Sewing at home, I’d been able to take breaks as I pleased, but not at Metyard’s. If I so much as shifted my legs, the twins glared: identical, baleful eyes watching me over needles that dipped in unison.
My own eyes felt bone dry from unremitting concentration. Every stitch looked double. I began to worry that more women, innocently purchasing clothes I’d made, would find themselves going blind.
When the clock downstairs struck eight, Kate finally sallied from the room. The other girls began to tie off their stitches. Eight was the finishing time, then. Thank God. As far as I could reckon it, we’d been working since about five or six in the morning.
A red ring marked the top of my middle finger, where the thimble had sat. Cramp had set my hand into a claw shape. I was afraid to think what that claw might have done.
In the bustle of packing away, I risked a few words to Mim.
‘What do we do now?’
Mim opened her lips to reply, but then there was a terrible pounding on the stairs. The floorboards shook. Nell, Ivy and Daisy all turned to look in our direction.
Mim’s nostrils flared again, and her stance became rigid.
‘What is it?’
The door answered me, banging back against the wall as if a gale had blown it in. Mrs Metyard stalked across the threshold, even taller and squarer than I remembered.
‘Where is she? Where is that villain, that vandal, who broke my china?’
It wasn’t china – only an earthenware plate – but no one dared say that to Mrs Metyard. Not when she spoke in a voice sharp enough to flay skin from the bone.
‘Thought you could hide it, did you?’ She swept over and gripped Mim by the wrist. It was the right wrist, the side with the missing finger. ‘Thought I wouldn’t notice? Devious wretch!’
‘It was an accident!’ Mim asserted, but Mrs Metyard struck the words from her mouth.
‘There are no accidents, girl, only carelessness. You were born careless.’
I could despise Mrs Metyard, storming and screeching like the witch from a pantomime. But when I saw Kate, lurking in the shadows by the door – that’s when I missed a breath.
She was all eyes and cheekbones. Chilling in her lack of expression. The peacock-blue dress didn’t compliment her now. It was an incongruous thing, belonging to a different world; its bright colour grotesque against the sudden pallor of Kate’s skin.
‘Must I teach you again?’ Mrs Metyard went on. ‘Do you need the rules and regulations made clear?’
‘No,’ Mim said. Not a plea. I admired her for that.
Kate was clutching something: it moved forwards and backwards, in slow, contracted waves beside her thigh.
It was a poker. An iron poker fetched from a fireplace downstairs.
‘I’ll do it, Mother.’
‘Very well. Twenty lashes. It’s the only way they learn.’
Kate sloped into the workroom, seizing Mim’s other wrist in her spare hand, so close to me I could have touched her. Lily of the valley wound up my nostrils, forced its way down my throat.
‘No!’ Mim cried.
They dragged her from the room.
Part of me expected the twins to laugh. They didn’t. Even when the door closed upon us and we heard the sound of Mim’s shoes, scraping across a distant floor. They were grave, staring at the wall.
‘They won’t hit her?’ I whispered. ‘I mean, not with that poker …’ A tingle, a ghost of feeling in my ribs. I thought Rosalind Oldacre’s boots had been bad.
Daisy pushed back the wisps of hair that had fallen over her forehead. ‘Don’t fret yourself. The blackamoors don’t feel pain, not like we do.’
It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Slowly, I pushed up the caramel sleeve on my right arm. My hand was still a claw – I made it into a fist.
‘You did this. You and Ivy. You’re the reason Mim—’
Nell touched my shoulder. ‘Better her than you.’
I hated every one of them. If I could, I would have boxed their ears, but there was that tread upon the stairs again.
Mrs Metyard reappeared. Her cheeks were flushed, her beady eyes sparkled.
‘Beg your pardon, Mrs Metyard, ma’am,’ said Nell. ‘It’s past eight. Shall I dismiss the girls, or is there something else we can assist you with?’
Muscles relaxed in Mrs Metyard’s jaw. She looked more collected, more as she usually did. ‘As a matter of fact, Nelly, I had Lady Morton call on me today. The black satin and tulle must be finished by the end of this week.’
‘A … fortnight ahead of our schedule, I believe?’ Nell was dead of expression. Dead of tone. I wondered what else had died, in this place.
A smile surfaced on Mrs Metyard’s lips. The lines by her chin puckered. ‘Just so. Fetch your embroidery needles, girls. It’s going to be a long night.’
After that, I didn’t care what I thought about while I sewed. Why shouldn’t Mrs Metyard’s clients see flashes of blood, or come up in the pox, if the girls who made their dresses were beaten black and blue?
Poor Mim. I’d never seen someone hit with a poker before. Just the idea of it made my skin tender. Would Kate heat the poker and burn her with it? I wondered if a brand would come up different, on skin so dark.
I soon found out.
The next day started very much like the one before: up at dawn, waiting for Kate to unlock us, the empty buckets. The only difference was in me. Something had broken. I was soft; I couldn’t bear to see Mim suffer.
I had to help her undress to wash. The cuts on her back had scabbed and dried the linsey nightgown to her skin. Scars cross-hatched her shoulders, silvery-white. This had happened before. Who’d helped her, when I wasn’t here? Had she struggled through alone?
No sounds of pity came from the girls around us; there were no flinches or cries. For the first time, I dared to stare at them properly, naked as they were. But what I saw unpicked a stitch inside of me.
They all wore scars of their own.