His crack of laughter made me jump. There was no mirth in it. ‘A boy! Can a human boy do that to an animal? Oh no, my lady. Mark my words, he is possessed of a demon.’
‘Indeed he must be. At that young age!’ He is only a little older than my Hetta. I pictured him, so short beneath the scaffold. How thickly the rope would pile around his small neck, how smooth and flat his little stomach would lie beneath the blade. A child hung, drawn and quartered. ‘Do you expect the King to show mercy?’
‘Mercy?’ He spat the word out like a thing vomited. ‘Would you extend mercy to the fiend?’
I stuttered. ‘No . . . I do not know. Deeds so wicked cannot go unchecked, and yet . . . Does not something within you baulk at this? Do you not feel the execution of a child will hang heavy upon your soul?’
‘In nowise.’ His eyes glittered. I did not like the thread of steel in his voice. ‘I am not responsible for this. The only person responsible is you.’
It hit me like a blow to the face.
‘You let him into the stables, you put the horse in his way. This would not have happened were it not for you.’ His glare pinned me to the spot. ‘If anyone has that boy’s blood on their hands it is you, Anne, and you alone.’
LONDON, 1866
The change in the texture of air was remarkable. As the carriage trundled through familiar streets, smog descended in a tobacco-coloured mist. Black smuts flecked the windows. Elsie tasted the biting scent of sulphur upon her tongue long before it invaded her nostrils.
Soon the factory materialised: one tall chimney flowing with smoke and behind it rows of slanting gables, like the dorsal fins of sharks. Iron railings enclosed the courtyard. Through the rails Elsie glimpsed a wagon delivering deal wood for the splints. A boy, one of their sellers, emerged from the building and walked past the horses with a tray bobbing at his waist. The merchandise seemed so much bigger than the boy himself.
A man opened the gates and they drew into the factory complex. Elsie heard metal clang behind her, locking her in. After The Bridge, this felt like another world. Alien. She looked with the eyes of a stranger at the place that had once been her home. Through the steamed factory windows she could see the cutting machine glinting like a hay knife as it whisked back and forth; sparks from the petulant matches that would not co-operate. The splinters of light hurt her eyes. She had to look away.
‘Right,’ said Jolyon as they stopped in the yard. ‘Let us get you up to the living quarters and rested. You must be exhausted after that journey.’
‘But what about the girls from Fayford? When their wagon arrives they will need to be settled in and shown what to do.’
‘Miss Baxter will take care of all that. Who do you think has been running around after the apprentices since you married?’
It nettled her, to be supplanted. This was hers. She might marry and move away, but she would never let go of the factory – she would always be mistress here. God knew she had earnt that title. ‘Well, Miss Baxter might look after them today, for I really am fatigued. But once I have rested I will start helping again.’
Jolyon chewed his lip.
‘It will benefit me,’ she explained. ‘I need to be where there is noise and bustle and life. At The Bridge I feel like a piece of taxidermy underneath a bell jar.’
‘We shall see. But first a cup of tea and a lie-down.’
She could not argue with that.
Firmly secured on Jolyon’s arm, she alighted from the carriage and turned left, past the dipping rooms and drying sheds, towards a small, grey-brick house commanding the west side of the courtyard. Dusty, frowzy women with tassels missing from the fringes of their shawls nodded their heads in acknowledgement as she came by. A fine white vapour, garlicky and pestilential, arose from their shoulders.
‘The windows could do with a scrub,’ she told Jolyon, as she regarded the house. ‘Look what happens when I leave you alone. I dread to think what kind of bachelor’s den I am walking into.’
He smiled. ‘You will find it just the same. The same as it always was.’
The front door squealed as Jolyon’s housekeeper opened it up to them. Mrs Figgis had a plump figure and a pudding face – no trace of cheekbones under the large pores on her skin. Her unwieldy bosom went before her. Elsie wondered how her apron stretched over it. She tried not to stare as she entered her old home.
Mrs Figgis was a new fixture, hired after Elsie’s marriage to do those womanly tasks she had always taken care of. Elsie was pleased to see how kind and motherly the woman acted, ushering them into the parlour, where the fire was already simmering, beneath the coals before she hurried out to fetch the tea tray.
It was a strange reversal of Elsie’s arrival at The Bridge. She found the mantelpiece clean. The windowsills, too. That was no small feat for a servant working in the yellow cloud of a factory. Thin powder – not precisely dust nor sand – got into everything, even under your nails and inside your nose.
‘I stand corrected,’ she said as she drew her bonnet off and sat before the fire. ‘You are being cared for extremely well.’
‘Indeed I am. Mrs Figgis is a treasure. Not, of course,’ he added swiftly, placing his hat on a stand and taking Elsie’s from her, ‘that she makes up for having you around.’
‘Flatterer. I don’t believe a word.’
Leaning back, she glanced around at the parlour. Jolyon was right – it was all the same. Faded wallpaper with a repeating pattern of rose bouquets, a few well-chosen ornaments on the shelves and crocheted antimacassars draped over the backs of the chairs. The usual chemical smell of the factory, heightened by her absence from it. The room was the same. Only Elsie had changed.
She could not help but notice how small everything was, after The Bridge: the chairs too close together, the fire feeble and insufficient. As if she had grown too large to be contained in such a place.
Mrs Figgis brought in the tea with some bread and butter, before tactfully leaving them alone. Elsie raised the cup to her lips. There was a chip missing from the rim.
‘I want you to take a drop of laudanum and sleep for the rest of today,’ Jolyon told her. He picked up a slice of bread. ‘Tomorrow, I shall make enquiries about your treatment.’
She nearly dropped her cup. ‘I saw a physician at The Bridge. He said I was well enough to travel.’
‘That is not a full recovery, though, is it?’
‘I will admit that I am still weak, Jo, but I don’t require more than rest and a glass of wine a day.’
‘You have had a nervous shock. It does not do to let such episodes pass unheeded. The physicians have all manner of therapies these days that can soothe you – steam inhalations, cold sitz-baths.’
She sipped the tea, but it was sour in her mouth and hurt when she swallowed it down. ‘I thought we agreed. I was not . . . It was all a ghastly joke.’
‘Yes.’ Jolyon chewed his bread and butter, purposefully avoiding her eyes. ‘I am not implying otherwise. But it is still a nasty blow to the nerves. And together with all the rest – Rupert passing, so suddenly, like that.’