by Sonia Velton
I was painting in my room when I heard it again, like a strange melody thumped out by a child. A single refrain, over and over.
“The Lord preserve us,” said Sara, clutching the shift she was folding to her chest, “what is that noise?”
“A loom in the garret. You will get used to it. There’ll be a journeyman up there from time to time.”
“But I thought the master sent his work out?”
“He does, but Mr. Thorel is allowing this journeyman to borrow a loom to weave his master piece. If the silk he weaves is good enough, he will be admitted to the Worshipful Company of Weavers and become a master himself. My husband says he is one of the most talented weavers in Spitalfields.”
“I see,” said Sara, doubtful. She eyed the ceiling suspiciously, as if the loom might fall through it, then continued folding my fresh linens. “It seems an imposition on you, madam,” she suggested, to the neat pile, when she had finished.
“Not really.” I concentrated on my brushwork, giving a tinge of blush to a pale petal. Sara loved to find slights and injustices where there were none. I would not allow her to draw me into her web of bad feeling. “This household was built for weaving, Sara. The floor of the garret is packed with silk waste to deaden the noise of the looms. A weaver in this house is as natural as a baker in a bakery. Besides, he seems pleasant enough.”
“You’ve met him?” Sara seemed both shocked and intrigued by the thought.
“Just once,” I said. “I took some seeds for the linnets I put in the garret.”
Sara bent to pick up my dirty linens from the floor but not before she had cast me an odd look. Then she left me to my painting. I found it comforting somehow to listen to him as I worked. As the light faded, I began to think about asking Sara to arrange some supper. Almost as soon as I had put down my brushes the noise stopped, as if we were linked in some way, the daylight our mutual taskmaster.
I looked at my painting. Another pattern for a silk that would never be made. Elias had not stopped me drawing my designs, I just painted when he was not about, contenting myself with imagining what the finished silk might look like. But something about the weaver’s presence above me—the thought that a design was slowly turning from paper to silk in my house—was tantalizing, like not realizing how much you have missed someone until you hear the sound of their voice. I picked up my watercolor, damp from my afternoon’s work, and left my room.
I waited on the landing, listening for any sounds from the garret. When I was sure he had left, I climbed the ladder to the trapdoor.
The room felt different. The late afternoon dimmed the long lights to panels the color of pearls across the wall, and the inside of the garret was full of shadows and unexpected edges. Close to his loom I could smell the silk, woody and nutty, laced with sweet woodruff.
I took my watercolor to the other empty loom and laid it over the heddles, which would hold the warp threads, trying to imagine it as a real silk, a tabby or a lustring, brocaded with silver-gilt foliate. I left the pattern on the loom and went to the shelves on the wall, holding spool after spool of silk thread. The linnets began to flutter and chirp, hoping for flax seeds, as I stood considering the colors, weaving one into the other in my mind, wondering which might show the other to its best effect. Then I chose a porcelain blue, a pretty burnt orange and a dark green. The spools were as big as melons in my arms as I carried them to the loom. I arranged the silk on top of the heddles so that they overlapped the edge of my pattern. Then I took a small step back to try to imagine the colors in the murky daylight, merging on the loom into the shapes I had drawn on the paper.
The trapdoor of the attic lifted as someone came up the stairs. I started, thinking it was Elias, feeling guilty although I was not sure why. My first instinct was to cover my pattern as if it were something shameful, so I moved to stand in front of the loom, grateful for the width of my skirts. I was facing him then, as he stood on the top step, confused and squinting. Because the last of the light was shining on him, I could see him clearly, but to him I must have been just a shadow by the loom.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I didn’t think you would still be working.”
The weaver stepped inside the garret but hesitated to come any further. “I forgot something, ma’am,” he said, indicating a cloth bag by his weaving bench.
“Please, take it,” I said, smiling but reluctant to step away from the loom. He approached the bench slowly, but instead of bending to pick up his bag he came over to me and the unused loom. Such was his height, it was easy for him to see behind me to the spools sprouting, like cabbages, from the heddles.
He almost smiled. I knew it was there in the background, behind his perplexed expression. “Can I help you with something, madam?”
I felt foolish. What had I been thinking, coming up here? I should have left my pattern where it belonged, drying in my room.
“No.” I gave a little shake of my head and turned away from him to take the spools off the heddles. Once I had removed them, the pattern slid from the loom and floated to the floor at the weaver’s feet.
“May I?” he asked.
I wanted to snatch it up, but could only stand there helpless, my arms full of silk. The weaver bent down and picked up the pattern. He laid it back on top of the loom, then offered, arms outstretched, to take the spools from me. Once my hands were free, I reached out to take back my watercolor.
“Did you paint that?” he asked, as I folded it firmly, not caring now whether it was dry.
I glanced up at him. It was a bold question from a journeyman. “Yes,” I said.
“It’s beautiful. You have a gift, Mrs. Thorel.”
I blushed as if he had complimented me on my hair or my dress. His comment seemed shockingly intimate, there in the darkening garret with no one else around.
He walked over to the shelves and began replacing the spools. I watched him for moment while his back was turned. His hair was a sandy brown, tied with a neat black ribbon at the nape of his neck. His shoulders were broad under the thin linen of his shirt and I could see the muscles flex as he reached for the highest shelf. When he turned back toward me I lowered my eyes to his shoes and followed them across the room, back to the bag he had left behind. Once he had picked it up, he inclined his head to me again to take his leave.
“Could you weave this?” I asked, brandishing my watercolor at him. The question came out before I had a chance to decide to ask it. He seemed so taken aback that I immediately wished I could snatch it back and make it unsaid, just as I now wished I could make my painting unseen by anyone but me.
“What I mean is … would it even be possible to weave it?” He must have sensed my discomfort, as his face became kind. “Of course,” he said simply. “You can weave anything. Birds, flowers, fruit, even shells. It’s not easy to make curves and shade the fabric, but it can be done.”
“So you could weave this?” I opened the paper again, revealing my hopes and secret desires on the page, made bold by his confidence.
“Well, not that exactly, no.” I snapped it shut again.
“Ma’am, please understand, your drawing is lovely, but it means nothing to a loom. You need to translate it into a language the loom can understand. Do you see?”
I did not, but I nodded anyway. Then he reached for my drawing again, holding out his hand, palm upward, in a silent request. When I gave it to him he opened it out and studied it. “You think in shapes, madam, but the loom only thinks in lines. You need to transcribe the design onto point paper and tell the loom row by row, square by square, precisely which thread is to go where. Then it would be possible to weave it.”
* * *
It was the next step, taking my pattern from idea to design. It thrilled me to think of transferring my pattern to point paper, yet I was reluctant, almost fearful. I would be doing something of which Elias disapproved and I knew I would n
ot tell him. Why should I? He had ridiculed my attempts to draw a pattern. But there was another reason for my apprehension. Thoughts of my pattern and weaving were now bound up with other things: linen stretched over muscle, and the sweet woodruff smell of that man as I had stood next to him at the loom.
9
Sara
I had been at 10 Spital Square a few weeks when I was sent out with a package for one of the master’s journeymen. I didn’t know where he lived, so I followed Moll’s directions, turning right into White Lyon Yard, then cutting through Pearl Street to get there. I knew when I must be getting close. The milkmaids slopped the unsold buttermilk from their pails straight into the street. As the weather grew warmer, it would sour in the afternoon sun and by nightfall the air would be thick with its stench. No one with a nose could miss the entrance to Buttermilk Alley.
Who lived by this narrow alley? Who woke every morning to the clanking of pails on yokes and the milkmaids chattering and fussing like ducks on a pond? The master owned more than fifty looms in Spitalfields, tucked into the garrets of weavers’ cottages, like the little row of houses next to Buttermilk Alley. Inside them, his journeymen weavers were busy turning his thread into silk cloth.
I approached the one at the most pungent end of the street, nearest the entrance to Buttermilk Alley. I knocked on the front door, smartly painted green, just as Moll had described it, but no one answered. Matching green shutters flanked a window to the left of the door but I couldn’t see anyone inside. I stepped back and looked up at the house. On the second floor a wide lattice window stretched the width of the building. I could hear the dull thumping and clanking of those infernal looms, not just from this house but all along the row, starting and stopping so that the whole street seemed engaged in a mechanical conversation. I stood outside for a few moments, the package cumbersome in my hands, wondering how long to wait.
Then, in the distance, I heard the sound of the tenor bell at Christ Church and the chattering of the looms began to cease until the row of little houses was silent. I knocked sharply on the door before it all started up again. A man opened it, tall and stooping, almost as if the cottage were a doll’s house filled with the wrong size dolls.
“I have a package from Mr. Thorel,” I said, offering it, thinking he would take it, but instead he nodded and gestured for me to come inside.
We went into the parlor. It had a range with a fire already burning, a table and chairs—more dining room than parlor, perhaps, although as the house was only one room deep it was hard to know. Another man was sitting at the table, pouring ale into a tankard.
“There’s a package from Thorel,” the tall man said.
“What makes you think it’s for me?” said the man at the table. He didn’t look up, just started rolling his shoulders and moving his head from side to side as if they were stiff from his day’s work.
“He gives me my thread up at the house.”
The man at the table stilled and looked at us. “Of course, you’re an inside weaver now, aren’t you, Lambert? Up there in Thorel’s garret, doing his bidding.”
I felt I had walked into something charged and uneasy. The air seemed thick around me, as if I were standing among words unsaid. I stepped toward the table to leave the package and go.
“Open it,” said the man at the table, before I could put it down. “Open it and let’s see what’s inside. If it’s a spool of finest thread dyed the latest verditer shade, it will be for him. If it’s a pile of plain thread for a lining, it will be for me.”
I glanced at the other man, unsure what to do, until the package was taken from my hand. The seated man ripped open the paper and tipped the contents onto the table, about ten bobbins all tightly wound with glossy black thread.
“You were right, Lambert, it is for me.” The man pushed the bobbins away from him. One rolled off the table and fell to the floor.
I turned to the man called Lambert. “Are you the journeyman weaving his master piece in the Thorels’ garret?” I asked, trying to take the attention away from the man sitting glowering into his ale.
“Yes. I’m Bisby Lambert and this is John Barnstaple.”
“His master piece,” Barnstaple spat. “Do you really think they’ll admit the likes of you into the Weavers’ Company? You’ve sold out, Lambert. You’re nothing but an inside weaver, toiling under the scrutiny of your master. I’d rather stay an outside weaver, with my freedom and pride, even if it means weaving handkerchiefs all day!”
I looked at Barnstaple properly then. He was unshaven, and a shadow of black defined his jaw. Dark hair fell around his face in thick, slightly curling hanks. He had the look of a misplaced pirate, wild and devil-may-care, as if the room were too small for him.
“I should go,” I said, wishing that Barnstaple would shift his gaze toward me even for an instant, that my leaving would make some impression on him. But he was staring at Lambert, challenging him, with his coal-black eyes, to gainsay him.
Esther
I spread the point paper on the dining table. Elias would not miss this one sheet. It had faint lines hatched over it, vertically and horizontally, so it was completely covered with tiny squares. Next to it was my painting.
I had to somehow lift my watercolor from its paper and lay it over the lines, magnified four times over. I set about drawing free hand. The flowers looked well enough, but when I held it up it seemed lopsided, as if there were more harebells on one side than the other. I knew that the loom would be an uncompromising disciple. I rubbed out the sketch and tried again, searching for an elusive symmetry to the design among all the little boxes on the page.
Still it seemed uneven. There was no room here for artistic freedom: the drawing had to be more exact than nature itself. I rubbed so hard at the marks I had made that a hole appeared in the center of the paper. I exclaimed in frustration and started again beneath the mistake. This time I arranged the first part of the pattern correctly, but when it came to the repeat, only half would fit. Was this what Elias had meant? It was as if he stood beside me, mocking, What is a dezine, Mrs. Thorel? Plainly it was not enough to be able to paint. The point paper demanded order and symmetry, like a pedantic schoolmaster. When my third attempt ended with a leaf projecting four boxes to the left further than its counterpart, I snatched up the loathsome drawing and threw it into the fire, strip by torn strip. There was such satisfaction in watching it burn that I picked up my original watercolor and tossed that in too, as if punishing it for being so unhelpful. But once the brief, angry glow was over, I was left with nothing. No point paper, no watercolor, and no inclination to try again to design a silk pattern.
10
Sara
Madam had become lackluster and lethargic. I tried to find things that would interest her, but she pushed away the embroidery hoop when I handed it to her and merely sighed when I asked her if she was quite well, offering her some port-wine jelly. She seemed peevish, asking me constantly whether I had mended the loose stitching on her panniers and where I had put her bodkin, even though I hadn’t touched it.
When I could hardly stand it, I suggested we go out to Spitalfields market together. At first, she was reluctant, complaining that there was nothing there of any interest nowadays, but I told her I needed to go. I had not been back since I had left Mrs. Swann and I could not hide in Spital Square forever. I hoped that my being with the quality would keep the likes of Mrs. Swann at bay, so I told Madam I had not the heart to go without her. She was pleased with that. Madam liked nothing better than to be needed.
* * *
Little had changed at the market. The same rotting meat and vegetables on the ground, the same strumpets and pickpockets round every corner. But Madam did not see any of that. She was drawn to the stalls of flowers, stroking the delicate petals and smiling. How it must be to see only beauty in the world. I left her then, chatting to the nurseryman about when the first roses might b
e in, and turned toward the stalls of clothes, thinking I would ask Madam for a new apron.
That was when I saw her, glimpsed little more than the flash of the scarlet skirts of her slammerkin in the crowd. I tried to go after her, but she was gone, and I could only stand there, imagining I could smell her scent of orange flowers and jasmine.
I had spent the first months at Spital Square trying to forget the Wig and Feathers, but I could not forget Lucy Carey. Mrs. Swann had put me in Lucy’s room when I first arrived. It fronted the street, and every evening Mrs. Swann would make Lucy dress in a slammerkin and stand at the window. She had a sweet voice and we would raise the sash a few inches so that her songs could float down to the street below. She knew all manner of ballads and saucy ditties and would sway and laugh while she sang as if she hardly knew, or cared, that anyone could see her.
She always stood with her back to the window and her face angled over her shoulder, as if she were about to walk away, but wouldn’t be displeased were a passing gentleman to follow. Her hair—a wig, of course—was piled high on her head with a few fat ringlets underneath. She was as slight as a child, and if you glanced up from the street, you would think that was what she was. A tiny young thing, with a waist a man could circle with his hands as her voice dripped honey into his ear.
But I watched her from the other side. Lucy was forty if she was a day. The coquettish tilt of her chin hid the scars on her face. Mrs. Swann kept her going for as long as she could—years ago Lucy had been on Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies—but once the skin had blistered all over her body the men would yelp when she undressed. It was as if they had unwrapped a parcel of meat to find it riddled with maggots. That was when Mrs. Swann began to douse her in perfume, as if they would be so taken with her sweet smell that they would notice nothing else.