“What is it, my boy?” Mr. Blake was waiting for him to continue. That too was new to Jem-an adult seemed to be interested in what he thought.
“Well, it be this,” he began slowly, picking his way through his thoughts like climbing a rocky path. “What’s funny about opposites be that wet and dry both has water, boy and girl be about people, Heaven and Hell be the places you go when you die. They all has something in common. So they an’t completely different from each other the way people think. Having the one don’t mean t’other be gone.” Jem felt his head ache with the effort of explaining this.
Mr. Blake, however, nodded easily, as if he understood and, indeed, thought about such things all the time. “You’re right, my boy. Let me give you an example. What is the opposite of innocence?”
“Easy,” Maggie cut in. “Knowing things.”
“Just so, my girl. Experience.” Maggie beamed. “Tell me, then: Would you say you are innocent or experienced?”
Maggie stopped smiling so suddenly it was as if she had been physically struck by Mr. Blake’s question. A wild, furtive look crossed her face that Jem recalled from the first time he met her, when she was talking about Cut-Throat Lane. She frowned at a passerby and did not answer.
“You see, that is a difficult question to answer, is it not, my girl? Here is another instead: If innocence is that bank of the river”-Mr. Blake pointed toward Westminster Abbey-“and experience that bank”-he pointed to Astley’s Amphitheatre-“what is in the middle of the river?”
Maggie opened her mouth, but could think of no quick response.
“Think on it, my children, and give me your answer another day.”
“Will you answer us summat else, Mr. Blake?” Maggie asked, recovering quickly. “Why’d you draw that statue naked? You know, in the Abbey.”
“Maggie!” Jem hissed, embarrassed she’d acknowledged their earlier spying. Mrs. Blake looked from Maggie to Jem to her husband with a puzzled expression.
Mr. Blake didn’t seem bothered, however, but took seriously her question. “Ah, you see, my girl, I wasn’t drawing the statue. I can’t bear to copy from nature, though I did so for several years in the Abbey when I was an apprentice. That exercise taught me many things, and one of them was that once you know the surface of a thing, you need no longer dwell there, but can look deeper. That is why I don’t draw from life-it is far too limiting, and deadens the imagination. No, earlier today I was drawing what I was told to draw.”
“Who told you?”
“My brother Robert.”
“He was there?” Maggie didn’t remember seeing anyone with Mr. Blake.
“Oh, yes indeed, he was. Now, Kate, if you’re ready, shall we go on?”
“Ready if you are, Mr. Blake.”
“Oh, but-” Maggie cast about for something to keep the Blakes with them.
“Did you know about the echo in the alcoves, sir?” Jem interjected. He too wanted Mr. Blake to remain. There was something odd about him-distant yet close in his attention, an adult and yet childlike.
“What echo is that, my boy?”
“If you stand in the opposite alcoves, facing the wall, you can hear each other,” Maggie explained.
“Can you, now?” Mr. Blake turned to his wife. “Did you know that, Kate?”
“That I didn’t, Mr. Blake.”
“D’you want to try it?” Maggie persisted.
“Shall we, Kate?”
“If you like, Mr. Blake.”
Maggie stifled a giggle as she led Mrs. Blake into the alcove and had her stand facing the wall, while Jem led Mr. Blake to the alcove opposite. Mr. Blake spoke softly to the wall, and after a moment he and Mrs. Blake laughed. That much Jem and Maggie heard, but not the conversation-mostly one-sided, with Mrs. Blake occasionally agreeing with her husband. Their isolation left the children standing in the road on either side of the bridge, feeling a little foolish. Finally Jem wandered over to Maggie. “What do you think they be talking about?”
“Dunno. It won’t be about the price of fish, that’s sure. Wish they’d let us back in.”
Did Mrs. Blake hear her? At that moment she stepped out and said, “Children, come and stand inside with me. Mr. Blake is going to sing.”
Jem and Maggie glanced at each other, then squeezed into the alcove with Mrs. Blake. At close range she smelled of fried fish and coal dust.
They faced the wall once again, Jem and Maggie giggling a little at being so squashed together, but not trying to move apart either.
“We’re ready, Mr. Blake,” Mrs. Blake said softly.
“Very good,” they heard his disembodied voice say. After a pause he began to sing in a high, thin voice very different from his speaking voice:
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by,
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
When the meadows laugh with lively green
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene.
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing Ha, Ha, He.
When the painted birds laugh in the shade
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread
Come live and be merry and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of Ha, Ha, He.
When he finished they were silent.
“Ha, ha, he,” Maggie repeated then, breaking the spell. “Don’t know that song.”
“It’s his own,” Mrs. Blake explained. Jem could hear the pride in her voice.
“He makes his own songs?” he asked. He had never met anyone who wrote the songs people sang. He’d never thought about where songs came from; they were just about, to be pulled from the air and learned.
“Poems, and songs, and all sorts,” Mrs. Blake replied.
“Did you like that, my boy?” came Mr. Blake’s disembodied voice.
Jem jumped; he’d forgotten that Mr. Blake could hear them. “Oh, yes.”
“It’s in a book I made.”
“What’s it called?” Jem asked.
Mr. Blake paused. “Songs of Innocence.”
“Oh!” Maggie cried. Then she began to laugh, and Mr. Blake joined in from his alcove, then Mrs. Blake, and lastly, Jem. They laughed until the stone walls rang with it and the first fireworks of the circus finale rocketed up and exploded, burning bright in the night sky.
PART III – May 1792
1
Though she was meant to be ironing sheets and handkerchiefs-the only ironing her mother trusted her with-Maggie left the back door open and kept an eye out on Astley’s field, which was just behind the house the Butterfields had rooms in. The wooden fence separating their garden from the field would normally block much of the view; it was old and rotting, though, and Maggie had slipped through it so often as a shortcut that she’d knocked it sideways and a gap had opened up. Every time the iron cooled, she shoved it into the coals in the fire and popped outside to poke her head through the gap so that she could watch the rehearsals taking place in Astley’s yard. She also looked out for Jem, whom she was meant to meet in the field.
When she came back into the kitchen for the third time, she found her mother, barefoot and in a nightdress, standing over the ironing board and frowning at the sheet Maggie had half-finished. Maggie rushed to the fire, picked up the iron, wiped the ash from its surface, and stepped up to the sheet, nudging her mother with the hope that she would move aside.
Bet Butterfield paid no attention to her daughter. She continued to stand, flat-footed, her legs a little splayed, arms crossed over her substantial bosom that, free from stays at the moment, was slung low and wobbled under her nightdress. She reached out and tapped part of the sheet. “Look here, you scorched it!”