The Silk Factory (22 page)

He heaved the knapsack on to his shoulder and softly closed the door behind him.

In the baking July heat, Beulah moved along the rows of mulberry trees quickly picking the leaves from the low, widespread branches and dropping them into a wicker basket. The worms must be fed continuously: thousands of voracious mouths that never stopped chomping and nibbling; they repulsed her.

She was deeply unhappy. She still missed Tobias dreadfully, even if he used to annoy her by walking on ahead and making her run to catch up with him, or by wanting to go to the Blood Tub at the end of the day. At least she’d known he was in the manufactory somewhere if she needed him and, in dire straits, would have protected her from the master. He had written once to Effie, a few months ago, saying that he’d found work with the canal folk, leading the horses and loading and unloading the barges, knowledge which Beulah tried to forget, repeating in her mind whenever the master looked her way, ‘Tobias is gone to London to look for work. We have no word of him.’ The last part was true at least: after the first letter they’d had no further contact and Beulah felt sure that he was making a new life away from danger and wouldn’t be coming back.

As for Effie, Beulah thought that she must be ill. She was all at once like an old person. She seemed always to be tired and crabby and she moved around so slowly, as if dragging a great weight after her. Sometimes, when she thought Beulah wasn’t looking, she rubbed her back as if she was in pain and when she sat down at the table she lowered herself so carefully into the chair that you’d think she was afraid her bones would break. Beulah tried to help her, taking the other end of the heavy washing basket, drawing water or hoeing the vegetable patch. Beneath her love and concern for Effie lurked fear too. She had seen first her mother and then her father taken off, within a year of each other, with the illness that made them cough blood. What if Effie were to be taken too? What would become of her then?

She moved on along the row, picking first from the lower branches and then standing the fruit ladder against the trunk to reach the higher ones and fill her apron. The heart-shaped leaves rustled softly around her, dappling her dress with shade. She wondered, as she did every day, what had become of Hanzi. She always left three eggs for him to find but for weeks now they’d not been taken. Nonetheless, each day she collected them and left new ones in case he returned. Once she had picked up an egg she must have missed, an egg so old that when the cook at the High House broke it, the kitchen was filled with a rotten stink and Beulah had got a slap from Mrs Gundy for her carelessness.

At the back of the plantation of young trees, before you reached what was left of the old orchard – apple, mulberry and pear trees – a new set of holes were being dug. They were meant for the planting of yet more saplings. Beulah watched as a blackbird pulled a worm from the newly turned soil and hopped away, taking the opportunity whilst the labourers were absent to pick up what food it could. A moment’s anxiety assailed her. Had she closed the cellar door securely? Every day the master reminded her that the worms must be protected against vermin: mice, rats, birds; the worms in their open beds would be easy pickings for any climbing or flying creature and all his work and expense on the grand scheme would come to naught. She breathed out a long sigh. Yes, of course she had secured the door; she remembered pushing against it to check it was firm.

The master’s enthusiasm for his new endeavour was absolute. The worms must be fed through both day and night and he had allowed Alice frequent respite from her usual duties in the bobbin-winding shop to instruct and oversee Beulah in the daytime. At night, ever since the breaking of the frames, he had employed a night watchman, whose other duties through the lonely hours were to keep the worms warm and fed. From midsummer’s day, when the small, yellow eggs, stuck to twigs and old cocoons, began to hatch tiny wiggling threads, Beulah had hated them. Now that they had grown to fat, pale caterpillars, the size of her finger, she hated them even more. By August they would be bigger still: the size of the master’s thumb.

It was lonely work. Some days she stole a few words with Biddy and the other children when she helped serve the midday meal, but sometimes she saw no one all day, bar Alice and Mrs Gundy: sour faces and hands ever ready to pinch and shove.

Biddy had told her that the master was more tyrannical than ever in the workshops; that his temper blew at the slightest provocation and that he constantly picked fault with the work of the weavers, rejecting their cloth and docking their pay, demanding they weave the pattern anew although everyone knew he took the cloth nonetheless and sold it with the rest. He came down hard on Walter and Jonas who had taken the place of Tobias and Saul as drawboys and went around muttering about some scheme to get in new apprentices instead and sack the lot of them. He had not, however, replaced the Jacquard machines.

Saul Culley had died from his wound. A sullen hatred for the master filled the factory. As he passed along the lines of workers, the evil eye followed him as soon as his back was turned. Ellis barely hid his hostility but Jervis was a broken man, blaming himself for involving the youngsters in the plot.

No one really knew for sure what had happened to Saul. Some said he had contracted gangrene from the wound, some that he had died from loss of blood during the amputation. The woman who came to lay him out said that the surgeon had ordered her to incinerate the sheets Saul had lain in and that she’d seen they were all burned to holes, as if acid had dripped on to them. There were rumours that Mr Boddington had interviewed both the master and his surgeon for several hours before letting them go and had asked for the sheets in vain. Whatever the truth of the matter, Saul had not talked and on the day of his burial a great gathering of men had followed the coffin to the graveyard and not a dragoon had been seen.

Even despite the frightening rumours and all the tension, Beulah still wished she were back in her old job with the company of the others so that she wouldn’t have to be near the horrible worms, nor be alone with the master.

She climbed down the ladder and tipped the green contents of her apron into the basket. As she pressed the leaves down to make room for more, she heard a noise. ‘Pssst!’ It came again from the direction of the hen house and she left the basket, walked to the end of the row of trees and peered out to see Hanzi peeping round the corner of the shed and beckoning her over.

Beulah hurried across the yard, as if busy on some urgent errand, and found him sitting with his back to the warm planks of the hen house, his legs stretched out before him and wearing a pair of boots that were clearly too big. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked. ‘I thought you’d gone for good.’

Hanzi grinned. ‘We went off to Appleby for the horse fair. Best part of the year!’

‘Appleby? Where’s that?’ The main market for horses in the county was Marefair in Northampton; she’d never heard of this other place.

‘’Tis right up north in Westmorland. All the Romanichal gather at Gallows Hill, outside the town, for the buying and selling of the horses. Almost everyone’s related to everyone else one way or another so ’tis a chance, once a year, to get reacquainted.’

‘How many folk go there then?’ Beulah, with her own small family of Effie and Tobias, couldn’t imagine the size of such a gathering.

‘Hundreds! ’Tis quite a sight to see the celebrations, with the tilted carts and tents covering the hillside and the horses all gleaming from being washed in the river and braided up with ribbons. We sold two cobs and a mule and I got these thrown in.’ He looked admiringly at his boots and gave them a little shine with his sleeve. ‘You look awful thin,’ Hanzi said, casting his eye over her. ‘Have you been ill?’

‘No, but my sister’s not well and the master’s making me look after worms and my brother had to run from the soldiery on account of frame breaking, and without his wage there’s not enough food in the house …’ It all spilt out.

‘Why don’t you take some eggs yourself?’

‘Too fragile to hide on my person,’ she said, ‘and nowhere else to put them.’

He laughed. ‘I’m in the same quandary,’ he said. ‘Having lost my hat.’ He pulled a comic, mournful expression. ‘When I get back with a pocketful of yolk and eggshells, I shall be in bad trouble.’

Beulah thought for a moment and then took her red flannel kerchief from her pocket. ‘Here, you can use this to tie them in,’ she said, ‘but be careful to carry it under your coat; the colour’s bright and could draw eyes to you.’

Hanzi took it from her with a smile and a nod. He dug deep into his own pocket and brought out a handful of mushrooms. ‘Here.’ He shoved them into her hands.

Beulah’s mouth watered at the thought of them fried up in dripping. Quickly, she pushed them inside her dress until they sat above the waistband, squashy against her skin, and retied her apron. She turned to thank him but he held his finger to his lips and signalled that she should go. Only then did she hear Alice’s voice asking Mrs Gundy whereabouts the pest of a child had got to. She ran quickly and slipped back into the trees, emerging near the factory carrying her basket.

Alice scolded her, carefully closing the cellar door behind them and chivvying Beulah down the steps. It was hot down there; the stove was kept constantly alight, for, despite the July day outside, the thick walls let none of the warmth in. Without a fire, it would become cold and damp as a cave and the precious worms would sicken and die. The master had schooled both of them in the signs of pebrine and muscardine fungus, and the dire results for them if they failed to keep the air warm and dry. The pungent aromas of lavender, rosemary and pennyroyal rose to meet them: the floor was strewn with herbs and vinegar to keep the atmosphere of the magnanery smelling sweet. The sound of the roomful of caterpillars eating was that of torrential rain playing on leaves: unceasing, deafening and overwhelming.

Alice, her dress open at the neck and her corset loosened beneath, fed the stove with coal and mopped her brow with the back of a red, chapped hand. ‘Well, what are you standing there for? Get on and feed them!’ she snapped at Beulah, who took up a handful of leaves and began to poke them into the first worm bed at intervals along its length. The tiers of beds were only inches apart, so that her hand hovered horribly close to the worms as she tentatively fed the leaves in. In the murky light from the small high windows, she peered into the trays at the fat oyster-white worms, taking care not to brush against them. If your hand came too near the worms they telescoped their heads and their first few segments back into their bodies so that they swelled out, and rose up menacingly towards your fingers as if they would bite you. Beulah didn’t know if they would bite. They might even be poisonous. She didn’t want to find out.

For the third time that week, she noticed a foul smell coming from one or two of the beds and, looking carefully, found a scattering of worms in each that were black and inert. She beckoned Alice over.

‘Not more! Are you sure you’ve never let the stove out, not even once?’ Alice said in a low voice.

‘I swear.’

‘Nor let them run low on fodder, nor disturbed them with banging the door, or singing, or jangling the fire-irons?’

Beulah shook her head vigorously.

Alice tutted and muttered as she picked out all the dead worms. She added a few more sickly-looking worms to the handful and threw them into the stove, saying, ‘This must be kept from the master. Do you understand?’

Beulah pressed her lips together tight to show she did. They both returned to work, Alice sweeping up the ash around the stove and stacking a new delivery of sacks of coal and kindling beside it, while Beulah went back to feeding the worms.

Moving from tray to tray, engrossed in her careful task, she didn’t hear the master enter and jumped at his voice behind her.

‘Has the girl been silent?’ he asked Alice, for the worms, he had told them, hated noise and she was neither allowed to sing as she carried in the baskets, nor to speak to Alice unless she was spoken to.

‘Yes, and the worms thrive.’

‘The air’s heavy outside and a storm can stop them from eating. If it becomes thunderous later you must take a live piece of coal from the stove with tongs and carry it near to each bed. ’Tis said it calms them and can ward off contagion.’

He walked along the rows of beds, looking into each to check the health of his prized worms and see that Beulah had spread sufficient leaves, until he came level with her and looked over her shoulder. He marked her cautious approach. ‘Would you like to go back to your friends?’ he said in a conversational tone. ‘Do you miss the bobbin shop, Beulah?’

Beulah, slowly and carefully spreading the leaves beneath his gaze, nodded almost imperceptibly.

‘Of course you do. Who wouldn’t rather be with their friends in the light than alone down here in this wormhole? You know, only your own stubbornness keeps you here.’

Beulah’s hand shook a little as she took another handful of leaves but she said nothing.

‘Still naught to tell me, eh? Not a thing brought back to mind that your vandalous brother told you? Nor any word of him?’ He leant closer as if he expected her to whisper a secret to him, his cheek next to hers. Suddenly he reached into the space above the worm bed and took her hand, forcing it to the back and her bare arm down upon the worms so that she cried out at the touch of their cool yielding bodies. He held her arm there and she felt the sickening sensation of the worms moving on her. As they contracted and stretched in their foraging quest, the tickle of their hooks and suckers rippled over her skin. ‘What would you like to tell me?’ he asked again, his breath sour with the smell of old tobacco.