Burning Bright. Tracy Chevalier
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‘It’ll be cooler tomorrow,’ Jem promised. Although Maisie was two years older than he, it often seemed to Jem that she was his younger sister, needing protection from the unpredictability of the world – though there was little of that in the Piddle Valley. His job would be harder here.
Anne Kellaway was watching the river as Jem had, her eyes fixed on a boy pulling hard on the oars of a rowboat. A dog sat opposite him, panting in the heat; he was the boy’s only cargo. Jem knew what his mother was thinking of as she followed the boy’s progress: his brother Tommy, who had loved dogs and always had at least one from the village following him about.
Tommy Kellaway had been a handsome boy, with a tendency to daydream that baffled his parents. It was clear early on that he would never be a chairmaker, for he had no affinity for wood and what it could do, or any interest in the tools his father tried to teach him to use. He would let an auger come to a halt mid-turn, or a lathe spin slower and slower and stop as he gazed at the fire or into the middle distance – a trait he inherited from his father, but without the accompanying ability to get back to his work.
Despite this essential uselessness – a trait Anne Kellaway would normally despise – his mother loved him more than her other children, though she could not have said why. Perhaps she felt he was more helpless and so needed her more. Certainly he was good company, and made her laugh as no one else could. But her laughter had died the morning six weeks before when she found him under the pear tree at the back of the Kellaways’ garden. He must have climbed it in order to pick the one pear left, which had managed to cling onto its branch and hung just out of reach all winter, teasing them, even though they knew the cold would have ruined its taste. A branch had snapped, and he fell and broke his neck. A sharp pain pierced her chest whenever Anne Kellaway thought of him; she felt it now, watching the boy and the dog in the boat. Her first taste of London could not erase it.
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 centre 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 accident; 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 moustache 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 closet 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 colour or texture of the wood.
This was how he lived, and how he was expected to live, until in February 1792 Philip Astley’s Travelling Equestrian Spectacular came to spend a few days in Dorchester just two weeks after Tommy Kellaway fell from the pear tree. Part of 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 early 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