The organ notes floated in the air, soft as moonlight at this distance.
Mrs. Money’s eyes were clear as she looked at her lover’s grave; her tears had been shed long since. “I suppose I should be making my escape in truth,” she said. Earlier this week she had presented Mr. Giles’s letter of credit at the bank; that thousand pounds, in cash, now belonged to the Weavers’ Library, with Mr. Giles none the wiser and thus unable to ask for it back.
Jenny Hull’s vengeance was complete.
Mrs. Money’s hand rested briefly on the gravestone in a final farewell, then she straightened and looked at Maddie. “Last chance—if you feel the need to flee Carrisford for a while, come by the Mulberry Tree an hour after dawn.”
Sophie’s heart stuttered in her chest.
Mrs. Money didn’t wait for a reply, but strode off into the night.
Maddie was still staring down at her mother’s headstone. “I swear every time I come here, the letters are worn down a little more,” she said. “I don’t want her memory to fade with them.”
Sophie swallowed the lump in her throat, as the willow tree shivered in the breeze overhead. “My mother is urging me to go out into the world—and you feel yours would want you to stay. Where does that leave us?” But she was afraid she knew. It always came down to this: Sophie wanted someone more than they wanted her.
The moonlight, the graveyard, even the music—it was a farewell scene, and it made Sophie’s heart ache.
Maddie spoke low. “Do you want to know a secret? My mother died angry. She didn’t regret attending the meeting at St. Peter’s Fields, but she wasfuriousthat her life was ending in such a fashion. It was like theft, she told me. The soldiers who killed her stole the rest of her life. From her, from me, from all of us—she had so much more work she wanted to do. The Weavers’ Library has always honored her sacrifice, and I have tried to carry on as she would have, but...”
Sophie reached out and took Maddie’s hand, then gently took both hands when she felt how chilled Maddie had become.
Maddie turned and drew their joined hands up. “I think if I tried to live the rest of her life in her place, that would be a kind of theft, too. I’d be stealing from myself—and I know I would have regrets, very strong regrets, about what I’d have to sacrifice.” She pressed her lips to the back of Sophie’s hands, one after the other. “But I promised I’d never lie to you, so let me say it clearly. I love you, Sophie. I can’t give you up. I don’t want to stay here if you’re leaving.” She pulled in a shaky breath. “If you ask me to come with you, I’ll say yes.”
Sophie feared she was dreaming. Here was fierce, beautiful, audacious Maddie Crewe offering her heart and her future. The Sophie of one year ago would have felt too small and sparrow-like to accept, would have worried this was something she had to earn instead of a gift freely given.
The Sophie of this moment, however, was an opportunist. Her flirtation with worthwhile crime had taught her to see the true value of things.
There was nothing in all the world she valued more than Madeleine Crewe.
So she bounced up on her toes, pulled Maddie down for a thorough kiss, and grinned in the moonlight. “I love you, too,” she said. “Come with me.”
“Now?” Maddie laughed.
“Now—and every day after.”
Maddie swooped Sophie up in her arms and whirled her about, there among the gravestones and the stained-glass rainbows. She was still laughing when Sophie kissed her again; Sophie swallowed up the sound of that laugh until it lit her up like the flame inside a lamp.
Maddie set her down at last, and for a moment they simply breathed together, as the sound of sacred music filled the air around them.
Chapter Nineteen
Mr. Giles, it transpired, had been extremely busy extremely quickly with the full amount of the loan from the Carrisford Bank, which exceeded even what Mrs. Money had demanded: with this vast sum he had consulted expensive experts on factory production and bought his usual gifts and bribes to smooth his way into this new branch of the industry. Many of these expenses were unrecoverable, and as the trustees began making stern sounds about the courts and the magistrates his desperation mounted by the hour.
In the end, Mr. Giles had to sell everything—his wares, his shop, his house, his furniture. He did make a case before the magistrates, and tried to call the Weavers’ Library members as witnesses to prove they’d helped defraud him. But every girl stood before the bench and testified she’d been hired to work the loom, had been blindfolded, had no idea the dye didn’t work as promised, or how that fraud had been sold to him by the deceitful Mrs. Money.
The magistrates, who’d had several quiet meetings with the trustees, turned a baleful eye upon Mr. Giles. Furious and disgraced, he left town to go live with a cousin somewhere in Cornwall, and everyone spared a moment to pity the cousin.
The elder Mr. Samson once more made an offer on the empty factory. Mr. Obeney, still grieving the loss of his utopia, sold hastily and moved away, while Mr. Samson began updating the old looms and hiring weavers and overseers, negotiating hours and wages with the Weavers’ Library—now once again the Weavers’ Library and Reform Society, the old name revived as soon as the ink had dried on the repeal of the Combination Acts. Full of funds and bolstered by legality, they were already strategizing about Mr. Prickett’s silk mill, the employees of which were threatening a strike.
The chief strategist would be not Maddie Crewe, but her stepmother: Mrs. Crewe had learned of the silk mill’s many faults of management from her observant daughters, and was earnestly and rather terrifyingly set on correcting them. The Weavers’ Library had used some of Mr. Giles’s own cash to purchase his empty storefront and made it the center of a cooperative retail society. Soon lace makers, shoemakers, tailors, piece workers, and others became members to show goods in the fledgling store, while Mrs. Crewe and her two daughters kept eagle eyes on stock and customers alike.
The running of the Weavers’ Library and Reform Society was now left to Judith Wegg and Alice Bilton, and Maddie was still staggered by the relief she felt at stepping down from a job she’d seen as a duty for so many years.
And then, six months after the concert, Mr. Frampton the elder had a letter from a friend and former fellow musician in Westminster. A gentleman he knew had a daughter mad for the piano but terrified of performing in public, and he wondered if Mr. Frampton might know someone who would know how to teach her.
Mr. Frampton was happy to say that he did, and passed along Sophie’s name. Several letters later, Sophie had a job, a new pupil, and a journey to pack for. Harriet Muchelney’s teaching would continue under the auspices of Mrs. Halban, an older woman with kind eyes who brooked absolutely no nonsense.
The week before the journey, the Aeolian Club and the Weavers’ Library threw a farewell soiree for Miss Sophie Roseingrave and Miss Maddie Crewe.
