by Olivia Waite
“Perhaps . . .” said Mr. Giles. His smile softened as his voice lowered. “You know, I think those colors suit you, miss. What say you keep the ribbon, as a gift? Just a little secret between friends.”
Sophie stared back at him. Uncertainty wound itself round her tongue and held her silent. She couldn’t think what to say to him, because she couldn’t think what it was he meant by giving her such a gift. She wasn’t his friend. He didn’t even know her name.
Mr. Giles tapped a thoughtful finger against his chin. “Of course, friends don’t repeat one another’s private conversations, do they?”
Ah. Confusion clarified. Not a gift, then. A bribe.
Bribes punctured the illusion of politeness, and Sophie sucked in a breath to sweetly reject his offer.
The door opened again, and she swallowed her words as Mr. Giles spun automatically on his heel.
A second woman entered—a lady, older, with plentiful gray threaded throughout the black strands of her hair. Sophie had met a duchess once, in London, while tuning her daughter’s new piano, and even though this lady’s high-waisted black coat was a little behind the fashion, she had that same aristocratic posture and arrogant tilt of the chin. From the fine leather of her shoes to the silver feathers arching proudly from her hat, everything about her reeked of wealth and luxury.
Mr. Giles offered her a deferential bow as she proceeded forward. “Welcome, madam,” he said. “How may I help you this afternoon?”
With his head lowered, he missed the way the lady’s lips curled slightly, in unmistakable scorn, though her voice stayed cool and untroubled. “My maid spilled a bottle of perfume and spoiled a silk gown,” she said. “I’ve come to see if you have anything decent to replace it with.”
“Our best silks are—” Mr. Giles began, but cut off when the lady gasped and stepped toward the counter.
One fine-gloved hand plucked at the corner of the odd blue silk, turning it back and forth, watching the light play on the threads of color. No mistaking it now: her mouth was a sneer, and her voice had turned positively glacial. “Sir, I must ask you: Where did you get this fabric?”
Mr. Giles scrambled forward and began rolling up the bolt of cloth, hurrying to hide the offending article. “My apologies, madam—that was brought to us in error—”
The lady’s grip on the cloth tightened into a fist. “It certainly was,” the woman said. “I know this weave, sir—and I can tell you one thing: it has never been offered for sale.”
Mr. Giles gulped and chattered, the trailing ends of explanations hanging from his lips as his eyes darted from the lady to the silk and back again.
“Who brought it to you? They had no right. I shall take this away and report it to the authorities at once.” She pulled a little harder on the corner of the silk.
A glint came into the mercer’s eye, and he put a hand firmly on the bolt, holding it in place. “Madam,” he said, with a little more steel than servility, “if there is some question about the provenance of this fabric, then by all means make your case to the magistrates. But until then, I must regretfully insist my wares remain with me.”
Her chin raised. “Is this all you have of the stuff?”
“Yes, madam.”
“I will pay you a pound for it,” the lady said.
Sophie choked, and even Mr. Giles looked stunned to hear his prices more than doubled. “A pound?” he said.
The lady clicked her tongue. “Have I offended your pride? A guinea, then.”
“Two guineas,” said Mr. Giles, who even in the midst of mystification was clearly ready to seize an opportunity.
“Done,” the lady replied.
Mr. Giles looked as happy as if he’d been offered three wishes by a benevolent fairy.
The lady held up a hand. “Provided—and I cannot insist enough upon this point—provided you let me know at once if you come across any more of this silk. Send to Mrs. Horace Money, at the Mulberry Tree.” Mr. Giles nodded acquiescence, and the lady reached diffidently into her purse for the guineas as the draper began wrapping her purchase in brown paper.
Sophie set the ribbon on a nearby shelf and slipped out the door. Mr. Giles wouldn’t miss such a small sale, not after the windfall he’d just had.
Her footsteps sounded an irritated march in the frost. Two guineas! For one bolt of ugly silk! Poor Miss Crewe. She had obviously been desperate to sell that fabric, and had no idea of its true value. She would come back later and find it gone—and Sophie was not willing to trust Mr. Giles would tell her the truth about what had happened. She would get her half-pay, but not realize she’d been so thoroughly cheated.
A flash of auburn hair—there! Miss Crewe’s tall form was just disappearing round the corner. Sophie hitched up her skirts and hurried to catch her.
It took two turnings before her shorter legs caught up with Miss Crewe’s long strides. They were just outside St. Severus’s churchyard, winter’s first snow draping the headstones in the graveyard like fur stoles on an opera-loving audience. “Miss Crewe!” Sophie gasped. “Excuse me, Miss Crewe!”
The woman paused with one hand on the graveyard gate. Her mitten like her muffler was thick blue wool, with scars where it had been darned and the newer yarn showed brighter against the old.
“Yes?” said Miss Crewe, squinting at Sophie, who had to pause to suck air into her lungs. “I’m sorry, have we met?” The woman’s lips pursed, and her head tilted, and a teasing note entered her voice. “Was I drunk?” Her eyes swept down Sophie’s shape and then up again, lingeringly.
“No, I—” Sophie gulped again, heat rushing over her wherever Miss Crewe’s gaze touched. It seemed Sophie wasn’t the only girl in Carrisford with an eye for other women.
Miss Crewe was smiling now, very slightly, as though remembering a wicked secret she was hoping Sophie remembered too.
Sophie’s voice was breathy when she went on: “I was in Mr. Giles’s shop just now—”
“Were you?” Miss Crewe’s hand tightened convulsively on the metal spike of the gate. Her alluring smile stayed in place, but that clutching grip told a different tale: she was on her guard.
“Y-yes,” Sophie replied. “After you left . . . Mr. Giles sold your silk—for two guineas!”
Miss Crewe shrugged, as if this was of no consequence. “I left it because I hoped he’d sell it. Obviously.”
“But,” Sophie protested, “at such a price—you were only asking—”
“Since we do not know one another, Miss Anybody,” Miss Crewe interrupted, “I will kindly ask you not to meddle in my business. A girl can wind up in a great deal of trouble that way.” She shoved open the graveyard gate with an unholy shriek of rusted metal.
Sophie flinched hard, as the discordant sound scraped raw every nerve she had.
By the time she unscrewed her eyes and straightened her spine again, Miss Crewe had passed the gate and was striding between the headstones. Sophie watched until her tall gray figure vanished behind the corner of the church.
The gate swung slowly shut on a long, anguished moan.
Sophie stared and stared at that empty corner, until a passing carter yelled at her to get out of his way. She scrambled out of the street, putting out one hand on the graveyard fence to steady herself.
Cold and iron bit through the worn leather of her glove. Sophie felt the drumbeat of panic—until she realized it was no memory this time. Her hand was wrapped around one of the gate’s iron spikes—the same one Miss Crewe had clutched, when Sophie had asked her . . . No, when Sophie had told her . . .
I will kindly ask you not to meddle in my business, Miss Crewe had said, haughty as any princess.
The wealthy woman’s voice plucked at Sophie’s memory: I know this weave . . . it has never been offered for sale.
Until today. By someone who didn’t even care how much it had sold for. Who responded with anger when someone tried to tell them they might have been cheated.
It didn’t make any sense—unless you ha
d seen something equally senseless before. Something that turned out to be a lie—and a lie dreadful enough to have ruined her entire family.
Cold spread from her hand, up her arm, and unfolded dark wings in her chest. Suspicion stretched, and fixed itself into a terrible certainty: something was horribly wrong in Carrisford.
Somebody was running a swindle.
And Miss Crewe was in it up to her pretty neck.
Sophie clenched her jaw, clutched her skirts, and marched back to Mr. Giles’s shop. She was going to ask him a few questions about Miss Crewe. And she didn’t care how many inches—or feet—or miles—of romantic ribbons she had to purchase to get the answers.
She wouldn’t ignore her misgivings, or tell herself she was imagining things. Not this time.
Nobody else was going to get ruined, if Sophie could prevent it.
Chapter Three
Maddie Crewe walked home in twilight, past where the new paving stones gave way to the rough medieval cobbles that marked the older parts of town. Once this neighborhood had been a fine estate with gardens, glasshouses, and overwealthy guests. But times had changed, the town had crowded in, and now it was a warren of homes divided up piecemeal and given out as poor relief by the parish overseers.
It was a place you lived when there wasn’t anywhere else for them to put you, except the workhouse.
Maddie let herself in the front door and breathed in the smell of Cat’s oyster stew. Soft humming came from the kitchen, and the appetizing clink of a pot being stirred. Some knot in Maddie’s heart unloosed a little at the prospect of a proper meal, and she hurried to shed her scarf and mittens and hang them up on their peg.
John Hedingham was in the front room, his cotton sleeves rolled up, punching lacing holes in kid leather with an awl. His wife, Emma, was sitting in the last of the light, embroidering a pair of satin slippers with delicate gilt clocks. Dozens of pairs of boots and slippers and shoes danced on the walls around them, the newness of silk and satin aggressively shiny against plain plaster and well-worn wood. Every flat surface in the room held tools or trimming—silk and lace, leather and damask, rolls of cord and thread and ribbon.
Beads and buttons and buckles gleamed like gorgeous insects as Maddie pulled up a stool and sat, taking care not to block the wan winter sunlight. Candles were dear and hard on the eyes.
“We spoke to Mrs. Ravenell today,” John began. “And Mr. Colson, Mrs. Doorey, and the Tahourdin brothers. Asked if they’d heard anything about a strange blue silk with . . . unusual properties.”
Maddie grinned. “And had they?”
John laughed. “Of course not—though you know Mrs. Ravenell. She pretended she’d heard it already.” His grin widened, and the awl punctured the leather once more. “So I pretended to tell her the next part of the tale.”
“Good,” Maddie said. “I know the rest of the Weavers’ Library has been around to nearly every workshop and draper’s in town. We might as well have posted handbills on street corners. It’ll be mysterious blue silk for three weeks, at least.” She leaned back, rolling her head to stretch the old crick out of her neck.
Emma peered anxiously over at her, though her hands never faltered. “Well?”
“Well yourself,” Maddie replied, spreading her gray wool skirts and stretching her feet out to take some pressure off her aching soles. Emma pouted, so with a flash of a grin Maddie took pity and stopped stalling. “Mr. Giles took the bait, no trouble. He paid me the rate I asked, and never let on how much profit he’d made on the sale.” Just like Miss Anybody had predicted—and just like Maddie and the Library had planned. “Mrs. Money said he nearly fell over himself trying to wriggle into her good graces.”
“Must be that aristocratic French blood of his,” John replied.
Maddie snorted. “How many times has he told that lie?” she groused. “His mother was an oyster farmer’s daughter—and about as French as I am.”
“I hear he asked the magistrates if he could display his comte grandfather’s coat of arms,” John said.
“If they said no, that’ll be the first time the magistrates ever said no to him,” Emma replied.
Maddie let it wash over her and pass her by. There had been a time when the mere reminder of Mr. Giles’s tricks would have her blood boiling. He’d started as what they called an undertaker: someone who took dyed silk thread from the manufacturers, had it woven up, and then returned it to them for final payment. He’d first hired apprentice weavers at half-pay rates, then bought a number of looms and started charging his weavers for their use, making extra profit on each piece of cloth produced. When demand fell off—as happened often, the trade being seasonal—he would send his weavers back to the parish for relief, having kept all the profit of their labor.
In this way Mr. Giles had spent the last two decades building up a solid little empire, piece by piece. He’d inherited his father’s shop and made luxurious improvements to it while his weavers strained and starved. He’d shorted them of payment and materials—but instead of trying to hide his skimming in the books, where it might have been noticed by his bankers, he passed off the extra in bribes to the manufacturers, dyers, and traders to get himself more advantageous rates than his rivals. He’d charmed Mr. Prickett from the silk-throwing mill into a ten percent discount (and he especially charmed his wife, went the rumor).
Lately, the man had managed to get himself set up as a factor to buy raw silk in London (the only legal port) and sell it to local mills and dyers. So now he could increase prices at any point—and send his profits up at every level further down the chain—even as the law gave him an excuse to keep wages down even as profits soared. Now Carrisford’s whole silk industry revolved around him, as though he were the worm at the heart of the cocoon.
Few weavers in Carrisford could avoid working with him in some capacity. Maddie had so far been able to manage it, thanks to her skill with pattern drafting—but she didn’t think that would last forever.
He’d played the game well: the only people who objected to his business practices were the ones least likely to be listened to. It had once left Maddie positively shaking with rage and frustration—but not any longer.
Not now that they were going to take every penny of that wealth away from him. To take it, and use it to fight back against the practices that kept so many people struggling.
She could almost taste it already, that tart sweet flavor of revenge. Maddie wondered if this was how prisoners felt, at the end of a long and difficult sentence. Years of cold and salt and hand-ruining labor—and then they looked up, saw the light shining through a window, and breathed the sweet, green air of home.
She would have to ask Mrs. Money about that, when all this was over.
Night fell, and Cat called out the stew was done. They trooped into the kitchen to eat, passing hunks of old bread around as Cat poured out small beer. John and Emma both dropped a kiss on her cheek to thank her, and she blushed happily.
Maddie smiled at the trio, a homey kind of envy flooding her along with the warmth of the oyster stew. It had been a while since she’d had someone—much less two someones—to share nights with. Most of the neighborhood thought Catherine Gray only kept house for the Hedinghams. Maddie knew different: Cat slept so infrequently in her own room that it had become an informal storeroom.
The housekeeper leaned contentedly now against Emma’s shoulder, John’s lips curving with intent as he watched them both from across the scarred kitchen table.
Maddie sighed into her beer, and thought about a pale face with brown hair and deep, soulful eyes, calling out to her at the churchyard gate. Miss Anybody had been soft and small and a little shy—the kind who always made Maddie go overall protective and commanding. Until Maddie had looked into those brown eyes and caught the flash of a bottomless, ravenous hunger that made it clear that quiet exterior was a lie and a fraud. It had shone for only an instant, that dark star, but Maddie still felt the pull of it, aching in her belly even now.
She wanted to see if she could sate such a hunger. She’d always been fierce that way: the more someone needed, the more she wanted to give.
Too bad Miss Anybody had overheard her with Mr. Giles. It had been a kind impulse, going after Maddie to tell her she was being cheated—but it was the worst possible timing. Where had the girl been when Mr. Giles was stealing Maddie’s best patterns and having them copied on the cheap? Why did she have to show up now, when Maddie had no time or attention to spare for flirting and frolics?
It was one thing to involve the Weavers’ Library in a criminal scheme—it was quite another to pull in some irreproachable tradesman’s daughter. Someone who trusted the authorities, and who could afford to be virtuous.
Dinner ended. John and Emma continued to work in the kitchen, sewing and stitching in cozy warmth as Cat took care of the washing up.
Maddie had some work left yet herself—but she couldn’t do hers at the hearth. She took a little more beer and went up to her room in the attic.
In the dimness, the frame of the loom rose high and stern as a guillotine. The moon was clouded over and the gas lamps that lit the silk mill at night didn’t quite reach this far, so Maddie lit a candle to work by. Tallow smoked and sputtered as she took off her wool dress to put it carefully away. There was a little dust on the hem from her long trek around town, but it brushed out quickly enough. In her shift and a comforter, topped by a thick shawl that had seen better days, Maddie sat at her small table and continued working out the pattern for a floral ribbon, one row of colored squares at a time.
The loom hulked in the corner of her vision, waiting to be warped. Maddie wondered how you could love and loathe a thing at one and the same time.
She had grown up measuring her height against its frame. Above it, at first, as the drawboy for her mother, perched on a ladder raising the warp threads in shifting sets as Mrs. Crewe sent the shuttle flying back and forth. Later, Maddie had learned the trick of that herself, throwing with just the right flick of the wrist, humming to keep the pace of the work strong and steady. Steady was reliable, reliable was quicker, and quicker was paid faster. She’d done a few years’ labor in the silk-throwing mill, and had taken a few other jobs when weaving work was especially hard to come by—but Maddie had always ended up back again at her mother’s side.
