Miss Muchelney gasped again, her voice unwittingly hitting some of the harmonics hidden in the notes.
Sophie wiped her eyes one final time and glanced up at her father.
He gripped her shoulder—lightly, fingers extended, just the way Sophie gripped the tuning hammer. His smile was soft, without any of the sadness he’d carried around like a cloak the past two months. “Well done, my dear,” he murmured.
Sophie gulped and nodded.He doesn’t have to know you can’t stop feeling that device,she told herself sternly.Just let him be proud of you.
Her father may have begun to recover from Mr. Verrinder’s fraud. But Sophie still had a long, long way to go.
This was how great crimes began: with a single secret question and no law around to overhear.
“All those in favor?” Maddie Crewe asked.
And every hand in the room went up.
Really, they ought to have been somewhere seedier for this. Not this small polite room with its whitewashed plaster and homely windows and a decade-old accretion of technical books. This crime should have been born in a proper den of iniquity, with guttering candles and dubious beverages and women of even more dubious morals.
Maddie supposed one out of three would have to do.
The conspirators here tonight were women and girls, ranging in ages from sixteen to sixty, and mostly on the younger side of the scale. Half were factory girls in their pinafores going off to work the night shift after this, the rest were handweavers of silk ribbons, satin, crepe, bombazine, brocade, and velvet. Madeleine Crewe was a ribbon weaver and the current chairwoman of the Carrisford Weavers’ Library (formerly Weavers’ Library and Reform Society, changed for prudence’s sake when the magistrates had started to look askance at any group with the wordreformin their name).
This crime was half Maddie’s idea.
The other half had come from Mrs. Money—“rhymes with stony,” as she’d explained in her gravelly voice. She was a newcomer, much better dressed than the others. Maddie had seen the girls’ eyes travel along the lines of her rich black coat with real fur at the cuffs and collar, estimating its weight and worth with eyes that knew precisely how much food the weaving of such fabric would have earned them. They’d been quite naturally wary of anyone in such a coat—until Maddie had showed them Mrs. Money’s convict love token, the twin to her own, and told them about the scheme, and asked if they wanted to help.
Hence the unanimous yes. Helping was what the Library was for, after all.
It wouldn’t be Maddie’s first walk on the shady side of the law. She’d slipped away from a shop a time or two with more in her pockets than when she’d come in. She’d let a lonely soldier—or his lonelier wife—buy her a meal and a drink in exchange for an evening’s company. Just to help a body get by when bread was dear. And a little light larceny now and again was practically expected of factory girls, as steady apprenticeships vanished and wages sank lower and lower. Everyone had to make shift somehow.
And once, at seventeen, when Maddie had finally had enough mistreatment and walked away from the throwing mill, and away from its horrible overseer... They’d sent her to jail for breaking contract and shaved her head so the lesson would sink in.
But hair, like hope, had a way of growing back. Maddie was free, and her auburn waves now flowed past her shoulders when she left them unpinned. She tucked one wayward lock behind her ear now, and smiled at her fellow thieves.
“It’s likely to be dangerous,” Mrs. Money said. Her voice was soft but her eyes were hard, and she turned them on every weaver in the room, one by one. “They’ll transport us, if they catch us.”
“Or worse,” Alice Bilton said.
“Nothing’s worse,” Mrs. Money shot back.
Alice put her long fingers to her long mouth and chewed her nails grimly. At nine-and-twenty, she was older than Maddie, but her thin frame and general air of nervousness made her seem a decade younger.
Mrs. Money continued: “Are you sure you don’t want to take that vote again?”
Maddie understood her skepticism. Mrs. Money had met these girls only tonight. If she’d known them better, she’d know the Library had been criminals for years already. Combinations, such as workers formed to agitate for better wages and working conditions, had been outlawed in England for decades. It was legal for workers to form associations to sell wares jointly, or purchase a set of small rooms like this for lectures, or take up subscriptions for their library of technical weaving volumes and pattern books.
But they knew if they tried to protest for higher wages or fewer hours, or any softening at all in their working conditions, the law would come down strongly on each and every one of them. As it had in London and Manchester and Birmingham.
The law hadn’t stopped the girls dreaming about it, though. And it hadn’t stopped them talking, especially when Maddie’s mother had been running things. The late Mrs. Crewe had always said: “There are only two kinds of people, Madeleine. The people you protect—and the people you protect them from.”
Maddie believed that more fiercely now that her mother was gone.
So instead of calling for a second vote, Maddie turned to Mrs. Money and asked: “Have you ever heard the story of Jenny Hull?”
The woman’s head snapped around.
Maddie couldn’t help but grin. She’d known that would get Mrs. Money’s attention.
The weavers, long familiar with the legend, snorted and laughed and elbowed one another.
