by Nunn, Kayte
‘Out with it,’ said Prudence, her expression narrowing with suspicion. ‘Are you a hedge witch?’
Rowan held her breath. A hedge witch was the name for someone who dealt in herbal tinctures and healing potions, not magic exactly, but she did not dare admit to even this, for the slightest hint of anything untoward cast a long shadow. She was still a stranger in this house and had yet to prove her worth and good character. ‘It is but a common remedy,’ she said quietly.
The cook hesitated for a brief moment, then held out her hand. ‘Right. Give it here, then. And you’d best be off to bed, girl. You’ve a long day ahead of you tomorrow.’
Rowan passed her the precious pot of ointment and turned to leave.
‘Thank you, Rowan Caswell,’ Tommy said.
She glanced back and flashed a grateful smile at him – he reminded her so much of her brother Will. He had the same shock of tow-coloured hair and eyes the colour of filberts and she couldn’t help but like him. ‘’Tis no matter,’ she said, before scampering up the back stairs.
When Rowan reached the top of the house she found the attic room again, though still no sign of the mysterious Alice. It was a small, shadowy space with a sloping ceiling and a dormer window that looked out onto the street. It contained an iron-framed bed made up with a patterned counterpane, linen sheets and a pair of thin pillows; a linen press and a chest of drawers on which sat a wide basin and a jug made up the remainder of the furniture. To Rowan, who had slept on a pallet in the kitchen at her aunt and uncle’s house, and before that shared a bed with two of her brothers when they were small, it appeared very grand indeed.
She placed her scant possessions on the floor next to the bed and lay down on the side furthest from the door. Though the mattress and pillow were thin, they felt like goosedown to Rowan after a night spent in a copse on the way to Oxleigh. She lay, luxuriating in the feeling of them against her skin, her mind a tumult of the day’s experiences. Then, remembering, she reached into her bundle and pulled out a small cross fashioned from two twigs bound in the centre with a strand of wool dyed red with crabapple bark. The twigs were from the rowan tree, for which she had been named, and her father had made it when she was little, indeed had made one for each of her brothers too. As she touched its familiar surface she heard her mother’s words. ‘For protection,’ she had said when she handed it to her. Rowan hoped the charm her mother had placed upon it had not lost any of its power, that it would keep her safe in this strange new place. She clutched the cross in her hand and was seized with a sudden longing to be back in Inkpen, curled by the embers of the fire, her brothers, like a tangle of pups, close by. Before she had time to dwell on the thought any more deeply, she was so soundly asleep that she did not stir when a young woman crept into bed next to her many hours later.
FIVE
1768, London
The petals were studded with tiny beads that, when looked upon closely, reflected a world turned upside down as if by a conjurer’s trick. Mary-Louise Stephenson sat at a table by the window in her drawing room and adjusted the flowers in the vase in front of her, loosening the tight knot she had wound them into when she gathered them and being especially careful not to break the remaining dewdrops.
Earlier that morning she had offered to go to the market, walking the few short streets from the house in Spital Yard in search of a turnip and some carrots, and on the way home she had picked these wildflowers, for they grew in tangled profusion in the ditches thereabouts. She favoured them above all others, which was just as well, for the household’s meagre income rarely stretched to the purchase of meat, let alone the flower-seller’s luscious roses, blousy peonies and the lilies that almost made her swoon with their perfume as she passed. Later, her sister Frances would add a handful of grain and some water to the vegetables that she had left in the kitchen, making a soup for their supper to have with a loaf of yesterday’s bread. With care, they would stretch this meal until the end of the week.
Ignoring the knot of hunger in her stomach, Mary turned the flowers this way and that, searching for the best angle of the sunny yellow coltsfoot and the purple flowers of wild violet. She had in mind to design a pattern from their contrasting forms and complementary hues. She worked by painting the flower first and then tracing a pattern from which to embroider a repeat of the flower onto fabric. Her ability with the needle was not of sufficient quality for her to imagine seeking employment in that area, nor were the wages – sevenpence for a day that often began at dawn and did not end until late at night – something to aspire towards. But it enabled her to demonstrate how the design might work when woven in silk. At least that was what she hoped.
It was her sister Frances who had suggested Mary turn her fondness for painting into a more profitable pursuit. They lived on the edges of the city’s weaving industry, on the outermost of a grid of streets barely a half-mile square, where almost every dwelling housed a loom on its upper floors, presided over by a journeyman or master weaver, and the air sang with their clack and clatter from sunup to sundown and beyond. Silks and damasks were woven and brocaded with showy patterns of flowers, exotic fruits and leaves. There was lustred taffety, corded paduasoy, silk tabby, damask and velvet; the most expensive silks were shot through with fine gold or silver thread. Patterned silk commanded a price more than double that of its plain cousins, for it required far greater skill to weave.
‘A few extra shillings in the household purse would indeed be a blessing,’ Frances had said. ‘For I do not know how we will afford the rent after this year.’ She insisted that Mary was as talented as any of the men. ‘More skilled too, once you learn the particulars, I’ll wager. It should be but a short step from painting and embroidery.’
Fabric design, like so many interesting – and better-paid – activities it seemed to Mary, was generally the province of men, and the pattern-drawers, mercers and silk weavers behaved like proprietary lovers, not allowing outsiders to come within sniffing distance of their work. There had been but one female pattern-drawer in recent decades – the revered Anna Maria Garthwaite – but she had been buried five years past now. Mary dreamed of one day taking her place, wished she were still alive to share her wisdom.
The sisters were fortunate in that Frances’s late husband, Samuel, had been a journeyman weaver, and they had friends among the legion who plied their trade in the surrounding streets. Frances had appealed to the good graces of one of them, Guy Le Maître, a Huguenot whose father had fled persecution in Lyon, to initiate them into the mysteries of weaving. One morning, he led them up into his loft, a sloping space filled with light that streamed in from long windows set into the angled walls. There he demonstrated the workings of the lashes and battens, the needles where they sat on guiding springs, and how the weft and warp threads were set up, using the pattern on the squared paper before him as a template. ‘We have a flying shuttle,’ he said, his expression serious as he pointed in the direction of a draw boy who sat atop the loom sending a small object on a wheeled track hurtling across the silk threads. ‘Now we can weave fabric wider than the span of a man’s arm. It is a great saving.’
Mary nodded, intoxicated by the dry, earthy smell of the skeins of silk thread and the lightning-fast movement of the shuttle. ‘Why, it is as fine embroidery, not weaving,’ she said, drawing as close to the loom as she dared. ‘How is that possible?’
‘The detail,’ he said. ‘The most intricate patterns can take weeks to mount.’
Mary’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion.
‘To set up,’ he explained. ‘This particular design is such that we can see enough of a repeat of the pattern whether used on a waistcoat or the skirts of a ball gown.’
A glimmer of understanding lit Mary’s mind as she marvelled at the rich colours of the silk thread wound on the bobbins that lined the room: buttercup yellow, the crimson of rosehips, peach, bright scarlet, and a purple–blue almost the exact hue of iris petals.
‘The more detailed the pattern,
the more lifelike it is, but also the more difficult to weave without making an error, dropping a thread. We must strike a balance,’ he said. ‘The pattern-drawer ought not to be a stranger to geometry nor proportion, as well as art,’ he added.
‘And how much of this fabric will you weave?’ she asked, though Frances, who stood nearby but said nothing, had already explained some of the workings of the trade. Mary had determined to appeal to Monsieur Le Maître’s sense of importance, to flatter his ego so that he might be forthcoming.
‘Generally only enough for four gowns, as much as the mercer has requested and knows he will sell. Each gown will use between nine and sixteen yards of material.’
‘So, between thirty and sixty-odd yards of one design in total,’ said Mary, calculating the sum in her head.
Guy’s eyes widened momentarily at her quick accuracy before his expression assumed its usual dour impassivity.
‘And how long will that take?’
‘Several months.’
‘I can see that a lady would not want to meet another wearing a gown of the same fabric,’ she murmured. ‘And why it commands such a high price.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Who chooses the colours? The weave? How exactly do you decide on a pattern?’
‘The weaver will sometimes commission a pattern-drawer; other times it is the mercer who decides what is to be woven. I have to admit, however,’ he grumbled, ‘that at times the pattern-drawer is unaware of the limitations of the loom and we have, on occasion, been forced to halt the weaving until it can be altered. Sometimes even scrap the entire commission.’
‘I can well imagine the cost in lost time and materials,’ Mary sympathised.
Guy nodded, seemingly unfazed by her endless questions. ‘The mercer provides us with the order, although we might make up a length of fabric in the hope of finding a buyer,’ he continued. ‘’Tis never good to have the loom lying idle.’
‘It must be difficult to translate a drawing onto paper, no?’ she asked.
‘It is at first,’ he admitted. ‘But here, let me show you on this twill …’
Mary left the weaver’s loft that day with her head spinning, as visions of how she might transform her naturalistic sketches of plants and wildflowers into patterns that might take the fancy of grand lords and ladies – perhaps even royalty, she allowed herself a fanciful dream – danced in her mind.
She spent her waking hours sketching and painting until her eyes strained, her fingers were numb and the candle stubs burned to pools of wax. She painted primrose and crocus, and then, as the weather grew warmer, cornflowers, cow parsley and foxgloves. She copied these onto fabrics, embroidering them until they appeared almost to possess three dimensions. From these she attempted to draw the pattern on the point paper as Guy had shown her, which the weaver would use as a template. Her first attempts ended in frustration, as she struggled to transfer her curling designs onto a grid. But she persisted, finally creating several that she thought might work.
‘They are quite fresh and lively,’ said Frances as Mary showed the portfolio of designs to her. ‘Why, I would be delighted to wear a gown woven with such delicate and pretty flowers.’
‘But they are so very different from the work of the other pattern-drawers,’ Mary said doubtfully, wondering suddenly if she might have been wasting her time with such common plants. Would they not appear ridiculous on sumptuous silk, as a damask relief or picked out in silver and gold threads? The flowers of the verge and byway that were dismissed as weeds? The fashion was for showier blooms, roses, lilies, camellias and the like. No, she reminded herself sternly, her wayside gleanings held a beauty of their own. She would persuade the weavers to use her designs. ‘My work will stand out as original,’ she declared, a note of determination in her voice.
‘I certainly hope you are right,’ said Frances, a worried expression not leaving her face. ‘For we will be down to our last few pounds ’ere long.’
Mary refused to let worry about money sway her from her purpose: to assemble a portfolio of sketches and patterns that might be woven onto silk to grace the backs of the finest ladies and gentlemen of the city.
It was only in the early hours of the morning that doubt weaselled its way into her churning mind and kept her awake until the first birds began their melodic twittering. Who was she, a spinster educated in a parsonage, to imagine she could force her way into a man’s world, let alone succeed at it?
SIX
Now
At first, Thea couldn’t remember where she was. Disorientated, she reached for her glasses and staggered from her bed, pushed aside the curtains and peered onto the street far below. It curved gently downhill, and in the grey morning light she could see the outline of the roofs of the college buildings at its far reaches, and beyond that, the green of the playing fields. Several trucks rumbled heavily along the other side of the road, crunching their gears as they descended towards the belly of the town.
The night before, after the lights had cut out, she had been on the point of feeling her way downstairs when they flickered on and off again, finally staying on. Putting it down to the dodgy electrics of an old house, and the spine-tingling screech to a cat shut indoors, she had nevertheless been unable to quell a prickle of apprehension as she settled down for the night. Despite her exhaustion, it had taken her longer than usual to fall asleep.
She left the window and glanced at her watch: still plenty of time before her meeting with the headmaster. She reached for her phone and pressed the button to turn it on but the screen remained resolutely black. She checked the charger and the lead. Nothing. Perhaps the socket didn’t work, or there’d been another power cut in the night? She silently cursed. She had wanted to check her emails; make sure she didn’t miss anything ahead of her first day. She was on her way to the shower when a crumpled shape in the corner of the room caught her eye. Her jacket. She could have sworn she’d hung it up on the back of the door. She must have been more tired yesterday than she realised. Next to it was a chocolate wrapper on the floor – she hadn’t managed to land that in the basket – and she knew that her first priority, after a shower, was breakfast, preferably not in the company of Dame Hicks. She needed to fortify herself before facing the inscrutable woman again.
The kitchen was large, clinically clean and, happily, empty. A clock on the wall showed the time at a quarter to twelve. Thea didn’t need to check her watch again to know that it had stopped quite some time ago.
She walked to the rear where a doorway led to a short passage and then a back door. Unbolting it, she saw a long, narrow garden bound by high flint walls. In the centre was a complicated-looking flowerbed with sections marked out in old bricks and pruned low hedging: a knot garden or parterre perhaps. Beyond that was a small fishpond. She stared at the flowerbed, her brain taking a few seconds to catch up with her eyes until she recognised the shape it made and where she had seen it before. It was a pentacle, the same as on one of the keys Mr Battle had given her. The wind scattered the last of the leaves on the damp grass and she shivered in the cold morning air.
Back in the warmth of the kitchen she rummaged in drawers and cupboards, not finding batteries for the stopped clock, but discovering tea, bread, jam and assorted boxes of cereal. A brace of large refrigerators was generously stocked with, among other things, butter, milk, cheese and vegetables. Cupboards yielded cups and plates, and cutlery was in a long drawer to one side of the room. Cheering up at the prospect of food and a cuppa, Thea toasted bread and boiled a kettle for tea before settling herself at the end of one of two long oak tables in the dining room, basking in the bright sunshine that now streamed through the two bay windows.
She had no sooner taken a bite of her toast when the door opened and the Dame appeared. The woman looked slightly less formidable in the daylight and was dressed in a similar blouse to the previous night, but this time with a pattern of red berries. Thea was wearing a pair of grey tailored trousers and a simply cut shirt in anticipa
tion of her first day in the job, had even added an unaccustomed swipe of lipstick, but she was sombrely dressed compared to the Dame. She put her toast down, hastily swallowed, and wished her good morning, resolving not to be intimidated.
As moments of silence stretched between them, Thea noticed an unusual round pewter brooch affixed to the Dame’s collar. It featured an arrow-shaped design, not unlike one of the keys Thea had been given. Intrigued, she wanted to ask about its origin, for it looked antique, but held her tongue. The older woman’s countenance did not invite personal questions, though when she spoke her tone was a few degrees less frigid.
‘I trust you are rested.’
‘Yes. Thank you. Though little could have disturbed me – I slept like the dead.’
The Dame looked at her sharply. ‘Perhaps we might find some time before the girls arrive to discuss the running of the house and where our responsibilities lie?’
Thea nodded. ‘How about eleven?’
‘Very good. I have to supervise the delivery of the remaining provisions, and the kitchen staff are due to arrive after lunch, but that will give us enough time to run over everything.’ She left Thea to her breakfast.
As Thea was clearing up in the kitchen, the door creaked open, followed by a high-pitched meow. Isis. The cat immediately began rubbing herself against Thea’s legs, doing figure of eights around her ankles. It seemed the cat, like the Dame, was far friendlier this morning. Thea reached down to stroke her and was treated to a rumbling purr. ‘Was that you yowling last night, hey? What was all that about?’ she crooned, casting about to see if there was anything on the floor that might be a bowl. ‘I’d better not feed you, puss,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t risk getting into trouble on my first day.’
She looked at her watch. Eight-thirty. Enough time to explore before her meeting. She’d had no opportunity to stroll through the town after her interview several months earlier, because she had been hurrying to get a bus to the train station, and she was now anxious to see what it might hold. These were, after all, the streets her father had spent much of his boyhood wandering; nearby were the playing fields he had battled on, the theatre he had performed in, the boarding house he had slept in. She and her sister had heard how he would run five miles before a cold shower and breakfast on icy winter mornings, how he’d been rapped over the knuckles with a wooden ruler for minor misdemeanours, wiping away the blood when it was over.
