Maddie began: “Here’s how they tell it. Jenny Hull was a silk weaver in Carrisford back when silk work was good money. She wove beautiful brocades. The best in all Essex, or so they say. One day a mercer tried to cheat her—saying she’d done less work than she had, so he could give her less money for it. Jenny decided it wasn’t right for him to keep a silk he hadn’t properly paid for. So she put on her best dress and found a friend and they pretended to be customers, and went by his shop when he was out. The friend distracted the assistant, while Jenny hid the bolt of brocade in her skirts and strode out—but the mercer came back early, and caught them, and brought them before the magistrates. Jenny’s friend was found not guilty—they couldn’t prove she’d meant to steal anything, when all she’d done was ask to look at the wares—but Jenny was condemned. She was the first woman from Carrisford to be transported to Australia, and the magistrates and the merchants made sure everybody in town heard about it.”
“Ever since,” Alice chimed in—she’d always reveled in ghost stories, and this was pretty near—“Carrisford weavers have told their daughters: behave, or you’ll walk Jenny Hull’s path. Be good, or you’ll end up where Jenny Hull went. And—well—the children started telling their own versions, after a while.”
“Don’t stay out late, or Jenny Hull will get you,” Judith Wegg added, curving her light brown hands into claws.
“Don’t flirt, don’t talk back, don’t ask questions, don’t be ungrateful—” Alice counted off.
“—or she’ll snatch you up and swallow you down and leave only your boots behind,” Maddie laughed. Mrs. Money was looking rather dumbfounded, and Maddie couldn’t blame her. It was one thing to hear about a local legend—quite another thing to actually become one.
“They say she was descended from witches,” Alice said, with relish, as Judith quirked an eyebrow at her. “Wicked from birth, and she used to weave spells into her silk.”
Mrs. Money made a faint sound of disbelief in the back of her throat.
“So you see,” Maddie concluded firmly, “we grew up certain that the law was ready to punish us for something, someday. It’s just the way things are.”
“Which is not to say we’re reckless,” Alice hurried to add.
“Not all of us,” Judith said wryly, making Alice hide a laugh behind one hand and attempt to look innocent.
Mrs. Money blew out a long breath, carefully smoothing down the fur on her coat collar. “That’s good,” she said bluntly. “For this to work, the worst thing we can be is afraid.”
“Howdoesit work?” Judith asked. “What is the plan precisely?”
Everyone looked at Maddie. Twenty-three pairs of eyes, bright and expectant and wary and nervous. Alone they would have been as easy to shake off as scraps of loose thread; twisted together, they bound Maddie to their cause like the ropes that pulled a sail taut against the wind.
If that made her feel strained and stretched and raggedy as a worn piece of canvas, well, that was just the price you paid for keeping everyone safe.
“We don’t have everything worked out yet,” Maddie said, “but we have the broad strokes. Here’s how we start...”
Chapter Two
The Muchelneys’ violin teacher was Mr. William Frampton, a pleasant-faced man with close-cropped dark curls and lustrous brown skin. He and Mr. Roseingrave discovered a mutual passion for mechanical design, and by the time they’d reached the Roseingraves’ shop Sophie and her father had been invited to next Tuesday afternoon’s meeting of the Aeolian Club, a musical and mathematical society that met once a month to perform for one another and discuss topics of artistic and scientific interest.
On the day, however, Mr. Roseingrave received a note about a possible piano for sale—the first such purchase he would be able to make since opening the Carrisford shop. “But you go on, Soph,” he said to his daughter, with a wink. “You’re a sensible girl. I think Carrisford is safe enough for you to adventure in on your own.”
The Aeolian Club met in the oldest section of town, in a room with a plaque that readCarrisfordWeavers’ Library. It was a small room, clearly well loved and much frequented. Books were stacked haphazardly upon the shelves that ringed the walls, many with samples of textured wool and silk brocade peeking out of the pages. A set of chairs had been drawn into a semicircle around a small dais at the front. The group was some two dozen in number, mostly tradesmen’s sons and daughters like Sophie, with a few of the local lesser gentry. Someone brought cakes and biscuits from the corner bakery, a pot of tea was produced, and mismatched cups with chipped handles were lavishly handed round.
Sophie sipped her tea and tried to remember names and was able to relax a little into the music during the performance part of the meeting. Miss Mary Slight played several variations on the harp, after which discussion broke out on the subject of whether or not it was possible to build an automaton that could play any stringed instrument. “The Musician built by Mr. Jacquet-Droz played a working organ,” Miss Slight recalled, “but that required only pressure from the mechanical hands. A harp involves a great deal more flexibility in the hand and fingers, and that brings up the question of how to control such complex movements.”
“The difficulty is not just in the movements,” Mr. Frampton countered, leaning hopefully forward. “The impossible part would be reproducing the real harpist’s extraordinary skill and sensitivity. I’m sure you need no enlightening uponthatsubject.”
Miss Slight blushed with pleasure.
Sophie hid a smile and slipped out to walk home again, leaving her new friend to his flirtation.
It was a bright morning, if cold, and the streets were thronged with townsfolk eager to get out and about before the snows returned.
People,Sophie marveled,are preposterously attractive.
She’d known this in London: from the highborn ladies to the street singers, Sophie hadn’t been able to walk down a single street in town without finding some face or figure that caught her eye and set her heartbeat thundering in her veins. She’d thought it was because she’d been born there, some kind of natural affinity—but she was having the same amount of trouble in Carrisford. People here weredifferentlyappealing—there was something in the general style that was unlike the inhabitants of London—but the beauty of them all kept Sophie’s appetites ready and ravenous.
A woman strode by with her hem swirling around slender booted ankles; the movement of those skirts made Sophie ache with envy and yearning. She hadn’t been kissed in over a year now...
Not for the first time, Sophie thought what a shame it was she couldn’t marry a woman. It’s not that men didn’t please her—Sophie liked a strong nose and a well-turned calf and a man who knew what to do with his hands—but there were just so many lovely women around. Such a waste to have to discount them as possible spouses.
Unfortunately, she didn’t think it was only a matter of it not being legal. Because even adding in the men she’d flirted with and pined for and even kissed once or twice, Sophie had always been the one of the pair to be more tempest-tossed by desire. Nobody had ever seemed to yearn for her the way she yearned for them.
Perhaps she was made wrong, somehow. Perhaps that was what had made her so susceptible to Mr. Verrinder’s poison.
