Jem stepped out of the front room and followed Mrs. Blake. The back room door was shut, and he sensed a muscular presence behind it, like a horse in a stable stall.
Maggie was down near the bottom of the garden, picking through a mass of brambles, nettles, thistles, and grasses. Her cap had got caught on a loop of bramble well off the ground and was signaling to her like a flag of surrender. She jerked it free and hurried back toward the house, stumbling over a bramble and scratching her leg. As she reached out to steady herself, she brushed against a nettle and stung her hand. “Damn these plants,” she muttered, and slashed at the nettle with her cap, stinging her hand even more. “Damn damn damn.” Sucking her hand, she stomped out of the wildness and into the patch of garden near the house, where there were orderly rows of seedlings planted-lettuce, peas, leeks, carrots, potatoes-and Jem inspecting them.
He looked up. “What’s wrong with your hand?”
“Damned nettle stung me.”
“Don’t suck it-that don’t help. Did you find some dock leaf?” Jem didn’t wait for her answer, but pushed past and picked through the undergrowth to a bank of nettles growing near the summerhouse, where two chairs had been set just inside its open doors. “Look, it’s this plant with the broad leaf-it grows next to nettles. You squeeze it to get some juice, then put it on the sting.” He applied it to Maggie’s hand. “Do that feel better?”
“Yes,” Maggie said, both surprised that the dock leaf worked and pleased that Jem had taken her hand. “How’d you know about that?”
“Lots of nettles in Dorsetshire.”
As if to punish him for his knowledge, Maggie turned to the summerhouse. “Remember this?” she said in a low voice. “Remember what we saw them doin’?”
“What’ll we do now?” Jem interrupted, clearly discomfited by any talk of that day they saw the Blakes in their garden. He glanced at Mrs. Blake, who was standing in the grass by the back door, hands in her apron pockets, waiting for them.
Maggie gazed at him, and he went red. She paused a moment, enjoying the power she held over him even if she wasn’t entirely sure what that power was, or why she had it with him and no one else. It made her stomach flutter.
Mrs. Blake shifted her weight from one hip to the other, and Maggie looked around for something that might keep them from having to leave. There was nothing unusual about the garden, however. Apart from the summerhouse, there was a privy by the door and an ash pit for the coal ash from the grates. The grapevine Miss Pelham was competing with grew rampant along the wall. Next to it was a small fig tree with broad leaves like hands.
“Does your fig bear any fruit?” Maggie asked.
“Not yet-it’s too young. We’re hoping next year it will,” Mrs. Blake answered. She turned to go inside, and the children reluctantly followed.
They passed by the closed door of the back room, and again Jem wished he could go in. The open door of the front room was more inviting, however, and he paused so that he could peek in once more at the printing press. He was just summoning up the courage to ask Mrs. Blake about it when Maggie said, “Mrs. Blake, could we see that song book of Mr. Blake’s you told us about up on the bridge? We’d like to see it, wouldn’t we, Jem?”
Jem started to shake his head but it came out as a nod.
Mrs. Blake stopped in the hallway. “Oh, would you, my dear? Well, now, let me just ask Mr. Blake if that will be all right. Wait here-I’ll just be a moment.” She went back to the closed door and tapped on it, waiting until she heard a murmur before she opened the door and slipped inside.
4
When the door opened again, Mr. Blake himself appeared. “Hallo, my children,” he said. “Kate tells me you want to see my songs.”
“Yes, sir,” Maggie and Jem answered in unison.
“Well, that is good-children understand them better than everyone else. ‘And I wrote my happy songs / Every child may joy to hear.’ Come along.” Leading them into the front room with the printing press, he went over to a shelf, opened a box, and brought out a book not much bigger than his hand, stitched into a mushroomcolored wrapper. “Here you are,” he said, laying it on the table by the front window.
Jem and Maggie stood side by side at the table, but neither reached for the book-not even Maggie, for all her boldness. Nei-ther had much experience with handling books. Anne Kellaway had been given a prayer book by her parents when she married, but she was the only family member to use it at church. Maggie’s parents had never owned a book, apart from those that Dick Butterfield had bought and sold, and Bet Butterfield couldn’t read-though she liked having her husband read old newspapers to her when he brought them back from the pub.
“Aren’t you going to look at it?” Mr. Blake said. “Go on, my boy-open it. Anywhere will do.”
Jem reached out and fumbled with the book, opening it to a place near the beginning. On the left-hand page was a picture of a large burgundy and mauve flower, and inside its curling petals sat a woman wearing a yellow dress with a baby on her lap. A girl stood next to them in a blue dress with what looked to Maggie like butterfly wings sprouting from her shoulders. There were words set out in brown under the flower, with green stems and vines twined around them. The right-hand page was made up almost entirely of words, with a tree of leaves growing up the right margin, vines snaking up the left, and birds flying here and there. Maggie admired the pictures, though she couldn’t read any of the words. She wondered if Jem could. “What do it say?” she asked.
“Can’t you read them, child?”
Maggie shook her head. “I only went to school a year, and forgot it all.”
Mr. Blake chuckled. “I didn’t go to school at all! My father taught me to read. Didn’t your father teach you?”
“He’s too busy for that.”
“Did you hear that, Kate? Did you?”
“I did, Mr. Blake.” Mrs. Blake was standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb.
“I taught Kate to read, you see. Her father was too busy as well. All right, my boy, what about you? Can you read the song?”
Jem cleared his throat. “I’ll try. I only had a little schooling.” He placed a finger on the page and began slowly to read:
I have no name
I am but two days old.-
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name-
Sweet joy befall thee!
He read in such stops and starts that Mr. Blake took pity on him and joined in, strengthening and quickening his voice so that Jem was trailing him, echoing his words almost like a game:
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.
From the picture Maggie worked out that the song was about a baby, and Mr. Blake sounded like a doting father cooing, repeating phrases and sounding daft. She wondered that he would know this was how fathers sounded when he had no children of his own. On the other hand, he clearly knew little about babies or he’d not have one smiling when only two days old; Maggie had helped with enough babies to know the smile didn’t come for several weeks, until the mother was desperate for it. She didn’t tell him this, however.
“Here’s one you’ll remember.” Mr. Blake turned over a few pages, then began to recite, “When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,” the song he’d sung to them on the bridge. This time he didn’t sing it, but chanted quickly. Jem tried to follow along with the words on the page, chiming in here and there with a word he was able to read or could remember. Maggie frowned, annoyed that he and Mr. Blake shared the song in a way she couldn’t. She looked at the picture that accompanied it. A group of people were sitting around a table with glasses of wine, the women in blue and yellow dresses, a man colored in mauve with his back turned, raising a cup of wine. She did remember one part of the song, so that when Mr. Blake and Jem got to the line, she joined in to shout “Ha, ha, he!” as if she were in a pub singing along with others.