Burning Bright. Tracy Chevalier
you, though not faster’n me. See?’ She snatched the tickets from Jem, and with a grin began to tuck them down the front of her dress.
‘I can keep them,’ Maisie suggested. ‘You haven’t got the stays.’
Maggie stopped smiling.
‘I’ll keep them,’ Anne Kellaway announced, and held out her hand. Maggie grimaced but handed over the tickets. Anne Kellaway carefully tucked them into her stays, then wrapped her shawl tightly over her bosom. The stern, triumphant look on her face was armour enough to keep away any rogue fingers.
The musicians were passing them now, and behind them three men brought up the rear of the parade waving red, yellow and white flags that read ASTLEY’S CIRCUS.
‘What’ll we do now?’ Jem asked when they had passed. ‘Go on to the Abbey?’
He could have been speaking to a family of mutes, oblivious to the surging crowd around them. Maisie was staring after John Astley, who by now had become just a flash of blue coat over winking horse flanks. Anne Kellaway had her eye on the amphitheatre in the distance, contemplating the unexpected evening ahead. Thomas Kellaway was peering over the bridge’s balustrade at a boat piled high with wood being rowed along the thin line of water towards the bridge.
‘C’mon. They’ll follow.’ Maggie took Jem’s arm and pulled him towards the apex of the bridge, sidestepping the traffic of carriages and carts that had begun to cross it again, and making their way towards the Abbey.
Westminster Abbey was the tallest, grandest building in that part of London. It was the sort of building the Kellaways had expected to see plenty of in the city – substantial, ornate, important. Indeed, they had been disappointed by the shabbiness of Lambeth, even if they had not yet seen the rest of London. The filth, the crowds, the noise, the indifferent, casual, neglected buildings – none of it matched the pictures they’d conjured of London back in Dorsetshire. At least the Abbey, with its pair of impressive square towers, its busy detail of narrow windows, filigreed arches, jutting buttresses and tiny spires, satisfied their expectations. It was the second time in the weeks they had been in Lambeth that Anne Kellaway thought, ‘There is a reason for us to be in London’ – the first time being only half an hour before, when she saw Miss Laura Devine performing the Pig on a Spit.
Just inside the arched entrance between the two towers, the Kellaways stopped, causing those behind them to grumble and push past. Maggie, who had continued on into the Abbey, turned around and blew through her lips. ‘Look at those country fools,’ she muttered, as the four Kellaways stood in a row, eyes up, heads tilted at the same angle. She couldn’t blame them, however. Although she had visited the Abbey many times, she too found it an astonishing sight on first entering and, indeed, throughout the building. At every turning, every chapel and tomb contained marble to be admired, carving to be fingered, elegance and opulence to be dazzled by.
For the Kellaways the sheer size was what pulled them up short. None had ever been in a place where the ceiling arched so high over their heads. They could not take their eyes off it.
Finally Maggie lost patience. ‘There’s more to the Abbey than the ceiling,’ she advised Jem. ‘And there’s better ceilings than this too. Wait till you see the Lady Chapel!’
Feeling responsible for their first proper taste of what London could offer, she led them through archways and in and out of small side chapels, casually throwing out the names of people buried there that she remembered from her father’s guided tour of the place: Lord Hunsdon, the Countess of Sussex, Lord Bourchier, Edward I, Henry III. The string of names meant little to Jem; nor, once he grew accustomed to the size and lavishness of the place, did he really care for all of the stone. He and his father worked in wood, and he found stone cold and unforgiving. Still, he couldn’t help marvelling at the elaborate tombs, with the carved effigies in tan and beige marble of their inhabitants lying on top, at the brass reliefs of men on other slabs, at the black-and-white pillars ornamenting the headstones.
By the time they reached Henry VII’s Lady Chapel at the other end of the Abbey, and Maggie triumphantly announced, ‘Queen Elizabeth,’ Jem had stopped listening to her altogether and openly gaped. He had never imagined a place could be so ornate.
‘Oh, Jem, look at that ceiling,’ Maisie breathed, gazing up at the fan vaulting, carved of stone so delicate it looked like lace spun by spiders, touched in several places with gold leaf.
Jem was not studying the ceiling, however, but the rows of carved seats for members of the royal court along both sides of the chapel. Over each seat was an eight-foot-high ornamental tower of patinated oak filigree. The towers were of such a complicated interlocking pattern that it would not have been a surprise to hear carvers had gone mad working on them. Here at last was wood worked in a way the Kellaways would never see the likes of in Dorsetshire, or Wiltshire, or Hampshire, or anywhere in England other than in Westminster Abbey. Jem and Thomas Kellaway gazed in awe at the carving, like men who make sundials seeing a mechanical clock for the first time.
Jem lost track of Maggie until she rushed up to him. ‘Come here!’ she hissed, and dragged him away from the Lady Chapel to the centre of the Abbey and the Chapel of Edward the Confessor. ‘Look!’ she whispered, nodding in the direction of one of the tombs surrounding Edward’s massive shrine.
Mr Blake was standing alongside it, staring at the bronze effigy of a woman that lay along the top of it. He was sketching in a small sand-coloured notebook, never looking down at the paper and pencil, but keeping his eyes fastened on the statue’s impassive face.
Maggie put a finger to her lips, then took a quiet step towards Mr Blake, Jem following reluctantly. Slowly and steadily they rounded on him from behind. He was so concentrated on drawing that he noticed nothing. As the children got closer, they discovered that he was singing under his breath, very soft and high, more like the whining of a mosquito than of a man. Now and then his lips moved to form a word but it was hard to catch what he might be saying.
Maggie giggled. Jem shook his head at her. They were close enough now that they were able to peek around Mr Blake at his sketch. When they saw what he was drawing, Jem flinched, and Maggie openly gasped. Though the statue on the tomb was dressed in ceremonial robes, Mr Blake had drawn her naked.
He did not turn around, but continued to draw and to sing, though he must have known now that they were just behind him.
Jem grabbed Maggie’s elbow and pulled her away. When they had left the chapel and were out of earshot, Maggie burst out laughing. ‘Fancy undressing a statue!’
Jem’s irritation outweighed his impulse to laugh too. He was suddenly weary of Maggie – of her harsh, barking laughter, her sharp comments, her studied worldliness. He longed for someone quiet and simple, who wouldn’t pass judgement on him and on Mr Blake.
‘Shouldn’t you be with your family?’ he said abruptly.
Maggie shrugged. ‘They’ll just be at the pub. I can find ’em later.’
‘I’m going back to mine.’ Immediately he regretted his tone, as he saw hurt flash through her eyes before she hid it with hard indifference.
‘Suit yourself.’ She shrugged and turned away.
‘Wait, Maggie,’ Jem called as she slipped out of a side entrance he had not noticed before. As when he first met her, the moment she was gone, he wished she was back again. He felt eyes on him then, and looked across the aisle and through the door to Edward’s Chapel. Mr Blake was gazing at him, pen poised above his notebook.
Anne Kellaway insisted that they arrive early, so they found seats right at