Blackberry and Wild Rose

by Sonia Velton

  He had halted the loom when I let go of the lash. Before he spoke, he moved to the edge of the bench so he could see me without looking through the vertical lines of the warp. “I understand. It’s harder work than it seems.”

  He was caught between the candlelight coming from inside the attic and the last of the daylight filtering through the windows. His face was planes of light and shade while the shadows gathered around him. As he sat at the loom, perfectly still, it was as if he posed for Hogarth. In front of him, the loom defined him and his place in the world. And what kind of picture did I make, with my silk gown settling around my feet and my soft white hands folded on my lap? I did little all day, then complained about two hours spent sitting beside a loom. If he was Industry then surely I was Idleness.

  “I want to feel what you feel,” I said. “Let me try to weave.” He watched me as I stood up and walked around him to the weaver’s bench. I gathered my skirts and made sure to fold them beneath me before I slipped into the space between the bench and the heddles, so that I was sitting next to him. He stared at me for a moment, then got up and stood behind me. I could feel his presence all the way down my back. Then he leaned over and spoke, his mouth so close to my ear that I could feel the warmth of his breath. “May I?” he said.

  He reached over and took hold of the lace of my sleeve, which was hanging down from my elbow. “You do not want this to get caught,” he said. “Not after last time.” His fingers grazed my skin as he tucked the lace under my sleeve. I should have pulled away and told him I would do it, but I didn’t. Then he shifted slightly and leaned over the other side. He must have been emboldened by my acquiescence because this time he was not so careful to avoid touching me. He drew the lace slowly back from my forearm, exposing my skin. Then he reached for the shuttle and handed it to me.

  “Start the loom,” he said. I rested my foot on the treadle and he laid his hand over the top of my leg, pressing down gently, showing me the right pressure to put the machine into motion. He checked the correct simples were raised, then told me to pass the shuttle. As the loom began its rhythmic dance, it suddenly seemed more wayward and powerful than it ever had from my stool at the side of the pattern mechanism. It was like trying to hold a ten-pound fish straight out of the water and the shuttle flew from my hand.

  “Not as easy as it looks, Mrs. Thorel?” he suggested, looking pleased with himself.

  I gazed up at him, but I didn’t return his smile. “None of this is easy,” I said.

  He turned away from me then, busying himself with securing the lashes.

  “You need to finish your master piece,” I said. “I have been selfish taking up all your time. I just—”

  Acknowledging something makes it real. It ends the pretense that there is nothing wrong with what you are doing. I still couldn’t give that up—I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “I don’t care about my master piece,” he said fiercely, turning back to me. “What are you saying? That you want to stop coming here?”

  “I cannot stop,” I said simply. “If you want this to end you will have to be the one to end it.”

  He seemed to find himself then, close down the person who had spoken to me so ardently, the man who had trailed his fingers over my skin and pushed the lace up my arm. “The silk will end this for us,” he said, as if he were talking to a fellow journeyman. “We cannot just keep weaving. The gathering roller will only hold six yards and we have almost that already. I will finish this silk for you. Then it will be over.”

  * * *

  Sara was turning down my bed when I walked in. She made a brief curtsy and said something under her breath, which sounded like, “There you are, madam.”

  I felt no need to explain why she had not found me in my room when she came to stoke the fire that now burned brightly in the hearth. Her whereabouts were the concern, not mine. I watched as she leaned over my bed and smoothed the sheets in an arc with her hand. Her belly pressed against it as she did so, preventing her from reaching the other side.

  “Here, let me help you.” I stood opposite her and stretched out my hand until it almost met hers. I swept upward, gathering the ripples of cloth and smoothing them over the side. When we both stood, we were facing each other across the bed.

  She tried to turn away, but I said, “No, wait,” so that she stopped, halfway toward the door.

  “I know that you have been leaving the house at night.”

  She stood for a moment, then rotated back toward me. There was a slight jut to her chin as she looked at me.

  “You go to Buttermilk Alley, where the journeymen live. Who is it you see?”

  And still she just looked at me. I had expected denial and hoped for an apology, but her silence infuriated me. As if I did not deserve so much as an explanation after all I had done for her! A passage from the Bible came unbidden to my mind.

  The Book of Ezekiel, chapter twenty-three, verse nineteen.

  I marched around the bed and grabbed her upper arms. Although I blush to own it, I wanted to slap her, just to see if that would loosen the words from her mouth. I was surprised by my own anger. She had insulted our household with her disobedience and her immorality.

  Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth wherein she had played the harlot …

  I gave her a shake. “You must tell me, Sara.” How dare she stay silent? How dare she walk out of my house at night as if it were her right to do just as she pleased? “Sara, you are with child. I can see it. We have to do something or you will end up in the workhouse.”

  I wanted to frighten her. I had every intention of helping her, but in that moment, I wanted her to feel the terror of life in the poorhouse to punish her for her brazen willfulness. And for standing there smugly fertile in front of me, when I was all but barren myself. Almost five years married and no child to show for it and this girl was ripening like a plum right under my nose.

  22

  Sara

  With child. What a strange expression. Of course, I was with child. I could not have dug that creature out from inside me if I tried. It was with me every moment of every day, like a strange malady that never passed. As I became more lethargic, it seemed only to get stronger, pushing out my belly as if demanding to be acknowledged.

  And now it had been. I could still feel the sharp dig of her thumbs into my arms as she held me, her questions confusing me, making me unsure where to start. The less I said, the more those thumbs pressed into my flesh. Then she became calmer, sitting next to me on the bed as if we were equals, holding her face in a look of studied patience.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  I looked up at her miserably and nodded.

  “Oh, Sara.” She shook her head and sighed, as if I had told her that I had ripped her favorite gown.

  “Who is the father?” She feigned indifference, but there was an edge to her voice that told otherwise.

  “I cannot tell you that, madam. You know I cannot.”

  She sprang up from the bed and stood over me. She was so tall that I had to look up at her, like a child being scolded.

  “But you must! Is it one of our own journeymen? Who is it? Tell me!” She was most particular about knowing which journeyman it might be. I wouldn’t have thought it would matter much to her. “Or are you meeting someone else entirely at Buttermilk Alley?” Her imagination was really taking hold now. “No matter,” she said, almost to herself, “they should all be dismissed for their part in this.” Then she paused, glaring at me. “And so should you be.”

  I stared hard at her, but her look was defiant. Did she want to see me hang? If she turned me out I would have nowhere to go. Mrs. Swann was like a hog rooting for truffles. She had her nose in every corner of this parish and the next. Without the protection of a household like the Thorels’, she would find me and I would be up before the magistrate as qui
ck as I could untie my bonnet.

  Madam was pacing the floor. Her skirts swished as she changed direction abruptly when she reached the end of the room. She looked strangely threatening, with her face in shadow and the light of the window behind her. “You cannot keep the child. You must know that.” She said it as if it were a fact, plain and unquestionable, like announcing that we would have mutton for supper. I had tried not to think of the fate of the creature that pressed against my flesh with its tiny limbs, of the moment I would sink gasping to the floor as God forced the sin from my body.

  “You must give the child away.” She took a few steps toward me and, as she became less silhouetted by the window, I saw the determined set of her mouth. “It will save the child from a life in the workhouse and you from your shame.”

  My belly clenched as she spoke, and the infant squirmed inside me in protest. I had accepted months ago that I was owned, like the pots and pans in the kitchen and the combs she fixed in her hair. But the thought that she had decided I should give away my child before it had taken its first breath flooded my veins with rage.

  She must have sensed this as she came and knelt before me, taking my hands in hers. “You know it is the right thing to do. The child will have a better life.”

  Better than with me? Is that what she was thinking as she squeezed my hands in hers and looked up at me with her gray-green eyes. She was gentle then, like she was handling a fractious horse. I forced a smile as if I accepted what she said, but I did not. I felt her words like physical violence, as if she had reached inside me and wrenched the child out herself.

  “But what if we were to be married?” I said. “We could give the child a good home.”

  “Married! If you were going to get married, surely you would be by now. Will he pay to support you and the child?”

  “We have talked of it. I need to give him time.”

  She snorted and stood up. “I wish time was all you had given him,” she said.

  I could not bear to listen to her mock me. Why did she pretend to be above me when she had almost certainly taken a lover herself? She had enough of her own secrets that she should not be telling me what I could, and could not, do. “If you make me give away the child, everyone will know who I am and what I did before I came here.”

  Madam stood, staring up at the coving. Then she turned back toward me and said, “How would they know?”

  “Because I shall tell them.”

  “Then you will destroy us both and your child as well. There is only one thing worse than a bastard, and that is the bastard of a whore.”

  Then she swept past me in a waft of lavender and privilege, flouncing out of the room to her cards or her sewing. I got up and continued making her bed, shaking air into her feather pillows and arranging them to her liking. As I was leaving, I caught sight of a bottle of pomade on her dressing table lying on its side. As I turned it upright my eyes rested on the drawer and the tiny lock, sitting keyless at its center. I tugged on the gold handle but it did not open. What lay hidden there in that dark drawer? A memento? Letters too scandalous to see the light of day? Before, I had hardly cared, but from that moment, I wanted to know everything she was trying to hide.

  Esther

  Elias closed the ledger with a thud. He rested his head in his hands, pushed his fingers up under his wig and scratched at his temples. I had been picking my moment to approach him and, until a minute ago, he had seemed good-humored enough. But now his jaw worked silently, and he stared down at the desk as if he expected answers magically to appear there.

  Elias was spending too much time indoors. Perhaps he was as frustrated with the same four walls around him as with anything in that ledger.

  “Husband, I wanted to talk to you about Twelfth Night.”

  He pushed away the ledger and leaned back in his chair. This was as much of an invitation to speak as I could expect.

  “I thought we could invite the Ogiers, Mr. and Mrs. Arnaud, of course, and perhaps the Vautiers.”

  Elias rested his head against his chair and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. When he looked at me again, he had cultivated an expression of incomprehension. “The Ogiers, the Vautiers? Do you suggest that I should spend my Twelfth Night with someone just because we share a pew at church? Just because their wives accompany you to the workhouse with bowls of soup and neatly stitched shirts?”

  I colored in spite of myself. I had chosen people whom I had thought he would be happy with, other master weavers, God-fearing Huguenots. Now he mocked me.

  “And where, wife, will the money come from this twelvemonth?” He gestured toward the ledger. “Do you understand how hard it is to sell silk nowadays?” He let out a breath of exasperation and batted away the suggestion with his hand. “Of course, you don’t. You are but a woman.”

  He picked up the ledger and tucked it under his arm. As he rose, he said, “We shall invite the Arnauds and no one else, and you will do all you can to use that pretty face of yours to get another order out of him.”

  He smiled then, as if it were all but a jest. I smiled too and nodded agreement to his wishes, but inside I thought of my silk: something precious and beautiful, emerging from nothing. Something mine.

  * * *

  The nurseryman had been right. By December the winter he had predicted set in. The frozen streets of Spitalfields became oddly silent, save for occasional children on makeshift sledges spinning, squealing, on the ice. Only the market was defiant, keeping the cold at bay with burning braziers scattered with orange peel and the hot breath of the livestock.

  Stalls that had displayed flowers months before were now full of branches of bay, laurel, and rosemary. Holly and ivy, tied together with string, hung in bunches from the gallery. Sara and I linked arms, a gesture of necessity, not affection. The ground was slippery and unaccommodating to heeled shoes and low hems. When we approached the stalls, a man emerged from under the gallery, clapping his arms around himself in an exaggerated attempt to warm up. He smiled. “I can’t remember a winter like it,” he said to Sara, as he looked her up and down. She feigned indifference and busied herself inspecting branches for insects and wilting leaves.

  My elder sister, Anne, had been born early in 1740 during a winter so cold that the Thames had frozen over, joining the two halves of London with an icy seam. She seemed never to feel the cold and I sometimes wondered whether that was why, just like babies born still enclosed in their sacs can never drown, protected somehow from the dangers the rest of us face. She would have been twenty-nine that winter.

  Among the branches, wax dolls studded with glass dangled from string, turning slowly in the chill air, sparkling figures dancing endlessly through the twelvemonth, tiny apparitions of the people yet to be born and the people who are gone.

  The decorations we bought filled the house. Each doorway was arched with laurel, paper flowers filled vases circled with strings of beads, and the mantelpieces were draped with holly. I did not usually go to such lengths to decorate the house, but that year the festive scene belied the tension in my home.

  23

  Sara

  Madam thought herself a good deal cleverer than she was. I didn’t bother with her pots of trinkets and jewelery: she would not hide anything there. Instead, I studied her person and the way she moved. While we dressed the mantelpiece—with great bushes that would surely start dropping their leaves all over the hearth the minute a fire was lit, and glass beads just asking to be broken with the first swipe of Moll’s dusting brush—she fiddled with the locket around her neck. It was made of enameled gold and given to her, she told me, by the master on their wedding day. I thought it too large for her delicate neck and didn’t care for it, but it could certainly hold a small key and that was surely where it was. She ran the locket idly back and forth along the chain as she surveyed our morning’s work.

  “It looks well, does it not?” she asked
me. I nodded and forced a smile. I knew it would not be long before I unclasped that locket from her pretty throat.

  * * *

  Mrs. Thorel bathed more than anyone else I knew. I dare say she even enjoyed it. Near every week I had Moll light a fire under the coppers to heat the water. The morning after we decorated the house she was sitting in her dressing room, still wearing her nightgown, while a lively fire burned in the grate. I had asked Moll to make sure the water was boiling because of the bitter weather and it still steamed in the bowl on the floor at her feet. While it cooled I laid out a clean shift for her to wear and a petticoat to go over it. Then I put a pannier on the chair and asked her what she might like to wear. She chose the flowered tabby in cream silk. I remember because it was my favorite of all her gowns. While she pulled her fingers through her hair to loosen the plaits, I picked out lace sleeves for the gown and ribbons for her hair.

  I always started at the top and worked down. I dipped the washcloth in the water and squeezed out the excess. I opened the cloth fully and draped it over her face, pressing the warm material down around her eyes and nose. Then I gently wiped her face and up around her hair, which darkened with the damp like the tarnishing of a copper pot. As I worked downward, I dropped the cloth back into the basin and slipped my hands around her neck. The clasp was fiddly and, for a moment, I thought she would lose patience and tell me to leave it be. But then it came open and I put the locket to one side. She leaned her head back and I gently parted the neck of her nightgown. She reminded me of an animal at the butcher, head bent back for the slaughter. I swept the cloth right down from behind her ear to the very top of her breasts then under her arms. When I had finished, I sprinkled lavender water into the basin and drew it up to her chair so that she could immerse her feet in it. She sat there wriggling her toes in the water while I tidied up behind her. Later, as I dressed her, I asked what combs she might like to put in her hair. Such was her interest in her appearance that she clean forgot I had failed to clasp the locket back round her neck.