Eppie (50 page)

Restless again, Wakelin had gone for a walk along the
riverside, alone.

‘I hate this place,’ Eppie said.

‘We have to think of the joyful times we’ve had,’ Martha
whispered, ‘not what our life is like now. It’s the only way we’ll get by.’  

Eppie did her best. Gabriel’s face was so clear it was as
though she could reach out and touch his cheek. A happy voice chirped, ‘Do you
want to see a pixie twirl?’ Dawkin’s face was less distinct, a dying memory. 

For a short while she slept and forgot her troubles, but sudden
noises catapulted her back to reality, banishing any chance of respite.

She remembered how, at home, she would lie in the truckle
bed and listen to the calls of the wild:  the
yipe
of badgers, the
roow
of foxes. Penetrating the gloom, the only sounds here were the shouts of
drunkards, boisterous laughter, and the occasional scream.

This was an alien world which hid many unknown terrors.

Hours before dawn, a bell clanged
through the oily blackness, summoning workers.  

Having spoken with Eibhlin, Martha believed working at the
mill to be their most sensible option. Come spring, as Wakelin said, they would
look for work on the land.   

Wakelin yawned noisily.

Fur had gone to check the snares he set yesterday. If he
left them too long someone else was bound to take the meat.

‘What about Lottie?’ Eibhlin asked.  

‘I’ll take her with me,’ Martha answered. ‘She’ll be no
trouble.’

‘The overseer won’t allow it. They don’t ask for birth
certificates and children under five are often taken in, but Lottie is far too
young.’

‘Whatever shall I do with her?’

‘Mrs Hoggett left her two-year-old tied to the grate in that
wall.’

‘Tie my child up like a beast?  Like as not she’d strangle
herself.’

‘There’s Grandmother Mobsby. She lives a few houses along.
Whilst her son and his children are at the mill she takes in little ones for a
few pence.’

Fog hung over the river and crept into alleys.

Eppie and Coline followed in the steps of their mothers. It
was odd to see the streets fill with people, all heading in the same direction.
Her lungs worse from the damp air, Eibhlin coughed persistently. Wakelin
trailed behind, his head lolling in tiredness.

 The steady shifting of workers ceased before the locked
mill gates. Crates were stacked in the yard, fluffy fibres caught upon their
rough surfaces. Ranged around the mill were a dye house, smith shop and
warehouse.

The canal began at the mill and stretched many miles to the
docks. Towing a narrowboat, a horse tramped towards them.

‘Wakelin!’ Ezra cried in surprise, walking up to him.

‘I was wondering when I’d bump into you. Are you working
here?’

‘Have been nigh on six months. See if you can get in with
me.’ 

Ezra’s son, Simkin, carried, as did Eppie and Coline, a tin
of cold tea and a basket containing bread and dripping for the family’s meal. 

A man, with mutton-chop sideburns and straggly hair which
stuck out beneath his tricorn hat, emerged from the office. He paced towards them.

Ezra nudged Wakelin. ‘That’s the overseer. There’s not a
scrap of friendliness about him.’

‘And that’s Snarl,’ Simkin told Eppie, pointing to the
overseer’s bulldog. ‘He’s got a ferocious bite, and don’t much care whose leg
he takes a lump outta.’

The gates clanged open.

The overseer was chewing a sticky sweet, his jaw rapidly
opening and closing. ‘You after work?’ he asked Martha. ‘Wait under them arches.’

Jenufer noticed Eppie’s nervous expression. ‘At least it’s
warmer in there.’

Eppie forced a smile. Inside, though, she was filled with a
sinking feeling.

Within the archway stood carts loaded with sacks of raw
cotton. Gloomy nooks and crannies led into numerous storerooms.

‘It’s like being in a castle,’ Eppie said.

‘Yur,’ Wakelin answered, ‘and we’re waiting to be dragged
into the dungeons.’ 

‘Don’t be silly,’ Martha rebuked. ‘It’s only for a short
while, until we’ve saved. Perhaps, after a few months, we could write to Claire
and go to America.’ Quietly, regretfully, she added, ‘I wish now we had gone
with her.’  

Trooping down to the mill advanced a line of pauper
apprentices, all orphans, some of whom had deformed limbs or stunted growth. None
of them showed in their faces the least enthusiasm for their work.

Checking his pocket-watch, the overseer addressed the
matron. ‘One minute late, Mrs Muggleton. Can’t you get your lot down any
quicker?’

‘It’s a long leg from the apprentice house and well you know
it Mr Crumpton. Besides, them getting no wages and knowing they’ll be thrown
onto the streets after their so-called apprenticeship has finished, well, they’re
hardly going to feel lively are they?’

‘All right, don’t make a meal of it.’ Some workers lingered
to chat in the courtyard. ‘In,’ Crumpton ordered, ‘or you’ll be the worse for
it.’

Huddled in the office, the new families eyed one another
uneasily.

‘Take their names,’ the overseer told Longbotham, the clerk.
‘If any of them can’t write,’ he poked a tooth, a boiled sweet having stuck, ‘their
mark will do.’

Eppie was fascinated by the overseer’s teeth. Fur had told
her that they had been taken from butchered donkeys and filed down to fit his
mouth.

In turn, the head of each family stood before the high desk
whilst the clerk worked lugubriously, his quill creeping over the paper like a
spider precisely constructing a web.   

In a rough, threatening voice, Crumpton said, ‘Throughout
the mill you will see notices called Yellowings. They state the rules. No doubt
none of you can read, so learn the rules of the mill by word of mouth from
those few who do.’ He prodded a book, its red leather cover punched with
decorative grapevines. ‘Break the rules, you will be fined and your name
written in Mr Grimley’s tome of misdemeanours. Discipline is expected at all
times.’ He stared stonily at Eppie as though she had already committed an offence.
‘The rules include no talking except on mill business, no looking out of
windows, no running, and definitely no practical jokes to be played on the
management. Any misbehaviour will be severely dealt with. Understand?’

Eppie nodded meekly.

‘Your children are your responsibility,’ Crumpton told the
parents, ‘so if they have any accidents don’t come crying to me.’

A portly gentleman, attired like a pigeon in sombre hues,
stepped into the office, upon his face a grave look of authority. ‘Mr Grimley,’
he said by way of introduction, ‘mill manager.’ 

Eppie recognised him as the gentleman who led the chapel
service. So the girl with him must have been Rowan, the girl who Gabriel was
fond of. She beamed with pleasure to be beside this gentle man. Somehow it made
Gabriel seem close.

In a deep, rumbling voice, Mr Grimley said, ‘Your normal
workday is sixteen hours, from five in the morning to nine at night. You are
permitted fifteen minutes for breakfast and tea.  Thirty minutes for dinner. Any
questions?’

‘Where’s the meal room?’ a woman asked.  ‘For breakfast,
like.’

‘You take your meals in the yard,’ Crumpton answered, ‘whatever
the weather.’ He turned at the sound of slapping feet.

Fur pelted breathlessly through the gates, gripping a dead rook
by its neck.

Crumpton threw back the door and stormed into the yard. ‘Late
again, ya bow-legged scrag!’ 

Mr Grimley ushered the families through an internal door
into the steamy mill. It felt delightfully warm after the chill of the streets.
Eppie gazed in wonder at cotton fluff
floating
like snowflakes around the workers’ blurred figures. It was as though she were
seeing everything through a mist.

Instantly, her delight was crushed by the deafening noise. The
sound was not unlike Shivering Falls, only this was far louder. Closing her
eyes, she could easily imagine that she was standing beside a hot-smelling iron
waterfall.

Machines sucked in cotton, stretched fibres, twisted, tensed
and drew it into thread. The sinuous white threads, like the strings of a harp,
were whirled onto hundreds of bobbins.

Beneath her feet the timber floor vibrated with the movement
of mule carriages grinding back and forth, their wheels screeching. A child
beside her pressed his hands against his ears in a vain attempt to cut out the
din. Eppie wondered how the mill building, which looked so strong on the
outside, could survive the continual shaking of the machinery.

Before the door closed, sealing their fate, Eppie glimpsed
Fur cowering against a wall, the overseer thrashing him with a strap.

A boy took Wakelin to the finishing shop where Ezra worked.

Leaning on his cane, Mr Grimley led the way past cast iron
pillars which held the weight of the floors above. Two boys rushed to empty the
contents of a skip into the mouth of a drum that had teeth like the bristles of
a brush. Passing over a cylinder, the cotton emerged out the other end in
strips where a couple of girls, barefoot to keep their balance on the greasy
floor, waited to catch it, a blanket held between them.   

Mr Grimley raised his voice to make himself heard above the
thunder of the machinery. ‘This is the scribbling engine. When the cotton comes
out it is full of knots so it has to go into the carding machine.’ He looked
sorrowfully at the new children. ‘It is kept in motion by an endless belt. Heaven
help you if you get caught in any of the machines. See that waste cotton on the
floor beneath the mules? It needs sweeping, regularly. That’s a job for youngsters
of a slight physique.’ He gently tapped his palm on top of Eppie’s head,
indicating that this rule applied to her. ‘Oiling is another thing. You
children must do that whilst the machines are in motion. Mind, the whirling
belts, grinding gears and wheels are open. Unguarded. If your arm is ripped off
there is no physician.’

‘Bobbin!’ Eibhlin cried.

Coline scuttled beneath the carriage as it moved away.

The clerk strode up an aisle between the machines, the red
fines book clutched in his hands.

‘Longbotham!’ Crumpton yelled.  ‘Fine Mrs O’Ruarc.  Dropped
bobbin.’   

Mr Grimley stared gravely at Coline as she scurried out. ‘Many
are the locks rudely torn from the children’s heads. So girls, before you set
to cleaning beneath the carriages, caps on. Be fast or you’ll get caught on the
way back. Ladies, have some of the women show you how to operate the mules. It’s
not difficult, though you’ll find it a long, tiring day. Coline, take these
children to the scutching room.’

She led the way to a vast room filled to the ceiling with
bales. Once the door was shut it was a little quieter. ‘See this?’ she asked
shyly, tugging a handful of dense fluff from an open bale. ‘It’s raw cotton
from America. All these twigs have to come out.’

Hours of steady work passed. All the while Eppie stood
beside a table scutching; picking out seeds and grit. Once a pile was scutched
clean she threw it into a skip. ‘Isn’t there anything interesting to do?’

‘You’ll have something to whine about when your fingers
start bleeding,’ Susannah, an older girl, answered coolly.

The new children sporadically erupted into fits of coughing,
their throats tickled by bits of cotton and fragments of thread, called flue,
that floated in the air.

‘Clench your teeth and breathe through your nose,’ Coline
suggested. ‘That way you won’t notice the fly so much.’

‘My back aches,’ a new girl grumbled.

‘If you ache now, wait ‘til you have to work on the mules,’
Cecily said. ‘Crumpton doesn’t allow anyone a rest, not even my mam, who’s near
the end of childbearing.’

‘We’re lucky,’ Lilias added. ‘We can chatter in here and the
overseer doesn’t know.’

The door crashed back. ‘You there, O’Ruarc, Dunham!’
Crumpton bawled. ‘To the mules!’

They sprang away before Snarl had a chance to bite. Hardly
were they through the door when Martha, who had her arms full of bobbins,
dropped one and uttered the dreaded word, ‘Bobbin!’ The bobbin rolled beneath
the mule carriage as it receded from the fixed roller beam. 

Crumpton shoved Eppie. ‘Look sharp! Longbotham, fine Mrs Dunham.
Dropped bobbin.’

Eppie had not a moment to ponder the dangers. Aware of Martha’s
frightened gaze fixed upon her, she launched forward on hands and knees beneath
the threads, her chin grazing on splintered timbers, hot oil splashing upon her
back. She was groping through the thick, white dust when the carriage rattled
back towards her like a giant scythe, its hissing wheels whirling ceaselessly.
Just as she thought she would be dashed to pieces she snatched up the bobbin
and wriggled out. 

‘Be quicker next time,’ Crumpton growled.  ‘I’m not scraping
you off the floor.’

The day dragged. 

Eventually, the night sky shrouded the windows, beautifully
dark blue.

Oil lanterns lit, still Eppie laboured on. Time and again
her nimble fingers were called upon as piecers working on the outside shouted
for her to join snapped threads.    

Although she hated the cellar she longed to return there to
escape the monotony of the mill. Her back ached unbearably from scavenging;
crawling beneath the machines, brushing up dust, and picking up bits of dropped
cotton. Her chest and throat hurt from coughing. 

Not only did she feel physically sick and tired but mentally
drained, worn out by the ridiculous restriction that she must not utter a
single word to Martha throughout the interminably long day. She felt weary of
holding back her emotions in the way she saw those around her doing, their
faces stony as Crumpton patrolled, glaring at their work. 

The bell clanged, tolling the end of the working day. Workers
funnelled through the yard. The mill kept hot and damp to stop the cotton
fibres snapping, the sudden change in temperature was torture.