The Hidden Thread

by Liz Trenow

  She led Anna to the side of the stall and pulled out a rough wooden stool.

  “Sit down and gather your senses for a moment. I’ll get you a cup of water.”

  Anna sat, gratefully sipping the tepid water, still light-headed yet feeling strangely elated by her discovery. Here, laid before her on a table, was everything she desired for her palette. If only she could paint it, right here and now.

  “You feeling better, miss?” The tone was kinder now, less impatient.

  “I am, thank you very much,” she said. “But I wondered…”

  “Yes?”

  “I wondered if I could stay awhile and try to sketch your beautiful display.”

  “Sketch?” She looked askance. “You some kind of artist? You ain’t going to put me in it, is you, like that naughty Hogarth fellow?”

  “Oh no, I just love to draw and paint flowers,” Anna hurried to reassure. “It wouldn’t take many minutes.”

  “So long as you keep out of me way, you can take all the time you like, dearie. Might be a nice lure for me customers,” she muttered as an aside.

  As Anna began to draw, her hands and fingers seemed to move almost automatically, linked to the perception of her eyes by unseen threads that bypassed conscious thought. The flowers quickly began to take shape on the page—the arcs of stems, the serration of leaves and shades of light filtering through translucent petals—and relief spread through her neck and shoulders like a balm. The world around her receded into a dim, barely perceptible background.

  She had filled a whole page with sketches and was trying to capture the way that the convolvulus twined through the sturdier stems of the teasel when an extraordinary idea began to take shape. It was a pattern of intertwined stems and flowers such as she had once seen in a hedgerow not far from home, a network of forms that seemed to reflect the wonderful beauty and unity of the natural world.

  Ten minutes later, a heavy hand on her shoulder made her nearly jump out of her skin.

  “Sorry to disturb, miss, but I have to nip off for a mo. Call of nature, you understand. Would you mind me stall for a few moments?” The woman pushed past and was gone.

  The interruption broke Anna’s concentration, bringing her back to the world around her. She looked around with alarm, realizing that she had absolutely no idea how long she had been sitting here. She’d heard no peals of midday church bells, but then she had heard nothing of the sounds of the market either, so absorbed had she been in her sketching. Was it lunchtime already, perhaps? Was the family sitting at the table, looking accusingly at the empty chair?

  The woman seemed to be gone for an age. How could it possibly take so long? She put away her sketchbook, moved the seat behind the stall, and sat with her head bent low, praying that no customer would stop. She had no idea what to do or say. After what felt like half an hour but was probably only a few minutes, she began to pace, anxiously peering through the crowds for a glimpse of the stallholder returning.

  Finally, she could stand the anxiety no longer. Ripping the page out of her sketchbook, she scrawled on the back: Sorry to leave. Please take this in gratitude for letting me sit by your stall. Then she laid it on the display and hurried to the stallholder next along. “The lady there asked me to keep an eye for her but now I have to go. Would you mind?”

  She almost ran through the market, down the steps, and back along the streets, only remembering just in time to slow to a more graceful pace and gather her breath before she reached Spital Square.

  • • •

  She entered the front door without being noticed and stepped into the profound darkness of the hallway, felt her way to the bottom of the stairs, and tiptoed upward, trying to avoid the slightest sound on the treads. Still half-blinded from the bright sunlight, she tripped on the top step and nearly fell. She caught herself with the banister and paused, with heart in mouth, fearing that she had been heard. But there was no sound and she had already reached the foot of the third set of stairs, the ones leading up to her attic, when she heard her aunt calling from the main bedroom, “Is that you, Anna dearest? Luncheon will be served in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes, it is me,” she said, holding her breath. “I will join you very shortly, Aunt.”

  Hurriedly, she removed her bonnet, changed out of her “maid’s disguise” and into her best dress, retied her hair into its bun, and fixed a crisply starched lace pinner onto her head. She gave her face and hands a quick rinse from the fresh jug of water Betty had kindly replaced since the morning and slipped downstairs to join the family in the dining room.

  Lunch was a tedious affair. The room was so hot and airless that the company seemed to have little appetite and less conversation. Exhilarated by the adventures of the morning, Anna felt deflated—if only she had someone to share her excitement with. William appeared even more taciturn than usual, and only Lizzie chattered on, complaining about the weather and the Latin declensions her tutor had been forcing her to learn. “It’s a dead language. Whatever use can it be?” she whined. “It’s not fair. And when I too am half-dead from the heat anyway. I hate her.”

  She turned to Anna. “I suppose you have had a lovely morning, Cousin. I was so jealous of you. What did you buy?”

  Anna’s heart nearly stopped. “Buy? I did not buy anything. I have been reading in my room.”

  “But you had a basket on your arm when you returned just now. I thought you had…” The girl faltered, seeing the flush rising on Anna’s face and her mother’s look of confusion. “Oh…I must have mistaken you for someone else,” she ended unconvincingly.

  Surprisingly, nothing further was said, either during the meal or immediately afterward. Later, when they had gone into the garden for some air, Lizzie whispered, “I am so sorry… I thought Mama knew you had gone out. Will you get into trouble?”

  “Do not fret, Cousin,” Anna replied, trying to sound braver than she felt. “I am sure everything will be perfectly understood.”

  It wasn’t until teatime that Aunt Sarah summoned her to the drawing room, and Anna was not invited to sit down.

  “Do I understand that you left the house on your own this morning, without a chaperone?”

  Anna had already decided that honesty was the only policy. “It was so hot that I thought I might die if I had to stay inside any longer. So I took a short walk, just for some fresh air. It was hardly any time at all.”

  “That is beside the point. Have I not stated, quite clearly, that it is unseemly for you to be out in the streets alone? You have no knowledge of the city and its ways, and could be lured into any kind of danger. And yet you choose to ignore my advice.”

  Anna lowered her face; it was easier to bite her lip that way. She had already decided that trying to defend herself would only lead to more trouble. The silence became almost suffocating.

  “Have you nothing more to say for yourself?” Sarah’s voice rose with irritation. “You seem to have no idea of the consequences of your actions. Just imagine should you have been seen by someone? Out on your own, with no chaperone? We would never have lived it down.”

  The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. “But I know hardly anyone in the city, Aunt, so there is little chance of my being recognized.”

  Aunt Sarah’s face turned an ugly puce color, the perspiration on her brow glittering in a beam of sunlight. “Don’t be impertinent, girl,” she said sharply. “It does not become you.”

  She blotted her forehead with a lace handkerchief and sighed. “My poor brother has obviously neglected your proper education in the ways of polite society, so I will have to teach you. When everyone has returned to the city in September, we will arrange tea parties and dinners to make sure that you are introduced to all the right people. That is how things are done in the city. Until then, you will only leave the house in the company of another member of the family or Betty, and then only with my per
mission. Do I make myself clear?”

  8

  If ye should ever unwarily fall into an offense, never seek to cover it over with a lye: for the last fault doubles the former; and each makes the other more inexcusable.

  —Advice for apprentices and journeymen

  OR A sure guide to gain both esteem and an estate

  Whatever was the English girl doing, leaving a piece of her sketching paper among the wildflowers?

  Henri had come to the market to acquire a cheap pair of breeches for the drawboy, who had snagged his only pair on a nailhead in the floorboards of the weaving loft. Mariette had pronounced them unrepairable and the lad was too embarrassed to venture to the market himself. Eventually, after much discussion over the breakfast table, M. Lavalle lost patience.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he shouted. “Why are you making such a to-do about this, boy? Is your bottom such a thing of beauty that young ladies may faint at the sight of it?”

  The lad began to cry.

  “Shall I go?” Henri asked. “It will take me but a quarter hour and I will be back at my loom before you have noticed my absence.”

  “Thank you for relieving me of this irritation,” M. Lavalle sighed, handing his coin pouch across the table.

  Henri made for the gallery above the main floor of the market and was halfway up the wooden stairs when he glanced across the stalls below and spied a figure sitting among the flower sellers. He could not see the face, which was bent over a book, but the incline of her neck, the pallor of her skin, and the long, elegant fingers were instantly recognizable.

  He stared for a while and then climbed to the top of the stairs and walked around the gallery, past the secondhand clothes sellers, until he was almost immediately above the English girl. She could not see him but, just fifteen feet overhead, he had a perfect view. All now became clear: she had a drawing pad on her lap and was sketching the flowers.

  And what drawings they were! He could see at once, even though they were only outlines and had not yet been colored in, that she had somehow managed to capture the shape of each stem, leaf, and flower so as to render them instantly recognizable even for un ignorant like him, who had never studied the natural world except in the designs which he wove. And they were nothing like the realistic depictions this girl was producing.

  He watched, transfixed, as the lines flowed onto the page in strong, powerful arcs, then pale, delicate curves, and even lighter strokes for shading of stems, leaves, and petals, bringing their shapes to life with extraordinary, three-dimensional veracity. She worked fast, almost feverishly, as if hungry to capture the forms, and the page was soon filled with vignettes of different plants.

  If I could draw like that, I could make my fortune as a silk designer like Leman or Baudoin, Henri thought to himself. Another idea flashed into his mind, Perhaps she could show me? before he dismissed it. Idiot! he cursed himself. Why would an English lady want to teach a poor French weaver like me?

  All the same, as he watched, he found it all too easy to daydream: how he might sit beside her, how she might gently place her hand over his to guide it across the paper…

  She turned to a blank page and started on a new design, drawing two bold, meandering lines equidistant from each other diagonally from the top of the paper to the opposite corner at the bottom and then two more, crossing the first, from the other corners, to make an open, curved trellis pattern. She followed each of those lines with lighter strokes either side and shaded them; it was soon clear that she was drawing the sinuous stems of a climbing plant. He followed her eyes as she looked up at her subject, the columbine entwined with the teasel, and could see that she was now reproducing its heart-shaped leaves and delicate bell-like flowers with their translucent petals, shading them with tiny strokes until they too became instantly recognizable.

  Soon, more plants began to appear on the page, interlaced through her trellis pattern: bold-faced oxeye daisies and nodding bluebell heads (although there were none of these on the stall), the curled petals of a dog rose flower and some fronded leaves so fine, like the hair of a baby, from a plant that he did not recognize. It took him a few moments to understand why her work was so true to life, so compelling: while the drawings in themselves were perfect, she also reflected the imperfections of nature, the torn leaf, the faded bloom, the crushed or folded petal.

  Henri was spellbound. He forgot the heat and the smell of the market, the drawboy’s breeches, M. Lavalle’s irritation, and the coin pouch hanging heavy in his pocket. The pressing deadline for the brocade he was working on today was suddenly unimportant.

  The notion dawned on him slowly, but once he realized the potential of what he could see on her page, he could barely contain his excitement. Although the girl was surely unaware of its significance, this was the most beautiful, elegant, and delicate fabric design he had ever seen in his life. It captured exactly what the dressmaker Miss Charlotte had been talking about: the wildflowers, the look of the countryside, the realistic rendering of the images, and the beautiful curving lines of nature that surely—his face flushed at the thought—reflected the perfect shapes of a woman’s body.

  The naive simplicity of it made his heart thud in his chest. He could almost see the design already transposed with dots of paint onto the squared point paper, and how the loom and its lashes should be set up to weave it.

  Then, all at once, an astonishing idea overcame him with an almost physical intensity, making him giddy. It was the perfect design for his master piece. Already he felt a strong sense of ownership. It was meant to be his.

  But how? Should he just approach her and ask if he could buy it? Would she be offended? Or would she just laugh in his face?

  At that moment, he saw the fat woman striding away from the stall. The girl moved her stool behind the table out of his sight. What was she doing now? He dithered, rooted to the spot by indecision. Within a few minutes she reappeared, pacing the gangway in front of the stall. Then she disappeared behind the stall again and reappeared with her basket. He saw her tear out the page from the sketchbook with his design on it, scribbling a few words on the back so hastily that he could not read them, and placing it faceup among the flowers. Before he knew it, she was gone.

  He was about to follow but, from observing her fretful demeanor, instinct told him that any interruption or intervention would not be welcomed. Besides, the drawing was still there on the stall, like a white bird stretching its wings in a flower-strewn field. The stallholder had not returned.

  Hurrying as quickly as he could without drawing attention to himself, Henri rounded the gallery until he reached the wooden stairs, slipped down them, and made his way toward the stall without knowing precisely what he was going to do when he reached it. And then, to his dismay, he saw the trader approaching with her wide-hipped stride from the other direction. He was so close to the stall by now that he could almost reach out and take the sketch without her noticing.

  “Oi! Put that back, boy!” A man’s harsh shout came from the other side of the aisle. “That was left for Mags, that was.”

  With a sudden turn of speed, the ruddy-faced Mags was upon him, snatching the paper from his hand. “Give that here, you thieving cur,” she said, smacking him across the head so hard that he stumbled and fell among the trampled mess of rotting fruit and discarded plants. He scrabbled away to avoid the kick that followed and crawled out of sight beneath a nearby stall, trying to catch his breath.

  “So, what have we here, then?” Breathing heavily from her efforts, she glanced at the sketch and turned the paper over. “That little missy done a runner then?”

  “Asked me to keep an eye out,” the man said.

  The pair of them examined the drawing for a few moments and began to argue about its value.

  “What’ll you give for it?”

  “Don’t you want it then?”

  “Looks like scribbles to me
. A load of nothing.”

  “Then I’ll give you nothing for it.”

  “Cheeky sod. I’ll tear it up, shall I?”

  “No!” Henri found himself shouting. He jumped up from his hiding place, holding out M. Lavalle’s purse. “I’ll buy it from you.”

  The woman’s fearsome demeanor softened in an instant. She knew her smile could charm men into spending far more than they had ever intended when buying flowers for their sweethearts. She could almost smell the pork chops the boy’s money would buy for this evening’s supper.

  “Two shillings,” she pronounced. The man beside her whistled quietly between his teeth.

  “Two pennies, more like,” Henri replied, remembering the errand on which he’d been sent. He had not checked how many coins were in the pouch but from its weight he judged there were not many, and he must not return without having purchased breeches for the drawboy.

  “One shilling then,” the woman said, standing foursquare, her feet wide across the aisle.

  “Thruppence,” Henri said, pulling back his shoulders to make himself as broad as possible. “I have other purchases to make and that is all I can afford.”

  She fixed him in the eye and held up the piece of paper, twisting her hands on each side as if to tear it.

  “Sixpence then,” he blurted out as if his life depended on it.

  The woman hesitated, examined the piece of paper again as if to convince herself that it was not worth more, and then, to Henri’s great relief, said, “Done.”

  • • •

  The drawboy pranced around the loom loft, jiggling his hips and singing an old French song, apparently delighted with his green serge breeches, even though they were several sizes too large and had to be held up with an old lash cord. They were already well worn, shiny at the knees and buttocks, and might not even last long enough for him to grow into them, but none of this seemed to dim his happiness.