A Web of Dreams

by Tessa Barclay

  Instead she found uproar. Madame Adair, the dressmaker, was in a furious quarrel with Baird, the personal maid.

  ‘If you dare to tidy away my work again, I shall complain to your mistress,’ Madame Adair was declaring. ‘You folded the silk after I’d had my girl press it ‒’

  ‘And she used my iron to do it! Without even asking! And if you so much as touch my hussif again, I’ll have the head off you,’ Baird said menacingly as she towered over the stout little dressmaker, who was facing up to her like a pouter pigeon.

  ‘Good gracious, if a person can’t borrow a paper of pins ‒’

  ‘You’re a dressmaker, aren’t you? You should have your own pins! And, anyway, you didn’t only take pins out of my hussif. Where are my buttonhole scissors, tell me that? You’ve taken those as well, and all the silks are gone ‒’

  ‘Well, I had to have something to tack up the skirt seams ‒’

  ‘You used my good silk threads for tacking? And without even asking?’

  ‘Baird!’ Jenny interrupted. ‘Baird, that’s enough. Madame Adair, if you need anything, please ask.’

  Madame Adair had spent the four days of her residence closeted with Lucy, who seemed to give the orders and certainly spoke to her with the air of being the mistress of the house. She therefore felt safe in taking a high tone with this interfering young lady who, she gathered, was the old-maid daughter of twenty-two.

  ‘My good woman, ask ‒ I tried asking this person yesterday and got nothing for my pains ‒’

  ‘Buckram ‒ how on earth am I supposed to have buckram? I only do mending, I don’t do dressmaking. Mistress Corvill, tell her to leave my things alone, I’m fair sick of having them turned upside down ‒’

  Lucy came out of her bedroom holding a piece of sky-blue silk to which was tacked the paper pattern for the bodice of her gown. ‘Who folded this up? It’s got creases all over it ‒’

  ‘Lucy, I think you ought to keep things within bounds ‒’

  ‘Oh! Jenny!’ Lucy had just realised Jenny had come home. She’d thought the argument was only between the maid and the dressmaker.

  ‘I think if you’re going to have a new ballgown made, you ought to be able to do it without turning the house upside down.’

  ‘If I may say so, young lady,’ said the dressmaker, completely misunderstanding the situation, ‘it would be a great deal easier to get things done if other people would not interfere in what doesn’t concern them.’

  Jenny turned a cold glance upon her. ‘Madame Adair!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You will please pack up all your paraphernalia and be out of this house in an hour.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Madame Adair inelegantly.

  ‘Pack up and go.’

  ‘You tell me to pack up and go?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘Who are you to dare ‒’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘But … but … Mrs Corvill, I appeal to you!’

  ‘Don’t appeal to Mrs Corvill,’ Jenny said, quite at the end of her tether. ‘I am the one who settles the bills in this family. If you are not out of this house in an hour I will deduct ten per cent off your total, because of the nuisance you have caused.’

  ‘Mrs Corvill!’ cried the dressmaker, looking in dismay at Lucy.

  Lucy trembled on the verge of defying Jenny openly. But so far she had always shied away from that. Now she clutched the piece of cut-out balldress to her breast and burst into tears. ‘Oh, how can you, Jenny, how can you shame me so in front of the servants!’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lucy, don’t carry on as if it were a tragedy.’

  ‘You let me work myself to a shadow refurbishing this dull old house ‒’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘And this is all the thanks I get!’

  ‘Am I to go or stay, madam?’ asked Madame Adair, raising her voice to make herself heard.

  A door across the landing opened and William Corvill came out, a book in his hands with his place kept by a finger in the pages. ‘What is all this noise?’ he demanded.

  Jenny was vexed and embarrassed. ‘Father, I’m sorry, it’s just a silly upset. We’ll be quiet.’

  ‘Quiet! Why should I be quiet over injustice?’ Lucy cried. ‘After all I’ve done, to be treated like this!’

  ‘Like what, lassie?’

  ‘Oh, Father,’ wept Lucy, woebegone, ‘I only wanted to have everything perfect for the ball ‒’

  ‘Lucy, please don’t drag Father into this. Madame Adair, if you’ll get your goods packed up and get ready to leave, I’ll pay you in cash.’

  ‘No!’ cried Lucy. ‘Who’ll finish my balldress? Father, I have my rights! Tell Jenny not to treat me like a child!’

  ‘What in the name of heaven is this all about?’ William said, gazing round at the group of angry women on the landing.

  ‘Sir, I only want to be treated with the respect due to me,’ Madame Adair said, deciding it was time to put these provincial nobodies in their proper place. ‘I am well-known in Glasgow, the Provost’s wife has her clothes made by me! I will not be ordered about like a servant.’

  ‘You’re the dressmaker, I think?’

  ‘I am a modiste, sir.’ She flounced across the landing, twitched a length of bright pink cloth from a chair just inside Lucy’s room, and spread it dramatically along the carpeting for William’s inspection. ‘I supply only the finest Parisian silks. The cost is high, but the finished gown is a work of art. My designs are recognised to be completely de bon gout.’

  ‘You see, Father?’ Lucy urged. ‘It’s not right to turn such a woman out of the house on an hour’s notice.’

  ‘She should never have been let in here,’ Baird said, very sour. ‘Her and her apprentice, fu’ o’ airs and graces, making free with my equipment and demanding meals at all hours of the day and night ‒’

  ‘You hold your tongue!’ Lucy said hotly. ‘You take far too much on yourself ‒’

  ‘Silence!’ roared William.

  Silence followed.

  ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!’ he went on, using a quotation that had trembled on his lips often in the past few weeks as he watched Lucy at work. ‘You should be ashamed to waste your thoughts on finery and frippery when you should be thinking of your immortal soul ‒’

  ‘Father, I apologise,’ Jenny put in. She had seen her father in this mood before, troubled more than he could bear over the trappings of society. Lucy, with her insistence on making a show for their neighbours, had tried his patience greatly. ‘I’ll see to Madame Adair’s departure and then you won’t hear another sound ‒’

  ‘Sir, if you are the master of the house, I appeal to you,’ the dressmaker interrupted. ‘I will not be turned out at an hour’s notice ‒’

  ‘I am trying to read Mr Schaff’s History of the Apostolic Church! How can I give my mind to it when the house is full of this unquiet spirit?’ He glared with contempt at the sumptuous silk spread out for his approval, at the cut piece Lucy still held.

  He twitched it out of her hand. ‘Remember the fate of the man who was clothed in purple and fine linen! Give your mind to higher things!’

  He crumpled the piece, cloth and paper, in his free hand and threw it contemptuously from him. It went towards the stairs in a loose parabola. Lucy uttered a cry of consternation, throwing herself forward to catch it. Her foot caught in the length of silk spread out on the floor, jerking it unexpectedly. William, who had stepped onto it to snatch the piece from Lucy’s hands, lost his balance.

  He staggered against the balustrade, his legs went from under him, he went headlong down the stairs.

  ‘Maister!’ screamed Baird, and threw herself forward to catch him. Her hand missed his jacket sleeve by a fraction. His heavy body thudded on the treads, he made a compulsive gesture to grasp the rails, missed.

  Next moment he was a sprawl at the foot of the staircase.

  Jenny picked up her skirt
s and ran down. He was lying head down, his legs somehow caught in the banister rail. She knelt beside him.

  ‘Father!’

  She put out a hand to raise his head. Then it struck her how unnatural it was, at how crooked an angle it lay.

  She sat back on her heels, cold with horror.

  William Corvill had broken his neck.

  Chapter Twelve

  After the first shock of regret and the excitement of the funeral, the chief interest in Galashiels was in the will. Corvill and Son was a chief employer in the town, and likely to have expanded considerably under the management of Miss Corvill. But now …?

  The terms of the will became known. A hundred pounds and his theological books to the United Secessionist Church. A hundred pounds to the Huguenot Church of Edinburgh. Five thousand pounds and a one-third share each in the house, Gatesmuir, to his wife and daughter. Thus having ensured they always had a roof over their head and an income if worst came to worst, he left everything else to his son, Edward Corvill.

  ‘It’s a damned shame,’ Ronald Armstrong remarked to friends, over a glass of ale in the saloon of the Abbotsford Inn. ‘She made the firm what it is. It should have been left to her.’

  ‘Aye, but you canna expect a man to leave a business to a lassie,’ came the objection from Hanson, the lawyer’s clerk. ‘It isn’t fitting.’

  ‘Fitting! Do you see any of the men and women the mill employs, refusing to work for her because it isn’t fitting?’

  Heads wagged or nodded. ‘What d’you think’ll happen now, Ronald?’

  ‘He’ll sell up. He’s no interest in it. I’m told he was a weaver once himself but he prefers to forget that now, among his high-toned friends. Him and that little Dresden china wife of his … If he’d the slightest mind to go on with the mill, his wife’d put a stop to it.’

  Here he was wrong, for since her father-in-law’s death, Lucy Corvill had learnt a lot. The interest aroused by the funeral had startled her. Everyone who was anyone had come to it ‒ all the members of the town council and the Manufacturers’ Corporation, all the local landowners, elders of all the churches besides the Secessionist, every other cloth-maker in the Scottish Borders, to say nothing of the workforce, which came in its entirety as a mark of respect.

  Letters of condolence began to come in from all over the world ‒ from wool merchants and selling agents in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Spain: from cloth warehousemen in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, New York, New Orleans, Sidney and Wellington. From fashion houses, from famous shops, from young William Morris the poet, from Scottish writers. Most impressive of all, there were letters from members of the nobility and, on the stiff unmistakeable paper of Buckingham Palace, a note in the very hand of the Prince Consort himself.

  This had borne in upon Lucy something she’d never believed ‒ that the Corvills were people of consequence. Their rather simple way of life, the gentle pursuits of country living, had misled her to think that they were of no importance. The mill, which had always been something that made her rather ashamed, now became a thing of value.

  So when her husband muttered that it would be as well to be rid of it as soon as possible, to his astonishment Lucy demurred.

  ‘But I thought you’d jump at the idea ‒’

  ‘No, Ned dearest, we ought to think very carefully. Your father wouldn’t have wanted you to sell up.’

  ‘No … But then, what did he expect me to do?’

  ‘He wanted you to run the mill, of course.’

  This may in fact have been an accurate reading of the will. Ned’s father had been worrying for some months about his son’s feckless life. He had been a long way from suspecting Ned’s addiction to the bottle, but he had sensed a lack of seriousness, a lack of direction. Ned had been down from university long enough now to have settled to work. But still he had avoided going to the mill to play his part.

  The will had been William’s way of forcing his son to face the real world. A man of twenty-three ought to have chosen his career and started upon it ‒ and the mill must be Ned’s career.

  Ned detested the mill. He had hated his loom when he had been a humble handweaver, and he hated the factory with its noisy engines and its smell of raw wool and dyes.

  However, coaxed by Lucy, he went to the place on the Monday after the funeral. Ten days had gone by since his father’s death. Jenny, broken with grief and guilt, had been nowhere near it. Everything was still going on in a lack-lustre way ‒ cloth was being made, orders were being packed. But there was no feeling of purpose in it.

  Ned walked round, accepting the little nods and half-curtseys of the workforce. He spoke to the foremen of the carding department and the weaving sheds. He came at length to the dye works. He had heard Jenny speak with respect of Ronald Armstrong. ‘Corvill’s have two secrets of success,’ she would sometimes say, ‘the perfection of the weaving and the subtlety of the colours. Father is responsible for the first and Mr Armstrong for the second.’

  Mr Armstrong greeted his new boss with politeness. He had scarcely ever said a word to him, except to pay his respects at the funeral.

  ‘Ah, Armstrong,’ Ned began. ‘I’ve dropped by to have a chat about the future of the mill.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘As you know, my father left it to me.’

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘I myself have never played any part in the running of the place.’

  ‘That’s a fact,’ observed Ronald, pulling at his chin to prevent a sardonic smile.

  ‘I think of putting in a manager.’

  ‘A manager.’

  ‘Yes, because if the truth be known, I’ve no head for business. I was trained as a scholar, you know.’

  ‘Oh, aye, Plato and Heraclitus.’

  Ned was startled. ‘You take an interest in philosophy?’

  ‘I’ve read a bit. And what I’ve read tells me that it’s no grounding for running a cloth mill. So you’re bringing in a manager.’

  ‘Yes. I’m going to look around for one.’

  ‘Look around?’ said Ronald in a sharp tone. ‘Why do you need to look further than your own house?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m speaking of your sister. She’s the best manager you could ever have.’

  ‘Excuse me, I don’t think you understand. I never thought it seemly that my sister should ‒’

  ‘You didn’t? But you lived on the money she brought in, I take it?’

  Ned was so taken aback that he actually gaped at the tall, loose-limbed, aproned figure draped at ease on a tall stool by his bench. ‘Look here, Armstrong ‒’

  ‘What? You think I’m impertinent? All right, sack me. But I’ll save you the trouble. If you put anyone else in Miss Corvill’s rightful place, I’ll walk out of this mill. And so will every other department head ‒ and believe me, we’ll get jobs with the opposition the day after, for anyone that ever worked for Corvill’s will be welcomed with open arms.’

  This was delivered in a tone of complete calm. Ned wrestled with a desire to order the man out on the instant, and a feeling that he was being told something he ought to pay attention to.

  ‘I … er … you express yourself very cogently …’

  ‘The English language lends itself to cogent speech. What I’m trying to tell you, Ned Corvill, is that if you don’t let your sister go on with her work here at Waterside Mill you’ll be doing her a great injustice and dealing yourself a foolish handicap.’

  ‘But a man would be more suitable ‒’

  ‘Suitable to whom? For what? Would anyone else have the gift of designing new plaids? Have you any idea how many successful new designs your sister has put in our pattern books?’

  ‘Well, I … She has a knack, I do of course appreciate …’

  ‘Show your appreciation by leaving her where she belongs ‒ in the office on the ground floor.’

  ‘But you don’t understand! My father left the mill to me!’

  ‘Fo
r what reason, only God knows. Very well, carry out his purpose ‒ run the mill. And if you can’t, leave the job to the one who can. The mistress is the best manager you’d find in a long day’s journey, and if you want a frank opinion it’s simple wrong-headedness to hire someone else.’

  ‘I don’t like your tone, Armstrong.’

  ‘Aye, well, I don’t like yours either. That makes us quits. Now, if you’ll excuse me, this tincture is about to lose its power so I’ll say good afternoon.’

  ‘See here, Armstrong ‒’

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Corvill; people talking to me when I’ve a red dye in my hand make me very nervous.’ Ronald twitched the test tube in his hands as if it were going to fly off in Ned’s direction. Ned beat a retreat.

  He stamped out of the mill furiously angry, but on the walk home to Gatesmuir he began to have second thoughts. The fellow might be totally insubordinate but he had a great talent as dye-master and if he walked out, he would find a job next day ‒ and with a competitor. Moreover, if one could just overcome one’s antipathy to having a woman as manager, it was true that Jenny was extraordinarily good at the job.

  Lucy was awaiting him. She had the silver tea service on a table by the drawing-room fire. Sitting behind it, all aglow in her rose-coloured velvet gown, she was a picture. Ned felt his irritability drain away. When she offered him his teacup and asked how he had fared at the mill, he told her of his encounter with Ronald but in a modified version.

  ‘Leave Jenny in control?’ his wife cried. ‘Oh, that’s not a good idea, Ned!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you are the Corvill of Corvill and Son, now your father is gone. It’s up to you to take your rightful place.’

  ‘Dear, I don’t really want to go to the mill every day and fiddle about with yarns and tensions ‒’

  ‘But if you have a manager ‒’

  ‘The fact is, dearest, Jenny is the best person for the post.’

  Lucy was adamantly opposed to the idea. Since William’s death, Jenny had taken no part in anything except the care of her mother, who was prostrated with grief. Lucy had reigned supreme. After the reading of the will, her powers seemed to have been extended even further than the house ‒ she would be the wife of the mill owner, wife to the great Corvill whose cloth was in demand by important people all over the world.