Maggie suspected they would have finished their business at the timber yard by now, and would round out the visit with a drink at a pub, where Dick Butterfield would no doubt take as many pints off of Thomas Kellaway as he could. She slipped out of the crowd to the road, and ducked first into the Royal Oak, the nearest pub to the gathering. As expected, it was jammed with people come in from the meeting to warm up, but her father and the Kellaways were not there. She then headed toward Lambeth, calling in at the White Lion and the Black Dog before finding them sucking pints at a table in a corner of the King’s Arms. Her heart pounded harder when she spotted Jem, and she took the moment before they saw her to study his hair curling around his ears, the pale patch of skin visible at the back of his neck, and the strong span of his shoulders that had broadened since they first met. Maggie was so tempted to go up behind him, put her arms around his neck, and nuzzle his ear that she actually took a step forward. Jem looked up then, however, and she stopped, her nerve lost.
He started at the sight of her. “Ar’ernoon. You all right?” Though he said it casually, he was clearly pleased to see her.
“What you doin’ here, Mags?” Dick Butterfield said. “Beaufoy catch you nickin’ a bottle of vinegar and send you packing?”
Maggie folded her arms over her chest. “Hallo to you too. I suppose I’m going to have to get my own beer, will I?”
Jem gestured to his own seat and mug of beer. “Take it-I’ll get another.”
“No, Pa, I did not get the boot from Beaufoy,” Maggie snapped, dropping onto Jem’s stool. “If I wanted to steal his poxy vinegar I know how to do it without getting caught. No, we had the afternoon off to go to that loyalist meeting down the road.” She described the gathering at Cumberland Gardens.
Dick Butterfield nodded. “We saw ’em when we was passing. Stopped for a minute, but we’d worked up a thirst by then, hadn’t we, sir?” He aimed this at Jem’s father. Thomas Kellaway nodded, though his pint was barely touched. He was not much of a daytime drinker.
“’Sides, those meetings don’t mean nothing to me,” Dick Butter field continued. “All this talk about the threat from France is nonsense. Them Frenchies has their hands full with their own revolution without tryin’ to bring it over here too. Don’t you think, sir?”
“Dunno as I understand it,” Thomas Kellaway answered-his usual response to such questions. He had heard talk of the French revolution when he worked with the other carpenters at the circus, but, as when serious matters were discussed at the Five Bells in Piddletrenthide, he usually listened without supplying his own opinion. It was not that Thomas Kellaway was stupid-far from it. He simply saw both sides of an argument too readily to come down on one side or the other. He could accept that the King was a concrete manifestion of the English soul and spirit, uniting and glori-fying the country, and thus essential to its well-being. He could also agree when others said King George was a drain on the country’s coffers, an unstable, fickle, willful presence that England would be better off without. Torn by conflicting views, he preferred to keep quiet.
Jem came back with another drink and a stool, and squeezed in next to Maggie so that their knees were touching. They smiled at each other, at the rarity of sitting together in the middle of a Monday afternoon, and remembering too the first time they had been to a pub together, when Jem met Dick Butterfield. His stool-finding and pub presence had improved greatly in the nine months since.
Dick Butterfield watched this exchange of smiles with a small cynical smile of his own. His daughter was young to be locking eyes with this boy-and a country boy at that, even one who was learning a good trade.
“You sell your chairs, then?” Maggie asked.
“Maybe,” Jem said. “We left one with him. And he’s going to get us some yew cheaper than we had from the other yard, in’t he, Pa?”
Thomas Kellaway nodded. Since Philip Astley’s departure to Dublin, he had been making Windsor chairs again, but had fewer commissions now that the circus man was no longer around to send customers his way. He filled his days making chairs anyway, using leftover bits of wood scrounged from the circus. Their back room was filling with Windsor chairs that awaited buyers. Thomas Kellaway had even given two to the Blakes, a gift for helping Maisie on that foggy October afternoon.
“Oh, you’ll do much better with this man at Nine Elms, lad,” Dick Butterfield put in. “I could have told you that months ago when you went to see that friend of Astley’s about wood.”
“He were all right for a time,” Jem argued.
“Let me guess-until the circus left town? Astley’s little deals only last while he’s got his eye on ’em.”
Jem was silent.
“That’s always the way with him, boy. Philip Astley showers you with attention, gets you customers, bargains, jobs, and free tickets-until he leaves. And he’s gone five months-that’s almost half the year, boy, half your life where he pulls out and leaves you stranded. You notice how quiet Lambeth is without him? It’s like that every year. He comes and helps you out, brings in business, gets people settled and happy, and then comes October and poof!-in a day he’s gone, leaving everybody with nothing. He builds a castle for you, and then he tears it down again. Grooms, pie makers, carpenters, coachmen, or whores-it happens to ’em all. There’s a great scramble to pick up work, then people drift off-the whores and coachmen go to other parts of London; some of the country folk go back home.” Dick Butterfield brought his beer to his lips and took a long draw. “Then come March it’ll start all over again, when the great illusionist builds his castle once again. But some of us knows better than to do business with Philip Astley. We know it don’t last.”
“All right, Pa, you made your point. He do go on, don’t he?” Maggie said to Jem. “Sometimes I fall asleep with my eyes open when he’s talkin’.”
“Cheeky gal!” Dick Butterfield cried. Maggie dodged and laughed as he swatted at her.
“Where’s Charlie, then?” she asked as they settled back down.
“Dunno-said he had summat to do.” Dick Butterfield shook his head. “Someday I’d like that boy to come home and tell me he’s done a deal, and show me the money.”
“You may be waitin’ a long time, Pa.”
Before Dick Butterfield could respond, at the bar a tall man with a broad square face spoke up in a deep, carrying voice that silenced the pub. “Citizens! Listen, now!” Maggie recognized him as one of the plainer speakers at the Cumberland Gardens rally. He held up what looked like a black ledger book. “The name’s Roberts, John Roberts. I’ve just come from a meeting of the Lambeth Association-local residents who are loyal to the King and opposed to the trouble being stirred up by French agitators. You should have been there as well, rather than drinking away your afternoon.”
“Some of us was!” Maggie shouted. “We already heard you.”
“Good,” John Roberts said, and strode over to their table. “Then you’ll know what I’m doing here, and you’ll be the first to sign.”
Dick Butterfield kicked Maggie under the table and glared at her. “Don’t mind her, sir, she’s just bein’ cheeky.”
“Is she your daughter?”
Dick Butterfield winked. “For my sins-if you know what I mean.”
The man showed no sign of a sense of humor. “You’d best see that she controls her tongue, then, unless she fancies a bed in Newgate. This is nothing to laugh about.”