Burning Bright. Tracy Chevalier

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       ONE

      There was something humiliating about waiting in a cart on a busy London street with all your possessions stacked around you, on show to the curious public. Jem Kellaway sat by a tower of Windsor chairs his father had made for the family years ago, and watched aghast as passers-by openly inspected the cart’s contents. He was not used to seeing so many strangers at once – the appearance of one in their Dorsetshire village would be an event discussed for days after – and to being so exposed to their attention and scrutiny. He hunkered back among the family belongings, trying to make himself less conspicuous. A wiry boy with a narrow face, deep-set blue eyes and sandy fair hair that curled below his ears, Jem was not one to draw attention to himself, and people peered more often at his family’s belongings than at him. A couple even stopped and handled items as if they were at a barrow squeezing pears to see which was ripest – the woman fingering the hem of a nightdress that poked out of a split bag, the man picking up one of Thomas Kellaway’s saws and testing its teeth for sharpness. Even when Jem shouted ‘Hey!’, he took his time setting it down again.

      Apart from the chairs, much of the cart was filled with the tools of Jem’s father’s trade: wooden hoops used to bend wood for the arms and backs of the Windsor chairs he specialised in, a dismantled lathe for turning chair legs, and a selection of saws, axes, chisels and augers. Indeed, Thomas Kellaway’s tools took up so much room that the Kellaways had had to take turns СКАЧАТЬ