by Sonia Velton
But there are no secrets in London. Even the houses lean across the narrow alleys toward each other and offer up their scandals in the blink of an opened curtain. One of the girls must have told Mrs. Swann what I was up to because I saw her come out of the Wig and Feathers from the window as I was getting dressed. It was raining at the time, but she seemed not to care. She stood on the step with her nose in the air, like a rat on its haunches sniffing for trouble. In a moment, she hoicked up her skirts and splashed through the puddles until she disappeared under Mrs. Hughes’ jetty.
Don’t let anyone tell you that sailors are a brave breed. He took off at the first sight of Mrs. Swann, a woman no taller than the average cabin boy. Still, she was a sight to behold, her face twisted with rage, telling me what she thought of me in language that made me grateful Mrs. Hughes was stone deaf. Then she grabbed my arm and yanked me out of there so fast that it was all I could do to snatch my overskirt from the bed and stumble after her. Once we were outside, she couldn’t even wait to get back inside the Wig and Feathers before she started on me again. So I stood there, in the rain and my petticoats, listening to her tell me what she would do to me. Then she boxed my ears so hard my head reeled.
* * *
A woman had been sheltering under one of the jetties near the main street. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, while I was listening to Mrs. Swann’s colorful language. After Mrs. Swann hit me, the woman became agitated and hovered about, like a concerned bee. When Mrs. Swann grabbed hold of my ear and tried to tug me back to the Wig and Feathers, the woman stepped out in front of us.
“Madam,” she said, in a voice that wavered slightly, “please let this poor girl go.”
“Poor girl?” repeated Mrs. Swann, pinching my ear even harder. “There is nothin’ poor about her. She’s a thief and a liar, that’s what she is.”
The woman blanched. I felt quite sorry for her, standing there arguing with the likes of Mrs. Swann, while the rain plastered her neatly curled hair to the sides of her face and darkened the pale blue silk of her dress.
“To be sure, I don’t know the circumstances,” she continued, “but whatever she has done, it cannot be right to hit her in the street. Why, she is barely dressed!” She gestured toward my petticoats.
Mrs. Swann let go of my ear, as if it were a hot coal, and rounded on her. “Indeed, you do not know anything, and I’ll thank you for staying out of matters that do not concern you.” She paused and looked her up and down.
“What are you even doing round here?” she asked, as if the woman were as strange and unexpected in that alley as the King himself.
“You’ll forgive me for sheltering from the rain, madam,” she said, her voice tart, like lemon cakes.
“Well,” said Mrs. Swann, “the ribbon shop is that way. Good day.” She gave a dismissive nod in the direction of the main street and even I couldn’t stop a smirk creeping into the corner of my mouth. She took hold of my upper arm and made as if to walk back to the Wig and Feathers.
As we turned the woman said, “I know what you are.”
Mrs. Swann stilled and rotated back toward her. “Do you really?” she said, but the woman had spoken to me.
She regarded me earnestly, her pale face stained pink with indignation at the cheeks. Slim, smooth hands fingered the delicate lace of her cap as it stuck wetly to her forehead over a sweep of copper hair. “There are other things you could do,” she said pointedly to me.
I looked at the ground. She must have mistaken my reluctance for shame or self-doubt, as she then said, “Plenty of young girls like you are needed in service,” in an encouraging voice.
I found her rather sweet. She seemed naive, assuming I did not know that I could spend my days doing someone else’s laundry, up to my elbows in lye, scrubbing out the stains with brick dust until my skin split.
A window in the Wig and Feathers opened and one of the girls called out to us. Mrs. Swann drew in an impatient breath. “Get inside, Sara,” she said, giving me a sharp push toward the tavern.
We left the woman standing alone in the alley, shifting her basket from one hand to the other, a grim expression on her face.
Esther
I delivered nineteen Bibles to the charity house the day I met the girl called Sara. When I got home, I took the final one into the withdrawing room, sat at the desk and opened it, smoothing back the front cover so that the spine cracked. I had not been able to stop thinking about the kind of life she must have. Surely her need for the word of God was every bit as great as that of anyone at the poorhouse. Of course, I had no idea whether she could read, but I picked up the quill anyway and wrote: From Mrs. Esther Thorel of 10 Spital Square.
I thumbed through to Corinthians and placed the ribbon among its pages. Although I hated to mark a book, I could not resist drawing the tip of the quill alongside a certain passage. Then I pressed the Bible shut.
I had no desire to go back to the tavern, so I told our cook to take the Bible to the Wig and Feathers and ask them to give it to a girl there called Sara. “The Wig and Feathers?” he said, with a lift of his eyebrows. Indeed, I insisted. Then I pressed a sixpence into his hand for his trouble and told him not to dally.
* * *
I went to find Elias. I knew where he would be. Though it was already six o’clock, he was still in the room at the front of the house, which he used to conduct his business. When I opened the door, he was bent over a wooden counter laid out with pieces of paper painted with stripes and scrolled shapes. He looked up at me, slightly confused, as if he couldn’t fathom what I was doing there. Then he looked out of the window to the square, as if he needed the emptying street and dwindling light to tell him that the workday was over.
My husband is one of the finest master silk weavers in all of Spitalfields, as was his father before him. His grandfather had learned the craft on the famous looms of Lyon, but when Huguenots could no longer live in peace in their homeland, his grandfather had escaped, bringing nothing with him save this exquisite skill. Many Huguenot weavers did the same, and when they settled in Spitalfields, the beauty and craftsmanship of Spitalfields silks began to outshine even those of Lyon.
“These are lovely,” I said, joining him at the counter and idly picking up one of the patterns.
He nodded slowly, still staring at them. “But which one is best, Mrs. Thorel? This is to be a very fine silk indeed.”
I looked down at them, all variations of elegant designs. Geometric shapes, tiny Chinese temples, and one with a dainty repeat of shells. “I like this one,” I said, gesturing to one that had a pattern of flowers in an Oriental style.
“Ah, the India plants,” said Elias. “Yes, I like it too.”
I put it back on the counter and began to ask him about supper, but he stopped me, reluctant to leave the subject of his silks. “There is a journeyman silk weaver,” he said. “He is extraordinarily talented, and I believe he could become a master. I have said he can use one of the looms in the garret to weave his master piece. They are just standing there empty after all.”
“Our looms? But why can he not weave his master piece on his own loom?”
Elias clicked his tongue. “He still has to earn a living! His loom is full of my work. This he will do in his own time, for his own purposes. I will give him the silk and pay his fee to the Weavers’ Company.”
Sometimes my husband surprised me. It was a generous act from a man usually driven by his commercial success. “That is very kind of you, husband.”
He gave a slight smile. “Not at all, wife. I shall get a figured silk to sell of unprecedented complexity, woven for me for nothing. One of these, in fact.” He indicated the patterns scattered over the counter. “For his part, if he is successful in being admitted, he will be a freeman and I will help him set up as a master on his own account. A fair exchange, do you not think?”
“But a journeyman, in our h
ome, it seems …” I struggled to find the words. I hardly knew what I thought of the idea. Was I horrified or excited?
“I am letting you know, that is all. He will use this door,” Elias nodded toward the door from his workroom onto the street, used by the mercers, dyers, and silk men who visited him to make deals over the wooden counter, “and the back stairs, so you should not see him at all. I mention that he will be here only because you may hear the noise of the loom in the attic.”
“The noise!” The whole of Spitalfields echoed with the movement of a thousand looms. “Oh, Elias, not in our house, surely.”
Almost immediately I regretted my outburst. Elias lifted his head from where he had returned to studying the patterns and faced me again, expression intent, daring me to challenge him. “This is a weaving household, Mrs. Thorel. The house was built by my grandfather with the money he made from nothing but talent. My father spent seven years as his apprentice on those looms and I myself spent seven more as my father’s apprentice, just to carry on the business I was born into. The only reason this house’s looms stand empty is that I have no son to follow me. So, if I do not complain about the want of a child, then you should not complain about the noise of a loom.”
He turned back to his designs, reordering them on the counter, moving one on top of another, the favored and the shunned. For once, I was glad that the silk drew his attention from me. He did not see the sting of his words.
* * *
I was a good wife, that much I know. I was diligent about my sewing and I ran an efficient household. We cooked for the poor and entertained the rich. At church I sat beside my husband, pretty enough to please him but somber enough to satisfy the Low Church. In the bedchamber, I conducted myself with neither complaint nor unseemly enthusiasm. Only the Lord knew why we had not been blessed with the child that my husband’s community considered a duty and a necessity.
In bed that night I pictured the looms above me, barren and empty, as unproductive as I had proved to be. Elias had no son to teach and mentor so now this man was coming into our house.
A stranger to me—an extraordinarily talented stranger.
3
Sara
My life was like one of my own petticoats. It just got grubbier and grubbier, and I was in it every day, so I scarcely noticed. At least, not until something so bad happened that it couldn’t be ignored, like a blot or a stain that could not be gotten out.
The day he turned up at the Wig and Feathers, Mrs. Thorel’s Bible had lain unopened on top of my chest of drawers for weeks, slowly becoming hidden by a pile of fans and wigs, growing dusty with face powder. I had known who it was from as soon as it arrived. Esther Thorel was not the only well-meaning woman to think that words in a book might change my life for the better. But what she, and they, didn’t understand was that I had no desire for a different life. Why would I when, after ten years in service, my own mother’s life had been worth just a pound? It was bewildering to me that Mrs. Thorel would think I might prefer getting up at dawn to scrub steps to what I had to do at the Wig and Feathers. It was half the work for twice the money. Or did she think that servants never got their ears boxed?
I had grown used to the men. I saw all manner of them at the Wig and Feathers: the bakers and butchers, the tanners and tallow chandlers, the merchants and magistrates. The men who tipped their hats to ladies as they passed and stepped to one side to allow them through the door first. The men you went to if you were sick, or if a street urchin had lifted the purse clean out from under your skirts. But they were not those men when they came to me. They were urgent and selfish. They cared nothing for pleasantries or the doffing of a hat. They say that whoring is a rage that comes upon a man and this was never truer than for that particular man.
He was not known to me or even to Mrs. Swann. Usually, Nathanial would stand outside the door when a man was new. He had been a slave and had seen things that would be unimaginable even to the residents of the Wig and Feathers. Something about his silent presence outside the door was enough to temper the extremes of most men. But that evening Nathanial had been sent out on an errand and the man walked in unchecked.
The preamble was typical enough. He had barely closed the door before he started shrugging off his jacket. He was a large man and his waistcoat strained under the pressure of his belly. Still, the fabric of it was very fine; I remember it well. When I sat back on the bed, it was level with my eyes and I concentrated on the beautiful sheen of the cream silk and the tiny mulberry trees repeating across it, rather than on the bulk of the man who wore it.
He bade me take off my dress. I started to protest that it was hardly necessary, but he fixed me with a sharp stare and I found myself loosening my bodice. When I was in my petticoats and stays I went to lie back on the bed, but he caught my arm with his hand, pulled me up and said, “Take it all off.”
I opened my mouth to complain, but he took an extra shilling from his pocket and tossed it down by the bed. The thought of a shilling that had not passed through Mrs. Swann’s hands first was enough to close my mouth for me. I undressed completely and lay back on the bed.
The room was cold. My arms crept across my body for warmth and to shield myself from his gaze. But he sat down on the edge of the bed and firmly took hold of my wrists, parting my arms and laying each one alongside my body.
“I want you to be cold,” he said softly.
And he did, as cold as a leg of mutton lying on the butcher’s block. He seemed intent on taking me there himself as not a minute after he had begun, he had his hands around my neck. A burning sensation started in my chest, as if I had inhaled hot coals from the fireplace and they lay smoldering in my lungs. Then stillness. I was aware of the man on top of me, but he was blurred around the edges, like the first man at Mrs. Swann’s had been.
I truly thought I had died, but when I came around the pain in my throat was so intense that I surely could not have been in Heaven. And if whores do not go to Heaven, then surely there is something worse for us in Hell than a room at the Wig and Feathers, which was plainly where I still was. The door was ajar and I could hear one of the girls clattering down the stairs screaming for Mrs. Swann.
She came up, in her own sweet time, and stared down at me. “Got a bad ’un, did you?”
I tried to speak but the words passed through my throat with all the ease of an apple stuck with pins. Mrs. Swann handed me a shawl to cover myself and a glass of water to ease my voice. After I had told her what happened, she shrugged and said, “He’s just a man that likes to bake his bread in a cold oven.” Then she left, but not before she had bent down to pick up the shilling lying on the floor.
I pulled the shawl tight around me and lay back on the bed. I closed my eyes because I could not manage anything else and let myself sleep. When I awoke the next day, I opened new eyes—eyes he had given me. I saw the shabby coverlet and the stained washstand. I saw the streaks on my thighs and the jut of my bones under my skin. I dressed in my undergarments, but I could not bear to put on the same dress, so I walked over to the chest of drawers to look for something else. Then I saw the corner of Esther Thorel’s Bible, almost covered by my tawdry ornaments. I pulled it out from underneath them and held it in my hands. It fell open at the pages she had separated with the ribbon and I saw the inked lines marking a passage:
II CORINTHIANS 5:17
Therefore, if any man be in Christ,
he is a new creature:
old things are passed away;
behold all things have become new.
Esther
It was not easy to climb up into the garret. The stairs were narrow and spindly, leading to a trapdoor in the floor. I had been up there once before. When I was first married and exploring my new home, I had been fascinated to see the looms and to imagine my husband as little more than a boy, strong and determined at the weaver’s bench, learning the craft of his forefathers.
It was late afternoon and the light was fading, but when I pushed up the trapdoor, I found that the garret was still flooded with light. Built into the attic of a weaving household are long lights: huge wall-to-wall windows facing south to illuminate the looms with as much light as possible, for as long as possible. They made me squint so it was a few seconds before I could make out the looms.
Two of them, angular silhouettes against the long lights. I could see that one had already been strung with warp threads, strands of cream stretched across the wooden frame and hung with weighted pulleys that would become the ground. The weft was cobalt blue. I walked over to the loom and ran my hand over the worn wood, pitted and grooved by three generations of silk weavers. Handles and treadles jutted from the sides and bottom. To me it was a structure of unanswered questions: what to pull, wind, lift, and throw, and when to do it. I had sought to answer those questions once, but Elias had snapped shut, like a book of secrets closing. Weaving was the work of men: go back to your sewing, little girl.
It was not a surprise that I married a silk weaver, a creator of art. I started drawing when I was a child. I took coal from the fire and marked any paper I could find with it. My mother would catch hold of me and turn my palms face up. If she found them blackened and dusty she would cuff me around the ear and tell me I was no better than a chimney sweep. When I was thirteen, she bought me a set of watercolors and I began to paint. As I grew older, I would wander on my own to Spitalfields market and walk through row upon row of flower stalls, piled high with carnations, geraniums, tulips, or roses, depending on the season. English fruits, like apples and pears, sat alongside pomegranates from some exotic faraway land. I would paint them all.