Burning Bright (29 page)

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 street, 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.

They met him at the lowest part of the valley, just next to a stream that ran along the seam of two fields. Mr. Case was about Thomas Kellaway's age, tall, wiry, with a pack on his back and the long, steady gait of someone who spends much of his time walking. He raised his eyebrows when he recognized Maisie and Rosie. “You going home, you two?” he inquired. “I heard none about it in the Piddles. They be expecting you?”

“No, they don't know—anything,” Maisie answered.

“You back to stay? We missed your hand. I've had customers ask specially for your buttons, you know.”

Maisie blushed. “You be teasing me, Mr. Case.”

“I must get on, but I'll see you next month, aye?”

She nodded, and he turned and strode off up the track they had just descended.

“Who was that?” Maggie asked, gazing after him.

Maisie looked back at him fondly, grateful that he'd not said anything or shown any surprise about the baby she carried. “The button agent making his rounds—he comes to collect buttons every month. He's off to Piddletown now. I'd forgot he comes this day every month. An't it strange how quick we forget things like that?”

The girls took a long time to climb the hill, panting and puffing, and stopping often, with Maggie carrying all of their bundles by now. As they rested she saw the telltale wince and tightening of Maisie's jaw, but decided to say nothing. They were able to go more quickly down the next hill before climbing slowly again. In this stop-start manner they made their way along the Piddle Valley, Maggie discovering that the stream they crisscrossed was actually the River Piddle, reduced to a trickle in the midsummer heat. This piece of information restored something of her old sense of humor. “River. River! You could fit a hundred o' them Piddlers in the Thames!” she crowed as she hopped onto a rock to cross it in two bounds.

“How d'you think I felt, seeing the Thames the first time?” Maisie retorted. “I thought there were an awful flood!”

Eventually they crested a hill to find that the track they were on intersected a proper road, which led down into a huddle of houses around a square-towered church, one side of it painted in gold light by the descending sun.

“At last!” Maggie said brightly, to cover her nerves.

“Not quite,” Maisie corrected. “Tha' be Piddlehinton—next but one to Piddletrenthide. It be a long village, mind, but we'll be there soon enough.” She gripped the stile they'd stopped by and leaned over it, groaning softly.

“It's all right, Maisie,” Maggie said, patting her shoulder. “We'll get you help soon.”

When the contraction had passed, Maisie straightened and stepped firmly onto the road. Rosie followed less certainly. “Oh, Maisie, what they going to say about us—about…” She glanced down at her own bump.

“There be nothing we can do about that now, can we? Just hold your head up. Here now—take my arm.” Maisie linked hers through her friend's as they descended into Piddlehinton.

While on the track, they had met no one other than the button agent, and seen a man with his sheep on a distant hill, and another with a horse and plow. The road proper carried more traffic, however—workers coming in from the fields, horsemen passing through on their way to Dorchester, a farmer driving his cows toward a barn, children running home from an afternoon playing by the river. The girls slipped in among the others, hoping not to draw attention, but that was impossible, of course. Even before they reached the first house in the village, children began to appear and follow them. Each time they had to stop to wait for Maisie, the children stopped too, at a distance. “I bet they an't had so much excitement all week,” Maggie remarked. “All month, even.”

As they approached the New Inn—the first pub in the village—a woman called out from her doorway, “Tha' be Maisie Kellaway, don' it? Didn't know you was coming back now. An' like tha'.”

Maisie flinched, but was forced to stop short with a contraction.

“You too, Rosie Wightman,” the woman added. “You been busy in London, have you?”

“Could you help us, ma'am?” Maggie interrupted, trying to keep her temper in check. “Maisie's havin' her baby.”

The woman studied Maisie. Behind her, two small boys appeared, peeking out at the newcomers. “Where be her husband? An' yourn?”

There was a silence during which Maisie opened her mouth and then shut it; the ease she'd developed in lying in London appeared to have deserted her.

Maggie had less trouble. “France,” she declared. “They gone to fight the Frenchies. I been charged to bring the wives home.” To counter the woman's skeptical look, she added, “I'm the sister of Maisie's husband. Charlie—Charlie Butterfield's his name.” As she spoke she kept her eyes fastened on Maisie's, willing her to follow suit. Maisie opened her mouth, paused, then said, “Tha's right. I be Maisie Butterfield now. An' Rosie be…”

“Rosie Blake,” Maggie finished for her. “Married to Billy Blake same day as my brother, just before they gone off to France.”

The woman regarded them, her eyes lingering on Rosie's dirty satin skirt. At last, though, she said to one of the boys peeking around her, “Eddie, run up to the Five Bells—don't bother at the Crown, they've no cart there today. Ask if they can send a cart back to pick up a girl in labor needs to go up the Kellaways' in Piddletrenthide.”

“We'll go along and meet the cart,” Maisie muttered as the boy ran off. “Don' want to stay round with her lookin' at us.” She linked arms with Rosie and started down the road, Maggie shouldering the bundles once more, the gang of children still following. Glancing behind her, she saw the woman cross the road to another who had just come out of her cottage; the first spoke to the second as they watched the trio.

As they walked, Maisie said in a low voice to Maggie, “Thank'ee.”

Maggie smiled. “Didn't you say once you'd always wanted a sister?”

“An' Rosie married to Mr. Blake! Can you imagine?”

“What would Mrs. Blake say?” Maggie chuckled.

They passed from Piddlehinton into Piddletrenthide, though Maggie would not have guessed without Maisie telling her, as there was no break or change in the long string of houses along the road. She felt herself being sucked deeper and deeper into the Dorset village, and though it was better than being in the empty field, its unfamiliarity—the mud everywhere, the cottages with their peculiar straw roofs, the flat eyes of the villagers watching her—made her uncomfortable. A few called out greetings, but many said nothing, simply staring at the girls even though they recognized them. Maggie began to wonder if perhaps Maisie should have remained in Lambeth to have the baby after all.

Maisie's waters broke in front of the Crown, and the girls had to stop, for her contractions were becoming more frequent and more painful. They led her to the bench next to the pub's door. “Oh, where is that cart?” Maisie gasped. Then the publican's wife came out with a cry and a hug for both Maisie and Rosie. It seemed only to take that one well-wisher to turn the mood from judgment to joy. Others emerged from the pub and from neighboring houses, and the Piddle girls were surrounded by surprised neighbors and old friends. Maisie rolled out her new lie for the first time, calling herself Maisie Butterfield so casually and fluently that Maggie wanted to congratulate her. She's going to be fine, she thought, and took a step back from the crowd.

The cart arrived at last, driven by Mr. Smart, the very man who had first brought the Kellaways to London, and who was now taking part in another, more local adventure he could talk about at the pub later. Several women lifted the groaning Maisie into the bed of straw spread in the back, and Rosie and the publican's wife climbed in after her. Maisie turned to ask Maggie for something from her bundle and discovered her friend was not in the cart with them. “Maggie!” she cried as they began to pull away. “Mr. Smart, wait for Maggie!” She had to stop, however, when the strongest contraction yet turned her cry into a scream.

The only sign that Maggie had been there at all was the girls' bundles she'd been carrying, stacked on the pub bench.

Jem sensed something was different long before the cart appeared. As he worked outside the front door of the Kellaways' cottage, painting a chair that his brother Sam had just finished leveling, he could hear a distant buzzing in the air of the kind that occurs when people have gathered and are discussing a subject, punctuated by occasional yelps from excited children. He did not think too much of it, for he had heard the same earlier that afternoon when the button agent passed through, and though he was long gone, his visit might account for the renewed disturbance. Perhaps two women were arguing over the quality the agent had assigned their buttons, whether superior, standard, or seconds. Each Piddle woman was proud of her handiwork, and hated to be judged not up to the usual standard. A catty remark by another could start an argument that might run publically for weeks.

Jem smiled at the thought, but it was with resignation rather than appreciation. Aspects of village life appeared very different to him since his return from London, now that he had something to compare it to. He couldn't imagine his Lambeth neighbors arguing over the quality of their buttons, for example. Though he never told anyone, there were times when Piddletrenthide, like its river, seemed limited after Lambeth and the Thames. Some days he opened the front door to look out, and his heart sank at the sight of everything being the same as it had been the day before. There were no pineapples carried past, no sky blue ribbons dangling down girls' backs. This was the sort of thing he might have complained about to Maisie if she were there. He missed her; and he envied her the months she was spending at the Blakes'.

It had not been easy for the Kellaways to settle back in to Piddletrenthide, even though they had been gone less than a year. They arrived in the middle of a snowstorm, so that no one was out on the road to greet them, and walked into their old cottage to find Sam Kellaway and his wife, Lizzie, in bed together, though it was gone noon. It had been an uncomfortable start, and some of the family had not quite recovered.

Thomas Kellaway soon enough took up his old spot in the workshop, relinquished grudgingly by Sam, who had enjoyed his brief taste of being his own master. His father was slower making his chairs than Sam liked, and Sam was quicker to point this out than before. Though neither said anything, Thomas Kellaway sometimes wondered if he was really still master of his workshop.

Anne Kellaway found it hard to fit in as well, for she had come back to a daughter-in-law in her place. In the past, Anne Kellaway and Lizzie Miller had got on, for Lizzie had been a quiet girl who always deferred to her future mother-in-law. With marriage and her own home, however, Lizzie had grown into a woman with opinions, which she was reluctant to hand back when the Kellaways reappeared at the cottage she had begun to make her own. She had changed some things, bringing in some Miller furniture, hanging new curtains, moving a table from one side of the room to the other. Within an hour of their arrival, Anne Kellaway had moved the table back, sending Lizzie into a sulk that had lasted these seven months. As a result the two women avoided being alone together—not easy when their work kept them in the same room so much; indeed, Anne Kellaway ought to have been helping Lizzie wash the curtains, but chose instead to work out in the garden beyond the chair workshop. She did not sense what Jem did—did not catch the current of excitement that passed invisibly through the village when something new was happening. Instead she was weeding among the leeks and trying not to think about the stump of the pear tree at the bottom of the garden. It had been a year and a half since Tommy died, and she still thought of him several times a day. That was what being a parent meant, she had come to realize: Your children remained with you, alive or dead, nearby or faraway. She fretted too about Maisie, stuck in Lambeth. They must find a way to get her back.

Then she heard Maisie's screams.

Anne Kellaway reached the front of the house at the same moment as the cart. “God in heaven,” she murmured as she caught sight of her daughter's bulk, and sought out her husband's eyes.

Thomas Kellaway took in his daughter's condition without blinking. A determined expression crossed his face—one that had developed during the months the Kellaways spent in Lambeth. He gazed at his wife. Then, in full view of his neighbors who had come out to see what the fuss was about, Thomas Kellaway strode over and, calling to Jem and Sam to help, lifted his daughter down from the cart.

Despite Thomas Kellaway's gesture, Anne Kellaway knew that the neighbors would watch to see what she would do, and take their response from her. Looking around, she saw her daughter-in-law, Lizzie, studying Maisie with barely concealed disgust. Anne Kellaway closed her eyes, and an image of Miss Laura Devine swinging freely on her rope arose in her mind. She nodded to herself, opened her eyes, and joined her husband, putting her arm around Maisie while Thomas Kellaway propped up her other side. “All right, Maisie,” she murmured. “You be home now.”

As they led her into the cottage, Maisie called over her shoulder, “Jem, you must find Maggie—I don't know where she's gone!”

Jem started, his eyes wide. “Maggie be here?”

“Oh yes, we couldn't have come without her. She's been so good to Rosie and me—arranged everything and looked after us. But then she disappeared!”

“Where were she last?”

“By the Crown. We got on the cart and I turned round and she weren't there. Oh, please find her, Jem! She han't any money and she's scared out here.” Maisie was pulled inside before she could see how fast her brother turned and ran.