The Silk Factory (30 page)

She shook her shoulders and turned the memory away; she must think logically and think hard. If the visitations happened when she became distressed,
because
she was distressed, then allowing herself to become disturbed was like opening a door to let the girl in. It was what mediums claimed to do when they contacted the spirits of the dead. What was the word?… Channelling. She had been opening a channel for something
other
, someone else’s loss or trauma, to move through, creating a space in which it could exist. She mustn’t let the channel open. She must take control of her feelings and shut the girl out. She told herself that as long as she didn’t buckle under her emotions, didn’t let the channel open, then nothing could happen.

If sadness over Mum or Lily were to assail her she would have to block it out, force her thoughts towards the future, make plans in her head, anything to keep herself calm and focused. Oh God, even this passing thought of Mum and Lily made her feel weepy. How on earth was she going to cope? She just had to, for the kids’ sake, that was all. She hugged Sam harder and put her other arm around Cara, gathering them in. Come on, think of something else, make a list in your head.
Get an electrician in to rewire upstairs, then a plasterer, then I can decorate,
she rehearsed. Her jaw felt tight from trying not to cry.
Get the cellar cleared out
, she thought grimly,
that’s top priority,
then tackle the garden
.
Press on regardless.
Finish what you’ve started
. That’s how Mum would have acted: got on with it, had the strength of character to endure in silence and shut her feelings away. Wasn’t that what Mum had done about Lily, for her sake? She’d kept silence about her lost child, carried the weight of her grief inside, so that Rosie could have a childhood: tranquil, innocent, protected. Her heart went out to her mother. How her memories must have risen up and followed her, a child trailing behind her reaching out to take her hand. She thought: Everyone who’s ever lost someone is haunted.

Effie lay sleeping on a low wooden bed with a thin rag mattress, one of a row of such beds that lined the walls of a long, whitewashed room. The windows, low under sloping eaves, spilled bright unforgiving light across the bare boards, and the heat, trapped in the attic room beneath the thick thatched roof, was oppressive.

An old woman in a brown grogram dress and a plain mob cap, sat beside the bed. At her elbow a table was strewn with the accoutrements of the sick room: a bowl of water with a cloth for cooling a fever, a cracked china cup with the dregs of an infusion of yarrow which gave off a musty sickly smell, and a basin and blade for bloodletting. The woman’s eyes seemed to droop in sleep but her hand moved idly every now and then to flap away a bluebottle, its buzzing loud and irritating in the quiet room.

Effie stirred and opened her eyes, at first following the random movements of the fly and then taking in the bed, the room and the woman beside her. ‘What is this place?’ she said slowly, her tongue thick in her mouth and her throat dry.

‘Why, ’tis the parish workhouse where you’ve been these past three days with childbed fever. But now it has passed, praise the Lord,’ the old woman said with equanimity.

Effie sucked in her breath as her loss came back to her, a longing that was a physical ache at her core. At the thought of her baby, her body responded and her breasts began to leak milk. The memory of how she had come here returned: her after-pains as she lay amongst the bundles of kindling in the bumping cart; her error in foolishly showing the carter her purse without thinking, so that he took all her money; sitting, bent double, in the porch of the workhouse while the gatekeeper went for a girl to help her inside. The women’s overseer, Mrs Smedley, an exceedingly plain, buxom woman in a stiffly starched dress, had asked her questions and written her answers in a book. Surely she had told her nothing of the baby; she’d simply said that she couldn’t pay her rent, hadn’t she? She had said that she’d been evicted and had nowhere else to go and remembered watching with relief as the woman had written under Cause of Admission
Vagrancy,
rather than
Disgraced Woman.

She placed her hand upon her belly, wincing at its tenderness. It was soft now, the flesh loose, but it was still big, still rounded. This woman had cared for her and had dressed her in this rough nightgown; of course, she would know the truth. ‘Did the doctor have to come? Does anyone else beside yourself know?’ she asked anxiously.

‘In your fever you drew close to your Maker. ’Twas a near thing. The doctor promised he would say nothing unless you passed over, when he would have to record the death as puerperal fever,’ she said, her expression sombre. ‘’Twas not the doctor that exposed you but one of the Board of Guardians, the farmers and businessmen who oversee us here.’

Effie groaned. She had hoped that Hob’s anger would play itself out; instead it had found vent in malice. Now she would be marked and Beulah along with her. ‘Where’s Beulah? Can she be brought to me?’ She had heard that families were separated here, men and women segregated, husband from wife, children afforded only an ‘interview’ of a few minutes each day with their mothers. Who knew whether sisters were allowed to be together?

‘There’s no Beulah here.’

‘You must be mistaken. My sister – Beulah? She’s nine years old. She would have come later in the day.’

The old woman said again, ‘No girl called Beulah. There are no more’n thirty of us here and I know every one.’

Effie struggled to sit up, her muscles weak as water. She had asked Alice to tell Beulah to come to the workhouse in Newnham village as soon as she finished her shift and impressed on her the need to reassure Beulah that she would be waiting for her there. Had she failed to keep her promise? What if Alice hadn’t told Beulah where to come? A cold dread seized her. Beulah would have gone home to find it boarded up and deserted and her Effie gone! Where would she have gone for help: a child, afraid of Hob Talbot, afraid of Fowler, with no adult she trusted and no one to ask for help? She grasped the old woman’s wrist. ‘How long did you say I’ve passed in fever?’

‘This last three days. You kept calling out for someone called Jack – your young man, I take it. Then yesterday, after the crisis, you fell into a deathly slumber and couldn’t be roused. Last night there was a terrible storm but you slept on and heard not a thing.’

Effie pushed back the bedclothes and with wobbly legs set her bare feet on the floor. ‘I have to find her.’ She struggled to her feet and the woman jumped up, her chair grating on the boards, and took her arm to steady her as she swayed.

‘You’re not strong enough. You’re half-starved.’

With a moan, Effie put her hand on to the bed and allowed herself to be slowly lowered down.

The woman said, ‘Wait. Rest. I’ll find out if anyone has been turned away. I’ll return soon.’

Effie slumped back against the pillows. The trapped fly buzzed in the pane beside her. She tried to think as Beulah would. Perhaps she would be too afraid to go far from home. Perhaps she would have slept in the derelict cottage adjoining their own, or maybe the hen house. Could she send someone to see?

The old woman returned with a cup of small ale and a bowl of milk potage. She put them down on the table as Effie gabbled her request.

‘I fear I cannot,’ she said. ‘Nor the others neither, for if you leave without permission you risk losing your place and may not be readmitted. You have to ask well in advance and are rarely granted permission unless ’tis to look for work.’

Effie took the cup from her and drank deeply. The woman put her hand on her arm. ‘Slower. Your stomach has been empty too long. Drink and eat slowly or you’ll vomit and lose all.’ She took up the bowl of sops and began to feed Effie small spoonfuls. ‘Like this,’ she said. ‘You should rest awhile and I will think if anything can be done.’

‘What are you called?’ Effie asked. ‘I don’t know you from hereabouts.’

‘Mary-Anne Ryland is my name. You wouldn’t know me, for it would have been before you were born when I came here and I’ve been here ever since.’

‘Thank you for your kindness, Mary-Anne,’ Effie said gravely. The thought that some were inmates at the workhouse for twenty years and more scared her but she kept it hid.

When Mary-Anne took the dishes away, Effie, moving slowly and carefully, looked for her clothes. They were neither at the end of the bed nor under it. Nor were there any garments in the room other than calico nightgowns like hers, each neatly folded on the pillows of the other beds.

Feeling a little stronger for the food and with heart put into her by the ale, she knelt down at one of the windows and looked out over the yard at the rear of the building. It was divided down the middle by a high brick wall. On one side, the men, stripped to the waist, were crushing gypsum for plaster-making. Their skin and hair were powdered white but she recognised one of them as the blacksmith who had lost his business when a shard of metal had lodged in his eye. He had been a strong wiry man but now his sloping shoulders and stooping gait spoke of frailty beyond his years. Another, she saw, was old George Turnbull, who’d lived in a shack in the woods and was reputed to have drunk himself into insensibility so many times that his brain had become dulled. The master, Mr Smedley, stood off a little way, barking instructions, at a distance sufficient to protect his dark jacket from the dust.

On the other side of the wall the women, dressed in the same uniform brown as Mary-Anne, sat on low stools bent over some close work that Effie could not make out, surrounded by baskets and hanks of rope. She recognised several: Agnes Barnwell, whose sailor husband had never returned, Sarah Nevin who had been gaoled more than once for drunkenness and the simpleton Mariah Slade with her wide, flat face and narrow eyes. Across the far end of both halves of the yard lay a hedge, beyond which a group of children were hoeing a vegetable garden. Two ancient women sat in the scant shade of an elder bush, keeping an eye on the children while knitting stockings. Behind the ordered rows of the kitchen garden lay an orchard of apple and pear trees, heavy with fruit.

Mary-Anne returned carrying a pair of heavy work boots in her hand and over her arm a coarse-spun petticoat, a plain grey shawl and a dress that had yellow and black stripes sewn upon the bodice. Effie eyed the waspish garment with apprehension. ‘Why is it different from the other women’s dress?’ she asked, although in her heart she already knew the answer.

‘I’m sorry to say it but ’tis to mark you out as fallen,’ Mary-Anne said. ‘’Tis meant to shame you, and warn others against you so that they will avoid you to keep their own reputations.’

‘Will no one even speak to me then?’

‘’Tis not such a loss,’ she said gently. ‘We work and eat in silence in any case. ’Tis only in the evenings there’s any chance to converse.’ She helped Effie out of the nightgown and into the ill-fitting clothes.

‘You will still speak to me, won’t you?’ Effie said.

‘Aye,’ Mary-Anne said, doing up the buttons at Effie’s cuffs. ‘I’ve nursed you from death’s door; I’ll not abandon you now.’ She gave a tiny smile. ‘Besides, I’m beyond worrying about my reputation.’ She turned Effie towards her by the shoulders and looked at the effect of the garish dress. ‘You must cover yourself with the shawl, in spite of the heat, or all will know you come from the workhouse. There’s a back way out I can show you,’ she continued. ‘If asked, I shall say you are still recovering and need rest. No one is allowed in the sleeping quarters until after evening prayers so they’ll not know any different. You must be back by eight o’clock though, mind.’

Effie squeezed her hand in gratitude. She quickly put on the boots and followed Mary-Anne, wrapping the shawl around her.

The cottage already had the sad air of desertion. Rough boards were nailed across the window and the door, so that the expression of the house was hidden, like eyes closed in sleep. After the storm, the air was humid and a vegetable smell rose from the garden. Clothes still hung from the line, wet and draggled, and the wind had loosened the corner of a sheet from its peg so that it lay half upon the ground. The hen house was empty: the hens and even the remains of their grain had been taken. Inside the neighbouring cottage there was no tell-tale gathering of bracken for a bed nor remains of food, only shards of broken glass and pigeon droppings spattering the ground and clumps of weeds that had taken root in the earth floor. No sign of Beulah anywhere.

Her alarm growing, Effie picked up one of the pieces of glass and returned to the front door of their old cottage. On the boards she scratched out a message in angular, capital letters.

She went to the well and drew up a bucket from which she drank and then washed her face and hands until she felt cooler. Now she would need to walk to Weedon Royal and make enquiries there. The weight in her heart dragged upon her as she thought of what had happened there and her lost baby. Beulah was too young to have witnessed a birth, far less dealt with a stillborn infant; she must have been terrified by the glimpse into such an adult world. Perhaps she had gone home at the end of the day with one of the other children, maybe Biddy? Even if Alice had told her to go to the workhouse, Effie knew that she would have been afraid. God knows she had dinned it into both Beulah and Tobias that it was to be avoided at all costs, that it was viewed by all as a place of shame, even though its punishment was for the guiltless crime of simply being poor.

Effie reached the silk factory as the afternoon drew to a close. Overawed by the shiny black paint and brass knocker of the main entrance, she loitered in the street, further down, waiting for someone to come out. At length, Mrs Gundy came round the corner from the back, bearing the basket of eggs to take to the cook at the High House, and Effie stopped her. Mrs Gundy told her that Beulah had not been seen for three days and that as a result she had been caused great inconvenience by the lack of a scullery maid. Effie, her misgivings multiplying, asked her to fetch Biddy out to see her.