The Silk Factory by Judith Allnatt

looked away the spell was lifted. She gave a little cry and stepped back into the room, dropping the bar as if it were hot.
    Outside, a blackbird flew low across the lawn uttering its chattering alarm call and then the garden was silent. Silent and utterly empty.

THREE
1812
    ‘You’re late,’ the silk master said to Tobias and Beulah Fiddement as they hurried in, their faces white and pinched by the cold, the girl stumbling with tiredness. From behind the wide expanse of his mahogany desk, strewn with scales, measuring rod, oil lamp and lustrous samples of cloth, he turned and pointed to the wooden clock that hung on the wall above his head. Its dial was the size of a cartwheel and it read three minutes to six. ‘I won’t tolerate tardiness,’ he continued. ‘I myself have been abroad since cockcrow and everyone else is in their place.’
    He leant back in his seat and surveyed them, tucking his thumbs into the pockets of his waistcoat, which strained over his corpulent middle. Despite the illusion of gentility lent by a brocade waistcoat and a well-cut coat, he had the weather-beaten appearance of a seafaring man and was thickset and square. A bushy set of mutton-chop whiskers made shift to compensate for a lack of hair atop but ever failed to draw Beulah’s eyes from the signs of old wounds on his bald head: a strange indentation on one side and a series of thick white scars that exerted a horrified fascination upon her and led her to stare in spite of the dangers of doing so. She moved up close to her brother.
    ‘Well?’ the master said to Tobias. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
    Tobias slipped Beulah’s hand into his. Making his voice as deep as he could, he said, ‘Begging your pardon, Mr Fowler, sir. We’re not early but we’re not late neither. The clock still lacks three minutes before the hour.’
    Fowler turned round to look again with exaggerated slowness. ‘So it does, young Fiddement, so it does. But perhaps you could tell me why you’re cutting it so fine, to use a saying of our trade? Why you’re playing fast and loose, as it were, with my time when you know the penalty for lateness is a five-penny fine?’
    Tobias thought of the long dark tramp from the neighbouring village of Newnham, through fields frozen into stiff clods beneath the snow and along cart tracks slippery with ice, Beulah shaking with the cold, his own teeth chattering, and of carrying Beulah pick-a-back once they reached the road into the village, so that he could, at last, run the final stretch. He said tentatively, ‘We were held up by the weather, sir.’
    ‘By the weather, you say? Surely just a little dusting of snow?’ He leant forward, his elbows on the desk. ‘Eh? Eh?’
    ‘I’m sorry, sir. We both are … sorry.’ He gave Beulah a nudge. She nodded and then hung her head.
Five pennies
, she was thinking; five pennies was most of his wage. Five pennies was potatoes and broth and coals. Five pennies gone was an empty belly and a cold hearth.
    The master leant back with his palms on the desk as if considering the matter. The cherrywood handle of the whip that he always carried at his belt was revealed as his coat fell back and Beulah looked away quickly. A smile played at the corners of his mouth. Beulah didn’t like the smile. Over the busy noise of the looms above, the clock ticked with a hollow, wooden sound that seemed to reverberate from every wall of the office.
    ‘It won’t happen again, sir,’ Tobias said.
    The long hand of the clock gave a jerk and achieved the vertical of six o’clock with a loud tock.
    ‘You’re quite right, Fiddement,’ the master said, fixing him with a keen eye. ‘It won’t happen again and pleasant though it is to be passing the time of day with you, we all have work to get on with. As you can see, it is six o’clock, you are not in your places and your wage will be docked by five pennies.’
    Tobias’s face blanched and his fists clenched, squeezing Beulah’s hand until it