The Silk Factory (7 page)

‘’Tis the short version, Euphemia being a bit of a mouthful,’ Effie said.

‘Jack Stamford, at your service. And this is Maisie who has a mind all of her own and has decided today that she likes neither birds nor bridges.’

‘She’s a fine horse,’ Effie said tentatively and reached over to stroke her muzzle with her fingertips.

‘Do you live hereabouts? With your family? Do you work for Hob Talbot?’ Jack checked the questions that were forming thick and fast in his mind for he wanted to know all about her but felt that he must tread slowly and softly not to scare her away.

‘I live on the farm, and take whatever work is offered on Mr Talbot’s land,’ Effie said simply, not giving too much away.

‘And what do you do out of snowdrop season?’

‘Oh, the snowdrops don’t last long. Most of the time I have to take in washing but all us maids help outdoors at harvest and when the hazelnuts are ready too.’

‘And you have a family?’ Jack prompted.

‘A younger brother and sister. Our mother passed away three years ago and our father followed soon after.’ She looked away.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Jack said gently. ‘It must be very hard for you.’

‘We get by,’ Effie said stoically. ‘You aren’t from these parts, are you?’ she enquired in return, for his accent was strange to her and folk in these parts were generally reserved to the point of taciturnity, not like this open-faced young man.

‘No, I’m from Bedfordshire, the third of five brothers and the only one to join the military; the others are all clergy like my father. He has a living at Oakley, near Bedford.’ As he spoke, a clear picture of the parlour at home came before him: his father’s books and sermons filling the shelves that lined the walls, a good fire in the hearth and his parents conversing as his mother sewed and his father worked, with a delicate touch, at the model ships he made. Each one was completed with the masts lying flat so that they would slip through the neck of a bottle, to be raised again like magic, once inside, with tiny threads. On every ship’s side was painted the name of a son and they were given as gifts as each one had reached their twelfth birthday, but kept on the mantel for all to enjoy.

He remembered how his brothers had all answered their father’s playful question about what they would do if they owned such a ship by saying that they would send her overseas to bring back books, fishing rods, a violin. Only Jack had said he would sail her himself, of course, and see the world from the Americas to Marrakesh. His father had smiled and said he had a vivid imagination. Jack felt the sharp pang of homesickness that always accompanied such recollections. His elder brothers were both married now, with children of their own, and settled near his parents; part of a close family life of visits and tea parties, walks and picnics. Well, he had taken a different path in search of excitement and a more active life, and one couldn’t have everything …

‘You miss your family,’ Effie said, seeing a wistful expression pass over his face.

‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘But God knows, I have enough to keep me busy with fifty men to oversee.’

‘You are from the barracks at Weedon Bec?’

Jack nodded. ‘Though some call it Weedon Royal, since the garrison was built.’

‘’Tis a monstrous place, is it not? The walls seem to take in an area bigger than the village itself! And the place is quite overrun with soldiers, more than five hundred of ’em, I’ve heard – all filling the inns with drunkenness and brawling with the locals.’

Jack pulled a face. ‘It’s true it can be difficult to keep some unruly elements orderly when they’re on furlough but I can assure you that on duty all is order and discipline.’

‘Well, I dare say we are all glad enough of it keeping us safe from Old Boney,’ Effie said as they reached a place where the track forked, the main thoroughfare continuing and a thin path splitting off from it. It was evidently little used, as weeds grew down the middle, dead and brown, sticking out of the snow like rusty wires. The path wound down to a wood where a cheerless chimney without a wisp of smoke could be glimpsed between the trees.

‘Can I accompany you to your door?’ Jack asked.

‘No, no, don’t trouble yourself,’ Effie said hastily. ‘I shall have to get back to work directly. Thank you once more for your assistance.’ She bobbed a curtsey and set off down the overgrown track holding her skirts aside from the brambles that grew from the hedges, all clogged with snow.

‘I hope we shall meet again,’ Jack called boldly after her. ‘I’m often out riding in these parts.’

Effie hurried on, telling herself that she must not smile, even though his obvious admiration warmed something in her heart, but as she reached the bend that would take her from his view she found herself turning, quite involuntarily, to look back. He raised a hand in farewell and she inclined her head before walking quickly away.

What foolishness is this? she thought to herself. A soldier – and a lieutenant to boot; he would be collecting girls’ hearts like loose change in his pocket. She was not some silly maid to have her head turned by a red coat and a handsome face, she said to herself sternly. And yet … he had not seemed glib or practised in his compliments, and he had told her something about himself … She was glad that she had stopped him from coming down to the cottage; she would not have liked him to see where she lived. In a rush of confusion, she realised that if she were not at least a little impressed by him she wouldn’t have cared about him seeing the place.

As Effie passed through the trees to the deserted clearing beyond, the cottage came into view, if cottage it could be called, and she came face-to-face with the evidence of the difference in their stations. Once two dwellings, the left-hand side of the building was now derelict. Their neighbours were long gone, forced out since the farmer was no longer obliged to provide board and lodging for his hands but merely to pay a wage and ‘hang the consequences’ if it proved insufficient to feed a family and still cover the rent. Since the enclosures, there was no longer common land left for grazing a beast of one’s own or rights to gather firewood or take a rabbit for the pot. The low, thatched roof had fallen in, leaving spars of joists and beams showing like a chair frame through old upholstery. Beneath the patchy snow the reed thatch was grey and mildewed, streaked with vivid green moss and straggling weeds. Sagging and collapsed, the cottage seemed to have become something almost organic, more compost heap than building. Pigeons roosted in it, spattering the earthen floors with droppings. The door hung crookedly from its hinges and the window, with its missing panes, resembled a crossword puzzle with its blacked-out squares, through which small birds hopped and flitted at will.

Although the other side of the roof was still supported, it was worn through in places so that Effie had to place a series of jugs and bowls under the thin places to catch the rain. The one small window and low door were overshadowed by the deep eaves and let in little sunlight even in summer. Dark and damp, with rotting frames and one of the small panes plugged with sacking, the dwelling seemed, each year, to moulder a little further towards the state of its neighbour, which stood as a constant reminder of its likely fate.

Effie picked her way down the path to the door, past the wilderness that had once been next-door’s garden on one side, and on the other, the remains of her own vegetable plot which was now visible only as lumpy rows of raised snow. At the side of the house a few hens pecked disconsolately at the ground where Tobias had cleared the path of snow so that the family could reach the well, the wooden privy and the fields beyond.

Once inside, Effie stripped off her wet gloves and set about riddling the cinders and ashes in the grate. It was almost as cold inside as out and her breath steamed before her. She set the ash pan aside and laid kindling in a pyramid, ready to be lit on her return, and then moved the clothes horse with its drapery of yesterday’s damp washing close beside it.

As she spread the shifts and shirts out on the wooden rails, the carter’s receipt rustled in her pocket and she wished that she need not deliver it to Hob. She shivered as she thought of the slow way he always took it from her hand, as if it were a billet-doux.

She crossed the ends of her shawl in front and tied them tightly behind her so that she might have both hands free. As she carried the ash pan to the pit outside she could feel just the slightest residual warmth from the grey cinders. She spread her aching fingers around the tin and thought again of the smiling soldier in his red coat.

Fowler came out from behind his desk to welcome Hinchin, the parish clerk, and said in a rough hearty manner, ‘Enoch!’

‘Septimus.’ Hinchin nodded a greeting. A tall stooping figure, dressed in black with a high white collar and a sober grey stock, Hinchin was in his forties with fine sandy hair and a face as long as a fiddle. His skin had the bluish tinge suggestive of poor circulation and an indoor life, and indeed he felt the cold badly.

The two men knew each other fairly well, through their attendance at church and at social functions in the village. Fowler extended his square, spade-like hand to enclose the limp white hand before him in a vice-like grip. ‘Thank you for agreeing to my little tour; I have much to show you,’ he said enthusiastically.

‘If this is with regard to the purchase of parish land, Septimus, I can tell you now that there’s none to be had. The military have their fingers in every pie …’

Fowler waved away his words. ‘No, no, it’s nothing like that. I need your help in a small matter, that is all – a minor representation to the parish vestry, just a word in the ear of your fellow councillors on my behalf.’

‘I can make no promises.’

‘I understand, I understand, but allow me to show you around and explain my plans at least. Indulge me.’ He gave Hinchin a smile so broad and encouraging that it revealed a gold filling and a missing back tooth.

Hinchin inclined his head and Fowler led the way. ‘The stores and my office take up the ground floor,’ he said as they climbed the stairs, ‘and the looms and frames for the main business of weaving are situated on the upper storey. We shall examine them later.’ He pushed open the door to the first-floor workshop. ‘But here … here is Progress. Here all is Experiment, Innovation and Novelty.’

A busy scene met Hinchin’s eyes: the long room was full of men, women and children engaged in activity which made very little sense to him and reminded him most of a bedlam. From a wheel at one end, a barefoot boy carrying a rod containing bobbins of silk ran the whole length of the room to a cross, round which he passed the threads and ran, panting, back again. At the wheel, a man stood turning steadily all the while and shouting to the boy to keep up an even pace and tension. Nearby, a red-faced man put his back into turning the handle of a fearsome-looking frame machine, with shafts and cogs the size of dinner plates, which twisted thread from flyers on to a reel. A foreman stood by with a stopwatch, as if the two were in some fiendish race.

Further along, a group of women sat at machines resembling spinning wheels. Four threads passed from reels through metal hooks fixed to a rail on the wall. They were folded together in the women’s hands and given a twist as they passed on to the wheel and then on to a spool as a thicker, stronger thread. In the opposite corner, a group worked at feeding and turning a horizontal octagonal frame and heating a set of copper rollers over a charcoal brazier that filled the air with a sooty carbon smell.

Hinchin, interested despite his determination to maintain a distance and detachment, looked expectantly at the silk master. Fowler threw out his hands expansively to take in the flying fingers of the workers, the bales of raw silk that lay here and there, and the creaks and groans of machinery and floorboards. ‘Throwing and doubling,’ he announced. ‘That is – giving the silk its twist and then winding strands together to make a stronger thread.’ He indicated the running boy and the cog-wheeled machine. ‘The old against the new – ’tis a little experiment of mine. The boy, if he is not too small, can run fourteen miles in a day and breaks no thread, but of course the process requires another hand: the twister; whereas the throwing machine requires only one and does not wear out or fall sick.’ He grinned at Hinchin and marched smartly past the group of women, dismissing them with a single word: ‘Doubling.’

They came to a halt beside the brazier as a man in an apron and heavy gauntlets lifted off the copper roller. He fitted it into a frame below a wooden roller, and a woman began feeding a myriad of multi-coloured threads between the two.

‘Nonpareil,’ Fowler announced. ‘My latest venture in ribbon production; each has twenty silken strands, every strand composed of sixty threads.’

Hinchin looked on with interest. ‘It isn’t woven at all! Is it fused by the heat?’

Fowler gave a satisfied nod. ‘Rolled and welded like a strip of metal.’ A woman knelt beside the machine, holding a large bowl into which she dipped the bright ribbon as it came off the rollers and was wound on to the octagonal drying spool. ‘The glue is made from old parchment, to make the union permanent,’ he explained. ‘This method I discovered in France.’

‘What’s in the room beyond?’ Hinchin asked.

A furtive look crossed Fowler’s face. ‘We must be quick,’ he said. He opened the door and almost pushed Hinchin through it before shutting it firmly behind them. Three men looked up in surprise and then continued their work again. The room was smoky and hot, the men with sleeves and breeches rolled up as far as they would go. In the chimney corner, a drum-sized roll of gold braid hung directly above a fire like a side of bacon being smoked. ‘An order for the military, for uniforms,’ Fowler said. ‘Only the best quality for our soldiery of course.’ One of the men glanced up at him with a knowing look and then dropped his eyes once more to the braid he was winding.

‘The room must be tightly sealed,’ Fowler said, waiting for the smell and eye-stinging smoke to affect Hinchin sufficiently so that he could suggest to him that they withdraw. The brazier was filled with partridge feathers and scarlet dye-stuff that lent a sheen to the gold braid, which Fowler, and all the men present, knew wouldn’t last beyond a month.

Hinchin coughed and rubbed his eyes; Fowler ushered him back out into the workroom, giving an unpleasant little smile behind his back. ‘Of course, upstairs we produce both plain and patterned ribbon by more traditional means,’ he continued as they made their way back, ‘for ladies’ gowns, hats, lingerie, et cetera, and every kind of folderol and frothy frivolity. Also broadloom silks for shawls and dresses; for this I buy in organzine ready prepared to use.’

‘And this weaving, you say, is your main business?’ Hinchin said as they climbed the stairs. ‘Why then, may I ask, do you experiment and diversify so? Surely you could have two floors of productive weavers instead?’

Fowler stopped in his tracks and turned to face him. ‘Why, Vertical Integration, man! Vertical Integration: control of the whole process from start to finish. That is the way forward!’

For a moment, to Hinchin, he appeared quite mad, his eyes staring and his collar knocked askew by the agitation of his hands as he sketched out his plans on the air.

‘Integration is the key to Expansion,’ he pronounced, ‘and I intend it to be complete. You shall see – yes, you shall see.’ He turned and led the way to the second floor, in a state of barely contained excitement and whistling between his teeth.

In the unheated workshop, the workers’ breath misted the rows of windows, as if their spirits were drawn out of them and pressed ghostly against the glass. The hands of the weavers moved quickly with shuttle and batten, each man working to his own rhythm as if dancing to a different tune that only they could hear. The result was a cacophony of wooden thumping and clattering, most discordant to the ear. The floor was strewn with tiny scraps of material and ends of thread, and the atmosphere was thick with fibres and filaments of silk. The clack of looms and winders was punctuated by the coughing of the children, who seemed most sensitive to the irritation.

As they reached the bobbin winders, Fowler and Hinchin stopped and looked back to survey the whole room. The children beside them worked on diligently, only stealing the odd glance at the stranger when stopping to change a pirn. Within moments, Hinchin was clearing his throat and took out a pristine white handkerchief to blow his nose; the effect of the thick air was really quite unpleasant, he thought. ‘The dust must be injurious to the health of your factory hands; don’t they find the fibres choking?’ He held the cloth over his nose and mouth.

Fowler raised his voice over the noise. ‘Nonsense! They’re used to it,’ he said dismissively. As he spoke, he noticed Beulah Fiddement in the row, the girl who had recently been late and had been insolent. ‘They’re coarse as clods and lack your finer sensibilities,’ he continued. He saw Beulah stiffen, angry colour rising to her face. The girl has spirit, Fowler thought with surprise; I shall have to break it.

He turned to Hinchin again and pointed out to him the different tasks of the weavers, some working the broad looms with their drawboys raising the warp threads to make the pattern, and others at the ribbon looms that could weave twelve ribbons at a time. ‘We make your galloons and ferrets, as we say in England, and your houppes and crépines, bourrelets and cordons, as the French would have it,’ he said with a flourish. ‘Anything and everything required by the foolishness of fashion.’

Hinchin, who was feeling the chill, fidgeted from foot to foot and said testily, ‘But what has all this to do with the vestry, Septimus? I fail to see how I can be of any assistance with your enterprise, admirable though it is.’

Fowler put his hand on his arm. ‘Have patience just a little longer; there’s one more thing I’d like to show you.’ He took him to the window and they looked out over the snowy yard and orchard behind the manufactory. At one side, a great number of fruit trees were laid flat on the white ground, their roots in the air, slowly falling into decay. In their place stood rows of bare-branched saplings of a type that Hinchin was unable to identify. Each had a wide spreading shape with a great proliferation of shoots and twigs at its extremities, and the bark had a rich orange glow, unfamiliar and exotic in the dead, winter landscape.

‘Sericulture! The farming of the worms that spin the silk,
that
is my next venture,’ Fowler announced triumphantly. ‘You will see that mixed in with the apple and plum, on the far side of the orchard, there are ancient mulberries?’ He pointed to large trees, gnarled and twisted, with boughs so low to the ground that some touched the earth itself. ‘Those gave me the notion; they will remain and gradually the other fruit trees will be replaced with young mulberries, as you see here.’

‘But surely worm rearing is the domain of the Mediterranean countries?’ In the face of Fowler’s manic enthusiasm, Hinchin chose his words carefully. ‘Is our climate wholly … suitable?’

‘They’re growing, aren’t they?’ Fowler said rudely. He checked himself, remembering that his purpose was to win Hinchin over. ‘King James had a similar project,’ he said grandiosely. ‘In Chelsea – a thousand trees.’

‘But it was unsuccessful!’ Hinchin remonstrated. ‘And to root out productive apple trees … Do you really think it wise?’

Fowler placed his hand on Hinchin’s shoulder. ‘Enterprise, Hinchin. Enterprise! Why, if no one is willing to Experiment, commit Funds, risk Capital, no Progress will be made!’

His tone was so vehement and his gaze so intense that Hinchin felt he could say no more. Fowler led him from the room, explaining, as they returned downstairs, his intention to convert the cellars into rearing houses by installing stoves and tiers of worm beds, and to import the silkworm eggs from a merchant he knew from his travels in Italy.

Back in his office, he beckoned Hinchin over to the desk, took from the top drawer a shallow glass case and laid it carefully before him. Under the glass, displayed on a board padded with dark blue velvet, were rows of moths, their wings spread flat, each body fixed with a glass-beaded pin. Fowler pointed at each male and female pair, reeling off the names of the specimens. ‘Here are your Muga and Tusseh silkmoths of the Indian jungle, Syrian, Japanese Oak and Spicebush varieties.’ He swept his hand over moths of varied hues, some with wings patterned with bullseyes or delicately marked edges. ‘None of these are suitable for our climate, but here’ – he tapped the glass – ‘we have
Bombyx mori
, the silkmoth of China, the Workhorse of the Genus, being the most prolific producer of Quality Silk.’

Hinchin peered closer. The two moths were the plainest in the case. Their furry bodies and short broad wings were a dull cream colour, against which their dark beady eyes and the arcs of their large feathery antennae stood out in sinister contrast.

Fowler said, ‘The female is the larger of the two – also fatter as it is swollen with eggs.’ He indicated the abdomen of the larger moth, through which a pin passed at the centre. ‘When she emerges from her cocoon her belly sac can hold five hundred eggs. Copulation occurs tail to tail and the eggs are laid on the empty cocoon casing until its white capsule is glued all over with pale yellow dots.’

Hinchin nodded as if he were considering this carefully. He thought them rather ugly and quite unlike the delicate native creatures, with their flimsy wings, that fluttered softly around his night-time window.

‘This species has been domesticated for five thousand years and can no longer survive without the intervention of Man. They are quite unable to fly and the caterpillars don’t wander.’ Fowler jabbed at the glass again as if to underscore his point. ‘These are the moths I shall rear, as the quality of their silk rules supreme,’ he finished pretentiously.