moment Maggie pressed hers over his, and their hands remained sandwiched that way for a time, each warming the other.
The valley before them was darkening now, the river and trees at the bottom no longer visible.
“I can’t stay here, though, Jem,” Maggie said softly. “I can’t.” She shed some tears, but soon wiped them.
“I’ll walk you to Piddletown if you like,” Jem said after a while.
“How can you? Look how dark it is!”
“Moon’ll be up soon—we can see by that.”
“Will it? How do you know that?”
Jem smiled. “Tha’ be the sort o’ thing we know out here. We don’t have lamplighters going up and down the streets.” He handed her his book while he climbed over the stile. When Maggie held out Songs of Experience for him to take back, Jem shook his head. “You keep it with t’other. Look how they fit together in your hand. They be just the same size.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t! No, you keep ’em. Otherwise yo
u’ll never see ’em.”
“I could come up to London to see them.”
“No, that’s not fair. No, you keep ’em and I’ll come to Piddledee-dee to visit.”
Jem laughed and took her hand. “Then you would have to learn to cross this field alone.”
“Not if you came to meet the coach.”
They argued about it all the way to Piddletown.
Acknowledgments
There are many—too many—resources on William Blake in the world. A few that I found most useful:
The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist (1863, and recently re issued)
Blake by Peter Ackroyd (1995)
The Stranger from altParadise: A Biography of William Blake by G. E. Bentley, Jr. (2001)
Blake Records (2nd edition) edited by G. E. Bentley, Jr. (2004)
William Blake (Tate Britain exhibition catalog) by Robin Hamlyn et al. (2001), particularly the section on Lambeth by Michael Phillips
William Blake by Kathleen Raine (1970)
William Blake: The Creation of the Songs by Michael Phillips (2000)
“Blake and the Terror, 1792–1793” by Michael Phillips, in TheLibrary, sixth series, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 1994), pp. 263–97
“No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth: William Blake’s Printmaking Workshop and Etching-Painting Studio Recovered” by Michael Phillips, in The British Art Journal, vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 13–21
The most comprehensive Internet resource on Blake is undoubtedly the William Blake Archive at www.blakearchive.org.
I am going to list only the most entertaining of the myriad works that have helped me to re-create eighteenth-century London, as well as a selection of resources useful for more specific topics:
The Autobiography of Francis Place edited by Mary Thale (1972); also the archive of Francis Place held at the British Library
London Life in the 18th Century by M. Dorothy George (1925)
On Lambeth Marsh by Graham Gibberd (1992)
A to Z of Regency London (1985): a remarkably detailed map made of London by Richard Horwood from 1792 to 1799 (with subsequent updates); also available online at www.motco.com
The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution edited by David Bindman (1989)
Astley’s Amphitheatre and the Early Circus in England, 1768–1830 (Ph.D. thesis) by Marius Kwint (1994); also the archive of Astley’s cuttings from newspapers held at the British Library
Buttony by Mervyn Bright (1971)
The English Regional Chair by Bernard D. Cotton (1990)
The punctuation Blake used in reproducing his poems was erratic and confusing; I have taken the liberty of stripping it away so that it can be read aloud more easily; readers who would like to see it as he printed it should refer to The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly revised edition, edited by David V. Erdman (1988). I am aware too that Blake’s poem “London” would likely have been in an earlier draft when Jem hears it in Bunhill Fields, but I’ve used the final version so as not to confuse everyone.
I would like to thank the following people who helped me during the making of this book:
Robin Hamlyn, curator at the Tate Collection, London; Chris Fletcher and his successor, Jamie Andrews, at the British Library, who allowed me to handle Blake’s notebook without flinching; Greg Jecman at the National Gallery of Art and Daniel De Simone at the Library of Congress, both Washington, DC; Sheila O’Connell at the Prints and Drawings Room of the British Museum; Tim Heath, president of the Blake Society (UK);
Marius Kwint, expert on Philip Astley, whom I hope will write a biography about him, for Astley was probably even more outrageous than I have portrayed him;
Mike and Sally Howard-Tripp, who first introduced me to the joys of Piddletrenthide;
Thelma Johns of the Old Button Shop in Lytchett Minster, Dorset, for sharing her knowledge and her Dorset buttons;
Guy Smith of Dorchester, for help with Piddle Valley pub names;
Lindsey Young and Alexandria Lawrence for their able assistance; Zoë Clarke for capable copy editing; Jonny Geller and Deborah Schneider, star agents; and editors Susan Watt and—new to the team, and what would we do without her—Carole DeSanti, pushing me to flex muscles I didn’t know I had;
Laura Devine, who bravely bought the privilege of allowing me to name a character after her, at an auction to raise funds for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (UK).
My single greatest debt, however, is to Blake scholar Michael Phillips, whose groundbreaking, attentive, and blessedly commonsensical work on Blake during his Lambeth years inspired me to focus on this period, and specifically on 1792 and 1793. His biography of Blake in Lambeth during the anti-Jacobin Terror in Britain is nearing completion, and will do much to help us understand this most complicated, unusual man. I eagerly await it.