Burning Bright (2 page)

Thomas Kellaway felt very small and timid as he passed between the tall columns outside the amphitheatre. He was a small, lean man, with tightly curled hair, like the pelt of a terrier, cut close to his scalp. His presence made little impression on such a grand entrance. Stepping inside and leaving his family out in the street, he found the foyer dark and empty, though he could hear the pounding of hooves and the cracking of a whip through a doorway. Following the sounds, he entered the theatre itself, standing among rows of benches to gape at the performing ring, where several horses were trotting, their riders standing rather than sitting on the saddles. In the center a young man stood cracking a whip as he called out directions. Though he had seen them do the same at a show in Dorchester a month earlier, Thomas Kellaway still stared. If anything it seemed even more astonishing that the riders could perform such a trick again. One time might be a lucky acci-dent; twice indicated real skill.

Surrounding the stage, a wooden structure of boxes and a gallery had been built, with seats and places to stand. A huge three-tiered wagon-wheel chandelier hung above it all, and the round roof with open shutters high up also let in light.

Thomas Kellaway didn't watch the riders for long, for as he stood among the benches a man approached and asked what he wanted.

“I be wantin' to see Mr. Astley, sir, if he'll have me,” Thomas Kellaway replied.

The man he was speaking to was Philip Astley's assistant manager. John Fox had a long mustache and heavy-lidded eyes, which he usually kept half-closed, only ever opening them wide at disasters—of which there had been and would be several in the course of Philip Astley's long run as a circus impresario. Thomas Kellaway's sudden appearance at the amphitheatre was not what John Fox would consider a disaster, and so he regarded the Dorset man without surprise and through drooping eyelids. He was used to people asking to see his boss. He also had a prodigious memory, which is always useful in an assistant, and remembered Thomas Kellaway from Dorchester the previous month. “Go outside,” he said, “an' I expect in the end he'll be along to see you.”

Puzzled by John Fox's sleepy-looking eyes and lackadaisical answer, Thomas Kellaway retreated back to his family in the cart. It was enough that he'd got his family to London; he had run out of the wherewithal to achieve more.

No one would have guessed—least of all himself—that Thomas Kellaway, Dorset chairmaker, from a family settled in the Piddle Valley for centuries, would end up in London. Everything about his life up until he met Philip Astley had been ordinary. He had learned chair-making from his father, and inherited the workshop on his father's death. He married the daughter of his father's closest friend, a woodcutter, and except for the fumbling they did in bed together, it was like being with a sister. They lived in Piddletrenthide, the village they had both grown up in, and had three sons—Sam, Tommy, and Jem—and a daughter, Maisie. Thomas went to the Five Bells to drink two evenings a week, to church every Sunday, to Dorchester every month. He had never been to the seaside twelve miles away, or expressed any interest, as others in the pub sometimes did, in seeing any of the cathedrals within a few days' reach—Wells or Salisbury or Winchester—or of going to Poole or Bristol or London. When he was in Dorchester, he did his business—took commissions for chairs, bought wood—and went home again. He preferred to get back late rather than to stay over at one of the tradesmen's inns in Dorchester and drink his money away. That seemed to him far more dangerous than dark roads. He was a genial man, never the loudest in the pub, happiest when he was turning chair legs on his lathe, concentrating on one small groove or curve, or even forgetting that he was making a chair, and simply admiring the grain or color or texture of the wood.

This was how he lived, and how he was expected to live, until in February 1792, Philip Astley's Traveling Equestrian Spectacular came to spend a few days in Dorchester, just two weeks after Tommy Kellaway fell from the pear tree. Astley's Circus was touring the West Country, diverting there on its way back to London from a winter spent in Dublin and Liverpool. Though it was advertised widely with posters and handbills and puffs about the show in the
Western Flying Post
, Thomas Kellaway had not known the show was in town when he went on one of his trips there. He had come to deliver a set of eight high-back Windsor chairs, bringing them in his cart along with his son Jem, who was learning the trade, as Thomas Kellaway had done from his father.

Jem helped unload the chairs and watched his father handle the customer with that tricky combination of deference and confidence needed for business. “Pa,” he began, when the transaction was complete and Thomas Kellaway had pocketed an extra crown from the pleased customer, “can we go and look at the sea?” On a hill south of Dorchester, it was possible to see the sea five miles away. Jem had been to the view a few times, and hoped one day to get to the sea itself. In the fields above the Piddle Valley, he often peered south, hoping that somehow the landscape of layered hills would have shifted to allow him a glimpse of the blue line of water that led to the rest of the world.

“No, son, we'd best get home,” Thomas Kellaway replied automatically, then regretted it as he saw Jem's face shut down like curtains drawn over a window. It reminded him of a brief period in his life when he too wanted to see and do new things, to break away from established routines, until age and responsibility yanked him back into the acceptance he needed to live a quiet Piddle life. Jem no doubt would also come to this acceptance naturally. That was what growing up was. Yet he felt for him.

He said nothing more. But when they passed the meadows by the River Frome on the outskirts of town, where a round wooden structure with a canvas roof had been erected, he and Jem watched the men juggling torches by the roadside to lure customers in; Thomas Kellaway then felt for the extra crown in his pocket and turned the cart off into the field. It was the first unpredictable thing he had ever done, and it seemed, briefly, to loosen something in him, like the ice on a pond cracking in spring.

It made it easier when he and Jem returned home later that night with tales of the spectacles they'd seen, as well as an encounter they'd had with Philip Astley himself, for Thomas Kellaway to face his wife's bitter eyes that judged him for having dared to have fun when his son's grave was still fresh. “He offered me work, Anne,” he told her. “In London. A new life, away from—” He didn't finish. He didn't need to—they were both thinking of the mound of earth in the Piddletrenthide graveyard.

The Kellaways waited at the cart for half an hour before they were visited by Philip Astley himself—circus owner, creator of spectacles, origin of outlandish gossip, magnet to the skilled and the eccentric, landlord, patron of local businesses, and oversized colorful character. He sported a red coat he had worn years before during his service as a cavalry officer; it had gold buttons and trim, and was fastened only at the collar, revealing a substantial belly held in by a buttoned white waistcoat. His trousers were white; his boots had chaps that came to the knee; and in his one concession to civilian life, he wore a black top hat, which he was constantly raising to ladies he recognized or would like to recognize. Accompanied by the ever-present John Fox, he trotted down the steps of the amphitheatre, strode up to the cart, raised his hat to Anne Kellaway, shook Thomas Kellaway's hand, and nodded at Jem and Maisie. “Welcome, welcome!” he cried, brusque and cheerful at the same time. “It is very good to see you again, sir! I trust you are enjoying the sights of London after your journey from Devon?”

“Dorsetshire, sir,” Thomas Kellaway corrected. “We lived near Dorchester.”

“Ah, yes, Dorchester—a fine town. You make barrels there, do you?”

“Chairs,” John Fox corrected in a low voice. This was why he went everywhere with his employer—to provide the necessary nudges and adjustments when needed.

“Chairs, yes, of course. And what can I do for you, sir, ma'am?” He nodded at Anne Kellaway a touch uneasily, for she was sitting ramrod straight, her eyes fixed on Mr. Smart, now up on Westminster Bridge, her mouth pulled tight like a drawstring bag. Every inch of her gave out the message that she did not want to be here or have anything to do with him; and that was a message Philip Astley was unused to. His fame made him much in demand, with too many people seeking his attention. For someone to display the opposite threw him, and immediately made him go out of his way to regain that attention. “Tell me what you need!” he added, with a sweep of his arm, a gesture lost on Anne Kellaway, who kept her eyes on Mr. Smart.

Anne Kellaway had begun to regret their decision to move from Dorsetshire almost the moment the cart pulled away from their cottage, the feeling deepening over the week they spent on the road picking their way through the early spring mud. By the time she sat in front of the amphitheatre, not looking at Philip Astley, she knew that being in London was not going to take her mind from Tommy as she'd hoped it might; if anything, it made her think of him even more, for being here reminded her of what she was fleeing. But she would rather blame her husband, and Philip Astley too, for her misfortune than Tommy himself for being such a fool.

“Well, sir,” Thomas Kellaway began, “you did invite me to London, and I'm very kindly accepting your offer.”

“Did I?” Philip Astley turned to John Fox. “Did I invite him, Fox?”

John Fox nodded. “You did, sir.”

“Oh, don't you remember, Mr. Astley?” Maisie cried, leaning forward. “Pa told us all about it. He and Jem were at your show, an' during it someone were doing a trick atop a chair on a horse, an' the chair broke and Pa fixed it for you right there. An' you got to talking about wood and furniture, because you trained as a cabi-netmaker, didn't you, sir?”

“Hush, Maisie,” Anne Kellaway interjected, turning her head for a moment from the bridge. “I'm sure he doesn't want to hear about all that.”

Philip Astley gazed at the slim country girl talking with such animation from her perch and chuckled. “Well, now, miss, I do begin to recall such an encounter. But how does that bring you here?”

“You told Pa if he ever wanted to, he should come to London and you would help him set himself up. So that's what we done, an' here we be.”

“Here you be indeed, Maisie, all of you.” He turned to Jem, judging him to be about twelve and of the useful age to a circus for running errands and helping out. “And what's your name, lad?”

“Jem, sir.”

“What sort of chairs are those you're sitting next to, young Jem?”

“Windsors, sir. Pa made 'em.”

“A handsome chair, Jem, very handsome. Could you make me some?”

“Of course, sir,” Thomas Kellaway said.

Philip Astley's eyes slid to Anne Kellaway. “I'll take a dozen of 'em.”

Anne Kellaway stiffened, but still did not look at the circus man despite his generous commission.

“Now, Fox, what rooms have we got free at the moment?” he demanded. Philip Astley owned a fair number of houses in Lambeth, the area around the amphitheatre and just across Westminster Bridge from London proper.

John Fox moved his lips so that his mustache twitched. “Only some with Miss Pelham at Hercules Buildings—but she chooses her own lodgers.”

“Well, she'll choose the Kellaways—they'll do nicely. Take 'em over there now, Fox, with some boys to help unload.” Philip Astley lifted his hat once more at Anne Kellaway, shook Thomas Kellaway's hand again, and said, “If you need anything, Fox'll see you right. Welcome to Lambeth!”

Maggie Butterfield noticed the new arrivals right away. Little escaped her attention in the area—if someone moved in or out, Maggie was nosing among their belongings, asking questions and storing away the information to relay to her father later. It was natural for her to be attracted to Mr. Smart's cart, now stopped in front of no. 12 Hercules Buildings.

Hercules Buildings was made up of a row of twenty-two brick houses, bookended by two pubs, the Pineapple and the Hercules Tavern. Each had three stories as well as a lower-ground floor, a small front garden, and a much longer garden at the back. The street itself was a busy cut-through taken by residents of Lambeth who wanted to cross Westminster Bridge but did not fancy their chances on the poor, ramshackle lanes along the river between Lambeth Palace and the bridge.

No. 12 Hercules Buildings boasted a shoulder-high iron fence, painted black, with spikes on top. The ground of the front garden was covered with raked pebbles, broken by a knee-high box hedge grown in a circle, with a bush severely pruned into a ball in the middle. The front window was framed by orange curtains pulled half to. As Maggie approached, a man, a woman, a boy her age, and a girl a little older were each carrying a chair into the house while a small woman in a faded yellow gown buzzed around them.

“This is highly irregular!” she was shouting. “Highly irregular! Mr. Astley knows very well that I choose my own lodgers, and always have done. He has no right to foist people on me. Do you hear me, Mr. Fox? No right at all!” She stood directly in the path of John Fox, who had come out of the house with his sleeves rolled up, followed by a few circus boys.

“Pardon me, Miss Pelham,” he said as he sidestepped her. “I'm just doing what the man told me to do. I expect he'll be along to explain it himself.”

“This is
my
house!” Miss Pelham cried. “I'm the householder. He's only the owner, and has nothing to do with what goes on inside.”

John Fox picked up a crate of saws, looking as if he wished he hadn't said anything. Miss Pelham's tone seemed also to bother the unattended cart horse, whose owner was also helping to carry the Kellaways' possessions upstairs. It had been standing docilely, stunned into hoof-sore submission by the week-long journey to London, but as Miss Pelham's voice grew higher and shriller, it began to shift and stamp.

“You, girl,” John Fox called to Maggie, “there's a penny for you to hold the horse steady.” He hurried through the gate and into the house, Miss Pelham at his heels.

Maggie stepped up willingly and seized the horse's reins, delighted to be paid for a front-row view of the proceedings. She stroked the horse's nose. “There now, boy, you old country horse,” she murmured. “Where you from, then? Yorkshire, is it? Lincolnshire?” She named the two areas of England she knew anything about, and that was very little—only that her parents had come from those parts, though they'd lived in London twenty years. Maggie had never been outside of London; indeed, she rarely enough went across the river to its center, and had never been a night away from home.

“Dorsetshire,” came a voice.

Maggie turned, smiling at the singing, burring vowels of the girl who had carried her chair inside and come out again, and was now standing next to the cart. She wasn't bad-looking, with a rosy face and wide blue eyes, though she did wear a ridiculous frilly mop cap that she must have fancied would go down well in London. Maggie smirked. One glance told her this family's story: They were from the countryside, come for the usual reason—to make a better living here than they did back home. Indeed, sometimes country people did do better. Other times…“Where's home, then?” she said.

“Piddletrenthide,” the girl answered, drawing out the last syllable.

“Lord a mercy—what did you say?”

“Piddletrenthide.”

Maggie snorted. “Piddle-dee-dee, what a name! Never heard of it.”

“It mean thirty houses by the River Piddle. 'Tis in the Piddle Valley, near Dorchester. It were a lovely place.” The girl smiled at something across the road, as if she could see Dorsetshire there.

“What's your name, then, Miss Piddle?”

“Maisie. Maisie Kellaway.”

The door to the house opened, and Maisie's mother reappeared. Anne Kellaway was tall and angular, and had her scrubby brown hair pulled back in a bun that hung low on her long neck. She gave Maggie a suspicious look, the way a chandler would someone he thought had stolen wares from his shop. Maggie knew such looks well.

“Don't be talking to strangers, Maisie,” Anne Kellaway scolded. “Han't I warned you about London?”

Maggie shook the horse's reins. “Now, ma'am, Maisie's perfectly safe with me. Safer'n with some.”

Anne Kellaway fastened her eyes on Maggie and nodded. “You see, Maisie? Even the locals say there be bad sorts about.”

“That's right, London's a wicked place, it is,” Maggie couldn't resist saying.

“What? What kind of wicked?” Anne Kellaway demanded.

Maggie shrugged, caught out for a moment. She did not know what to tell her. There was one thing, of course, that would clearly shock her, but Maggie would never tell that to Anne Kellaway. “D'you know the little lane across Lambeth Green, what runs from the river through the fields to the Royal Row?”

Maisie and Anne Kellaway looked blank. “It's not far from here,” Maggie continued. “Just over there.” She pointed across the road, where fields stretched almost unbroken to the river. The redbrick towers of Lambeth Palace could be seen in the distance.

“We only just arrived,” Anne Kellaway said. “We han't seen much.”

Maggie sighed, the punch taken out of her tale. “It's a little lane, very useful as a shortcut. It was called Lovers' Lane for a time 'cause—” She stopped as Anne Kellaway shook her head vehemently, her eyes darting at Maisie.

“Well, it was called that,” Maggie continued, “but do you know what it's called now?” She paused. “Cut-Throat Lane!”

Mother and daughter shuddered, which made Maggie smile grimly.

“Tha' be no great thing,” a voice chimed in. “We've a Dead Cat Lane back in the Piddle Valley.” The boy who had been carrying the chair inside was standing in the doorway.

Maggie rolled her eyes. “A dead cat, eh? I suppose you found it, did you?”

He nodded.

“Well, I found the dead man!” Maggie announced triumphantly, but even as she said it she felt her stomach tighten and contract. She wished now that she'd kept quiet, especially as the boy was watching her closely, as if he knew what she was thinking. But he couldn't know.

She was saved from having to say more by Anne Kellaway, who clutched the gate and cried, “I knew we should never have come!”

“There, now, Ma,” Maisie murmured, as if soothing a child. “Let's get some things inside now. What about these pots?”

Jem let Maisie calm their mother. He had heard often enough of her worries during their journey. She had never betrayed such nerves in Dorsetshire, and her rapid transformation from capable countrywoman to anxious traveler had surprised him. If he paid too much attention to her, he began to feel anxious himself. He preferred instead to study the girl holding the horse. She was lively looking, with tangled black hair, brown eyes fringed with long lashes, and a V-shaped smile that made her chin as pointy as a cat's. What interested him most, however, was seeing the terror and regret that flashed across her face as she mentioned the dead man; when she swallowed, he felt sure she was tasting bile. Despite her cockiness, Jem pitied her. After all, it was certainly worse to discover a dead man than a dead cat—though the cat had been his, and he'd been fond of it. He had not, for instance, found his brother Tommy; that had been left to his mother, who had run into the workshop from the garden, a look of horror on her face. Perhaps that explained her anxiety about everything since then.

“What you doin' at Hercules Buildings, then?” Maggie said.

“Mr. Astley sent us,” Jem answered.

“He invited us to London!” Maisie interjected. “Pa fixed a chair for him, and now he's come to make chairs in London.”

“Don't say that man's name!” Anne Kellaway almost spat the words.

Maggie stared at her. Few people had a bad word to say about Philip Astley. He was a big, booming, opinionated man, of course, but he was also generous and good-natured to everyone. If he fought you, he forgot it a moment later. Maggie had taken countless pennies off of him, usually for simple tasks like holding a horse still for a moment, and had been allowed in free to see shows with a wave of his liberal hand. “What's wrong with Mr. Astley, then?” she demanded, ready to defend him.

Anne Kellaway shook her head, grabbed the pots from the cart, and strode up to the house, as if the man's name were physically propelling her inside. “He's one of the best men you'll meet in Lambeth!” Maggie called after her. “If you can't stomach him you won't find no one else to drink with!” But Anne Kellaway had disappeared upstairs.

“Is this all of your things?” Maggie nodded at the cart.

“Most of it,” Maisie replied. “We left some with Sam—he's our older brother. He stayed behind. And—well—we'd another brother too, but he died not long ago. So I've only had brothers, you see, though I did always want a sister. D'you have sisters?”

“No, just a brother.”

“Ours be marrying soon, we think, don't we, Jem? To Lizzie Miller—he been with her for years now.”

“Come on, Maisie,” Jem interrupted, reluctant to have his family's business made public. “We need to get these inside.” He picked up a wooden hoop.

“What's that for, then?” Maggie asked.

“A chair mold. You bend wood round it to make it into the shape of a chair back.”

“You help your pa make chairs?”

“I do,” Jem answered with pride.

“You're a bottom catcher, you are!”

Jem frowned. “What d'you mean?”

“They call footmen fart catchers, don't they? But you catch bottoms with your chairs!” Maggie barked with laughter as Jem turned bright red. It didn't help that Maisie joined in with her own tinkling laugh.

Indeed, his sister encouraged Maggie to linger, turning back as she and Jem reached the door with the hoops looped around their arms. “What's your name?” she called.

“Maggie Butterfield.”

“Oh, you be a Margaret too! In't it funny, Jem? The first girl I meet in London and she do have my name!”

Jem wondered how one name could be attached to two such different girls. Though not yet wearing stays the way Maisie did, Maggie was fuller and curvier, padded by a layer of flesh that reminded Jem of plums, while Maisie was slim, with bony ankles and wrists. Though intrigued by this Lambeth girl, he didn't trust her. She may even steal something, he thought. I'll have to watch her.

Immediately he felt ashamed of the thought, though it didn't stop him from glancing out of the open front window of their new rooms a few minutes later to make sure Maggie wasn't rummaging in their cart.

She wasn't. She was holding Mr. Smart's horse steady, patting its neck as a carriage passed. Then she was sniggering at Miss Pelham, who had come back outside and was discussing her new lodgers in a loud voice. Maggie seemed unable to keep still, hopping from one foot to the other, her eyes caught by passersby: an old woman walking along who cried out, “Old iron and broken glass bottles! Bring 'em to me!”; a young girl going the opposite way with a basket full of primroses; a man pulling the blades of two knives across each other, calling out above the clatter, “Knives sharpened, get your knives sharpened! You'll cut through anything when I'm done with you!” He pulled his knives close to Maggie's face and she flinched, jumping back as he laughed. She stood watching the man go and trembling so that the Dorsetshire horse bowed his head toward her and nickered.

“Jem, open that window wider,” his mother said behind him. “I don't like the smell of the last lodgers.”

Jem pushed up the sash window, and Maggie looked up and saw him. They stared at each other, as if daring the other to look away first. At last Jem forced himself to step back from the window.

Once the Kellaways' possessions were safely upstairs, they all went back out to the street to say good-bye to Mr. Smart, who would not stay the night with them, being anxious to make a start back to Dorsetshire. He'd already seen enough of London to provide weeks of anecdotes at the pub, and had no desire to be there still come nightfall, when he was sure the devil would descend on the inhabitants—though he didn't say so to the Kellaways. Each found it hard to let go of their last link to the Piddle Valley, and delayed Mr. Smart with questions and suggestions. Jem held on to the side of the cart while his father discussed which traveling inn to aim for; Anne Kellaway sent Maisie up to dig out a few apples for the horse.

At last Mr. Smart set off, calling “Good luck an' God bless'ee!” as he pulled away from no. 12 Hercules Buildings, muttering under his breath, “an' God help'ee too.” Maisie waved a handkerchief at him even though he didn't look around. As the cart turned right at the end of the road, slipping in among other traffic, Jem felt his stomach twist. He kicked at some dung the horse had left behind, and though he could feel Maggie's eyes on him, he didn't look up.