Burning Bright (15 page)

Bet Butterfield glanced about, suddenly aware of her family's public display of disunity. “Hallo again,” she said, spying Anne Kellaway and trying to get back to safe neighborly chitchat. “I'll be coming round to finish that Blandfield Wagon Wheel one o' these days.”

“Cartwheel,” Anne Kellaway corrected. “Blandford Cartwheel.”

“That's right. We'll be seeing you. Shall we, Dick?” She took her husband's arm.

“Dog and Duck, I think, gal.”

“That'll do me.”

The Butterfields went one way, the Kellaways the other. Jem caught Maggie's eye as Charlie pulled her along, and they held each other's gaze until she was yanked out of sight by her brother.

None of them noticed Mr. Blake sitting on the steps of one of the houses across from the fire; Mrs. Blake stood behind him, leaning against the house. He had his little notebook resting on his knee and was scribbling rapidly.

At five on Sunday morning, John Honor, head carpenter for Astley's Circus, died of injuries sustained from the fireworks laboratory explosion. After paying his condolences to the widow, Philip Astley caught the Kellaways as they were leaving for the early church service at St. Mary's, and offered Thomas Kellaway a position as carpenter for his circus.

“He will,” Anne Kellaway answered for the family.

“Friends, gather round now—I want to have a word with you. That's all of you, in the ring, please.” Philip Astley's thundering voice could be heard throughout the amphitheatre. Jem and Thomas Kellaway glanced at each other and laid down the tools they had been gathering up—it was Saturday noon and they were just finishing their work for the day. They made their way with the other carpenters from backstage to the ring, where they were joined by grumbling acrobats, riders, costume girls, grooms, circus boys, musicians, dancers, and all the rest of the circus workers. It was not unheard of for Philip Astley to call a meeting of the company, but he did not normally choose to do so when they were about to have an afternoon off before the evening performance. His timing suggested that the news would not be good.

Thomas Kellaway did not join in the grumbling. Though he had now been working for the circus for three months, and was glad of the regular wages, he still felt too new to say anything unless asked directly. Instead he simply stood next to the stage with Jem and the other carpenters and kept quiet.

John Fox leaned against the barrier that separated the pit seats from the circus ring, and continued to chew on something so that his long mustache wriggled. His eyelids were so low that he seemed to be asleep where he stood; he could also conveniently avoid eye contact with anyone. John Astley was sitting in the pit with some of the other horsemen, his riding boots—cleaned and polished daily by one of his cousins—propped up on a railing, as he picked at a thumbnail.

“Fox, is everyone here? Good. Now, friends, listen to me.” Philip Astley batted his hands up and down to quiet the noises of discontentment. “Boys and girls, first I would like to say that you have been doing an impressive job—a most impressive job. Indeed, I believe this season will go down as one of our very best. For sheer professionalism as well as dazzling entertainment, no one can touch us.

“Now, my friends, I must share some news with you that will affect us all. As you are aware, these are trying times. Dangerous times, we might say. Revolutionary times. Over the summer there has been growing turbulence in France, has there not? Well, good people of the circus, it may well be reaching a bloody climax. Perhaps some of you have heard the news today from Paris, where there are reports of twelve thousand citizens killed. Twelve thousand royalists, friends—people loyal to king and family! People like you and me! Not twelve, not twelve hundred, but twelve thousand! Do you have any idea how many people that is? That is twelve nights' audience, sir.” He gazed at the singer Mr. Johannot, who stared back at him with wide eyes. “Imagine twelve audiences piled up in the streets around us, ladies.” Philip Astley turned toward a group of seamstresses who had been giggling in their seats, and who froze when he glared at them. “Slaughtered mercilessly, men, women, and children alike—throats cut, bellies slashed open, their blood and entrails pouring down the gutters of Westminster Bridge Road and Lambeth Marsh.” One of the girls burst into tears, and two others followed.

“Well may you cry,” Philip Astley continued over their sobs. “Such actions so close to our own shores pose a grievous threat to us all. Grievous, dear colleagues. The imprisonment of the French king and his family is a challenge to our own royal family. Watch and weep, friends. It is an end to innocence. England cannot let this challenge to our way of life pass. Within six months we will be at war with France—my instincts as a cavalryman tell me so. Kiss your fathers and brothers and sons good-bye now, for they may soon be off to war.”

During the pause that followed as Philip Astley let his words sink in, irritated looks and grumbles were replaced with solemn faces and silence, apart from the weeping from the costume bench. Thomas Kellaway looked around in wonder. The revolution in France was certainly discussed more in London pubs than at the Five Bells in Piddletrenthide, but he had never thought it would ever affect him personally. He glanced at Jem, who had just turned thirteen. Though too young for cannon fodder, his son was old enough to feel the threat of being press-ganged into the army. Thomas Kellaway had seen for himself a press-gang in action at a Lambeth pub, drawing in a gullible youth with promises of free pints, and then frogmarching him to a nearby barracks. Tommy would have been a prime target, Thomas Kellaway thought. It should be Tommy he'd be concerned about rather than Jem. But then, if Tommy were alive to worry about, they'd still be a close, loving family safely tucked away in the Piddle Valley, far from the danger of press-gangs. Thomas Kellaway had not considered such threats when he and his wife decided to come to London.

“I have been taking the measure of our audiences,” Philip Astley continued, and Thomas Kellaway pulled himself out of his thoughts to listen. “Public entertainers must be ever vigilant to public moods. Vigilant, my friends. I am aware that, though audi-ences like to be kept abreast of the state of the world, they also come to the amphitheatre to forget—to laugh and rejoice at the superlative wonders before their eyes, and to put out of their minds for one evening the worries and threats of the world. This world”—he gestured around him, taking in the ring, the stage, the seats, and the galleries—“becomes their world.

“Even before today's terrible news, I had reached the inevitable conclusion that the current program places perhaps too much emphasis on military spectacle. The splendid and realistic enactment of soldiers striking camp at Bagshot Heath, and the celebration of peace during the East India Military Divertissement—these are scenes of which we can be justly proud. But perhaps, friends, given the present state of affairs in France, they are
de trop
—particularly for the ladies in the audience. We must think of their sensitive natures. I have seen many members of the gentler sex shudder and turn away from these spectacles; indeed, three have fainted in the last week!”

“That were from the heat,” the carpenter next to Thomas Kellaway muttered, though not loud enough for Philip Astley to hear.

“And so, boys and girls, we are going to replace the Bagshot Heath spectacle with a new pantomime I have penned. It will be a continuation of the adventures of the Harlequin my son played earlier this season, and will be called
Harlequin in Ireland
.”

A groan arose from the assembled company. Astley's Circus had been playing to good crowds and, after several changes in program, had settled down into a happy routine that many had expected would take them right through early October to the end of the season. They were tired of change, and content to repeat themselves each night without learning a new show, which would require a great deal of unexpected extra work. Saturday afternoon off would certainly be canceled, for a start.

Even as Philip Astley reiterated that
Harlequin in Ireland
would be a tonic for revolution-weary audiences, the carpenters were already heading backstage to ready themselves for immediate set building. Thomas Kellaway followed more slowly. Even three months into his job with the circus, he found working with so many others overwhelming at times, and sometimes longed for the quiet of his workshop in Dorsetshire or at Hercules Buildings, where there had only been him and his family to make noise. Here there was a constant parade of performers, musicians, horses, suppliers of timber and cloth and oats and hay, boys running in and out on the endless errands supplied by Philip Astley, and general hangers-on creating chaos along with the rest of them. Above all there was Philip Astley himself, bellowing orders, arguing with his son about the program or Mrs. Connell about ticket sales or John Fox about everything else.

Noise was not the only thing Thomas Kellaway had had to adjust to in his new position. Indeed, the work couldn't be more different from his chairs, and he sometimes thought he ought to tell Philip Astley that he was not suitable for the demands made on him, and admit that he had really taken the job only to satisfy his circus-obsessed wife.

Thomas Kellaway was a chairmaker—a profession which required patience, a steady hand, and an eye for the shape wood would best take. Building the sorts of things needed for Astley's Circus was a completely different use of wood. To expect Thomas Kellaway to be able do such work was like asking a brewer to trade jobs with a laundress, simply because both used water. In making chairs, the choice of wood used for each part was critical in creating a strong, comfortable, long-lasting chair. Thomas Kellaway knew his elm and ash, his yew and chestnut and walnut. He knew what would look and work best for the seat (always elm), the legs and spindles (he preferred yew if he could get it), the hoop for the back and arms (ash). He understood just how much he could bend ash before it splintered; he could sense how hard he had to chop at an elm plank with his adze to shape the seat. He loved wood, for he had been using it all his life. For scenery, however, Thomas Kellaway had to use some of the cheapest, poorest wood he had ever had the misfortune to handle. Knotty oak, seconds and ends of beech, even scorched wood salvaged from house fires—he could barely stand to touch the stuff.

Harder even than that, though, was the idea behind what he was meant to make. When he made a chair, he knew it was a chair—it looked like one, and it would be used as one. Otherwise there was no reason for him to make it. The scenery, however, was not what it was meant to be. He constructed sheets of board cut into the shapes of clouds, painted white, and hung up in the “sky” so that they looked like clouds—yet they were not clouds. He was building castles that were not castles, mountains that were not mountains, Indian pavilions that were not Indian pavilions. The only function of what he now made was to resemble something else rather than to be it, and to create an effect. Certainly it looked good, from a distance. Audiences often gasped and clapped when the curtain went up and the carpenters' creations set the scene—even if up close they were clearly just bits of wood nailed together and painted for effect. Thomas Kellaway was not used to something looking good from far away but not up close. That was not how chairs worked.

His first weeks at Astley's were not the disaster they so easily could have been, however. Thomas Kellaway was rather surprised by this, for he had never in his life worked as part of a group. The first time he appeared at the amphitheatre, the day after Philip Astley hired him, carrying his tools in a satchel, no one even noticed him for an hour. The other carpenters were busy building a shed at the back in which to store the few bits and pieces that had been salvaged from the laboratory fire. Thomas Kellaway watched them for a time; then, noting one of the carpenters going around the gallery of the theatre, tightening handrails, he found some nails and bits of wood, took up his tools, and set about making repairs in the boxes. When he'd finished, having gained in confidence, he went back to the half-built shed and quietly inserted himself into the scrum of men, handing over the right-sized plank just when it was needed, scrounging up nails when no one else could find any, catching a loose board before it hit a man. By the time the last plank for the slanted roof had been hammered into place, Thomas Kellaway had become a natural part of the team. To celebrate his arrival, the carpenters took him at noon to their favored pub, the Pedlar's Arms, just across the road from the timber yards north of Westminster Bridge. They all got drunk except for Thomas Kellaway, drinking toasts to their late head carpenter, the unfortunate John Honor. He left them to it, finally, and returned to work alone on a wood volcano that was to spew fireworks as part of the drama
Jupiter's Vengeance
.

Since then Thomas Kellaway had spent the summer keeping quiet and working hard. It was easier, keeping quiet, for when he did open his mouth the men laughed at his Dorset accent.

Now he began to sort through his tools. “Jem, where be our compass saw?” he called. “One o' the men needs it.”

“At home.”

“Run and get it, then, there's a good lad.”