by Sonia Velton
“Moll, I want to know what Sara is doing at night when she is not in her room. If she leaves, I want you to follow her and tell me where she goes.”
Moll’s eyes widened but her words, if there were any, were stuck somewhere in her throat.
“There is a shilling for you, if you do it.”
Moll gave a tentative nod.
“You may come to my room when you have something to tell me.”
She nodded again, this time more confidently, and I left her to her ashes.
* * *
I did not have to wait long before she came. There was a quiet knock on my dressing room door that I knew could not be Sara as she was running an errand for me.
Moll was blushing. The only time she would ever be in this room would be to light the fire or clean the hearth and almost never with me present. What a shame she did not appear to have the same qualms about my husband’s room.
She peered at me from behind the straw-colored curls coming loose from her cap and said, “You were right, ma’am. Sara is leaving the house at night.”
I nodded to encourage her. “Where is she going?”
Moll didn’t speak. I couldn’t tell whether this was true reluctance or a show to make me think that my shilling had been well spent.
Then she looked up at me and said, “The weavers’ cottages by Buttermilk Alley, ma’am.”
“What is she doing there?”
Moll shrugged as if that information might cost me more. Elias owned many weavers’ cottages around Spitalfields, which he rented to the journeymen with the looms they contained. “Do you know which weavers live there?” I asked her. She nodded. “John Barnstaple, ma’am,” she said, “and Bisby Lambert.”
I tried not to react to her words. I didn’t want her to see my shock when she said his name. I just pressed the coin into her palm and watched her slip round the door. I sank down onto my stool. This was my own doing. I had brought it upon myself, taking in a girl from the street.
Judge not, that ye be not judged. This was what I had done for her, and in return she had taken me for a fool. And with one of our own journeymen.
* * *
The evenings were fast drawing in. Each passing day stole the light from our windows and robbed us of precious time. Silk is its own master and cannot be coaxed from the loom before it is ready. I yearned for it to be finished at the same time as I dreaded the final pass of the shuttle.
Bisby Lambert was bent over the loom while I clung to one of the lashes. The garret was cold. There was no fireplace; only the house warmed us from below. Sitting hunched on my stool, hardly moving in the cold, I began to feel like I was turning to ice.
With every draw of the simples, I waited for the right opportunity to ask him about Sara.
“You know my lady’s maid, Sara Kemp, I believe?”
He looked up, surprised. There was no right moment: I had just come out with it.
“She runs errands to Buttermilk Alley sometimes,” he replied, neutrally.
“Yes, but she does more than just that, doesn’t she?”
“Pass twenty and take two,” he said.
I tutted, then slackened the drawn simples and pulled the second set of lashes. “I mean that her purpose at Buttermilk Alley is not running errands. She is coming to see someone there.”
“Pass two, take eight.”
My breath came out in an exasperated puff, which clouded in the garret’s cold air. “Even at night,” I said deliberately. “She is even there at night time.”
“Pass eight, take seven.”
I had lost all feeling in my immobile hands and the lash slipped from my fingers.
“I said take seven!”
“I can’t!” I said. “My fingers are numb!”
He stopped the loom, releasing the treadles and setting down the shuttle. Then he was kneeling beside me. My pale hands were pressed together, a single balled fist in my lap. He circled them with his own and lifted them to his lips. His hands were wide and warm over mine, enclosing them completely. He inhaled then breathed into the space between our fingers. Over the top of our hands he lifted his eyes to mine. “You cannot think that your maid is coming to see me?”
The pressure of his hands was secure and reassuring. I wanted to stay sitting in that cold garret forever, just so he would never let go.
I found then that I could barely speak. I had not really thought that it was him Sara was visiting, but I had been surprised by how much I wanted it not to be true, by how much I needed to hear him say it wasn’t. I gave a slight nod.
“Good.” He gave my hands a quick squeeze, then dropped them back into my lap. “Take lash seven, please.”
* * *
I couldn’t get out of my mind the moment he had held my hands in his and reassured me about Sara. I thought about it constantly, mining the memory for any nuggets of emotion it might reveal. He had touched me, brought my hands to his lips and breathed his hot breath against my skin. It was an unspeakable intimacy and yet … What journeyman would not deny that he was courting the maid of the household he worked for? Had he never taken Ives’ small hands in his and rubbed the life back into them?
20
Sara
Gin.
I had never tried it before that night, even at Mrs. Swann’s. Most of London seemed to be laid out on the streets dead-drunk on it, and the sight of Mrs. Swann’s daughters reeling and giggling before they’d had breakfast was enough to make me decide never to touch it. But it was as easy to purchase as bread and just as cheap. Everyone was buying it, from the washerwomen to the footmen. Men received it as part of their wages. Women gave it to their babies. It was everywhere.
I sat on my bed and took my first sip, grimacing at the floral taste. Drinking one of Madam’s perfumes could not have been more unpleasant. I made myself drink more and more until my head spun and my mind altered. I imagined the baby flushed away along a river of gin, disappearing in its frothy churn. Then I was running down the riverbank alongside him, watching as he tumbled and fought for air. I could not let him drown, so I knelt by the river and tried to fish him out. But when I grabbed hold of him, he turned into a huge flapping fish with great jaws that snapped down on my arm and dragged me into the swirling river of gin. Then I hung there with him, in the strange tranquility of the riverbed, neither trapped nor free. Neither breathing nor drowning.
My stomach heaved, but I kept drinking until I could see the bottom of the bottle appear when I tipped it up. I let it fall to the floor next to my bed and the remaining liquid seeped into the floorboards. Then I slept the kind of sleep that rendered me a dead weight until the next morning. When I awoke I checked the bed all around me to see whether it had left my body during the night. But it was still there, a resistant bump, like a crease in a garment I could not iron out, no matter how hard I tried.
* * *
John Barnstaple lay back on the pallet and let out a long breath, his eyes brown-black in the candlelight. When he looked at me again he glanced at my belly as if he needed proof of my condition.
I lay alongside him, close enough to place my hand on his jaw and tilt his face toward me. The most striking weaver in Spitalfields. I still thought him so. His skin was rough and scratched my fingers as they slid across it. Finally, I had had to tell him and now he would not even look at me.
“There are ways,” he said presently, “to remedy this.”
“Remedy it?” I wasn’t sure what he meant. “You mean marriage?”
He blew air into his cheeks and looked up at the ceiling.
“Marriage! That is not what I was thinking.”
He got up and pulled on his shirt. Over at the washstand he splashed water on his face and stared at himself in the cracked mirror, as if his own image might advise him what to do. “Go to see someone. There are ways.”
A flush
of shame colored my face. Although I fought against them, I could feel tears welling in my eyes.
“I have already drunk as much gin as I can manage,” I said. “It didn’t work.”
He laughed. “If gin did the job then the population of London would be half what it is.”
“But why should we not think of marriage?” I persisted. It was the most obvious of solutions to this kind of difficulty. I’ll own I almost felt a fraud, suggesting that he marry a whore, but I had kept that from him and I was a different person now. Just like Mrs. Thorel’s mother, the tavern singer turned wife of a surgeon.
He peered closer to the looking glass and started picking at his teeth. “Why all the talk of marriage? You weren’t thinking of it when you first jumped into my bed.”
I was glad of his interest in his teeth, so he did not see me flinch at his words.
“There is a child to think of now,” I said, keeping my voice even.
He shrugged at himself, then turned toward me again. “What about the Thorels? What would they say? You wouldn’t be able to keep your room and Lord knows there’s precious little space for you both here.” He cast a glance around the garret. A loom and a straw pallet: no place for a baby.
“What do you care for the Thorels? They do not pay you a fair wage as it is.”
“No, but they pay for the bed you’re lying on.”
“It’s hardly a bed,” I said, sitting up. “We could get new lodgings together.” But he was already pulling on his breeches and tucking in his shirt as if he had somewhere more important to be, as if anything were more important than me and my baby. I felt the first bitter sting of resentment as I watched him go on with his life as if nothing had changed. “You will have to pay to support me.”
He paused for a moment as he was putting on his waistcoat and stared hard at me. “What makes you think that?”
“You have to. The parish won’t pay for me when the father of the child should.”
He turned sour then, no longer even trying to dress his words with kindness. “How can they know I’m the father? How can I even know I’m the father?”
“I will swear an oath to it,” I said, defiant.
He tutted. “Calm yourself, woman, there is no need for that.” He looked as if he was about to go, but then walked back over to the pallet, as if I were an afterthought, and knelt beside me. He took my hand and said, “We still have time before the baby comes.”
Esther
Pastor Gabeau leaned on the pulpit of L’Église Neuve. The Sunday congregation was a sea of muted browns and black before me, heads dipping and murmuring in prayer.
“And we must guard against the dangers of drink,” intoned Gabeau. “Take heed of what you see on the streets and shun the paths that lead to destruction.” The thought of Elias’ peace-loving kinsfolk lying drunk in the street was almost laughable. The Huguenots were more likely to enjoy flowers and the music of songbirds. I was not so sure, though, about Sara. Only the other day I had found her in her room in the morning, trying to put her shoes on the wrong feet. The smell in the air pricked my nostrils and Sara was as green about the gills as a person could be.
I glanced at Elias. He was doing a good impression of paying attention to the sermon. His head was bent forward at a respectful angle and he held his prayer book in his lap, rubbing occasionally at the silver clasp with his thumb. But I knew that his mind would be full of the escalating price of the finest raw silk from Italy, not the dangers of sin. In truth, my mind was not on the sermon either. It was the sin closer to home that concerned me most. I was convinced that Sara was with child. I had managed to keep Sara’s past hidden from Elias over the months, but what would I do when she was betrayed by her own belly?
In the next pew, I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Arnaud. Mrs. Arnaud caught my eye and we nodded in acknowledgment. I watched her for a moment, sitting perfectly still and upright next to her husband. She was the very model of the sobriety and hard work for which the Huguenot people are known. What would she think about my pregnant maid? She was like a barometer, gauging my success as a wife and the mistress of a Huguenot household; the bellwether of our community.
When the sermon was over, Elias made sure that the press and flow of the crowd pushed us toward the Arnauds. Soon he was a few steps ahead of me, shaking hands with Mr. Arnaud, finding a way to draw the conversation toward business, making sure this trip to church was not a wasted opportunity. Mrs. Arnaud was surrounded by a group of lace-collared, white-capped ladies, all waiting for her direction, which poorhouse to visit next and how many shirts to stitch beforehand. I felt completely alone among this righteous flock.
Then Pastor Gabeau was alongside me, matching his slow stride to mine, hands clasped behind his back. He could see Elias and Mr. Arnaud deep in conversation by the pulpit, so he drew me toward the door, where we stood—half in the early winter sunlight, half in the cavernous gloom of the church—while Pastor Gabeau said his goodbyes and accepted thanks.
“You have seemed preoccupied these past weeks, Mrs. Thorel,” he commented, still smiling and nodding, as the last of the congregation retreated.
I found it easier without his gaze upon me; I did not want to be subjected to the scrutiny of the Church and be found lacking.
“May I help?” he said, in response to my silence. He stood out on the steps while I was still inside, light meeting darkness, good versus evil.
“I have a friend …” I hesitated, knowing that the pastor would see through this half-hearted deception, but he just smiled and gave me an encouraging nod.
“Well, she suspects that her maid might be …” I did not know how to say the words to a minister.
Gabeau drew a breath, part resigned sigh, part summoning his resolve. “I have seen all of humanity walk through these doors, Mrs. Thorel. I doubt there is any aspect of the human condition that would surprise me.”
“Indeed not, Pastor. It is just that my friend does not know what to do with her. What is the right thing to do?”
“If there is a child, then it is for the father to do the right thing,” said Gabeau, sternly. “But if he cannot,” he continued, when I did not respond, “or will not, then we can help.”
I looked up at him and must have appeared so surprised and grateful that he said, “Your friend is not the first mistress of a household to find herself in such a situation, Mrs. Thorel. In fact, here is the lady you should speak to.”
Pastor Gabeau held out his arm to Mrs. Arnaud as she approached. They exchanged the smiles of trusted friends, warm and genuine. I stepped out of the chill of the nave and joined them in the pale sunshine.
“Mrs. Arnaud has a friend on the Committee of Enquiry of the Foundling Hospital, I believe.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Arnaud.
“Mrs. Thorel has a friend whose maid is with child. Is there any advice we can offer her?”
Mrs. Arnaud looked kindly and concerned. There was no trace of the judgment and condemnation I had feared. “I am sorry to hear that. It is always a difficult situation, but your friend can send her to a lying-in hospital when her time is near. Then, the very best thing for the baby would be to place it in the Foundling Hospital. I can help, if your friend is prepared to support the girl with the petition to the Foundling Hospital?”
“Oh, she is,” I said eagerly.
“Good,” said Pastor Gabeau. “The best way to love God is in our benevolent deeds, not just our worship.”
21
Sara
Moll was avoiding me. I could tell by the way she slipped past me in the hallway, and my voice rang out into empty stairwells whenever I called her. I took to creeping around outside closed doors until one day I heard her talking to Monsieur Finet in the kitchens. I opened the door noiselessly so as not to give her the chance to disappear.
They stopped talking when I walked in. Moll made a great show of busying her
self with her broom. When she tried to step around me to get to the door, I grabbed her skinny arm and held it tight. She yelped like a puppy.
Monsieur Finet got to his feet. “Leave the girl be. She’s just trying to get on.”
How typical of him to take her side before even a word had been spoken. I suspected he could not see the truth past her doll-like features and slender waist. I gripped her harder. “Why did you tell Madam about Buttermilk Alley?”
“Tell her what about Buttermilk Alley?” she said, her smooth brow creasing.
“That I have been going there. You’ve been following me. I saw you one night—you don’t know it, but I did. And now Madam is watching every move I make. You have told her, I know you have. Who else could it have been?”
“I never,” she said, and started to twist her arm.
Monsieur Finet took another step toward us. “I don’t care what’s been going on, let her go.”
“Who else was it, then? You, Monsieur Finet?”
Finet laughed. “What interest have I in the comings and goings of women? If you have been leaving the house, you must accept the consequences. It’s not the girl’s fault.” He took hold of my wrist in one hand and Moll’s arm in the other and pulled them apart. Moll rewarded Finet with such a smile you’d have thought he’d saved her from a burning house.
She must have thought she had escaped when she shot up the stairs to sweep the hearths with more enthusiasm than I had ever seen from her before, but I was watchful from then on. She saw me reflected in every pot she polished and every grate she shone.
Esther
As we drew further into winter the darkness came earlier each day. There was less and less time left after the tenor bell sounded for Bisby Lambert to come to Spital Square and weave. That should have meant I saw him less, but it didn’t. His master piece lay unfinished in its loom, while my own silk gained length with every week that passed.
I set down the lashes and stretched my arms. It was cripplingly repetitive being a drawboy. “I am seeing lashes when I close my eyes,” I said. “I dream of them!”