The Silk Factory (14 page)

‘You mind the maister,’ he said. ‘He’s one o’ they men as acts like the wife at home has her head up the chimney. You come along o’ me.’ He took her elbow and steered her over towards the lambing pens. Hob stayed where he was, his gaze following their progress around the edge of the flock.

‘This un’s the ewe we tried before.’ Martin pointed into one of the rough thatched shelters where a black-faced ewe stood ruminating, another lamb asleep in the straw at her feet. ‘Put the lamb in with ’er,’ he said, ‘I’ll be back presently.’ Effie did as she was bid and the lamb tottered a few steps and sank to its knees. She righted it and gave it a little push towards the ewe but the ewe showed no interest. She pushed the lamb closer but each time she tried it the ewe walked away.

Martin returned with one of the dogs. ‘This un’s a good quiet un,’ he said. He put the collie into a pen two down from the ewe, with an empty pen between them. ‘He won’t bark or scare ’er something dreadful but having ’im there should make ’er feel a bit more motherly, like.’

The ewe, sensing the threat, walked fast up and down the pen and then stood in front of her sleeping lamb, her nostrils flaring as she took in the scent of the dog. Effie found a patch of straw where the ewe had urinated and rubbed it over the orphan lamb’s back. Slowly she approached the ewe, set the lamb down on the straw in front of her and backed away. The ewe sniffed the new lamb, sniffed again and began to lick until the lamb struggled awkwardly to its feet. It swayed for a moment and then took a halting step forward. The ewe, its eyes still fixed upon the crouching dog, stood still and let it find the udder. The lamb found the teat and began to suck, weakly at first and then with eyes closed, ears laid back, its whole being concentrated on its awakening struggle for life.

Effie and Martin exchanged a smile, Effie feeling the triumphant elation that a new life always brought. They leant on the hurdle watching for a few moments. ‘I reckon she’s taken to ’er now,’ Martin said. ‘I’d best get on and you’d best not stand about.’ He looked around to locate a farmhand working at a distance from the master and said, ‘Go on down and help Jones.’

Effie made her way down the line of pens, tying her old worsted shawl tightly in front of her to leave her hands free for lambing. Beneath her clothes, her body was warm, wrapped in pale mauve wool. She could feel it as she moved, soft against her skin.

Beulah stood at the long table in the kitchen at the back of the silk factory, peeling potatoes. Mrs Gundy, under whose supervision Beulah had been placed three weeks ago, was poking at a ham bone in a huge pot of boiling water, scraping off the scraps of meat that still adhered to it in order to make a thin stock in which the potatoes would be boiled and served to the workers as ‘broth’.

Beulah’s legs ached from long standing and her fingers ached from long peeling but neither pain was as bad as the ache for the company of the other children still working upstairs. She had no understanding of why she had been singled out for this punishment, for punishment she was sure it was; she had seen the gleam in Fowler’s eye when he had told her that she was relieved of her bobbin-winding duties and would now be maid-of-all-work and like it. She had bitten back the urge to question why she must leave the others and he had stood over her as if waiting for her to speak, watching her like a cat with a mouse between its paws. She had cast her eyes down so that he shouldn’t see her dismay. ‘You are a sullen, ungrateful child,’ he’d said and, taking her by the arm, he’d pulled her roughly from the line and the frightened glances of the others and clattered down the stairs, hauling her behind him so that she stumbled and bumped her way down the steps and arrived in the kitchen close to tears. She had blinked them away. She would not cry in front of him. He peered into her face giving a sneering kind of smile and pushed her towards Mrs Gundy, saying, ‘Help in the kitchen and general errands, Mrs G. May be required for deliveries from time to time. To be kept busy fetching and carrying. Any idleness, send her directly to me.’

Beulah peeled the last potato, dropped it into the bucket and added the peelings to the overflowing pail of pigswill beside her. Without turning round, Mrs Gundy said in her flat voice, ‘Take the slops out and then collect the eggs.’ Beulah hefted the pail up in front of her with the handle at her chest and struggled outside. The snow had stopped and the wind had dropped, leaving a blue sky and clear air sharp as spring water. The trees in the orchard were shapes outlined in white: the felled apple trees softly rounded, the new saplings straight and twiggy and the older trees sculptural in their twisted shapes, trunks patterned by peeling bark and patches of green and yellow lichen. The chicken house at the back of the orchard was topped with an eight-inch layer of snow, as if it had been crowned with a hat. The hens pecked around the dungheap for grubs and worms, tan feathers and red wattles bright glimpses of colour between the trees.

Beulah gave good day to the carpenter as he passed her on his way in with a long length of timber; he was building shelves in the cellar in readiness for the trays that would eventually hold the silk worms, at Mr Fowler’s request. She tramped over a stretch of virgin snow, with its frozen crust that gave under her feet with a crunch into softer powder beneath. It pinched her toes in her holey boots and soaked her dress so that it clung to her ankles.

The pig was a brute: a lumbering, snorting, stinking beast, and Beulah dared not go into the sty. The first time she’d done so, she’d almost been caught between its huge bulk and the wall and had been afraid she’d be crushed, for the hardest of pokes and shoves made no odds to the creature; its thick, sparse-haired hide seemed to have no feeling. Next time, she had searched around until she’d found an old barrel and upended it beside the sty wall as a makeshift step.

She rested the bucket on top of the wall, clambered up on to the barrel and tipped the slops over into the trough below, calling, ‘Pig-ho! Pig-ho!’ The pig emerged from the makeshift lean-to shelter, which consisted of an old door propped on its side against the wall. Its ears flopped over its eyes and its legs were covered in filth, giving it a comical look, Beulah thought, like a fat pink lady with long stockings. She stole a few moments to amuse herself by scratching its back with a stick, and watched it rub itself against the brick wall in an ecstasy of relief from itching. ‘You wicked creature!’ she said to it. ‘You greedy hog!’ becoming bold now that she was relieved of the need to get too near it.

She perched herself on the wall and took a handful of straw from the grey pile beside the sty, to wipe out the bucket and then line it in preparation for egg collecting.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a movement among the trees of the orchard, but, turning to look, saw nothing but a blackbird hopping from branch to branch. She clambered down from the wall and made her way past the rows of sapling mulberry trees towards the hen house. She climbed the shallow ladder and ducked her head in through the low door. Once her eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness, she slipped her hand into each nesting place in turn to feel amongst the straw for the solid smoothness of an egg. She soon had a dozen or so and climbed back down, intending to search the other laying places she knew: in the hollows of the roots of certain apple trees and the sheltered nooks under the blackcurrant bushes.

As she rounded the corner of the hen house, she came face-to-face with an olive-skinned boy, a little older and bigger than she, squatting down with his hand stretched beneath the wooden shed, in the act of reaching for an egg that had rolled underneath; he had two others cushioned in his upturned hat. His coat was tattered and so threadbare that it had a greasy look. His breeches barely reached down to his knees; he wore no stockings and his feet were bound in sacking.

‘Sorry, missus, to have frighted you,’ he said, glancing quickly around to see if she had anyone with her.

‘You’re one of the gypsies from up Castle Dykes,’ Beulah said. ‘You shouldn’t take anything from here. The master is a
bad
man.’

Keeping his eyes on her face all the time, he curled his fingers around the egg and brought it out from under the shed. ‘We has to eat, see?’ Slowly, he placed it next to the others in his hat, not caring for the smudges of hen dirt and feathers.

‘Oh, please don’t! He’d beat you if he caught you! I’ve seen him bang a boy’s head against the wall until he didn’t know which way was up! He’d beat you and then fetch the constable as well.’

‘But he’ll not catch me. You’ll not tell on Hanzi, missus, will you? You’ll not turn Hanzi in?’

Beulah looked at the thin figure before her, his skin goose-bumped and his footcloths a waterlogged mess. She shook her head. In an instant he sprang up and was running, bent low, using the hedge at the back of the orchard as cover until he reached a gap and squeezed through, disappearing as quickly as a rabbit down a hole.

Beulah leant against the side of the hen house, her heart still hammering. She waited there for a while, to make sure that anyone watching from the windows of the factory who might have glimpsed the running figure shouldn’t connect her with it. At length, she emerged casually and began working her way around the laying places. She found no more eggs, which, she thought, was hardly surprising, as other fingers had clearly been there before hers and she wondered, crossly, whether Mrs Gundy would scold her for not finding sufficient. Nonetheless, she had been hungry herself often enough to recognise the boy’s starving look and to pity it.

In the event, she didn’t have to worry, as when she returned with the eggs she was summoned upstairs to the first floor where the overseer told her that she was to take a basket of bindings for retrimming uniforms and deliver them to the military depot. She was to take them to the East Lodge, and say that the delivery was meant for the clothing stores, and she was to wait for a receipt.

Beulah laboured up the hill towards the garrison. The basket was large, awkward and heavily laden with many stacked rolls of tapes, and the cart traffic had turned the snow to muddy, slippery slush. As she reached the bastion at the corner of the huge walled enclosure, she was conscious of a pair of eyes upon her and dared not glance up at the lookout slit, behind which a sentry must be posted. She drew in tighter against the great wall, as if she could scuttle along, unobserved in its shadow, like a little spider hugging a wainscot.

The East Lodge was a rectangular gatehouse topped by a cupola and wind vane, and built of yellow brick, in contrast to the vast expanse of redbrick wall either side. It gained its intimidating stature not only because of its solid, foursquare shape, but by the fact that it was built over an arm of the canal and the semi-circular tunnel that gave the water entrance beneath the building was equipped with a heavy iron portcullis, which was raised to let barges in and out and lowered to secure the entrance, descending to touch the bottom of the Cut. Beulah didn’t like the building’s face. Its blind window openings, bricked in for security, were like blank eyes above the downturned mouth of the tunnel opening and the barred portcullis was like a prison gate.

Today, however, as she approached the swing bridge that was used to cross the canal, the portcullis was slowly opening and a long black barge was waiting to gain entrance through the building. She stood aside to wait. Boy and horse passed in front of her, followed by the rounded shape of the boat’s load, hidden under a grey and greasy oilcloth, like the humped back of a leviathan. The boat was steered by a man dressed in a rough smock coat with a cloth tied around his head against the cold. He hawked and spat into the murky green water. As the portcullis creaked and groaned and the boat moved forward, another boat hove into view, whilst down the road ahead came six sweating horses drawing a huge limber on which sat a fat driver and a sturdy nine-pounder gun. Beulah, overcome by the noise and the scale of all around her, wished that she could turn tail. She stayed, poised uncertainly beside the canal, wondering how she was to make herself noticed amongst all the busyness.

She was soon glad that she had waited as she observed the driver stop at an iron gate in the wall, at which he appeared to speak. Just like the story in the chapbook that Effie had read to her, the gate opened as if he had said ‘Open Sesame’ and the horses and limber passed through. Now she at least knew how to gain entry and once the traffic had dissipated and the bridge swung back into place, she hurried forwards. No sooner had she reached the gate than an iron grille slid back and a pockmarked face appeared and demanded she state her business. Beulah repeated what she’d been told to say and once more the gate swung open; she entered and the gatekeeper closed and barred it behind her with a sonorous clang.

Beulah stared wide-eyed at the huge storehouses that towered on either side of the canal and at the boats drawn up against the wharves, where crowds of boatmen and soldiers unpacked barrel after wooden barrel in an unending stream. Each was covered in hides to prevent sparks struck from the wheels of the barrows from igniting the gunpowder. In the distance was a wide basin where further barges were turning, and beyond them row upon row of magazines. Near at hand were workshops from which hammering and hissing issued, and the whole was so busy with men, horses, carts and so forth that there was barely a path to be followed between them. The gatekeeper gave her a push towards the footbridge that was constructed against the gatehouse and spanned the canal. ‘Up there,’ he said abruptly. ‘Go in that door and someone from the Public Offices will attend to you.’ He turned back to his duties at the gate.

Beulah climbed the steps and entered. She found herself in an empty hallway with three doors. She hesitated. There was no one to whom she could tell her errand so what should she do? Strange grinding noises came from behind the central door, which, she guessed, must house the winding mechanism and windlass for the portcullis. The door on the left was firmly closed but the one on the right was open and voices came from within. In the hall, opposite the open door, was a settle. The master had a similar bench outside his office where merchants, agents and deliverymen sat waiting to be called in to see him. She sat down on the settle, placed the basket beside her and waited, swinging her feet, for someone to notice that she was there.