As part of the Astley showmanship, another circus boy brought out John Astley’s chestnut mare and led her down the alley to stand in front of her owner’s house. Astley Senior soon joined them outside no. 14 Hercules Buildings, and when his son did not immediately appear, he shouted at the open windows, “Get up, you bloody fool, you idiot son of mine! Do you not realize what that sound was? Tell me you care a tinker’s damn about your own circus that you’re meant to be managing! Show me just this once that it means more to you than your drinking and rutting!”
John Astley appeared in the doorway of his house, his hair ruffled but looking otherwise unhurried. Philip Astley’s words appeared to have no effect on him. He deliberately took his time shutting the door, inflaming his father further. “Damme, John, if this is how you feel about the business, I’ll cut you out of it! I will!”
At that moment there was another, smaller explosion, then a series of pops and crackles, some loud, some soft, and whooshings and high-pitched shrieks. Those noises had the effect that none of Philip Astley’s words did: John Astley ran to his horse and leapt into the saddle even as the horse jumped ahead in answer to his call. He took off up Hercules Buildings at a gallop, leaving his heavier father to trot more sedately behind.
None of them looked back or they would have seen the head of Miss Laura Devine, Europe’s finest slack-rope dancer, poke out of the first-floor window of John Astley’s house and watch them clatter up the road and turn right onto Westminster Bridge Road. Only an old woman with a basket of strawberries saw Miss Devine’s moon face hovering above the street. She held up a berry. “Nice sweet juicy strawb for you, my dear? You’ve already given in to temptation once. Go on, have a bite.”
Miss Devine smiled and shook her head; then, with a glance up and down the street, she withdrew from sight.
At no. 6 Bastille Row, Dick and Charlie Butterfield were sitting in the kitchen, a pan of bacon between them, fishing out slices with their knives and dipping hunks of bread in the pan fat. They both jumped at the first enormous bang, coming from just the other side of the Asylum for Female Orphans, which faced the houses on Bastille Row. Moments later there was a tinkle of glass all up and down the street, as each window in the row of houses fell to the ground. Only no. 6 was spared, as it had no glass in its windows at present: Charlie had broken them one drunken evening when he’d thrown his shoes at the cat.
Now, without a word, both set down their knives, pushed back their chairs, and went out into the street, Charlie wiping at his greasy chin with his sleeve. They stood side by side in front of their door.
“Where’d it come from?” Dick Butterfield asked.
“There.” Charlie pointed southeast toward St. George’s Fields.
“No, it was that way, I’m sure.” Dick Butterfield gestured east.
“Why’d you ask then if you’re so sure?”
“Watch yourself, lad. A little respect for your pa and his hearing.”
“Well, I’m sure it was that way.” Charlie waved emphatically toward St. George’s Fields.
“There’s nothing could blow up that way.”
“What’s your way, then?”
“Astley’s fireworks laboratory.”
They were saved from arguing further by the sight of a cloud of smoke rising from the direction Dick Butterfield had chosen, about two hundred yards away. “Astley’s,” he confirmed. “He’ll be in a right state. This’ll be a sight to see.” He hurried toward the smoke, Charlie following more slowly. Dick Butterfield looked back at his son. “Come on, lad!”
“Couldn’t we finish the bacon first?”
Dick Butterfield stopped short. “Bacon! Bacon at a time like this! Christ amighty, I’m ashamed to call you a Butterfield! How often have I told you, lad, about the importance of speed? We’ll get nothing from this if we dawdle and grease our lips with bacon and let others get there before us! What is it about that idea that escapes you, lad? Tell me.” Dick Butterfield gazed at his son, taking in his seemingly permanent sneer, his fidgety hands, his badly wiped chin slick with grease, and worst of all, his eyes like a fire laid but unlit, not even by an explosion he ought to be curious about. Not for the first time, Dick Butterfield found himself thinking, Maggie should be here-she’d learn from this, and wishing she were a boy. He wondered where she was now. The explosion surely would flush her out and bring her running. Then he would wallop her good for running away-though he might hug her too. He turned his back on Charlie and stumped off toward the smoke. After a moment Charlie followed, still thinking of the bacon congealing in the pan at home.
The blast indeed flushed Maggie out in the end. When she heard the ruckus from Hercules Hall-circus boys running back and forth, Philip Astley shouting, John Fox giving directions-and then the crackles and shrieks began from the site of the explosion, she could stand it no longer: She was not going to miss out on the neighborhood drama, no matter if her parents saw her. She ran to the back of the Blakes’ garden and hoisted herself up and over the wall, dropping to a run across Astley’s field, joined there by other curious residents heading toward the smoke and the noise.
Jem watched her make her escape and knew he couldn’t remain at home. “Come on, Maisie!” he shouted, pulling his sister after him down the stairs. Out in the street they heard a clattering, and first John Astley and then Philip Astley passed by on horseback. “Oh!” Maisie cried, and began to run after them. Her frilly mop cap flew off, and Jem had to stop and snatch it up before hurrying to catch up with her.
5
Every year on the fourth of June, Philip Astley provided a fireworks display for the King’s birthday, setting them off from barges in the Thames at half-past ten at night, when the circus had finished. No one had asked him to take on this responsibility; he had simply begun it twenty years before, and it had become a tradition. Astley sometimes used fireworks on other occasions-at the beginning and end of the season to promote his circus, and during performances when someone important was attending. He set up a fireworks laboratory in a house on Asylum Place, down a short lane from the Asylum for Female Orphans.
The Asylum was a large, formidable building, not unpleasant to look at, on a site where Hercules Buildings, Bastille Row, and Westminster Bridge Road all met. It provided a home for two hundred girls, who were taught to read a little, and to clean, cook, wash, and sew-everything that would prepare them for lives as servants once they left the Asylum at age fifteen. They might have been stunned by losing their families, but the Asylum was a respite of sorts between that sorrow and the long drudgery that their lives were to become.
The Asylum yard was surrounded by a six-foot-high black iron fence. It was up against these bars in a corner of the yard that many of the girls and their minders were crowded, their faces all turned like sunflowers toward the fireworks house, which was now spitting and crackling and burning bright. For the girls it was as if this unusual entertainment had been laid on especially for them, with a fine spot from which to view it.
Inhabitants from surrounding houses were watching the fire too, but they were not so exhilarated by the spectacle. Indeed, those whose properties were very close to the laboratory feared their own houses would catch fire. Men were shouting; women were weeping. More people arrived all the time from neighboring streets to see what was happening. No one did anything, however: They were waiting for the right person to take charge.
He arrived on horseback with his son. By this time rockets were exploding, most of them heading sideways and smashing into the walls of the laboratory house, but one escaping up through the flames-which by now had eaten open a section of the roof-and shooting into the sky. Fireworks are impressive even in daylight, and especially when you have never seen them, as many of the orphans had not, for they were locked in at night well before any of Astley’s fireworks displays on the river. A sigh arose from them as the rocket shed green sparks.