“All right,” Jem said after a moment.
“I’ll see you later, down by Lambeth Palace.”
“Right.” Jem started to scramble down.
“Jem?”
He stopped. “What is it?”
“Bring us summat to eat, eh?”
And so Maggie stayed in the Blakes’ garden. The Blakes said nothing about her being there-not even when she continued to stay. At first she spent most of the day out and about in Lambeth, avoiding the places her parents and brother might be, meeting up with Jem and Maisie when she could. After a while, when it became clear that the Blakes didn’t mind her remaining, she began to hang about their garden more, sometimes helping Mrs. Blake with her vegetables, once with the laundry, and even doing a bit of mending, which she would never have offered to do for her mother. Today Mrs. Blake had brought Songs of Innocence to her and sat with her for a bit, helping to sound out words, then suggested Maggie look through it on her own while she got on with her hoe. Maggie offered to help, but Mrs. Blake smiled and shook her head. “You learn to read that, my dear,” she said, “and Mr. Blake’ll be more pleased with you than with my lettuces. He says children understand his work better than adults.”
Now when she heard Bet Butterfield ask Anne and Maisie Kellaway if they’d seen her daughter, Maggie held her breath as she waited for Maisie’s reply. She had little faith in the girl’s ability to lie-she was no better than Jem at it. So when Maisie said after a pause, “I’ll just ask Jem,” Maggie let out her breath and smiled. “Thanks, Miss Piddle,” she whispered. “London must be teachin’ you summat, anyway.”
4
When Maisie arrived upstairs, Jem and Thomas Kellaway were bending a long ash pole to make the hoop for the back of a Windsor chair. Jem didn’t yet have the strength or skill to do the bending himself, but he could secure the iron pegs that held the ash his father bent around the hoop frame. Thomas Kellaway grunted and strained against the pole he had earlier steamed to make more supple; if he bent it too far it would split and be ruined.
Maisie knew better than to speak to them at this crucial stage. Instead she busied herself in the front room, rustling about in Anne Kellaway’s box of buttony materials filled with rings of vari-ous sizes, chips of sheep horn for the Singletons, a ball of flax for shaping round buttons, bits of linen for covering them, both sharp and blunt needles, and several different colors and thicknesses of thread.
“One last peg, lad,” Thomas Kellaway muttered. “That’s it-well done.” They carried the frame, with the pole wrapped around and pegged to it, over to the wall and leaned it there, where it would dry into shape.
Maisie then let a tin of horn bits drop; when it hit the floor the lid popped open and exploded, scattering a shower of rounds of horn all over the floor. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and went down on her knees to gather them up.
“Help her, Jem, we be done here,” Thomas Kellaway said.
“Maggie’s mother’s come asking if we’ve seen her,” Maisie whispered as Jem crouched beside her. “What do we say?”
Jem rubbed a polished gray disk of sheep horn between his finger and thumb. “It’s taken her long enough to come looking, han’t it?”
“Tha’ be what Ma said. I don’t know, Jem. Maggie seems happy where she is, but she should be with her family, shouldn’t she?”
Jem said nothing, but stood up and went to the back window to look out. Maisie joined him. From there they had a clear view into the Blakes’ summerhouse, where Maggie was sitting, just the other side of the wall from Anne Kellaway and Bet Butterfield.
“She’s been listening to us!” Maisie cried. “She heard it all!”
“Maybe she’ll go back now she knows her mother wants her.”
“Dunno-she’s awfully stubborn.” Maisie and Jem had tried to talk Maggie into returning home, but she was adamant that she would live at the Blakes’ all summer.
“She should go back,” Jem decided. “She can’t stay there forever. It’s not fair on the Blakes, is’t, having her there. We should tell Mrs. Butterfield.”
“I suppose.” Maisie clapped her hands. “Look, Jem, Ma’s showing Mrs. Butterfield how to make buttons!”
Indeed, while Maisie was upstairs, Bet Butterfield had leaned over to watch enviously as Anne Kellaway’s deft fingers wound thin thread around a tiny ring. Seeing such delicacy tempted her to rebel, just to show everyone Bet Butterfield’s worn hands could do more than wring water from sheets. “Let me try one o’ them fiddly things,” she declared. “It’ll keep me out of mischief.”
Anne Kellaway started her on a straightforward Blandford Cartwheel, trying not to laugh at the laundress’s fumbling fingers. Bet Butterfield had managed only to sew around the ring, however, when her buttony lesson was cut short by an unexpected sound: a sudden explosion booming through the houses on Bastille Row, across Astley’s field and through the back wall. Bet Butterfield felt her chest thud, as if someone had thumped her with a cushion. She dropped the button, which immediately unraveled, and stood up. “Dick!” she cried.
The boom made Anne Kellaway’s teeth chatter the way they did when she had a high fever. She too stood up, but she had the presence of mind to hang on to the buttons in her lap.
The rest of the Kellaways froze where they were in the workshop when they heard the explosion, which rattled the panes of the sash windows. “Good Lord, what was that?” Maisie cried. She and Jem peered out of the window, but could see nothing unusual apart from the reaction of others. Mrs. Blake, for instance, paused with her hoe among her lettuces and turned her head toward the sound.
Maggie jumped up immediately, though she then sat right down again-her mother might spot the top of her head if she stood, and Maggie didn’t want to be discovered. “What can it be? Oh, what can it be?” she muttered, craning her neck in the direction of the blast. She heard Bet Butterfield go farther down the garden, saying, “Where’d it come from, then? Damn that laburnum-it’s blockin’ the view! Look, if we go down to the end of the garden we might see it. There! What did I tell you? I never seen such smoke since a house caught fire over in Southwark where we used to live-burnt so clean there weren’t a trace of it afterwards. Lord, I hope Dick an’t mixed up in it. I’d better get back home.”
Philip Astley knew immediately what the sound was. Not normally a slugabed, he’d had vinegary wine the night before and suffered later from a rotten gut. He was lying in bed in a fitful doze, his legs tangled up in sheets, his belly resembling a shrouded barrel, when the explosion woke him right into a standing posi-tion. He registered the direction of the blast and bellowed, “Fox! Saddle my horse!”
Moments later a circus boy-there were always boys hanging about Hercules Hall waiting to run errands-was sent to rouse John Astley, who ought to have been up by now rehearsing the new program that would soon open, but had been distracted by other things and was still at home, and, indeed, naked.
Philip Astley came rushing out of his house, pulling on his coat, his trousers not fully buttoned, John Fox at his heels. At the same time another boy led out his white charger and held him while Philip Astley mounted. There was no need to ride his horse; for where he was going it would be quicker to slip around the back of Hercules Hall and across the field to an alley between some of the Bastille Row houses. That indeed was what John Fox and the circus boys would do. But Philip Astley was a circus man, and always aware of the impact he made in public. It wouldn’t do for a circus owner and ex-cavalry man to appear on foot at the scene of a disaster-even one only a few hundred yards away. He was expected to be a leader, and it was better to lead from atop a horse than on the ground, puffed and red-faced from running with a belly such as his.