The Silk Factory (13 page)

‘Yes, yes, of course. Come in.’ Automatically, she stood back and opened the door to let Josh into the narrow hall. Still coming round from heavy sleep, her mind seemed fixed on her strange night-time experience, as if the floaty, cottony stuff were filling her skull, making normal connections impossible. She turned on her heel and squeezed past her mum’s bike to get to the kitchen. ‘What are you doing here? Do you want tea?’ she said.

Josh followed her, making a meal out of getting past the bike. ‘You can’t be serious!’ he said. ‘You were supposed to meet me at the service station.’ He turned his wrist over to stare at his watch with exaggerated concentration. ‘Oh, two hours ago at least.’

Rosie stopped, the box of tea bags in her hands. ‘Oh God! I forgot.’

‘You
forgot
?’ Josh raised his eyebrows.

‘I mean, I knew yesterday – I had it all planned, only I had the most awful night. I must have gone off really heavy when I finally did get to sleep.’ She rubbed her forehead as if smoothing lines away.

‘Have you been drinking?’ Josh asked, his voice deepening.

‘No!’

‘Or taking sleeping pills?’

‘No I haven’t,’ Rosie said sharply.

Josh folded his arms and surveyed her. ‘Because I sat there for ages wondering where you were, thinking you might have had an accident; that something might have happened to the kids.’

‘Well, why didn’t you call me?’

‘I did,’ Josh said drily.

Rosie’s eyes flew to her bag on the table beside them, where she knew her phone was – right at the bottom. ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not usually like this.’ She plonked the tea bags down and took some bread from the bread bin for toast.

‘Haven’t the kids even had breakfast?’ Josh said. ‘For God’s sake, Rosie, we’re supposed to be going to Monkey World. Remember, I told you – Sam wanted to do the junior zip wire through the trees? I booked for two o’clock. It cost the earth!’

‘Look, I said sorry. I was up in the night with a horrible nightmare – really weird …’ Josh was looking at her with a strange, wary expression. She pushed her hand through her tangled hair. ‘Things haven’t been easy, right?’ She felt her voice tremble a little and was furious with herself.

Josh went to the living-room door and Rosie heard him telling Sam to turn the TV off
right now
and go and get dressed
.
‘We’re going in ten minutes,’ he finished.

She pushed the button of the toaster down; she would do toast and marmite and they could eat it in the car. She heard the thump of Sam’s feet as he stomped up the stairs and Josh returned.

‘He doesn’t want to do what he’s told, does he?’

‘He’s fine, just a bit unsettled by all the changes,’ she said defensively.

‘Why don’t you go back to the flat then? It’s a bloody nuisance having to hare up and down the motorway to pick them up.’

‘I didn’t mean that kind of change.’
As you well know
, she thought. ‘Anyway, it’s not as if I’ve taken them off to Aberdeen, it’s only forty miles apiece.’

‘Or a damn sight further today. Sleeping in until midday! What’s the matter with you?’

They glared at each other.

‘There’s nothing the matter with me, I just had a bad night, that’s all.’

He looked sceptical. ‘Are you sure? Because if you’re depressed, it would be better to get something for it. It’s not really fair on the kids.’

Rosie said stiffly, ‘I’m not depressed.’ There was no way she’d tell Josh that she was taking pills.

Josh let the silence lengthen. Pointedly, he looked around at the messy kitchen: a pile of dirty clothes on the floor beside the washing machine, last night’s dishes still in the sink, a litter of crisps and a smear of jam on the table. Upstairs, from Sam’s bedroom, the sound of a computer game began. ‘You know what your mum was like.’

‘I’m not.’

‘All I’m saying is there’s a history.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Because my first concern has to be the children.’

‘I said I’m fine.’ Rosie raised her voice and pushed past him. She ran upstairs, a mixture of anxiety and anger coursing through her, a pressure in her chest.

She picked Cara up, changed her nappy, dressed her and cleaned her teeth, telling her that she was going to have a lovely trip to some woods with her daddy. She took her into Sam’s room and told them both that they could have toast in the car. ‘It’ll be like having a picnic on the way,’ she said brightly.

‘But I want Sugar Puffs,’ Sam said.

‘Toast will be nicer.’

‘Toas … toas …’ Cara repeated.

‘I don’t want toast!’ He clenched his fists, on the verge of working himself up.

‘Plee-ease, Sam,’ Rosie said, at the end of her tether.

The unfamiliar tone in his mum’s voice made him pause.

‘That’s my good boy,’ Rosie said and shepherded him downstairs, carrying Cara on her hip.

Josh was already at the door and, without speaking to him, she put Cara into his arms and went to wrap up the toast in tin foil and fetch the children’s bags.

Josh strapped the kids in and took the bags from Rosie. ‘Three o’clock tomorrow at the service station then,’ he said. ‘You won’t forget?’

‘I’m tired, not mentally deficient,’ she snapped.

After they’d gone, Rosie made tea and took it up to the bathroom. She stood under the shower with her eyes closed, letting the warm water run over her hair and skin, trying to focus on the sensation and let it soothe her uneasiness. Although she’d never admit it to Josh, she was really worried about the things that were happening to her: the strange memories that were surfacing, the waking dream, the appearance of the girl … Well,
seeing
things: that wasn’t normal, was it?

She opened her eyes and the white steam filling the bathroom took her back with a lurch to the night before and the heavy, choking sensation that had felt so real, not like a dream. She wondered if the anti-depressants might be behind it all, whether the muzziness she often felt was only part of a far worse side-effect, but she quailed at the thought of cutting back on her pills. She knew she wouldn’t cope without them. If she could just get back on top of things Josh wouldn’t be able to needle her so. She didn’t like the way he had said ‘my first concern has to be the children.’ What did he mean? He seemed to imply that she wasn’t in a fit state to look after them properly. He needn’t know she was taking anything; nobody need know. The phrase ‘mother’s little helper’ drifted through her mind, making her feel anxious once again. She wondered if this was how her mum had sometimes felt: as though what was demanded of her was just too much, as if she were crawling through the days with her secrets a crushing weight on her back. The steam was horrible; it made it hard to breathe …

She turned the shower off, stepped out and wrapped herself in a towel. The shower dripped for a few moments and then stopped. Silence. She dried herself slowly, listening to it. She would put the radio on when she went downstairs; get some voices in the house. She thought about the night to come. Perhaps she would leave the radio and the light on through the night.

Effie sat next to the fire in the shepherd’s cottage, a newborn lamb wrapped in a sack upon her knee. She dripped some beestings, the ewe’s first milk, from the pen filler on to her fingers and tried again to get the animal to open its mouth, holding her wet fingers to its muzzle so that it should get the scent of the milk. ‘Come, come, won’t you give suck, little one?’ she murmured to it, but it lay inert, its damp body smeared with streaks of blood and blue-white matter.

The shepherd, old Martin Eben, had found it caught in a drift against a hedgerow with its dead mother. The snow had come down fast and the north-easterly was whipping it into drifts before he could gather all the flock in from the lower pasture; the worst snow he’d seen in twenty years. Even though Hob Talbot had set the other men on to help gather the sheep into the fold and had stridden out himself in overcoat and gaiters, there were still ewes unaccounted for. Seeking shelter in the lee of the hedges, deep in between the gnarled roots of cob and hawthorn, a few might not be found until the spring thaws and the gatherings of crows. This lamb had only a slim chance, for it must have the beestings in the first twenty-four hours of its life or it would not survive. The shepherd had brought it back over his shoulder to one of the pens made of hurdles and thatch within the fold, and tried to introduce it to another ewe. He had rubbed it with the afterbirth of her single lamb to make it smell like her own and put it to the teat but the ewe had repeatedly rejected it. The lamb’s strength had begun to wane; it would not suckle and he had been forced to bring it indoors to try feeding it by hand.

Once again, Effie rubbed the lamb’s body briskly with the sacking to try to stimulate the coursing of its blood. This time, it struggled weakly, its bony knees digging into her thighs as it tried to rise to its feet. Quickly she dipped again, held her dripping fingers to its mouth and exclaimed, ‘There, now we have it!’ as the lamb’s rough tongue rasped her fingers. She picked up the pen filler and skilfully substituted it for her fingers, smiling as the lamb coughed and then swallowed as she squeezed the dribbles of liquid on to its tongue.

The wind whistled in the chinks between stones and lintels. The dwelling was crudely built and the circle of warmth around the scant fire was a small one. She felt the cold against her back and the draughts around her ankles and was glad that she had worn all the layers she owned. Snow blew in below the door in gritty puffs of vicious cold. She was glad, too, that Beulah and Tobias would have been safely at the manufactory before this blizzard started and hoped that it would blow itself out long before they made their way home. She hoped that Jack had not been fool enough to set out in such weather and reassured herself that it was certainly too poor to ride.

After their meeting on the day that the boxes of snowdrops had toppled, he had returned each day at the same time, as if his ride always took him along the same route and coincided with the departure of the carter, so that they might walk together from the nuttery. She had been shy and cautious at first but he had asked her many questions. He said that he knew nothing about these parts and had enquired about the countryside around them and the history of the villages, to draw her into conversation. She found herself telling him where the source of the river was to be found, bubbling up from underground beneath a path near the woods, and the stories of the lords and ladies entombed in the churches, their sleeping alabaster effigies carved so fine you could trace the strands of the lords’ beards or the embroidered flowers on the ladies’ bodices. He had spoken of his family and his boyhood in Oakley, until her reserve broke down and she told him of her father’s work as carpenter for Hob Talbot’s estate, for which he needed to read, write and figure, for measuring and the drawing up of plans. He had taught her mother, who in turn had taught Effie, for her father believed that learning was a way out of poverty for the common man and that it should be the birthright of all, for all were equal in the eyes of the Lord. He had written, in the front of their family Bible, the words of the old radical, John Ball:
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?
Effie had smiled as she told him this; partly at the memory of how readily her father used to quote it and partly in recognition of how she could bandy words with Jack quite happily on subjects that others would assume beyond her station both as a woman and as a common farmhand. His interest and his easy conversation made her forget the difference in their stations.

She had told him Tobias and Beulah’s names and ages, proudly, as if she were their mother, and a little of their natures and accomplishments: Beulah swift to smile or anger and quick to learn her letters; Tobias, less interested in book-learning than craft and skill and, at fourteen, leaving boyish things behind, determined to become a master weaver and raise their lot. Here she had stopped though, as she wished to say nothing of the family’s money troubles.

Then one day Jack had not come and she had walked home alone, realising for the first time how much she had come to look forward to their exchanges and berating herself for letting her heart soften over a soldier. An hour later, as she struggled from the well behind the house with a pail whose handle almost froze to her skin, she had heard a knocking at the door and, rounding the corner, had come upon Maisie tied to the gatepost and Jack at her door, raising his hand hesitantly to knock again. ‘Maisie threw a shoe,’ he said ruefully. ‘So it was Shanks’s pony for me.’ He looked perished.

Effie had stood there at a loss, blushing that he should see the state of the cottage in which they lived, clutching the bucket before her as if she could hide behind it and her shame be swallowed up.

‘Forgive me for calling on you without an invitation,’ he said, ‘but I was so disappointed not to see you.’ He looked at her with his hopeful, open expression. ‘I thought you might wonder where I was.’ He stepped forward. ‘Please – let me carry that for you,’ and she relinquished the bucket and found herself opening the door so that he could take it to the fireside for her.

Remembering her manners, she offered him refreshment, apologising that she only had small beer and oat bread in the house and he said that he would only take it if she let him ‘earn his keep’ by replenishing the woodpile for her. He led Maisie into the neighbouring derelict cottage, drew water for the horse and rubbed her down before setting to work splitting logs, while Effie took the chance to set the room a little straighter and cheer the fire.

As they sat together at the deal table, breaking bread and talking, Effie put from her mind all thought of the piles of washing yet to do, of the tin in which too few coins rattled, of the pantry cupboard empty save for some carrots and a few potatoes that would barely make a soup. For a short, glorious hour she was neither labourer nor tenant, nor washerwoman nor stand-in mother, but simply a woman talking and laughing with a man. His attention warmed her as thoroughly as the fire, a prickle of excitement on her skin as sudden and unexpected as the rising sparks thrown by the crackling logs.

At length he apologised that he must leave as he had a duty that afternoon to oversee a delivery of a thousand muskets from Birmingham, to replace those sent recently to London. ‘I must make haste, as I shall have to lead Maisie,’ he said, ‘although I had much rather stay.’ At the door, he had taken her hand and, as their eyes met, he had raised it to his lips, holding her gaze. Although she knew that this was the gentry’s farewell to a lady, she had felt that his eyes and his touch were more ardent than form required. She returned to her work all of a dither: sorting the washing all wrong so that wool and worsted got in with the cottons and letting the copper boil over, nearly putting out the fire.

Since then he had visited almost every day, staying for as long as his duties would allow. Each time he helped her with whatever task she had on hand, until Tobias noticed the growing woodpile and the mended chicken coop and commented that she need not take over his chores and, rather haughtily, that it was a man’s work. After that, she only allowed Jack to draw water for her, so that no trace should be left of his presence.

He began to bring gifts. First he brought a pair of gloves that he said were to protect her hands when she was working at the nuttery but, although they were soft, pliable leather, she knew that, wearing them, she would not be able to feel the slender stems of the snowdrops, thin as grass, and so had not been able to use them. If she had come by them any other way she could have sold them and the family could have eaten well on the proceeds, but instead she had laid them away at the bottom of the clothes chest: guilty treasures. Yesterday, as he was about to leave, he had brought out a parcel wrapped in crackling paper: a shawl of pale mauve wool woven so fine that when she held it up the light shone through, revealing a delicate cobweb pattern. ‘It’s the loveliest thing!’ she’d exclaimed. ‘But I couldn’t wear it. Everyone would know I had a follower. It’s far too good for me, anyway.’

He had placed it around her shoulders and taken her by the hands, holding her at arm’s length the better to look at her. ‘Never say that. Nothing is too good for you, dearest Effie,’ he’d said, looking gravely into her eyes. Then he had drawn her towards him and they had kissed; a long kiss that had left her breathless and quivering when they drew apart. He had touched her hair, laying a shining strand against the pale wool before kissing her again on the forehead, like a blessing, and taking his leave.

She had said nothing to Tobias or Beulah of Jack’s visits. She had been concerned when he had been calling at the nuttery to find her, in case any of the other women should be lingering or the carter with his suspicious looks should still be there. There were plenty in the village who gossiped and some who envied her the cottage, however humble, and said that her family had no right to it after her father died. They said that it should have been given to one of the other labourers, usually citing their own kin in particular, and that orphans belonged in the workhouse. Effie feared that a rumour reaching Hob suggesting anything less than blameless behaviour on her part could bring that state about all too quickly.

She lived from day to day, longing to see Jack. She was glad that now he visited her at home, where the track led nowhere other than her house and no one had any reason to come, but at the same time she knew that should he be discovered there it would be near impossible to pass his visit off as chance. The risk of discovery was less but the circumstances more damning. Far better that Tobias and Beulah knew nothing, for what they didn’t know, they couldn’t let slip.

For the umpteenth time, Effie bent to replenish the tiny pen filler ready to dribble a little more on to the back of the lamb’s tongue and rub its throat to encourage it to swallow. There was a scuffling with the latch and Martin, the shepherd, came in with a gust of freezing air that almost blew out the tiny fire. He pulled the door closed behind him, making the flames bend and dance, and strode over to hold his broad hands out over its meagre warmth. ‘Oh, ’tis bitter cold, m’duck – colder’n a dog’s nose, a woman’s knees or a man’s behind.’ The snow dripping from his sleeves made the fire hiss and sputter. He nodded at the lamb. ‘There’s still life in ’er then?’

Effie nodded. ‘She’s thawed out and taken a fair bit.’ She stroked the lamb’s ears.

‘You’m the same patience as your father, God rest ’im. We worked alongside each other twenty year and he’d allus stick at a job ’til it were done.’ The shepherd squatted down and lifted the animal’s chin. ‘Eyes’re bright enough,’ he said. The lamb stretched out its neck and let out a long bleating cry. He stood again. ‘Bring ’er along. There’s summat I want to try.’

Effie gathered the sacking around the lamb and followed him from the cottage into the whirling whiteness. The wind took her breath away so that she must put her head down and gasp, and the snow stung her cheeks and eyes: gritty particles of ice rather than soft flakes. The shepherd’s heavy boots sank in, leaving holes in the snow that Effie stepped into, in a vain attempt not to overtop her own button boots. Ice water seeped in at the eyelets and through the holes in one sole and her teeth began to chatter.

They reached the fold; Martin called to one of the men to open the gate and they sidled quickly through and got in amongst the wet press of sheep. Hob and one of the labourers were busy examining the ewes and dividing them into two separate pens: one for those whose udders had dropped, showing that their time was close, and the other for those that still had some way to go. When Hob caught sight of Effie, he paused and straightened up to get a better look at her.

A well-built man in his mid-forties, his thick dark hair was still only a little grey and good food and comfortable living had kept him in rude health; he cut a fine bulky figure, swathed in his great coat. He was known in the village as a man of appetites: a big drinker, a hard hunter who had an eye for the women; last year a dairymaid, Susannah Cleave, had been sent packing by the mistress, setting tongues clacking. He turned to give an order to the labourer, as if he were about to come over, and Effie’s heart sank. She wanted neither his attention nor the gossip that would attend it and she bent her head over the lamb, trying to avoid meeting his eye. Martin dropped back beside her and made some show of checking on the lamb.