The Silk Factory (37 page)

Rosie sits at the table in the room on the top floor, sketching out a mountain scene with Buddhist pilgrims climbing a winding road to a cloudy summit. She is happy, her consciousness hovering between the airy room, with its high ceiling and white walls, and the peaks and waterfalls forming in fluid lines of ink on the creamy cartridge paper. She is aware of both worlds, suspended between them in the half-trance state of creation. Something is forming in the back of her mind, something indeterminate between thought and feeling, so that she’s not even sure if it relates to art or life.

She has heard a sculptor say that the figure he creates exists already within the block of stone and what he does is to find it: to chip away what is extraneous and liberate it. Her own work often feels like this, a search, through the movement of her hand, for the shape of an inner vision already complete, but the feeling she has today is more expansive; the joy she feels in painting is part of something bigger, more momentous.

A sparrow lands in a flutter on the windowsill in front of her and she looks up and is distracted. It’s no good forcing such things, in any case; whatever the insight is, it will come in its own good time. The bird is a little ball, its feathers fluffed out against the cold. The breeze lifts and parts them. The sky is a bright, clear blue and the sun has melted the frost away in all but the shadiest corners. She rests her chin on her hands and looks down on the garden.

Where once there was waist-high undergrowth, there is now fresh, newly laid turf. She has cleared a path to the back gate, and the last of the brambles and bindweed is in the incinerator waiting to be burnt. She’s worked hard, the last few days, and now the garden looks twice its old size. Sam loves to play in the sunny open patch at the bottom, where she’s chalked a goalmouth on the fence. She’s pleased with the result of her labours, only … Underneath the spreading arms of the mulberry tree, the shade is still gloomy and the grass looks bare and cheerless. She thinks, I could plant bulbs but they wouldn’t flower until after we’ve gone back to London.

She wishes that her mother could have seen the garden cleared. It would have given her pleasure, perhaps reminded her of how it used to look when they first lived here. They could have replanted the borders together. Her eyes well up and she blinks and reaches to touch her mum’s glasses, always kept on the desk in front of her, amongst her ink bottles. She runs her finger around their tortoiseshell rims, experiencing the familiar pain of loss.

As if her mother is answering a question she’s not even aware she’s framed, an idea comes. Snowdrops! Her mother always said that they do better if you plant them not as dry bulbs but ‘in the green’, as grown plants. She’d had clumps of them growing in the shade of the hedge at the cottage in Somerset; they were one of her favourite flowers. Rosie imagines how they would brighten the ground beneath the old mulberry tree. They would glimmer beautifully against the shaded grass and bring movement to its sombre stillness as the wind shook them.

The idea has hold of her now: she will plant them in memory of Mum, and Lily. A memorial garden. She screws on the lids of the inkpots and washes her brushes automatically, calculating how long she has before she needs to set off to pick up the children from Josh, how long it will take her to get to and from the garden centre and to do the planting, already knowing that she must do this, that it must be today, that it just feels
right
. She hurries downstairs to gather up her coat and keys.

One by one, she carries the trays of flowerpots from the car and places them in the half-shade at the edge of the mulberry tree. There’s no breeze so before she starts she puts a match to the firelighters in the bottom of the incinerator, poking it through the hole in the side. There’s a paraffin smell and flames lick up the sides of the white blocks, catch on dry grass and begin to sizzle through the bundled undergrowth. She stands watching for a while as the weeds curl and shrivel, spitting and crackling, but she doesn’t hold her cold hands to the warmth. The fire is about ritual, not comfort. It is a cleansing, the burning away of old things, making way for the new. Yellow flames shoot from the funnel in the lid, flickering and hazing the air above it, the fence behind wavering out of true.

Rosie gathers her tools and a kneeling pad and stoops in under the low branches, pulling one of the trays in after her. She cuts a cross in the turf, peels it back and digs a hole three inches deep, then more holes, each a few inches apart. After sprinkling a little sharp sand into each, she tucks in small groups of plants, tenderly patting the turf up to the stems. She works methodically but to a carefully random pattern. Thinking of Lily, she doesn’t want the drifts of flowers arranged in waves – she cannot have them foaming across the grass to break on the trunk of the tree. She aims instead for rounded shapes, tries to think of pillows, rest, peaceful sleep.

Sitting back on her heels, she touches a flower, lifting its drooping head with her forefinger. She remembers how her mother used to say that a snowdrop is like three drops of milk hanging from a stem and sees that this is true. Her mother’s voice is in her head, ‘Galanthus,’ she says. ‘It means milk-white flowers. My grandmother used to say that her great-great-grandmother was a snowdrop picker … that’s not a job you hear of any more …’

Rosie wonders if this ancestor too came from these parts. How far back had the family lived around here? She thinks about the nuttery over at Newnham, where snowdrops used to be harvested right up to the 1920s. She’s read about it somewhere. It stuck in her mind that the flowers were laid in boxes between layers of blue tissue paper and sent up to Covent Garden. Maybe, way back in the nineteenth century, that’s where she’d worked as a picker. How strange to think of all those forebears living in one small corner of a county, generation after generation; perhaps she and her mother had even been the first to break away. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to think of going back to London or of someone else living here. The house and garden have come to mean something to her, to be part of her history – and May is here. The place and May are all she has left to connect her to her family origins, to give her a sense of belonging. ‘My native place,’ that’s what Mum had called it, as though her life had grown from here and was rooted in its soil.

Belonging. After all the ache of loss, it is what she craves the most. It isn’t only that she’s found a close friend in Tally, or that she chats with people in the street, has joined a book group, talks to other mums outside playgroup, or even that she wants to know Tom Marriott better, although all these things are important. It’s about having a place in the world that means something to her.

She returns to her digging, but slowly, thoughtfully.

Although she doesn’t pray, she feels each plant that she sets in place is a kind of blessing. Mum, Lily, oh my lost ones, she thinks, how I love you and miss you. You are my family, my flesh and blood. She thinks of the strength of the tie of blood: the thread that still joins her to Lily and to their mother, the web stretching backwards to people unknown who yet form part of her, and forwards through Sam and Cara to those she will never know, yet of whom she will be a part. As she plants, the insight that she has felt just beyond her reach all day begins to crystallise: a slow, satisfying realisation. She is going to stay.

On her knees, she works on steadily, leaning forward under the low branches, reaching right under the branch with the rusty iron stake into all the darkest frost-dampened corners. Tiny pieces of bark catch in her hair.

As she reaches the trunk, about to continue around it and beyond, it is as if she’s rolling back the shade. Behind her it is punctuated with glimmering, waxy-petalled light but before her the shadow seems deeper, as if something has been gathered in: an intensification of shade and stillness … and something else … a sense of someone waiting. She forces herself not to think about the girl, fights to block out the image of her crouching here,
right here
, elbow-deep in weeds as Rosie looked down, months ago, from the top-storey window and felt afraid.

Instead, she rehearses what she knows about snowdrops. ‘Moly,’ she says to herself sternly. ‘The classical name for the snowdrop is moly. It was given to Odysseus to make him immune to the poisons of the witch, Circe.’ It occurs to her that the witch’s potion was to make captured sailors forget their homes and loved ones.
An antidote to forgetfulness
.
It’s the perfect flower for a memorial.

On her knees, Rosie cuts and digs. She sprinkles and plants. Behind her, something in the fire burns through and gives way, making her jump. The ashes settle with a sigh. After the sound, the stillness is heavy, the silence pregnant, as if she’s being watched by someone who is waiting to speak. She carries on, pushing forward into the icy cold. She is going to do it, come what may. She is going to finish the job.

At the far edge of the tree’s canopy she plants the last clumps of flowers in a broad swathe of white. She stumbles stiffly to her feet and steps back to look at her work. The fire has burned out and it is perfectly quiet. Beneath the tangled branches with their gnarled shapes and peeling bark, drifts of white flowers, each one new, smooth, perfect, reflect the light.

A breeze seems to pass through the garden, shaking the flowers, a shiver running through them, as if brushed by someone’s skirt. The movement flows towards her yet Rosie feels no rushing draught upon her face or hands, only the slightest disturbance of the air, as if someone has passed her, close enough to touch.

The flowers are still again, each delicate head drooping, and yet the sense of stillness has subtly shifted. It is no longer expectant but peaceful. Rosie feels it in her bones: something has departed.

Together with a great deal of walking in and around the village of Weedon Bec, studying the following books and articles helped me to imagine the world of silk weavers, soldiers and snowdrop-pickers in 1812:

The White Slaves of England, compiled from Official Documents
by John C. Cobden 1853

The Silk Industry
by Sarah Bush (2009)

The Story of Silk
by Dr. John Feltwell (1990)

The Silk Industry of the United Kingdom, its origin and development
by Sir Frank Warner (1921)

The Luddite Rebellion
by Brian Bailey (1998)

A Dorset Soldier - The Autobiography of Sgt William Lawrence 1790 -1869
Ed. Eileen Hathaway (1993)

A Postcard from Weedon Bec
by Julia Johns, Weedon Bec History Society (2004)

Weedon Royal Ordnance Depot Revisited
by J.E. King, Weedon Bec History Society (1996)

Storehouse Enclosure, royal Ordnance Depot, Weedon Bec, Conservation Plan Vol II Gazeteer
by Liv Gibbs. The Historic Environment Consultancy Adopted 2005

The Inhuman Taskmaster - A story of Weedon Bec
– an article by Victor A. Hatley.

Like Dew before the Sun - Life and Language in Northamptonshire
by Dorothy A. Grimes (1991)

Workhouses of the Midlands
by Peter Higginbotham (2007)

I am also indebted to the staff of The Silk Mill museum in Derby and Whitchurch Silk Mill in Hampshire,
for their patience in answering my many questions and for showing me the operation of looms and other machines.

In researching the idea of residual haunting (the Stone Tape Theory) I was grateful for the following articles:
www.parascience.org.uk/articles/musings.htm
,
wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Tape
and
wiki/Apparitional_experience
,
Recording Ghosts
at
assap.ac.uk/newsite/articles
,
forensic-architecture.org/lexicon/stone-tape-theory
and
What kind of Person sees Ghosts?
at
patheos.com/blogs/epiphenom
.

In addition, heartfelt thanks are due to my editor, Katie Espiner, for her perceptive comments and suggestions, expert advice and invaluable support, to my agent, Laura Longrigg for her solid belief in my books and for all her efforts on my behalf, also Cassie Browne, Charlotte Cray, Richenda Todd, Linda Joyce, Charlotte Abrams-Simpson and Ann Bissell at HarperCollins, for helping to produce this beautiful book and bring it to its readers; Lucy Anderson and Pat Kent for their good company through many long days at the library; Janet Lambdon, Lynne Jennings, Katie Hill, Susan Foley, Diana Wingrove Owen and Susie Freer for cheering me on, and my family, near and far, for their unstinting encouragement, in particular my husband, Spencer, my son and daughter, James and Lottie, my sister Louise Gillard Owen, my father, Peter Gillard, and lastly, my mother, Isabel Gillard who, though sadly no longer with us, still buoys me up through the legacy of her faith in my writing.

Judith Allnatt is the acclaimed author of
A Mile of River,
a Radio Five Live Book of the Month,
The Poet’s Wife
and
The Moon Field
. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature and the East Midlands Book Award. Her short stories have featured in the Bridport Prize Anthology, the Commonwealth Short Story Awards and on BBC Radio 4. She lives with her family in rural Northamptonshire.

www.judithallnatt.co.uk

:
@judithallnatt