“Charlie don’t cry at all,” Maggie retorted. Charlie did not take the hint, but continued to lounge at the table. Maggie glared at him as she began to peel the onions. Bet Butterfield cut some of the fat off the meat and dropped it into a frying pan to heat. Then she stood over her daughter, watching her work.
“Not rings,” she said. “Slivers.”
Maggie paused, the knife biting into half an onion. “Stop it, Mam. You said onions make you cry, so go ’way.”
“How can I go ’way when you an’t chopping ’em right?”
“What difference does it make how I chop ’em? Rings or slivers, they taste the same. Onions is onions.”
“Here, I’ll do it.” Bet Butterfield grabbed at the knife. Maggie held on to it.
Charlie looked up from his contemplation of nothing and watched mother and daughter grapple with the knife. “Careful, Mam,” he drawled. “Maggie’s handy with a knife, an’t you, Maggie?”
Maggie let go. “Shut it, Charlie!”
Bet Butterfield glanced from one to the other of her children. “What you talkin’ about?”
“Nothing, Mam,” they answered in unison.
Bet Butterfield waited, but neither said anything more, though Charlie smirked at the fire. Their mother began chopping the onions just as she had done the ironing—automatically, methodi-cally, repeating an act so familiar that she didn’t have to waste any thought on it.
“Mam, the fat’s smokin’,” Maggie announced.
“Put the meat in, then,” Bet Butterfield ordered. “Don’t let it burn. Your pa don’t like it burnt.”
“I’m not going to burn it.”
Maggie burnt it. She did not like cooking any more than ironing. Bet Butterfield finished chopping the onions, scooped them up and dropped them into the pan before grabbing the spoon from her daughter. “Maggie!” she cried when she turned the meat and saw the black marks.
Charlie chuckled.
“What’d she do this time?” Dick Butterfield spoke from the doorway. Bet Butterfield flipped the meat back over and stirred the onions vigorously. “Nothing, nothing—she’s just gettin’ back to the ironing, an’t you, duck?”
“Mind you don’t scorch it,” Dick Butterfield commented. “What? What?” he added as Charlie began to laugh and Maggie kicked at her brother’s legs. “Listen, girl, you need to treat your family with a little more respect. Now, help your mother.” He hooked a stool with his foot and pulled it under him as he sat down, a movement he had perfected from years of pub stool sitting.
Maggie scowled, but pulled the iron from the fire and went back to the pile of sheets. She could feel her father’s eyes on her as she ran the iron back and forth, and for once she concentrated on smoothing the cloth systematically rather than haphazardly.
It was rare for all four Butterfields to be in the same room together. By the nature of their different work, Dick and Bet were often out at odd times, and Charlie and Maggie had grown up dipping in and out of the house as they liked, eating from pie shops or taverns or street sellers. The kitchen felt small with them all there, especially with Charlie’s legs taking up so much space.
“So, Mags,” Dick Butterfield said suddenly, “Charlie tells us you was out with the Kellaway boy when you was meant to be gettin’ beer for your mam.”
Maggie glowered at Charlie, who smiled.
“You spend all your time runnin’ round with Dorset boys,” her father continued, “while your mam an’ me is out workin’ to put food in your mouth. It’s time you started to earn your keep.”
“I don’t see Charlie working,” Maggie muttered into her ironing.
“What’s that?” Charlie growled.
“Charlie don’t work,” Maggie repeated more loudly. “He’s years older’n me and you’re not sendin’ him out to work.”
Dick Butterfield had been batting a piece of coal back and forth on the table, and Bet Butterfield was holding the pan over the pot and pushing the meat and onions in to join the potatoes. Both paused what they were doing and stared at Maggie. “What you mean, gal? Course he works—he works with me!” Dick Butterfield protested, genuinely puzzled.
“I meant that you never had him apprenticed, to a trade.”
Charlie had been looking smug, but now he stopped smiling.
“He is apprenticed, to me,” Dick Butterfield said quickly, with a glance at his son. “And he’s learned plenty about buying and selling, han’t you, boy?”
It was a sore point with Charlie. They’d not had the fee needed to have him apprenticed at thirteen, for Dick Butterfield had been in prison then. He’d done two years for trying to pass off pewter as silver, and by the time he’d come out and recovered his busi-ness, Charlie was a fifteen-year-old boor who slept till noon and spoke in grunts. The few tradesmen who might have been prepared to take on an older boy spent just a minute in his company and made their excuses. Dick Butterfield was only able to call in one favor, and Charlie lasted all of two days at a blacksmith’s before he burnt a horse while playing with a hot poker. The horse dispatched him for the blacksmith by kicking him unconscious; he bore the scar through one eyebrow from that blow.
“It an’t Charlie we’re talkin’ about here, anyway,” Dick Butterfield declared. “It’s you. Now, your mam says it’s no good you doin’ the laundry with her, as you haven’t got the knack of it, have you? So I’ve asked about, and got you a place with a friend of mine in Southwark, makes rope. You start tomorrow morning at six. Best get a good night’s sleep tonight.”
“Rope!” Maggie cried. “Please, Pa, not that!” She was thinking of a woman she’d seen in a pub once whose hands were rubbed raw from the scratchy hemp she had to handle all day.
“Surprise,” Charlie mouthed at her.
“Bastard!” Maggie mouthed back.
“No arguments, gal,” Dick Butterfield said. “It’s time you grew up.”
“Mags, run next door and ask ’em for some turnips,” Bet Butterfield ordered, trying to defuse the growing anger in the room. “Tell ’em I’ll get some more down the market tomorrow.”
Maggie banged the iron into the coals and turned to go. If she’d simply gone out, got the turnips, and come back, the moment might have passed. But as she went toward the door, Charlie stretched out a foot to trip her, and Maggie sprawled forward, banging her shins on the table and knocking Dick Butterfield’s arm so that the piece of coal he’d been playing with flew from his hands and dropped into the stew. “Damn, Mags, what you doing?” he shouted.
Even then the situation could have been repaired if only her mother had scolded Charlie for tripping her up. Instead Bet Butterfield cried, “What’s the matter with you, you clumsy clod! You tryin’ to ruin my stew? Can’t you do anything right?”
Maggie staggered up from the floor to come face-to-face with Charlie’s sneer. The sight made something in her snap, and she spat in her brother’s face. He jumped up with a roar, his chair flung backward. As Maggie hopped across the room to the door, she shouted over her shoulder, “Fuck you, the lot of you! You can take your turnips and shove ’em straight up your arse!”
Charlie chased her out of the house and down the street, bellowing “Bitch!” all the way, and would have caught her but for a coach rumbling along Bastille Row that she darted in front of and that he was forced to stop for. This gave her the crucial seconds she needed to get him off of her heels, race across Mead Row, and dive down an alley that ran along the backs of gardens and came out eventually across from the Dog and Duck. Maggie knew every hidey-hole and alley in the area much better than her brother. When she looked back, Charlie was no longer following her. He was the sort of boy who never bothered to chase someone unless he was sure he could catch them, for he hated being seen to lose.
Maggie hid behind the Dog and Duck for a while, listening to the noise inside the pub and watching out for her brother. When she felt sure that he was no longer looking for her, she crept out and began to make her way through the streets in a wide semicircl
e around Bastille Row. It was quiet now; people were at home eating, or in the pub. Street sellers had packed up their wares and gone; the whores were just beginning to emerge.
Eventually Maggie ended up at the river by Lambeth Palace. She sat on the bank for a long time, watching the boats going up and down in the early evening sunlight. She could hear, up along the river, the distinct sounds of Astley’s Circus—music and laughter and occasional cheers. Her heart was still pounding and she was still grinding her teeth. “Damned rope,” she muttered. “Piss on that.”
Though she was hungry, and she would need somewhere to sleep, she didn’t dare go home to face her parents and Charlie, and rope. Maggie shivered, though it was a balmy evening yet. She was used to spending time away from the house, but she’d never slept anywhere else. Perhaps Jem will let me sleep at his house, she thought. She couldn’t think of another plan, and so she leapt up and ran along Church Street past Lambeth Green to Hercules Buildings. It was only when she was standing in the road across from Miss Pelham’s house that Maggie faltered. No one was standing in the windows of the Kellaways’ rooms, though they were propped open. She could call out or throw a pebble up to get someone’s attention, but she didn’t. She just stood and looked, hoping that Jem or Maisie would make it easy by spotting her and beckoning for her to come up.
After a few minutes of standing and feeling foolish, she stepped into the road again. It was getting dark now. Maggie walked down the alley between two Hercules Buildings houses that led to Astley’s field. Across it was her parents’ garden, where she could see a faint light through the gap in the fence. They would have eaten the stew by now. She wondered if her mother had saved any for her. Her father might have slipped to the pub to bring back more beer and perhaps an old paper or two that he would be reading out to Bet and Charlie, if Charlie hadn’t already gone to the pub himself. Perhaps the neighbors had popped around and they were catching up on the local gossip or talking about how difficult daughters could be. One of their neighbors played the fiddle—perhaps he’d brought it with him and Dick Butterfield had drunk enough beer to sing “Morgan Rattler,” his favorite bawdy song. Maggie strained her ears, but couldn’t hear any music. She wanted to go back, but only if she could slip in and sit with her family and not have a fuss made, and not have to say sorry, and take the beating she knew waited for her, and go the next morning and make rope for the rest of her life. That was not going to happen, and so she had to stand and watch from afar.
Her gaze fell then on the wall at the end of the Blakes’ garden just to her left. She contemplated it, gauging how high it was, and what was behind it, and whether or not climbing over it was what she wanted to do.
Not far from the wall was a wheelbarrow one of Astley’s nieces had been using in the kitchen garden. Maggie looked around. For once the yard was deserted, though there were figures moving about inside Hercules Hall—servants preparing a late supper for their master. She hesitated, then ran in a crouch over to the barrow and pushed it to the end of the wall, wincing at the squeak the wheel made. Then, when she was sure no one was watching, she climbed onto the barrow, pulled herself to the top of the wall, and jumped down into the darkness.
PART IV
June 1792
1
It was a treat for Anne and Maisie Kellaway to be able to sit out in Miss Pelham’s garden to make their buttons. Miss Pelham had gone the day before to visit friends in Hampstead, taking her maid with her, and was staying the week for the air—Lambeth was unseasonably hot and the hills just north of London were likely to be cooler. In her absence the Kellaway women were taking advantage of the sunshine and the empty garden. They had brought chairs out and were sitting in the square with the white lilac in the center, surrounded by pinks. Lilac was Maisie’s favorite flower; she’d longed to sniff it but had only been able to watch over it longingly from their windows as its white blossoms began to appear. Whenever she went to the privy, she wondered if she could dash across the gravel path, bury her nose in the flowers, then run back before Miss Pelham saw her. But her landlady always seemed to be lingering at the back window or in the garden itself, pacing with her cup of beef broth, and Maisie never dared. Now, though, she could sit by it for a whole morning and get her fill of its scent until next year.
Maisie leaned back in her chair and sighed as she stretched her neck, tilting her head to the left and right.
“What is’t?” her mother asked, still bent over the button—a Blandford Cartwheel—she was making. “Tired already? We’ve hardly begun. You’ve only made two.”
“It’s not that. You know I like making buttons.” Indeed, Maisie had once made fifty-four Blandford Cartwheels in one day, a record for the Piddle Valley—though a girl to the east in Whitchurch was known to make a gross of buttons a day, as Mr. Case, the button agent who came monthly to Piddletrenthide, often reminded the women who brought their finished buttons to him. Maisie was sure the girl made simpler buttons that could be done faster—Singletons and Birds’ Eyes, or Dorset Crosswheels, which weren’t as fiddly as Cartwheels. “It be just that I—I miss our lilac back home.”
Anne Kellaway was silent for a moment, examining her finished button and using her thumbnail to distribute rows of thread more evenly so that the button resembled a tiny spider’s web. Satisfied, she dropped the button in her lap with the others she had made, and picked up a new metal ring, which she began wrapping with thread right the way around the rim. Then she addressed Maisie’s comment. “Lilac smells the same here, don’t it?”
“No, it don’t. It be smaller and has fewer flowers, and it an’t so perfumed, and there be dirt all over it.”
“The bush be different, but the flowers still smell the same.”
“No, they don’t,” Maisie insisted.
Anne Kellaway did not pursue the argument; though she had—with the help of regular visits to the circus—grown more accepting of their new life in London, she understood what her daughter meant. “I wonder if Lizzie Miller’s picked any elderflowers yet,” she said instead. “I han’t seen any out here yet. Don’t know if they come out here earlier or later’n Dorsetshire. I hope Sam shows her where the early patch be up Dead Cat Lane.”
“What, near the top?”
“Yes.” Anne Kellaway paused, thinking about the spot. “Your father carved me a whistle from the wood of that tree when we was young.”
“That were sweet. But you can’t still have the whistle, Ma, can you? I never seen it.”
“I lost it not long after, in the hazel wood near Nettlecombe Tout.”
“How tragic!” her daughter cried. Recently Maisie had grown more sensitive to the goings-on between couples, loading them with a depth of emotion that Anne Kellaway herself felt she could never match.
She glanced sideways at her daughter. “It weren’t so tragic as all that.” She would never tell Maisie, but she’d lost it during a tumble with Thomas Kellaway—“priming the pump for the marriage bed,” as he’d put it. Now, so many years later, it was hard to imagine why they’d done such a thing. Though she knew she must still love her husband, she felt old and numb.
“D’you think Sam has married Lizzie by now?” Maisie asked. “She got the ring in the Michaelmas pie last year, didn’t she? It be time for her to marry.”
Anne Kellaway snorted. “That old tale. Anyway, Sam said he would send word if he did.”
“I wish we were there to see it. Lizzie’d look so pretty with flowers in her hair. What would she wear, d’you think? I’d wear white lilac, of course.”
Anne Kellaway frowned as she wound the thread rapidly around the button ring. She and Maisie had been making buttons for years in their spare time, and she had always enjoyed sitting with her daughter, chatting about this and that or simply being quiet together. These days, however, she had little to add to Maisie’s remarks about love and beauty and men and women. Such thoughts were far from her life now—if they had ever been close. She couldn’t recall being interested in things like tha
t when she was fourteen. Even Thomas Kellaway’s courting her at nineteen had surprised her; sometimes when she’d walked with him along lanes and across fields, or lain with him in the woods where she lost her whistle, she had felt as if it were someone else in her place, going through the motions of flirting and blushing and kissing and rubbing her hands along her lover’s back, while Anne Kellaway herself stood off to one side and studied the ancient furrows and dikes that underpinned the surrounding hills. Maisie’s intent interest embarrassed her.
However, she too wished that she could see her eldest son married. They’d only had one letter from Sam, at the beginning of May, though Maisie, who could read and write better than the rest of the Kellaways, had set herself the task of writing to him weekly, and began her letters with a paragraph full of questions and speculation about all that might be going on in the Piddle Valley—who would be shearing their sheep, who was making the most buttons, who had been to Dorchester or Weymouth or Blandford, who’d had babies. However, though he could read and write a little—all the Kellaway children had gone for a bit to the village school—Sam was not a letter writer, or very talkative. His letter was short and poorly written, and did not answer Maisie’s questions. He told them only that he was well, that he’d carved the arms for a new set of pews for the church at Piddletrenthide, and that it had rained so much that the stream running through Plush had flooded some of the cottages. The Kellaways devoured these bits of news, but there had not been enough of them, and they were still hungry.
Since they got little news from home, Anne and Maisie Kellaway could only speculate over their buttons. Had the publican sold the Five Bells as he was always threatening to do? Had the head-stock holding the treble bell at the church been mended in time for the Easter Sunday peal? Had the maypole been set up in Piddletrenthide or Piddlehinton this year? And now, as they bent over their buttons: Would Lizzie Miller pick the choicest elderflowers for cordial and wear lilac in her hair at the wedding the Kellaways would miss? Anne Kellaway’s eyes blurred with tears for not knowing. She shook her head and focused on her Blandford Cartwheel. She had finished wrapping the ring with thread and was now ready to create spokes to make it look like the wheel of a cart.