Burning Bright

1

There was something humiliating about waiting in a cart on a busy London street with all your possessions stacked around you, on show to the curious public. Jem Kellaway sat by a tower of Windsor chairs his father had made for the family years ago, and watched aghast as passersby openly inspected the cart’s contents. He was not used to seeing so many strangers at once-the appearance of one in their Dorsetshire village would be an event discussed for days after-and to being so exposed to their attention and scrutiny. He hunkered back among the family belongings, trying to make himself less conspicuous. A wiry boy with a narrow face, deep-set blue eyes, and sandy fair hair that curled below his ears, Jem was not one to draw attention to himself, and people peered more often at his family’s belongings than at him. A couple even stopped and handled items as if they were at a barrow squeezing pears to see which was ripest-the woman fingering the hem of a nightdress that poked out of a split bag, the man picking up one of Thomas Kellaway’s saws and testing its teeth for sharpness. Even when Jem shouted, “Hey!” he took his time setting it back down.

Apart from the chairs, much of the cart was filled with the tools of Jem’s father’s trade: wooden hoops used to bend wood for the arms and backs of the Windsor chairs he specialized in; a dismantled lathe for turning chair legs; and a selection of saws, axes, chisels, and augers. Indeed, Thomas Kellaway’s tools took up so much room that the Kellaways had had to take turns walking alongside the cart for the week it took to get from Piddletrenthide to London.

The cart they had traveled in, driven by Mr. Smart, a local Piddle Valley man with an unexpected sense of adventure, was halted in front of Astley’s Amphitheatre. Thomas Kellaway had had only a vague notion of where to find Philip Astley, and no idea of how big London really was, thinking he could stand in the middle of it and see the amphitheatre where Astley’s Circus performed, the way he might back in Dorchester. Luckily for them, Astley’s Circus was well known in London, and they were quickly directed to the large building at the end of Westminster Bridge, with its round, peaked wooden roof and front entrance adorned with four columns. An enormous white flag flying from the top of the roof read ASTLEY’S in red on one side and AMPHITHEATRE in black on the other.

Ignoring the curious people on the street as best he could, Jem fixed his eyes instead on the nearby river, which Mr. Smart had decided to wander along “to see a bit o’ London” and on Westminster Bridge, which arched over the water and ran into the distant mass of square towers and spires of Westminster Abbey. None of the rivers Jem knew in Dorset-the Frome the size of a country lane, the Piddle a mere rivulet he could easily jump across-bore any resemblance to the Thames, a broad channel of rocking, choppy green-brown water pulled back and forth by the distant tide of the sea. Both river and bridge were clogged with traffic-boats on the Thames; carriages, carts, and pedestrians on the bridge. Jem had never seen so many people at once, even on market day in Dorchester, and was so distracted by the sight of so much movement that he could take in little detail.

Though tempted to get down from the cart and join Mr. Smart at the water’s edge, he didn’t dare leave Maisie and his mother. Maisie Kellaway was gazing about in bewilderment and flapping a handkerchief at her face. “Lord, it’s hot for March,” she said. “It weren’t this hot back home, were it, Jem?”

“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 midturn, 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 on to 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.

2

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 center 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 acci-dent; 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 mustache 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 closest 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 color or texture of the wood.

This was how he lived, and how he was expected to live, until in February 1792, Philip Astley’s Traveling Equestrian Spectacular came to spend a few days in Dorchester, just two weeks after Tommy Kellaway fell from the pear tree. 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 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 fun when his son’s grave was still fresh. “He offered me work, Anne,” he told her. “In London. A new life, away from-” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to-they were both thinking of the mound of earth in the Piddletrenthide graveyard.

3

The Kellaways waited at the cart for half an hour before they were visited by Philip Astley himself-circus owner, creator of spectacles, origin of outlandish gossip, magnet to the skilled and the eccentric, landlord, patron of local businesses, and oversized colorful character. He sported a red coat he had worn years before during his service as a cavalry officer; it had gold buttons and trim, and was fastened only at the collar, revealing a substantial belly held in by a buttoned white waistcoat. His trousers were white; his boots had chaps that came to the knee; and in his one concession to civilian life, he wore a black top hat, which he was constantly raising to ladies he recognized or would like to recognize. Accompanied by the ever-present John Fox, he trotted down the steps of the amphitheatre, strode up to the cart, raised his hat to Anne Kellaway, shook Thomas Kellaway’s hand, and nodded at Jem and Maisie. “Welcome, welcome!” he cried, brusque and cheerful at the same time. “It is very good to see you again, sir! I trust you are enjoying the sights of London after your journey from Devon?”

“Dorsetshire, sir,” Thomas Kellaway corrected. “We lived near Dorchester.”

“Ah, yes, Dorchester-a fine town. You make barrels there, do you?”

“Chairs,” John Fox corrected in a low voice. This was why he went everywhere with his employer-to provide the necessary nudges and adjustments when needed.

“Chairs, yes, of course. And what can I do for you, sir, ma’am?” He nodded at Anne Kellaway a touch uneasily, for she was sitting ramrod straight, her eyes fixed on Mr. Smart, now up on Westminster Bridge, her mouth pulled tight like a drawstring bag. Every inch of her gave out the message that she did not want to be here or have anything to do with him; and that was a message Philip Astley was unused to. His fame made him much in demand, with too many people seeking his attention. For someone to display the opposite threw him, and immediately made him go out of his way to regain that attention. “Tell me what you need!” he added, with a sweep of his arm, a gesture lost on Anne Kellaway, who kept her eyes on Mr. Smart.

Anne Kellaway had begun to regret their decision to move from Dorsetshire almost the moment the cart pulled away from their cottage, the feeling deepening over the week they spent on the road picking their way through the early spring mud. By the time she sat in front of the amphitheatre, not looking at Philip Astley, she knew that being in London was not going to take her mind from Tommy as she’d hoped it might; if anything, it made her think of him even more, for being here reminded her of what she was fleeing. But she would rather blame her husband, and Philip Astley too, for her misfortune than Tommy himself for being such a fool.

“Well, sir,” Thomas Kellaway began, “you did invite me to London, and I’m very kindly accepting your offer.”

“Did I?” Philip Astley turned to John Fox. “Did I invite him, Fox?”

John Fox nodded. “You did, sir.”

“Oh, don’t you remember, Mr. Astley?” Maisie cried, leaning forward. “Pa told us all about it. He and Jem were at your show, an’ during it someone were doing a trick atop a chair on a horse, an’ the chair broke and Pa fixed it for you right there. An’ you got to talking about wood and furniture, because you trained as a cabi-netmaker, didn’t you, sir?”

“Hush, Maisie,” Anne Kellaway interjected, turning her head for a moment from the bridge. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear about all that.”

Philip Astley gazed at the slim country girl talking with such animation from her perch and chuckled. “Well, now, miss, I do begin to recall such an encounter. But how does that bring you here?”

“You told Pa if he ever wanted to, he should come to London and you would help him set himself up. So that’s what we done, an’ here we be.”

“Here you be indeed, Maisie, all of you.” He turned to Jem, judging him to be about twelve and of the useful age to a circus for running errands and helping out. “And what’s your name, lad?”

“Jem, sir.”

“What sort of chairs are those you’re sitting next to, young Jem?”

“Windsors, sir. Pa made ’em.”

“A handsome chair, Jem, very handsome. Could you make me some?”

“Of course, sir,” Thomas Kellaway said.

Philip Astley’s eyes slid to Anne Kellaway. “I’ll take a dozen of ’em.”

Anne Kellaway stiffened, but still did not look at the circus man despite his generous commission.

“Now, Fox, what rooms have we got free at the moment?” he demanded. Philip Astley owned a fair number of houses in Lambeth, the area around the amphitheatre and just across Westminster Bridge from London proper.

John Fox moved his lips so that his mustache twitched. “Only some with Miss Pelham at Hercules Buildings-but she chooses her own lodgers.”

“Well, she’ll choose the Kellaways-they’ll do nicely. Take ’em over there now, Fox, with some boys to help unload.” Philip Astley lifted his hat once more at Anne Kellaway, shook Thomas Kellaway’s hand again, and said, “If you need anything, Fox’ll see you right. Welcome to Lambeth!”

4

Maggie Butterfield noticed the new arrivals right away. Little escaped her attention in the area-if someone moved in or out, Maggie was nosing among their belongings, asking questions and storing away the information to relay to her father later. It was natural for her to be attracted to Mr. Smart’s cart, now stopped in front of no. 12 Hercules Buildings.

Hercules Buildings was made up of a row of twenty-two brick houses, bookended by two pubs, the Pineapple and the Hercules Tavern. Each had three stories as well as a lower-ground floor, a small front garden, and a much longer garden at the back. The street itself was a busy cut-through taken by residents of Lambeth who wanted to cross Westminster Bridge but did not fancy their chances on the poor, ramshackle lanes along the river between Lambeth Palace and the bridge.

No. 12 Hercules Buildings boasted a shoulder-high iron fence, painted black, with spikes on top. The ground of the front garden was covered with raked pebbles, broken by a knee-high box hedge grown in a circle, with a bush severely pruned into a ball in the middle. The front window was framed by orange curtains pulled half to. As Maggie approached, a man, a woman, a boy her age, and a girl a little older were each carrying a chair into the house while a small woman in a faded yellow gown buzzed around them.

“This is highly irregular!” she was shouting. “Highly irregular! Mr. Astley knows very well that I choose my own lodgers, and always have done. He has no right to foist people on me. Do you hear me, Mr. Fox? No right at all!” She stood directly in the path of John Fox, who had come out of the house with his sleeves rolled up, followed by a few circus boys.

“Pardon me, Miss Pelham,” he said as he sidestepped her. “I’m just doing what the man told me to do. I expect he’ll be along to explain it himself.”

“This is my house!” Miss Pelham cried. “I’m the householder. He’s only the owner, and has nothing to do with what goes on inside.”

John Fox picked up a crate of saws, looking as if he wished he hadn’t said anything. Miss Pelham’s tone seemed also to bother the unattended cart horse, whose owner was also helping to carry the Kellaways’ possessions upstairs. It had been standing docilely, stunned into hoof-sore submission by the week-long journey to London, but as Miss Pelham’s voice grew higher and shriller, it began to shift and stamp.

“You, girl,” John Fox called to Maggie, “there’s a penny for you to hold the horse steady.” He hurried through the gate and into the house, Miss Pelham at his heels.

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 center, 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 mop cap that she must have fancied would go down well in London. Maggie smirked. One glance told her this family’s story: They were from the countryside, come 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 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 redbrick 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 shortcut. 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!”

“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 of her worries during their journey. She had never betrayed such nerves in Dorsetshire, and her rapid transformation from capable countrywoman to anxious traveler 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 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 of 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 mold. You bend wood round it to make it into the shape of a chair back.”

“You help your pa make chairs?”

“I do,” Jem answered with pride.

“You’re a bottom catcher, you are!”

Jem frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“They call footmen fart catchers, don’t they? But you catch bottoms with your chairs!” Maggie barked with laughter as Jem turned bright red. It didn’t help that Maisie joined in with her own tinkling laugh.

Indeed, his sister encouraged Maggie to linger, turning back as she and Jem reached the door with the hoops looped around their arms. “What’s your name?” she called.

“Maggie Butterfield.”

“Oh, you be a Margaret too! In’t it funny, Jem? The first girl I meet in London and she do have my name!”

Jem wondered how one name could be attached to two such different girls. Though not yet wearing stays the way Maisie did, Maggie was fuller and curvier, padded by a layer of flesh that reminded Jem of plums, while Maisie was slim, with bony ankles and wrists. Though intrigued by this Lambeth girl, he didn’t trust her. She may even steal something, he thought. I’ll have to watch her.

Immediately he felt ashamed of the thought, though it didn’t stop him from glancing out of the open front window of their new rooms a few minutes later to make sure Maggie wasn’t rummaging in their cart.

She wasn’t. She was holding Mr. Smart’s horse steady, patting its neck as a carriage passed. Then she was sniggering at Miss Pelham, who had come back outside and was discussing her new lodgers in a loud voice. Maggie seemed unable to keep still, hopping from one foot to the other, her eyes caught by passersby: an old woman walking along who cried out, “Old iron and broken glass bottles! Bring ’em to me!”; a young girl going the opposite way with a basket full of primroses; a man pulling the blades of two knives across each other, calling out above the clatter, “Knives sharpened, get your knives sharpened! You’ll cut through anything when I’m done with you!” He pulled his knives close to Maggie’s face and she flinched, jumping back as he laughed. She stood watching the man go and trembling so that the Dorsetshire horse bowed his head toward her and nickered.

“Jem, open that window wider,” his mother said behind him. “I don’t like the smell of the last lodgers.”

Jem pushed up the sash window, and Maggie looked up and saw him. They stared at each other, as if daring the other to look away first. At last Jem forced himself to step back from the window.

Once the Kellaways’ possessions were safely upstairs, they all went back out to the street to say good-bye to Mr. Smart, who would not stay the night with them, being anxious to make a start back to Dorsetshire. He’d already seen enough of London to provide weeks of anecdotes at the pub, and had no desire to be there still come nightfall, when he was sure the devil would descend on the inhabitants-though he didn’t say so to the Kellaways. Each found it hard to let go of their last link to the Piddle Valley, and delayed Mr. Smart with questions and suggestions. Jem held on to the side of the cart while his father discussed which traveling inn to aim for; Anne Kellaway sent Maisie up to dig out a few apples for the horse.

At last Mr. Smart set off, calling “Good luck an’ God bless’ee!” as he pulled away from no. 12 Hercules Buildings, muttering under his breath, “an’ God help’ee too.” Maisie waved a handkerchief at him even though he didn’t look around. As the cart turned right at the end of the road, slipping in among other traffic, Jem felt his stomach twist. He kicked at some dung the horse had left behind, and though he could feel Maggie’s eyes on him, he didn’t look up.

A few moments later, he sensed a subtle shift in the sounds of the street. Although it continued to be noisy with horses, carriages, and carts, as well as the frequent cries of sellers of fish and brooms and matches, of shoe blackeners and pot menders, there seemed to be a quiet pause and a turning of attention that wound its way along Hercules Buildings. It reached even to Miss Pelham, who fell silent, and Maggie, who stopped staring at Jem. He looked up then, following her gaze to the man now passing. He was of medium height and stocky, with a round, wide face, a heavy brow, prominent gray eyes, and the pale complexion of a man who spends much of his time indoors. Dressed simply in a white shirt, black breeches and stockings, and a slightly old-fashioned black coat, he was most noticeable for the red cap he wore, of a sort Jem had never seen, with a peak flopped over; a turned-up rim; and a red, white, and blue rosette fixed to one side. It was made of wool, which in the unusual March heat caused sweat to roll down the man’s brow. He held his head slightly self-consciously, as if the hat were new, or precious, and he must be careful of it; and as if he knew that all eyes would be on it-as indeed, Jem realized, they were.

The man turned in at the gate next to theirs, stepped up the path, and hurried inside, closing the door behind him without looking around. When he had disappeared, the street seemed to shake itself like a dog caught napping, and activity was renewed all the more vigorously.

“Do you see-that is why I must speak with Mr. Astley immediately,” Miss Pelham declared to John Fox. “It’s bad enough living next door to a revolutionary, but then to be forced to take in strangers from Dorsetshire-it’s too much, really!”

Maggie spoke up. “Dorsetshire an’t exactly Paris, ma’am. I bet them Dorseters don’t even know what a bonnet rouge is-do you, Jem, Maisie?”

They shook their heads. Though Jem was grateful to Maggie for speaking up for them, he wished she wouldn’t rub his nose in his ignorance.

“You, you little scamp!” Miss Pelham cried, noticing Maggie for the first time. “I don’t want to see you round here. You’re as bad as your father. You leave my lodgers alone!”

Maggie’s father had once sold Miss Pelham lace he claimed was Flemish, but it unraveled within days and turned out to have been made by an old woman just down the road in Kennington. Though she hadn’t had him arrested-she was too embarrassed that her neighbors would find out she’d been duped by Dick Butterfield-Miss Pelham spoke ill of him whenever she could.

Maggie laughed; she was used to people berating her father. “I’ll tell Pa you said hallo,” she simpered, then turned to Jem and Maisie. “Bye for now!”

“Z’long,” Jem replied, watching her run along the street and disappear into an alley between two houses. Now she was gone, he wanted her back again.

“Please, sir,” Maisie said to John Fox, who was just setting out with the circus boys to return to the amphitheatre. “What’s a bonnet rouge?”

John Fox paused. “That’ll be a red cap like what you just saw your neighbor wearing, miss. They wears it what supports the revolution over in France.”

“Oh! We did hear of that, didn’t we, Jem? Tha’ be where they let all those people out of the Bastille, weren’t it?”

“That’s the one, miss. It don’t have much to do with us here, but some folks like to show what they think of it.”

“Who be our neighbor, then? Is he French?”

“No, miss. That’ll be William Blake, born and bred in London.”

Miss Pelham cut in. “You leave him be, you children. You don’t want to get in with him.”

“Why not?” Maisie asked.

“He prints pamphlets with all sorts of radical nonsense in them, that’s why. He’s a stirrer, that man is. Now, I don’t want to see any bonnets rouges in my house. D’you hear me?”

5

Maggie came to see the Kellaways a week later, waiting until she judged they were well settled into their rooms. She had passed along Hercules Buildings a number of times, and always looked up at their front window, which they had quickly learned to keep shut so that the dust from the road wouldn’t get inside. Twice she had seen Anne Kellaway standing at the window, hands pressed to her chest, looking down at the street. When she caught sight of Maggie, she stepped back, frowning.

This time no one was looking out. Maggie was about to throw a pebble at the window to get their attention when the front door opened and Maisie came out carrying a brush and dustpan. She opened the front gate and with a twist of her wrist 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 mop 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 on a lathe, with Jem at his side, watching. He wore a white shirt and mustard-colored 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 recognize. 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.

“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’ll 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 neighbors’ 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, graveled 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 neighbor’s, 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 color 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-story 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 now, though she used to ride with him. Don’t see much of her. Mr. Astley keeps some of the circus horses there too-the best ones, like his white horse and John Astley’s chestnut. That’s his son. You saw him riding in Dorsetshire, didn’t you?”

“I reckon so. It were a chestnut mare the man rode.”

“He lives just two doors down from you, the other side o’ the Blakes. See? There’s his garden-the one with the lawn and nothin’ else.”

Hurdy-gurdy music was now drifting over from Hercules Hall, and Jem spotted a man leaning against the stables, cranking and playing a popular song. Maggie began to sing along softly:

One night as I came from the play

I met a fair maid by the way

She had rosy cheeks and a dimpled chin

And a hole to put poor Robin in!

The man played a wrong note and stopped. Maggie chuckled. “He’ll never get a job-Mr. Astley’s got higher standards’n that.”

“What d’you mean?”

“People’s always coming to perform for him over there, hopin’ he might take ’em on. He hardly ever does, though he’ll give ’em sixpence for tryin’.”

The hurdy-gurdy man began the song again, and Maggie hummed along, her eyes scanning the neighboring gardens. “Much better view here than at the back,” she declared.

Afterward Jem couldn’t remember if it was the sound or the movement that first caught his attention. The sound was a soft “Ohh” that still managed to carry up to the Kellaways’ window. The movement was the flash of a naked shoulder somewhere in the Blakes’ garden.

Closest to the Blakes’ house was a carefully laid out, well-dug kitchen garden partially planted, a garden fork now stuck upright in the rich soil at the end of one row. Anne Kellaway had been following its progress over the last week, watching with envy the solid, bonneted woman next door double-digging the rows and sowing seeds, as Anne Kellaway would be doing herself if she were in Dorsetshire or had any space to plant a garden here. It had never occurred to her when they decided to move to London that she might not have even a small patch of earth. However, she knew better than to ask Miss Pelham, whose garden was clearly decorative rather than functional; but she felt awkward and idle without her own garden to dig in springtime.

The back of the Blakes’ garden was untended, and filled with brambles and nettles. Midway along the garden, between the orderly and the chaotic, sat a small wooden summerhouse, set up for sitting in when the weather was mild. Its French doors were open, and it was in there that Jem saw the naked shoulder and, following that, naked backs, legs, bottoms. Horrified, he fought the temptation to step back from the window, fearing it would signal to Maggie that there was something he didn’t want her to see. Instead he pulled his eyes away and tried to direct her attention elsewhere. “Where’s your house, then?”

“Bastille Row? It’s across the field-there, you can’t quite see it from here, what with Miss Pelham’s tree in the way. What is that tree, anyway?”

“Laburnum. You’ll be able to tell easier in May when it flowers.”

Jem’s attempt to distract her failed, however, with the second “Ohh” confirming that the sound came from the same place as the movement. This time Maggie heard it and immediately located the source. Jem tried but couldn’t stop his eyes from being drawn back to the summerhouse. Maggie began to titter. “Lord a mercy, what a view!”

Then Jem did step back, his face on fire. “I’ve to help Pa,” he muttered, turning away from the window and going over to his father, who was still working on the chair leg and hadn’t heard them.

Maggie laughed at his discomfort. She stood at the window for a few moments more, then turned away. “Show’s over.” She wandered over to watch Jem’s father at the lathe, a heavy wooden frame with a half-carved leg clamped to it at chest height. A leather cord was looped around the leg, the ends attached to a treadle at his feet and a pole bent over his head. When Thomas Kellaway pumped the treadle, the cord spun the leg around and he shaved off parts of the wood.

“Can you do that?” Maggie asked Jem, trying now to smooth over his embarrassment, tempted though she was to tease him more.

“Not so well as Pa,” he replied, his face still red. “I practice making ’em, an’ if they be good enough he’ll use ’em.”

“You be doing well, son,” Thomas Kellaway murmured without looking up.

“What do your pa make?” Jem asked. The men back in Piddletrenthide were makers, by and large-of bread, of beer, of barley, of shoes or candles or flour.

Maggie snorted. “Money, if he can. This an’ that. I should find him now. That smell’s making my head ache, anyway. What’s it from?”

“Varnish and paint for the chairs. You get used to it.”

“I don’t plan to. Don’t worry, I’ll see myself out. Bye for now, then.”

“Z’long.”

“Come again!” Maisie called out from the other room as Maggie clattered down the stairs.

Anne Kellaway tutted. “What will Miss Pelham think of that noise? Jem, go and see she be quiet on the way out.”

6

As Miss Pelham came up to her front gate, having spent a happy day visiting friends in Chelsea, she caught sight of some of the wood shavings Maisie had scattered in front of the house and frowned. At first Maisie had been dumping the shavings into Miss Pelham’s carefully pruned, O-shaped hedge in the front garden. Miss Pelham had had to set her straight on that offense. And of course it was better the shavings were in the street than on the stairs. But it would be best of all if there were no shavings at all, because no Kellaways were there to produce them. Miss Pelham had often regretted over the past week that she’d been so hard on the family who’d rented the rooms from her before the Kellaways. They’d been noisy of a night and the baby had cried constantly toward the end, but at least they didn’t track shavings everywhere. She knew too that there was a great deal of wood upstairs, as she’d watched it being carried through her hallway. There were smells as well, and thumping sometimes that Miss Pelham did not appreciate at all.

And now: Who was this dark-haired rascal running out of the house with shavings shedding from the soles of her shoes? She had just the sort of sly look that made Miss Pelham clutch her bag more tightly to her chest. Then she recognized Maggie. “Here, girl!” she cried. “What are you doing, coming out of my house? What have you been stealing?”

Before Maggie could reply, two people appeared: Jem popped out behind her, and the door to no. 13 Hercules Buildings opened and Mr. Blake stepped out. Miss Pelham shrank back. Mr. Blake had never been anything but civil to her-indeed, he nodded at her now-yet he made her nervous. His glassy gray eyes always made her think of a bird staring at her, waiting to peck.

“Far as I know, this is Mr. Astley’s house, not yours,” Maggie said cheekily.

Miss Pelham turned to Jem. “Jem, what is this girl doing here? She’s not a friend of yours, I trust?”

“She-she’s made a delivery.” Even in the Piddle Valley, Jem had not been a good liar.

“What did she deliver? Four-day-old fish? Laundry that’s not seen a lick of lye?”

“Nails,” Maggie cut in. “I’ll be bringing ’em by reg’lar, won’t I, Jem? You’ll be seein’ lots more o’ me.” She stepped sideways off Miss Pelham’s front path and into her front garden, where she followed the tiny hedge around in its pointless circle, running a hand along the top of it.

“Get out of my garden, girl!” Miss Pelham cried. “Jem, get her out of there!”

Maggie laughed, and began to run around the hedge, faster and faster, then leapt over it into the middle, where she danced around the pruned bush, sparring at it with her fists while Miss Pelham cried, “Oh! Oh!” as if each blow were striking her.

Jem watched Maggie box the leafy ball, tiny leaves showering to the ground, and found himself smiling. He too had been tempted to kick at the absurd hedge so different from the hedgerows he was used to. Hedges in Dorsetshire were made for a reason, to keep animals in fields or off of paths, and grown of prickly hawthorn and holly, elder and hazel and whitebeam, woven through with brambles and ivy and traveler’s joy.

A tap on the window upstairs brought Jem back from Dorsetshire. His mother was glaring down at him and making shooing motions at Maggie. “Er, Maggie-weren’t you going to show me something?” Jem said. “Your-your father, eh? My pa wanted me to-to agree on the price.”

“That’s it. C’mon, then.” Maggie ignored Miss Pelham, who was still shouting and swatting ineffectively at her, and pushed through the ring of hedge without bothering to jump it this time, leaving behind a gap of broken branches.

“Oh!” cried Miss Pelham for the tenth time.

As Jem moved to follow Maggie into the street, he glanced at Mr. Blake, who had remained still and quiet, his arms crossed over his chest, while Maggie had her fun with the hedge. He did not seem bothered by the noise and drama. Indeed, they had all forgotten he was there, or Miss Pelham would not have cried “Oh!” ten times and Maggie would not have beaten the bush. He was looking at them with his clear gaze. It was not a look like that of Jem’s father, who tended to focus on the middle distance. Rather Mr. Blake was looking at them, and at the passersby in the street, and at Lambeth Palace rising up in the distance, and at the clouds behind it. He was taking in everything, without judgment.

“Ar’ernoon, sir,” Jem said.

“Hallo, my boy,” Mr. Blake replied.

“Hallo, Mr. Blake!” Maggie called from the street, not to be outdone by Jem. “How’s your missus, then?”

Her cry revived Miss Pelham, who had sunk into herself in Mr. Blake’s presence. “Get out of my sight, girl!” she cried. “I’ll have you whipped! Jem, don’t you let her back in here. And see her to the end of the street-I don’t trust her for a second. She’ll steal the gate if we don’t watch her!”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jem raised his eyebrows apologetically at Mr. Blake, but his neighbor had already opened his gate and stepped into the street. When Jem joined Maggie, they watched as Mr. Blake walked down Hercules Buildings toward the river.

“Look at his cocky step,” Maggie said. “And did you see the color in his cheeks? And his hair all mussed? We know what he’s been up to!”

Jem would not have described Mr. Blake’s pace as cocky. Rather he was flat-footed, though not plodding. He walked steadily and deliberately, as if he had a destination in mind rather than merely setting out for a stroll.

“Let’s follow him,” Maggie suggested.

“No. Let him be.” Jem was surprised at his own decisiveness. He would have liked to follow Mr. Blake to his destination-not the way Maggie would do it, though, as a game and a tease, but respectfully, from a distance.

Miss Pelham and Anne Kellaway were still glaring at the children from their positions. “Let’s be going,” Jem said, and began to walk along Hercules Buildings in the opposite direction from Mr. Blake.

Maggie trotted after him. “You’re really comin’ with me?”

“Miss Pelham told me to see you to the end of the street.”

“And you’re goin’ to do what that old stick in a dress wants?”

Jem shrugged. “She’s the householder. We’ve to keep her happy.”

“Well, I’m goin’ to find Pa. You want to come with me?”

Jem thought of his anxious mother, of his hopeful sister, of his absorbed father, and of Miss Pelham waiting by the stairs to pounce on him. Then he thought of the streets he did not yet know in Lambeth, and in London, and of having a guide to take him. “I’ll come with you,” he said, letting Maggie catch up and match his stride so that they were walking side by side.

7

Dick Butterfield could have been in one of several pubs. While most people favored one local, he liked to move around, and joined drinking clubs or societies, where the like-minded met at a particular pub to discuss topics of mutual interest. These nights were not much different from other nights except that the beer was cheaper and the songs even bawdier. Dick Butterfield was constantly joining new clubs and dropping old ones as his interests changed. At the moment he belonged to a cutter club (one of his many occupations had been as a boatman on the Thames, though he had long ago lost the boat); a chair club, where each member took turns haranguing the others about political topics from the head chair at a table; a lottery club, where they pooled together on small bets that rarely won enough to cover the drinks, and where Dick Butterfield was always encouraging members to increase the stakes; and, by far his favorite, a punch club, where each week they tried out different rum concoctions.

Dick Butterfield’s club and pub life was so complicated that his family rarely knew where he was of an evening. He normally drank within a half-mile radius from his home, but there were still dozens of pubs to choose from. Maggie and Jem had already called in at the Horse and Groom, the Crown and Cushion, the Canterbury Arms, and the Red Lion, before they found him ensconced in the corner of the loudest of the lot, the Artichoke on the Lower Marsh.

After following Maggie into the first two, Jem waited for her outside the rest. He had only been inside one pub since they arrived in Lambeth: A few days after they moved in, Mr. Astley called to see how they were getting on, and had taken Thomas Kellaway and Jem to the Pineapple. It had been a sedate place, Jem realized now that he could compare it with other Lambeth pubs, but at the time he’d been overwhelmed by the liveliness of the drinkers-many of them circus people-and Philip Astley’s roaring conversation.

Lambeth Marsh was a market street busy with shops and stalls, and carts and people going between Lambeth and Blackfriars Bridge, toward the city. The doors to the Artichoke were open, and the sound poured across the road, making Jem hesitate as Maggie pushed past the men leaning in the doorway, and wonder why he was following her.

He knew why, though: Maggie was the first person in Lambeth to take any interest in him, and he could do with a friend. Most boys Jem’s age were already apprenticed or working; he had seen younger children about, but had not yet managed to talk to any of them. It was hard to understand them, for one thing: He found London accents, as well as the many regional ones that converged on the city, sometimes incomprehensible.

Lambeth children were different in other ways too-more aware and more suspicious. They reminded him of cats who creep in to sit by the fire, knowing they are barely tolerated, happy to be inside but with ears swiveling and eyes in slits, ready to detect the foot that will kick them back out. The children were often rude to adults, as Maggie had been to Miss Pelham, and got away with it when he wouldn’t have in his old village. They mocked and threw stones at people they didn’t like, stole food from barrows and baskets, sang rude songs; they shouted, teased, taunted. Only occasionally did he see Lambeth children doing things he could imagine joining in with: rowing a boat on the river; singing while streaming out of the charity school on Lambeth Green; chasing a dog that had made off with someone’s cap.

So when Maggie beckoned to him from the door of the Arti-choke, he followed her inside, braving the wall of noise and the thick smoke from the lamps. He wanted to be a part of this new Lambeth life, rather than watching it from a window or a front gate or over a garden wall.

Although it was only late afternoon, the pub was heaving with people. The din was tremendous, though after a time his ears began to pick up the pattern of a song, unfamiliar but clearly a tune. Maggie plunged through the wall of bodies to the corner where her father sat.

Dick Butterfield was a small, brown man-his eyes, his wiry hair, the undertone of his skin, his clothes. A web of wrinkles extended from the outer corners of his eyes and across his forehead, forming deep furrows on his brow. Despite the wrinkles, he had a young, energetic air about him. Today he was simply drinking rather than attending 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 neighbors 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. Later Anne Kellaway had taken an axe 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 easygoing 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 barrow full 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, reas oning 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 neighbors 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 from Paradise Lost-the very last lines, when Adam an’ Eve are leaving Eden. Made me sorry for ’em.”

“I didn’t hear anything like that from the Blakes,” Jem said, then felt Maggie’s sharp kick under the table.

“It was after you stopped looking,” she insisted.

Jem opened his mouth to argue further, then stopped. Clearly the Butterfields liked their stories embroidered; indeed, it was the embroidery they wanted, and would soon pass on to everyone else, made even more elaborate, until the whole pub was discussing the Blakes playing Adam and Eve in their garden, even when that was not what Jem had seen at all. Who was he to spoil their fun-though Jem thought of Mr. Blake’s alert eyes, his firm greeting, and his determined stride, and regretted that they were spreading such talk about him. He preferred to speak the truth. “What do Mr. Blake do?” he asked, trying instead to guide the subject away from what they had seen in the garden.

“What, apart from tupping his wife in the garden?” Dick Butterfield chuckled. “He’s a printer and engraver. You seen the printing press through his front window, han’t you?”

“The machine with the handle like a star?” Jem had indeed spied the wooden contraption, which was even bigger and bulkier than his father’s lathe, and wondered what it was for.

“That’s it. You’ll see him using it now and then, him an’ his wife. Prints books an’ such on it. Pamphlets, pictures, that sort o’ thing. Dunno as he makes a living from ’em, though. I seen a few of ’em when I went looking to sell him some copper for his plates when he first moved here from across the river a year or two ago.” Dick Butterfield shook his head. “Strange things, they were. Lots o’ fire an’ naked people with big eyes, shouting.”

“You mean like Hell, Pa?” Maggie suggested.

“Maybe. Not my taste, anyway. I like a cheerful picture, myself. Can’t see that many would buy ’em from him. He must get more from engraving for others.”

“Did he buy the copper?”

“Nah. I knew the minute I talked to him that he’s not one to buy like that, for a fancy. He’s his own man, is Mr. Blake. He’ll go off an’ choose his copper an’ paper himself, real careful.” Dick Butterfield said this without rancor; indeed, he respected those who would clearly not be taken in by his ruses.

“We saw him with his bonnet rouge on last week, didn’t we, Jem?” Maggie said. “He looked right funny in it.”

“He’s a braver man than many,” Dick Butterfield declared. “Not many in London show such open support for the Frenchies, however they may talk in the pub. PM don’t take kindly to it, nor the King neither.”

“Who’s PM?” Jem asked.

Charlie Butterfield snorted.

“Prime Minister, lad. Mr. Pitt,” Dick Butterfield added a little sharply, in case the Dorset boy didn’t know even that.

Jem ducked his head and gazed into his beer once more. Maggie watched him struggling across the table, and wished now that she had not brought him to meet her father. He did not understand what Dick Butterfield wanted from people, the sort of quick, smart talk required of those allowed to sit with him on the stool he kept hooked around his foot under the table. Dick Butterfield wanted to be informed and entertained at the same time. He was always looking for another way to make money-he made his living out of small, dodgy schemes dreamt up from pub talk-and he wanted to have fun doing it. Life was hard, after all, and what made it easier than a little laughter, as well as a little business putting money in his pocket?

Dick Butterfield could see when people were sinking. He didn’t hold it against Jem-the boy’s confused innocence made him feel rather tender toward him, and irritated at his own jaded children. He pushed Maggie abruptly from his knee so that she fell to the floor, where she stared up at him with hurt eyes. “Lord, child, you’re getting heavy,” Dick said, jiggling his knee up and down. “You’ve sent my leg to sleep. You’ll be needin’ your own stool now you’re getting to lady size.”

“Won’t nobody give her one, though, and I’m not talking ’bout just the stool,” Charlie sneered. “Chicken-breasted little cow.”

“Leave off her,” Jem said.

All three Butterfields stared at him, Dick and Charlie leaning with their elbows on the table, Maggie still on the floor between them. Then Charlie lunged across the table at Jem, and Dick Butterfi eld put his arm out to stop him. “Give Maggie your stool and get another one,” he said.

Charlie glared at Jem but stood up, letting the stool fall backward, and stalked off. Jem didn’t dare turn around to watch him but kept his eyes on the table. He took a gulp of beer. He’d defended Maggie as a reflex, the way he would his own sister.

Maggie got up and righted Charlie’s stool, then sat on it, her face grim. “Thanks,” she muttered to Jem, though she didn’t sound very grateful.

“So, Jem, your father’s a bodger, is he?” Dick Butterfield said, opening the business part of the conversation since it seemed unlikely that Jem would entertain them further.

“Not a bodger, exactly, sir,” Jem answered. “He don’t travel from town to town, an’ he makes proper chairs, not the rickety ones bodgers make.”

“Course he does, lad, course he does. Where does he get his wood?”

“One of the timber yards by Westminster Bridge.”

“Whose yard? Bet I can get it for him cheaper.”

“Mr. Harris. Mr. Astley introduced Pa to him.”

Dick Butterfield winced at Philip Astley’s name. Maggie’s father could negotiate good deals most places, but not when Mr. Astley had got in before him. He and his landlord kept a wide berth of each other, though there was a grudging respect on both sides as well. If Dick Butterfield had been a wealthy circus owner, or Philip Astley a small-time rogue, they would have been remarkably similar.

“Well, if I hear of any cheaper wood, I’ll let you know. Leave it with me, lad,” he added, as if it were Jem who’d approached him for advice. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll call in one day, shall I, and have a word with your pa. I’m always happy to help out new neighbors. Now, you’ll be expected back home, won’t you? They’ll be wonderin’ what kept you.”

Jem nodded and got up from the stool. “Thank’ee for the beer, sir.”

“Course, lad.” Dick Butterfield hooked his foot around Jem’s stool and dragged it back under the table. Maggie grabbed Jem’s half-drunk beer and took a gulp. “Bye,” she said.

“Z’long.”

On his way out, Jem passed Charlie standing with a crowd of other young men. Charlie glared at him and shoved one of his friends so that he knocked into Jem. The youths laughed and Jem hurried out, glad to get away from the Butterfields. He suspected, however, that he would see Maggie again, even if she had not said, “Bye for now,” this time. Despite her brother and father, he wanted to. She reminded him of September blackberries, which looked ripe but could just as easily be sour as sweet when you ate them. Jem could not resist such a temptation.