Maggie was still surprised that the Blakes hadn’t thrown her out of their garden, as she was sure her own parents would do if they found a stray girl in theirs. Indeed, Maggie tried hard to hide the first days she was there. She had a miserable time of it, though. The night she first pitched over the wall, she didn’t sleep at all, shivering back among the brambles she’d tumbled into, even though it was a balmy night, and jumping at every rustle and snap as rats and foxes and cats went about their business around her. Maggie was not afraid of the animals, but their sounds made her think that people might be about, even though the Blakes’ garden was well removed from the shouts from the pubs, the comings and goings around Hercules Hall, the drunken quarrels, the ruttings up against the back wall. She hated not having four walls and a roof to protect her, and toward the end of the night she crept into the summerhouse, where she slept fitfully until dawn, waking with a yelp when she thought someone was sitting in the doorway. It was only a neighbor’s cat, however, watching her curiously.
The next day she went across Westminster Bridge and dozed in the sun in St. James’s Park, knowing the Butterfields were unlikely to go there. That night she hid in the summerhouse, this time with a blanket she’d stolen from home when no one was in, and slept much better-indeed, so well that she woke late, with the sun in her eyes and Mr. Blake sitting out on the steps of the summerhouse, a bowl of cherries beside him.
“Oh!” Maggie cried, sitting up and pushing her tangled hair from her eyes. “Sorry, Mr. Blake! I-”
One look from his bright gray eyes silenced her. “Would you like some cherries, my girl? First of the season.” He set the bowl next to her, then turned to look back out over the garden.
“Thanks.” Maggie tried not to gobble them, though she had eaten little the last two days. As she reached toward the bowl for the fourth time, she noticed that Mr. Blake had his notebook on his knee. “Was you goin’ to draw me?” she asked, trying to recover some of her spirit under awkward circumstances.
“Oh no, my girl, I never draw from life if I can help it.”
“Why not? An’t it easier than to make it up?”
Mr. Blake half turned toward her. “But I don’t make it up. It’s in my head already, and I simply draw what I see there.”
Maggie spat a stone into her hand to join the others she held, hiding her disappointment behind the gesture. She would have liked Mr. Blake to draw her. “So what d’you see in your head, then? Children like them pictures in your book?”
Mr. Blake nodded. “Children, and angels, and men and women speaking to me and to each other.”
“An’ you draw ’em in there?” She pointed at the notebook.
“Sometimes.”
“Can I see?”
“Of course.” Mr. Blake held out his notebook. Maggie threw the cherry stones into the garden and wiped her hand on her skirt before she took the notebook, knowing without having to be told that it was important to him. He confirmed this by adding, “That is my brother Robert’s notebook. He allows me to use it.”
Maggie leafed through it, paying more attention to the drawings than the words. Even if she had been able to read, she would have found it hard to make out his scrawl, full of words and lines scratched out and written over, verses turned upside down, sometimes written so quickly they seemed more like black marks than letters. “Lord, what a mess,” she murmured, trying to untangle the jumble of words and images on a page. “Look at all that crossin’ out!”
Mr. Blake laughed. “What comes out first is not always best,” he explained. “It needs reworking to shine.”
Many of the drawings were rough sketches, barely recognizable. Others, though, were more carefully executed. On one page a monstrous face carried a limp body in its mouth. On another a naked man stretched across the page, calling out anxiously. A bearded man in robes and with a mournful expression spoke to another man bowing his head. A man and woman stood side by side, naked, and other naked bodies were drawn twisted and contorted. Maggie chuckled at a sketch of a man peeing against a wall, but it was a rare laugh; mostly the pictures made her nervous.
She stopped on a page filled with small drawings, of angels with folded wings, of a man carrying a baby on his head, of faces with bulging eyes and gaping mouths. At the top was a striking likeness of a man with beaded eyes, a long nose, and a crooked smile, his curly hair mussed about his head. He looked so different from the other figures-more concrete and unique-and the drawing done with such care and delicacy that Maggie knew immediately he was someone real. “Who’s this, then?”
Mr. Blake glanced at the page. “Ah, that’s Thomas Paine. Have you heard of him, my child?”
Maggie dredged up memories of evenings half-asleep with her family at the Artichoke. “I think so. My pa talks about him at the pub. He wrote summat what got him into trouble, didn’t he?”
“The Rights of Man.”
“Hang on-he supports the Frenchies, don’t he? Like-” Maggie cut herself off, remembering Mr. Blake’s bonnet rouge. She had not seen him wear it recently. “So you know Tom Paine?”
Mr. Blake tilted his head and squinted at the grapevine snaking along the wall. “I have met him.”
“Then you do draw real people. This an’t just from your head, is it?”
Mr. Blake turned around to look at Maggie fully. “You’re right, my girl. What is your name?”
“Maggie,” she replied, proud that someone like him wanted to know.
“You’re right, Maggie, I did draw him as he sat across from me. That was indeed one instance of drawing from life. Mr. Paine seemed to demand it. I suppose he’s that sort of fellow. But I don’t make a practice of it.”
“So-” Maggie hesitated, not sure she should push such a man as Mr. Blake. But he looked at her inquiringly, eyebrows raised, his face open to her, and she felt that here, in this garden, she could ask things she wouldn’t elsewhere. It was the beginning of her education. “In the Abbey,” she said, “you was drawin’ summat you saw for real. That statue-except without the clothes.”
Mr. Blake gazed at her, small movements in his face accompanying his thoughts from puzzlement to surprise to delight. “Yes, my girl, I did draw the statue. But I was not drawing what was there, was I?”
“No, that’s certain.” Maggie chuckled at the memory of his sketch of the naked statue.
Lesson over, Mr. Blake picked up his notebook and stood, shaking his legs as if to loosen them.
The rasping scrape of a window being opened made Maggie look up. Jem was hauling up the back window next door. He saw her and Mr. Blake and froze, staring. Maggie raised a finger to her lips.
Mr. Blake did not look up at the sound the way most people would, but started toward the door. He seemed to Maggie to be interested in the world around him only when he chose to; and now he had lost interest in his garden, and in her. “Thanks for the cherries, Mr. Blake!” Maggie called. He lifted a hand in reply but did not turn around.
When he was inside, Maggie beckoned to Jem to join her. He frowned, then disappeared from the window. A few minutes later his head appeared above the wall-he had climbed up Miss Pelham’s bench and was standing on its back. “What you doing there?” he whispered.
“Come over-the Blakes won’t mind!”
“I can’t-Pa needs me. What you doing there?” he repeated.
“I left home. Don’t tell anyone I’m here-promise?”
“Ma and Pa and Maisie will see you from the window.”
“You can tell Maisie, but no one else. Promise?”