The Silk Factory

by Judith Allnatt

  She shakes herself and narrows her eyes against the eastern sun, focusing on the long roof, glistening with dew, filling in from her memory the tall walls and rows of windows below, the scullery door and the pigsty beyond.

  Beneath the mist, somewhere in the rows of trees behind the building, is a tree with a baby in its roots. In her dreams, the cage of its ribs is laced with curled taproots like two clenched hands. Its skull is a hollow cup, small as a bird’s nest, and its finger bones are tiny sticks adrift in a sea of earth. Always it calls to her: from the ashes of campfires, from the gnat-filled shade beneath the trees where the horses are tethered, from the empty moors with their desolate spaces; and in the small hours its crying rouses her so that she thinks her own children have woken.

  None of the others wanted to come back here. Over the last ten years, every time their meandering route has passed within fifty miles of this place she has asked Hanzi to help her persuade them to make camp at Castle Dykes. Just once, just to let me search for my sister, she has said every time: please, Hanzi … I can’t rest … if you love me … She has worn him down. Despite his concern that only bad will come of it, this time he stood beside her while she told the others that she must go back. He bore witness to the nightmares that afflict her and the sadness that sometimes fills her until she feels she is drowning in it. He can see that she has no peace.

  Yesterday, when they pulled into the clearing, the sign she had left for Effie was gone – but then so was the wood store, tumbled and rotted by wind and weather. She had hurried back to the cottage, in the forlorn hope that there might be some message, some indication that Effie had been back there, but she found the place derelict. The boards had been stripped from it, the planks jemmied off and even the door wrenched from its hinges, all taken for firewood. The windows were smashed and the rooms full of damp and beetles. The roof of the neighbouring cottage was completely fallen in, the gable end pointing emptily at the sky.

  On the road to the village, a woman she didn’t recognise came out from the farm, with two barking dogs on rope leashes. She took one look at her gypsy clothes and threatened to set the dogs on her. Beulah turned back and hurried away.

  ‘’Tis too dangerous,’ Hanzi said. ‘We leave tomorrow. Early.’

  There is not much time. She has crept away from the camp, and come here at first light before even the ploughboys are up, to look over the valley and think of Effie and of the baby and be sorry.

  Sometimes she imagines finding Effie again, how they would fall on each other’s necks and weep with joy after all these years. Yet always in this daydream, as they step apart, Effie looks at her with a face turned to sorrow and asks her, ‘Where is my baby?’ And what can she say in reply? That she buried a living child deep in the ground and fled … That she was too afraid to save him? She has done a wickedness that cannot be undone.

  ‘Where can I go to mourn?’ Effie’s sad face asks her and there is no cross or stone to show her. There is not even a small mound outside a churchyard wall to take her to, in the line where other infants lie, who died without a father’s name or words said over them by priest or parson. There is no marker save a tree, the same as any other in the row. Now, she could not even tell which tree it was. So she has come to stand in this place despite the horror of the memories of the cellar, Fowler, her terrified flight – drawn back to gaze at the scene of her sin, a penitent who can find no rest.

  Hanzi tries to help her. When she wakes from a bad dream, shaking and cold, he puts their youngest in her arms and tucks the blanket tight around them all. He doesn’t understand that since she has had her own children it has brought home to her the enormity of what she did. Sometimes, in the evenings, while the others drink and sing, she can do nothing but stare into the flames of the fire. When she’s asked why she’s silent she says that she thinks of her family scattered to the four winds and a child who should never have been lost.

  Hanzi says, ‘We have our own family now.’

  And she should listen, she knows. There are joys in this life: Hanzi, her children, the woods and moors and mountains she’s seen, and familiar, known faces around a campfire in the midst of a wilderness. She knows that, alone, fending for herself, she would founder: soon taken into the House of Correction as a vagrant; but within her clan she’s stronger. One man cannot arrest the whole band of them and, at the first sign of trouble, fleet and secret, they move on. She couldn’t bear to live within four walls now; she’d find it stultifying, oppressive; she prefers the scatter of stars across the black triangle of the open tent flap, the smell of woodsmoke and the hiss of the fire.

  It is a difficult life though, and she is often afraid. She is afraid when she goes out before dawn to milk a farmer’s cow, creeping into the field, whispering to the beast and warming her hands on its flank. Each time they enter a new village she is afraid: of the barking dogs, of the taunts and jeers and of being spat upon and called pikey and rumney and gypsy’s whore.

  It is a hard life but she wouldn’t change it. At least she can smell the clean air, feel the sun on her face and move through God’s good earth. A gypsy’s fears and hardships are transitory: thrown stones can be dodged, cold and hunger come and go with the seasons and can sometimes be cheated with guile and light fingers. It’s not like the constant grinding hardship and fear of the factory worker, where every slip may bring a blow, and a word spoken out of turn may mean dismissal and the workhouse.

  She knows that masters such as Fowler exist in almost every mill and workshop. She’s heard of children found hiding in the stores, too exhausted to go home, being whipped by the overseer where they lay, of beatings with a wetted strap and indecent liberties taken with the bigger girls. Stories are shared at Appleby, where the gypsies gather, offered up by other runaways: masters who would take girls by the hair with one hand and slap them with the other – big or little, it made no difference; and boy apprentices hung by tied hands from a cross-beam, and left there.

  When she thinks of the great body of humanity she knows that most of it is poor, starved, ragged and dirty, while the few live on their lifeblood as surely as ticks live on a sheep. To the masters, men are become only parts of their machines. They don’t consider them human beings, but have shrunk them to merely ‘hands’; they are reduced simply to their useful working parts. Her father used to tell her of the days of his childhood, when a man could live off the common land or ply his trade and be beholden to no one and independent in his views. Now men are no better than slaves: to an overseer, to the clock, to the moving parts of a machine. Never again will anyone have such power over her. Being an outcast is the price she has to pay for that freedom but she pays it gladly. She will never again call anyone master.

  She gazes, snow-blind, at the fog that laps the roof of the silk factory. Somewhere beneath the mist, the dark wet trunks of the mulberry trees are pillars in the vapour; droplets form on leaves and twigs to gather and drip into the white silence. She knows that, forever, she will dream this place, her spirit drawn to that of the buried child. She has no way of making amends and the past will never give her rest. This is her burden and she must bear it.

  It is growing late but still she stands motionless, a dark silhouette high above the milky valley.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Rosie sits at the table in the room on the top floor, sketching out a mountain scene with Buddhist pilgrims climbing a winding road to a cloudy summit. She is happy, her consciousness hovering between the airy room, with its high ceiling and white walls, and the peaks and waterfalls forming in fluid lines of ink on the creamy cartridge paper. She is aware of both worlds, suspended between them in the half-trance state of creation. Something is forming in the back of her mind, something indeterminate between thought and feeling, so that she’s not even sure if it relates to art or life.

  She has heard a sculptor say that the figure he creates exists already within the block of stone and what he does is to find it: to chip away what is extraneous and liberate it. Her o
wn work often feels like this, a search, through the movement of her hand, for the shape of an inner vision already complete, but the feeling she has today is more expansive; the joy she feels in painting is part of something bigger, more momentous.

  A sparrow lands in a flutter on the windowsill in front of her and she looks up and is distracted. It’s no good forcing such things, in any case; whatever the insight is, it will come in its own good time. The bird is a little ball, its feathers fluffed out against the cold. The breeze lifts and parts them. The sky is a bright, clear blue and the sun has melted the frost away in all but the shadiest corners. She rests her chin on her hands and looks down on the garden.

  Where once there was waist-high undergrowth, there is now fresh, newly laid turf. She has cleared a path to the back gate, and the last of the brambles and bindweed is in the incinerator waiting to be burnt. She’s worked hard, the last few days, and now the garden looks twice its old size. Sam loves to play in the sunny open patch at the bottom, where she’s chalked a goalmouth on the fence. She’s pleased with the result of her labours, only … Underneath the spreading arms of the mulberry tree, the shade is still gloomy and the grass looks bare and cheerless. She thinks, I could plant bulbs but they wouldn’t flower until after we’ve gone back to London.

  She wishes that her mother could have seen the garden cleared. It would have given her pleasure, perhaps reminded her of how it used to look when they first lived here. They could have replanted the borders together. Her eyes well up and she blinks and reaches to touch her mum’s glasses, always kept on the desk in front of her, amongst her ink bottles. She runs her finger around their tortoiseshell rims, experiencing the familiar pain of loss.

  As if her mother is answering a question she’s not even aware she’s framed, an idea comes. Snowdrops! Her mother always said that they do better if you plant them not as dry bulbs but ‘in the green’, as grown plants. She’d had clumps of them growing in the shade of the hedge at the cottage in Somerset; they were one of her favourite flowers. Rosie imagines how they would brighten the ground beneath the old mulberry tree. They would glimmer beautifully against the shaded grass and bring movement to its sombre stillness as the wind shook them.

  The idea has hold of her now: she will plant them in memory of Mum, and Lily. A memorial garden. She screws on the lids of the inkpots and washes her brushes automatically, calculating how long she has before she needs to set off to pick up the children from Josh, how long it will take her to get to and from the garden centre and to do the planting, already knowing that she must do this, that it must be today, that it just feels right. She hurries downstairs to gather up her coat and keys.

  One by one, she carries the trays of flowerpots from the car and places them in the half-shade at the edge of the mulberry tree. There’s no breeze so before she starts she puts a match to the firelighters in the bottom of the incinerator, poking it through the hole in the side. There’s a paraffin smell and flames lick up the sides of the white blocks, catch on dry grass and begin to sizzle through the bundled undergrowth. She stands watching for a while as the weeds curl and shrivel, spitting and crackling, but she doesn’t hold her cold hands to the warmth. The fire is about ritual, not comfort. It is a cleansing, the burning away of old things, making way for the new. Yellow flames shoot from the funnel in the lid, flickering and hazing the air above it, the fence behind wavering out of true.

  Rosie gathers her tools and a kneeling pad and stoops in under the low branches, pulling one of the trays in after her. She cuts a cross in the turf, peels it back and digs a hole three inches deep, then more holes, each a few inches apart. After sprinkling a little sharp sand into each, she tucks in small groups of plants, tenderly patting the turf up to the stems. She works methodically but to a carefully random pattern. Thinking of Lily, she doesn’t want the drifts of flowers arranged in waves – she cannot have them foaming across the grass to break on the trunk of the tree. She aims instead for rounded shapes, tries to think of pillows, rest, peaceful sleep.

  Sitting back on her heels, she touches a flower, lifting its drooping head with her forefinger. She remembers how her mother used to say that a snowdrop is like three drops of milk hanging from a stem and sees that this is true. Her mother’s voice is in her head, ‘Galanthus,’ she says. ‘It means milk-white flowers. My grandmother used to say that her great-great-grandmother was a snowdrop picker … that’s not a job you hear of any more …’

  Rosie wonders if this ancestor too came from these parts. How far back had the family lived around here? She thinks about the nuttery over at Newnham, where snowdrops used to be harvested right up to the 1920s. She’s read about it somewhere. It stuck in her mind that the flowers were laid in boxes between layers of blue tissue paper and sent up to Covent Garden. Maybe, way back in the nineteenth century, that’s where she’d worked as a picker. How strange to think of all those forebears living in one small corner of a county, generation after generation; perhaps she and her mother had even been the first to break away. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to think of going back to London or of someone else living here. The house and garden have come to mean something to her, to be part of her history – and May is here. The place and May are all she has left to connect her to her family origins, to give her a sense of belonging. ‘My native place,’ that’s what Mum had called it, as though her life had grown from here and was rooted in its soil.

  Belonging. After all the ache of loss, it is what she craves the most. It isn’t only that she’s found a close friend in Tally, or that she chats with people in the street, has joined a book group, talks to other mums outside playgroup, or even that she wants to know Tom Marriott better, although all these things are important. It’s about having a place in the world that means something to her.

  She returns to her digging, but slowly, thoughtfully.

  Although she doesn’t pray, she feels each plant that she sets in place is a kind of blessing. Mum, Lily, oh my lost ones, she thinks, how I love you and miss you. You are my family, my flesh and blood. She thinks of the strength of the tie of blood: the thread that still joins her to Lily and to their mother, the web stretching backwards to people unknown who yet form part of her, and forwards through Sam and Cara to those she will never know, yet of whom she will be a part. As she plants, the insight that she has felt just beyond her reach all day begins to crystallise: a slow, satisfying realisation. She is going to stay.

  On her knees, she works on steadily, leaning forward under the low branches, reaching right under the branch with the rusty iron stake into all the darkest frost-dampened corners. Tiny pieces of bark catch in her hair.

  As she reaches the trunk, about to continue around it and beyond, it is as if she’s rolling back the shade. Behind her it is punctuated with glimmering, waxy-petalled light but before her the shadow seems deeper, as if something has been gathered in: an intensification of shade and stillness … and something else … a sense of someone waiting. She forces herself not to think about the girl, fights to block out the image of her crouching here, right here, elbow-deep in weeds as Rosie looked down, months ago, from the top-storey window and felt afraid.

  Instead, she rehearses what she knows about snowdrops. ‘Moly,’ she says to herself sternly. ‘The classical name for the snowdrop is moly. It was given to Odysseus to make him immune to the poisons of the witch, Circe.’ It occurs to her that the witch’s potion was to make captured sailors forget their homes and loved ones. An antidote to forgetfulness. It’s the perfect flower for a memorial.

  On her knees, Rosie cuts and digs. She sprinkles and plants. Behind her, something in the fire burns through and gives way, making her jump. The ashes settle with a sigh. After the sound, the stillness is heavy, the silence pregnant, as if she’s being watched by someone who is waiting to speak. She carries on, pushing forward into the icy cold. She is going to do it, come what may. She is going to finish the job.

  At the far edge of the tree’s canopy she plants the last clumps of fl
owers in a broad swathe of white. She stumbles stiffly to her feet and steps back to look at her work. The fire has burned out and it is perfectly quiet. Beneath the tangled branches with their gnarled shapes and peeling bark, drifts of white flowers, each one new, smooth, perfect, reflect the light.

  A breeze seems to pass through the garden, shaking the flowers, a shiver running through them, as if brushed by someone’s skirt. The movement flows towards her yet Rosie feels no rushing draught upon her face or hands, only the slightest disturbance of the air, as if someone has passed her, close enough to touch.

  The flowers are still again, each delicate head drooping, and yet the sense of stillness has subtly shifted. It is no longer expectant but peaceful. Rosie feels it in her bones: something has departed.

  Acknowledgements

  Together with a great deal of walking in and around the village of Weedon Bec, studying the following books and articles helped me to imagine the world of silk weavers, soldiers and snowdrop-pickers in 1812:

  The White Slaves of England, compiled from Official Documents by John C. Cobden 1853

  The Silk Industry by Sarah Bush (2009)

  The Story of Silk by Dr. John Feltwell (1990)

  The Silk Industry of the United Kingdom, its origin and development by Sir Frank Warner (1921)

  The Luddite Rebellion by Brian Bailey (1998)

  A Dorset Soldier - The Autobiography of Sgt William Lawrence 1790 -1869 Ed. Eileen Hathaway (1993)