Burning Bright (18 page)

Jem had not really considered what it was he had come all this way for. He had supposed Bunhill Fields would be grand, being in London—the Westminster Abbey equivalent of a graveyard, something you walked miles to see. To his surprise, it seemed to him not so different from the Piddletrenthide church graveyard. It was, of course, much bigger. Ten Piddle church grounds could have fit comfortably into this field. Moreover, there was no church or chapel for services or spiritual comfort, but simply row upon row of gravestones, broken up here and there by larger monuments, and by a few trees—oak, plane, mulberry. Nor was it sheltered from the outside world as a place for quiet contemplation, for a large brewery jutted into the field, filling it with the worldly, lively smell of hops, and doubtless very busy during the week.

Yet as he stared at the gravestones through the iron railings, waiting with the girls for Mr. Blake's mother to be carried to her resting place, and later, as a few graveside words were spoken and they idled among the stones, Jem felt Bunhill Fields send him into the silent reverie—part tranquil, part melancholic—so familiar to him from when he used to wander around the Piddletrenthide church graveyard. Now that village graveyard included Tommy's grave, though, and Jem knew he would feel different there. “Pear tree's loss,” he murmured, making Maggie turn her head and stare.

The funeral was over quickly. “They didn't have a church service,” Jem whispered to Maggie as they leaned against a large rectangular monument and watched from a distance while Mr. Blake and his brothers shoveled earth into the grave, then handed the spade over to professional gravediggers.

“They don't here,” Maggie explained. “This is a Dissenters' graveyard. They don't use prayer books or nothing, and the grounds han't been blessed. Mr. Blake's a proper radical. Didn't you know that?”

“Do that mean he'll go to Hell?” Maisie asked, plucking at a daisy growing at the base of the grave.

“Dunno—maybe.” With her finger Maggie traced the name on the tombstone, though she could not read it. “We're all going to Hell, I expect. I'll wager there is no Heaven.”

“Maggie, don't say that!” Maisie cried.

“Well, maybe there's a Heaven for you, Miss Piddle. You'll be awfully lonely there, though.”

“I don't see why there has to be just the one or t'other,” Jem said. “Can't there be something that's more a bit of both?”

“That's the world, Jem,” Maggie said.

“I suppose.”

“Well said, my girl. Well said, Maggie.”

The children jumped. Mr. Blake had detached himself from the funeral party and come up behind them. “Oh, hallo, Mr. Blake,” Maggie said, wondering if he was angry with them for following him. He did not seem angry, though—after all, he was praising her for something.

“You have answered the question I posed you on Westminster Bridge,” he continued. “I wondered when you would.”

“I did? What question?” Maggie searched her memory, but couldn't recall much of the heady conversation they'd had with Mr. Blake on the bridge.

“I remember,” Jem said. “You were asking what was in the middle of the river—between its opposite banks.”

“Yes, my boy, and Maggie has just said what it is. Do you understand the answer?” He turned his intense gaze on Jem, who looked back at him, though it hurt, the way staring at the sun does, for the man's glittering eyes cut through whatever mask Jem had donned to go this deep into London. As they looked at each other, he felt stripped naked, as if Mr. Blake could see everything inside him—his fear of all that was new and different about London; his concern for Maisie and his parents; his shock at the state of Rosie Wightman; his new, surprising feelings for Maggie; his deep sorrow for the death of his brother, of his cat, of everyone who was lost and would be lost, himself included. Jem was confused and exhilarated by his afternoon with Maggie, by the odors of life and death at Smithfield's, by the beautiful clothes in St. James's Park and the wretched rags of St. Giles, by Maggie's laughter and the blood from her nose.

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'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.”

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:

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.”