The Silk Factory

by Judith Allnatt

  Tally topped up their glasses. ‘It’s all about perception and belief being affected by our needs,’ she said, warming to her theme. ‘It happens in ICU all the time. You wouldn’t believe the number of relatives who open the windows when loved ones pass on.’

  Rosie looked blank.

  ‘To let their spirits go.’ Tally said. ‘Even people who aren’t at all religious do it when they’re faced with the finality of death. That’s what I mean: folk believe what they need to because the alternative’s unbearable.’

  Rosie nodded slowly. Unbearable. It was true that sometimes she found her loneliness was too much to bear. Even though these haunting visions of the child were disturbing, maybe her psyche dreamt them up as being better than the alternative: the loss of all of her original family.

  Tally drained her glass. ‘Have a word with the nursing staff about May. It’s most likely the meds making this worse. Get them to review what’s been prescribed.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘I’d better get some supper on ready for Rob coming in. Can you stay?’ She levered herself up out of the chair.

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ Rosie said, getting up and lifting Cara into her arms. ‘Bath time,’ she said, hugging her tight.

  Back home, Rosie comforted herself with the normality of the children’s evening routine, shutting herself off from thoughts about the revelations of the day by joining in the splashing, bubble-blowing, water-pouring games of bath time. At the end of it she was almost as wet as the children were and changed into her own pyjamas and dressing gown after helping Cara into her sleep suit. ‘You’re delicious,’ she said to Cara as she carried her downstairs for milk and a biscuit before bed. She nuzzled her face against the softness of her hair and breathed in the smell of baby shampoo. ‘I could eat you up!’

  She snapped on the light switch in the kitchen and the fluorescent strips flickered and hummed into life, pressing back the dark to black rectangles in the panes of window and door. She sat at the table, Cara on her lap drinking from her sippy cup, while she and Sam played the Memory game. They each turned over two cards, looking for matches among the brightly coloured pictures: beach balls, cars, flowers, trains, animals and faces. Sam was good at it, he had a sharp eye, and where once she would have deliberately picked up a mismatch to let him win, she found herself being drawn into the game, both of them avid to find the next pair. She hardly noticed when Cara suddenly stopped her drowsy sucking at the beaker, pushed the cup away and got down from her knee as if someone had called her.

  Rosie took her turn, adding three pairs of cards to her pile before turning up a star and a feather and placing them back face down again. ‘Drat, you can get both of those now,’ she said.

  ‘Mum, Cara’s trying to get out,’ Sam said, looking past Rosie to where Cara was reaching up and pulling on the handle of the glazed back door. ‘What’s she want out there?’

  Rosie glanced round. ‘It’s all locked. Come on, Cara, come and sit on Mummy’s knee.’

  With one chubby hand still on the handle, Cara pressed the other against the thick, frosted glass.

  ‘It’s your go,’ Rosie said. The glass was already covered with finger smears and, besides, Cara would get bored in a minute.

  Cara pulled the handle down and let go, pulled down and let go; each time the handle made a grating noise.

  ‘Cara!’ Rosie said without turning round.

  ‘Dirl!’ Cara shouted.

  Rosie, busy trying to memorise Sam’s last go, which had revealed the elephant she needed to match the one she’d spotted on the far left of the table, finally glanced round. Cara had her nose and hands pressed flat against the glass, and she was gazing out into the darkness of the garden.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Sam said as Cara took her head back, away from the glass, and then slowly leant her forehead against it once again. He got down from the table and peered through the pane above Cara’s head. ‘There’s nothing out there,’ he said, at a loss.

  ‘Boo!’ Cara called out and began banging her hands on the glass. ‘Boo! Boo!’

  ‘I think she’s playing peekaboo,’ Sam said. ‘Like in a mirror.’ He put his arms around her middle to lift her away.

  ‘You mustn’t bang on the glass, Cara,’ Rosie said. She knew it was toughened, shatterproof stuff but still, it could loosen a whole panel.

  Sam picked her up like a sack of spuds and began to walk backwards away from the door. Cara reached towards it and began to cry, squirming in his arms. Sam said, ‘Cara! Stop it! You’re spoiling our game!’

  Rosie took her from him. ‘She’s tired,’ she said. Cara struggled to get down, pushing herself away from Rosie’s chest. ‘I’ll take her up. Back in a minute.’

  As she carted her away, Cara started up in earnest. ‘Boo-la!’ she wailed between her sobs.

  ‘You are one tired girl,’ Rosie said, holding her tight and stroking her hair. Once they were climbing the stairs she felt her begin to subside, her body slackening, sobs turning to snuffles.

  ‘Wan’ Boo-la,’ she muttered pettishly but then she found her thumb and gave in.

  TEN

  1812

  Beulah stood on the barrel scratching the pig’s back with a stick, stealing a few moments to enjoy the feeling of watery March sunshine on her shoulders. The sound of hammering came from the rough lean-to next to the scullery door, where the village carpenter, Mr Guilfoyle, had been set to work. Ellis Coulishaw and Nathan Trim, another hand from the first floor, were further along, leaning against the wall beside the main door, where the master had ordered them to wait, as he was expecting what he mysteriously referred to only as ‘goods inwards’. They chatted in a desultory fashion and sucked on their clay pipes.

  The hammering stopped and was replaced by the sound of tuneful whistling. Beulah jumped down from the barrel and ran around the back of the sty so that she could approach the carpenter’s shed without passing the scullery door and being spotted by Mrs Gundy. She peeped round the end of the lean-to. Mr Guilfoyle was sanding the edges of a long, shallow, wooden tray that sat across a broad trestle. Fifteen or twenty more trays were stacked at an angle against the wall of the factory, next to piles of chestnut planks and a wicker basket of tools. Beulah breathed in the peppery smell of cut wood mixed in with the strong tobacco that Mr Guilfoyle chewed in the side of his cheek.

  The carpenter was grey and bearded. His rolled-up sleeves revealed veins and sinews standing out in his thick forearms and his fingers and nails were stained a yellowish brown by the oils he used. He glanced at Beulah from under fearsome beetling eyebrows that she noticed had a fine sprinkling of sawdust caught up in them. Keeping one hand on the post of the lean-to, as if she might bolt at any minute, curiosity got the better of her and she said, ‘What are you making?’

  ‘Beds for the worms,’ Mr Guilfoyle said.

  Beulah’s eyes grew large. Worms, horrid, wriggly, clammy things, lived in the earth. What would you want to put them in trays for? She hated creeping, crawling things. When Tobias was younger, he used to think it was funny to catch spiders in his closed hands and then let them go beside her. He would dangle an earthworm over her head or collect clockers from under a stone and put a cold handful down her back. She imagined all those trays full of earthworms, tangles of pinkish brown, crawling over each other. ‘Why would you want to keep worms?’ she said.

  ‘To spin silk, of course,’ he said, without missing a beat in the constant rubbing to and fro of the sanding block. ‘Your master will get the silk moth’s eggs from abroad and when they hatch, the worms – that is, caterpillars – will come out. Hundreds … thousands of them.’

  ‘Euuch.’ Beulah’s skin crawled. Caterpillars were even worse. ‘Where’s he going to keep them?’

  ‘In the cellar, where he’s had the stove put in. They need to be kept warm to hatch out.’ He stopped sanding, ran his thumb along the edge of the tray and then stood it up on its side with the others. ‘The beds’ll be in stacks, one above the other.’ He made a slicing mo
vement in the air with his hand. ‘Tiers of them, right up from the floor to the ceiling.’ He grinned. ‘I’m keeping the job of fixing these to the supports in case we get bad weather and I want to get indoors.’ He winked at her.

  ‘Silk comes from caterpillars? How?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Now, that I don’t know.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Maybe like gossamer comes from a spider? We shall have to wait and see.’

  Beulah shuddered. ‘Not me.’ The thought of a room full of thousands of caterpillars all writhing around together was enough to turn her stomach.

  From the far end of the building came the clop and rumble of a cart drawing to a halt and a carter’s call of ‘Ahoy!’

  Through the open lean-to, Beulah saw Nathan rush off to find the master. Ellis knocked out his pipe and stepped forward. A dray horse pulling a cart carrying a huge, angular object with a large sheet of oilcloth tied over it was driven past them and into the yard. The carter jumped down and looped the reins through one of the rings set in the wall. Nathan and the master emerged together, Fowler’s face full of excited anticipation. Beulah whipped into the lean-to, shrinking into the space between the planks and the wall, where no one could see her but she could peep out at the proceedings. She hoped she wouldn’t be stuck there too long and began to worry that Mrs Gundy might come looking for her, or, worse still, that Hanzi, the gypsy boy, might turn up while the master was about. She hadn’t seen him this morning and had left three eggs for him to find, as she always did if they missed their chance for a few hurried words behind the hen house.

  Fowler directed the carter and his two men to uncover and unload the cart. Huge wooden frames were taken down, along with several leather boxes. ‘Take them up but make no attempt at assembly or threading until I come,’ Fowler said curtly to Ellis and Nathan. He turned away to sign the docket that the carter produced and didn’t see Ellis hawk and spit on the ground beside the machinery before taking hold of one end while Nathan took the other. Ellis counted them in, as if they were about to sing: ‘One … two … three …’ The two men heaved, and, red in the face and straining, inched the weighty contraption towards the door and then on up the stairs.

  ‘I take it the others are not far behind?’ Fowler was saying to the carter.

  ‘We travelled in tandem. They’ll be here directly,’ the man said and even as he spoke, the sound of hooves on the cobbles rang out and one cart after another turned smartly into the yard.

  Beulah crawled through the triangular space left between wall and trays towards the scullery door, seeing her chance while all were distracted by the hullabaloo. So, they’re here, she thought. Two on each cart, that’s six in all. She stored it up to tell Tobias in case Ellis had no chance to get upstairs and see Jervis. Her heart, already racing at the danger of being discovered away from her work by Fowler, seemed to jump into her throat at the thought of the weavers’ plans. She couldn’t imagine that, come Saturday night, rough hands would be laid upon the master’s property. The frames had a grand sort of beauty: solid, foursquare and with the sheen of polished mahogany. Fashioned by some other workman’s hands, they were not rough work like the plain wooden trays but precise craftsmanship: carved and jointed, each piece ready to be intricately connected, oiled and smooth.

  Mr Guilfoyle had downed tools and stood at the scullery end of the lean-to with his arms folded, surveying the scene. Beulah reached the end of the triangular tunnel and sat back on her heels, waiting. The horses were being tethered like the first and she began to panic that her moment might pass. She edged forward, her boots making a scuffling noise on the ground, and Mr Guilfoyle glanced round and took in her plight. Casually, as if to clear a space in his makeshift workshop, he lifted one of the long trays from the stack and nodded at her to follow. He set off for the scullery door and the stairs to the cellar beyond, so that Beulah could scurry along, hidden on the far side of him, back into the factory. He carried on down to the cellar without a glance at her and Beulah, quick as a mouse, disappeared into the shadowy alcove where the brooms were kept and emerged carrying a pail and scrubbing brush just as Mrs Gundy came scowling through the kitchen door.

  Effie and Jack were working together in the garden at the side of the cottage. Jack’s red coat hung on a nail sticking out from the privy door; bright in the spring sunshine it swung a little in the March breeze. His shirtsleeves rolled up, he was scraping away the top layer of earth and straw from the potato clamp with a spade, while Effie, on her knees, worked on the section he’d already opened, picking out the potatoes from further layers. The weather was warming and the clamp must be unpacked before the last of the crop began to rot. A burlap sack was tied around Effie’s middle to protect her skirt but her hands and nails were ingrained with dirt as she scrabbled the earth aside and felt for the hard knobbly shapes. They worked companionably together. Jack dug in too hard and sliced into a potato by accident so that Effie teased him a little, asking him in a strict voice if he wouldn’t mind keeping bayonet practice out of her vegetable garden and then laughing at him when he pulled a face at her and tossed the potato over his shoulder into the hedge. They returned to the task, Jack humming a military air while he scraped and shovelled.

  As Effie bent once again over the clamp, the pungent smell of clods and potatoes made her feel a little nauseous and she swallowed hard and tried not to breathe too deeply. She didn’t want Jack to guess what she had begun to suspect. She had no appetite until late in the afternoon, and had counted thirty-five days since her last show of blood, anxiously marking them on a paper, crossing through the line of marks on the seventh day, a tally for every week that passed. Part of her wanted to tell him. In her dreams, when she told him, his face softened with love and pride; he took her in his arms and whispered to her that all would be well, that they would soon be wed and safe in their own little house, that he would make it well. He stroked her hair and told her that she was strong and fit and had nothing to fear. But in her waking, worrying hours she felt fearful and ashamed. Memories of the lambing were still fresh in her mind: the distressed bleating of the ewes, lambs turned the wrong way, the struggle and blood involved in bringing new life – sometimes a struggle to the death. And they were not yet wed. Fallen for a child people called it, and those who were not wed were fallen women. If anyone in the village were to find out, she would be forced by the parish to name the father; he would be fetched in front of the parish vestry and the two of them publicly disgraced. If she refused to name him she would be taken to the workhouse.

  If only Captain Harris had agreed to grant them married quarters! They could have been having the banns read by now, only weeks away from making their vows. Jack had told her that the captain couldn’t bend the rules to allow Tobias and Beulah a place and had made it sound as though it was all a case of military regulations, but the captain had also failed to grant Jack special dispensation to take leave to visit his father and in this Effie saw not goodwill thwarted by discipline but dissuasion, if not definite obstruction. She could well imagine what would have been said: not a good idea to fraternise with the locals … far too quick and impulsive … marrying out of your class … foolhardy, ruining your prospects, a chain around your neck. Jack had been far too sensitive to tell her any of it, but the look of anger on his face when he had told her that he’d been ordered to apply for leave through the normal channels and wait his turn had spoken volumes.

  If only his turn could come soon, she thought. She couldn’t tell him her fear that she was with child, not before they visited his parents; she just could not. Jack would be bound to act differently; he hadn’t a dissembling bone in his body. And his father a reverend! Jack might feel duty-bound to tell the truth and then she would be shamed. Even if they decided to say nothing, his mother would surely notice his reticence and her blushes, and spy it out. No, far better to carry her secret on her own a little longer and hope that the visit would be soon, and that Jack’s parents would see how much they cared for each other and be per
suaded to bless their union.

  She sorted through the potatoes as she picked, putting the good ones straight into a sack. The diseased ones or those that Jack had sliced into by accident she rejected. Those that had started to sprout she put aside in a basket for seed. Moving on along the clamp, she started once more with the top layer, reaching into the dark earth and straw, her hand finding the first cool oval shape. It fitted her palm perfectly, heavy and solid with pale waxy skin, making her think of the white curled shape that must be inside her, growing, getting bigger every day. She put her hand out to steady herself against the mound of earth.

  ‘What is it, Effie dear?’ She heard Jack’s voice as if it were coming from a long way away. ‘Are you unwell?’ She felt his hand under her elbow.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘I rose too quickly from kneeling, that’s all.’ She looked up at him.

  ‘You look a little pale,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Are you sure you’re not sickening for something?’

  She shook her head.

  He put his arm around her and she leant her head against him. ‘When will we go and meet your family?’ she asked. ‘Can it be soon?’

  ‘It can indeed,’ he said. ‘I’ve got three days’ leave for this Monday fortnight. I just need to write to check that there’ll be room to receive us: that is, that John and the family won’t be staying at that time and occupying all the bedchambers. I was going to tell you as soon as I had sent and had an answer.’

  Effie hugged him tight, her face turned in to his shoulder so that he shouldn’t see her relief and wonder at it.

  ‘So you’re pleased then.’

  Effie nodded, unable to trust herself to speak.