The Silk Factory (19 page)

Moonlight fell upon the village, on slopes of pale thatch and grey slate and on chimney pots grown cold. It picked out the gleam of the weathervane on the church tower, the shine of the brass knockers on the doors of the Rectory and the High House, the silver of the puddles in the street and the glint of hatchet’s edge and lump hammer. The nine men walked silently through the quiet streets towards the silk factory, their faces blackened with coal dust and their hats and caps pulled low. Jervis went in front, carrying a heavy staff, closely followed by Ellis Coulishaw with a long-handled axe over his shoulder, and Jim Baggott with a length of lead pipe under his arm. ‘Every man-jack of you must be armed,’ Jervis had told them and even Tobias and Saul had come equipped with shovel handle and pick.

They reached the centre of the village and slipped into single file to disappear into the deep shadows below the eaves. Although it was four hours after midnight, a time chosen so that all revellers would be abed but well before first light when ploughboys and milkmaids would be making their way to the fields, the night watchman would be somewhere about, padding his solitary rounds. With no sound save for the rustle of a coat or the creak of a boot, they took their way along West Street and emerged on to New Street at the far end from the High House. Jervis signalled for them to stop and they stood for a moment surveying the empty street, the darkened windows of the master’s house with its half-closed shutters, and the lines of blank factory windows on which the moon shone directly, revealing the dark humped shapes of the machines inside.

Tobias’s heart thumped in his chest as he followed Jervis and the other men out into the street and down towards the factory. As they passed into the entryway between the factory and Mrs Oliphant’s bawdy-house, Saul was posted to wait at the corner as a lookout, to watch the street and make the call of a screech owl if anyone should appear. Tobias felt more anxious still as he parted from Saul and was left to take his place with the older men.

A candle bobbed in a window and Mrs Oliphant’s large pasty face, framed by her night bonnet, appeared above it and then disappeared again. All stood stock-still. The scullery door opened with a creak and the lady of the house stood in the doorway, holding up the candle and clutching together the edges of her nightgown at the neck. She didn’t scream at the sight of the group of men, as Tobias had felt sure she would, but raised her eyebrows and stepped forward, pulling the door half-shut behind her. ‘Jim Baggott, is that you? What’s amiss?’ she hissed.

Baggott looked down and shuffled his feet.

From inside, a slurred voice called out, ‘What’re you at, woman? Come back to bed!’

Jervis stepped forward into the patch of light cast by the stump of candle. He gestured towards the factory and held his finger to his lips.

Mrs Oliphant gave a quick glance behind her as bed springs creaked. ‘A soldier wants a warm body for his money, not a cold bed,’ came the voice again.

‘Oh, hold your blab, I’m coming d’rectly,’ she said. She inclined her head to Jervis and, shielding the candle in her cupped hand against the draught from the door, went back inside, closing it gently behind her.

Tobias let out a long shaking breath and followed the others round the corner of the factory. Now it was time to do his part. The coal chutes were too small even for his slight frame but each cellar had a window to let in a little murky light. Ellis counted along to the fifth window, a small aperture glazed with tiny panes of bottle-bottom glass. He wrapped a sack around the head of his axe to muffle the sound. The first swing stove in the middle with a crash of glass on to the brick floor below. The next blows splintered the remaining wood, sending shards of glass tinkling from the edges of the frame.

‘Boots first,’ Ellis whispered. ‘’Tis too high to risk landing on your pate. We’ll lower you.’

Jervis and Ellis took a hand each; Tobias climbed through the hole and they lowered him down, his feet kicking unsuccessfully in search of the floor. ‘Let me drop,’ he hissed. As they let go he felt a searing pain under his arm; his feet hit the floor and he stumbled backwards and sat down hard on a pile of coal. In the pitch-dark corner, he put his hand to his armpit and found the cloth of his jacket and shirt ripped open and a warm, wet patch where a jagged edge of glass must have remained in the frame and cut him as he fell. He felt as if he might be sick.

A huddle of heads were blocking off the moonlight from the window. ‘Are you safely landed?’ came Jervis’s voice.

‘For the Lord’s sake, get the scullery door open and let’s proceed with the business,’ Ellis said.

Tobias pulled his shirt free from his trousers, balled up the material in the hollow of his armpit and clamped his arm down at his side. He felt his way to the stone steps and climbed them with one hand held out before him, until he touched the wood of the cellar door. He pushed and it swung open as Ellis had said it would, for the bolt had been hanging by one screw for a fortnight and the master had been too busy with his grand schemes to notice. As he hurried through the scullery, there was a scurry of movement and a gleam of eyes that made him jump and bark his shin on a stack of buckets as rats disappeared behind the mounded sacks of turnips, flour and potatoes piled in the corner.

He felt for the bolts on the scullery door. He could just reach the top one, which slid across smoothly, but the bottom one was stiff and he had to work the catch up and down to ease it across. Outside, he could hear Ellis grumbling and Jervis shushing him. At last he got it clear, opened the door and everyone piled in.

‘Right,’ Jervis said. ‘Lanterns.’ Jim Baggott and Griffith lit them and held them aloft, revealing the eight of them, with faces black as chimbley-sweeps, a deal table, baskets, pails, brooms and mops spilling from an alcove, piles of provisions in sacks and a long shelf ranged with leather fire-buckets. ‘Before we start, let me just remind you that afterwards you must get quickly home, stow your tools, wash away every trace of black, get into your nightshirts and into your beds, as if you’ve been there all night, tight as ticks with your missus. Understand?’ There was a mumble of agreement. Jervis nodded, satisfied. ‘When we get up there, keep the light well covered,’ he continued. ‘Jim, you go in front. Griffith, bring up the rear.’ They shuffled on through the kitchen and along the corridor to the stairs. The door to the master’s office stood open, weights, scale and yardstick laid neatly on the desk and the white face of the clock looking back at the moon like a great, wide-open eye. Tobias hurried past.

On the first floor, moonlight lay in skewed rectangles across the wooden boards but it reached no further than the doubling wheels, which cast strange elongated shadows as if their spoked wheels had been squashed to ovals and their spindles stretched out like spears. The new machines were in darkness, ranged in a row on the other side of the room, their canopies reaching almost to the ceiling. Jim and Griffith put the lanterns on the floor at either end of the row so that a dim light was cast upwards and glowed on the sturdy frames of polished wood and the white loops of card hanging from the Jacquard heads in accordion pleats, all punched with holes as if inscribed with strange hieroglyphic writing.

‘Right, lads,’ Jervis said. ‘Line up at the ready.’ The men shuffled along until all were stationed in front of a frame. Jervis stepped forward and rammed his heavy staff between the main frame and the Jacquard head of one of the machines, preparing to lever the two apart. He raised one hand ready to signal. ‘For hand-fashioned work at the old-fashioned price, eh, lads?’

‘Aye!’ came the rumbling response and, as he brought down his hand, all struck together. Ellis swung his axe at an upright as if he were coppicing a tree and the frame lurched forward, the heavy head collapsing into the machine’s innards where Jim smashed the end of the lead pipe down upon it, pounding it to a flattened mass. Tobias, gritting his teeth against the pain under his arm, brought the pick down upon the batten of the machine nearest him and pulled it away from the frame with a sickening sound of splitting wood. All around him, shafts and heads crashed against one another, warps were rent side to side and the thick chains of folded card fell to the floor in unruly heaps like crumpled washing. The men’s faces were red, their eyes fierce and intent as the room filled with the pungent smell of the sweat of labour and fear.

Above the uproar, Jervis signed to Tobias to use his pick to rip the piles of card chains and Tobias, despite his wound, was carried along in the fervour and set to, pitching the sharp point into a heap and bracing his foot against it as he pulled to tear it apart.

Ellis and Jim had worked themselves into a fury and had hit on a method. With grim-set faces they got either side of a machine and began to rock it, making use of the play in the structure that was fixed together with wooden pegs and wedges, aiming to tip it forwards.

‘Mind it don’t go through the floor!’ Griffith called out to them above the din, but it had already reached its tipping point and the weight of the head pulled it out of their hands. Both men leapt back as it hit the boards and smashed like a dropped egg, shafts and treadles flying outwards. The noise reverberated like a thunderclap, the very floor beneath their feet seemed to dip and ripple under the impact. Ellis began to laugh and Jim dusted off his hands as if to say it was a job well done.

‘You are too passionate!’ Jervis shouted above the din of banging and chopping.

‘’Tis quicker and more thorough,’ Jim said, moving along to the sixth frame, the last in the row still standing intact.

Over in the High House, Fowler awoke from troubled dreams and lay wondering what had crept into his sleep to make him toss and turn until his nightshirt was a sweaty tangle twisted round him. Tabitha, too, seemed disturbed in her sleep; she rolled on her side and then flopped back again on to her back. Fowler got out of bed to take a piss. The candle was out and he felt around under the bed for the chamber pot. He took it over to the window, where the shutters were half-open to let in a little moonlight, and relieved himself, looking out blearily into the street. A small movement at the corner of the factory caught his eye; a dog or a cat, he thought, or maybe some randy soldier slipping away from Mrs Oliphant’s.

Inside the factory, despite Jervis’s remonstrations, Jim and Ellis heaved at the last loom and two other men left off what they were doing and joined them. Griffith came behind Ellis and tugged at his sleeve. ‘It’s too risky! The noise is too great!’ he was saying but amidst the din his mouth appeared to open and close soundlessly.

As it tipped, the men sprang back. The frame cracked and snapped, crumpling sideways as it hit the floor so that debris flew out and a shaft caught the lamp and sent it rolling across the floor. Griffith hobbled forward and swept up the lantern before the scraps of silk and thread strewn over the boards could catch alight. He held it aloft, swinging crazily above the wreckage of beater and reed, delicate warp and weft, mails and lingoes smashed into a tangled mess beneath the broken wood.

Fowler, at the window, standing over the steaming pot, suddenly came wide-awake. A light. A light was moving in his factory. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The light disappeared as if it had been quickly doused.

‘Thieves!’ he shouted, causing Tabitha to sit bolt upright in fright. ‘The knaves are after my silk!’ Even as the words left his lips his sleep-befuddled brain recognised that the light had not been in the windows of the storerooms downstairs, where the bolts of fabric and drums of ribbon were kept, but on the first floor where all his new enterprises and experiments were housed. ‘Damned villains!’ he roared. ‘They’re after breaking the frames or burning the place down!’ He threw open the door and bellowed downstairs for his manservant, Samuel, who slept beside the range, and then pulled on his breeches and boots, gathered up his coat and clattered down the stairs.

Samuel emerged from the kitchen, pale, yawning and struggling into his jacket. Fowler clipped him for his slowness. ‘Go straightaway to the guardhouse. Knock up the soldiery and tell them the silk factory’s being put to the torch. Tell them it’s an insurrection. That’ll get ’em moving.’ He unlocked the door. ‘I shall go for the constable. Be quick and quiet and we shall catch the rogues red-handed.’ He pushed the boy outside as Tabitha, holding a candle before her, came to the top of the stairs asking if her silver was safe, Hebe peered out curiously behind her and the maid locked herself into her room and hooked a chair under the handle.

The dust of silk threads fell slowly around the weavers as they stood panting, looking at the wreckage, their ardour spent. ‘You have the note?’ Jervis said. Tobias fumbled in his pocket and drew out the folded paper.

As Samuel stumbled into the street, the sound of a screech owl split the night, not once but twice, and he turned and ran as fast as he could towards the barracks. The sound fell eerily into the silence in the factory. There was a moment’s pause, in which a pile of debris settled, raising a sigh of dust, and then Jervis shouted, ‘We’re discovered, lads! Make haste! Out the back, quick as you can!’

Tobias dropped the note, grabbed up the pickaxe and ran. The men pushed and scrambled their way down the stairs, Jervis bringing up the rear and urging them to be swift and secret and remember their vow. Out in the yard, Tobias hesitated, looking for Saul. The sky was no longer black but fading to an inky blue against which the brightness of the moon began to diminish, telling Tobias that beyond the buildings, over the fields’ horizon, the sun must be drawing its crack of yellow light. He leant against the scullery wall for a moment, his head swimming. The air struck cool against his front and he realised that the whole side of his shirt was soaked with blood where the action of wrecking the machines had opened the wound further.

Saul appeared, looking terrified. ‘Hasten away! The master’s out of his house!’

‘Follow me,’ Jervis ordered, leading them into the deep shadow of the orchard. Bending double under the low branches of mulberry and apple trees they made their way to the back hedge and found a thin place to push through. ‘Now, scatter and don’t look back!’ Jervis said as he counted them through and each took their different ways, melting into the shadows.