The Silk Factory

by Judith Allnatt

  She gathered up her shawl and bundle and stood slowly, pushing herself upright with one hand on her thigh. She must make her way to the silk factory, getting along as best she could between the pains. Beulah would have to help her find a carter to take her to Newnham. The workhouse would have to take them in. There was nowhere else left to go.

  Beulah was coming out of the scullery with her empty basket, ready to fetch more mulberry leaves, when her sister came round the corner of the building, bent over like an old woman and with one hand grasping at the wall as if it were the only thing keeping her upright. Beulah ran. ‘Effie! Effie, what is it? What ails you?’ she said as she reached her and pulled Effie’s arm over her shoulder. Effie shook her head, unable to speak, her face the colour of uncooked dough, and Beulah knew that she had been right; Effie was sick – terribly sick. ‘Quick, down here.’ With a rapid glance to check for Mrs Gundy, she helped her sister inside and down the cellar steps. There she froze, for at the worm beds, with her back to them, stood Alice, counting the number of cocoons in the fanned twigs of broom and the number of new worms that had started to spin. Effie put her hand to her mouth, overcome by the close heat from the stove, the torrential sound of the feeding worms and the fusty, unpleasant smell of sweet herbs overlaying decay.

  ‘You’ve been dawdling again, Beulah,’ Alice said, without looking up. ‘Get on and feed them quickly; they’re running short of fodder.’ When there was neither answer nor movement she turned and her jaw dropped.

  ‘My sister’s sick. I think she’s really sick,’ Beulah babbled. ‘I don’t know what to do!’

  ‘Well, she can’t stop here. The master’s not paid his visit yet,’ Alice said. ‘Get her out.’

  Effie, squeezing Beulah’s shoulder so hard that it hurt, looked pleadingly at Alice. ‘My time’s come,’ she said.

  Alice stared at her stonily for a moment. She stepped forward, pulled Effie’s arm away from her stomach, spread her hand flat and pressed it against her belly.

  ‘I’m barely six months gone. ’Tis too early, surely?’ Effie said desperately.

  Alice looked grim.

  ‘Can you stop it?’

  Alice gave the slightest shake of her head. ‘’Tis too late for that.’

  As a new wave of pain took her, Effie gasped, dropped her bundle and bent forward with her hands upon her knees. Alice cast around the cellar and pulled together a heap of empty kindling sacks to cover the cold brick floor. Between them, Alice and Beulah lowered Effie down. Alice pulled up Effie’s skirts and Beulah saw that her petticoat and underclothes were wet. Alice began to strip them off. ‘Go to the kitchen,’ she ordered. ‘Fetch scissors and string and as many cloths as will not be missed.’

  Beulah hesitated. Effie was moaning, ‘I can’t! I can’t!’ her head turning from side to side and her hand gripping Alice’s arm.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Beulah whispered.

  Alice snorted. ‘Nothing that won’t be righted shortly. Now, run!’

  Beulah hurried to the kitchen door and hid behind it, peeping through the crack. Mrs Gundy was sweeping the floor, stopping now and then to spread tea leaves before her to collect the dust and stop it from rising. Beulah waited in an agony of anxiety, willing Mrs Gundy to be done and go. She wanted to fulfil her task if it would help Effie but why had Alice asked her to fetch these things? What possible use could they be? What was Alice going to do to her? Effie needed a doctor – medicine! Mrs Gundy bent down, groaning, to brush the sweepings into a pan. Beulah danced from foot to foot in frustration as the woman moved heavily over to the table and began to sprinkle it with soda. Halfway through scrubbing it, the master’s bell, high on the wall, rang and she stopped working and wiped her hands on her apron. It rang again, harder and more insistently, and, grumbling, she left the room. Beulah darted from her hiding place and gathered the items she’d been sent for from table and dresser drawers.

  When she returned to the cellar, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light that filtered in through the barred windows. Effie was squatting on the pile of sacks, tangled drawers and petticoat, her arm around Alice’s shoulders. Her skirts were bunched up around her waist, her pale legs exposed to the thigh. Not knowing what else to do, Beulah laid the haul from the kitchen down beside Alice, who said, ‘Get the other side of her. Let her lean on you.’

  As she took her place, Beulah asked Effie how she fared but she didn’t reply, didn’t even seem aware that it was Beulah by her side. Effie was making strange noises, sometimes panting, sometimes giving a long, deep, animal moan so that Alice told her to hush up and hold her noise and Effie pressed her lips together hard and clenched her teeth to trap the sound inside. Her face turned red and sweaty and she began to make grunting noises that reminded Beulah of the sow in the yard. Whenever she groaned and grunted, Alice said, ‘Bear down,’ and put her hand down between Effie’s legs so that Beulah looked away, embarrassed.

  Alice, now on her knees, shuffled round to be in front of Effie, who still leant on Beulah’s shoulder. She reached between Effie’s legs, bunching up the folds of the petticoat beneath her as something dark and wet came out of her, retreated and appeared again. As it emerged once more, Beulah saw Alice pull gently on it until she got it free, and then again on an angular shape so that, as Effie gave a long, low cry, the whole came slithering out, with a great deal of blood, into the cotton petticoat, partly covered in a shiny membrane thinner than muslin. Alice opened the remains of the birth sac with her fingers and Beulah stared at what looked at first like a skinned rabbit ready for the pot, with a pale grey slippery rope attached. Alice wrapped a cloth around it. Effie lay back, leaning on her elbows and Alice pressed one hand at the bottom of her abdomen and pulled gently on the cord so that something dark, bloody and horrible slid out. The grey-white cord pulsated as if a heart were beating within it but there was no movement from the creature curled in the cloth. Beulah, thinking of the things that Effie said to comfort her, murmured, ‘There, ’tis all done now. ’Tis all over with.’ She pushed the damp strands of hair that were stuck to Effie’s forehead back off her face.

  ‘Is it safely delivered? Let me see it!’ Effie said.

  Alice worked deftly with string and scissors to separate the infant from the afterbirth, her lips pressed together in a thin line of concentration, saying never a word to Effie.

  ‘Give it to me,’ Effie said, her voice loud and hoarse. She strained forward to see.

  Alice put it into Effie’s arms, saying, ‘It’s a boy.’ She bundled the mess up in a sack and went to the stove. She pushed it in on top of the dying embers of coals, and flames began to lick the sacking, which twisted and shrivelled, its contents hissing. A sickening, meaty smell filled the cellar.

  Beulah looked down at the newborn. It didn’t look like any of the babies she’d seen. The babies that the women carried in shawls tied around them at harvest time were pink and rounded. This one was half the size, with thin, stick-like arms and legs, and its skin was mottled and translucent so that you could see the veins beneath. She gazed into its face. Its eyes were tight shut, the eyelids huge and swollen; its nose was squashed to one side and its lips were wide. The head was pointy with a swollen area on top, squeezed and elongated in the birth. She thought it quite ugly.

  Effie cupped the infant’s swollen head in one hand, passing the other hand all over its body, stroking and murmuring over it. She opened its fist, no bigger than a walnut, and touched its palm. Its fingers curled but did not grip. Beulah thought that she wouldn’t choose to touch it. Its body was all smeared with blood and was greasy-looking, with white stuff in the folds of its skin – skin that seemed somehow too big for its bones.

  Effie cradled it in the crook of her arm and then bent and blew gently into its face. Its eyes remained shut. Its brow didn’t wrinkle. She began rubbing its limbs again, harder this time, lifting each arm and chafing it between her palms, but when she let them go they fell back, floppy as a rag doll’s. She hugged it
to her breast and rocked back and forth, looking up at Alice in appeal.

  Alice took the baby from her, lifting it from its wrappings. She held it up by the heels. It dangled from her hands. ‘There’s no life in it,’ she said.

  Beulah saw the last vestige of hope pass from her sister’s eyes. Effie’s face crumpled and a high, keening cry escaped her lips.

  Alice took the cloth from Effie’s slack fingers, wrapped it around the still form and pushed it into Beulah’s arms. ‘We need to get rid of it,’ she said under her breath. Her eyes flicked to the stove.

  Aghast, Beulah held the warm bundle tightly against her and shrank back.

  ‘Take it then, ’tis not my kin and no business of mine,’ Alice hissed. ‘I don’t care how you do it but go and get rid of it. Do you want the whole village to know your sister’s shame?’ Alice knelt beside Effie and rested a hand awkwardly on her shoulder. ‘Shush, shush,’ she said; then more urgently, ‘Don’t take on so; you’ll have the master down here. Do you want us to lose our positions?’

  As Beulah moved away with the baby in her arms, Effie called out, ‘Jack! Jack!’ and tried to rise. Alice caught hold of her arm; she fell back weakly against the sacks and sobbed hopelessly with her head in her hands.

  Beulah laid the bundle in her basket. Her hands would not stop shaking but she forced herself to grasp the handle and lift it. She must carry it as if it were empty, as if this were any normal trip to replenish the worms’ food, on any normal afternoon. She went quietly up the cellar steps, listening at the door before venturing into the scullery. Behind her, she heard Alice saying grimly to Effie, ‘This is how we’ll proceed. As soon as I’ve cleaned you up and you’ve rested a little, I shall catch one of the carters and you can pay him to take you home. You have money?’

  Beulah peeped out, saw that the scullery was empty, slipped out and quickly pulled the door shut fast behind her, as she’d been schooled. A whiff of the horrible smell of sooty burnt meat hung in the air and she prayed it would not travel and bring curious noses.

  Outside, she forced herself to walk, not run, although she was longing to. In the open expanse of yard, under the harsh light, she felt horribly exposed, as if the windows behind her were rows of unblinking eyes and the master standing at any one of them. There was tightness in her chest so that it was hard to catch her breath. She sought the shadow of the pigsty wall and squatted down, sitting back on her heels for a moment and trying to calm herself. She glanced back over her shoulder, furtively, to check that no one had emerged. The windows stared blankly back. As she turned, she saw with horror that an end of white cloth trailed from the basket and hastily tucked it in, looking quickly away from the bundle inside.

  Her mind raced. There was only one place she could think of to hide the little body so that it would not be found. She set off once again, entering the rows of mulberry trees at the same point from which she’d emerged earlier in the day, as if picking up her work exactly where she had left off. Once within the cover of the trees she ducked under their low branches, making a beeline for the back of the plantation. She paused within the margin of the trees and peeped cautiously through the newly planted saplings to the latest line of holes dug by the workmen, where the last of the new saplings lay on the ground in a row, their root balls wrapped in wet sacking. The diggings were deserted; a spade stood upright in the earth and a shovel lay propped against a tree where the men had downed tools for their afternoon break. Beulah drew forward to the very edge and looked around for any clue to their whereabouts, wondering if they had withdrawn into the shade of the orchard to smoke a pipe, but there was no sign and she concluded that they had gone to the well for water or to Mrs Gundy, who would sometimes spare them some small beer. Unsure how long it would be before their return, she hurried forward to the first hole in the line, the next to be filled, and knelt down upon the spoil heap, the basket by her side. The hole was wide, to give plenty of room for roots to grow. Deep and straight-sided, flat spade marks sliced through the dry, sandy topsoil and the darker damp soil beneath.

  She glanced all around and then stayed still for a moment, listening. The only sounds were the fluting song of a blackbird calling for its mate and the rustle of hedge sparrows flitting here and there. Quickly, she picked up the bundle. She could feel the pliable solidity of the infant’s body within the slippery folds of the cloth. She thought that she should say a prayer but shock had numbed her mind and no words would come. Holding it in the crook of her arm, she lay flat on her stomach at the edge of the hole so that she could reach, and lowered it down into the bottom of the pit. The white cloth that had covered its crown slipped away and the head, lolling sideways, was exposed. Beulah stared at the baby’s tiny, perfect ear, the whorl inside, its curled edge and delicate lobe. Its skin was pale and waxy, the veins beneath giving it a blueish tinge. With a whimper, she pulled the material over to cover it, only to reveal instead its tiny hand and wrist.

  The first spade of earth that she scraped from the spoil heap fell upon the white cloth and trickled away down the sides of the humped shape; the second began to cover it. In the distance, Beulah heard shouts and laughter, male voices, and desperately dragged the unwieldy spade through the spoil heap, scraping earth into the hole until there was a thin covering of soil and stones and all of the white had disappeared. Only the little hand remained uncovered.

  As she looked down, there was a movement, a shifting beneath the soil. The baby’s fingers, which had been open and loose, curled as she had seen them do when Effie touched its palm. She gasped and bent closer. A pebble, dislodged by her change of position, fell from the side of the hole, a trickle of sandy soil following it. She peered in, listening for the faintest sound. The movement … it could have been just the crumbly soil settling; it must have been … mustn’t it?

  Nearby, the chattering noise of the blackbird’s alarm call rang out and she panicked. Desperately, she scrabbled more earth over with her hands. The voices were getting nearer, the men making their way along the path beside the mulberry trees. She hesitated, wringing the cloth of her apron between her hands, scraped more earth into the hole, and then, overwhelmed by fear, grabbed up the basket and ran for the trees. She ducked under the branches, hiding in their green shadow. Glancing back she saw that she had thrown the spade down in her haste, forgetting to return it to its upright position in the ground. Hardly breathing, she watched as a man and two boys, in their rough smocks and breeches, returned carrying pails of water to moisten the newly planted saplings. The boys’ hair was wet, their smocks darkened with splashes of water and they carried on their banter, pushing and jostling each other to try to make the water spill while the older man laughed at them. They picked up their tools without heeding.

  The boys began digging at the end of the row. The man took up the next sapling to plant it and Beulah felt sure he would notice that the spoil heap was spread wide or see her smaller footprints among his own. He slit open the sacking and removed it, teased out the roots and placed the sapling in the hole. As he began to shovel earth in, Beulah had to close her eyes: the weight of it on those tiny bones, the air crushed out of its lungs, its little face against the stony earth … Every slice of the spade and slide and drop of the soil into the hole was a torment that made her scrunch her eyes tighter. Still, behind her closed eyelids, she saw the tiny fingers close and the spasm of movement that could have been the earth settling or could have been the small body curling against the weight pattering down on it: a near dead creature shuddering to consciousness as blows rained down. Oh, what had she done! She saw pale shiny roots, like long fingers, growing and grasping, pushing their way down and through … She opened her eyes to find the workman beating the earth down with the flat of his spade. It was too late.

  Thump! Thump! Thump! The dull sound of tamping and packing the earth followed her as she crept away; it echoed in her head even as her flight took pace, pushing her way through the branches, heedless of scratches and breaking twigs, wanting only
to get back to Effie and be comforted. It was still there – Thump! Thump! Thump! – as she broke from the cover of the trees and ran with her empty basket bumping at her knees straight across the open yard and headlong into the scullery, where she came face-to-face with the master.

  ‘And where are you going in such haste?’ he said, catching hold of her arm above the elbow. He glanced at her apron, smeared with dirt, and at the empty basket. ‘What’s afoot?’ he demanded.

  Beulah kept her head down, her eyes level with the brass buttons and watch chain on his waistcoat. In his hand was the whip he carried; he tapped its polished, cherrywood handle against his thigh. ‘Nothing, master,’ she muttered. She pulled against his grip. ‘I need to be about my business feeding the worms.’

  ‘We’ll go together,’ he said. ‘I was just about to pay my visit.’ Moving his grip from her arm to the back of her neck, he pushed her in front of him.

  The door to the cellar stood ajar. ‘What’s this?’ the master said, his temper rising. ‘How many times have I impressed on you the need to keep the room secure at all times? Where is Alice?’ And he racketed her down the steps so fast that her feet barely touched the ground.

  Alice and Effie were gone. Beulah’s stomach turned over in fear. The scissors and string lay on the floor beside the stove. The bloody sacks had been stuffed inside it and had stifled the fire; the door hung open, revealing that it was out. The room was already noticeably cooler and without the masking smell of warm herbs the place smelt like a butcher’s shop: a mixture of the iron tang of blood and under it a smell like rotten meat. And it was quiet. The noise of the worms feeding, like thousands of raindrops falling on leaves, all day, all night, had all but stopped.