Darby's Angel

by Marcy Stewart

  Despite his outward appearance as a nice guy—Simon knew better than to believe outward appearances—Edward might be unstable. What if she refused him, and he became so disappointed he’d want to kill her?

  Don’t trust anyone, Simon told himself. Not Lenora, not Edward, not anyone.

  The thought stirred him from bed. He bathed, dressed in his new clothes, then went downstairs to the dining room.

  “Well, well, you made it just in time,” said Uncle Richard from the head of the table. “Darby said you might be going with us this morning.”

  Alexander threw his napkin onto his empty plate and pushed back his chair. “I don’t know why you want to come. The workers won’t like your spouting sonnets at them.”

  “Alex, please,” Darby said. She gave Simon a troubled, lingering look and rose. “We usually leave at this time. Perhaps you could bring a muffin or piece of fruit to eat in the carriage?”

  “I’m not hungry, thanks.”

  “Then we should depart.”

  Darby circled the table as her uncle and brother joined Simon at the doorway. Simbar, his naked head shining beneath the chandelier, awaited them in the hall distributing hats and gloves. Simon was surprised to receive a black top hat that made him think of old vaudeville routines with taps and canes. Darby explained it had been her father’s. He suppressed his smile and put it on as the other men did theirs while Darby tied the ribbon of her straw bonnet beneath her chin. The velvet ribbon matched the violets on her dress, he saw with a feeling of tenderness. Then, since it was expected of him, he reluctantly drew on a pair of the late Mr. Brightings’s gloves, which were far too tight. When they were all properly swaddled from head to fingers to toes—Simon wondered why they did not cover their faces, too—the foursome left the house and entered the carriage that awaited them.

  Alexander claimed the seat beside his sister, forcing Simon to share the bench opposite with Uncle Richard, whose girth did not leave a great deal of room.

  “You haven’t seen the pottery, I believe,” Darby said to Simon as the coach began to move. “When we traveled to the Wallaces’ home on Sunday, we journeyed in the opposite direction.”

  Simon did not disagree, though he had viewed the twenty-first century version of the factory on his ride to Brightings from the airport. As he recalled, the pottery was located about five miles from the house.

  Uncle Richard folded his hands on top of his belly and stared worriedly at Darby. “Hope Old Sam is well today,” he said. “Mr. Triagart’s growing impatient for his urn. Don’t blame ‘im; he loved that old terrier of his. While he waits, he’s having to store Muddykin’s ashes in a cookpot.”

  “That’s no fault of ours,” Alexander said. “You’re the one who keeps making the individual orders. The money is in moulded quantities, not single pieces. Darby has told you so a hundred times.”

  “Ah, but local patronage and good will—”

  “—is all very well,” Darby interrupted. “But it does not support our ninety-three workers.”

  “Are you abandoning hand-crafted items entirely to go into mass production?” Simon asked, not liking the idea of progress as well as Darby apparently did; but then, she had not seen the skies blackened with it.

  “Some work is done by hand,” Darby explained. “Alex, for one, spends a portion of his day painting our more expensive porcelain. But it’s not economical to craft odd pieces that require the services of a thrower like Old Sam when pressers can stamp out many more items in the same amount of time. And the quality is uniform.”

  Spoken like a true industrialist, thought Simon. One side of his mouth lifted in an ironical smile. Darby was more progressive than he, man of the future that he was.

  Uncle Richard’s jowls quivered as he cleared his throat “Don’t mind us, Mr. Garrett. My niece and nephew have their way of looking at things, and I have mine. And who’s to say which way is right?”

  “The profit-sheets are most objective,” Darby answered.

  “Hah! That’s my business partner talking!” burst Uncle Richard with an overdone twinkle.

  “Not for much longer,” sang Alexander under his breath.

  “And you, young sir,” declared the older man to his nephew with no apparent lessening of spirits, “I was glad to see you and m’daughter walking arm-and-arm last night. Mended your argument, have you?”

  Alexander scowled. “What argument?”

  “Ho, you try to deny it, do you? You think no one noted how you’ve been cutting Lenora these past few days?”

  “Your meaning escapes me, Uncle.”

  “Now, now, don’t try to pull that innocent act with me; I wasn’t born in a blarney field. Lenora dropped tears telling us how you ignored her on Sunday, spending all your time with that Wallace chit.”

  “Evelyn is not a chit,” Darby said coldly.

  “I didn’t ignore Lenora; she ignored me,” declared Alexander at almost the same instant. “For him,” he added bitterly, glancing at Simon, who would not meet his eyes but shifted his weight closer to the door.

  Uncle Richard laughed heartily. “That’s what I thought you’d been thinking. I told Lenora there was nothing to it, but she was certain you were angry with her. You know what m’daughter’s like, children. She’s a warm-hearted girl and likes to make everyone feel at home. That’s all her attention to Mr. Garrett meant. Nothing else. Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Garrett, if you were hoping different. She is dashed fond of you, Alexander. Dashed.”

  Alexander folded his arms. “I see whom I want, when I want.”

  “Of course you do, m’boy! Who ever thought or said differently?”

  Silence reigned in the coach for the remainder of the journey. Simon was deeply relieved when the kilns of the pottery came into view.

  Less than half the buildings he’d known in the twenty-first century factory were here, but the pottery was impressive nonetheless. And strangely archaic-looking. The bottle kilns, looking for all the world like old-fashioned milk jugs, loomed taller than their accompanying, three-storied warehouses and the flint mill banking the Trent. And he was wrong about the pollution, he saw; the sky was thick with it.

  Darby noticed his frowning observation of the smoke and said, “If coal were not so cheap, we could not exist competitively. The kilns are unfortunately not very efficient; it requires at least two pounds of coal to fire one pound of clay.”

  “Um,” he grunted noncommittally. The factory he’d known was powered with electricity, but that was far in the future.

  Nodding to the occasional worker who hurried by, he followed Darby and the men across a dirt-packed yard littered with coal-carts, broken crockery, lumber, piles of bricks and rusted fragments of equipment, the original uses of which he could only guess. When they entered the nearest warehouse, Simon paused inside the door, his senses so thoroughly assaulted with noise, heat, and activity that he could not think for a moment.

  The enormous chamber was open to the rafters, except for a balcony of rooms reached by an open, wooden staircase—offices, he decided. Although he noted a number of decent-sized windows, the bricked walls and floor, the mass of people and equipment, gave the impression of darkness broken by flashes of fire from the ovens.

  He had never been inside a factory before. It reminded him more than a little of an artist’s rendering of hell.

  While he stood mute, a pale-faced woman hurried toward them. Before she arrived, Alexander turned to Darby, shouting, “I’m going to see the new engravings!”

  Darby nodded, then waved aside Uncle Richard as he voiced his intention of finding Old Sam. By this time the woman had joined them, and Darby looked at her inquiringly, saying, “Yes, Mary?”

  “It’s my Millie, miss,” the worker said, rubbing her hands in her apron. “She’s sick today.”

  “Again?” Darby said impatiently. “This is the second or third time this month.”

  “Second, Miss Brightings. She ain’t pretending, I promise ye. Her hands has broke out in
tumble spots and hurt her something awful.”

  Darby touched the woman’s arm sympathetically. “We’re going to have to think seriously about this, Mary. It seems that removing the transfers is not the right work for her, and—”

  “Oh, no, miss! She just has to get used to it, that’s all. She likes taking the papers off ‘cause ‘tis easy, but keeping her hands in water all day ain’t. She’ll toughen up in awhile.”

  Darby lowered her voice, and Simon moved closer to hear. “Mary, I know you need the funds. I’m not thinking of letting her go. We’ll find another position she can do better.”

  “But there ain’t nothing,” said Mary, her face twisting. “You know Millie ain’t very smart for her years. You give Clemmy her old job, and I jes’ don’t know what else she can do.”

  “We’ll find something, don’t worry. Just take care of your little girl.”

  With a distressed expression, Mary nodded and walked away.

  Darby turned to Simon. “I’ll give you a brief tour, then you can walk around on your own. I have a meeting with the miller and his men in an hour; after that I spend the rest of my time wherever I’m needed. Today we’re running a new design of Alex’s, and I’m anxious to see how it turns out.”

  Simon thought she looked excited, not anxious. The noise and the incessant movement quickened her like a stimulant. “How old is that woman’s daughter?” he asked.

  “Hm? Oh, she’s seven or eight; I’m not certain.”

  Darby moved onward, looking back at him in surprise when he didn’t immediately follow. He walked forward on feet that suddenly felt heavy as cement.

  There followed a mind-numbing lesson in the pottery business, all introduced by Darby in brisk, precise sentences. He saw the moulds that had been discussed in the carriage; these, she told him, were made from either plaster of Paris or lightly baked clay; both facilitated the drying of the final product as well as shaping it. Two men were engaged in making them, there being a steady need for different styles and replacements. A design would first be made in alabaster, then a stoneware duplicate from which the plaster moulds were cast. For dishes, flat hollow-ware was used; the men stamping them out were called pressers.

  He saw biscuit, or once-fired ware, being dipped in liquid glaze in large, wooden tubs. The more expensive china was fired twice and dipped in a glaze almost completely made of flint glass.

  “The lead glazes are not as healthy for the workers,” Darby explained. “As to the composition of the plates themselves, we have followed Mr. Wedgwood’s lead in using the whitest Devon clay we can find. Our dishes are as economical and elegant as his Queen’s ware, though we supply our own decoration—all of it Alex’s. The time is soon coming when even the humblest cottager will be able to afford beautiful dinnerware.” She added lightly, “Father often said it was our beholden duty to banish delft, pewter and wood from every table.”

  When Simon responded with only the most perfunctory of smiles, she looked a little puzzled, then urged him to the next division of work. As they moved from one area to another, the workers under observation would eye them with brief interest, then return to their tasks with scarcely a pause. Darby spoke loudly to be heard over the clatter and shouted instructions of one laborer to another.

  “A soft-paste hybrid is employed for our finer porcelain. Hard paste is of course preferred on the Continent, as it is more similar to the oriental. But like Mr. Spode, we’ve found adding felspar to the bone-ash makes a cross between the two, and it is easy to work and produce in great quantities.” Plates were stacked on a nearby shelf, and she held up a cream-coloured dish with a gold band circling the outer edge. “This is an example of our fired gold; we mix gold-leaf and honey together before we fire it; it does not rub off easily as the old gilding did.”

  She showed him the ovens, large enough to enter and lined with shelves. As he watched, men and boys walked into the sweltering kilns, round cases stacked on their heads.

  “Those stone carriers are called saggars,” she said, misreading his absorption. “The objects to be fired are inside them. The saggar protects them from the smoke.”

  “It’s unbelievably hot in there,” he said. Although they stood well away, smothering heat radiated outward from the bricked kilns; he felt his shirt growing damp.

  Darby smiled. “The ovens reach almost 1400 degrees centigrade when in operation.”

  They moved past men operating mechanical lathes, saggar-makers, and clay-beaters. “When my uncle is no longer an impediment, one of the first things we intend is to experiment with the design of our kilns. Alex thinks circular ones might be more efficient.”

  She paused longest to explain the operation of print-transference. “Here is where Alex’s art comes to life,” she said. “The engravers cut designs into copper plates, then heat and ink them with metallic oxide and oil. When the excess is removed, an impression is made from them onto moistened paper.”

  She strolled to another table, where women, Mary among them, pressed the inked paper to dishes, then rubbed rollers across them. “Once the design is transferred, the girls rinse off the paper in cold water. Then the plate is heated to remove the oil. After that, it’s glazed.”

  Three little girls stood with their hands plunged into vats of water, peeling off the papers. Darby walked toward them and whispered something. Three pairs of hands lifted. She inspected them approvingly, then darted a look at Mary, who observed her with an anxious expression. Darby nodded at the children and squeezed Mary’s shoulder without comment.

  They wandered on. Darby led him outside to view the flint mill.

  “The flint is needed to strengthen the clay for higher temperatures,” Darby said. “Now that we have a steam engine, the crushing process is easier and safer. When my father was a child, the flint was reduced to particles by means of iron mortars operated by brute force, then sieved through lawn. But the workers sickened and died because they breathed the dust into their lungs. Now it is ground to a powder beneath the water, then mixed into slip.”

  “How practical,” commented Simon.

  “Yes, it is,” she said, looking at him curiously. “Well, I must meet with the miller now. Do you wish to accompany me, or would you rather wander about on your own?”

  “I’ll look around myself, thanks,” he mumbled.

  “Very well. If you tire, my office is the second one at the top of the stair.”

  He nodded but did not move. She hesitated, scanned his face with a hint of a smile in her eyes, then walked toward the framed building that housed the mill. He watched her disappear inside, then turned to a warehouse he’d not viewed yet and entered.

  More of the same here. People working hard, looking irritable, looking pale and thin and worn for their years. Little children toiling beside their parents. Adolescents taking on greater responsibilities, receiving no understanding for the clumsiness that their quickly-growing limbs gave them. One boy received a harsh scolding for dumping a stack of saggars that Simon knew was far too heavy. The child, red-faced with shame, was forced to sweep the broken pieces from the scalding floor of the kiln.

  Simon wandered into another building which contained mostly supplies, then returned to the first warehouse. He walked among the laborers asking questions, offering praise, expressing interest in their work; and all the time his eyes were moving restlessly, his ears listening woodenly, his heart sinking like a stone in the river Trent.

  He was heading toward the stairs when a small boy rushed toward him carrying a bucket and dipper. With one foot on the bottom tread, Simon waited.

  “You tirsty, sir?” asked the child. “I got water.”

  Simon glanced at the communal ladle, thought of a million diseases, then looked into the boy’s hopeful eyes. “Sure,” he said, and accepted a couple of sips.

  When the child reached upward to reclaim the dipper from Simon’s hands, his sleeve fell back, exposing a stretch of dark, shriveled skin reaching from his wrist to his elbow. Simon instantly felt
horror and struggled not to show it.

  “What’s your name, son?” he asked.

  The boy smiled shyly. “Clemmy.”

  His hair was as fair as Tay’s had been, though Clemmy’s eyes were a rich brown against a too-white face. He was not much bigger than Tay either, though Simon knew this boy must be older. Steeling himself, he asked.

  “I jes’ turned six, sir, ‘ow old is you?”

  Simon forced himself to chuckle. “I guess that’s fair. I’m thirty-one.”

  “Gor, dat old? Granny’s thirty-four. I tink, but ‘er ‘as lines on ‘er face.”

  “Really? That’s too bad.”

  Simon tried not to stare, tried not to think how much Clemmy resembled Tay. The boy didn’t, not really. Tay was only three when he died, and his eyes were green as a budding leaf, his skin tanned and glowing with health.

  “What happened to your arm?” Simon asked gently.

  Clemmy looked blank, then saw the direction of Simon’s gaze. “What, dis?” He set the pail on the floor and pulled back his sleeve cheerfully. “I got too close to Joe when ‘ee was dipping plates in de ‘ot bath. Won’t niver do dat again!”

  Transfixed, Simon stared at the scar while the child continued to extend it proudly. He could think of nothing to say. When a woman in a coarsely-woven brown dress scurried toward them, Simon lifted his eyes with almost sleepy reluctance.

  “Clemmy!” the female whispered harshly. “Don’ bother the gennulman. Go back to work now.”

  The boy heaved a large sigh and walked away.

  Simon stirred to awareness. “Thank you, Clemmy,” he called. The child must not have heard him, for he did not turn again.

  “Please don’ mind ‘im, sir. My boy’s still learning.”

  Simon sent the coldness in his heart to his eyes. “He’s doing very well,” he said, his lips moving hardly at all. “For a baby.”

  “Oh, he ain’t no baby, sir. Miss Brightings don’ let ‘em come in ‘til they’s six year old.”

  Simon could not look at her any longer. He placed a shaking hand on the rail and began to climb the stairs.