by Sonia Velton
I need not have worried. He did not recognize me any more than he would have noticed the same hackney coachman twice. The people who served his needs were as unremarkable to him as the shoes he put on his feet. He saw no more humanity in me than he did in the salt cellar he took from my hand without another word.
Esther
The sound of Moll’s happiness had flitted like a moth across the hallway and landed on my heart. As much as I had tried to carry on as if nothing had happened, I was not myself and even Mrs. Arnaud noticed.
“My dear,” she said, when we were settled in the parlor and the men continued to discuss their business downstairs, “are you quite well?”
I could not tell her, of course. Ours was a friendship of circumstance, not affection.
“I am, thank you, Mrs. Arnaud, but I have much to think about at the moment.”
“Indeed.” She looked at me quite kindly and nodded. “It’s just that I wondered whether all is as it should be …” she paused then and glanced away from me “… at home.”
I blushed and looked down at my hands. “Sometimes,” I ventured, “I feel invisible. As if I am no more to him than the table he sits at, or the ornaments on the shelves.”
“Come, my dear,” she said, placing her hand over my own and squeezing it, “you are young and pretty. This cannot be so. All men are preoccupied, but none more so than those whose business is silk. Do not take it to heart.”
It was an odd sensation, her hand over mine. She had never touched me before and I felt strangely comforted, as if she had connected me to her because our lives were the same, both in the shadow of a mistress more beautiful and demanding than any other.
“It is not just the silk.”
“Ah.” Mrs. Arnaud took back her hand as if the intimacy was suddenly too much. “If he is … distracted, then you must find something to busy yourself with. Is it not time you had a child?”
“But we have not been blessed.”
Mrs. Arnaud smiled. “A child will come, when God feels you are ready.”
“But what if it does not? I already feel that I have failed him. He has no heir—perhaps that is why …” We sat in silence, my words slowly turning stale. “We should return to the men,” I said presently.
She caught my arm as I went to stand up. “You cannot change him, so you must learn to live with it. It will be like a piece of grit in your shoe, painful and annoying, but you must carry on regardless. Do you understand?”
“Is that what you do?” I asked her, surprised at my own directness.
“It is easier now I am older,” she said, quite matter-of-fact. “I choose to busy myself with other things.” She let go of me then and gave my arm an awkward pat. “Find something to do which makes you truly happy, my dear. That is all I can suggest.”
* * *
I already knew what would make me happy. The next day I waited until Elias went out to Mr. Arnaud’s house in Artillery Lane, then stepped into his workshop. There were piles of books and papers and ledgers, covering every stage of the silk-weaving process, from the sticky little worms to the startling vermilion shades of the dyes. There must be something here about preparing the mise-en-carte, I thought, as I pulled book after book down from the shelf. The watercolor painting and the point-paper design were simply two parts of the same process, one artistic, the other technical. If artistry was talent and could not be learned, then technical drawing was craft and certainly could be.
Seven years an apprentice, and twelve books to show for it, three written in French. I had to love Elias for his attention to detail. There was not one element of his profession that he had not studied and mastered. I took the book on point-paper preparation to the counter. Then I found a silk design, the one with the Chinese temples, already paired with its mise-en-carte, waiting to be sent out to a journeyman, with the silk threads that would make it real.
I skimmed through the book, stopping occasionally to see how its directions had been put into practice in the example in front of me. The pattern was reduced to shades of black and gray, plotted over the lines. Letters of the alphabet labeled each grid. Each shade had been assigned a color beneath the pattern: jaune, lilas clair, lilas foncé. I spent all afternoon there, willing Elias not to return and shooing Sara away when her head appeared round the door and she exclaimed, “There you are, madam!” By the afternoon, I was beginning to understand. When I looked again at the temple pattern, the watercolor seemed mute and fragile while the point paper was like the advocate that would speak for it to the loom. I just had to reduce my designs to their most elemental level, then rebuild them, color by color, across those tiny boxes.
14
Sara
I returned to Buttermilk Alley just before the tenor bell sounded. I waited, but the noise from the second floor didn’t stop. He must be busy, I thought, imagining John Barnstaple grudgingly finishing Thorel’s silk order. I was wondering whether there was any point in knocking when the door opened and Bisby Lambert came out with a young boy.
“I’ve come to collect Thorel’s order,” I told them. “Like Barnstaple told me to.”
Lambert nodded. “He’s upstairs,” he said, holding open the door for me before they went on their way. Off to Spital Square, I supposed, to clank above Madam while she tutted about the noise, trying to read her latest novel.
I walked up the stairs to the garret where Barnstaple was working at his loom, placed directly under the wide lattice windows. Because the cottage was only one room deep, there were large windows on each side of the top floor. Opposite Barnstaple’s there was a second loom, larger and with more beams and pulleys, standing still and silent, like the angular skeleton of some strange creature. Straw pallets lay on the floor, one beside the bigger loom and one under the slope of the catslide roof, next to a simple washstand and mirror. Otherwise the room was empty, save for bobbins and quills scattered about the shelves and silk waste collecting in drifts on the floor. A place to work and sleep. Sleep and work.
Barnstaple stopped pushing on the pedals under the loom with his feet and hung up the shuttle. “It’s done,” he said, sullen, as if he begrudged even his own achievement.
“Mr. Thorel will be pleased.” I watched him with a slight smile as he walked round to the end of the loom and began cutting the threads tethering the silk to it and knotting them together.
“What’s this one for?” I asked, inspecting the other loom while Barnstaple continued to cut and knot.
“Flowered silk,” he said. “That’s Lambert’s drawloom. He weaves the tricky figured silk. I weave the simple stuff. Like this,” he said, finally freeing his silk from the loom.
“What is it?”
“A plain weave lustring. It’ll end up as the lining to some woman’s muff, or at least that’s how I like to imagine it.”
I gave him a sharp glance. He was grinning, a filthy look on his face. It was the first time I had seen him smile. I wondered whether I didn’t prefer the dark, brooding rebel to this coarse man. “Is that where you sleep?” I asked, nodding toward the pallet under the roof.
“It is. I get up, piss in the pot, then weave all day until I go to sleep again. Six days a week, every week, just to line the pockets of a man like Thorel.”
Of course the weavers slept by their looms. It amused me to imagine that weaver in Spital Square curling up on his pallet in Madam’s garret. How would she feel if she thought that a journeyman—muscles taut from working the looms, skin sharp with sweat—was lying only a few feet above her? Would it turn her delicate stomach or would she find it rather thrilling?
“Where does Lambert sleep?”
“Downstairs. We’d kill each other otherwise. It’s bad enough that I have to look at him all day.” He glanced toward Lambert’s drawloom.
“Does Thorel not weave?”
Barnstaple scoffed. “He’s barely touched a shuttle s
ince he finished his apprenticeship. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to weave—he knows as much as Lambert even—it’s just too much like hard work for him. He commissions the patterns, buys the silk and puts it out to his weavers. There’s fifty or more of us, working his looms throughout Spitalfields. When we’re done, we give him the finished silk.”
“Except Lambert’s allowed into Spital Square.”
Barnstaple’s face clouded. “Lambert thinks he’s got it in him to be a master. More fool him. He’ll work his guts out, only for Thorel to take the silk from him for nothing. Worshipful Company of Weavers indeed.”
He dropped the silk onto the bench and walked over to me. “But you’re not really interested in weaving, are you?”
I said nothing, conscious of the silence. No milkmaids calling out their wares in Buttermilk Alley, no weavers clanking out a living, thread by gossamer thread, in the row of cottages. Just this man and me, alone in an attic room.
“Why d’you keep coming here?” He stepped closer to me. I could feel him all the way down the length of my body, even though he barely touched me, such was the energy in him. Wound like a coiled spring, the moment before release.
“To get the master’s silk,” I said flatly.
“No.” He shook his head. “That’s not what you really want.”
“How do you know what I want?”
“I can tell. You’re not like other girls squealing blue murder if you so much as put a hand on them.” He reached for the back of my neck and drew me toward him. “Are you?” he whispered against my lips.
It was the first time a man had touched me since Mrs. Swann’s. It was at once completely familiar yet startlingly different, like the same tune played on an upturned bucket, then a harpsichord. But still I pushed him away, just because I could, even though the urgent press of him against me was as thrilling as the opium had been that first evening at Mrs. Swann’s.
Now it was up to me to decide.
Esther
I rose early and left the house to escape from my gilded cage. The streets were quiet. Only the nurseryman was up, standing with his cart at the corner of Spital Square and White Lyon Yard. He knew me well and nodded a greeting as I approached. I never left buying flowers to servants: I wanted the pleasure of choosing them myself and of walking away carrying a small handful of the season with me. But he had not seen me in a while. Flowers in the house made me want to paint, and I had drawn nothing since the day I burned the point paper.
I paused alongside his cart. It was the beginning of June, and it was laden with the blooms of early summer. Elias had dismissed my first attempt at a silk pattern and told me to go back to my sewing. I had been put in my place, wife and mistress of the household, a role I had been tethered to almost all my life by a silken cord of privilege and ease. But that tinkling laugh had cut through it, as easily as snipping an embroidery thread. I would still be the wife and manage the house, but a little part of me had been set free.
Elias was wrong. There was nothing more beautiful than what was laid out before me on that cart—irises and carnations, bees squabbling over white and purple lilacs. I could not look at all of this and fail to imagine it captured somehow on silk. Not in some stiff, stylized way, but in its natural form, so realistic that you could almost reach out and pluck the flower from the fabric.
I turned to the nurseryman. “I should like to buy some flowers,” I said.
He grinned at me, his first customer of the morning. I couldn’t decide whether to take the summer flowers or make a bough pot for the empty fireplace. In the end, I asked him to cut me some flowers, but he added a few sprigs of green. The nurseryman didn’t seem to mind the thorns—his hands were as twisted and gnarled as the branches.
“The season’s a-changing, ma’am,” he said, as he handed the bouquet to me.
“Yes,” I said. “It looks to be a hot summer.”
“Hot summer, cold winter,” he said simply. And he was right: a winter was coming that would freeze the very breath in our lungs. I wish I could remember his name, but perhaps I never asked it. You won’t find him there now. He did not survive the winter that was to come.
* * *
I was arranging the flowers in a vase when Moll came in. I had got up so early that she had not had a chance to clean the hearth. She made as if to leave when she saw me, but I gestured for her to come in. She looked at the floor as she passed me, as was her habit. I had always thought it was out of shyness, or respect for my position compared to hers, but now I saw things differently. She could not meet my gaze any more than the hangman looks into the eyes of the condemned. I watched her as she worked. I could not help it. If I had been asked before then what color her eyes were, I would not have been able to say, but now I studied every inch of her. She had a neat, heart-shaped face tapering to a pointed chin. The kind of chin you could imagine taking between thumb and forefinger and tilting upward.
I set my jaw and turned determinedly away from her. Instead of tormenting myself with every sweet plane of her face, I concentrated on my flowers and the watercolor they would become. Silk? No, you cannot do that. It was only because I had believed Elias’ words that the point paper had defeated me. Now I knew him so much better. He was not the man I had thought he was, and I no longer took his word for granted. And now there was another voice in my head: You have a gift, Mrs. Thorel.
Once Moll had gone I laid out my paper and watercolors and threw open the shutters so that the light fell straight onto the vase, picking out every curve of leaf and stem. The nurseryman had given me carnations and I began to sketch their showy sun of petals, but they seemed too fussy somehow. Then my eye was drawn to a single dog rose caught among them almost as if it should not have been there; a little Cinderella finding itself at the ball. It was the color of a blush on a creamy cheek. There was something captivating about its open face and downy yellow center, and the perfect simplicity of its shape, like the flower a child might draw. I found it easy to paint because it was pure and uncomplicated—quite unlike everything else in my life—and I lost myself in the delicate heart shape at the end of each petal and the way the pink turned to white before the yellow began. I ignored Sara’s pleas to come down to breakfast and by midmorning I had finished. Meandering across the width of the paper, spare sprays of flowers entwined with their leaves. As a watercolor it was good, but as a silk it needed more. I had to balance the subtle repeat of the flowers with something stronger, so I accented each cluster with a berry motif, drawn from memory. I chose blackberries for their intense color; a reminder of the autumn to come, even as the summer is still in bloom. When I took a step back, I could see it: the perfect symmetry down the entire length of the design, serpentine, Hogarth’s own Line of Beauty. I knew instinctively that this was something the loom could understand. A simple design that I could plot on those numerous squares, line by line and row by row.
My new pattern needed a name. I couldn’t think of anything more apt than those of the plants so I wrote “Blackberry and Wild Rose” across the top, along with the date, 2nd June 1768. There was a drawer in my dressing table with a lock. I took the tiny key from the locket round my neck and opened it, placing the watercolor, neatly folded, inside. It would be obvious to anyone that this was no ordinary painting and there were some questions that I did not want to have to answer.
* * *
Sara was creaking around the hallway outside. When she came in, she colored as she saw me close and lock my drawer, as if it were a personal affront for me to lock anything away. By then Sara knew almost everything there was to know about me. The scent of my favorite pomade and the color of my stockings. She sorted through my dirty shifts and stitched my petticoats. Was I to keep nothing to myself?
15
Sara
God blessed me with neither great brains nor great beauty, but I am no dolt. Did she think she was the only one with secrets? She fumbl
ed with her little keys and drawers in the same way that she shielded her breasts with her hands when I undressed her. But why should I avert my eyes from the curve of her flesh when I am allowed to see the contents of her chamber pot?
Seeing Mr. Arnaud again had made me realize that I could never escape the Wig and Feathers. Its roots spread from the end of the little lane next to Spitalfields market throughout the parish, tunneling everywhere, cracking the very ground I walked on. This life of churchgoing and piety was not mine. It had been forced upon me, traded in return for my good behavior. I dusted and darned, I scrubbed and sewed, but I would never do any more than that. Virtue had a price, which had turned out to be relentless hard work and tedium. It made me think: If your lot in life really is to lie on a bed of straw, then why should you lie there alone?
The next time Monsieur Finet had asked Moll to take a message to the journeymen in Buttermilk Alley, she pulled such a face you’d have thought he had asked her to empty the slops. So I offered to take it. By the time I had finished catering to Madam’s every whim and could leave, it was late evening. Buttermilk Alley was deserted but the sour tang lingered. Raised voices were coming from inside the weavers’ cottage and it took a while for anyone to answer. When the door finally opened, it was not John Barnstaple or Bisby Lambert who stood before me.
“I have a message from Mr. Thorel for the journeymen.” The man twisted round to look at John Barnstaple, surrounded by men. He saw me through the doorway and nodded to the man, who stepped to one side and allowed me to pass. Inside, Bisby Lambert and Barnstaple were sitting at the ends of the table, while other journeymen squeezed onto benches on either side, or leaned against the walls. That little room was so full I could barely get into it. They must have been discussing something important, as they didn’t look up when I hung my shawl on the hook by the door. I made myself useful, filling their empty ale pots from a jug. It was no place for a woman, but if I kept quiet and served some purpose they tolerated me well enough.