Fowler shoved the chair, making it rock, so that Beulah gasped and reached backwards to grasp the rail and steady herself. The master grabbed her arm in a grip that fingerprinted it with bruises and twisted it up behind her back. ‘I said stand still!’ he shouted, twisting harder so that she yelped in pain.
The door swung open and the constable entered. ‘Mr Fowler! What is this!’ he exclaimed. ‘Our investigations do not include laying hands upon minors!’
Fowler let go of Beulah’s arm and, seeing her chance, she scrambled down on shaky legs and sat down with a bump on the chair.
‘What news?’ Fowler demanded. ‘Have any of them talked?’
‘Not yet.’
‘And the captive, Saul Culley?’
‘A ball caught him in the thigh. He’ll need a doctor before he’s fit for questioning.’
A gleam came into Fowler’s eye. ‘Shot, you say? He may be persuadable. I shall have my own surgeon look at him.’ Seeing Boddington’s uncertain expression, he added: ‘To give an opinion on whether the limb can be saved, you understand.’
Boddington glanced down at Beulah, who was bent over, nursing her arm. ‘Send the child back to her work, Mr Fowler,’ he said. ‘These things are not for her ears.’
‘In just a moment,’ Fowler said amiably. ‘First she must tell us where her family lives. You must be able to do that, surely?’ he said to Beulah, leaning his hands on his knees in the attitude of a kind uncle, bending down to her level.
Beulah looked from him to Mr Boddington and back again.
‘Newnham, is it? Or Everdon?’ Fowler had seen the Fiddement children drenched through enough times to know that they walked a long way and clearly weren’t from the village.
Beulah looked at the door, willing Tobias to come through it. Why did he not come? He was supposed to do everything as usual, not leave her all alone to face the master! ‘Newnham, sir,’ she muttered.
‘There, that’s better,’ Fowler said in a jovial tone. ‘Now, where in Newnham?’
‘Down the track, off the lane.’
‘Which lane? What’s it called?’
Beulah shrugged. ‘It hasn’t got a name. It’s just the lane.’
‘Don’t fool with me, girl …’ Fowler’s hands itched to take hold of her and shake it out of her.
Beulah shrank back in the chair.
Mr Boddington said, ‘Who’s your landlord, child? Who does your house belong to?’
Close to tears, Beulah said, ‘Hob Talbot.’
Boddington nodded, satisfied. ‘Now let her go, sir,’ he said to Fowler.
Ignoring his words, Fowler asked him, ‘What of the enquiries made house to house?’
Boddington shook his head. ‘Nothing. The villagers would have us believe they sleep sounder than hedgepigs in winter. Not one will admit to seeing or hearing anything.’
‘I shall post bills offering a reward,’ Fowler said decisively. ‘We’ll see whether that will loosen any tongues.’
‘The girl, sir?’ Boddington insisted quietly.
Fowler went to the door by the stairs and called for Mrs Gundy, who came puffing from the kitchen. ‘Set the Fiddement girl to some useful employment,’ he said loudly for Boddington’s benefit but as Beulah passed him he said, under his breath, ‘Don’t think I’ve finished with you. I’ll have the truth if it takes ’til Michaelmas to get it.’
‘You understand my dilemma.’ Captain Harris sat at his desk, behind the pool of light cast by the oil lamp, with Jack standing before him. ‘Sergeant Clay has placed certain evidence before me, suggesting that you failed to apprehend a felon and yet you refuse to explain yourself.’
‘Sergeant Clay must be mistaken, sir.’ The colour rose to Jack’s face.
‘One man’s word against another’s is not sufficient in this case, lieutenant,’ the captain said drily. Stamford was clearly hiding something. He had no time for Clay, whom he knew to be hot-headed, undisciplined and lazy, but, nonetheless, he couldn’t ignore an allegation that Stamford was some kind of revolutionary – an insurrectionist sympathiser – however unlikely it seemed. ‘Come now, you must be able to give a more satisfactory account of your actions?’ He fixed Jack with a keen eye.
Jack remained at attention, staring ahead and refusing to meet his gaze. It pained him to be unable to answer, for he valued his spotless record and Harris’s good opinion, and felt dishonoured by his silence, even if it were only to protect himself against the malice of a blackguard like Clay.
Harris sighed. He prided himself on running an orderly company and had no wish for an investigation that would suggest fraternisation with rebellious elements in the community and would undermine the authority of the military in the area. Fraternisation. The word stirred a memory, somewhere in the back of his mind, of a previous conversation with Stamford. Ah – it was Stamford who had asked about married quarters a month or so ago. He’d had to refuse because the woman in question had a younger brother and sister in her care … both working at the silk manufactory … It all began to fall into place. Now he could make some sense of it. He rolled his pen to and fro across the leather top of the desk. If this came out it could all go very badly for Stamford. Neither would it reflect well upon the army.
He pulled the inkpot and a sheet of paper towards him, dipped his pen and began to write. Jack stood with his arms ramrod straight by his sides and heels pressed smartly together. Behind his deadpan expression he cursed Clay as his enemy and himself as a fool for not realising sooner the extent of the man’s spite. What if he were court-martialled? What would become of Effie then? He had tried to do the right thing by her but in solving one problem had only succeeded in creating a greater one.
Captain Harris shook the sand from his letter back into the dish, folded the paper and took a stick of sealing wax from the drawer. ‘You will leave within the hour and take this letter to Captain Quilter, who will be embarking troops at Southampton in three days’ time, for the Iberian Peninsula. You will be on that ship.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Jack managed. It was a reprieve – for that he must be grateful – but his thoughts flew immediately to Effie. ‘May I have one day’s leave, so that I can put my affairs in order before I go, sir?’ he asked. ‘There’s someone I must visit … I mean I have obligations I feel I must fulfil.’
Harris sealed the envelope and pushed it across the desk to him. ‘You may not,’ he said abruptly. ‘The connection with the person, and family, in question is best forgotten – do you not think?’
Jack opened his mouth to speak further but Harris had a dangerous look in his eye.
‘Dismissed, lieutenant,’ he said firmly.
Jack sat at the rickety table in his room, beneath the small window through which he had stared so often at the stars, thinking of Effie. Quickly he penned a note.
My dearest Effie,
I hope that all is well with the whole family. I write in haste as I am posted overseas and ordered to go tonight. My darling, I cannot tell you how I shall miss you and worry for you but I have no choice. I know that you have a little money saved but before this is gone you must visit Father and Mother, as we planned, and ask for their help, as I do not know how long I shall be away. I shall write of you to them in glowing terms. I realise that you will be anxious about such a visit without me by your side but, my dear, you must do this for my sake as I shall not rest unless I know that in my absence you are under their protection.
God alone knows how long this posting may last but keep faith with me, dearest love, and be assured I intend to survive it and I shall return. I hope that our parting will be for only a short while and the current trouble will die down and soon be forgotten. I shall write again at greater length as soon as I have opportunity but for now am ordered to leave within the hour for Southampton. I fear incarceration would be my fate if I do not comply.
I love you so, dear Effie, and shall long every day to hold you in my arms again.
Yours, with all my heart,
; Jack
He sealed it quickly. He would get one of the drummer boys to take it. Yates was trustworthy and he would pay him thruppence for his discretion. He gathered his few belongings and packed them into his knapsack. He stood for a moment in the middle of the room, wondering at how his life had been shaken upside down in the space of just one day. Could it have been only last night that he had sat here planning their trip to Bedford, anticipating with pleasure introducing Effie proudly to his family? He had imagined showing her the river in which he’d fished as a boy, his father’s books and his mother’s flower garden.
How strange that an action taken with the best intentions, to protect his beloved Effie from hurt, could lead to such disastrous consequences. When he thought of Tobias’s terrified face looking up at him from behind its prison of thorns he knew he could not have acted any differently. Tobias too would be journeying tonight and he hoped he had found food and somewhere safe to lay his head.
He heaved the knapsack on to his shoulder and softly closed the door behind him.
TWELVE
In the baking July heat, Beulah moved along the rows of mulberry trees quickly picking the leaves from the low, widespread branches and dropping them into a wicker basket. The worms must be fed continuously: thousands of voracious mouths that never stopped chomping and nibbling; they repulsed her.
She was deeply unhappy. She still missed Tobias dreadfully, even if he used to annoy her by walking on ahead and making her run to catch up with him, or by wanting to go to the Blood Tub at the end of the day. At least she’d known he was in the manufactory somewhere if she needed him and, in dire straits, would have protected her from the master. He had written once to Effie, a few months ago, saying that he’d found work with the canal folk, leading the horses and loading and unloading the barges, knowledge which Beulah tried to forget, repeating in her mind whenever the master looked her way, ‘Tobias is gone to London to look for work. We have no word of him.’ The last part was true at least: after the first letter they’d had no further contact and Beulah felt sure that he was making a new life away from danger and wouldn’t be coming back.
As for Effie, Beulah thought that she must be ill. She was all at once like an old person. She seemed always to be tired and crabby and she moved around so slowly, as if dragging a great weight after her. Sometimes, when she thought Beulah wasn’t looking, she rubbed her back as if she was in pain and when she sat down at the table she lowered herself so carefully into the chair that you’d think she was afraid her bones would break. Beulah tried to help her, taking the other end of the heavy washing basket, drawing water or hoeing the vegetable patch. Beneath her love and concern for Effie lurked fear too. She had seen first her mother and then her father taken off, within a year of each other, with the illness that made them cough blood. What if Effie were to be taken too? What would become of her then?
She moved on along the row, picking first from the lower branches and then standing the fruit ladder against the trunk to reach the higher ones and fill her apron. The heart-shaped leaves rustled softly around her, dappling her dress with shade. She wondered, as she did every day, what had become of Hanzi. She always left three eggs for him to find but for weeks now they’d not been taken. Nonetheless, each day she collected them and left new ones in case he returned. Once she had picked up an egg she must have missed, an egg so old that when the cook at the High House broke it, the kitchen was filled with a rotten stink and Beulah had got a slap from Mrs Gundy for her carelessness.
At the back of the plantation of young trees, before you reached what was left of the old orchard – apple, mulberry and pear trees – a new set of holes were being dug. They were meant for the planting of yet more saplings. Beulah watched as a blackbird pulled a worm from the newly turned soil and hopped away, taking the opportunity whilst the labourers were absent to pick up what food it could. A moment’s anxiety assailed her. Had she closed the cellar door securely? Every day the master reminded her that the worms must be protected against vermin: mice, rats, birds; the worms in their open beds would be easy pickings for any climbing or flying creature and all his work and expense on the grand scheme would come to naught. She breathed out a long sigh. Yes, of course she had secured the door; she remembered pushing against it to check it was firm.
The master’s enthusiasm for his new endeavour was absolute. The worms must be fed through both day and night and he had allowed Alice frequent respite from her usual duties in the bobbin-winding shop to instruct and oversee Beulah in the daytime. At night, ever since the breaking of the frames, he had employed a night watchman, whose other duties through the lonely hours were to keep the worms warm and fed. From midsummer’s day, when the small, yellow eggs, stuck to twigs and old cocoons, began to hatch tiny wiggling threads, Beulah had hated them. Now that they had grown to fat, pale caterpillars, the size of her finger, she hated them even more. By August they would be bigger still: the size of the master’s thumb.
It was lonely work. Some days she stole a few words with Biddy and the other children when she helped serve the midday meal, but sometimes she saw no one all day, bar Alice and Mrs Gundy: sour faces and hands ever ready to pinch and shove.
Biddy had told her that the master was more tyrannical than ever in the workshops; that his temper blew at the slightest provocation and that he constantly picked fault with the work of the weavers, rejecting their cloth and docking their pay, demanding they weave the pattern anew although everyone knew he took the cloth nonetheless and sold it with the rest. He came down hard on Walter and Jonas who had taken the place of Tobias and Saul as drawboys and went around muttering about some scheme to get in new apprentices instead and sack the lot of them. He had not, however, replaced the Jacquard machines.
Saul Culley had died from his wound. A sullen hatred for the master filled the factory. As he passed along the lines of workers, the evil eye followed him as soon as his back was turned. Ellis barely hid his hostility but Jervis was a broken man, blaming himself for involving the youngsters in the plot.
No one really knew for sure what had happened to Saul. Some said he had contracted gangrene from the wound, some that he had died from loss of blood during the amputation. The woman who came to lay him out said that the surgeon had ordered her to incinerate the sheets Saul had lain in and that she’d seen they were all burned to holes, as if acid had dripped on to them. There were rumours that Mr Boddington had interviewed both the master and his surgeon for several hours before letting them go and had asked for the sheets in vain. Whatever the truth of the matter, Saul had not talked and on the day of his burial a great gathering of men had followed the coffin to the graveyard and not a dragoon had been seen.
Even despite the frightening rumours and all the tension, Beulah still wished she were back in her old job with the company of the others so that she wouldn’t have to be near the horrible worms, nor be alone with the master.
She climbed down the ladder and tipped the green contents of her apron into the basket. As she pressed the leaves down to make room for more, she heard a noise. ‘Pssst!’ It came again from the direction of the hen house and she left the basket, walked to the end of the row of trees and peered out to see Hanzi peeping round the corner of the shed and beckoning her over.
Beulah hurried across the yard, as if busy on some urgent errand, and found him sitting with his back to the warm planks of the hen house, his legs stretched out before him and wearing a pair of boots that were clearly too big. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked. ‘I thought you’d gone for good.’
Hanzi grinned. ‘We went off to Appleby for the horse fair. Best part of the year!’
‘Appleby? Where’s that?’ The main market for horses in the county was Marefair in Northampton; she’d never heard of this other place.
‘’Tis right up north in Westmorland. All the Romanichal gather at Gallows Hill, outside the town, for the buying and selling of the horses. Almost everyone’s related to everyone else one way or another so ’ti
s a chance, once a year, to get reacquainted.’
‘How many folk go there then?’ Beulah, with her own small family of Effie and Tobias, couldn’t imagine the size of such a gathering.
‘Hundreds! ’Tis quite a sight to see the celebrations, with the tilted carts and tents covering the hillside and the horses all gleaming from being washed in the river and braided up with ribbons. We sold two cobs and a mule and I got these thrown in.’ He looked admiringly at his boots and gave them a little shine with his sleeve. ‘You look awful thin,’ Hanzi said, casting his eye over her. ‘Have you been ill?’
‘No, but my sister’s not well and the master’s making me look after worms and my brother had to run from the soldiery on account of frame breaking, and without his wage there’s not enough food in the house …’ It all spilt out.
‘Why don’t you take some eggs yourself?’
‘Too fragile to hide on my person,’ she said, ‘and nowhere else to put them.’
He laughed. ‘I’m in the same quandary,’ he said. ‘Having lost my hat.’ He pulled a comic, mournful expression. ‘When I get back with a pocketful of yolk and eggshells, I shall be in bad trouble.’
Beulah thought for a moment and then took her red flannel kerchief from her pocket. ‘Here, you can use this to tie them in,’ she said, ‘but be careful to carry it under your coat; the colour’s bright and could draw eyes to you.’
Hanzi took it from her with a smile and a nod. He dug deep into his own pocket and brought out a handful of mushrooms. ‘Here.’ He shoved them into her hands.
Beulah’s mouth watered at the thought of them fried up in dripping. Quickly, she pushed them inside her dress until they sat above the waistband, squashy against her skin, and retied her apron. She turned to thank him but he held his finger to his lips and signalled that she should go. Only then did she hear Alice’s voice asking Mrs Gundy whereabouts the pest of a child had got to. She ran quickly and slipped back into the trees, emerging near the factory carrying her basket.
The Silk Factory Page 21