Burning Bright. Tracy Chevalier
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a penny for you to hold the horse steady.’ He hurried through the gate and into the house, Miss Pelham at his heels, still complaining.
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 centre, 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 mob cap that she must have fancied would go down well in a city. Maggie smirked. One glance told her this family’s story: they were from the countryside, come to London 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 at 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 red-brick 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 short cut. 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 to London!’
‘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 during their journey of her worries about London. She had never betrayed such nerves in Dorsetshire, and her rapid transformation from capable countrywoman to anxious traveller 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 grim task 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 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 mould. You bend wood round it to make it into the shape of a chair back.’
‘You