A Curse Dark as Gold Page 18

  Rosie’s eyes leaped with delight, and she caught my hand.

  “What a splendid idea,” I said. “Rosie, why didn’t we think of it? Oh, Uncle, do say yes—we wouldn’t think of detaining you in Shearing one moment longer than necessary.”

  Uncle Wheeler coughed. “Why, Charlotte, anyone would think you eager to be rid of me!”

  I felt myself color. “Oh, no, Uncle—it’s only that we know how tedious it’s been for you here these last months—and we’re so grateful to you—”

  “I think what my wife is trying to say,” Randall broke in, “is that while she is deeply appreciative of all you’ve done for her, there really is no reason for you to prolong your stay here.”

  He was smiling still, that easy, casual expression he wears so well—but his voice had a firmness to it I did not recognize. It seemed almost like a challenge.

  But Uncle Wheeler did not rise to it. He gave a gentle, mild laugh, and settled back into the faded sofa, his cup at his lips. “My dear boy,” he began, but at that very moment there was a crash, like the sound of all the plates in the house breaking at once, followed by a scream.

  “Rachel!” Rosie and I were on our feet at once, sprinting for the kitchen.

  It was a shambles. Rachel stood in the hub of a ring of broken glass and crockery, splattered broth and vegetables on the floor. She was spewing a stream of unintelligible obscenities—and she was bathed in red.

  “Rachel, my God, you’re bleeding!” I rushed to her, lifted her apron to her face, but she waved me off.

  “No, no—it’s cherries. Spoilt now.” Still trembling slightly, she pointed to the utter ruin of a tart. “Daft vandals!”

  “What?” Randall was right on Rosie’s heels. The cause of the destruction, a brickbat, dripping with syrup, lay amid the rubble. Randall stooped for it, brushing off a speck of broken glass. “Here, there’s a message.” He untied the scrap of cloth, now sticky and stained with red, from around the bat.

  “‘You’ve been warned.’ What the devil is that supposed to mean?”

  I shook my head, just as dumbfounded. “But who threw it?”

  Randall turned and flung open the kitchen door, stepping out into the night. “There’s no one—oh. Charlotte, you’d better come out here.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Randall reached a hand out to me, and I gingerly stepped across the shattered glass and strewn food to the doorway. “Oh, mercy!” The words stuck in my throat and came out a strangled squeak.

  It looked as though a great storm had struck the woolshed and the yard, scattering our stock to the four winds. There was cloth everywhere—pieces of it. Scraps, snips, slices. Whole packs, bound for transport, had been torn apart and shredded to rags. The woolshed doors were wrenched clean off their hinges and banged crazily against the stone walls. Someone had broken into the dyeshed and overturned the vats and scattered dyestuffs into the liquid streaming over the yard. What looked like a great grey blanket floating across the yard—or a ghost in a smoky shroud—revealed itself to be several yards of silver cassimere, slashed to ribbons. I stooped for it, wrapped some round my hands, lifted it to my face and waited for it to whisper its secrets to me. It was sticky and damp and reeked of ammonia; I cast about and found that the barrels of lant outside the mill had been tipped on their sides, to let their foul contents leech onto the ground and the remnants of my cloth.

  The entire stock—every bale, every bolt, every yard of cloth. Every kersey, every baize, every satinette—destroyed. Willfully. Gleefully. Maliciously. This was not just one or two lengths, vandalized on the tenterhooks. This was a massive act of unfettered aggression. An attack on Stirwaters. On me.

  “Who did this?” Randall said. He was still clutching the brick, and I thought he looked as if he’d like to throw it at someone.

  “Does it matter?” I asked, futilely trying to piece together a tear in the silver cassimere.

  “I’ll say it does,” Randall said. “When I get my hands on whoever’s responsible—”

  Rosie flung herself into the yard, straining into the darkness as though she could see the culprits lingering in the fringe of wood, pointing and sniggering at us.

  “Rosie, it’s no use,” I said. “They’d be long gone by now. We’d never find them.”

  Randall looked from Rosie to me. “Well, you must have some idea!”

  “An idea, maybe. But no proof. Someone who knew that Harte would be gone, and that’s the entire village.”

  “The entire village wouldn’t do this. Now, think! While we have time to fetch the magistrate and round them up!”

  I shook my head. “The magistrate won’t be here until Sunday month, and by then all the evidence will be gone.”

  Randall grabbed for his hair and remembered too late that he had cut it off. His hand hung, helpless, before his face. “Blast—I forgot. Small towns.”

  The mess—both inside and out—took hours to clean up, while my uncle fretted and tut-tutted and lifted not a single white manicured finger to help us. We swept up as much of the damaged cloth as we could, bundling it into old wool bags (the vandals had even destroyed the wrapping-cloth), but I knew we’d be finding bits of flannel and satinette in tree branches and under shrubs for a long time to come. Randall rolled up his shirtsleeves and held the woolshed doors as Rosie fixed the hinges; afterward she pronounced her brother-in-law “a proper hand with a ladder and block.”

  But among all the mess, there was no sign of the culprits’ identity.

  “I don’t think one person could have done all this,” Randall said. “Look.” He gave the righted lant barrel a push. “Even empty, this is heavy.”

  “But the locks weren’t broken,” Rosie said. “Whoever did this unlocked the woolshed. Only Harte and Charlotte have keys, and Charlotte’s never left a door unlocked in her life.”

  “You have Harte’s keys,” I reminded her gently. “He left them with you when he went home, remember.”

  She looked horrified, and took off for the Millhouse. A moment later she returned, breathless and brandishing the ring with a look of such relief I thought she’d cry. “They were right there, under my pillow. Right where I left them. Unless—” she gave a stricken sob. “Unless I left it unlocked.”

  “Hush, love. It wouldn’t have mattered if you did. Look what they did to the doors—do you think a thing like a lock would have stopped them? Besides, after what happened with the attic room—” I stopped myself, unwilling to draw that thought to its conclusion.

  Rosie had no such qualms. “What? It won’t open a door so we can get our thread out, but it will open a door to vandals who want to destroy the woolshed?”

  “That’s how things work around here, isn’t it?” I said bitterly. “It’s capricious.”

  “Who’s capricious?” Randall said, causing us both to start. He had wandered off, looking for evidence, and we had forgotten him.

  Rosie and I exchanged a sharp glance. “Peg Eagan,” I said, half at random, and added pointedly to Rosie, “Look, whatever happened, there was clearly some human agency involved. Go see if you can find out where the Eagans were tonight.”

  The news was all round the village by morning. The millhands, who had not quite stopped coming to work even with the millwheel broken, trailed in after sunrise, shocked and furious. Jack Townley was ready to form a lynch mob, and Mercy Fuller dug her hands through the scraps we’d collected, mewing over each in turn. “Ah, this one’s the kersey Mrs. Hopewell were so proud of!” or “Not my black baize!”

  And I? I floated around the millyard, like a ghost in true, unable to summon up the resolve to do—whatever I must do to see Stirwaters past this. Randall found me, wandering helplessly through the shale, turning up bits of rock with my toe and collecting stray scraps we had missed.

  “Charlotte, we must talk about this! You know the stock’s a total loss.”

  I nodded, neatly stacking the scraps I had gathered. They were still damp and reeked of stale urine.
/>   “But surely you were insured?”

  I stared at him, wanting suddenly to laugh, hysterically. “Insured? Who can afford insurance?”

  We had no stock. We had no wool to make more, no millwheel to drive the machines to make more, no time at all in which to consider the matter. Captain Worthy was coming at the turning of the month, and our payment was due to the bank a few weeks later. And now I had the banker suddenly too close for comfort, reminding me at every turn of the dire strait we were in. “I’ll think of something,” was all I could say, until my voice colored from despair to impatience.

  The vandals were still unidentified. If the millhands had their suspects, no one spoke of them in my hearing, and our own efforts had come to naught.

  “Mrs. Drover swore up and down that both Tansy and Peg were in the public room all night.” Rosie kicked at the ground in frustration. “I still say they were involved—somehow. I saw Tansy at Hale’s yesterday, and she just grinned and did this—” Rosie made a gesture with her fingers, pantomiming scissors.

  I drew back my lips in distaste. “That’s just Tansy, being Eaganish.”

  “What about this Pinchfields?” Randall suggested. “You said they’ve threatened you—maybe they sent a henchman down to rough you up a little. Has there been a stranger in the village recently?”

  I gave a mirthless laugh. “If there was, he hides his business better than any person in the history of Shearing. No, maybe—” I faltered, frowning.

  “What?” Rosie and Randall echoed one another, but I shook my head. I’d been about to say perhaps it was one of our own, but when I weighed them in my mind—Jack Townley, the Lambs, Mr. Mordant…I couldn’t bear the thought. For once, it was almost easier to believe in a curse.

  Thus the days ticked away toward our deadlines, and I just sat in my office and stared out over the pond, as the rustles and sighs of the mill twined their way inside my head. If I had paid them any mind, I might have thought I was going mad. But the truth was, I was out of options. I could perhaps sell the scraps to be ground up for processing, though I would never get the value the whole cloth would have brought from Porter & Byrd. Randall tried to offer his help, but I would hear none of it.

  “Look, I do wish you’d reconsider,” he said, a week after the destruction of the cloth. We were eating lunch at the Grange, a hearty Bakehouse-prepared meal of bean soup and steaming brown bread. “You’re running out of time, and we have the money, or we can get it. It just doesn’t make sense for you to be so resistant.”

  I scowled over my bowl. “No. I’ll not have you risking your fortune on Stirwaters, too.”

  “It’s hardly a fortune,” he said with a laugh. “Besides, it’s our money now.”

  “Six hundred pounds is a fortune. And it’s your money, and Stirwaters is my mill. It’s my responsibility, and I’ll not have it said that you’re married to a—” Uncle Wheeler’s words on my lips, I faltered, my quarrel with Rosie still too fresh in my mind.

  “Married to a what?” he asked. “Charlotte, who said anything of the sort?” He reached across the table, but I pulled my hands back.

  “I did not marry you for your money, and you did not marry me for my mill,” I snapped. “Stop fussing—I’ll figure it out.” I rose and began clearing the table with a vast clattering of dishes and silverware, until Randall threw up his hands and marched out into the yard, to pick up his hedge shears and hoe.

  I bit my lip and watched him leave. Our honeymoon was drawing to a close. Soon he would be heading back to Harrowgate—with or without our mortgage payment—and I would be here, in Shearing, with the same problems I always had. The looming certainty of that was more than I could bear, suddenly, so I bundled myself up in my cloak and hat and wandered down the hill to Stirwaters.

  To my surprise, my sister was in the finishing room. She had an odd air about her, distracted, faint—as if she were waiting for something. She started when she saw me, and I couldn’t tell if she was suddenly frightened, or relieved. She reached for me, but dropped her hands. “Charlotte, don’t be angry.”

  I stared at her a moment. “What did you do?” But as I looked at her, her jaw set but a measure of fear in her wide blue eyes, I knew. Suddenly, I knew.

  I turned and pounded upstairs as fast as I could.

  “Charlotte, wait—”

  I turned back. Rosie was a few paces behind me. “I didn’t—” She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “Truly, Charlotte, he just showed up.”

  He was there, in my office, sitting on the corner of my desk and leafing through Father’s atlas. I stopped short in the doorway, struck with such relief that for a moment I could not breathe. Rosie caught me up and took my hand, and I managed to recover myself.

  “Mr. Spinner,” I said, straightening my bonnet, which I had not bothered to straighten these many days. “How pleasant to have you call again.” I was aware how shrill and ridiculous my voice sounded—but I could not care.

  “Aye.” Mr. Spinner nodded, his ruddy whiskers bobbing slightly. “I see you’ve come to some distress with your property since I was here last.”

  I nodded, foolish, eager.

  “Bad luck, that. Need a hand, then, ladies?”

  The wind howled round the mill and rattled all the glass in the casements. I felt a moment of clarity and reason, and seized upon it.

  “Yes, Mr. Spinner, but—” I pitched my voice as calm as I could make it. “I’m afraid that we haven’t any need for gold thread at present. Have you any other skills?”

  Jack Spinner lowered my father’s atlas to the desk. “Oh, and what are you wanting for, these days?”

  “Cloth.”

  Spinner nodded approvingly. I forged on. “We have some damaged yardage. Is there anything you can do—”

  “Something happen to some of that famous Stirwaters Blue? Well, I was a passable hand at the loom, in my day. I may be able to piece it back together for you.” He paused and eyed me pointedly, his gaze travelling between my face and my bodice. “I hear you pay fair wages to your weavers, Mistress Miller.”

  I put a hand up—and felt my fingers brush the enamel timepiece. Randall’s gift. I hesitated.

  Spinner saw. “Ah, well, if I can’t help you, I can’t help you. I’ll just be on my way, then, I suppose.”

  “No, wait.”

  “Charlotte, no!” Rosie clutched my arm, but I was unpinning the watch. It’s only money. I told myself I did not feel the prick of tears as I dropped the crimson bauble into Jack Spinner’s outstretched hand, where it glittered with the gloss of blood.

  “The loom is in the attic. Follow me. Rosie—start fetching in what’s left of the stock.”

  The ancient loom stood deep in shadow beneath the sloping eaves. Spinner brushed past me and made his shambling way toward the machine. The low sunlight seemed to follow him, until he stood with one hand raised toward the loom, all shadows swept from the corner. He eased himself onto the bench and gave a few passes with the shuttle, still in place after all these years.

  “Ah,” he said, in that queer, rusty voice, “Helen’s loom. Good old machine, this one.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I drew forward, curious.

  “But what’s this, then? Someone’s been tinkering, I see.” He stooped low, giving a push to some lever beneath the body of the loom. A pulley carried the motion through the machine, and it shuddered. “Heh,” Spinner laughed. “Look at that. I’ll hardly have to do any work.”

  He beckoned for me to hand him something; I spied some old brown canvas under the window, and pressed a corner of it into his hand. At his touch, it began to unravel—slowly, inevitably, as if it lost all memory of having ever been cloth. Spinner began to whistle, a lively tune that clashed with the howling wind outside.

  “Now, Helen. Currer’s wife, and mistress of Stirwaters in her day.” He whistled a few more bars of his song; the threads of the canvas wound themselves onto the quill, until the shuttle was full and ready to weave. Spinner gave the shutt
le a tap with one hand. “Fine lady, she was. Mother of Simon, mother of Aaron. Good lads.”

  Helen—Currer—I shook my head. Mercy, what was he talking about? Currer Miller was the second keeper of Stirwaters, more than eighty years ago.

  “Oh, and we mustn’t forget Hap, now…such a shame what happened to him—”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Oh, no, you’re not,” Spinner said, a thread of darkness suddenly in his voice. “Not really. Those boys mean nothing to you.”

  My mouth was open to ask him to explain himself, but Rosie returned at that moment, dragging the pack bag of scraps behind her.

  I spent the next half hour helping Rosie load the cloth into the attic. We quarrelled briefly—we seemed to be quarrelling, briefly, more and more these days—over who should stay in the mill overnight; I felt it my duty, but she pressed me to return to the Grange, and not leave Randall to wonder over an absence that should be impossible to explain.

  “It’s Uncle Wheeler’s Friday card game,” she said. “He won’t be home before dawn, and by then he’ll be in no state to wonder where I am.”

  Spinner promised us that the work would be completed by morning, and that no one would mark the strangeness of its origin. And perhaps he was right. Why should they? Who on Earth would guess that the cloth appeared by magic?

  In the dark of that night I woke, shivering, for my husband had rolled over in the bed, taking the blankets with him. I lay there a long while, listening to Randall’s breathing. Its rhythm could not soothe me, and I found myself fumbling for the little timepiece, and a candle to read it by—but of course there was nothing, and I fell back onto my pillow, stricken. Eventually I rose and crept through the dark, unfamiliar hallways of my new home, to the great dining hall and its view of Stirwaters’s millpond.

  How different it seemed in the dead of night, from the cosy, candle-lit room where Randall and I had eaten hours earlier. Now the room was deep in shadow, the ancient furniture looming eerily in the darkness. The carvings on the fireplace, lit up by a shaft of moonlight through those enormous windows, seemed to leer at me, their twisted faun-faces reminding me sharply of Mr. Spinner. I drew back the curtains enough to look down on the pond, but the wheelhouse was not visible, and I could not see if any light still burned in the office. The Millhouse was dark as a grave.