The Silk Factory (36 page)

Rosie was so surprised that all she could say was ‘Oh’. They hadn’t even been to see the school in Streatham yet; how on earth could Sam have got it into his head that he wouldn’t like it? ‘Where do you want to go then?’

‘I want to go to school with Amy.’

‘Aah. I see,’ Rosie said, relieved on one count, for school did seem to hold some attraction, and worried on another, as separating Sam and Amy when they moved was obviously going to be an issue.

Her phone rang downstairs and she said, ‘OK, we’ll talk some more about this another day. Night night, chump-chop.’ She kissed him and tucked the duvet up to his chin before running downstairs.

She caught her breath and fished her phone out of her bag but she was just too late. Looking at the number, she didn’t recognise it. She put the phone down and started to stack up the plates from teatime and take them over to the sink. A minute later the phone rang again. She dumped the plates with a clatter, wiped her hands on her jeans and took the call.

‘Hello, yes?’

‘It’s Tom Marriott here. I wondered if you got the letter about your settlement all right?’ he said in a cheery voice.

Rosie was puzzled, wondering why he was ringing out of working hours and, more to the point, when he had handed the case over to someone else. ‘Yes, thanks. I did ring and thank Mr Douglas, actually,’ she said rather stiffly.

‘Oh, right,’ he said. He recovered his stride. ‘Well, I was just ringing to see if I could take you out to lunch to celebrate, maybe some time next week?’

Rosie thought this rather cheeky considering he’d dropped the case. Surely if she celebrated with anyone it should be with the man who’d done the work, although the thought of having lunch with the ancient Mr Douglas with his droopy moustache and clipped manner seemed unappealing, and also very odd. ‘Do you do this for all your clients?’

‘Well, no …’ He sounded amused.

‘Well then.’

‘You’re a hard woman, Rosie Milford! If you don’t want to celebrate your good news, how about joining me to celebrate mine? I’ve finally got my own flat again so I’m out of my mum’s and Viv’s hair at last.’

Rosie was puzzled.

He went on, ‘I’m not sure how much help I was there, really; I’m all fingers and thumbs with babies. David’s back now anyhow.’

‘Who’s David?’ she said in confusion.

‘Oh, sorry, he’s my brother-in-law. He works overseas; that’s why my sister was staying at Mum’s for a while to get a bit of help from us with the baby.’

Sister! Rosie did a mental double-take. So the baby stuff he’d bought at the supermarket had been for his niece, not his daughter, and the Christmas card … well
of course
that was only from him – he wasn’t married.
He wasn’t married.
A sudden burst of excitement at the possibilities warred with crushing embarrassment at the way she’d behaved. Whatever must he have thought about her frostiness?

Her silence had lasted so long that he began again. ‘Look, I know you probably felt let down when I transferred the case. The truth is I wanted to ask you to have lunch with me but I didn’t feel I could while I was acting for you – you know, fraternising with a client, ethics and all that – and then when I told you Mr Douglas was taking over and I walked you to your car, you seemed so cross I couldn’t get out what I wanted to say so I just stood there like an idiot and watched you drive away.’ He paused. ‘Are you still angry?’

Rosie, who found she was holding her breath, gasped, ‘No.’

There was a moment’s silence in which Rosie felt he might be smiling. ‘So, will you have lunch with me to celebrate my new flat?’

‘Like a date …’

‘Yes.’ He was definitely smiling. ‘So like a date, in fact, that it’ll be exactly that.’

‘Sorry, I’m a bit out of practice.’ Why on earth had she said ‘like a date’? She sounded about fourteen. She felt about fourteen, she thought ruefully. ‘Um, where did you have in mind?’

‘Say, La Pergola, on Friday? One o’clock?’

‘That would be lovely,’ she said, slipping back into adult politeness. They said their goodbyes and she hung up.

Blimey. A date. With Tom Marriott of the crinkly eyes and the gallant manners. She sat down on a kitchen chair and ran through her itinerary for the week ahead. Could she get into town to get a new top, or maybe a dress? And perhaps get her hair cut – it was a bit dry and frazzled-looking at the ends. Maybe there was a good side to feeling like a teenager; she hadn’t felt this bubbling, lifted feeling, this fizzing excitement, for years. It was nice. Even if it came to nothing, it felt good.

A young woman stands at a gate on the ridge, looking out over the village of Weedon Royal. Her skin is as brown as a cobnut and she is dressed in the gypsy fashion: her skirt above the ankles and her boots laced tight, the better for running when there’s the need. Her clothes are ragged at wrists and hem and a triangle of blue cloth is tied over her hair, which is braided and hangs down her back.

On the other side of the valley, the barracks and arsenal rise from the water meadows in redbrick, foursquare solidity: angular blocks at odds with the soft rounds of trees on the slope below. They impose upon the landscape, a physical expression of power: storehouses of potential destruction filled with soldier after soldier, thousands of muskets, and barrel after barrel of powder.

Below them, the village lies in a pool of early-morning mist. The slate roofs of the taller buildings float above it like open books laid face down and the church tower is truncated to a dumpy lookout post.

The young woman, Beulah, is searching for one roof, one particular building. The mist changes the topography; the houses no longer huddled and crowded together. There is white space between the occasional buildings that rear through it, so that bearings are lost. Nonetheless, despite this and the lapse of years, once she finds the long straight run of the roof of a three-storey building she instantly knows it for the silk factory. She leans her elbows on the bar of the gate, which is coarse-grained with pale green lichen, and looks out over the place that haunts her, remembering …

She can hear the clack and clatter of the looms that seemed to vibrate the very bricks and timbers of the place. The smell of the cellar, the sweet, musty scent of herbs barely overlaying the odour of rot, is in her nostrils, and the feel of Fowler’s grip as he shoved her against the wall is on her flesh. Sliding to the ground, she had cowered down; her hands travelling over the brick floor, feeling for the metallic scrape of the scissors and then grasping them. In terror, she saw the Master’s intention in his eyes as he turned the whip around and knew she had but a moment to act.

As he covered her mouth she brought the scissors down upon his forearm with all her force. He cried out and let his hand drop. In the second that he stood staring at his arm in stupefaction, she scrambled away from him and was at the cellar steps before he had dashed the scissors to the ground, and up them before he had roared after her, clutching his wound and bellowing like the very devil. Then she was out, out into the bright sunlight and running for her life, past the carpenter’s shed, past the end of the building, round the corner to the street where a cart was pulling away, and on, to the road out of the village.

She ran uphill until her mouth tasted full of salt and she felt her chest would burst. She crouched over with her hands on her knees, gasping until she got back her breath, and then slipped through a field gate and ran again, heading across country to home and to Effie, who would know what to do.

There were men at the cottage. She hid in the hedge at the back of the house, watching one hammering boards across the windows and another catching the hens. When he caught one, he held it upside down by the feet. The man examined each bird, pulling its wings wide and prodding its breast. He shoved some, squawking, into a crate and pulled the necks of others with a sharp twist and a snap and then dropped them, limp, into a sack. She thought of Alice holding up the baby and saying, ‘There’s no life in it,’ and felt sick.

She stayed under the hedge, curled up tight with her arms around her knees. She was afraid of what might happen, with the men there, if Effie came back. She wondered if Effie had already returned and was hiding in the house and would be trapped there. At last, the other man stopped hammering and put his tools into his belt. The two of them went off together, one carrying the crate and the other with the sack over his shoulder, chatting amicably as if this ruin of her home, her life, was all in a day’s work. Their voices faded away down the lane. She waited, shivering, until it was utterly silent and then a little longer until the sounds of the songbirds returned, before coming out.

As she crept down the path alongside the washing that hung all haphazardly from the line, her steps raised tiny white feathers from the ground. They floated around her and fell again to catch in the glistening grass. She went to every boarded window, tapping and calling, ‘Effie! Effie! It’s only me, Beulah,’ but there was no answer. She called louder through a crack in the planks across the door, ‘Are you in there? It’s safe now – they’ve gone!’ The evening settled back to stillness, the peaceful murmuring of the doves in the hawthorn thicket at odds with the scene of desolation.

She sat on the doorstep and, after a while, played a game, idly throwing pebbles at a gap between the slats of the gate. She waited and waited. The air began to cool and she started to be afraid of night coming. She got to thinking that Effie must have been caught. She knew that having a baby without being wed could mean you were sent to gaol. The thought of being locked up made her mortal afeared. What if they were to come for her too? She didn’t want to stay there, with the bats flitting around the eaves and an owl calling from the thicket, wondering all night if every squeak or crackle was the creak of a horse’s harness or the rustle of a man’s coat. There was no one to go to. Tobias was lost to her and she could go to no one at the factory for fear that the master would hear of it and find her; in any case, Biddy would have less idea what to do than she did. But soon she would lose the light … She hesitated and then decided. She would go to find Hanzi at Castle Dykes.

She shakes herself and narrows her eyes against the eastern sun, focusing on the long roof, glistening with dew, filling in from her memory the tall walls and rows of windows below, the scullery door and the pigsty beyond.

Beneath the mist, somewhere in the rows of trees behind the building, is a tree with a baby in its roots. In her dreams, the cage of its ribs is laced with curled taproots like two clenched hands. Its skull is a hollow cup, small as a bird’s nest, and its finger bones are tiny sticks adrift in a sea of earth. Always it calls to her: from the ashes of campfires, from the gnat-filled shade beneath the trees where the horses are tethered, from the empty moors with their desolate spaces; and in the small hours its crying rouses her so that she thinks her own children have woken.

None of the others wanted to come back here. Over the last ten years, every time their meandering route has passed within fifty miles of this place she has asked Hanzi to help her persuade them to make camp at Castle Dykes.
Just once, just to let me search for my sister,
she has said every time:
please, Hanzi … I can’t rest … if you love me …
She has worn him down. Despite his concern that only bad will come of it, this time he stood beside her while she told the others that she must go back. He bore witness to the nightmares that afflict her and the sadness that sometimes fills her until she feels she is drowning in it. He can see that she has no peace.

Yesterday, when they pulled into the clearing, the sign she had left for Effie was gone – but then so was the wood store, tumbled and rotted by wind and weather. She had hurried back to the cottage, in the forlorn hope that there might be some message, some indication that Effie had been back there, but she found the place derelict. The boards had been stripped from it, the planks jemmied off and even the door wrenched from its hinges, all taken for firewood. The windows were smashed and the rooms full of damp and beetles. The roof of the neighbouring cottage was completely fallen in, the gable end pointing emptily at the sky.

On the road to the village, a woman she didn’t recognise came out from the farm, with two barking dogs on rope leashes. She took one look at her gypsy clothes and threatened to set the dogs on her. Beulah turned back and hurried away.

‘’Tis too dangerous,’ Hanzi said. ‘We leave tomorrow. Early.’

There is not much time. She has crept away from the camp, and come here at first light before even the ploughboys are up, to look over the valley and think of Effie and of the baby and be sorry.

Sometimes she imagines finding Effie again, how they would fall on each other’s necks and weep with joy after all these years. Yet always in this daydream, as they step apart, Effie looks at her with a face turned to sorrow and asks her, ‘Where is my baby?’ And what can she say in reply? That she buried a living child deep in the ground and fled … That she was too afraid to save him? She has done a wickedness that cannot be undone.

‘Where can I go to mourn?’ Effie’s sad face asks her and there is no cross or stone to show her. There is not even a small mound outside a churchyard wall to take her to, in the line where other infants lie, who died without a father’s name or words said over them by priest or parson. There is no marker save a tree, the same as any other in the row. Now, she could not even tell which tree it was. So she has come to stand in this place despite the horror of the memories of the cellar, Fowler, her terrified flight – drawn back to gaze at the scene of her sin, a penitent who can find no rest.

Hanzi tries to help her. When she wakes from a bad dream, shaking and cold, he puts their youngest in her arms and tucks the blanket tight around them all. He doesn’t understand that since she has had her own children it has brought home to her the enormity of what she did. Sometimes, in the evenings, while the others drink and sing, she can do nothing but stare into the flames of the fire. When she’s asked why she’s silent she says that she thinks of her family scattered to the four winds and a child who should never have been lost.

Hanzi says, ‘We have our own family now.’

And she should listen, she knows. There are joys in this life: Hanzi, her children, the woods and moors and mountains she’s seen, and familiar, known faces around a campfire in the midst of a wilderness. She knows that, alone, fending for herself, she would founder: soon taken into the House of Correction as a vagrant; but within her clan she’s stronger. One man cannot arrest the whole band of them and, at the first sign of trouble, fleet and secret, they move on. She couldn’t bear to live within four walls now; she’d find it stultifying, oppressive; she prefers the scatter of stars across the black triangle of the open tent flap, the smell of woodsmoke and the hiss of the fire.

It is a difficult life though, and she is often afraid. She is afraid when she goes out before dawn to milk a farmer’s cow, creeping into the field, whispering to the beast and warming her hands on its flank. Each time they enter a new village she is afraid: of the barking dogs, of the taunts and jeers and of being spat upon and called pikey and rumney and gypsy’s whore.

It
is
a hard life but she wouldn’t change it. At least she can smell the clean air, feel the sun on her face and move through God’s good earth. A gypsy’s fears and hardships are transitory: thrown stones can be dodged, cold and hunger come and go with the seasons and can sometimes be cheated with guile and light fingers. It’s not like the constant grinding hardship and fear of the factory worker, where every slip may bring a blow, and a word spoken out of turn may mean dismissal and the workhouse.

She knows that masters such as Fowler exist in almost every mill and workshop. She’s heard of children found hiding in the stores, too exhausted to go home, being whipped by the overseer where they lay, of beatings with a wetted strap and indecent liberties taken with the bigger girls. Stories are shared at Appleby, where the gypsies gather, offered up by other runaways: masters who would take girls by the hair with one hand and slap them with the other – big or little, it made no difference; and boy apprentices hung by tied hands from a cross-beam, and left there.

When she thinks of the great body of humanity she knows that most of it is poor, starved, ragged and dirty, while the few live on their lifeblood as surely as ticks live on a sheep. To the masters, men are become only parts of their machines. They don’t consider them human beings, but have shrunk them to merely ‘hands’; they are reduced simply to their useful working parts. Her father used to tell her of the days of his childhood, when a man could live off the common land or ply his trade and be beholden to no one and independent in his views. Now men are no better than slaves: to an overseer, to the clock, to the moving parts of a machine. Never again will anyone have such power over her. Being an outcast is the price she has to pay for that freedom but she pays it gladly. She will never again call anyone master.

She gazes, snow-blind, at the fog that laps the roof of the silk factory. Somewhere beneath the mist, the dark wet trunks of the mulberry trees are pillars in the vapour; droplets form on leaves and twigs to gather and drip into the white silence. She knows that, forever, she will dream this place, her spirit drawn to that of the buried child. She has no way of making amends and the past will never give her rest. This is her burden and she must bear it.

It is growing late but still she stands motionless, a dark silhouette high above the milky valley.