“We used to employ skilled hand-weavers, but in practice there is little need. Children can learn to mind the machines just as quickly, and with one-tenth the fuss.” Vallimir gestured towards the whirring engines, the little figures crawling around them. Though more the gesture of a judge towards a crime than a showman towards a spectacle. “With the improved machinery, plus the lower costs of labour and housing, this shed is more profitable than the other two combined. And far more easily controlled.”
Vallimir nodded down towards a heavyset foreman patrolling the floor. Behind his back, Savine saw that he held a stick. Or would one describe it as a whip?
“How long do they work here?” she croaked out, over the hand she had unconsciously pressed across her mouth.
“Shifts are fourteen hours. Any longer has proved unsustainable.”
She had boasted of her toughness, but a few moments in there was enough to make Savine feel dizzy, and she clutched at the rail. Fourteen hours’ hard labour in that dust and noise, day after day. And hot as the Maker’s forge, as her father liked to say. She could already feel the sweat tickling at her scalp beneath her wig. “Why is it so hot?”
“Any cooler and the yarn becomes sticky, the machines can be fouled.”
She wondered if so much wilful human misery had ever been created in one space before. She put a hand on Vallimir’s shoulder. “When it comes to business, profit is the only right. Loss the only wrong.”
“Of course.”
Something told Savine they both had their doubts. But she could blame him, the bloodless bastard, and he could blame her, the flint-hearted bitch, and no doubt the profits would lubricate any grinding gears in both their consciences. If they did not make efficiencies, after all, there would always be some other owner whose stomach had been strengthened by failure. Would their workers weep for them when they went out of business? Or would they rush to find some new employer to whine their petty grievances at?
“Well done,” she shouted in Vallimir’s ear, though her voice sounded somewhat strangled. The heat, of course, and the noise, and the dust. “I asked you to make a profit and you have done so, regardless of sentiment.”
“Sentiment is even more dangerous in a mill owner than a soldier.”
They were cooking something somewhere, and Savine caught a whiff of it. Like the food they gave her mother’s dogs on the estate. She pressed one hand to her still-aching stomach, but hardly felt it through the bones of her corset. She wondered about her button and buckle manufactory in Holsthorm, where little fingers were best suited to little tasks. Was it like this? Was it worse? She licked her lips, swallowed sour spit.
“You might consider improving their conditions, however. Perhaps some separate living quarters could be constructed in the yard? Somewhere clean for them to sleep. Better food.”
Vallimir raised one brow.
“Luxury is wasteful,” said Savine, “but hardship can reduce productivity. In my experience, there is a balance to be struck. With better conditions, you might manage longer shifts after all.”
“An interesting suggestion, Lady Savine.” Vallimir nodded slowly as he looked down at the children, jaw-muscles working. It should have been a heartbreaking spectacle. But there is no room in business for hearts. Not ones easily broken, anyway.
She hitched up the corners of her smile. “If I might look over the books now?”
A great frame occupied the middle of the first and largest shed, a spinning shaft through its centre that brought power from the river, via an engineer’s nightmare of cogs, gears, cranks, belts, to the great looms that ran in two rows along the floor. A web of thread was reeled in from giant spindles, cloth of different patterns and colours grinding off the rollers. Around the looms the men were gathered, sweat-beaded and grease-smeared, tight-lipped and hard-eyed. If the occupants of the third shed had been apt to break her heart, she imagined the occupants of the first would rather smash her skull.
Savine did not expect affection from the workers. She had made her reputation from flagrant displays of wealth, after all, and those tended to sit badly with the poor. But there was something about the way these particular men watched her. A cold, quiet focus to their fury more troubling than any outburst. Rather than too many guards, she began to wonder whether they had brought too few.
She touched Lisbit gently on the elbow. “Would you mind stepping outside and bringing the carriage to the gate?”
The heat had turned Lisbit’s rosy cheeks an angry, blotchy red. “Sure we shouldn’t leave now, my lady?” she muttered, worried eyes darting to the workers.
Savine kept blandly smiling. A lady of taste always smiles. “Better not to show weakness. To our employees or our partners.” She was not a woman to be deterred by hatred: not from her workers, not from her rivals, not from the men she bullied, bribed or blackmailed to get her way. It is when they truly hate you, after all, that you know you have won. So she met the seething dislike with effortless superiority, paraded past with her shoulders back and chin high. If she was to be cast as the villain, so be it. They were always the most interesting characters anyway.
Vallimir’s office was at the very end of the shed, a kind of box up on a frame with barrels and crates stacked haphazardly beneath, a balcony outside from which an owner might look down upon their employees like a king upon his subjects. Or an empress upon her slaves.
The colonel bowed stiffly as he offered her the way up. “Take as long as you need.” He turned to frown at the scores of sullen workmen. “Though perhaps no longer.”
The door was fitted with two locks and a heavy bar, so sturdy it was an effort for Savine to swing it shut. She tore open the hook at the collar of her jacket, trying to flap some air onto her sweaty neck, but the atmosphere in the office was hardly less stifling than on the manufactory floor, the nerve-shredding chatter of the machines hardly less oppressive.
A loose board groaned under her boot as she made her way to Vallimir’s desk and its cargo of ledgers. She hated to see anything shoddily made, especially in a building she had helped pay for, but at that moment she had larger worries. She slipped past the desk to the window, one hand rubbing at her throat where the worry had become an almost painful pressure.
The street outside was deserted. All at work, of course, and what but work would bring anyone to this lane of spiked walls and barred gates, of towering mills and rumbling machinery? Yet there was something wrong about the quiet. A weight on the air, like the calm before a thunderstorm. Savine frowned out at the empty lane, biting at her lip, wondering if she could leave now without—
A man slipped around the brick corner of the next mill. Others followed, a group of twenty or more. Working men in colourless clothes, much like the ones Savine had seen in Holsthorm, in Adua, in all the cities of the Union. Much like the ones at work below, but moving furtively, as if they were one animal with one purpose.
Then she caught a glint of bright steel and became aware, with a strange shiver, that they were all armed. Some carried sticks beside their legs, some heavy tools. The leader had what was quite clearly an old sword. He knocked at a gate in the wall; it swung open as if by prior arrangement and the men rushed inside.
She spun around at a shout from the shed behind her, then more, and louder. A commotion even over the roar of the engines. She crept to the door, put a tentative hand to the latch, wanting to open it, fearing to open it.
“Back!” she heard Vallimir roar as she eased it open. “Back, damn you!”
The workers had abandoned their tasks and crowded towards that end of the mill, a solid mass of men all facing her, faces twisted with anger, tools, iron bars and stones gripped in their fists. Her jaw dropped.
Vallimir’s guards were holding them back in a desperate crescent at the bottom of the steps but they were outnumbered twenty-to-one. Savine’s eyes darted in horror over that ugly swarm. That mob.
Vallimir stood facing them on the balcony, the back of his neck turning red as he bellowed at
them. “Step away at once!”
A man in a stained vest whose arms looked like they were made from old rope pointed at Vallimir with a club and screamed, “You step away, you old fucker!”
Things began to flicker up from the crowd: thrown stones, thrown tools, thrown bits of machinery, bouncing from the walls of the office, clattering from the guards’ armour.
Something knocked Vallimir’s hat off and he sank down with his hand clapped to his bloody scalp. A bottle shattered next to the door and Savine heaved it shut, dropped the heavy bar and backed into the room. In spite of the stifling heat, she felt cold to her shaved scalp. She had expected an ugly scene on the way out, perhaps, insults hurled and surly men dragged to the cells while she glided back to luxury, unruffled. How could she have expected this? An armed insurrection!
She could hear her own snatched breath. The breath of a hunted animal. Foolishly, with fumbling fingers, she drew her sword. That was what one was supposed to do when one’s life was in danger. Was her life in danger? The noise was louder outside, closer. Over the endless whirr of the machinery she heard screaming, swearing, mindless growling, the clash of steel. A long, high shrieking started which would not stop.
She needed to piss, needed to piss terribly. The sword’s grip was slippery in her suddenly sweaty palm. Her eyes darted to the windows. Fitted with heavy grates. To the furniture. Nowhere to hide she would not be found in an instant. To the floor… and the loose board.
She threw herself onto her knees, prising at the wood with her fingertips, with her polished fingernails. She clenched her teeth as she worked her fingers under the board, heedless of the tearing splinters, worked the point of her sword into the gap, hammering at the pommel with the heel of her hand.
Savine jerked her head up at a voice outside. “Open the door, darlin’.” Syrupy, but with an edge of menace. The voice of a slaughterman coaxing a piglet back into the pen. “Open the door, we’ll be gentle. Make us break it, maybe we break you, too.” Rough giggling, and Savine jumped at a blow that made the bar shudder.
She hauled at the hilt of her sword, every sinew tensed and trembling. With a squealing complaint, the nails gave and Savine went sprawling on her back, sword bouncing away bent across the floor.
She scrambled to the hole. A glimpse of the dusty boxes below between two joists. Wide enough to wriggle through? She fumbled at the buttons on her jacket, bleeding fingertips leaving red smears on the material, and tore it off. She wrestled the silver buckle of her lovely sword-belt open and flung it away. The sword she dropped through the hole, its clatter drowned out by the clattering of the machines. No time for preparations. No time for doubts. She swung her legs into the gap, started to slide through. Far from ladylike, but there is no ladylike way to escape from a gang of killers.
“I’m going to count to five, bitch!” That voice from outside the door, boiling over with violence now. “Five, then we’re coming in!”
“Count to a thousand, you cunt!” she snarled as she worked her hips into the hole, tight, too tight, boards digging at her through her clothes.
“One!”
She was stuck fast. She clenched her teeth, squirmed desperately, clutched at the joists and tried to haul herself through.
“Two!”
She gave a growl and with a mighty ripping of cloth tore through, scraped one shoulder, caught her chin on timber as she fell, flopped down on her side below, head cracking against the rim of a barrel.
“Three!” she heard faintly through the ringing in her ears.
She pushed herself up, groggy. She couldn’t see, felt a stab of panic. Touched a trembling hand to her eyes. Her wig was skewed across them. She ripped it off, threw it down. She was trapped by something. Her torn skirt, snagged on a nail head above. She clawed at the laces and slithered free of it, left it hanging behind her.
“Four!”
She saw her sword gleaming in the shadows, closed her fist around the grip and started to crawl, keeping low, slithering along in the dust behind the barrels. That unearthly shrieking was still going on, pausing every now and then for a whooping breath then starting again.
“Five!” She heard the door of the office tremble from a blow, the bar rattle in its brackets.
She’d cut her palm, somehow, torn two of her fingernails half-off, was leaving blood on everything she touched, dabs and smears of it across her petticoats. That would be hell to get out. Hell to get out. She had to get out.
She crawled on, head pulsing, shoulder throbbing, jaw aching, hips grazed raw, crawled as fast as she could, tongue pressed into her teeth, crawled, blood tickling at her eyebrow, catching glimpses between the barrels as she went.
Vallimir being dragged away, bloody head lolling. A worker cackling as he waved the colonel’s hat around, impaled on the end of a huge knife. One of the guards, lying still, helmet torn off, hair matted and a dark pool around his broken head. Another on hands and knees, men gathered around, hitting him lazily with sticks which clanged off his dented armour.
He stumbled up, putting out a groggy arm to steady himself, was jerked off his feet as his hand was caught between two cogs, dragged into the midst of the machinery. He gave a great high-pitched scream as his arm was crushed, hauled into the gears up to the shoulder, blood spattering his face. Savine felt spots of it on her own cheek, but no one heard her gasp over the noise of the tortured machinery, of the tortured man.
There was a lurch, a slow grinding, the guard’s scream turning to a bubbling wail, then the machinery lurched on, wheels turning. Savine tried not to look. Keep her eyes ahead. This wasn’t happening. None of it was happening. How could it be happening? Men were shouting. Barking like a pack of dogs. She couldn’t make out words, only anger and the shuddering blows on the door above.
She followed the main driveshaft with her eyes, saw it disappear through a dark hole in the brickwork on the other side of the looms. Perhaps she could crawl to it, in the shadowy, dusty space below the gears. Through there. Perhaps through there.
She wriggled under the rollers on her belly. Ambitious as a snake, now she slithered like a snake, like a worm, wet with sweat in the sticky heat, prickling with fear as the frames rattled and whirred around her. She could see a lad through the turning machinery, chink of light across his eager face, but he was staring towards the office. They all were. Staring like wolves at the henhouse. Waiting for the door to give. So they could drag her out.
She crawled on, broken fingernails clutching, on through a great spatter of that guard’s blood, on under the great shaft that brought power into the shed, twinkling with grease as it madly spun, dust puffing from the floor with her every whimpering breath.
At any moment, she expected the delighted scream. There she is! At any moment, she expected rough hands to close around her ankle. Bring the bitch out! Her sweating back tingled in anticipation of it. Her chest heaved, coughing and shuddering from the dust as she struggled on, biting her tongue, trying to smother the desperate fear.
When she finally reached the hole in the wall, she almost sobbed with relief. Clutched at the ragged bricks and dragged herself through, tumbled into a dark passageway, sprawled in ankle-deep water and took a fetid mouthful, spat it out, retching.
The place was dark, only a flickering glimmer at the edges of damp bricks, throbbing with the noise of machines, echoing with distorted screams. There was light ahead, a winking light, and she eased towards it, sodden boots slopping and slurping in the mud, the clattering growing louder, something moving up ahead.
One of the great waterwheels that turned the driveshaft. Whirring, creaking, thrashing timbers, light stabbing between the black beams, water foaming as the slats of the wheel plunged into the river, showering spray as they thrust out again in a rain of shining drops.
The wheel might have been four times as high as a man. There was no way through it. But between its endlessly moving timbers and the slimy wall of the mill, there was a gap. A gap beyond which she saw muddy daylight, the fai
ntest hint of a shingle beach.
She glanced back down the shadowy tunnel. No sign of pursuit. But the door would not hold for ever. They would be coming. And if they caught her…
Could she slide between the wheel and the wall? Was it possible?
She pressed her tongue into the roof of her mouth as she tried to judge the gap. What if she did not fit? Would she be dragged under and drowned? Dragged into the gears and ripped limb from limb? Would her skull be crushed like a walnut between wheel and supports? Would she be slashed, cut, nipped and nibbled as she struggled to get free, bleeding to death from a hundred wounds while she was spun helplessly over, and over, and over? She thought of that guard’s despairing wail as his arm was crushed by the machinery. But there was no other choice.
She pressed herself against the wall, breath shuddering through her teeth with fear and exhaustion, and slowly, by tiny degrees, eased one shoulder around the corner. She lowered one filthy boot into the river, fishing for the bottom, fishing, sodden petticoats clinging to her trembling leg as she eased in to the thigh and found mud. She wormed herself on, sticking to the corner, clinging to it with her shoulder blades as if her life depended on it. Which it did.
She tried desperately, pointlessly to suck herself in, suck herself flat, clutching at the sodden grip of her sword, chewing on her lip with fearsome concentration, sunlight flashing and flickering through the spinning bars. She trusted to her footing on the muddy river bottom and gradually, gradually slipped her other leg in, taking a fistful of her petticoats and dragging them hard against her in case they floated into the wheel and snatched her to her death. Killed by her own clothes fleeing a textile mill. There was a joke there somewhere.
She gasped as a bolt sticking proud of the wood caught her chest, ripped some embroidery free and nearly dragged her into the thrashing timbers of the wheel. She just managed to keep her balance, broken fingernails scrabbling at the crumbling mortar behind her, teeth rattling with terror. She edged sideways, the clammy weight of her sodden petticoats clinging to her legs, water showering her, hardly able to breathe for the rotten acid stink of the river, one cheek scraping the bricks and her eyes squeezed almost shut, her skull fit to burst with the wheel’s clatter, hammer, whirr, its mindless rage.
A Little Hatred Page 24