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 that 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.
“What’s that sound?” Maisie said.
Anne Kellaway heard a chop-chop-chopping next door. “Tha’ be Mrs. Blake with her hoe,” she said in a low voice.
“No, not that. There it be again-someone knocking on Miss Pelham’s door.”
“Go on and see who it is,” Anne Kellaway said. “It may be tickets for the circus.” She’d heard that the program was to change again soon, and Mr. Astley had sent them tickets every time it did. She had already begun to anticipate a knock on the door and another set of tickets thrust at her. Anne Kellaway knew that she was becoming greedy for the circus, and was perhaps relying too readily on Mr. Astley’s continuing generosity with complimentary tickets. “Seats for seats!” he’d said once, delighted with the chairs Thomas Kellaway had made him.
As she went to answer the door, Maisie was smoothing her hair, biting her lips, and pulling at her dress to make it sit properly over her stays. Although a circus boy usually brought them the tickets, Maisie nursed a fantasy that John Astley himself might deliver them. She’d had a special thrill the last time the Kellaways went to the circus, when John Astley had played the Harlequin in Harlequin’s Vagaries, and Maisie had been treated to a whole half hour of gazing at him as he sang, courted Columbine-played by newcomer Miss Hannah Smith-and danced upon his chestnut mare. Maisie had watched him with a lump in her throat-a lump that got stuck when at one point she was certain he looked at her.
When she was thinking sensibly, Maisie knew very well that John Astley was not a man she could ever expect to be with. He was handsome, cultured, wealthy, urbane-as different as could be from the sort of man she would marry in the Piddle Valley. Although she loved her father and brothers-especially Jem-they were awkward and dull next to John Astley. Besides, he provided a distraction from London, which still scared her, and from her brother Tommy’s death, which she seemed to feel more acutely four months on. It had taken that long for her to acknowledge that he was not still in Piddletrenthide and might appear at any time at Miss Pelham’s door, whistling and boasting of the adventures he’d had on the road to London.
For a brief moment, Maisie stood by the front door of no. 12 Hercules Buildings and listened to the knock, which had grown persistent and impatient, and wondered if it could be John Astley.