Burning Bright

1

“Friends, gather round now-I want to have a word with you. That’s all of you, in the ring, please.” Philip Astley’s thundering voice could be heard throughout the amphitheatre. Jem and Thomas Kellaway glanced at each other and laid down the tools they had been gathering up-it was Saturday noon and they were just finishing their work for the day. They made their way with the other carpenters from backstage to the ring, where they were joined by grumbling acrobats, riders, costume girls, grooms, circus boys, musicians, dancers, and all the rest of the circus workers. It was not unheard of for Philip Astley to call a meeting of the company, but he did not normally choose to do so when they were about to have an afternoon off before the evening performance. His timing suggested that the news would not be good.

Thomas Kellaway did not join in the grumbling. Though he had now been working for the circus for three months, and was glad of the regular wages, he still felt too new to say anything unless asked directly. Instead he simply stood next to the stage with Jem and the other carpenters and kept quiet.

John Fox leaned against the barrier that separated the pit seats from the circus ring, and continued to chew on something so that his long mustache wriggled. His eyelids were so low that he seemed to be asleep where he stood; he could also conveniently avoid eye contact with anyone. John Astley was sitting in the pit with some of the other horsemen, his riding boots-cleaned and polished daily by one of his cousins-propped up on a railing, as he picked at a thumbnail.

“Fox, is everyone here? Good. Now, friends, listen to me.” Philip Astley batted his hands up and down to quiet the noises of discontentment. “Boys and girls, first I would like to say that you have been doing an impressive job-a most impressive job. Indeed, I believe this season will go down as one of our very best. For sheer professionalism as well as dazzling entertainment, no one can touch us.

“Now, my friends, I must share some news with you that will affect us all. As you are aware, these are trying times. Dangerous times, we might say. Revolutionary times. Over the summer there has been growing turbulence in France, has there not? Well, good people of the circus, it may well be reaching a bloody climax. Perhaps some of you have heard the news today from Paris, where there are reports of twelve thousand citizens killed. Twelve thousand royalists, friends-people loyal to king and family! People like you and me! Not twelve, not twelve hundred, but twelve thousand! Do you have any idea how many people that is? That is twelve nights’ audience, sir.” He gazed at the singer Mr. Johannot, who stared back at him with wide eyes. “Imagine twelve audiences piled up in the streets around us, ladies.” Philip Astley turned toward a group of seamstresses who had been giggling in their seats, and who froze when he glared at them. “Slaughtered mercilessly, men, women, and children alike-throats cut, bellies slashed open, their blood and entrails pouring down the gutters of Westminster Bridge Road and Lambeth Marsh.” One of the girls burst into tears, and two others followed.

“Well may you cry,” Philip Astley continued over their sobs. “Such actions so close to our own shores pose a grievous threat to us all. Grievous, dear colleagues. The imprisonment of the French king and his family is a challenge to our own royal family. Watch and weep, friends. It is an end to innocence. England cannot let this challenge to our way of life pass. Within six months we will be at war with France-my instincts as a cavalryman tell me so. Kiss your fathers and brothers and sons good-bye now, for they may soon be off to war.”

During the pause that followed as Philip Astley let his words sink in, irritated looks and grumbles were replaced with solemn faces and silence, apart from the weeping from the costume bench. Thomas Kellaway looked around in wonder. The revolution in France was certainly discussed more in London pubs than at the Five Bells in Piddletrenthide, but he had never thought it would ever affect him personally. He glanced at Jem, who had just turned thirteen. Though too young for cannon fodder, his son was old enough to feel the threat of being press-ganged into the army. Thomas Kellaway had seen for himself a press-gang in action at a Lambeth pub, drawing in a gullible youth with promises of free pints, and then frogmarching him to a nearby barracks. Tommy would have been a prime target, Thomas Kellaway thought. It should be Tommy he’d be concerned about rather than Jem. But then, if Tommy were alive to worry about, they’d still be a close, loving family safely tucked away in the Piddle Valley, far from the danger of press-gangs. Thomas Kellaway had not considered such threats when he and his wife decided to come to London.

“I have been taking the measure of our audiences,” Philip Astley continued, and Thomas Kellaway pulled himself out of his thoughts to listen. “Public entertainers must be ever vigilant to public moods. Vigilant, my friends. I am aware that, though audi-ences like to be kept abreast of the state of the world, they also come to the amphitheatre to forget-to laugh and rejoice at the superlative wonders before their eyes, and to put out of their minds for one evening the worries and threats of the world. This world”-he gestured around him, taking in the ring, the stage, the seats, and the galleries-“becomes their world.

“Even before today’s terrible news, I had reached the inevitable conclusion that the current program places perhaps too much emphasis on military spectacle. The splendid and realistic enactment of soldiers striking camp at Bagshot Heath, and the celebration of peace during the East India Military Divertissement-these are scenes of which we can be justly proud. But perhaps, friends, given the present state of affairs in France, they are de trop-particularly for the ladies in the audience. We must think of their sensitive natures. I have seen many members of the gentler sex shudder and turn away from these spectacles; indeed, three have fainted in the last week!”

“That were from the heat,” the carpenter next to Thomas Kellaway muttered, though not loud enough for Philip Astley to hear.

“And so, boys and girls, we are going to replace the Bagshot Heath spectacle with a new pantomime I have penned. It will be a continuation of the adventures of the Harlequin my son played earlier this season, and will be called Harlequin in Ireland.”

A groan arose from the assembled company. Astley’s Circus had been playing to good crowds and, after several changes in program, had settled down into a happy routine that many had expected would take them right through early October to the end of the season. They were tired of change, and content to repeat themselves each night without learning a new show, which would require a great deal of unexpected extra work. Saturday afternoon off would certainly be canceled, for a start.

Even as Philip Astley reiterated that Harlequin in Ireland would be a tonic for revolution-weary audiences, the carpenters were already heading backstage to ready themselves for immediate set building. Thomas Kellaway followed more slowly. Even three months into his job with the circus, he found working with so many others overwhelming at times, and sometimes longed for the quiet of his workshop in Dorsetshire or at Hercules Buildings, where there had only been him and his family to make noise. Here there was a constant parade of performers, musicians, horses, suppliers of timber and cloth and oats and hay, boys running in and out on the endless errands supplied by Philip Astley, and general hangers-on creating chaos along with the rest of them. Above all there was Philip Astley himself, bellowing orders, arguing with his son about the program or Mrs. Connell about ticket sales or John Fox about everything else.

Noise was not the only thing Thomas Kellaway had had to adjust to in his new position. Indeed, the work couldn’t be more different from his chairs, and he sometimes thought he ought to tell Philip Astley that he was not suitable for the demands made on him, and admit that he had really taken the job only to satisfy his circus-obsessed wife.

Thomas Kellaway was a chairmaker-a profession which required patience, a steady hand, and an eye for the shape wood would best take. Building the sorts of things needed for Astley’s Circus was a completely different use of wood. To expect Thomas Kellaway to be able do such work was like asking a brewer to trade jobs with a laundress, simply because both used water. In making chairs, the choice of wood used for each part was critical in creating a strong, comfortable, long-lasting chair. Thomas Kellaway knew his elm and ash, his yew and chestnut and walnut. He knew what would look and work best for the seat (always elm), the legs and spindles (he preferred yew if he could get it), the hoop for the back and arms (ash). He understood just how much he could bend ash before it splintered; he could sense how hard he had to chop at an elm plank with his adze to shape the seat. He loved wood, for he had been using it all his life. For scenery, however, Thomas Kellaway had to use some of the cheapest, poorest wood he had ever had the misfortune to handle. Knotty oak, seconds and ends of beech, even scorched wood salvaged from house fires-he could barely stand to touch the stuff.

Harder even than that, though, was the idea behind what he was meant to make. When he made a chair, he knew it was a chair-it looked like one, and it would be used as one. Otherwise there was no reason for him to make it. The scenery, however, was not what it was meant to be. He constructed sheets of board cut into the shapes of clouds, painted white, and hung up in the “sky” so that they looked like clouds-yet they were not clouds. He was building castles that were not castles, mountains that were not mountains, Indian pavilions that were not Indian pavilions. The only function of what he now made was to resemble something else rather than to be it, and to create an effect. Certainly it looked good, from a distance. Audiences often gasped and clapped when the curtain went up and the carpenters’ creations set the scene-even if up close they were clearly just bits of wood nailed together and painted for effect. Thomas Kellaway was not used to something looking good from far away but not up close. That was not how chairs worked.

His first weeks at Astley’s were not the disaster they so easily could have been, however. Thomas Kellaway was rather surprised by this, for he had never in his life worked as part of a group. The first time he appeared at the amphitheatre, the day after Philip Astley hired him, carrying his tools in a satchel, no one even noticed him for an hour. The other carpenters were busy building a shed at the back in which to store the few bits and pieces that had been salvaged from the laboratory fire. Thomas Kellaway watched them for a time; then, noting one of the carpenters going around the gallery of the theatre, tightening handrails, he found some nails and bits of wood, took up his tools, and set about making repairs in the boxes. When he’d finished, having gained in confidence, he went back to the half-built shed and quietly inserted himself into the scrum of men, handing over the right-sized plank just when it was needed, scrounging up nails when no one else could find any, catching a loose board before it hit a man. By the time the last plank for the slanted roof had been hammered into place, Thomas Kellaway had become a natural part of the team. To celebrate his arrival, the carpenters took him at noon to their favored pub, the Pedlar’s Arms, just across the road from the timber yards north of Westminster Bridge. They all got drunk except for Thomas Kellaway, drinking toasts to their late head carpenter, the unfortunate John Honor. He left them to it, finally, and returned to work alone on a wood volcano that was to spew fireworks as part of the drama Jupiter’s Vengeance.

Since then Thomas Kellaway had spent the summer keeping quiet and working hard. It was easier, keeping quiet, for when he did open his mouth the men laughed at his Dorset accent.

Now he began to sort through his tools. “Jem, where be our compass saw?” he called. “One o’ the men needs it.”

“At home.”

“Run and get it, then, there’s a good lad.”

2

When needed, as today, Jem helped his father in the amphitheatre; other times he joined the other circus boys hanging about to run errands for Philip Astley or John Fox. Usually they were to places in Lambeth or nearby Southwark. The few times he was asked to go farther afield-to a printer’s by St. Paul’s, or a law office at Temple, or a haberdasher’s off St. James’s-Jem passed on the honor to other boys, who were always looking for the extra penny that came with trips across the river.

Often Jem didn’t know where he was meant to go. “Run to Nicholson’s Timber Yard and tell them we need another delivery of beech, same size as yesterday’s,” John Fox would say, then turn away before Jem could ask him where the yard was. It was then that he most missed Maggie, who could have told him in a flash that Nicholson’s was just west of Blackfriars Bridge. Instead he was forced to ask the other boys, who teased him equally for his ignorance and his accent.

Jem didn’t mind being sent home; indeed, he was pleased to get out of the amphitheatre. September was a month he associated with being outside even more than the summer months, for it was often balmy but not stifling. September light in Dorsetshire was glorious, the sun casting its gold aslant across the land rather than beating straight down as it did in midsummer. After the frantic haying that kept the countryside constantly moving in August, September was quieter and more reflective. Much of his mother’s garden was ready to eat, and the flowers-the dahlias, the Michaelmas daisies, the roses-flourished. He and his brothers and Maisie gorged on blackberries till their fingers and lips were stained bright purple-or until Michaelmas at the end of September, when the devil was meant to have spat on brambles and the berries went sour.

Yet beneath all of the golden September abundance, an inevitable current was also pulling the other way. There might still be plenty of green about, but the undergrowth was slowly accumulating dried leaves and withered vines. The flowers were at their brightest, but they also faded quickly.

September in London was less golden than in Dorsetshire, but it was still very fine. Jem would have lingered if he could; but he knew that if he delayed fetching the compass saw, the waiting carpenter would go to the pub, and then would be unable to work, leaving more for him and his father to do. So he hurried through the back streets between Astley’s Amphitheatre and Hercules Buildings without stopping to enjoy the sunshine.

Miss Pelham was hovering in the front garden of no. 12 Hercules Buildings, wielding a pair of pruning shears, the sun lighting up her yellow dress. Next door at no. 13, a man was leaving William Blake’s house whom Jem had not seen before, though he seemed familiar, leaning forward as he walked with his hands tucked behind his back, his gait deliberate and almost flat-footed, his wide brow furrowed. It was only when Miss Pelham whispered, “That’s Mr. Blake’s brother,” however, that Jem recognized the family resemblance. “Their mother’s died,” she continued in her hiss. “Now, Jem, you and your family are not to make noise, do you hear? Mr. Blake won’t want you hammering and banging and moving whatnot about. You be sure to tell your parents.”

“Yes, Miss Pelham.” Jem watched Mr. Blake’s brother walk up Hercules Buildings. That must be Robert, he thought-the one Mr. Blake had mentioned a few times.

Miss Pelham snipped savagely at her box hedge. “The funeral’s tomorrow afternoon, so don’t you get in the way.”

“Will the procession be going from here?”

“No, no, from across the river. She’s to be buried at Bunhill Fields. But you stay out of Mr. Blake’s way anyway. He won’t want you or that girl hanging about in his moment of sorrow.”

In fact, Jem had seen nothing of Mr. Blake all summer, and little enough of Maggie either. It seemed a year since Maggie had hidden at the Blakes’, their lives had changed that suddenly.

This made it even more surprising when a few minutes later Jem spied her, of all places, in the Blakes’ garden. He had looked out of the back window to see if his mother was in Mr. Astley’s kitchen garden. Indeed she was, showing an Astley niece how to tie tomato plants to stakes without damaging the stems. Thomas Kellaway had got up his courage to ask Philip Astley if his wife might use a bit of the field for her own vegetable patch in return for helping out the Astley niece, who seemed not to know a turnip from a swede. Anne Kellaway had been overjoyed when he agreed, for though it was mid-June by then, and too late to plant much, still she had managed to put in some late lettuces and radishes, as well as leeks and cabbage for later in the year.

Jem was about to turn away to head downstairs, compass saw in hand, when a flash of white inside the Blakes’ summerhouse caught his eye. At first he feared he might be seeing a repeat of the naked display he’d witnessed a few months back, and which still made him blush when he thought of it. Then he saw a hand flung out in the shadow of the doorway, and a boot he recognized, and gradually he made out Maggie’s still form.

No one else was in the Blakes’ garden, though Miss Pelham was now in her back garden, deadheading her roses. Jem hesitated briefly, then clattered downstairs, hurried along Hercules Buildings, into the alley leading to Hercules Hall, and then left at the end to skirt along the back garden walls. Anne Kellaway was still with her tomato plants, and Jem crept past her. He reached the Blakes’ back wall, where an old crate was still hidden under a clump of long grass from the two weeks when Maggie climbed back and forth over it rather than trampling through the Blakes’ house. He stood by it, watching his mother’s back. Then, in a rush, he climbed the wall and hopped over.

Picking his way quickly through the wild back garden, Jem stole toward Maggie, keeping the summerhouse between him and the Blakes’ windows so that they wouldn’t see him. Once next to her, he could see her shoulders and chest moving up and down with her breath. Jem looked around, and when he was certain the Blakes were not in sight, he sat down to watch Maggie as she slept. Her cheeks were flushed, and there was a smear of yellow along her arm.

Since the fire, Maggie had vanished. Jem and his father worked hard at Astley’s, but they did not put in the hours that Maggie did at the mustard manufactory, where she started at six in the morning and worked until evening, six days a week. On Sundays, when the Kellaways were at church, Maggie was still asleep. Sometimes she slept all of Sunday. When she did that, Jem didn’t see her from one week to the next.

If she did get up on a Sunday afternoon, they would meet by the wall in Astley’s field, and go down to the river together-sometimes by Lambeth Palace, other times to walk over Westminster Bridge. Often they didn’t do even that, but simply sat against the wall. Jem watched as Maggie’s liveliness drained from her; with each passing Sunday she looked more exhausted, and thinner, the curves that attracted him hardening. The lines on her palms and fingers and the spaces under her nails were seamed with yellow. A fine dust settled on her skin as well-on her cheeks, her neck, her arms-that did not wash away entirely, a yellow ghost lingering. Her dark hair went dull gray because of the powdered mustard dust it collected. At first Maggie had washed it out every day, but she soon gave up-washing took up time when she could be sleeping, and why bother to have clean hair when the next morning it would just go mustardy again?

She smiled less. She talked less. Jem found that for once he was leading the conversation. Most of the time he entertained her with stories of the goings-on at Astley’s: the fight between Philip Astley and Mr. Johannot over the bawdy words in “The Pieman’s Song” that brought the house down each night; the disappearance of one of the costume girls, later found at Vauxhall Gardens, drunk and pregnant; the night when Jupiter’s volcano was knocked over by the force of the fireworks ignited from it. Maggie loved these stories, and demanded more.

Jem felt an ache, looking at her now. He wanted to reach over and run his finger through the mustard dust on her arm.

Finally he whispered her name.

Maggie sat up with a shout. “What? What is it?” She looked around wildly.

“Shhh.” Jem tried to calm her, cursing himself for frightening her. “Miss Pelham be close by. I just saw you here, from our window, and thought-well, I wanted to see if you was all right.”

Maggie rubbed her face, recovering her composure. “Course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason. It’s just-shouldn’t you be at the factory?”

“Oh, that.” She sighed, a grown-up sound Jem hadn’t heard from her before, and ran her fingers through tangled curls. “Too tired. I went this morning, then run off at dinnertime. All I want is a little sleep. You got anything to eat on you?”

“No. Did you not get any at the factory?”

Maggie laced her fingers together and stretched so that her shoulders humped back. “Nah, left while I could. Never mind, I’ll eat later.”

They sat awhile in silence, listening to the snipping of Miss Pelham at work on her roses. Jem’s eyes kept straying to Maggie’s arm, which was now hugging her knees.

“What you lookin’ at?” she said suddenly.

“Nothing.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I just wondered-what it tastes like.” He nodded at the dusty smear on her arm.

“Mustard? Like mustard, fool. Why-d’you want to lick it?” Maggie teasingly held it out.

Jem turned red, and Maggie pressed her advantage. “Go on,” she murmured. “I dare you.”

Though he wanted to, Jem didn’t want to admit it. He hesitated, then leaned over and ran the flat of his tongue a few inches through the mustard dust, the soft hairs that grew on her arm tickling his tastebuds. He felt dizzy with the sensation of tasting her warm, musky skin for just a moment before the harsh mustard exploded in his mouth, prickling at the back of his throat and making him cough. Maggie laughed, a sound he hadn’t heard enough of these days. He sat back, so ashamed and aroused that he didn’t notice the hairs on Maggie’s arms standing on end.

“Did you hear? Mr. Blake’s ma died,” he said, trying to find his way back to solid ground.

Maggie shivered, wrapping her arms around her knees again. “Has she? Poor Mr. Blake.”

“Funeral be tomorrow. Bunhill Fields, Miss Pelham said.”

“Really? I been there once, with Pa. Shall we go to it? Tomorrow’s Sunday, so we’re not workin’.”

Jem looked sideways at his friend. “We can’t do that-we didn’t even know her.”

“Don’t matter. You’ve not been over that way, have you?”

“Where?”

“Past St. Paul’s, by Smithfield’s. The older bit of London.”

“Don’t reckon I have.”

“You even been across the river?”

“Course I have. Remember when we went to Westminster Abbey?”

“That’s all? You been here six months and you been across the river just once?”

“Three times,” Jem corrected. “I went back to the Abbey once. And I’ve been across Blackfriars Bridge.” He didn’t tell Maggie that he’d gone across but not got off the bridge on the other side. He had stood and watched the chaos of London, and couldn’t bring himself to step into it.

“Go on-you’d like it,” Maggie persisted.

“What-the way you’d like the countryside?”

“Hah! It’s not the same.” When Jem continued to look dubious, Maggie added, “C’mon, it’ll be an adventure. We’ll follow Mr. Blake, like we’ve always wanted to do. What, you afraid?”

She sounded so much like her old self that Jem said, “All right. Yes.”

3

Jem did not tell his parents or Maisie where he was going. Anne Kellaway would forbid him to go so far into London; Maisie would want to come along. Normally Jem didn’t mind if his sister was with him and Maggie. Today, however, he was nervous, and didn’t want to be responsible for Maisie too. So he simply said he was going out, and though he didn’t meet Maisie’s eye, he could feel her pleading gaze.

Perhaps it was because she’d had extra sleep the previous day, but Maggie was more sparkling than she had been for many a Sunday. She had washed herself, hair as well, so that, except for the creases in her hands, her skin was a more normal color. She had put on a clean shift over her gown, tied a light blue neckerchief around her neck, and even wore a slightly crumpled straw hat with a broad brim, trimmed with a navy blue ribbon. Her shape was different too-her waist and chest sharper, more defined-and Jem realized she was wearing stays for the first time.

She took Jem’s arm with a laugh. “Shall we step into town, then?” she said, sticking her nose up in the air.

“You look nice.”

Maggie smiled and smoothed her shift over her stays, a gesture Maisie often made but that clearly was new to Maggie, as it had little effect on the wrinkles and bunches under her arms and at her waist. Jem suppressed an urge to run his own hands down her sides and squeeze her waist.

He glanced down at his patched, dusty breeches, coarse shirt, and plain brown coat that had once been his brother Sam’s. It hadn’t occurred to him to keep on his good church clothes for going into London; apart from worrying that they would be damaged or get dirty in the city, he would have had to explain to his family why he was wearing them. “Should I put on a better coat?” he asked.

“Don’t matter. I just like to dress up when I get the chance. Neighbors’d make fun of me if I wore this round here. C’mon, we’d best get back to the Blakes’. I been keeping an eye on the house but no one’s come out yet.”

They set themselves up to wait across from no. 13 Hercules Buildings, behind the low hedge that separated the field across the road from the road itself. It was not as sunny as the day before; still warm, but hazy and close. They lay in the grass, and now and then one of them would pop up to look over and see if there was any sign of Mr. Blake. They saw Miss Pelham leave with a friend, heading for the Apollo Gardens on Westminster Bridge Road, as she often did on a Sunday afternoon, to drink barley water and look at the flower displays. They saw John Astley ride out on his horse. They saw Thomas and Anne Kellaway and Maisie leave no. 12 and walk past them on their way down to the Thames.

Just after the Kellaways passed, the door to no. 13 opened and Mr. and Mrs. Blake stepped out, turning into Royal Row to make their way through back streets to Westminster Bridge. They were dressed as they always were: Mr. Blake wore a white shirt, black breeches buckled at the knee, worsted stockings, a black coat, and a black broad-brimmed hat like a Quaker’s; Mrs. Blake wore a dark brown dress with a white neckerchief, her creased bonnet, and a dark blue shawl. Indeed, they looked more like they were going for a Sunday afternoon stroll than to a funeral, except that they walked a little more quickly than usual, and with more purpose, as if they knew exactly where they were going, and that end point was more important than the journey there. Neither looked grim or upset. Mrs. Blake’s face was perhaps a little blank, and Mr. Blake’s eyes more firmly fixed on the horizon. As they seemed so ordinary, no one said anything or took off a hat as people might have done had they known the Blakes were mourners.

Maggie and Jem scrambled over the hedge and began to follow them. At first they stayed well behind them. But the Blakes never looked back, and by the time they crossed Westminster Bridge, the children had drawn close enough that they would be able to hear them speak. The Blakes did not talk, however; only Mr. Blake hummed to himself, and occasionally sang snatches of songs in a high-pitched voice.

Maggie nudged Jem. “Those an’t hymns, like what you’d expect him to be singing today. I think those are his songs what he’d got in his book. Them Songs of Innocence.”

“P’raps.” Jem was paying less attention to the Blakes and more to the scenery around him. They had passed Westminster Hall and the Abbey-where crowds were milling about after the end of one service or before the beginning of another-and continued straight along the road from the bridge. Soon it ran into a large green space dotted with trees, with a long narrow body of water in the middle.

Jem stopped to gape. People were strolling along the raked gravel paths dressed in far finer clothing than anything he had seen in Lambeth. The women wore gowns so structured that the clothes seemed almost to be alive themselves. Their wide skirts were in bright colors-canary yellow, burgundy, sky blue, gold-and sometimes striped or embroidered, or decorated with tiers of ruffles. Elaborately trimmed petticoats filled out the women’s figures, while their hair, piled high on their heads like towers and capped with huge creations in cloth that Jem was reluctant to call hats, made them look like top-heavy ships that might blow over easily with a passing wind. These were the sorts of clothes that you could never wear if you wanted to do any work.

If anything the men’s clothes surprised him more, for they were meant to be closer to what Jem himself wore; there was a nod toward utility, though clearly these men did no work either. He studied a man passing by, who wore a coat of brown and gold silk that cut away elegantly to reveal breeches of the same pattern, a cream and gold waistcoat, and a shirt with ruffles at the neck and cuffs. His stockings were white and clean, the silver buckles on his shoes highly polished. If Jem or his father wore these clothes, nails would snag the silk, wood shavings would be caught in the ruffles, the stockings would get dirty and torn, and the silver buckles would be stolen.

In such well-dressed company, Jem felt even more ashamed of his patched breeches and frayed coat sleeves. Even Maggie’s attempts at dressing up-her battered straw hat, her wrinkled neckerchief-looked ludicrous here. She felt it too, for she smoothed down her dress once more, as if defying others to look down on them. When she lifted her arms to straighten her hat, her stays creaked.

“Wha’ be this place?” Jem said.

“St. James’s Park. See, there’s the palace over there, what it’s named for.” She pointed across the park to a long, redbrick building, crenellated towers flanking its entrance and a diamond-shaped clock suspended in between that read half-past two. “C’mon, the Blakes will get away from us.”

Jem would have liked to linger longer to take in the scene-not only the costume parade, but the sedans being carried about by footmen wearing red; the children dressed almost as lavishly as their parents, feeding ducks and chasing hoops; the dairy maids calling out, “A can of milk, ladies! A can of milk, sirs!” and squirting milk into cups from cows tethered nearby. Instead he and Maggie hurried to catch up.

The Blakes headed north, skirting the east side of the park. At the beginning of a wide avenue planted with four rows of elms-“The Mall,” Maggie explained-which ran down past the palace, they veered into a narrow lane that led out to a street lined with shops and theatres. “They’ll be going up the Haymarket,” Maggie said. “I’d best take your arm.”

“Why?” Jem asked, though he didn’t pull his elbow away when she tucked her hand into it.

Maggie chuckled. “We can’t have London girls taking advantage of a country lad.”

After a minute he saw what she meant. As they walked up the wide street, women began to nod at him and say hello, when no one had paid him any attention before. These women were not dressed as the women in St. James’s Park had been, but were in cheaper, shinier gowns, with more of their bosom revealed, and their hair bundled under feathered hats. They were not as rough as the whore he had met on Westminster Bridge, but that may have been because it was daylight and they were not yet drunk.

“An’t you a lovely lad,” said one, walking arm in arm with another woman. “Where you from, then?”

“Dorsetshire,” Jem replied.

Maggie yanked his arm. “Don’t talk to her!” she hissed. “She’ll get her claws into you and never let go!”

The other whore wore a floral print gown and matching cap, which could have looked elegant if she didn’t have so much cleavage on show. “Dorsetshire, eh?” she said. “I know a girl or two round here from Dorsetshire. Want to meet ’em? Or would you rather have London-bred?”

“Leave him alone,” Maggie muttered.

“What, got your own already?” the floral one said, grabbing Maggie’s chin. “Don’t think she’ll give you what I can.”

Maggie jerked her chin away and let go of Jem’s arm. The whores laughed, then turned to latch on to a better prospect while Maggie and Jem stumbled off, silent with embarrassment. The haze had grown thicker, and the sun had disappeared, poking through only briefly now and then.

Luckily Haymarket was a short street, and they soon passed into quieter, narrower lanes, where buildings were crowded, making the way darker. Though the houses were closer together, they were not shabby, and the people in the streets were a little more prosperous than Jem and Maggie’s Lambeth neighbors.

“Where are we?” Jem asked.

Maggie skirted some horse dung. “Soho.”

“Is Bunhill Fields near here?”

“No, it’s a ways yet. They’ll be going to his mam’s house first, and take her from there. Look, they’ve stopped. There.” The Blakes were knocking at the door of a shop where black cloth had been hung in the windows.

“James Blake, Haberdasher,” Jem read aloud from the sign above the shop. The door opened and the Blakes stepped inside, Mr. Blake turning to lock the door behind him. Jem thought he glanced up for a moment, but not long enough to recognize them. Nonetheless, they backed down the street until they were out of sight of the shop.

There were no carriages waiting near the door, or any sign of movement inside once the Blakes had disappeared. After leaning against the side of some stables a few doors down and attracting sharp looks from the people passing in and out of nearby houses, Maggie pushed herself off of the wall and began to walk back toward the shop. “What you doing?” Jem said in a low voice as he caught up with her.

“We can’t stand there waitin’-attracts too much attention. We’ll walk round and keep an eye out for the undertaker’s carriage.”

They walked past the shop windows and up and down the neighboring streets, soon finding themselves at Golden Square, whose name a posy seller told them. As London squares go, it was not particularly elegant, but the house fronts were wider, and it was lighter than the surrounding streets. The square itself was fenced off with iron railings, so Jem and Maggie strolled all around the outside of it, studying the statue of George II in the center.

“Why’d they do that to me?” Jem asked as they walked.

“Who do what?”

“Those…women in the Haymarket. Why’d they ask me those things? Can’t they see that I be young for-for that?”

Maggie chuckled. “Maybe boys start earlier in London.”

Jem turned red and wished he hadn’t said anything, especially as Maggie seemed to relish teasing him about it. She was smiling at him in a way that made him kick at the gravel path. “Let’s go back,” he muttered.

By the time they arrived, a cart was stopped in front of the shop and the door was open. Neighbors began to open their own doors and stand in the street, and Jem and Maggie hid among them. Mr. Blake appeared with the undertakers and two brothers-one of them the man Jem had seen at Hercules Buildings the day before. Mrs. Blake followed with another woman who had the same thick brow and chunky nose as the Blake men, and must be a sister. As the men carried the coffin out of the door and placed it in the cart, the gathered crowd in the street bowed their heads and the men removed their hats.

When the coffin had been loaded, two of the undertakers climbed onto the box seat and, touching the horses with their reins, set off slowly, the mourners following on foot, with the neighbors behind them. The procession moved up the street until it narrowed; there the neighbors stopped, and stood watching until the cart doglegged into an even smaller street and disappeared.

Jem halted. “P’raps we should go back to Lambeth,” he suggested, swallowing to try to move the lump lodged in his throat. Seeing the coffin in the cart and the neighbors removing their hats had reminded him of his own brother’s funeral, where neighbors had stood in their doorways with heads bowed as the cart carrying his coffin passed, guided to the graveyard by the tolling of a single bell at the Piddletrenthide church. People had openly cried, for Tommy had been a popular boy, and Jem had found it hard to make that short walk between cottage and church in front of everyone. Though he thought of his brother less now, there were still moments when he was ambushed by memories. London had not completely buried Tommy, for any of the Kellaways. At night Jem still heard his mother crying sometimes.

Maggie did not stop with Jem, however, but ran up the street the moment the neighbors turned away to go back to their houses. At the intersection where the procession had disappeared she looked back at Jem and gestured urgently. After a moment, he followed.

4

They soon arrived at Soho Square, a little larger than Golden Square, but with similar iron railings, grass plots, gravel walks, and a statue of Charles II on a pedestal in the center. Unlike Golden Square, it was open to the public, and while the funeral procession passed around the north side, Jem and Maggie walked directly through it, mingling with other Londoners out looking for a bit of fresh air and light-though the air was thicker here than in Lambeth, and full of the smells of people living close together: coal fire smoke, sour, mildewed clothes, boiled cabbage, fish on the turn. And although Soho Square was much more open than the surrounding streets they had walked through, the sky had clouded over completely now, so that there was no longer any golden September light, but a weak, diffuse gray that made Jem think of endless November afternoons. It seemed late, almost evening, and he felt he had been away from Lambeth for hours; yet he had not heard the bells strike four o’clock.

“Here.” Maggie thrust a piece of gingerbread at him that she’d bought from a seller walking past with a tray on his head.

“Thank’ee.” Jem crunched the hard, spicy bread guiltily. He had not brought any money to buy things with, for he had thought it might be taken from him.

On the other side of the square they rejoined the back of the procession, and a few turnings later passed a square church topped with a tall tower. Maggie shivered. “St. Giles,” was all she said, as if the name should conjure up its own associations without her having to explain. Jem did not ask. He knew St. Giles was the patron saint of outcasts, and it was clear enough from the surrounding buildings that the church was aptly named. Though they did not advance down them, Jem could glimpse the filth on the cramped streets, smell them from afar, and see the misery marked on the faces around him. It was not his first encounter with London slums. He and Maggie had explored some of the streets by the river in Lambeth, not far from where she now worked making mustard, and he had been shocked that people could live in such dank, dark conditions. Then, as now, his heart was squeezed tight with longing for Dorsetshire. He wanted to stop a man who passed them in rags, his face drawn and dirty, and tell him to walk out of London, and to keep going until he reached the beautiful green hills etched with furrows and washed in sunlight that formed the backdrop of Jem’s childhood.

He did not stop the man, however. Jem followed Maggie, who followed the Blakes. He did notice that Mr. Blake turned his head to look down those slummy streets even as he continued his march behind his mother’s coffin.

Where there were slums in London, there were whores; St. Giles was full of them. They had the manners not to call out to the members of the funeral procession. Jem, however, was at a distance behind it, and not wearing black, and so was considered a fair target. They began calling to him, as those on the Haymarket had, though these whores were a very different breed. Even Jem, who’d had no experience of women like this, could see that the St. Giles whores were in a much more desperate state than their better dressed, healthier Haymarket equivalents. Here faces were gaunt and pockmarked, teeth black or missing, skin yellow, eyes red from drink or exhaustion. Jem could not bear to look at them, and stepped more quickly, even at the risk of catching up with the Blakes. But he could hear them. “Sir, sir,” they insisted on calling him, running alongside and tugging at his sleeve. “Have a go, sir. Give us sixpence, sir. We’ll make you smile, sir.” Their accents were pri-marily Irish, like most of the St. Giles population, but there were others too-Lancashire, Cornish, Scottish, even a Dorset burr piping up.

Jem walked faster; but not even Maggie swearing at them could shake the women. He drew so close to the funeral procession, with his human gaggle of geese honking noisily at his elbow, that one of Mr. Blake’s brothers-the one Jem thought might be Robert-turned around and frowned at the whores, who at last dropped back.

“We’re coming up to High Holborn,” Maggie announced as the street began to widen. Then she stopped.

Jem stopped too. “What is’t?”

“Shh. I’m listening.”

He thought he could hear nothing but the normal sounds of London life: carriages rumbling past; a man calling, “Cotton laces, ha’penny a piece, long and strong!”; another playing a sad tune on a pipe and interrupting it to shout, “Give a penny to a poor man and I’ll change my tune to a merry one!”; a couple quarreling over a mug of beer. These were all sounds he’d grown used to after six months in Lambeth.

Then he did hear something; underneath all of these growls and rumbles and shouts came a voice of a different timbre-a Dorset voice. “Jem! Jem! Come back!”

Jem whirled about and peered through the crowded street. “There,” Maggie said, and darted toward a frilly white cap.

Maisie was standing with another girl near a stall selling cockles. Though Maisie’s age, she was much smaller, with a hank of straw-colored hair and a pale thin face rouged with two great dots on her cheeks and a smear across her lips, like a young girl’s idea of how to paint her face. Her eyes were pinched and red, as if she’d been crying, and she looked about as if expecting a blow to come at her from anywhere. She wore no chemise, but simply her leather stays, dark and greasy with use, and a red satin skirt over dirty petticoats. She had torn a strip from the bottom of the skirt and tied it in her hair.

“Jem! Jem!” Maisie cried, rushing up to him. “Here be Rosie Wightman. Didn’t you recognize her when you passed? Rosie, it’s Jem.”

Jem would not have given the girl a second look, but when she turned her red-rimmed eyes up to him he saw-under the rouge, the grime, and the pathetic attempt at seductiveness-the face of the girl he used to catch eels with in the River Piddle, and whose parents lost their barn to fire because of her. “Ar’ernoon, Jem,” she said, revealing the familiar gap between her front teeth.

“Lord-you know this girl?” Maggie said.

“She be from home,” Maisie answered.

“And what in the name of God’s green earth are you doing here, Miss Piddle?”

Maisie looked as shifty as it was possible for a girl wearing a frilly mop cap to look. “I were-I were following you. I saw you set out after the Blakes, so I told Ma and Pa my head ached, and I come after you. Followed you all the way,” she added proudly.

“You got a penny for us, Jem?” Rosie asked.

“Sorry, Rosie-I han’t any money on me.”

“Give her your gingerbread,” Maisie ordered.

Jem handed the half-eaten piece to Rosie, who crammed it into her mouth.

“Damn, the Blakes!” Maggie muttered, and turned to look for the procession. After moving so slowly through the back streets, the cart was now picking up speed on the larger road. It was almost out of sight among the traffic along High Holborn. “I’ll just run and see which way they’re going-wait here and I’ll come back for you.” Maggie disappeared into the crowd.

“What you doing here?” Jem asked Rosie.

Rosie looked around, as if to remind herself of where she was. “I do work here,” she said through a mouth full of ginger sludge.

“But why did you run off an’ come to London?”

Rosie swallowed. “You know why. I couldn’t have my parents and the neighbors all pointin’ fingers at me about the fire. So I made my way up here, didn’t I.”

“But why don’t you go home?” Maisie said. “Your parents would-” She stopped as she remembered that the Wightmans were in the workhouse at Dorchester, information she was not about to pass on to Rosie. “Anyway, surely Dorsetshire be better than this!”

Rosie shrugged and wrapped her arms around herself, as if comforting herself with a hug.

“We can’t just leave her here, Jem,” Maisie said. “Let’s bring her back to Lambeth with us.”

“But then Ma and Pa’d know we come into town,” Jem argued, trying not to let his distaste show. It seemed that whores were following him everywhere.

“Oh, they won’t mind, not when they do see we’ve brought Rosie.”

“I dunno.”

While the Kellaways discussed what to do, Rosie stood docile, licking her fingers for stray ginger crumbs. It might be expected that she would take some interest in what was to happen to her, but she did not. Since arriving in London the year before, she had been raped, robbed, and beaten; she owned nothing but what she wore, and was constantly hungry; and though she didn’t know it yet, she had the clap. Rosie no longer expected to have any say over her life, and so she did not say anything.

She’d only managed to attract one man so far today. Now, though, perhaps because a bit of attention was being paid to her, men suddenly took more notice of her. Rosie caught the eye of a slightly better dressed man and brightened.

“You busy, love?” he asked.

“No, sir. Anything for you, sir.” Rosie wiped her hands on her dress, smoothed her straw hair and took his arm. “This way, sir.”

“What’re you doing?” Maisie cried. “You can’t leave us!”

“Nice to see you,” Rosie said. “Z’long.”

“Wait!” Maisie grabbed her arm. “Come-come and find us. We can help you. We live in Lambeth. Do you know where tha’ be?”

Rosie shook her head.

“What about Westminster Bridge?”

“I been there,” Rosie said.

The man pulled his arm from her grasp. “Are you coming or do I have to find company elsewhere?”

“Course I am, sir.” Rosie grabbed his arm again and walked away with him.

“Go to Westminster Bridge, Rosie,” Maisie called, “and at the end of it you’ll see a big building that has a white flag with red and black letters flying from it. Tha’ be Astley’s Circus. Go there during the day and ask for Thomas Kellaway-all right?”

Rosie did not look back but led her customer down a side street, pulling him out of sight into an alley.

“Oh, Jem, I think she nodded,” Maisie said. “She heard me and she nodded. She’ll come-I’m sure of it!” Her eyes were full of tears.

Maggie ran up to them. “It’s all right,” she panted. “They’re held up by two coaches scraped each other and the drivers arguin’. We’ve a minute or two.” She looked around. “Where’s the other Miss Piddle?”

“Gone off,” Jem said.

“She’s going to meet us at Astley’s tomorrow,” Maisie added. Maggie looked from one to the other and raised her eyebrows.

5

As the children followed the funeral procession down High Holborn, Jem sensed a change in the city the farther east they went, into the older part of London. The streets of Soho had been laid out in a kind of grid pattern. Now, however, streets led away from High Holborn less predictably, curving out of sight, dead-ending abruptly, narrowing into lanes a cart could barely squeeze through. They looked as though they simply grew into their shape and size rather than being planned. This part of London was what it was, and made no attempt to be grand or elegant or ordered, as Soho and Westminster did. There were still plenty of houses and shops and pubs about, but these were broken up with larger buildings-factories and warehouses. Jem could smell beer, vinegar, starch, tar, lye, tallow, wool. And when they at last turned off High Holborn, he smelled blood.

“Lord a mercy, I can’t believe they’re going through Smithfield’s!” Maggie cried, wrinkling her nose. “Couldn’t they take another route?”

“What’s Smithfield’s?” Maisie asked.

“Cattle market. We’re on Cow Lane now.”

The street led uphill toward a series of low buildings, where the smells of manure, urine, and cow sweat mingled with the darker metallic odors of blood and flesh. Though the market was shut on a Sunday, there were still people cleaning out stalls. As they passed, a woman threw a bucket of water across their path, sloshing a pink wave around their shoes. Maisie froze in the puddle and put her hand to her mouth.

“C’mon, Miss Piddle,” Maggie ordered, grabbing her by the arm and marching her through the bloody water-though she herself had gone pale at the sight of blood. “Don’t stop now-we can’t have you being sick on us, can we? Now, you haven’t told us how you managed to follow us so far without being seen. I didn’t see her back there, did you, Jem?” As she spoke, she was gulping air, making Jem study her.

Maisie giggled, recovering more quickly than Maggie. “It weren’t easy-especially all that time when you was waiting for the undertakers to arrive. Once you doubled back on yourselves and I had to turn away and look in a clockmaker’s window till you’d passed. I were so sure you’d see me then, but you didn’t. And then in the second square when I were looking at the statue and you come up, I had to jump behind it! Oh, but Jem, you do think Rosie will come to Astley’s, don’t you? She has to. And we’ll help her, won’t we?”

“I don’t see what we can do, really. We can’t send her back to Dorsetshire-not with her parents in the workhouse, and her like she be now.”

“She could stay with us, couldn’t she? Ma and Pa wouldn’t turn her away.”

“Miss Pelham would.”

“Not if we say she be our sister, come from Dorsetshire. Miss Pelham won’t know we han’t a sister.”

“She’d have to change her clothes, that’s sure,” Maggie interjected. “Couldn’t wear those clothes and call her a Piddle girl. The old stick would see her for what she is in a minute.”

“I’ll lend her clothes. And she could get a job-at the mustard factory, for instance. She could work with you.”

Maggie snorted. “I wouldn’t wish that even on an enemy. Look what happens when you work there.” She pulled a handkerchief from her stays, blew into it, and showed them. The contents were bright yellow, streaked with blood. “D’you know that feeling when you take too much mustard sauce on your beef or your fish, and it hurts your nose? Well, that’s what it feels like every day at the factory. When I was first there I sneezed all the time, and my eyes and nose ran. They said they’d let me go if it kept up. Wish they had. I got used to it finally, but I can’t smell anything now, and I taste mustard whenever I eat. Even that gingerbread tasted of mustard. So don’t go suggesting your friend work there.”

“P’raps we could find her work at the circus,” Maisie suggested.

“Or the Asylum for Female Orphans might take her, if we lie and say her parents be dead,” Jem said. “Which they do be, in a way, to her.”

“There’s better’n that for her,” Maggie said. “She could go to the Magdalen Hospital in St. George’s Fields. They take whores there”-Maisie flinched at the word-“and turn ’em into proper girls, teach ’em to sew an’ that, find ’em places as servants.”

Maisie broke in. “Rosie can sew. I know she can. She used to make buttons with me. Oh, I know we can help her!”

During all this talk, they had been walking steadily, turning here and there to follow the mourners. Suddenly the funeral cart stopped in front of a gate behind which rows of gravestones loomed. They had arrived at Bunhill Fields Burying Ground.

6

Jem had not really considered what it was he had come all this way for. He had supposed Bunhill Fields would be grand, being in London-the Westminster Abbey equivalent of a graveyard, something you walked miles to see. To his surprise, it seemed to him not so different from the Piddletrenthide church graveyard. It was, of course, much bigger. Ten Piddle church grounds could have fit comfortably into this field. Moreover, there was no church or chapel for services or spiritual comfort, but simply row upon row of gravestones, broken up here and there by larger monuments, and by a few trees-oak, plane, mulberry. Nor was it sheltered from the outside world as a place for quiet contemplation, for a large brewery jutted into the field, filling it with the worldly, lively smell of hops, and doubtless very busy during the week.

Yet as he stared at the gravestones through the iron railings, waiting with the girls for Mr. Blake’s mother to be carried to her resting place, and later, as a few graveside words were spoken and they idled among the stones, Jem felt Bunhill Fields send him into the silent reverie-part tranquil, part melancholic-so familiar to him from when he used to wander around the Piddletrenthide church graveyard. Now that village graveyard included Tommy’s grave, though, and Jem knew he would feel different there. “Pear tree’s loss,” he murmured, making Maggie turn her head and stare.

The funeral was over quickly. “They didn’t have a church service,” Jem whispered to Maggie as they leaned against a large rectangular monument and watched from a distance while Mr. Blake and his brothers shoveled earth into the grave, then handed the spade over to professional gravediggers.

“They don’t here,” Maggie explained. “This is a Dissenters’ graveyard. They don’t use prayer books or nothing, and the grounds han’t been blessed. Mr. Blake’s a proper radical. Didn’t you know that?”

“Do that mean he’ll go to Hell?” Maisie asked, plucking at a daisy growing at the base of the grave.

“Dunno-maybe.” With her finger Maggie traced the name on the tombstone, though she could not read it. “We’re all going to Hell, I expect. I’ll wager there is no Heaven.”

“Maggie, don’t say that!” Maisie cried.

“Well, maybe there’s a Heaven for you, Miss Piddle. You’ll be awfully lonely there, though.”

“I don’t see why there has to be just the one or t’other,” Jem said. “Can’t there be something that’s more a bit of both?”

“That’s the world, Jem,” Maggie said.

“I suppose.”

“Well said, my girl. Well said, Maggie.”

The children jumped. Mr. Blake had detached himself from the funeral party and come up behind them. “Oh, hallo, Mr. Blake,” Maggie said, wondering if he was angry with them for following him. He did not seem angry, though-after all, he was praising her for something.

“You have answered the question I posed you on Westminster Bridge,” he continued. “I wondered when you would.”

“I did? What question?” Maggie searched her memory, but couldn’t recall much of the heady conversation they’d had with Mr. Blake on the bridge.

“I remember,” Jem said. “You were asking what was in the middle of the river-between its opposite banks.”

“Yes, my boy, and Maggie has just said what it is. Do you understand the answer?” He turned his intense gaze on Jem, who looked back at him, though it hurt, the way staring at the sun does, for the man’s glittering eyes cut through whatever mask Jem had donned to go this deep into London. As they looked at each other, he felt stripped naked, as if Mr. Blake could see everything inside him-his fear of all that was new and different about London; his concern for Maisie and his parents; his shock at the state of Rosie Wightman; his new, surprising feelings for Maggie; his deep sorrow for the death of his brother, of his cat, of everyone who was lost and would be lost, himself included. Jem was confused and exhilarated by his afternoon with Maggie, by the odors of life and death at Smithfield’s, by the beautiful clothes in St. James’s Park and the wretched rags of St. Giles, by Maggie’s laughter and the blood from her nose.

Mr. Blake saw all of this in him. He took it in, and he nodded to Jem, and Jem felt different-harder and clearer, as if he were a stone that had been burnished by sand.

“The world,” he said. “What lies between two opposites is us.”

Mr. Blake smiled. “Yes, my boy; yes, my girl. The tension between contraries is what makes us ourselves. We have not just one, but the other too, mixing and clashing and sparking inside us. Not just light, but dark. Not just at peace, but at war. Not just innocent, but experienced.” His eyes rested for a moment on the daisy Maisie still held. “It is a lesson we could all do well to learn, to see all the world in a flower. Now, I must just speak with Robert. Good day to you, my children.”

“Z’long, sir,” Jem said.

They watched him thread his way through the graves. He did not stop at the funeral party as they’d expected, however, but continued on until he knelt by a grave.

“What were that all about?” Maisie asked.

Jem frowned. “You tell her, Maggie. I’ll be back in a minute.” He picked his way through stone slabs until he could crouch behind one near Mr. Blake. His neighbor was looking very animated, his eyes glinting, though there was little light to make them so-indeed, the clouds had grown thicker, and Jem felt a raindrop on his hand as he hid and listened.

“I feel it pushing at me from all sides,” Mr. Blake was saying. “The pressure of it. And it will get worse, I know it, with this news from France. The fear of originality will stifle those who speak with different voices. I can tell only you my thoughts-and Kate, bless her.” After a pause, he continued, “I have seen such things, Robert, that would make you weep. The faces in London streets are marked by Hell.”

After another, longer pause, he began to chant:

I wander through each chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man

In every infant’s cry of fear

In every voice, in every ban

The mind-forged manacles I hear.

“I’ve been working on that one. I am writing all new, for things have changed so. Think on it, until we meet again, my brother.” He got to his feet. Jem waited until he had gone back to the group in black, then went around to look at the headstone Mr. Blake had knelt by. Doing so confirmed what he had begun to suspect about the brother Mr. Blake spoke of so much: The stone read “Robert Blake, 1762-1787.”

7

The undertakers with their cart moved off in one direction, the Blakes in the other, down the long tree-lined avenue that led to the street. The infrequent spots of rain were beginning to fall more persistently. “Oh dear,” Maisie said, pulling her shawl closely around her shoulders. “I never thought it would rain when I came out. And we be such a long way from home. What do we do now?”

Maggie and Jem did not have a plan beyond reaching Bunhill Fields. It was enough to have done that. Now it was dim with rain, and there was no longer a goal to reach, other than getting home.

Out of habit, Maggie followed the Blakes, with Jem and Maisie falling in behind her. When the family reached the street, they did not turn down it and retrace their steps. Instead, the group got into a carriage that sat waiting for them. It set off briskly, and though the children ran after it, it soon left them behind. They stopped running and stood in the street, watching the carriage race far away from them until it turned right and disappeared. The rain was coming down faster now. They hurried along the street until they came to the crossroads, but the carriage could not be seen. Maggie looked about. She didn’t recognize where they were; the carriage was taking a different route back.

“Where are we?” Maisie asked. “Shouldn’t we try to follow them?”

“Don’t matter,” Maggie answered. “They’ll just be goin’ back to Soho when we want Lambeth. We can find our own way back. C’mon.” She set out as confidently as she could, without telling the others that in the past she’d always come to this part of London with her father or brother, and had let them lead the way. However, there were plenty of landmarks Maggie had been to and could surely find her way back from: Smithfield’s, St. Paul’s, the Guild-hall, Newgate Prison, Blackfriars Bridge. It was just a matter of finding one of them.

For example, ahead of them and across a green was a massive U-shaped building, three stories high and very long, with towered sections in the middle and at the corners where the wings began.

“What’s that?” Maisie said.

“Dunno,” Maggie answered. “Looks familiar. Let’s see it from the other side.”

They walked parallel to the railings that enclosed the green and then past one wing of the building. At the back a high, crumbling stone wall covered with ivy ran alongside, and another, even higher wall had been built closer to the building, clearly designed to keep people in.

“There be bars on the windows,” Jem announced, squinting up through the rain. “This a jail?”

Maggie peered at the windows high up in the walls. “Don’t think so. I know we’re not near Fleet, nor Newgate neither-I been there for hangings and it don’t look like this. There’s not this many criminals in London, not behind bars.”

“You’ve seen someone hanged?” Maisie cried. She looked so horrified that Maggie felt ashamed to confirm it.

“Just the once,” she said quickly. “That was enough.”

Maisie shuddered. “I couldn’t bear to see someone killed, no matter what they’ve done.”

Maggie made a garbled noise. Jem frowned. “You all right?”

Maggie swallowed hard, but before she could say anything, they heard a wail from one of the high barred windows. It began low in pitch and volume, then ascended the scale, growing louder and higher until it became a scream so forceful it must have torn its owner’s throat. The children froze. Maggie felt goose bumps sweep up and down her.

Maisie clutched Jem’s arm. “What’s that? Oh, what is’t, Jem?”

Jem shook his head. The sound stopped suddenly, then began again in its low range, to climb higher and higher. It reminded him of cats fighting.

“A lying-in hospital, maybe?” he suggested. “Like the one on Westminster Bridge Road. Sometimes you hear screams coming from it, when the women are having their babies.”

Maggie was frowning at the ivy-covered stone wall. Suddenly her face shifted with recognition and disgust. “Oh Lord,” she said, taking a step back. “Bedlam.”

“What’s-” Jem stopped. He was remembering an incident one day at Astley’s. One of the costume girls had seen John Astley smiling at Miss Hannah Smith and begun to cry so hard that she sent herself into a fit. Philip Astley had thrown water in her face and slapped her. “Pull yourself together, my dear, or it’s Bedlam for you!” he’d said before the other costume girls led her away. He’d turned to John Fox, tapped his temple, and winked.

Jem looked up at the windows again and saw a hand fluttering between the bars, as if trying to grasp at the rain. When the scream began the third time, he said, “Let’s go,” and turned on his heel to walk what felt like west to him, toward Soho and, eventually, Lambeth.

Maggie and Maisie followed. “That’s London Wall, you know,” Maggie said, gesturing at the stone wall to their right. “There’s bits of it all round. It’s the old wall to the city. That’s what made me recognize Bedlam. Pa brought me past here once.”

“Which way do we go, then?” Jem said. “You must know.”

“Course I do. This way.” Maggie turned left at random.

“Who…who stays at Bedlam?” Maisie faltered.

“Madmen.”

“Oh dear. Poor souls.” Maisie stopped suddenly. “Wait-look!” She pointed at a figure in a red skirt ahead of them. “There’s Rosie! Rosie!” she called.

“Maisie, we’re nowhere near St. Giles,” Maggie said. “She won’t be over here.”

“She might be! She said she works all over. She could’ve come here!” Maisie broke into a run.

“Don’t be an idiot!” Maggie called after her.

“Maisie, I don’t think-” Jem began.

Jem’s sister was not listening, but running faster, and when the girl turned suddenly into an alley, Maisie dived after her and disappeared.

“Damn!” Maggie ran, Jem matching her stride for stride.

When they reached the turning, both Maisie and the red skirt were gone. “Dammit!” Maggie muttered. “What a silly fool!”

They hurried down the alley, looking at each turning for Maisie. Down one they saw a flash of red in the doorway of a house. Now that they could see her face, it was clear that indeed the girl was not Rosie, or a whore either. She shut the door behind her, and Jem and Maggie were left alone among a few houses, a church, a copper shop, and a draper’s.

“Maisie must have kept going,” Maggie said. She ran back to the original alley, Jem at her heels, and continued along it, ducking into other alleys and lanes. At a dead end, they turned; at another they turned again, getting wound more and more tightly into the maze of streets. Jem said little, except to stop Maggie once and point out that they’d come in a circle. Maggie thought he must be furious with her for getting them so lost, but he seemed to show neither anger nor fear-just a grim determination.

Maggie tried not to think beyond finding Maisie. When for a moment she let her mind picture the three of them, lost in these tiny streets in an unknown part of a huge city, with no knowing how to get home, she began to feel so breathless with fear that she thought she would have to sit down. She had only ever felt this frightened once before, when she’d met the man in what would become Cut-Throat Lane.

As they ran along another alley, they passed a man who turned and leered at them. “What you runnin’ from, then?”

Maggie shrieked, and shied like a spooked horse, startling Jem and the man, who shrank back and disappeared into a passageway.

“Maggie, what is’t?” Jem grabbed his friend by the shoulders, but she threw him off with a shudder and turned away, her hand against the wall, trying to steady herself. Jem stood watching her and waiting. At last she took a deep, shaky breath and turned back to him, rain dripping from her crushed straw hat into her eyes. Jem searched her unhappy face and saw there a distant, haunted look that he had caught a few times before-sometimes when she didn’t know he saw it, others like now when she desperately tried to hide it. “What is’t?” he said again. “What happened to you?”

She shook her head; she would not say what it was.

“It be about that man in Cut-Throat Lane, don’t it?” Jem guessed. “You was always funny about that. You went funny back at Smithfield’s too.”

“It was Maisie what looked sick, not me,” Maggie retorted.

“You did too,” Jem insisted. “You looked sick because you saw so much blood back in Cut-Throat Lane. Maybe you even-” Jem paused. “You saw it happen, didn’t you? You saw him get killed.” He wanted to put his arm around her to comfort her, but knew she wouldn’t let him.

Maggie turned her back on him and started down the alley again. “We have to find Maisie,” she muttered, and would say nothing more.

Because of the rain, there were few people about. As they searched, the rain fell even harder in a last attempt to drench anyone outside, then suddenly stopped altogether. Immediately doors began to open. It was a close, cramped area of London, with small, dark houses that had survived change from fire and fashion and poverty only because they were so solid. The people who emerged were similarly sturdy and settled. There were no Yorkshire or Lancashire or Dorsetshire accents here, but the sound of families who had lived for many generations in the same place.

In such a neighborhood, strangers stick out like early-budding crocuses. Hardly had the streets begun to fill with Sunday evening strollers than a woman passing pointed behind herself. “You’ll be wanting the girl with the frilly cap, will you? She’s back there, by Drapers’ Gardens.”

A minute later they came out into an open space where there was yet another enclosed garden, and saw Maisie standing by the iron railings, waiting, her eyes shiny with tears. She said nothing, but threw her arms around Jem and buried her face in his shoulder. Jem patted her gently. “You be all right now, do you, Maisie?”

“I want to go home, Jem,” she said, her voice muffled.

“We will.”

She pulled back and looked in his face. “No, I mean back to Dorsetshire. I be lost in London.”

Jem could have said, “Pa makes more money working for Mr. Astley than he ever did as a chairmaker in Piddletrenthide.” Or, “Ma prefers the circus to Dorset buttons.” Or, “I’d like to hear more of Mr. Blake’s new songs.” Or even, “What about John Astley?”

Instead he stopped a boy his own age, who was whistling as he passed. “Excuse me, sir-where be the Thames?”

“Not far. Just there.” The boy pointed, and the children linked arms before heading in the direction he’d indicated. Maisie was trembling and Maggie was pale. To distract them, Jem said, “I know a new song. D’you want to learn it?” Without waiting for them to reply, he began to chant:

I wander through each chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

They had chanted the two verses he knew three times together when they slipped into a stream of traffic heading onto London Bridge. “It be all right now,” Jem said. “We’re not lost. The river will lead us back to Lambeth.”