Burning Bright. Tracy Chevalier
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sit on benches, though some in the pit chose to stand crowded close to the ring where the horses would gallop, the dancers dance, the soldiers fight. There was plenty to look at while they waited. Jem and his father studied the wooden structure of the boxes and the gallery, decorated with mouldings and painted with trompe l’oeil foliage. The three-tiered wagon-wheel chandelier Thomas Kellaway had seen on his first day was now lit with hundreds of candles, along with torches around the boxes and gallery; a round roof with open shutters high up also let in light until night fell. At one side of the ring a small stage had been built, with a backdrop painted with mountains, camels, elephants and tigers – the oriental touch Philip Astley had referred to in describing The Siege of Bangalore pantomime.
The Kellaways also studied the audience. Around them in the pit were other artisans and tradesmen – chandlers, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, printers, butchers. The boxes held the middling sorts – merchants, bankers, lawyers – mostly from Westminster across the river. In the galleries stood the rougher crowd: the soldiers and sailors, the men who worked at the docks and in the warehouses along the Thames, as well as coalmen, coachmen, stablehands, brickmakers and bricklayers, nightsoil men, gardeners, street sellers, rag-and-bone men and the like. There were also a fair number of servants, apprentices and children.
Thomas Kellaway disappeared while they were waiting, then returned and, with a sheepish smile, held out four oranges. Jem had never had one: they were rare enough in London, and non-existent in Piddletrenthide. He puzzled over the skin, then bit into it like an apple before realising the peel was inedible. Maisie laughed at him as he spat out the peel. ‘Silly,’ she murmured. ‘Look.’ She nodded at those sitting nearby who deftly peeled their oranges and dropped the bits on the floor. As they trampled and shuffled over the remains throughout the evening, the peel released its sharp acid scent in waves, cutting through the various smells of horse dung, sweat and smoke from the torches.
When the music struck up and Philip Astley stepped out onto the stage to address the audience, he stood for a moment, scanning the pit. Finding Anne Kellaway, he smiled, satisfied that with his charm he had turned an enemy into a friend. ‘Welcome, welcome to the Royal Saloon and New Amphitheatre for the 1792 season of Astley’s Circus! Are you ready to be dazzled and distracted?’
The audience roared.
‘Astonished and amazed?’
More roaring.
‘Surprised and scintillated? Then let the show begin!’
Jem was happy enough before the show, but once it began he found himself fidgeting. Unlike his mother, he was not finding the circus acts a welcome distraction. Unlike his sister, he was not smitten with any of the performers. Unlike his father, he was not content because those around him were happy. Jem knew he was meant to find the novelty acts astonishing. The jugglers throwing torches without burning themselves, the learned pig who could add and subtract, the horse who could boil a kettle and make a cup of tea, Miss Laura Devine with her twirling petticoats, two tightrope walkers sitting at a table and eating a meal on a rope thirty feet above the ground, a horseman drinking a glass of wine as he stood on two horses galloping around the ring: all of these spectacles defied some rule of life. People should tumble from standing on ropes strung up high or on galloping horses’ backs; pigs shouldn’t know how to add; horses can’t make cups of tea; Miss Devine should become sick from so much spinning.
Jem knew this. Yet instead of watching these feats in awe, with the wide eyes and open mouth and cries of surprise of the people around him – his parents and sister included – he was bored precisely because the acts weren’t like life. They were so far removed from his experience of the world that they had little impact on him. Perhaps if the horseman stood on the back of one horse and simply rode, or the jugglers threw balls instead of burning torches, then he too might have stared and called out.
Nor did the dramas interest him, with their oriental dancers, reenactments of battles, haunted houses and warbling lovers – apart from the scenery changes, where screens of mountains and animals or rippling oceans or battle scenes full of soldiers and horses were suddenly whisked away to reveal starry night skies or castle ruins or London itself. Jem couldn’t understand why people would want to see a replica of the London skyline when they could go outside, stand on Westminster Bridge and see the real thing.
Jem only brightened when, an hour into the show, he noticed Maggie’s face up in the gallery, poking out between two soldiers. If she saw him, her face showed no sign of it – she was enrapt by the spectacle in the ring, laughing at a clown who rode a horse backwards while a monkey on another horse chased him. He liked watching her when she didn’t know it, so happy and absorbed, the shrewd veneer she cultivated dropped for once, the pulse of anxiety that drove her replaced by innocence, even if only temporarily.
‘I’m just going out to the jakes,’ Jem whispered to Maisie. She nodded, her eyes fixed on the monkey, who had jumped from its horse to the horse carrying the clown. As Jem began to push through the dense crowd, his sister was laughing and clapping her hands.
Outside he found the entrance to the gallery around the corner, separating the rougher crowd from the more genteel audience in the pit. Two men stood in front of the staircase leading up. ‘Sixpence to see the rest of the show,’ one of them said to Jem.
‘But I just been in the pit,’ Jem explained. ‘I’m going up to see a friend.’
‘You in the pit?’ the man repeated. ‘Show me your ticket, then.’
‘My ma has it.’ Anne Kellaway had tucked the ticket stubs back into her stays, to be kept and admired.
‘That’ll be sixpence to see the rest of the show, then.’
‘But I don’t have any money.’
‘Go away with you, then.’ The man turned away.
‘But—’
‘Get out or we’ll kick you all the way to Newgate,’ the other man said, and both laughed.
Jem went back to the main entrance, but he wasn’t allowed in there either without a ticket stub. He stood still for a moment, listening to the laughter inside. Then he turned and went out to stand on the front steps between the enormous pillars framing the entrance. Lining the street in front of the amphitheatre, near where he and his family had waited in Mr Smart’s cart the day they arrived in London, were two dozen carriages, waiting to take members of the audience home after the show, or down to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens a mile south to continue their evening’s entertainment. The coach drivers slept in their seats or gathered together to smoke and talk and flirt with the women who had wandered over to them.
Otherwise it was quiet, except for the occasional roar of the audience. Though the street outside the amphitheatre was well lit with torches and lamps, the roads led away into darkness. Westminster Bridge itself was a shadowy hump over which two rows of lamplights marched. Beyond them London hung like a heavy black coat.
Jem found himself drawn back to the bridge and the river. He walked up it, following the lamps from pool to pool of light. At the apex of the bridge he stopped and leaned over the balustrade. It was too high to see directly below, and so dark that he could make out little anyway. Even so, he sensed that the Thames was a different river from what the Kellaways had seen earlier. It was full now; Jem could hear it slopping and slurping and sucking at the stone piers that held up the bridge. It reminded him of a herd of cows in the dark, breathing heavily and squelching their hooves in the mud. He took a deep breath – like cows, the river smelled of a combination of fresh grass and excrement, of what came in and what went out of this city.
Another scent enveloped him suddenly – like the orange peel from his fingers, but far stronger and sweeter. Too sweet – Jem’s throat tightened at the same time as a hand gripped his arm and another reached into his pocket. ‘Hallo, darling, looking for your destiny down there? Well, you’ve found her.’
Jem tried to pull away from the woman but her hands were strong. She wasn’t much taller than him, though her face was old under its paint. Her hair was bright yellow, even in the dim light, her dress dirty blue and cut low. She pushed her