Burning Bright. Tracy Chevalier
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a club. He pulled his daughter onto his lap, and was singing along with the rest of the pub when Jem finally reached them:
And for which I’m sure she’ll go to Hell
For she makes me fuck her in church time!
At the last line, a deafening shout went up that made Jem cover his ears. Maggie had joined in, and she grinned at Jem, who blushed and stared at his feet. Many songs had been sung at the Five Bells in Piddletrenthide, but nothing like that.
After the great shout, the pub was quieter, the way a thunderclap directly overhead clears the worst of a storm. ‘What you been up to, then, Mags?’ Dick Butterfield asked his daughter in the relative calm.
‘This an’ that. I was at his house—’ she pointed at Jem ‘—this is Jem, Pa – lookin’ at his pa making chairs. They just come from Dorsetshire, an’ are living at Miss Pelham’s in Hercules Buildings, next to Mr Blake.’
‘Miss Pelham’s, eh?’ Dick Butterfield chuckled. ‘Glad to meet you, Jem. Sit yourself down and rest your pegs.’ He waved at the other side of the table. There was no stool or bench there. Jem looked around: all of the stools in sight were taken. Dick and Maggie Butterfield were gazing at him with identical expressions, watching to see what he would do. Jem considered kneeling at the table, but he knew that was not likely to gain the Butterfields’ approval. He would have to search the pub for an empty stool. It was expected of him, a little test of his merit – the first real test of his new London life.
Locating an empty stool in a crowded pub can be tricky, and Jem could not find one. He tried asking for one, but those he asked paid no attention to him. He tried to take one that a man was using as a footrest and got swatted. He asked a barmaid, who jeered at him. As he struggled through the scrum of bodies, Jem wondered how it was that so many people could be drinking now rather than working. In the Piddle Valley few went to the Five Bells or the Crown or the New Inn until evening.
At last he went back to the table empty-handed. A vacant stool now sat where Dick Butterfield had indicated, and he and Maggie were grinning at Jem.
‘Country boy,’ muttered a youth sitting next to them who had watched the whole ordeal, including the barmaid’s jeering.
‘Shut your bonebox, Charlie,’ Maggie retorted. Jem guessed at once that he was her brother.
Charlie Butterfield was like his father but without the wrinkles or the charm; better-looking in a rough way, with dirty blond hair and a dimple in his chin, but with a scar through his eyebrow too that gave him a harsh look. He was as cruel to his sister as he could get away with, twisting burns on Maggie’s arms until the day she was old enough to kick him where it was guaranteed to hurt. He still looked for ways to get at her – knocking the legs out from the stool she sat on, upending the salt on her food, stealing her blankets at night. Jem knew none of this, but he sensed something about Charlie that made him avoid the other’s eyes, as you do a growling dog.
Dick Butterfield tossed a coin onto the table. ‘Fetch Jem a drink, Charlie,’ he commanded.
‘I an’t—’ Charlie sputtered at the same time as Jem said, ‘I don’t—’ Both stopped at the stern look on Dick Butterfield’s face. And so Charlie got Jem a mug of beer he didn’t want – cheap, watery stuff men back at the Five Bells would spill onto the floor rather than drink.
Dick Butterfield sat back. ‘Well, now, what have you got to tell me, Mags? What’s the scandal today in old Lambeth?’
‘We saw summat in Mr Blake’s garden, didn’t we, Jem? In their summerhouse, with all the doors open.’ Maggie gave Jem a sly look. He turned red again and shrugged.
‘That’s my girl,’ Dick Butterfield said. ‘Always sneakin’ about, finding out what’s what.’
Charlie leaned forward. ‘What’d you see, then?’
Maggie leaned forward as well. ‘We saw him an’ his wife at it!’
Charlie chuckled, but Dick Butterfield seemed unimpressed. ‘What, rutting is all? That’s nothing you don’t see every day you look down an alley. Go outside and you’ll see it round the corner now. Eh, Jem? I expect you’ve seen your share of it, back in Dorsetshire, eh, boy?’
Jem gazed into his beer. A fly was struggling on the surface, trying not to drown. ‘Seen enough,’ he mumbled. Of course he had seen it before. It was not just the animals he lived among that he’d seen at it – dogs, cats, sheep, horses, cows, goats, rabbits, chickens, pheasants – but people tucked away in corners of woods or against hedgerows or even in the middle of meadows when they thought no one would pass through. He had seen his neighbours doing it in a barn, and Sam with his girl up in the hazel wood at Nettlecombe Tout. He had seen it enough that he was no longer surprised, though it still embarrassed him. It was not that there was so much to see – mostly just clothes and a persistent movement, sometimes a man’s pale buttocks pistoning up and down or a woman’s breasts jiggling. It was seeing it when he was not expecting to, breaking into the assumed privacy, that made Jem turn away with a red face. He had much the same feeling on the rare occasion when he heard his parents argue – as when his mother demanded that his father cut down the pear tree at the bottom of their garden that Tommy had fallen from, and Thomas Kellaway had refused. Anne Kellaway had taken an axe later and done it herself.
Jem dipped his finger into the beer and let the fly climb onto it and crawl away. Charlie watched with astonished disgust; Dick Butterfield simply smiled and looked around at the other customers, as if searching for someone else to talk to.
‘It wasn’t just that they were doin’ it,’ Maggie persisted. ‘They were – they had – they’d taken off all their clothes, hadn’t they, Jem? We could see everything, like they were Adam an’ Eve.’
Dick Butterfield watched his daughter with the same appraising look he’d given Jem when he tried to find a stool. As easy-going as he appeared – lolling in his seat, buying drinks for people, smiling and nodding – he demanded a great deal from those he was with.
‘And d’you know what they were doing while they did it?’
‘What, Mags?’
Maggie thought quickly of the most outlandish thing two people could do while they were meant to be rutting. ‘They were reading to each other!’
Charlie chuckled. ‘What, the newspaper?’
‘That’s not what I—’ Jem began.
‘From a book,’ Maggie interrupted, her voice rising over the noise of the pub. ‘Poetry, I think it was.’ Specific details always made stories more believable.
‘Poetry, eh?’ Dick Butterfield repeated, sucking at his beer. ‘I expect that’ll be Paradise Lost, if they were playing at Adam an’ Eve in their garden.’ Dick Butterfield had once had a copy of the poem, in among a barrowful of books he’d got hold of and was trying to sell, and had read bits of it. No one expected Dick Butterfield to be able to read so well, but his father had taught him, reasoning that it was best to be as knowledgeable as those you were swindling.
‘Yes, that was it. Pear Tree’s Loss,’ Maggie agreed. ‘I know I heard them words.’
Jem started, unable to believe what he’d heard. ‘Did you say “pear tree”?’
Dick shot her a look. ‘Paradise Lost, Mags. Get your words right. Now, hang on a minute.’ He closed his eyes, thought for a moment, then recited:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
His neighbours stared at him; these were not the sort of words they normally heard in the pub. ‘What you sayin’, Pa?’ Maggie asked.
‘The only thing I remember