Maddie let it wash over her and pass her by. There had been a time when the mere reminder of Mr. Giles’s tricks would have her blood boiling. He’d started as what they called an undertaker: someone who took dyed silk thread from the manufacturers, had it woven up, and then returned it to them for final payment. He’d first hired apprentice weavers at half-pay rates, then bought a number of looms and started charging his weavers for their use, making extra profit on each piece of cloth produced. When demand fell off—as happened often, the trade being seasonal—he would send his weavers back to the parish for relief, having kept all the profit of their labor.
In this way Mr. Giles had spent the last two decades building up a solid little empire, piece by piece. He’d inherited his father’s shop and made luxurious improvements to it while his weavers strained and starved. He’d shorted them of payment and materials—but instead of trying to hide his skimming in the books, where it might have been noticed by his bankers, he passed off the extra in bribes to the manufacturers, dyers, and traders to get himself more advantageous rates than his rivals. He’d charmed Mr. Prickett from the silk-throwing mill into a ten percent discount (and he especially charmed his wife, went the rumor).
Lately, the man had managed to get himself set up as a factor to buy raw silk in London (the only legal port) and sell it to local mills and dyers. So now he could increase prices at any point—and send his profits up at every level further down the chain—even as the law gave him an excuse to keep wages down even as profits soared. Now Carrisford’s whole silk industry revolved around him, as though he were the worm at the heart of the cocoon.
Few weavers in Carrisford could avoid working with him in some capacity. Maddie had so far been able to manage it, thanks to her skill with pattern drafting—but she didn’t think that would last forever.
He’d played the game well: the only people who objected to his business practices were the ones least likely to be listened to. It had once left Maddie positively shaking with rage and frustration—but not any longer.
Not now that they were going to take every penny of that wealth away from him. To take it, and use it to fight back against the practices that kept so many people struggling.
She could almost taste it already, that tart sweet flavor of revenge. Maddie wondered if this was how prisoners felt, at the end of a long and difficult sentence. Years of cold and salt and hand-ruining labor—and then they looked up, saw the light shining through a window, and breathed the sweet, green air of home.
She would have to ask Mrs. Money about that, when all this was over.
Night fell, and Cat called out the stew was done. They trooped into the kitchen to eat, passing hunks of old bread around as Cat poured out small beer. John and Emma both dropped a kiss on her cheek to thank her, and she blushed happily.
Maddie smiled at the trio, a homey kind of envy flooding her along with the warmth of the oyster stew. It had been a while since she’d had someone—much less two someones—to share nights with. Most of the neighborhood thought Catherine Gray only kept house for the Hedinghams. Maddie knew different: Cat slept so infrequently in her own room that it had become an informal storeroom.
The housekeeper leaned contentedly now against Emma’s shoulder, John’s lips curving with intent as he watched them both from across the scarred kitchen table.
Maddie sighed into her beer, and thought about a pale face with brown hair and deep, soulful eyes, calling out to her at the churchyard gate. Miss Anybody had been soft and small and a little shy—the kind who always made Maddie go overall protective and commanding. Until Maddie had looked into those brown eyes and caught the flash of a bottomless, ravenous hunger that made it clear that quiet exterior was a lie and a fraud. It had shone for only an instant, that dark star, but Maddie still felt the pull of it, aching in her belly even now.
She wanted to see if she could sate such a hunger. She’d always been fierce that way: the more someone needed, the more she wanted to give.
Too bad Miss Anybody had overheard her with Mr. Giles. It had been a kind impulse, going after Maddie to tell her she was being cheated—but it was the worst possible timing. Where had the girl been when Mr. Giles was stealing Maddie’s best patterns and having them copied on the cheap? Why did she have to show up now, when Maddie had no time or attention to spare for flirting and frolics?
It was one thing to involve the Weavers’ Library in a criminal scheme—it was quite another to pull in some irreproachable tradesman’s daughter. Someone who trusted the authorities, and who could afford to be virtuous.
Dinner ended. John and Emma continued to work in the kitchen, sewing and stitching in cozy warmth as Cat took care of the washing up.
Maddie had some work left yet herself—but she couldn’t do hers at the hearth. She took a little more beer and went up to her room in the attic.
In the dimness, the frame of the loom rose high and stern as a guillotine. The moon was clouded over and the gas lamps that lit the silk mill at night didn’t quite reach this far, so Maddie lit a candle to work by. Tallow smoked and sputtered as she took off her wool dress to put it carefully away. There was a little dust on the hem from her long trek around town, but it brushed out quickly enough. In her shift and a comforter, topped by a thick shawl that had seen better days, Maddie sat at her small table and continued working out the pattern for a floral ribbon, one row of colored squares at a time.
The loom hulked in the corner of her vision, waiting to be warped. Maddie wondered how you could love and loathe a thing at one and the same time.
She had grown up measuring her height against its frame. Above it, at first, as the drawboy for her mother, perched on a ladder raising the warp threads in shifting sets as Mrs. Crewe sent the shuttle flying back and forth. Later, Maddie had learned the trick of that herself, throwing with just the right flick of the wrist, humming to keep the pace of the work strong and steady. Steady was reliable, reliable was quicker, and quicker was paid faster. She’d done a few years’ labor in the silk-throwing mill, and had taken a few other jobs when weaving work was especially hard to come by—but Maddie had always ended up back again at her mother’s side.
Despite the familiarity of the machine, Maddie had learned to hate the loom for the amount of time it stole from her. The soul-numbing hours she had to spend in front of it to produce even an inch of the fabric whose luster was worth infinitely more than the sheen of sweat on her brow.
Fashions had shifted, and these days power looms ate up more and more of the market for cloth. Like Maddie herself, the loom had grown over the years: the Jacquard machine, new warp threads, the multiple shuttles flying back and forth had all been added by Maddie or her mother’s hands. The late Mrs. Crewe had scrimped and leveraged every London connection she had to get one of the first Jacquard heads in Carrisford—it was a mass of a machine that sat on top of the loom like a bishop in a cathedral pulpit, pattern cards rattling hollowly as their punched holes stopped or let pass the rods that moved the heddles up and down. Expensive, but it let Mrs. Crewe weave complex patterns in a fraction of the time.
A card punch had come with it, and that’s how Maddie had begun designing her first patterns. Simple to start with, but soon she was doing elaborate brocade and figured pieces, swirls of color and shape emerging from the secrets encoded in the cards.
Winter was the low season for weaving work, which followed the currents of fashion and so was busiest at the height of summer. A lot of the girls went into service or found other makeshift work; Maddie filled these months in front of a pin block, arranging the thick pins, setting one card on top, and pressing down the open metal guide to puncture the card in all the necessary places. Some of the more elaborate patterns she sold to the cotton weavers who’d had Jacquard looms in their factories for years now. The money from one of these sales was usually enough to get her through the lean times until she could start weaving ribbon on her own loom again.
She still missed working with her mother, the closeness and company of it. The bright jewel-colored satins they used to produce, before the water- and steam-powered looms came along to make those cheaper from the factories. Maddie still had a bit of one particular weave, a bolt of pure bright gold like liquid sunlight.
Fabrics that, she was sure, could have competed with anything smuggled into the country from the French workshops.
She’d find out soon enough, Maddie supposed. According to the newsmongers, the Spitalfields Acts that forbade French silk imports were under siege in Parliament. British dressmakers and drapers would soon be flooded with exquisite French textiles. Everyone knew the first thing the factory owners would do in reaction was to install more power looms. The black silk mourning crepe that Carrisford had been known for was a weave ideal for power loom production.
Which meant less work for the hand looms.
The handweavers still had the edge in velvets, but that wouldn’t last forever. Maddie had lived through the decline of Carrisford’s once-robust wool industry a decade ago, when the end of the wars meant wool imports resumed. She’d seen how the wool weavers had struggled to survive on the trickle of jobs that hadn’t moved to the more machine-friendly north.
She’d worked factories before, and she never wanted to again.
