Burning Bright. Tracy Chevalier

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      She looked around, astonished at the mess the Kellaways had managed to make in the room after only a few days. It was as if a timber yard, with its chunks and planks and splinters and shavings of wood, had been dumped indoors. Scattered among the wood were saws, chisels, adzes, augers and other tools Maggie didn’t recognise. In the corner she could see tin pots and troughs, filled with liquid. There was a smell in the air of resin and varnish. Here and there she could find order: a row of elm planks leaning against the wall, a dozen finished chair legs stacked like firewood on a shelf, wood hoop frames hanging in descending size from hooks.

      ‘Didn’t take you long to make yourself at home! Does Miss Pelham know what you’re doin’ up here?’ she asked.

      ‘Pa’s workshop were out in the garden back home,’ Jem said, as if to explain the disorder.

      Maggie chuckled. ‘Looks like he thinks he’s still outside!’

      ‘We keep the other rooms tidy enough,’ replied Anne Kellaway, appearing in the doorway behind them. ‘Maisie, come and help me, please.’ She was clearly suspicious of Maggie, and wanted to keep an eye on her daughter.

      ‘Look, here be the seat for the chair Pa’s making specially for Mr Astley,’ Maisie said, trying to put off leaving her new friend. ‘Extra wide to fit him. See?’ She showed Maggie an oversized, saddle-shaped seat propped against other planks. ‘It has to dry out a bit more; then he can add the legs and back.’

      Maggie admired the seat, then turned to look out of the open window, with its view over Miss Pelham’s and her neighbours’ back gardens. The gardens of Hercules Buildings houses were narrow – only eighteen feet across – but they made up for this deficiency with their length. Miss Pelham’s garden was a hundred feet long. She made the most of the space by dividing it into three squares, with a central ornament gracing each: a white lilac in the square closest to the house, a stone birdbath in the central square, and a laburnum tree in the back square. Miniature hedges, gravelled paths and raised beds planted with roses created regular patterns that had little to do with nature but were more concerned with order.

      Miss Pelham had made it plain that she did not want the Kellaways hanging about in her garden other than to use the privy. Every morning, if it wasn’t raining, she liked to take a teacup full of broth – its dull, meaty smell visiting the Kellaways upstairs – and sit with it on one of two stone benches that faced each other sideways, halfway along the garden. When she got up to go inside again she would dump the remains over a grapevine growing up the wall next to the bench. She believed the broth would make the vine grow faster and more robust than that of her neighbour, Mr Blake. ‘He never prunes his vine, and that is a mistake, for all vines need a good pruning or the fruit will be small and sour,’ Miss Pelham had confided to Jem’s mother in a momentary attempt to reconcile herself to her new lodgers. She soon discovered, however, that Anne Kellaway was not one for confidences.

      Apart from Miss Pelham’s broth times and the twice-weekly visit from a man to rake and prune, the garden was usually deserted, and Jem went into it whenever he could, even though he could see little use for one like this. It was a harsh, geometrical place, with uncomfortable benches and no lawn to lie on. There was no space in which to grow vegetables and no fruit trees apart from the grapevine. Of all the things Jem expected from the outdoors – fertile soil, large vibrant patches of growth, a solidity that changed daily and yet suggested permanence – only the varied ranges of green he craved were available in Miss Pelham’s garden. That was why he went there – to feast his eyes on the colour he loved best. He stayed as long as he could, until Miss Pelham appeared at her window and waved him out.

      Now he joined Maggie at the window to look out over it.

      ‘Funny to see this from above,’ she said. ‘I only ever seen it from there.’ She indicated the brick wall at the far end of the garden.

      ‘What, you climb over?’

      ‘Not over – I an’t been in it. I just have a peek over the wall every now and then, to see what she’s up to. Not that there’s ever much to see. Not like in some gardens.’

      ‘What’s that house in the field past the wall?’ Jem indicated a large, two-storey brick house capped with three truncated towers, set alone in the middle of the field behind the gardens of the Hercules Buildings houses. A long stable ran perpendicular to the house, with a dusty yard in front.

      Maggie looked surprised. ‘That’s Hercules Hall. Didn’t you know? Mr Astley lives there, him an’ his wife an’ some nieces to look after ’em. His wife’s an invalid now, though she used to ride with him. Don’t see much of her. Mr Astley keeps some of the circus horses there too – the best ones, like his white horse and John Astley’s chestnut. That’s his son. You saw him riding in Dorsetshire, didn’t you?’

      ‘I reckon so. It were a chestnut mare the man rode.’

      ‘He lives just two doors down from you, the other side o’ the Blakes. See? There’s his garden – the one with the lawn and nothin’ else.’

      Hurdy-gurdy music was now drifting over from Hercules Hall, and Jem spotted a man leaning against the stables, cranking and playing a popular song. Maggie began to sing along softly:

      One night as I came from the play

      I met a fair maid by the way

      She had rosy cheeks and a dimpled chin

      And a hole to put poor Robin in!

      The man played a wrong note and stopped. Maggie chuckled. ‘He’ll never get a job – Mr Astley’s got higher standards’n that.’

      ‘What d’you mean?’

      ‘People’s always coming to perform for him over there, hopin’ he might take ’em on. He hardly ever does, though he’ll give ’em sixpence for tryin’.’

      The hurdy-gurdy man began the song again, and Maggie hummed along, her eyes scanning the neighbouring gardens. ‘Much better view here than at the back,’ she declared.

      Afterwards Jem couldn’t remember if it was the sound or the movement that first caught his attention. The sound was a soft ‘Ohh’ that still managed to carry up to the Kellaways’ window. The movement was the flash of a naked shoulder somewhere in the Blakes’ garden.

      Closest to the Blakes’ house was a carefully laid out, well-dug kitchen garden partially planted, a garden fork now stuck upright in the rich soil at the end of one row. Anne Kellaway had been following its progress over the last week, watching with envy the solid, bonneted woman next door double-digging the rows and sowing seeds, as Anne Kellaway would be doing herself if she were in Dorsetshire or had any space to plant a garden here. It had never occurred to her when they decided to move to London that she might not have even a small patch of earth. However, she knew better than to ask Miss Pelham, whose garden was clearly decorative rather than functional; but she felt awkward and idle without her own garden to dig in springtime.

      The back of the Blakes’ garden was untended, and filled with brambles and nettles. Midway along the garden, between the orderly and the chaotic, sat a small wooden summerhouse, set up for sitting in when the weather was mild. Its French doors were open, and it was in there that Jem saw the naked shoulder and, following that, naked backs, legs, bottoms. Horrified, he fought the temptation to step back from the window, fearing it would signal to Maggie that there was something he didn’t want her to see. Instead he pulled his eyes away and СКАЧАТЬ