by Sonia Velton
He let out a breath of exertion, then the whole mechanism seemed to swing back and I was free. I gathered my skirts in delight and, for a brief moment, they came up and revealed my stockinged ankles just as he was sitting back on his haunches. It was as fleeting as the snap of a twig, but his glance made me feel as if I had stepped into hot water.
He stayed crouched at my feet. “Does the weaving really mean so much to you, madam?”
“Yes,” I said, and all my frustration and longing to bring my pattern to life seemed to gush out on the wave of that one word.
He nodded and stood up. “Then I will help you,” he said.
* * *
We fell into a rhythm. For every two days he came with Ives to work on his master piece, he came one day alone to weave with me. I sat on the stool next to the loom pulling the lashes and drawing the simples as he directed. There was something inevitable about the time we spent together, the direction of our lives already mapped out with the same precision that a pattern is drafted onto point paper. I was observing a transition, the strands of silk thread disappearing from the bobbins and becoming so woven together that they would be impossible to pick apart. And with every pass of the shuttle his life and mine intertwined. For as long as I continued to pull the lashes in the correct sequence, the pattern would be drawn up, line by line, on the warp. The result was predetermined.
* * *
It is a woman’s duty to bear children, no matter if it kills her. And I have seen that happen often enough, not least to my own sister, who panted and screamed her way to God for the sake of a half-formed infant who outlived her by less than an hour. As they put her into the ground, along with the child who had killed her, my mother turned to me and said, “This is what it means to be a woman.”
Sometimes I watched the children playing in the street from my parlor window. They would bounce their hoops over the cobblestones like cartwheels, and run, shrieking and laughing, after them with their sticks. It was not that I didn’t want a child of my own—I did, desperately—it was that I found it hard to long for the very thing that might take me from this world. It was not something that Elias would ever understand. Despite his domestic distractions, he knew his duty in the bedchamber and fulfilled it with the same sense of purpose he did everything else. There had been a baby once, but as soon as it had made its presence known, it had disappeared in a trail of blood down my shift. God forgive me, but before the crushing sadness, there had been relief. Every day I have remained childless since, I have wondered whether I was being punished for that brief moment of release. And not just by God. I felt my husband punished me every day for not being the woman he had thought I was, for not being Sophia Courtauld, perfect wife and mother, beloved of his community, for being the wrong choice. He had paid too high a price for me and seen no return.
Infatuation turned to resentment is a bitter thing. It sours the wine and turns the bed cold. But I did not complain.
“Looking for love in marriage,” my mother used to tell me, “is like looking for currants in a bun. Nice enough if they’re there.” And yet Elias was a man who could create beauty from next to nothing. No one could feel the sensual slip of one of his silks over their skin and doubt that. Sometimes I wondered what my life might have been like if Elias had ever focused the same exquisite attention on me.
After a while, I couldn’t recall what it was to truly love, any more than a caged bird can remember its freedom. Until he reminded me. In those hours in the garret I realized what it was to feel a man’s presence so strongly that I could barely look at him. I came to know how just the press of him against my leg could wipe all else from my mind.
18
Sara
The scent of lavender pomade in the garret. That was how I knew she’d been there. Madam had taken to appearing and disappearing, like a phantom. Even when she was around, she was half-hearted about everything. Not so much about reading her psalms—she was always half-hearted about that—but with her needlework. Usually she could sit for hours in front of the window with her head bent over some sewing, but she had become distracted, her lips pursed in a thin line, plucking at the stitches as if they had annoyed her on purpose.
It hadn’t occurred to me to check the attic, but I sensed her from the moment I stepped though the trapdoor. I know what a weaving garret smells like. It smells of silk and weavers and both are rich, musky odors, like damp wool or an earthy forest floor. But this one was sweet with gentility, the same flowery elegance that I found so cloying downstairs. For a moment I stood there in the silence. It was so peaceful, with the light fading from the long lights and the shadows creeping, like mice, from under the looms. What brought her up here, I wondered, where the only living things were the weavers and the songbirds?
* * *
Mr. and Mrs. Arnaud proved frequent visitors at Spital Square. Every time I saw him I worried that he would finally recognize me, but over the months I realized that the eyes peering out from that fleshy face saw only the Madeira wine or the pork stuffed with apple and sage. I was able to serve him his food and drink, and stand right in front of him, hoping that one day he might choke on it.
Mr. Arnaud was as dour as his wife was amiable. It made him an easy dinner guest—his needs were met by a meat pie and a glass of port—but Mrs. Arnaud was much harder work. She came for the conversation. I had thought that Madam’s ability to chatter about the latest textiles was without match, but even she was glassy-eyed by the time the soup was served.
“But have you seen them, Mrs. Thorel?” said Mrs. Arnaud. “They are so plain!”
Madam laid down her soup spoon for a moment. “But is that so bad, Mrs. Arnaud? I mean, silk design has been much the same for these hundred years past. Perhaps it is time for a change.”
Mr. Arnaud scoffed into his soup, spattering it over the best damask. “You see, wife, Mrs. Thorel does not live in the past as you do. She is a young woman after all.”
Mr. Arnaud glanced at Madam over his spoon, and I saw her through his eyes: her face flush-pink against the white lace of her collar, her eyes large and wide-spaced like a child’s. Next to Madam, Mrs. Arnaud was a faded bloom, the kind of flower that should be plucked from the vase before the petals fall.
I looked at the master to see whether he had noticed Mr. Arnaud staring at his wife, but he was busy with his soup.
“Of course,” said Madam, patting her lips with the cloth, “I love the old baroque styles as much as anyone, but perhaps there is room for both, the more elaborate designs for formal attire and the simple silks for other occasions.”
“Other occasions? Why, Mrs. Thorel, you’ll have us all wearing calico next!”
They were childless, these two, as was Madam. But there was something hopeful about Mrs. Thorel. She was not yet thirty, after all, while Mrs. Arnaud was already wrinkling like a walnut. Mrs. Arnaud’s fertility was a book that was closing, the last pages turning, and Mr. Arnaud lacked the time or the inclination to pull down the ribbon to save the place. Poor Mrs. Arnaud talked brightly of the children she would have in the same way that we planned for the last days of autumn, even though we knew that the cold was coming.
It was while I was pinning Madam’s hair the next morning that I first felt the baby twist, like a newt, inside my belly. I gave a little gasp and put my hand to it, but all I felt was the bones of my stays, as if the infant already knew what kind of world lay outside and had sought refuge behind them.
Madam looked at me strangely and I mumbled something about the kippers we had had for breakfast. But I knew it was the slippery flip of new life, the first unmistakable confirmation of everything I had suspected. I glanced at Madam again in the mirror: she was undoing the hair I had just pinned and curling it again higher on her head, unconcerned about anything other than her own appearance. I had no fear of her noticing yet. I was there for my usefulness, not my beauty, and she would no more look closely a
t me than she would gaze upon her chamber pot.
Esther
Sara was airing my summer gowns before packing them away for the winter. Inside the house it was still warm, but a cool breeze laced with woodsmoke blew through my open window. My chamber was covered with a blanket of silk. On my bed was a damask gown with an ornate pattern. It used to belong to my sister, Anne, and my mother had given it to me after Anne died. I liked neither the pattern nor the memories it held. I lifted it from the bed and turned to Sara, who was kneeling by my blanket chest, lifting out my woolen petticoats.
“Sara, you may have this now.”
She stood up quickly, her arms full of undergarments. Dried sprigs of last year’s lavender fell to the floor. “Madam, are you sure? It’s a very fine gown.”
And it was. The silk was a shaded damask background with a geometric pattern. You could imagine how it would have looked in the firelight, each of the twelve hundred threads per inch catching the light slightly differently. A Spitalfields silk is an investment, not something to be thrown away. It should be passed down through generations, cut and remade from gown to waistcoat, through every garment in between.
“Of course I’m sure,” I told her. In truth, although the silk was fine, the style was far too old-fashioned for me to wear again. “Come, let’s see how it looks.”
Sara placed the woolens on the bed in the space left by the gown. I took her arm and led her to my dressing mirror. I stood behind her and held the bodice up to her chin. I was a few inches taller than her, so I could see over her shoulder how the subtle reds and greens complemented her hazel eyes.
“There, it looks well on you.”
Sara flushed and looked at the floor. I had hoped to see her smile. I hung the garment over one of my arms and turned her toward me with the other.
“Why don’t you try it on properly?”
“Try it on? Why, madam, I couldn’t possibly.”
“I should like to see how it becomes you,” I said crisply. “Now turn around.”
Sara, reluctant, took the bodice from me and turned so that I could begin to loosen the lacing of her own clothes. Then I shrugged the sleeves from her shoulders and pulled them off. When she turned back to me, she had folded her arms across her chest, as if I were a rake intent on seducing her rather than her mistress.
“Come,” I said, gently opening her arms, “you see me in such a state every day.”
The skin under her clothes was impossibly white. Her soft breasts spilled over the top of her stays, like fresh milk tipping out of the pail.
I slipped the bodice onto her arms and smoothed it. Her cloth cap looked odd next to such a fine silk so I pulled it from her head. As I did so, her hair fell from its knot and spread over her shoulders. I had hardly noticed it before, but it was the color of the horse chestnuts just beginning to fall from the trees outside and as glossy as a well-groomed mare.
“Indeed, Sara, you are far from plain,” I said, as I stepped around her skirts to begin lacing up the back. “Once I have fitted the bodice, I am sure I will finally see you smile.”
I was chattering to compensate for her own silence. But as I came to the bottom of the lacing, my voice faded away. The material would not meet, no matter that I tugged and pulled on the lacing, which was strange because the top fitted well. I walked round to stand in front of her and looked at her more closely than I had ever done before, but her arms had crept back to her waist and hovered there as if she had an attack of the gripes.
“Well,” I said, much more curtly now, “it is yours if you wish to have it. You can make something new out of the material. If you do not care for it, then you may sell it. There is a good trade in old silks at Spitalfields market. You may well be glad of a few extra shillings.” I said the last words rather pointedly, but she did not take the bait. Instead, she hurriedly took off the gown. I watched her undress, slipping the silk from her pale limbs, then hiding herself again in the forgiving folds of a servant’s dress. She took up the basket of freshly dried herbs from my dressing table and silently began to lay out my summer gowns with sprigs of lavender.
* * *
Sara’s last task of the evening was to dampen down the fire. That night she helped me to change out of my clothes, untied my hair and combed it through while I sat at my dressing table in my shift and dressing gown. Afterward, as I knelt on the low velvet stool by my bed, I heard the clank and scrape of irons in the grate. She left me without saying good-night, backing noiselessly out of the door so as not to disturb my prayers.
When I climbed into bed a few minutes later, it was like lying on the marble shelf in the pantry. The cold had crept up on us that autumn. It strengthened like bindweed in the garden and choked the warmth out of the nights. I chided myself for not asking Sara to put the hot coals from the fire into a warming pan for my bed. Still, it was not yet late, so I slipped out of bed and pulled on my dressing gown.
I had expected to see her on the landing—extinguishing the lights lining the staircase one by one as she made her way up to bed—but the candles still flickered dully against the walls and the hallway was empty. I took a chamber stick and held it out in front of me, following its glow up the stairs toward her room. I knocked on her door, then called to her, but there was no answer. I opened the door slowly, hoping its reluctant creak would rouse her before I had to. When the door had swung wide, I held the candle aloft and whispered her name, but my words were swallowed by a darkness that offered nothing in return. I patted over her bed, feeling for her body under the coverlet, even though I knew she was not there.
I made my way back down the stairs, intending to search for her in the kitchens, more interested now in her whereabouts than my warming pan. But as I reached my landing the stairs leading down to the floors below began to creak and the light from a candle rose up from the stairwell.
“There you are,” I said a little tartly, stepping toward the light.
It was not Sara who emerged, but Elias. “That is a fine greeting for a husband,” he said, with a smile, setting down his candle and taking my hand. I looked at him expectantly. There must be a reason for his good humor, especially at this hour.
“Arnaud has commissioned another fine brocaded silk,” he announced. “It is good work in these difficult times.”
“I am glad, husband,” I said.
“Indeed,” he murmured, as he took the chamber stick from my other hand and blew out the flame. In the gloom smoke curled up from the spent wick and stung my nostrils. He gripped my hand tightly. “Shall we go to bed, wife?”
I tried to nod, but his lips were already on mine, bringing with them the lingering sweetness of Madeira wine.
19
Sara
“I came looking for you last night.”
I took a moment to finish my stitch, tying and cutting off the thread, before I looked up at her and said, “I’m sorry, madam. The night was cold and I slept in the kitchen downstairs.”
She continued to study me, her needle dipping and rising under her practiced fingers. “I see,” she said presently.
The circumstances of our meeting were a constant presence in the room, like the ticking of the clock or the crackle and spit of the fire. Madam had bought my virtue for three pounds, eight shillings, and sixpence, as if she was purchasing new ribbons for her hair. As far as she was concerned, it was no longer mine to give away. But what right had she to judge me? She had taken on the piety of her husband’s people as easily as she had slipped into the fine silks they made. She had adopted their manners, their industriousness and their thrifty ways, but she was neither French nor Huguenot. She had said no more about her mother after the day I had first arrived and I had not questioned her further. I had never quite understood what she had been trying to tell me until I overheard Finet telling Moll that the master had set many tongues wagging when he married a girl who wasn’t French. I tried not to
listen to servants’ gossip, of course, but their chatter filled the kitchen, like the heat from the range, and I could no more take their words out of my ears than I could keep the warmth from my bones. Everyone knew that Madam was the daughter of a wealthy surgeon. He had a shop on Mincing Lane and some say he attended the King himself, lancing his boils and cutting off his bunions, but no one knew a thing about her mother. At least, not until the pair of them were run out of town for being a murderer and a whore. So, it seemed we were not so different, Madam’s mother and I. When I think on it, I wonder whether it was not me she saw that day behind the Wig and Feathers but her own mother, standing in her petticoats having her ears boxed.
Esther
Early the next morning, I found Moll in the parlor. She stood uneasily before me, shifting from one foot to the other, with a brush in one hand, a pan in the other. Ashes from the hearth scattered the floorboards where she had jumped up suddenly when I entered. Her expression was almost comic: half annoyed that I had ambushed her, half bashful to be in my presence.
She dipped a quick curtsy and tried to hide the brush and pan behind her skirts.
“I won’t keep you long,” I said. Nor did I intend to. Looking at the girl gave me no pleasure. She was like a painting hanging on the wall that I had never particularly liked and wanted to get rid of. Pretty enough to some, but mawkish to me. But if a painting is taken down when it has been there a while, you are left with its grubby outline for all to see, and sooner or later something equally tawdry will take its place.
“Did Sara sleep with you last night?”
Moll looked vague, chewing at her pretty pink lips and letting her blue eyes wander round the room. “I don’t know, ma’am.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Surely she did or she didn’t.”
“Perhaps she came to bed after I was asleep.”
“So she was not there when you went to bed?”
Moll gave a little shrug. The girl was infuriating.