Make industry a part of your character as early as possible: Be officiously serviceable to your Master on all occasions: if possible prevent his commands, understand a nod, a look, and do rather more than is required of you, than less than is your duty.
– Advice for apprentices and journeymen
OR A sure guide to gain both esteem and an estate, 1760
As the girls disappeared around the corner Guy began to dance around his friend making squelchy kissing noises and jerking his hips suggestively.
‘Tais-toi, crapaud.’ Henri chased him and punched him sharply on the arm.
‘Pourquoi?’ Guy said, punching him back. ‘Elle est belle, non, la jeune Anglaise? Another addition to your crowd of adoring admirers?’
‘Ça n’a pas d’importance, idiot. I helped her, nothing more.’ Henri walked away, struggling to persuade himself that this was true. In fact, he had not stopped thinking about her since that first encounter.
Her name was Anna, niece of the mercer Joseph Sadler; that much he knew from his bruising encounter with her cousin William, just a few days ago. One piece of the riddle was in place. But the rest of her was a puzzle. She dressed as a maid but spoke like a lady. Unlike most English women of her class she had been polite enough to acknowledge and thank him and would have talked for longer, he reckoned, had the younger girl not been nagging her. She was tall – almost as tall as himself – skinny and not, at first glance, especially pretty, with all those freckles and eyes that seemed undecided as to whether to be blue or green. In fact, there was little remarkable about her, and yet he could not put her from his mind. She appeared demure and modest, even though she came from a family he’d heard were ruthlessly ambitious and the most snobbish social climbers of the area.
‘Jumped-up weaver, nothing more than the rest of us, that Mr Sadler,’ Monsieur Lavalle had grumbled one day, on returning from delivering some silks to the Spital Square establishment. ‘Just because he’s got a few dukes and duchesses wearing his stuffs.’
Henri never discovered quite why M. Lavalle, normally a peaceable man, should have been moved to speak so strongly against the mercer. He imagined there had been some snub about the quality of the silk he’d been offering to Mr Sadler, or perhaps he suspected that the mercer was importing foreign fabrics. But it wasn’t one’s place, as a journeyman, to question your master.
‘Pas si vite, Henri. Why such a rush?’ Guy called, running to catch up. ‘We still have fifteen minutes.’
‘I must hurry back,’ Henri said. ‘I was only sent to deliver the lustrings to Shelleys. I still have two feet of the damask to weave by dusk.’
‘Surely you don’t need light to weave your miracles.’
Henri’s cheeks coloured. At the time he’d been so delighted by M. Lavalle’s compliment that he had unwisely repeated it to Guy. Now it seemed he would never live it down.
‘It’s such a dark purple it’s impossible to see dropped threads by candlelight, and it’s got to be ready first thing in the morning. See you tomorrow?’
‘À demain. Shall we return to meet your new English sweetheart again? Or will it be the one you were lusting after last week?’
‘Vas au diable,’ Henri cursed cheerfully as they parted and he headed towards Princes Street. It always gave him a happy feeling, safe inside, walking these streets, the silk weavers’ streets – his streets – rows of houses with warp winders hanging over the doors, the songs of birds in their cages and the clatter of looms from the long-light lofts high above the street.
Henri regarded M. Lavalle as a father figure and was only too aware that he owed everything to the master weaver. He barely remembered his own father, who had died when vainly trying to save his sister from drowning in the Bay of Biscay during their flight from France.
Through much subterfuge they had managed to escape from the foul-mouthed dragonnades for whom they, along with all other Protestant families, had been required to provide lodgings. It was supposedly to ensure they had renounced their faith but it also resulted in penury as they were forced to sell their looms to make room for the soldiers, and meet their endless demands for food and wine. To refuse would mean a beating or worse. His elder sister disappeared one day and never returned. He’d heard people whispering, although he did not at the time understand what they meant: that she’d refused a soldier’s advances and paid for her virtue with her life.
‘We have nothing left to stay for,’ his father had whispered late one evening as the soldiers snored in their beds. ‘It is time for us to leave, while we still have a few livres remaining.’
They trudged sixty miles to the coast under the cloak of three long, cold nights, resting during daylight to avoid capture, and arrived at the port only to learn that the ship for which they had bought tickets had been wrecked. They spent the last of their savings bribing the captain of a small fishing smack – five hundred livres before embarkation, and the promise of a further five hundred on arrival in Plymouth.
These things Henri knew from what his mother, Clothilde, had since told him. All he remembered of that terrible journey was being carried through the surf in the dead of night by a gruff captain with enormous hands and then hauled through a narrow trapdoor in the deck down into the pitch-black bilges of the ship, the stink of rotten fish and the fearful sting of the kippering salt on which they crouched. She had recounted how, before leaving the port, they’d been advised to stand stock-still, in perfect silence, immediately beneath the main beam of the deck above so that their skulls should not be pierced by the swords that customs inspectors would thrust between the planks to detect stowaways.
Sometimes, Henri’s dreams were haunted by other memories: the whites of his parents’ eyes in the darkness as the smack bucked and rolled, his mother’s retching, his sister’s terrified whimpers. And how, as the ship pitched even more violently, they were thrown against the side of the hold, the trapdoor was blown open and they were plunged into a torrent of freezing ocean water. He would always waken at this point, crying out and struggling for breath, knowing that this had been the end of his life as he had once known it.
It was only many years later that his mother managed to steel herself to describe what happened next. They hauled themselves on deck through the trapdoor, battling the cascades of water crashing over the ship, only to discover that the fisherman and his boy had disappeared, presumably washed overboard by that first devastating wave. Their only hope was to lash themselves to the mast and pray that they would ride out the storm, but before they could do this another mountainous surge hit them, dashing twelve-year-old Marie over the side of the ship and into the darkness. His father had immediately jumped in to rescue her, but both had been carried away in the swell, never to be seen again. The last of the family’s savings went with them.
Clothilde’s memories of how they survived the storm were vague, but eventually they were shipwrecked on the coast of what he now knew to be the county of Kent and hauled to safety by salvage hunters. They must have been sorely disappointed to discover that their sole bounty was a woman and a small boy, half dead from exposure, but one of the families took them in and nursed them back to life.
Henri could remember little of what happened over the next few months. They found shelter in an abandoned shed on the edges of a small town and his mother seemed to give up all hope, weeping day and night and never venturing out, while he went scavenging for food, clothes and blankets.
Then, one day, he was caught by a market trader who accused him of thieving and dragged him by his ears to the home of the Town Clerk. Although Henri had by now learned a few words of English they were nothing like sufficient to explain that he had only been waiting for discarded food, and that he and his mother were starving because they had lost everything at sea.
The Town Clerk, a barrel of a man with bloodshot eyes, a heavily powdered wig that sat lopsided on his head and a white beard that cascaded over his chest, bellowed at him, ‘So, what do they call you, boy?’
Terrified, Henri managed to mutter his name.
‘Onry? Ain’t that a Frenchy name?’
Henri nodded.
‘How’d you get here, then?’
He understood the question and tried to find the words to reply but failed, and instead tried to mime the motion of a boat tossing in a storm. As the man continued to shake his head in bafflement Henri was overcome with fear and frustration, and began to cry.
Then the miracle happened. A young woman came through the door with a tea tray. As well as the teapot, tea plates, cups and saucers, sugar bowl and milk jug, the tray contained a plate of sandwiches and another of small biscuits. Captivated by the sight of such deliciousness passing so close to his face, Henri’s tears dried in an instant. He found his mouth watering and heard his stomach rumbling. It was all he could do to prevent his hands from reaching out to grab a small piece.
‘Oh,’ she exclaimed. ‘I didn’t know you had a visitor, Father. Shall I bring another plate? He looks famished.’
There was an agonising silence as the two of them regarded the urchin in his bare feet and rags, his limbs so thin they might snap at any moment.
The man grunted. ‘I suppose you’d better, m’dear. Come and join us. I need you to translate.’
Henri stood obediently as they seated themselves by the fireside, eating everything that was passed to him, and drinking a whole mug of milk while trying to answer the questions the man fired at him. The girl’s French was rudimentary and some of the sentences she translated made little sense, but he responded as best he could. As the interrogation continued, haltingly, it became clear that many of Henri’s replies were also becoming lost in translation.
Eventually he managed to convey to them that he and his mother were fugitive Huguenots, his poor drowned father having been a silk weaver in their home town, and that his mother had worked as a throwster in the same trade, twisting the finest single silk threads together on her wheel to make yarn of the correct denier as required by the weaver. Even though his hunger was clearly apparent they found it hard to believe that he and his mother had no home and, literally, not a sou to their names, and survived from his begging and scavenging.
‘We must do something for him, Pa,’ the girl said.
‘It’s the workhouse for them, I reckon.’
‘But didn’t you hear what he said about his mother? She has a craft and would earn a living if she could find work.’
‘There’s no throwstering around these parts, my dear.’
‘There is in London. What about Uncle? He works in the silk trade, doesn’t he?’
‘Pssht. He don’t want vagrants turning up at his door, Louisa. Enough of this, lad. I’ll let you off the charge of pilfering if you do as I say. Bring your mother here and we’ll take you to St Dunstan’s. At least you’ll get food and a bed there.’
As the girl showed him to the front door she whispered, ‘Don’t go to the workhouse, it’s a terrible place. You’ll get separated from your ma there. Go down the side steps and come to the kitchen door. Cinq minutes.’
She met him at the threshold, thrusting a brown-paper package into his hand.
‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘Now get out of here before Father catches you.’
On his way back to the shack he hid in a copse and carefully unwrapped the package. Inside was pure treasure, better than any gold. It contained a loaf of stale bread, a large chunk of cheese and a girl’s drawstring pocket holding a single silver shilling and a piece of paper on which were written the words: My uncle, Nathaniel Broadstone, silk weaver, 5 Marks Lane, Bethnal Green, London. Do not mention my name.
The journey took four days of walking and hitching lifts from cartiers because the stagecoach tickets cost more than the shilling would cover, and it was evening by the time they found their way to Bethnal Green. It had been raining all day and they were soaked to the skin. The man who answered the door regarded the ragged and sodden pair suspiciously.
Fear tightened Henri’s voice into a squeak. ‘Please, sir, we come to see Mr Broadstone.’
‘And who are you, may I ask?’
‘Henri Vendôme, sir, and my mother, Madame Clothilde Vendôme.’
‘And so, madame, why have you brought your son to my doorstep?’
She shook her head.
‘Speak, woman.’
‘We cannot say, sir.’ How could he betray the girl’s kindness?
The man shook his head. ‘If you cannot say, then why should I help you? Be off and stop pestering me.’
They endured an uncomfortable and terrifying night huddled in a doorway, trying to avoid the attention of the many unsavoury characters that seemed to populate the streets after dark. A bitter rain lashed down unceasingly and the noises of the city were strange and fearsome to their ears. More than once, Henri wished himself back in the Kentish shack, and that he had never met the Town Clerk or his daughter, who had given them such hope of a new beginning only for it to be so rudely dashed in this noisy, foul-smelling place.
And yet, in the morning, the sun came out and warmed them dry, and they stopped at a market stall to buy a couple of hot pies with their last few pennies. As Henri struggled to order in English the woman smiled and, miraculously, replied in fluent French. A fellow countrywoman! It was the first time they’d heard their own language, from a native speaker, since being washed up on these shores.
‘C’est gratuit,’ she said, handing over the pies. ‘Keep your pennies. You look a little down on your luck.’
Clothilde burst into tears. ‘Oh, merci madame, merci mille fois! Dieu vous bénisse.’
Through her sobs, the story poured out in an incontrollable stream of words, as though a barrage had been unstopped. Finally she was able to express herself, to tell her tale to a sympathetic ear.
‘Ah, les pauvres,’ the woman said, at last. ‘But take heart, madame. You still have your lovely boy at your side. And you are in the best place for a new start.’
Mon Dieu! They could barely believe what she told them. This was a place where many thousands of French and Flemish refugees had settled over the decades, fleeing persecution just as they had done. The English followed the same religion as theirs, more or less, and, at least officially, were welcoming, even if the locals were not always so sympathetic.
This area, just outside the city walls, she said, was where most of the French congregated. There were churches and charitable organisations and, best of all, literally hundreds – ‘des centaines, à chaque coin de rue’ – of silk weavers, warpers, throwsters, merchants, mercers.
She held her hands wide to express the scale of what she was trying to convey. ‘There is work for everyone here,’ she said. ‘London is crazy for silk.’
When, finally, Henri and his mother took their leave, she advised them to head for the French church in Fournier Street, a short walk away in a place called Spitalfields. The church elders would be able to help, she said. They followed her instructions and headed for the tallest building in the distance.
As they drew near, Henri’s eyes were pulled heavenwards by the extraordinary tower, tiered like a wedding cake, with its tapering spire above almost touching the clouds. It made him feel quite dizzy. Apart from its spire the building looked more like a palace: broad granite steps led up to a door made for giants, surrounded by massive pillars that would take several Henris to join their hands around. The whole building was brilliant white, whiter than a new fall of snow, and glowed like a beacon in the sunlight among the dark, noisy streets of the city.
As they stood, in awe, Clothilde began to weep all over again. ‘It’s too grand,’ she said. ‘However can a pair of vagrants like us enter such a place?’ But Henri dragged her up the steps. ‘How can we know if we don’t try, Maman? What else can we do?’
Just as they reached the doors, a tall, black-frocked priest emerged.
‘Can I help?’ he said, peering down at them.
‘We look for French church.’
‘Then you’re in the wrong place, laddie. This here is Christ Church,’ the man said, pointing behind them. ‘L’Église de l’Hôpital is just along there.’
It’s hard to believe that was ten years ago, Henri thought to himself as he sauntered down Lamb Street and Browns Lane, turning right into Wood Street, avoiding the route that would lead him past the kiosk selling sugared almonds. The girl at the stall was undoubtedly pretty but she had at first resisted his flatteries. Then, after weeks of dedicated flirting, he’d managed to steal a sweet, almond-scented kiss. More recently, she’d allowed him, with much giggling and a little high-pitched squeal, to feel her breast. But, as so often, and in a way he did not quite understand, once the game was won he’d begun to find the girl’s attentions a little burdensome. His thoughts were already turning elsewhere.
At the far end of Wood Street the English church glimmered in the sunlight just as it had on that day. As he passed Fournier Street, he could see L’Église de l’Hôpital itself, a fine building on the junction with Brick Lane, still standing tall and proud above the terraced rows of weavers’ houses.
As an apprentice Henri had not been allowed to leave the house on a working day but, now that he had graduated to become a journeyman, he was often asked to run errands: taking and returning messages to and from weavers or mercers, collecting and delivering additional supplies of raw silk to be twisted by throwsters and of warp beams and thrown silk to weavers, bringing back woven silk ready for packaging and sale. He revelled in these new freedoms. M. Lavalle trusted him implicitly and depended on him to help teach the other apprentices from time to time.
‘Bonsoir, Henri,’ M. Lavalle called from the office at the front of the house. It was barely half past four, but Henri knew when it was wisest not to argue.
‘Apologies for my tardiness, sir,’ he said, poking his head around the door. ‘Shelleys kept me waiting twenty minutes but the sun still sails in the sky. I have three hours yet to complete that damask. Pas de problème.’
M. Lavalle looked up from his ledger, peering over his glasses. As usual, when not seeing customers, he was casually dressed in baggy trousers and a waistcoat that had seen better years, his favourite deep-crimson velvet cap concealing his balding pate. He was not a handsome man, but his pudgy, deeply lined face and irregular complexion spoke of a life of hard work and pleasures enjoyed: good food, plentiful drink, and the contentment of loving and being loved.
He smiled benignly at his protégé. He’d watched the emaciated, lice-infected urchin boy whom he’d first encountered emerging, like a silk moth from a cocoon, into an intelligent, lively young man with a remarkable aptitude for hard work, who had completed his seven-year apprenticeship with ease and was now well on his way to achieving his own mastership.
As an established member of the Huguenot community in Spitalfields, M. Lavalle was an elder of the French church which had, over time, developed clear protocols for helping the hundreds of destitute compatriots who arrived every year. Each family would be issued with second-hand clothes and boots, and would be fed and cared for at a parishioner’s home for a number of weeks until they were able to find work and fend for themselves.
M. Lavalle remembered that first meeting with perfect clarity. The dreadful state of the mother and child had touched his heart: their skinny frames, ragged clothes and desperate eyes. He had gladly offered to act as their temporary host, especially on learning that they had come from the same region of central France as his own forebears. Not that he’d ever lived there himself; his parents had escaped before he was born, shortly after the persecution of Protestants first began.
In those days, before so many thousands had followed them, the English were very welcoming. But with successive waves of immigration, and French people now outnumbering native speakers on some streets, the welcome had worn thin. Even though the guild had lifted their ban on ‘Strangers’ and M. Lavalle, like many other French masters, was now accepted as a Freeman of the Company of Weavers, resentment had grown, and divisions had formed.
The streets of Spitalfields could become treacherous late of an evening, when the young gallants had been supping in the taverns for a few hours. At the very least, insults could be thrown: he’d not infrequently been called a ‘cabbage head’, ‘froggy’ or ‘French piss pot’. Only the other day he had picked up a pamphlet entitled ‘Considerations upon the Mischiefs that may arise from granting too much indulgence to Foreigners’, which he had skim-read, briefly, before consigning it to the fire in disgust.
Through M. Lavalle’s introductions Clothilde soon secured work as a silk throwster. She was already experienced and her skills were much in demand, especially as she was prepared to put in the hours and could turn out yarn quickly, with a consistent twist. Within weeks her reputation had grown sufficiently to guarantee regular work and she was earning enough to rent an independent lodging. M. Lavalle helped them find a small room in a house off Brick Lane.
For the first time in many months she discovered something to live for, something to relieve the grief that had almost destroyed her mind. The knot of fear that seemed to have taken up permanent lodging in her belly began to ease, and Henri even caught his mother smiling from time to time.
He was sent to the church school, where he quickly learned to speak and write English, also showing a special aptitude for arithmetic and a great curiosity for the natural world. Even at that young age, all who met him were charmed by the boy. He, in turn, came to learn that by being willing and good-natured, by offering his sweet smile, he could make the world go his way. When he turned twelve, M. Lavalle offered him employment as a drawboy in his own weaving loft.
From dawn until dusk Henri would sit under a loom and, on the command of the weaver, pull the correct lashes that were laced to the simple. These, in turn, produced the figured design of the cloth and, even in those early years, he was full of questions, wanting to know how the design was translated from the painted original, how the figure harness worked or why this or that denier of silk was always used. It was this evident interest, his application to work and a maturity beyond his years that encouraged M. Lavalle to take on Henri as an apprentice without demanding the usual premium.
This act of generosity had been well rewarded: in the main the lad had obeyed the rules of the indenture, the requirement to be ‘modest, civil, clean and above all obedient to his master’, and, over time, M. Lavalle had entrusted him with increasingly complex work, which he could now weave with great accuracy.
At nineteen, when Henri completed his indentures, he’d gratefully accepted M. Lavalle’s offer of full-time work as a daily-rate journeyman, and accommodation. When he was ready, Henri would present his ‘master piece’ to demonstrate that he had gained all the skills necessary to be admitted to the Worshipful Company of Weavers as a master weaver, and he would then be able to set up on his own in business, and employ other apprentices and journeymen. But as a widower with no sons of his own, the fancy had been growing in M. Lavalle’s mind of late that Henri might, one day, inherit his business.
M. Lavalle’s only surviving child, Mariette, had always viewed Henri as the older brother she’d never had. But lately, at nearly fifteen, her responses had subtly changed. She had, more than once, commented on Henri’s good looks, his striking Breton colouring, the thick black hair that had grown so long that he was obliged to tie it back as he worked, and the intense, questioning chestnut-brown eyes that seemed never to miss a thing.
When once she always had a snippy retort to Henri’s banter, it now seemed to reduce her to a fit of girlish giggles. If he paid a simple compliment, such as appreciation of the food she placed on the table in front of him, her cheeks would flood with pink.
M. Lavalle watched these changes, feeling out of his depth in this new phase of his child’s life, and wishing for the thousandth time that his wife were still alive to deal with it. In a few years’ time the pair would make an ideal match. Once Henri had achieved his mastership he would be in a position to start the process of handing over the business and slipping into gentle retirement, reading his books and warming his feet by the fire. He could not think of a better outcome.
Henri climbed the two flights of stairs to the top landing, and then up the ladder, pushing open the trapdoor into the weaving loft. Every inch of this room was familiar to him, every smell and sound, the way the light fell through the windows onto the looms in different seasons and weathers. Eleven years of his life had been spent in this large, airy space that stretched the width of the house, with its roughhewn wooden floors, dormer windows across the front and two skylights angled into the roof at the rear. Three sturdy wooden looms, two spinning wheels and a rack holding wound warp beams occupied the floor area almost entirely, leaving only narrow walkways between.
The walls to each side were covered from floor to ceiling with boxes of bobbins, shuttles and pirns, all carefully labelled by colour, twist and denier. Empty warps were suspended from the ceiling, ready to be sent out to the winders. These beams, too awkward to manoeuvre down narrow stairways, would be eased through the wide casement window and lowered to the street below on ropes from a gantry. The reverse operation was used for returning the wound warps ready for mounting on a loom.
The windows were thrown wide open this sultry July afternoon – being at the top of the house, hard beneath the tiles, the loft was always too hot in summer or too cold in winter. Under the looms were straw pads on which the drawboy and apprentice slept. At the end of his indentures, Henri had graduated to the privilege of a truckle bed in a small box room in the basement of the house, next to the kitchen, where it was never too cold nor too warm and was close to supplies of bread and cheese which, if taken in moderation, could evade the cook’s suspicions.
‘Merde, it’s hot up here today,’ Henri said, closing the trapdoor with a gentle thud.
The drawboy, who normally worked the lashes and simples, had taken Henri’s absence as an opportunity and was asleep on his pallet. Benjamin, the apprentice for whom he had responsibility for tuition, sat dully slumped at his loom, upon which he was supposed to be weaving a basic grey taffeta lining for gentlemen’s waistcoats.
‘How’s that tabby going?’ Henri said, peering over to see for himself. ‘Whatever have you been up to? I’ve been gone an hour and you’ve barely woven an inch.’
‘Broken warp thread,’ the boy muttered. ‘Took an age to find. They’re the devil to see in this colour.’
Henri examined the woven fabric more closely. ‘Make sure you pull that heddle firmly after each pass of the shuttle, to press the weft taut against itself. No skimping or the fabric will turn out uneven and it shows badly on a plain silk like this. Take care Monsieur Lavalle has no excuse to dock your dinner again.’
The boy was lazy and already half starved for being rude to his master; he was the spoiled only son of an English mariner and spoke longingly of going to sea, but his father had decided that the silk business would be more profitable and less dangerous. Henri doubted he would see out the full seven-year indenture, but it was a feather in his own cap that M. Lavalle had entrusted him with the boy’s training and he was determined to persevere while he remained.
He nudged the drawboy awake with his toe. ‘Lashes time, gamin.’ The boy groaned and rubbed his eyes, then stirred himself into his position beside the loom.
For the next few hours the three boys worked hard, each concentrating on their tasks, the only sound the clack of the shuttles, the rattle of the treadles manipulated by Henri’s feet, as if he were an organist, and his terse instructions to the drawboy about which of the dozen numbered simples of the figure harness to pull: ‘cinq, cinq, un, sept, dix, dix.’
They all knew that, as the sun lowered behind the roofs of the houses on the other side of the street, the light would quickly fade and weaving would have to stop. On rare occasions when a deadline was immutable they could weave by candlelight, but the going would be slow and the quality jeopardised. Fine silk threads, only visible because of their lustre, would become almost impossible to see by the flickering light of a candle. More than once, Henri had been forced to reweave a piece because of the faults he had discovered the following day, and M. Lavalle would fly into a rage at the waste of precious silk.
Later that evening, after a supper of boiled eggs, apple pie and ale followed by a short game of backgammon with M. Lavalle and Benjamin, Henri retired to his basement room. The cook was still clattering about the kitchen next door, clearing up, laying the fire and preparing vegetables for the following day, but the noise of domesticity never troubled him. He found it comforting; a reminder of how, as a boy in France, he would listen to his parents talking and moving about in the house below his bedroom, long before their troubles began.
Henri closed his eyes and wondered how his mother was faring this sultry night. A year ago the widow had been courted by one of her customers, a weaver from Bethnal Green, whose wife had died, leaving him with five small children to raise. But he was pockmarked and ill-tempered and she’d been wary of his attentions. Even though grief still cast a long shadow over her heart she had found her place in society, taking on voluntary work at the French church and making a good living as a throwster, while no longer being responsible for Henri’s upkeep. Now in her late forties, she had grown to relish her independence and had no intention of taking on responsibility for a new family. So, when the widower proposed, she had refused him.
Unfortunately he took her refusal as a personal slight and she had received no work from him ever since. And he seemed to have told his friends, too, because commissions from other regular customers also dried up from that moment. She was a proud woman and rarely complained, but Henri could hardly fail to notice that she had been forced to give up the second room of her lodgings, which meant that she had to work, eat and sleep in a single cramped and airless space. There was little food in her cupboard, and he would slip her a loaf of bread or a couple of eggs whenever he could.
He’d mentioned it to M. Lavalle, who had tried to send as much work as he could in her direction. What Henri now wanted most in the world was to gain his mastership and then raise enough money to rent his own house and his own looms, to provide his mother with the comfort and security she so desperately deserved.
Of late he had spent the moments before sleep imagining himself in the aromatic embrace of the sugared-almond seller but this time, when sleep finally came, it was of the English girl that he dreamed, the girl with the bold gaze and blue-green eyes, the girl who spoke like a lady but dressed as a maid. She took his hand and led him into a room hung on all sides with the most beautiful silks he had ever seen, sumptuous satin grounds figured with intricate, elegant and delicate floral designs in intense, lustrous colours, the kind that took months to weave just a few yards of, that cost hundreds of pounds and was commissioned only for dukes and duchesses, bishops and royalty.
He woke, in the dark, knowing that the dream was his future: to achieve his Freedom and be accepted into the Weavers’ Company, he would have to create, design and then weave without fault such a fabric as one of these, as his master piece.