Shining Threads

by Audrey Howard

  ‘Oh, no, please go on.’

  He allowed himself to smile again, his eyes on her curving mouth. ‘Well . . . I used to steal from the larders of those who had more to eat than I did.’ His face became serious and her soft . . . dear God . . . soft pink mouth dropped open in awe.

  ‘Where . . . ?’

  ‘Every place I could find with a window I could open. Not the poor, of course, since they had nowt worth stealing anyway, but on most nights I would slip out when the others fell into their exhausted sleep and find a house which looked as though the occupants fed on more than cold-water oats and pigswill.’

  ‘Pigswill?’ She shuddered and pressed her shoulder against his.

  ‘Aye, for that’s what the others ate, lass. At first I’d hardly the strength to walk the necessary miles, for these houses were not close to the mill, as you can imagine . . .’

  ‘No, indeed.’

  ‘. . . but gradually, with the food I ate, and I only stole what was nourishing, and the milk I drank, I became stronger and could go further afield. I was a very resourceful lad, Miss Harrison,’ – and you are a resourceful and strong man, Will Broadbent, and will go far, she had time to consider – ‘and I meant to survive. I used to enjoy those walks, striding out in the summer night when it was warm and all scented with the aroma of wildflowers, or the heather drifting down from the hills. I had known only the stink of the mill, you see, and the spinning room and all the unwashed people who worked there.’

  ‘Of course.’ Her eyes were enormous in her pointed face, a face bemused and wondering, and he had the most overpowering inclination to place his mouth on the one which parted in fascinated interest as he told his tale. He tore his gaze away to stare into the sunlit valley below, then he grinned.

  ‘Promise me you won’t breathe a word to your uncle or I’ll lose me grand new job afore I start?’

  ‘My uncle? Why?’

  ‘One of the larders I robbed was at Greenacres.’

  ‘Oh Lord, you didn’t?’ He could see he had impressed her enormously, as would anything which was out of the ordinary, different, or smacked of defiance of authority.

  ‘I did, Miss Harrison. I helped myself to a turkey leg which I knew would not be missed, a lump of the most delicious cheese which I have since discovered was from our own Lancashire, drank a pitcher of milk, thick with cream, and some plum pudding. It was Christmas, you see.’

  He had not said it to gain her sympathy, just to demonstrate why he had remembered the exact meal on which he had dined that night in the house in which she herself was probably upstairs sleeping. But somehow his words moved a soft and dangerous thing inside her and she took fright at it since this man was a stranger after all.

  She cleared her throat and blinked her eyes as though to clear the fog of curious emotion which blurred them, then stood up quickly and turned away for she did not want him to see and wonder over her sudden agitation. In her mind’s eye she could still visualise the tiny scar he had on his chin, no more than a small indent, and she wondered wildly how he had come by it in his deprived and loveless childhood; then, even more wildly, why it should concern her.

  ‘I’d best get you home, Miss Harrison,’ he said abruptly.

  They were the exact words needed to release her from the strange enchanted spell his voice had cast about her. She was no weak girl who needed a man’s help to get her from one place to another. She was Tessa Harrison who could ride gloriously to hounds and keep up with the best horseman in the county. She could leap the highest hedges and the widest streams. She could shoot fifty birds with fifty shots and had been known, though her family were not aware of it, to dress herself in her cousins’ clothing and frequent a bare-knuckle prize fight and even a bear baiting with Drew and Pearce and Nicky Longworth. She had not enjoyed either, but she had seen them, had proved herself as strong and resolute as any man and she did not need this chap to escort her home.

  ‘I need no help to get me home, Mr Broadbent,’ she said sharply, her eyes flaring in a burst of annoyance which came from nowhere to attack him.

  ‘As you like, Miss Harrison.’ His voice was just as curt for he had found himself to be quite devastated when the softness, the sweet womanliness of the past few minutes was dashed away coldly as the affronted Miss Harrison leapt lightly on to the back of the small mare she whistled up.

  ‘Safe journey, then,’ he could not help adding for it seemed to him it was a long, hard road she was to take.

  ‘Heavens, Mr Broadbent, I am to go but to Greenacres, after all.’

  ‘I doubt it, Miss Harrison.’ Turning swiftly away from her, his face curiously stern, he strode off in the direction of Edgeclough.

  4

  They stood in the office of the spinning-mill manager, their faces set in identical expressions of boredom, young gentlemen impeccably suited in the sober uniform of a businessman: black frock coat, light grey trousers, plain grey waistcoat and a shirt front which was immaculate. Each wore a pearl tie-pin in his neck cloth, a present from their mother on their seventeenth birthday, just gone. Their loathing of commerce could not have been more evident and Mr Wilson sighed, for what was the use of it? They wasted his time, which was valuable, and their own, which was not, but Mr Greenwood had insisted upon it and there was nothing the manager could do. He had worked at Chapman Manufacturing for nearly twenty years, starting as a spinner, then overlooker, a promotion to foreman, then manager of this mill two years ago, answerable to Mr Charlie Greenwood himself.

  For the past few months, ever since they had left school, the twin sons of Mr and Mrs Joss Greenwood, who owned Chapmans, had been coming to the mill each morning at five thirty. Slowly, week by week, they were moving through the whole process of preparing and spinning yarn, starting in the blow room where the bales of raw cotton were opened, cleaned and blended ready for combing. Here the impurities and short fibres were removed until the cotton was ready for spinning. There were five more procedures to be gone through – winding, knitting, warping, sizing and drawing in – before the spun yarn was ready for weaving and the cloth finished. All must be thoroughly learned by Masters Drew and Pearce, and though they presented themselves each day and were seen to be there in the flesh, so to speak, it could not be said that either of them had the slightest notion of how the simplest process came about, nor the slightest desire to be told.

  They had been lounging against the stable-yard wall, just beyond the laundry, when nemesis had fallen. A pretty laundry maid stood between them, all three giggling over some nonsense the boys were pouring into her willing ear, when Joss Greenwood had come across them. He had arrived at Greenacres unexpectedly, perhaps for a purpose, who was to say? Certainly not the two boys whose eyes had widened in alarm as his hands fell on their shoulders, the expression on his face freezing the blood in their veins.

  ‘You will settle down to some decent occupation,’ he said when they stood before the desk in his study, ‘and that means, naturally, in the trade which employed your maternal and paternal grandfathers. Your place is in the mill. You are to be commercial gentlemen as not only your father, your grandfather but your great-grandfather were before you, not young squireens like Nicky Longworth or Johnny Taylor who were born to it. Do you understand?’

  They said they did.

  ‘You were born to be manufacturers and manufacturers you will be. That is why you were educated at the local grammar school and not at public school as your friends were, so that you might get something in your heads other than a bit of Latin and Greek. Do I make myself clear?’

  They said he did.

  ‘Now I appreciate that you have no particular aptitude for it; that you have no inclination towards machinery, nor the adding up of profit and the subtraction of loss. But you will learn, for that is what you are to do with your lives now that your schooling is ended. Is that clear?’

  They said it was.

  ‘You will accompany your Aunt Jenny and Charlie to the mill each day, starting at five thirty,
as they do, and you will learn to get on with those about you. To start with you will go with Wilson on his daily round of the mill at Chapmanstown, since it is the largest, and make yourselves conversant with all the processes of spinning, and work with Aunt Jenny in the counting house getting to know the overall business strategy. You will travel to Manchester with Charlie to acquaint yourselves with the trading side of the business, see to the purchase of raw cotton, learning from him, and others, how to judge when to buy and how much to pay. There will be the organising of credit to our customers, the collection of trade debts in world markets and the proper knowledge of how to husband your resources. You will agree, will you not, that there is a lot to be learned and the quicker you get started the sooner you will be able to take over when the time comes. Is that understood?’

  They said that it was.

  ‘You will go to the Cloth Hall each week, or perhaps more often, depending on trade. Your lives will be controlled, not by your own whims and fancies but by the factory bell. There will be no galloping off to join the Squire’s hunt at the first hint of autumn. You will work in the spinning rooms and weaving sheds and get yourselves dirty, as I did, as your Aunt Jenny did, as Charlie did, as your own mother did, and you will become millmasters, the manufacturing gentlemen you were destined to be. Do you understand? And if I hear you have disobeyed me I shall have you whipped into the mill yard and keep you permanently without money until you stay there.’

  Mr Wilson was droning on and Drew yawned.

  ‘. . . designed to spin and wind automatically. It will also make the necessary adjustments between successive draws to take account of the growing size of the cop and the decreasing length of the bare spindle blade, as you will see when we go into the spinning room . . .’

  What is the old fool blethering on about? Drew’s eyes signalled to Pearce. God knows, he was answered, and could you care less? The two handsome boys, just seventeen years old and destined never to go to Cambridge, never to go on a Grand Tour as Johnny Taylor’s father had promised him, never to go anywhere, their despairing expressions said, but across the yard and into the spinning room, or to Broadbank and the weaving sheds, stared desperately into one another’s eyes.

  ‘Now have you any questions before we go into the spinning room, young sirs?’ Mr Wilson asked genially, shortsightedly, hopelessly, since he knew there would be none.

  They said they hadn’t.

  ‘Right, then if you will follow me we will step across the yard and Broadbent will show you the self-actor in motion.’

  Pearce told himself that this time it would be better. No one had warned him on that first day two months ago when they had entered the spinning room, and so the shock had been all the greater, and he had felt that he could not really be blamed for the way he had reacted then. He and his brother had been reared like the young colts up in the paddocks of Greenacres and the contrast had been appalling. Suddenly they had been transferred from the lush meadows where they had bucked and kicked their high-spirited heels since the day they were born. Taken from the sun-dappled freedom, from the joy of being skittish with their own kind, it had seemed to Pearce, they had been put, like the pit-ponies they had heard about, in the black confines of the underground mines. That was how the spinning room had appeared to Pearce, used as he was to wild moors, high-vaulted skies and the pungent smell of heather and gorse in his nostrils.

  There had been a general darkness at first, a lack of the fresh air and sunshine to which they were both accustomed, though the windows of the mill stood wide open. The noise was indescribable; clatter, rattle, bang, the swish of thrusting leavers, the crash of carriages ‘letting in’, the shouts of the minders as they summoned a piecer or a scavenger. What seemed to be hundreds of people crowded down the long rows of spinning mules with literally thousands of spindles and the heat was such he could distinctly see the oil bubble from the pinewood planking of the floor. Little piecers ran barefoot repairing broken threads, skidding and slipping, some of them, with the speed they went, rolling instinctively to avoid the gliding carriages, well aware of the consequences should one of the advancing monsters catch them.

  A film of flock, or ‘fly’, as it was called, immediately settled on the fine coats of the two young gentlemen and dusted their smoothly brushed hair. Pearce felt it invade his mouth as he took a deep breath, settling in his throat and drifting into his nostrils. His stomach lurched uneasily and the breath became trapped somewhere in his lungs. He knew himself to be suffocating. If he did not get out of here he would either vomit the substantial breakfast he had eaten all over his new, pale grey waistcoat, or faint right away like any languid maiden. The mass of interested faces, the noisy spinning mules, the straps and belts and wheels, the constant movement of women and children and machines all ran together, blending into a misted haze which floated before him and about him, and he had time only to fling himself backwards, down the steps and into the yard before nausea overtook him. He clung to the wall, watched by men who nudged one another slyly, their prediction that these two fine young gentlemen would never last the course becoming true on their very first day, it seemed. His face sweated and so did his body inside the immaculate crispness of his clean shirt. He felt dirty and wretched, a sensation he had never known before and he had not liked it. But he had been forced to go back, time and time again, and it had never got better. Never. The walls closed in on him; the machines appeared to glide towards him the moment he entered the room, hemming him in between their lethally moving parts. He swore he would overcome the sensation and was ashamed when he could not. He was afraid of nothing, just like Drew. They had ridden frighteningly wild horses ever since they had been big enough to climb on their backs. They had jumped hurdles higher than their own heads. They had gone out with the hunt and taken many a tumble, broken a bone or two, clambered back on and continued as though nothing had happened, smiling through the pain. They had fought boys bigger and stronger than themselves, had their eyes blacked and blacked a few in their turn, bloodied noses, and known no fear. The bleak, open barrenness of the moorland, vast and empty and cruel at times, an enemy of those who did not respect it, was their territory, a place he loved and roamed with Drew and Tessa, but it held no terror for him, unlike the hot, clammy, airless hell of the spinning room. And his terror grew with every visit, a terror he was forced to hide from everyone but Drew, and it shamed him.

  On this day, as he followed Drew inside, the din and confusion which met him at the door instantly stunned him, taking his mind and his determination. His step faltered. His eyes went black and sightless and but for the broad back of his brother ahead of him he would have lost his way. He was like a sleep-walker, but some tiny, still-intelligent part of his mind told him he must just follow that back wherever it went: hang on to that thought, to that solid, dependable shape ahead of him, the brother who had never in all their young lives together let him down or deserted him, who had been his other half for sixteen years and who would lead him from this place which, with every second, was closing in on him.

  But it was no use, his last desperate thought told him, as the greyness about him became black. He felt himself slip on the oil-soaked floor, his stomach heaved and the blood began to drain away from his head.

  ‘Just bend ower, lad,’ a light voice said and he felt a pressure on his arm and across his back and though it was not forceful he found himself obeying. He was hanging, head down – how in hell had he got here? – over a motionless machine. He could see nothing but oil and cotton-waste and the face, young and cheeky, of a little piecer who had crept beneath the machine to get a better look at him. There were bare feet everywhere, dirty and splayed, ugly some of them with swollen veins and joints, but the pair nearest to him, though just as dirty, were small and fine, narrow and really rather shapely. He sensed dozens of pairs of curious, probably amused eyes on him; then he was gripped again in a violent spasm of nausea.

  ‘Come on, old chap,’ a gentle voice said and familiar, strong
brown hands, duplicates of his own, grasped his. He clung gratefully to them as they began to lead him, blind and ill, towards the doorway at the end of the interminably long room and out into the yard.

  ‘Fresh air’ll see ’im right,’ a voice said briskly, as though the owner of it really had no time to be wasting on him, then he was out . . . thank God, thank God . . . out of the smell and the din and the enveloping walls, the hellish confusion, and at once he was recovered.

  He lifted his head and looked into Drew’s concerned face, which grinned at once, letting him know that though he did not really understand what ailed his twin he was quite willing to try, and to stand shoulder to shoulder with him should anyone turn awkward over it. There was a girl there, small, light-boned and thin and yet giving the impression, strangely, that she was as sturdy as the weeds which grew in the hedgerow. Her face was pale, and plain as a bleached yard of cotton. Her eyes were a sharp and almost colourless blue and her fine, mousy hair was dragged back from her face into what must surely have been a painful knot at the back of her head. Her bare feet stepped without concern on the bare cobbles and he knew that this must be the person who had, with her quick thinking, saved him from losing consciousness.

  ‘Tha’ll be reet now. Tek a few deep breaths,’ she ordered, wiping her hands down her sacking apron. She did not look away when his eyes met hers, nor shuffle about awkwardly as the lower orders often did in the presence of their superiors, but met his glance steadily. He had never seen a girl less comely and yet she had a quiet dignity which was unusual in someone of her age and class. ‘Tha’ll get used to it, like we all ’ave to,’ she added ready, now that he was recovered, to get back to her work.