A Web of Dreams

by Tessa Barclay

  ‘No ‒’

  ‘It’s true,’ Jenny said cruelly. ‘What’s more he arranged things so that my brother, who was my escort and protector, went on the train to Aberdeen and left me at his mercy.’

  ‘No, good God!’

  ‘It frightens you? It ought to! Now you know what it’s like, don’t you?’

  Laura pulled herself together. She closed her gaping mouth, straightened her shoulders. ‘What do you want, then? Money, I suppose. How much?’

  Until that moment Jenny’s only impulse had been to strike back at Laura Prentiss for the contempt with which she’d been treated. She wanted only to see the other woman brought to a standstill, made to understand she wasn’t dealing with a nobody.

  Money? She didn’t want money.

  And yet …

  Why should Captain Prentiss and his shrewish wife walk away from the affair with only a bad scare? Bobby had wounded Jenny deeply, by his cowardice and his lack of concern for her. Love … Well, she’d been a fool to think he loved her, she understood that now. So he had deceived her, made a fool of her, treated her just as his wife described ‒ as a slut, a prostitute.

  Such women were paid for their trouble. It seemed Bobby’s other lovers had been paid. Why should she fail to profit, even if only financially, from their liaison? There was nothing else worth saving from the wreck.

  She said to Mrs Prentiss, ‘I should expect to be well rewarded for my silence.’

  ‘Jenny!’ Bobby gasped.

  She glanced at him. He looked stricken. She knew he was shocked by the thought that she might take money. He knew her as generous in the deepest sense, giving herself without stint. For him that had been the greatest charm of the affair ‒ the fact that she expected nothing but his love.

  ‘How much?’ Laura repeated. ‘A hundred pounds?’

  ‘A hundred!’ said Jenny. ‘For the hurt I’ve suffered, for the things you’ve said, and for keeping my silence with the palace ‒a paltry hundred?’

  ‘Two?’ said Laura. ‘Two hundred.’

  Only yesterday Jenny would have thought two hundred pounds a very large sum. But the negligence with which the Countess Velikilova had agreed to the cost of the dress length had taught her something. Sums that seemed huge to hard-working tradesmen were nothing at all to the rich.

  ‘I’ll take five hundred pounds,’ she said, in a very calm, cool tone.

  ‘Jenny, what’s got into you?’ Bobby implored, making a move almost as if he would take her arm.

  ‘Stay away from that girl!’ blazed his wife. ‘You weak, stupid fool! Haven’t you done enough?’ She was thinking of the years she had helped him with his career, the boring hours at Court listening to German music or the little lectures of the Prince. She thought of the money they had spent on clothes and carriages and entertaining.

  Her sights had been set on seeing Bobby at last made a Viceroy ‒ or at least, on being herself a Vicereine. She had pictured herself in gowns of the finest satin, receiving the homage of Indian princes in jewelled turbans, mounting howdahs decked with gold, entering palaces with lapis-lazuli domes.

  But one breath of scandal, one whisper that her husband’s morals were suspect, and he would be closed out by the royal family. Victoria and Albert were sternly upright. They might extend Christian charity to those who had ‘fallen’, but they would never employ them in high office.

  And then, when all was said and done, she loved him. He had married her for her fortune, she knew that ‒ but he had taught her to love him, to need him physically.

  So … It was going to cost hard cash to preserve their life. And she could see it was no use trying to haggle with this hard little girl. Besides, it was beneath her dignity. And after all, what was five hundred pounds compared with the money already poured out to get Bobby this far?

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I will send you a banker’s draft. Give me your address.’

  Jenny’s mind raced. A letter, a banker’s draft … it would cause comment in their household. The passing of it through the bank account of William Corvill and Son presented no problem; she’d had the keeping of the books since she was fifteen and her father scarcely glanced at them. But a letter … her father, as head of the house, opened all correspondence. ‘I’ll have cash,’ she said.

  ‘Cash!’

  ‘Five hundred golden sovereigns. And I’ll have them now.’

  ‘But … but … gracious heavens, girl, no one carries that sort of money about.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘There’s a bank on the corner of the square,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m sure Captain Prentiss, a junior equerry of the Royal Household, would have no difficulty getting cash against an order on his own bank.’

  ‘But ‒’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Jenny said. The tea tray with its silver service still sat on the little table before the fire. ‘A cup of tea?’ she inquired, taking up the cold teapot.

  Laura almost ran to the door. ‘Get her her money!’ she cried to Bobby as she wrenched it open. ‘Pay her and get rid of her! I’ll never forgive you, Bobby, for submitting me to this humiliation.’

  The door crashed shut behind her. There was a silence.

  Then Bobby came to sit beside her on the sofa. ‘Jenny,’ he said, ‘you don’t really mean all this.’

  He put out a hand as if to take hers.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said.

  ‘Jenny!’

  ‘Go and get the money.’

  ‘But … but … you don’t really want it?’

  She drew a deep breath. ‘What I really want is beyond you to give. So I’ll take the money instead.’

  ‘But it’s so unlike you ‒’

  She got up quickly, to put distance between them. She couldn’t bear to have him near, to smell the familiar and once loved pomade he put on his hair, the scent of his shaving soap, the savour of sandalwood that always seemed to linger about his body.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ she said. ‘You never bothered to get to know me. So go and fetch the money, and let’s be quit of one another.’

  He picked up hat and gloves and went out without looking back. Twenty long minutes later he returned bearing a small chamois leather pouch which chinked.

  ‘Five hundred gold sovereigns,’ he said angrily. ‘I hope they make you happy.’

  She took them without a word. As she picked up her cloak he said, struck by sudden alarm, ‘Jenny, you’ll keep your word? You won’t say anything to the Palace?’

  ‘I never want to speak of you or hear of you again,’ was her bitter reply.

  Late that night, Millicent Corvill was awakened by small sounds downstairs in the cottage. She was sure as she woke that it was her beloved Ned, coming home late. With a shawl over her shoulders, she went quickly downstairs to offer a hot drink, soup, whatever he might need.

  Even as she went down the steep staircase she knew it couldn’t be Ned. The sounds had been of someone opening the dampers on the kitchen range, to bring the fire to life. Ned had no more idea how to handle the controls of the range than fly ‒ he had never in his life had to lift a finger in the house.

  And as her husband was sound asleep in their bed, it must be Jenny. But what could Jenny be doing, downstairs at this time of night?

  Her daughter was sitting in the wooden armchair by the hearth. She was in her nightgown with her dressing-gown thrown around her. She was curled up in the chair, her head supported on her hand. In the low red light from the fire it was possible to see that she was staring into its depths but not to distinguish the glisten of tears.

  ‘Gracious lord, lassie,’ exclaimed Millicent, though in a loud whisper so as not to disturb the sleeping menfolk. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’

  With reluctance Jenny stirred. ’I couldn’t sleep, mother.’

  ‘Are you ill? Have you the cramps?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I just couldn’t sleep.’ And couldn’t stay in bed: restless, angry, full of pent-up energy caused by reaction to the sce
nes of the day.

  A common mill girl. The words stung and rankled. Though they were untrue in every sense, the reasoning behind them had foundation.

  Compared with Laura Prentiss she was a nothing. Proud though she might be of her father’s abilities, of her own talents as designer, of a brother at the university, she knew she had no worth in the eyes of Bobby’s wife.

  It had never perturbed her hitherto. The Corvills were having success enough, she had thought.

  But now pride and something that might be ambition were gnawing at her. She had tossed and turned for hours before finally rising to steal downstairs, to pace the stone-floored kitchen until at last she had felt chilly enough to rouse the fire.

  ‘Surely you should be getting your sleep, child. You’re so busy all the while, and today you’ve been out and about and done so well …’

  ‘Have I done well, mother?’

  ‘What a question! Four hundred guineas from the Russian lady!’ Mrs Corvill took up the poker, gave the embers a little stir. ‘Will I make you a cup of tea? Or a hot drink with the raspberry cordial?’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘What will we do with the money, mother?’ she demanded.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How shall we use it?’

  ‘Use it?’

  ‘Father will tell me to give it to the bankers, to have it entered in their ledgers to our account. But what then?’

  Mrs Corvill had no idea. Moreover, the trend of the conversation worried her. It sounded so strange, so impatient. Her daughter’s mind was clearly full of financial concerns, and Mrs Corvill lived in dread that one of her children would, through excessive use of their minds, develop the mysterious illness called brain fever. What exactly it was, she didn’t know. But clever people often succumbed to it, so she heard.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry your head on that,’ she scolded gently. ‘It’s not fitting. Your father is the one to deal with money matters.’

  ‘Really?’ Jenny said in a tone her mother had never heard from her before. It sounded almost like disdain. ‘The only way he knows to deal with money is to earn it. Once earned, he never uses it.’

  ‘Of course he uses it. What do you think we live on, but the money he earns?’

  ‘He earns much more than a mere livelihood. There’s money now in the bank, and there’ll be more when we get the price of the dress piece for the Russian lady. There’ll be a lot of money, Mother. And it just sits there in the bank, doing nothing.’

  Mrs Corvill made a great mental effort. ‘Doesn’t it … doesn’t it earn interest?’

  ‘Oh, interest! Two-and-a-half per cent! We could do far better than that.’

  ‘Could we?’ She didn’t want to talk about it. She had no idea what two-and-a-half per cent meant. ‘I think I’ll make a cup of cocoa,’ she said.

  ‘Mother!’ But Jenny bit back her impatience. Cocoa and toast, tea and biscuits, beef broth and thin gruel ‒ these had been the remedies for every ailment, the responses to every crisis in the Corvill family.

  Millicent took a saucepan from a hook, poured in milk from an earthenware jug, and moved towards the range.

  ‘What would you say if I told you we ought to move?’ Jenny demanded.

  Her mother started, so that the milk in a tidal wave escaped from the pan to make a splash on the hooked rug. ‘Move? Leave the Dean Village?’

  ‘Leave Edinburgh.’

  To ward off the words, Millicent went to fetch a cloth. She mopped at the stain on the rug. Then she rinsed the cloth, hung it on its accustomed hook, and poured more milk into the saucepan. ‘There won’t be enough for breakfast,’ she lamented. ‘I’ll have to go out to Wilson’s Dairy at six.’

  ‘We should move to the Borders,’ Jenny said, following her own line of reasoning. ‘That’s where all the fine woollens are being made these days. We should take a mill, or part of a mill ‒’

  ‘Jenny!’ her mother cried, forced at last to take heed. ‘You’re over-excited. It’s all this talking to foreign ladies and ‒’

  ‘It’s the next logical step. We’re getting far too much work to handle ourselves ‒’

  ‘But your father factors it out.’

  ‘It’ll soon be too much to do on handlooms, even if he employs every webster he knows. Besides, it’s so inefficient, trotting up and down the village supervising what they’re doing. Either we have to get them all together in one place and go over to water power ‒ which would cost the earth ‒ or we have to move somewhere else, where the power and the accommodation already exist.’

  ‘No,’ said her mother. ‘No, Jenny, don’t talk like this.’

  ‘At the moment we buy our yarn as we need it and so far we’ve done well enough, the dyeing has been good and we’ve always got what we wanted. But we ought to have control of the dyeing, we ought to have control of the spinning to ensure the thread’s fine enough. And as to the finishing afterwards …’ She nodded to herself. ‘We’ve been lucky so far, Meldwick’s been able to take every piece and finish to a high standard. But the time’s coming when we’ll have to go to a second finisher. And who could do it well enough to please us?’

  ‘That’s for your father to say.’

  ‘Besides, we ought to do our own finishing. We ought to have it all in our hands, from start to finish. That way we could plan, do you understand, mother?’

  ‘No,’ said Millicent faintly. She snatched the saucepan off the range as the milk hissed up in a slow boil. She realised, to her consternation, that she’d forgotten to mix the cocoa in the cups. She felt frightened, at a loss.

  ‘It’s time the Corvills were mill owners, mother. What do you think?’

  Millicent gasped, and burst into tears. ‘I think you’re mad!’

  That was the reaction of Jenny’s father when she put the plan to him after breakfast.

  ‘Move? Where to?’

  ‘To the Borders.’

  ‘But that would cost a fortune ‒’

  ‘No, if you look in the newspaper you’ll see that there are mills to let ‒’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense!’

  ‘It’s not nonsense. It’s time we thought about the future. We have so much work ‒’

  ‘God will look after the future, my lass,’ he told her with some sternness. ‘It’s not for us to question His intentions.’

  ‘His intentions for us are quite clear,’ Jenny riposted. ‘He’s given us this talent to make fine cloth, and we must use it.’

  William was struck. The parable of the talents … Could it be true that they were meant to grow into a mill-owning firm, that God, who looked with approval on those who exerted themselves in the sphere in which it had pleased Him to place them, wanted them to move on?

  Mrs Corvill was terrified by the idea and called in her son to support her. To her dismay, Ned was on Jenny’s side in the days of discussion that followed.

  ‘In this life you either go forward or you go back,’ he said. ‘You can’t stand still.’

  Since he was a scholar, taking philosophy at the university, no one dared argue with him. That he had his own reasons for wanting the family business to expand, his parents didn’t guess.

  Ned was enjoying life as a student. He was actually drinking less because there seemed fewer frustrations in his world. But one had proved inescapable.

  In matters of intellect there was a great democracy at the university. But when it came to making friends and belonging to groups, some were accepted and some were not. And Ned had found that to some, he was not acceptable.

  The son of the poorest country minister would be welcomed to the social round. A lawyer’s son could be invited to parties in Charlotte Square. But the son of a mere webster could never be a gentleman.

  That apart, there was the humiliation of coming home to the cottage and its clacking loom-shed. He couldn’t invite friends here. And in the Christmas vacation his father had actually expected him to sit to his loom again. Impossible!

  Ned threw his weight behind Jenny
’s plan. As to the actual financial investment, that was up to her. She said they had the money or could borrow if need be. She had put the five hundred gold sovereigns in the bank, together with the draft for four hundred guineas from the Countess Velikilova and other monies that fell due on quarter day. No one thought to question the bank balance, which was very healthy.

  ‘We have the money,’ she said, at the end of one of the long arguments that seemed to dominate their lives these days. ‘We have the skills, we have the reputation, we have royal patronage, we have a great future before us. All we need is the courage.’

  There was a long silence round their kitchen table. Mrs Corvill picked at the edge of her apron. Ned and Jenny looked at their father.

  ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘You can look in the newspapers for the agents of property in the Borders.’

  Chapter Five

  This was a time when many men were making the step from self-employment to the employment of others. Engineers who had built or mended machines for factories hired others to build them, navvies who had helped construct the railways got contracts from the railway owners to supervise the building of new lines.

  In the cloth trade, it was usually the fullers and dyers who organised a factory. Fullers were the men who finished woollen cloth after it was woven, thickening and shrinking it to the requirements of the cloth merchant. Dyers sometimes handled the woven cloth, sometimes the spun yarn.

  Their work needed premises big enough for dye vats and the machinery invented for the finishing, the fulling stocks. In the area known as the Scottish Borders, the buildings also housed the new water-driven weaving looms. The woollen industry needed water for power but, almost more importantly, for the dyeing and cleaning and processing of the cloth. Pure water, soft water ‒ that was the great need, so that the dyes shouldn’t be altered by lime or other elements, so that nothing should harm the fine wool fibres.

  Along the rivers of the Borders, woollen mills had sprung up. Some of the rivers were tributaries of the river Tweed. And by a happy accident a name had been invented for the cloth made there.

  Woollen cloth sent to London merchants was referred to in the invoices as ‘tweel’ ‒ the Scottish form of the word twill, referring to the manner in which it was woven. Invoices were, of course, hand-written, copper-plate.