Burning Bright

  “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 cr
ied. “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.