The Silk Factory

by Judith Allnatt

  THE SILK FACTORY

  JUDITH ALLNATT

  Copyright

  The Borough Press

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

  Copyright © Judith Allnatt 2015

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  Cover photographs © Diane Kerpan/Arcangel Images (moth);

  Shutterstock.com

  Judith Allnatt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

  Ebook Edition © MAY 2015 ISBN: 9780007523009

  Source ISBN 9780007522989

  Version 2015-04-24

  Dedication

  For Spencer, with love and appreciation

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three: 1812

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven: 1812

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten: 1812

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen: 1812

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One: 1822

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Judith Allnatt

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  It was on their first day at the house that Rosie saw the stranger child. Standing at the sink, her hands deep in suds, Rosie was gazing vaguely at the sunlit, overgrown garden where Sam and Cara were playing. The sash window had old glass that blunted the image, wavering the straightness of fence and washing line, bending the uprights of trees and clothes prop, pulling things out of shape. Sam was kneeling beside the patch of earth that Rosie had cleared for him, making hills and valleys for his matchbox cars and trucks by digging with an old tablespoon, and Cara was toddling from bush to bush with a yellow plastic watering can. Through the antique glass, Rosie watched them stretch and shrink as they moved, as if she were looking through ripples. She closed her eyes, glad of a moment of calm after the trauma of the last few days. Letting go of the plate she was holding, she spread her tense fingers, allowing the warmth of the water to soothe her. When she opened her eyes, another child was there.

  A little girl was sitting back on her heels beside a clump of Michaelmas daisies that grew against the fence. She had her back to Rosie and was holding tight to the handle of a large wicker basket that stood on the ground beside her. Cara seemed unfazed by the girl’s presence and continued to move, engrossed, along the row of plants. Rosie bent forward to look through the clearest of the panes and peered closer. The child was small, maybe around eight or nine, although something in the tense hunch of her shoulders made her seem older. Her hair hung down her back in a matte, dusty-looking plait and she was wearing dressing-up clothes: an ankle-length dress and pinafore in washed-out greys and tans, like a home-made Cinderella costume.

  Where on earth had she come from? She must be a neighbour’s child but how had she got in? The wooden fences that separated the gardens between each of the houses in the terrace were high – surely too high for a child to climb.

  Rosie had made a cursory check of the unfamiliar garden before letting the children go out to play. The bottom half of the garden was an overgrown mess, a muddle of trees and shrubs. An ancient mulberry tree stood at the centre, its massive twisted branches hanging almost to the ground and its trunk swathed in ivy. Like the lilac and buddleia around it, the tree was snarled with briars and bindweed growing up through broken bricks and chunks of cement. The path that led down towards the fence at the bottom, which marked the garden off from an orchard beyond, disappeared into a mass of nettles and brambles before it reached the padlocked door.

  The child glanced over her shoulder, back towards the houses, a quick, furtive movement as if she were scanning the upper windows of the row, afraid of being overlooked. Rosie caught a glimpse of her face, pale and drawn with anxiety, before the girl turned back and reached forward to quickly tuck a piece of trailing white cloth into the basket. Almost unconsciously, Rosie registered that the girl was left-handed like herself, and that there was something animal-like in her movements: quick, like the darting of a mouse or the flit of a sparrow, some small dun creature that moves fast to blend into the background. Something wasn’t right here. She had seen distress in those eyes.

  She turned away, dried her hands hurriedly and slipped on her flip-flops. She would go gently, raise no challenge about her being in their garden but say hello and try to find out what was the matter. Maybe if she pointed out that her mother would be worrying where she was, she could persuade the girl to let her take her home.

  But when she stepped outside, the child was gone. Sam and Cara were playing, just as before, but there was no sign of the girl. Sam had appropriated Cara’s watering can and was pouring water into a large hole, while Cara squatted beside him watching. They were both safe and showed no interest, at least for the moment, in following the girl, wherever she had gone. Rosie ran her eyes along the overgrown borders once more, looking for any evidence of an exit route: a path beaten through the long clumps of couch grass, or branches of shrubs bent or broken where she had crawled through, but all seemed exactly as it had been. Well, there must be a gap somewhere, Rosie thought, maybe a gap that the children in the row used as a shortcut to get the run of all the gardens. There had to be some thin path through the overgrown tangle at the far end that she had overlooked or loose slats behind one of the border shrubs that spilt unruly on to the tussocky lawn: dark masses of euphorbia, standard roses rambling and tangling, and lavender grown leggy off old wood.

  ‘Who was that girl who came to play?’ she asked Sam.

  Sam was engrossed in scraping earth from the sides of the hole down into it and chopping at the sludgy mixture with his spoon. ‘What girl?’ he said without lifting his head.

  ‘The girl … who was over there near Cara.’ Rosie gestured towards the clump of daisies. ‘Didn’t she speak to you?’

  ‘No,’ Sam said, frowning as he dug.

  ‘No she didn’t speak to you or no you didn’t see her?’

  ‘No girl,’ Sam said emphatically.

  Rosie sat back on her heels and watched her son as he dug and mixed, his face set into a bullish expression that suggested she would get no further. Before the events of the last few months he had always been a sociable child, keen to play wi
th other children, and cooperative, chatty even. Now she often found herself uncertain, unable to get through to him as he lost himself in solitary games, or refused to do what he was told or even to answer her. He swung between periods of clingy dependency and periods of blank withdrawal. It was no surprise to Rosie that he either could not or would not tell her about the girl. His little, ordinary world had been jarred and jumbled, caught up in the hurricane of grown-ups’ problems. She sighed and scrambled to her feet.

  ‘It’s no good asking you, is it, Cara-mara?’ she said, patting her on the head. Cara looked up at her with a beaming smile, holding two fistfuls of mud towards her. ‘Lovely,’ Rosie said. ‘Do not put it in your mouth, munchkin; we’ll get you washed up in a minute.’ She set off around the garden to find the gap in the fence that she must have missed on her first brief exploration.

  She examined the fence behind the borders first, parting the branches of shrubs and peering through thickets of roses that had turned to brambles. No holes. She worked her way around the huge mulberry tree to the bottom of the garden, trampling a path as far as she could through the nettles and poking the clothes prop through the yards of undergrowth to test the strength of the fence, slat by slat. She could only conclude that it was all intact. The wooden door in the right-hand corner was solid and the padlock sound. There were no holes where the wood had rotted through, no planks that had come loose, no sections or corners with gaps left in between. No way in.

  Returning to the clump of Michaelmas daisies, she stood sucking the back of her hand where a briar had caught her and left a scratch dotted with tiny beads of blood. She looked yet again at the fence behind it, stared at the knots in the wood and the runs in the creosote, dropped her eyes to the patch of grass where the child had been, as if she expected her footprints still to be stamped upon the green. She stared blankly at plantains and buttercups in the turf.

  There was a squeal of rage from Sam as Cara, finally losing interest in the fascinating squidginess of mud, moved on hands and knees through the hills and valleys of Sam’s carefully constructed raceways. Rosie scooped Cara up and moved her to a safe distance before Sam could take a swipe at her. ‘She didn’t mean to,’ she said firmly to Sam who was staring angrily at the disarray of his carefully placed cars and diggers.

  ‘You two mudlarks are going to need a good wash before you come in,’ Rosie went on, taking in the state of Sam’s shorts and knees and Cara’s plastic pinny. Cara had returned to gathering up handfuls of mud and was gazing with a rapt expression as she clenched her chubby fists to see it squeeze out between her fingers. Rosie filled a bucket with water from the outside tap and knelt down on the grass beside them. Her long hair had come loose from its butterfly clip; fine silky strands had escaped and she tutted in irritation.

  She plunged Cara’s arms up to the elbows in the clean water and began to rub. ‘It’s TV time anyway,’ she said desperately, ‘and if you get washed quickly and change those shorts you can have Jammie Dodgers while you watch it.’

  As Rosie resumed the washing up, she gazed out once again at the garden, trying to recapture her earlier momentary calm. It eluded her and she found herself thinking instead of how her mother had loved gardening and how it must have pained her to see the garden, which Aunt May had once cared for so beautifully, going to ruin, overgrowth softening the shapes and blurring the structure.

  When May had become too confused to cope, six months ago, Mum had arranged for her to move into a nearby retirement home and had taken over the house, giving up her rented cottage in Somerset and moving up to Northamptonshire so that she could be near enough to visit May every day. She had divided her time between May and Rosie, travelling up and down the motorway each week to see Rosie in London, to help with the children for a couple of days and give her moral support through the aftermath of her messy divorce. It had been too much for her, Rosie thought with a pang. She’d suggested many times that she should bring the children here, to save her mother the travelling, but her mum had always put her off, saying that it was easier for her to come to them than to drag the children and all their paraphernalia on a long trip.

  Rosie gazed out at the bushes against the fence, bent over by the bindweed clogging stems and branches. She had a vague memory of a letter of her mother’s that mentioned the garden was getting beyond her and that she might have to get in some help. Rosie felt the familiar stab of guilt. She should have seen the signs, should have known that her mother had been saying indirectly that she was unwell long before her visit to them in London when things had gone so terribly and suddenly wrong … Rosie’s mind swerved from the memory of that night: waking to hear strange moans and strangled noises from the spare room, finding her mother slumped on the floor beside the bed, the sound of her own voice – Mum! Mum! She shut it out quickly as she had trained herself to do, a door in her mind closed and bolted, a curtain drawn down in an instant: thick as velvet, muffling.

  As she forced her mind back to the garden, a treacherous image came before her of her mum pruning roses at the cottage in a battered straw trilby and a baggy summer dress, her hands too big in gardening gloves. Blinking fiercely, she picked up a handful of cutlery and dumped it into the water. This is no good, she said to herself, no good at all, as she scrubbed with unnecessary vigour. Give in to this and the floodgates would open.

  She clattered the forks and spoons into the container on the draining board and turned away from the sink, groping for the kitchen roll. Pressing it to her eyes she stood very still to gather herself together. What was it she had been about to do? Ah yes, she had promised the kids Jammie Dodgers.

  She leant against the kitchen table; she would get calm first; she couldn’t risk Sam noticing again. ‘Mummy, your eyes look funny,’ he’d said when he’d walked in on her in the bathroom yesterday, and she had told him that it was because she’d been taking off her make-up with stingy stuff. She had sat on the toilet seat and gathered him on to her lap, leaning her cheek on the top of his head. His face in the mirror had her delicate features and colouring, the same hazel eyes and serious expression. His hair was fine and silky like hers although his was blond and curled at the ends and hers, long, brown with fair lights and poker-straight, always seemed to be escaping whatever bands or clips she pinned it up with. She had hugged him tight, breathing in the scent of warm boy and clean washing. He had wriggled and said, ‘You’re squeezing!’ and she had loosened her arms, suddenly realising the ferocity of her hug. ‘Sorry,’ she’d said and tried a laugh. ‘I don’t know my own strength!’ aware as she said it of the irony of the well-worn phrase when she felt anything but strong.

  Rosie stuffed the muddy clothes into the washing machine as the sound of another cartoon’s signature tune started up in the living room. As she glanced around at the pile of drying up still left to do and the crumbs and smears of yoghurt on the table, she felt the familiar drain of energy that came over her so easily these days: the feeling that the smallest task, that she would once have done without even thinking, had suddenly grown mountainous. And there was all the mess outside to clear away … She leant against the sink, staring blankly through the wavery glass at the bucket full of muddy water, the muddle of toys spread across the lawn and the place where the little girl had been. It was strange that neither of the children had even seemed to notice she was there, and even stranger that it seemed she had simply disappeared. Could she have dreamt her? Was it possible? She had closed her eyes for a moment … She was bone tired after the long drive up here from London the evening before, overwrought by coming here, amongst her mother’s things, where every object was a reminder of her loss, overwhelmed by the tasks that lay ahead of her with not a soul here to give her some support.

  Not that Josh had been much of a support in London anyway, she thought bitterly. He had even let her down over the funeral. He’d promised to come and back her up, help look after the children, pay his last respects. She’d felt relieved, grateful even, that despite their break-up she’d
have him standing solidly beside her, shoulder to shoulder when it still mattered. He hadn’t turned up.

  She thought about the service she’d arranged at her local church in Streatham, the small number of mourners that she’d been able to muster, her mum having been taken ill so far from her own home. There had been no point trying to fetch Aunt May, she was too confused to have coped. There were a few old school friends of Mum’s who lived in the capital, and a cousin or two. Their voices sounded thin and quavery as they sang, disappearing into the vaulted space: ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer,’ favourites of Mum’s that she would have called ‘good rousing numbers’ floating up to be lost in the immensity of pillars and rafters.

  Her friend, Corinne, the French assistant at the school where Rosie had once taught art, took the kids for the day. Corinne’s offer was a huge practical help but it meant that Rosie had no one with her at the funeral to whom she felt close. She stood, holding on to the pew in front as if it were the only thing keeping her upright; unable to control her voice enough to sing. She read the hymn numbers on the wooden board over and over to keep herself from breaking down.

  At the burial, she gave up the fight and wept, and one of the coffin-bearers passed her a handkerchief and squeezed her shoulder. Afterwards, she gave everyone a meal at a local hotel and then went back to Corinne’s and they drank potfuls of tea together.