Burning Bright. Tracy Chevalier
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emptied the pan full of wood shavings onto the road, looking around as she did. On spotting Maggie, she froze, then giggled. ‘Ar’ernoon, Maggie! Is’t all right just to throw it in the road like that? I do see others throw worse.’
Maggie snorted. ‘You can chuck what you like in the gutter. But what you doing throwin’ out wood shavings? Anyone else’d burn them in the fire.’
‘Oh, we’ve plenty for that – too much, really. I throw away most of what I sweep up. Some of this be green too an’ don’t burn so well.’
‘Don’t you sell the extra?’
Maisie looked puzzled. ‘Don’t reckon we do.’
‘You should be sellin’ that, you should. Plenty could do with shavings to light their fires with. Make yourself a penny or two. Tell you what – I could sell it for you, and give you sixpence out of every shilling.’
Maisie looked even more confused, as if Maggie were talking too fast. ‘Don’t you know how to sell things?’ Maggie said. ‘You know, like that.’ She indicated a potato seller bellowing, ‘Lovely tatties, don’t yer want some tatties!’ vying with a man who was crying out, ‘You that are able, will you buy a ladle!’
‘See? Everybody’s got summat to sell.’
Maisie shook her head, the frills on her mob cap fluttering around her face. ‘We didn’t do that, back home.’
‘Ah, well. You got yourself sorted out up there?’
‘Mostly. It do take some getting used to. But Mr Astley took Pa and Jem to a timber yard down by the river, so they’re able to start work on the chairs he wants.’
‘Can I come up and see?’
‘Course you can!’
Maisie led her up, Maggie keeping quiet in case Miss Pelham was hovering about. At the top of the stairs, Maisie opened one of two doors and called out, ‘We’ve a visitor!’
As they entered the back room that served as his workshop, Thomas Kellaway was turning a chair leg in a lathe, with Jem at his side, watching him work. He wore a white shirt and mustard-coloured breeches, and over that a leather apron covered with scratches. Rather than frowning, as many do when they are concentrating, Thomas Kellaway was smiling a small, almost silly smile. When at last he did look up, his smile broadened, though to Maggie it seemed he was not sure what he was smiling at. His light blue eyes looked her way, but his gaze seemed to fall just beyond her, as if something in the hallway behind caught his attention. The lines around his eyes gave him a wistful air, even as he smiled.
Jem, however, did look directly at Maggie, with an expression half pleased, half suspicious.
Thomas Kellaway rolled the chair leg between his hands. ‘What’d you say, Maisie?’
‘D’you remember Maggie, Pa? She held Mr Smart’s horse while we was unloading our things here. She lives – oh, where do you live, Maggie?’
Maggie shuffled her feet in the wood shavings that covered the floor, embarrassed by the attention. ‘Across the field,’ she mumbled, gesturing with her hand out of the back window, ‘at Bastille Row.’
‘Bastille Row? There be an odd name.’
‘It’s really York Place,’ Maggie explained, ‘but we call it Bastille Row. Mr Astley built the houses last year with money he made off a spectacle he put on of the storming of the Bastille.’
She looked around, astonished at the mess the Kellaways had managed to make in the room after only a few days. It was as if a timber yard, with its chunks and planks and splinters and shavings of wood, had been dumped indoors. Scattered among the wood were saws, chisels, adzes, augers and other tools Maggie didn’t recognise. In the corner she could see tin pots and troughs, filled with liquid. There was a smell in the air of resin and varnish. Here and there she could find order: a row of elm planks leaning against the wall, a dozen finished chair legs stacked like firewood on a shelf, wood hoop frames hanging in descending size from hooks.
‘Didn’t take you long to make yourself at home! Does Miss Pelham know what you’re doin’ up here?’ she asked.
‘Pa’s workshop were out in the garden back home,’ Jem said, as if to explain the disorder.
Maggie chuckled. ‘Looks like he thinks he’s still outside!’
‘We keep the other rooms tidy enough,’ replied Anne Kellaway, appearing in the doorway behind them. ‘Maisie, come and help me, please.’ She was clearly suspicious of Maggie, and wanted to keep an eye on her daughter.
‘Look, here be the seat for the chair Pa’s making specially for Mr Astley,’ Maisie said, trying to put off leaving her new friend. ‘Extra wide to fit him. See?’ She showed Maggie an oversized, saddle-shaped seat propped against other planks. ‘It has to dry out a bit more; then he can add the legs and back.’
Maggie admired the seat, then turned to look out of the open window, with its view over Miss Pelham’s and her neighbours’ back gardens. The gardens of Hercules Buildings houses were narrow – only eighteen feet across – but they made up for this deficiency with their length. Miss Pelham’s garden was a hundred feet long. She made the most of the space by dividing it into three squares, with a central ornament gracing each: a white lilac in the square closest to the house, a stone birdbath in the central square, and a laburnum tree in the back square. Miniature hedges, gravelled paths and raised beds planted with roses created regular patterns that had little to do with nature but were more concerned with order.
Miss Pelham had made it plain that she did not want the Kellaways hanging about in her garden other than to use the privy. Every morning, if it wasn’t raining, she liked to take a teacup full of broth – its dull, meaty smell visiting the Kellaways upstairs – and sit with it on one of two stone benches that faced each other sideways, halfway along the garden. When she got up to go inside again she would dump the remains over a grapevine growing up the wall next to the bench. She believed the broth would make the vine grow faster and more robust than that of her neighbour, Mr Blake. ‘He never prunes his vine, and that is a mistake, for all vines need a good pruning or the fruit will be small and sour,’ Miss Pelham had confided to Jem’s mother in a momentary attempt to reconcile herself to her new lodgers. She soon discovered, however, that Anne Kellaway was not one for confidences.
Apart from Miss Pelham’s broth times and the twice-weekly visit from a man to rake and prune, the garden was usually deserted, and Jem went into it whenever he could, even though he could see little use for one like this. It was a harsh, geometrical place, with uncomfortable benches and no lawn to lie on. There was no space in which to grow vegetables and no fruit trees apart from the grapevine. Of all the things Jem expected from the outdoors – fertile soil, large vibrant patches of growth, a solidity that changed daily and yet suggested permanence – only the varied ranges of green he craved were available in Miss Pelham’s garden. That was why he went there – to feast his eyes on the colour he loved best. He stayed as long as he could, until Miss Pelham appeared at her window and waved him out.
Now he joined Maggie at the window to look out over it.
‘Funny to see this from above,’ she said. ‘I only ever seen it from there.’ She indicated the brick wall at the far end of the garden.
‘What, you climb over?’
‘Not over – I an’t been in it. I just have a peek over the wall every now and then, to see what she’s up to. Not that there’s ever much to see. Not like in some gardens.’
‘What’s that house in the field past the wall?’ Jem indicated a large, two-storey brick house capped with three truncated towers, set alone in the middle of the field behind the gardens of the Hercules Buildings houses. A long stable ran perpendicular to the house, with a dusty yard in front.
Maggie looked surprised. ‘That’s Hercules Hall. Didn’t you know? Mr Astley lives there, him an’ his wife an’ some nieces to look after ’em. His wife’s an invalid