Shining Threads (60 page)

‘Who . . . did Annie . . . her family . . . ?’ Her mouth was so dry she could barely speak but the woman continued to grin slyly.

‘She’ll be at Spicers in Earnshaw Street.’

‘And . . . the rest . . . ?’

‘Nay, they’ve gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘All on ’em in one day. Seen it ’appen a lot. ’Ole families kick t’bucket an’ one left ter tell t’tale.’

Oh, dear God, sweet merciful God . . . She felt the ground tilt and for one dreadful moment thought she was about to go down into that foul, slime-coated horror which lay about her, but somehow
balancing against the half-fainting Emma she kept herself upright.

‘Where . . . where is . . . Earnshaw Street, if you please?’

‘Just up yonder.’ The woman turned away, her interest in the visitors at an end.

They walked to Earnshaw Street for there were no cabs to be found in this pestilential jumble of rat-ridden cottages in which ten, fourteen, sixteen persons slept habitually in one room, this
area of tottering tenements where the residents lived in rows side by side and on top of one another, where a hundred rooms housed more than a thousand destitute outcasts.

‘Just up yonder’ proved to be back over the bridge which spanned the Irwell, another rickety building with the name
SPICERS PINS
over the door, and needing no more than a
stiff breeze to have it down, Tessa was convinced. The large room which led directly off the street was filled with small tables at each of which sat four children. None of them appeared to be more
than six or seven years old, small, pallid, their eyes quite blank and incurious, and the sound of their wheezy breathing in the foetid air reminded Tessa of the sound of the engines at Victoria
station, but that had been cheerful and energetic and this was not. There was a kind of frame fixed before each child on which was suspended what appeared to be a heavy weight. Under each table was
a treadle and as the child pressed it with a bare and bony foot, the weight came thumping down with a deafening clatter. They were ‘pin-heading’, applying heads to the shanks of pins,
the heads tightened by a blow from the weight hanging before them.

Annie was not among them.

Emma clung like a child herself to Tessa’s hand. She had been brought up in the vicinity of mills and the men and women who worked in them. She was from such a family herself but what she
had seen today had sent her senses reeling and she could do no more than follow where Miss Tessa led, praying to her Methodist God to deliver her soon from the horrors she was witnessing today. She
winced, sidling even closer to her mistress as a man appeared from behind a machine.

‘’Ere, what d’yer think you’re up to?’ he demanded to know, not recognising in that first moment and the dim haze of the work room that Tessa and her maid were
‘quality’. ‘You’ve no right in ’ere an’ I’ll thank yer to be off,’ he added roughly, his manner marking him as the owner of the factory and the
children who worked there.

‘I’m looking for a friend of mine.’ Tessa’s tone was peremptory. Her eyes were riveted to the sight of one small child, her back bowed in the form of a letter
‘C’, her head no more than six inches from the table, falling into what appeared to be a deep and comatose sleep. The man gave the child a casual but stinging blow about the ear and her
head hit the table top but in an instant her tiny hands were reaching automatically for the pin shanks and her filthy feet for the treadle.

The man scratched his head and Tessa watched Emma do the same. She herself had never felt quite so filthy in all her life. Her skin itched and prickled and she longed to be at home in front of
her own bedroom fire, a bath of hot water standing ready to receive her, to soak for an hour in its perfume, but would she feel clean even then?

‘Surely there is no need to strike the child like that?’ She spoke coldly, using the telling weapon of her class, the only one she had.

‘There is if I’m ter keep ’em awake, lady. They’re no use ter me asleep. Anyroad, what’s it ter do wi’ you?’

She sighed for there was nothing she could do, not for this child, but she could help Annie, if no one else in this sweat-shop.

‘I believe you have a friend of mine working here,’ she said haughtily.

‘A friend of
yours
madam?’ the man said incredulously. ‘What, in ’ere?’ He eyed her expensive gown and boots, her imperious bearing and the expression on her
face which told him she would find her friend or know the reason why.

‘Annie Beale. Is she here or not?’

‘Annie Beale? A friend of yours?’

‘Do you employ her or not?’

‘Aye, she’s in pin-sheetin’ room.’

‘Lead me to her.’

‘Nay, missus, she’s busy an’ so am I.’

‘Emma.’ Emma cowered against her mistress, too appalled and terrified to do more than keep herself upright, just. ‘Emma, go and fetch a Peace Officer. I’m perfectly sure
these children are all under age, certainly underpaid and definitely undernourished. You will have heard of the Factory Act of 1833, I presume?’ The man stood open-mouthed but managed to nod
and indicate that he had. ‘Then if I am not led to my friend at once I shall report you to the Factory Inspectorate. In fact, I shall probably do so anyway.’

She could hear her mother’s voice in her head, saying the words she herself had just spoken about the Factory Act and the Inspectorate, and she marvelled that though her ears had not heard
them years ago when they had been discussed, her brain had both noted and retained them.

Annie was the last in a row of girls and young women, all sitting at a long bench with their faces to a grimy, soot-stained window. There was a vice before each one and in the vice was a paper
folded previously by the overlooker. The pins made in the outer room were placed carefully, a dozen at a time, in the holes which had been especially punched in the paper, and when the paper was
full it was removed and the procedure repeated. The room was damp and packed from wall to wall with similar benches and females, and something else was there too which, though she had never been in
such a place before, Tessa recognised as despair.

Annie seemed unable to grasp who Tessa was. When the man tapped her on the shoulder, his truculent face indicating that she was to stand up and shift herself, she did so slowly, her reflexes
slack and unco-ordinated. The face she turned to Tessa was grey and narrow, her eyes deep in bony sockets above her cheekbones. Her threadbare skirt and bodice was sweat-stained and sour and her
dirty feet were bare.

‘Hello, Annie,’ Tessa said softly and before the amazed stare of the factory owner and the dozens of women who were his slaves, she drew the drab and unknowing figure of Annie Beale
into her own elegant and compassionate arms. She held her for a moment then began to guide her between the benches but strangely, it seemed, Annie did not want to go.

‘We’re going home, Annie. Home to your cottage in Edgeclough,’ Tessa murmured, taking Annie’s hand.

‘What about them?’ Annie’s voice was harsh and filled with something Tessa could not identify.

‘Who, Annie?’

‘Them.’ Annie’s hand lifted, swinging in a tired arc to indicate all the hopeless faces who were staring dazedly at her and the fine lady who had come so incredibly amongst
them.

‘What . . . ? I don’t understand.’

‘Yer never did, lass.’ Annie sat down again and drew a sheet of pins towards her.

‘You mean you want to take . . . to take them as well?’

The man at her back began to laugh. He had never enjoyed anything so much for years. The idea of this fine madam trailing up Earnshaw Street with this bloody lot at her heels was the funniest
thing he’d ever heard. Just wait until he told his missus in that fine villa in Cheetham Hill which ‘this lot’ had earned for him and his family.

‘They’re in as bad a state as me, Tessa Harrison.’

‘Dear God, Annie, I might have known you’d be just the same. Even with all that’s happened to . . .’

‘I’ll not come wi’out ’em.’

‘Very well.’ The factory owner smirked for he’d have summat to say to Annie Beale when her ‘friend’ had gone, but his smirk changed to amazement when Tessa turned
to the young women at her back and addressed them just as though they were human beings and not the dregs of the streets which he knew them to be.

‘I am Mrs Tessa Greenwood,’ she said vigorously, ‘the owner of the Chapman Manufacturing Company Ltd in Crossfold. Have any of you heard of Crossfold? It is near Oldham.’
One or two nodded their heads hesitantly. ‘I will give work, decent work, to any of you who can make your way there. Do you understand? Again a couple nodded their heads and it was to these
that she addressed herself. ‘I have several mills, spinning mills and weaving and the work is easily learned. Annie here will help you . . .’ It was then that Annie’s new position
in life became clear to her and she reached out and clasped her friend’s hand.

Really, Mr Briggs remarked fretfully that evening to Mrs Shepherd in the privacy of the housekeeper’s small but cosy sitting-room, one wondered what the world was coming
to when the gentry – if you could call them that, which he doubted sometimes – brought what one could only term a ‘common’ person into the house and the mistress of it
treated her as though she was her dearest friend: ordering the bath to be placed in front of her own bedroom fire, totally ignoring Miss Laurel’s cries of alarm, and the maids running up and
down the stairs with jugs of hot water and warm towels, with milk and eggs and soup. And to cap it all sending off a carriage-load of servants, who were, after all, in
his
charge, to some
dreadful little cottage in Edgeclough to prepare it for her friend’s immediate return, she said. Light the fire, she told them, Mrs Shepherd, and scrub the place from top to bottom.
There’s some unused furniture up in the attic, Briggs, she said, beds and chairs and things. You will know what is needed, just as though I had the arranging of such like. I want the place to
be warm and as clean as a new pin. Mind, when she said ‘new pin’, Mrs Shepherd, she shuddered quite visibly, though I can’t think why. And then off they go, the pair of them,
three hours later, in madam’s carriage and the whole house in an uproar, and the stables with horses got out, and carriages in and out of the stable yard, and on top of it all Emma having a
fit of hysteria, screaming about lice, if you please, tearing at her hair as though she was demented. And as for Miss Laurel,
she
was in a faint after shrieking for the whole valley to hear
that if any disease had been brought into the house to harm her children she would never speak to Miss Tessa again. And
he
agreed with her, the master, I mean, though knowing the kind of
acquaintance he favours in those low gin shops I hear tell he frequents, I can’t imagine why.

‘I’ll stay with you, Annie,’ Tessa said when Annie was settled at her own hearth. ‘I’ll sleep in the chair by the fire.’

‘You’ll not.’ Annie’s face was calm now and her eyes were lucid. She sat in a wing chair, old and somewhat faded, brought over hastily by carriage with several other
pieces by the maids, her head resting against its padded back. She was clean, her skin stretched tightly over her delicate bones, pale and thin, but clean, and her own pleasure at the comfort of it
showed in the way her eyes lingered on every shadowed corner of the room, on the warm flames licking against her old kettle; in the way she smoothed her hands down the faded but spotless skirt and
bodice rummaged from somewhere in Tessa’s wardrobe, far too big, but
clean
.

‘I’m not taking orders tonight, Annie, you are, and besides, the carriage has gone.’

‘I’m all right now, so you can get off home.’

‘You don’t change, do you, Annie?’

‘Not where it shows, lass, and I’m not ready to talk . . . about . . . about them, not yet. ’Appen in a day or two . . .’

‘Annie, oh, dearest Annie . . .’

‘Give over, Tessa.’

‘Why didn’t you let me know? You know I would have come at once. You make me feel ashamed . . .’

‘Nay, you’ve nowt ter be ashamed of. Yer’ve bin a good friend ter me.’ It was the nearest Annie could get to a declaration of affection. ‘Yer’ve ’ad
enough on thy plate, so I ’eard, ter be botherin’ about me an’ mine.’

‘But it’s all done now, Annie. Everything’s running beautifully. I’ve . . . we . . . we had help . . .’ She looked down at her hands which gripped one another
tightly. Her face was soft and smiling and her skin flushed to a lovely rosy hue. ‘The mills are a limited company now and there is a board of directors. Will Broadbent . . . you remember
Will?’ She looked up at Annie and her eyes told their own story and Annie knew, of course. But this was not the time to ask questions, even if she had cared to.

‘That’s why I came to fetch you, Annie,’ Tessa went on, not aware that her love for Will Broadbent shone in her flushed face. ‘The mill is to be opened next week and your
job is waiting for you if you want it. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Yer know I’ll do what I’ve always done an’ that’s work at mill an’ earn me own livin’.’

‘But what about those girls from Spicers, and all the other young women who need someone to help them?’

‘You’ll help them.’

‘No, you will.’

‘Me? What can I do?’

‘You’ll think of something, Annie. We could . . . open a small factory . . . do pin-heading, but in decent conditions . . .’

‘But I’m a spinner . . .’

‘Does that mean you can do nothing else? Would you not like to give a hand to girls who have no one else to help them?’

‘Aye.’ Annie’s face had become quite pink and her eyes glowed.

‘But you’re to have a rest first, Annie.’ Despite Annie’s sudden interest it was apparent she was very tired. Beneath the false glow there was a waxy look of strain about
her mouth and sad eyes.

‘Aye, a day or two, ’appen, then . . .’

‘Annie, will you stop being so stubborn? You’re in no fit state to . . .’

‘I’ll decide what sorta state I’m in, if yer don’t mind and . . .’

The soft knock on the cottage door made them both jump but even as she moved to open it the image of Will Broadbent slipped into Tessa’s mind and her heart began to beat joyfully.