Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier Read Free Book Online Page A

as a footrest and got swatted. He asked a barmaid, who jeered at him. As he struggled through the scrum of bodies, Jem wondered how it was that so many people could be drinking now rather than working. In the Piddle Valley few went to the Five Bells or the Crown or the New Inn until evening.
    At last he went back to the table empty-handed. A vacant stool now sat where Dick Butterfield had indicated, and he and Maggie were grinning at Jem.
    â€œCountry boy,” muttered a youth sitting next to them who had watched the whole ordeal, including the barmaid’s jeering.
    â€œShut your bonebox, Charlie,” Maggie retorted. Jem guessed at once that he was her brother.
    Charlie Butterfield was like his father but without the wrinkles or the charm; better-looking in a rough way, with dirty blond hair and a dimple in his chin, but with a scar through his eyebrow too that gave him a harsh look. He was as cruel to his sister as he could get away with, twisting burns on Maggie’s arms until the day she was old enough to kick him where it was guaranteed to hurt. He still looked for ways to get at her—knocking the legs out from the stool she sat on, upending the salt on her food, stealing her blankets at night. Jem knew none of this, but he sensed something about Charlie that made him avoid the other’s eyes, as you do a growling dog.
    Dick Butterfield tossed a coin onto the table. “Fetch Jem a drink, Charlie,” he commanded.
    â€œI an’t—” Charlie sputtered at the same time as Jem said, “I don’t—” Both stopped at the stern look on Dick Butterfield’s face. And so Charlie got Jem a mug of beer he didn’t want—cheap, watery stuff men back at the Five Bells would spill onto the floor rather than drink.
    Dick Butterfield sat back. “Well, now, what have you got to tell me, Mags? What’s the scandal today in old Lambeth?”
    â€œWe saw summat in Mr. Blake’s garden, didn’t we, Jem? In their summerhouse, with all the doors open.” Maggie gave Jem a sly look. He turned red again and shrugged.
    â€œThat’s my girl,” Dick Butterfield said. “Always sneakin’ about, finding out what’s what.”
    Charlie leaned forward. “What’d you see, then?”
    Maggie leaned forward as well. “We saw him an’ his wife at it!”
    Charlie chuckled, but Dick Butterfield seemed unimpressed. “What, rutting is all? That’s nothing you don’t see every day you look down an alley. Go outside and you’ll see it round the corner now. Eh, Jem? I expect you’ve seen your share of it, back in Dorsetshire, eh, boy?”
    Jem gazed into his beer. A fly was struggling on the surface, trying not to drown. “Seen enough,” he mumbled. Of course he had seen it before. It was not just the animals he lived among that he’d seen at it—dogs, cats, sheep, horses, cows, goats, rabbits, chickens, pheasants—but people tucked away in corners of woods or against hedgerows or even in the middle of meadows when they thought no one would pass through. He had seen his neighbors doing it in a barn, and Sam with his girl up in the hazel wood at Nettlecombe Tout. He had seen it enough that he was no longer surprised, though it still embarrassed him. It was not that there was so much to see—mostly just clothes and a persistent movement, sometimes a man’s pale buttocks pistoning up and down or a woman’s breasts jiggling. It was seeing it when he was not expecting to, breaking into the assumed privacy, that made Jem turn away with a red face. He had much the same feeling on the rare occasion when he heard his parents argue—as when his mother demanded that his father cut down the pear tree at the bottom of their garden that Tommy had fallen from, and Thomas Kellaway had refused. Later Anne Kellaway had taken an axe and done it herself.
    Jem dipped his finger into the beer and let the