‘Shure we can but try,’ said Mary-Anne, as they sat at Sarah’s kitchen table drinking tea after a long evening checking and folding the garments they’d worked on since midsummer when Sarah had first put the idea of the clothes market to her friend.

‘Of course, you’re right,’ Sarah replied, yawning deeply and then laughing at herself. ‘I’m sorry, Mary-Anne, at this moment I’m so tired, I couldn’t give you change of a sixpence.’

Mary-Anne nodded ruefully, drained her mug of tea and stood up. ‘We’ve done our best an’ if it doesn’ work out shure there’s no great harm done. Ye’ll be as right as rain in the mornin’.’

At the front door she paused, put her arms around Sarah, hugged her and kissed her cheek. ‘Jamsey will be up here in good time the morra an’ Scottie can give him a han’ t’ pack the trap. You can pick me up on the way past. I’ll be ready and I’ll have a bit of lunch in a bag; you’ll have enough to do without doin’ that as well. Now away to yer bed, like a good wumman,’ she said briskly, as she drew her shawl round her and stepped out into the damp and misty night.

Sarah yawned yet again as she looked round the cluttered room. Garments were stacked, neatly tied up with strips of torn fabric or string to keep them in manageable bundles. They weren’t heavy, but they had to fit into the trap with both Mary-Anne and herself, as well as Jamsey, who’d offered to help them load and unload and take care of Daisy until whatever time they were ready for the homeward journey.

Most of the garments were their own work, but some had been made by friends or neighbours. Those were the items Sarah was most anxious to sell. But standing looking at them wasn’t going to help. She could almost hear Mary-Anne scolding her as she stood staring at their stock when she should be seeing to the fire, laying the table for breakfast and getting herself off to bed.

 

The next morning even the irrepressible Mary-Anne was quiet as they trotted briskly into town, Daisy clearly surprised at this change in direction. By nine o’clock, they had laid out their stall, chatted briefly to the traders on either side of them and were awaiting their first customer. They were both surprised and somewhat taken aback when a red-faced man came up to them and without any acknowledgement or greeting, started turning over garments and examining some of them.

Sarah had just made up her mind to speak when he glanced at them dismissively. ‘I suppose the pair of you have a licence to sell this stuff?’

‘Of course,’ said Sarah calmly, knowing without even looking at her that Mary-Anne was getting cross.

‘An’ where might I ask did ye get all this stuff?’ he went on, dropping a child’s dress in a crumpled heap on top of a row of neatly arranged garments.

‘You may indeed ask,’ said Sarah, ‘but we’re under no obligation to tell you,’ she said, picking up the child’s dress and refolding it neatly.

He scowled at them, turned his back and walked away. A few minutes later their first customer arrived. She was impressed with the quality of the work and pleasantly surprised when they told her the price.

She bought five items and Mary-Anne could hardly wait till she was out of earshot to say:  ‘Diden I tell you so?’

‘Who does thon fat-faced fella think he is?’ she demanded, after their next customer had gone.

Sarah herself had been wondering the same thing. Clearly, his nose was out of joint and if he wanted to know who they were it could only mean he must somehow see them as competition. In one respect they were indeed competition if he were one of the ‘drapers’ who handed out cloth and collected garments from home workers, paying them a pittance for their long hours of labour. Anyone else selling similar work would of course be a threat.

They didn’t have long to wait for an answer to their questions. Around noon, although they’d remained busy all morning, there was a sudden lull. When Mary-Anne and Sarah observed their neighbours taking out their lunch, they produced their own.

‘I hope you had as good a morning as we’ve had,’ said Sarah, addressing a young woman far gone in pregnancy, who was sitting down gratefully on one of the rickety chairs provided with the stall itself.

‘Yes, it was good enough but I’m hoping the afternoon will be even better. I’ve my eye on your baby clothes if we make enough,’ she said with a smile.

‘Ye’d be welcome to choose what ye want now an’ we’ll put it by for ye, till ye see how things go,’ said Mary-Anne promptly. ‘Come an’ have a look when ye’ve had a bit of a rest. It’s hard work standin’ an’ ye might miss what you particularly wanted if ye leave it too long.’

‘That’s very good of you,’ said a tall young man, clearly her husband, as he refolded heavy-duty work trousers and took dark-coloured linen shirts from a battered cardboard box stacked under the equally battered wooden stall itself. ‘I think Rachel here took a fancy to the baby’s dress your first customer didn’t buy.’

‘Did you know the gentleman in question?’ Sarah asked promptly.

‘Oh yes, we know him all right,’ said Rachel, looking up at her husband. ‘My mother used to do work for him until her eyes got bad. She used to say “he’s as mean as get out.”’

Sarah had never heard the expression before but it was clear when Mary-Anne laughed aloud that she was entirely familiar with the comment. Clearly, it was not complimentary.

Rachel and Joe were selling seconds of work clothes from a factory near Antrim. They worked on commission, but that was paid weekly in cash. It wasn’t a lot, they admitted, but they saved it for the rent which otherwise made a big hole in what Joe earned as a home weaver.

Much encouraged by the friendliness of the young couple, Sarah and Mary-Anne brought out all the baby clothes they still had left and let Rachel choose what she wanted. Joe insisted that in another hour he’d know how much they could spend and there’d still be time to sell anything she’d chosen but couldn’t afford.

‘Isn’t it nice to meet nice people?’ Mary-Anne whispered to Sarah as they tidied up their lunch bags, straightened their stock and observed the people who were now reappearing from various eating places as well as shops and offices nearby.

 

‘Well now, will you at least take credit for the idea?’ said Mary-Anne, nudging her friend as they sat once again at Sarah’s kitchen table. ‘Wou’d ye have believed that much if I’d told you?’

Mary-Anne waved her hand at the piles of coins they had just counted and put in saucers and bowls on the table, while Sarah made her notes and added up the total.

‘I couldn’t have done it without you, Mary-Anne. Are you sure we can keep going?’

‘Sure what’s t’ stop us. I ken see we’ve got t’fine more stuff in a hurry for next week, but sure when we deliver the money to the women that was tryin’ us out can’t we ask them if they’d do a bit extra this week till we see how much we’ll be needin’? If I know some of them, they’ll be only too glad to have the chance, especially those with husbands on short time or out of work. An’ I can do extra m’self. I can leave most of my jobs to the boys and do far more than I was doin’.’

‘Yes, but every week?’ Sarah said cautiously.

‘Every week we need stuff till we get a whole team together. Now we’ve shown we can do it, I’m tellin’ you they’ll be queuin’ up for a decent rate of pay. They’ve not had that before. Didn’t ye hear yerself what young Rachel said about what yer man giv’ t’ her mother whin she was workin’ for him? Sure it was next t’nothin’ an’ with a red nose like that, he must be on the bottle. Drinkin’ poor folks’ earnin’s!’ she ended up furiously.

In spite of herself, Sarah laughed. Mary-Anne was so forthright, she seldom paused to think, but she was also so kind-hearted that it was only the likes of Mr Rednose, as they’d christened him, that got the rough end of her tongue. Sarah knew perfectly well that Mary-Anne was quite capable of finding women in need and getting them organised, provided Sarah herself did all the calculations of their earnings. Mary-Anne had confessed freely she was no good at sums. Her own housekeeping she managed with money in different sized jam pots so she could see where she was and which jar needed the egg money when it came.

They agreed that tonight it was too late to make any more plans, but they’d made a start, had learnt a lot and made a tidy sum from both their own work and the modest commission they were charging to cover their expenses. Sarah was sure they would enjoy the activity even more when they’d had a bit of practice and a proper team they could rely on for creating their stock. Cheered as she was by their success, she couldn’t see how she could make time to sew, as well as all the other things she needed to do for the house or forge. But the pencilled figures in her battered jotter could not be argued away. The first day had been a great success.

 

November proceeded damp and misty but with no hard weather. Sarah and Daisy were able to get to work without problems and once back in Sir George’s room she slowly began to get order into the piles of documents she’d now found in cupboards and drawers. To these new piles, she had to add a suitcase full of documents which Sir George presented her with after one of his visits to his Dublin house.

Among the most welcome items to emerge from the Dublin suitcase was the Armagh out-letter file in which the letters Sir George had sent from Castle Dillon had been copied up in a flowing hand with a great many flourishes and squiggles.

Sarah rather wondered if the young man who had abandoned Sir George without notice, leaving his letters and papers in such a state of disorder, had artistic pretensions. But she was still enormously grateful. The presence of the out-letter book meant she could now trace back letters and ongoing negotiations and tell Sir George what he’d said on previous occasions.

She’d come to enjoy the way he smiled at her when she told him about a newly arrived letter, one of a sequence whose predecessors she’d read in the out-letter book. ‘Well you know what to say to him,’ he’d say, washing his hands entirely of the matter.

He was seldom irritable with her and often asked her advice as a ‘disinterested bystander’. Sarah was seldom disinterested in any matter touching the management of his estates, his responsibility for tenants or servants, but she knew what he meant. He needed to try out his ideas and she enjoyed their discussions, just as she had enjoyed talking to Jonathan Hancock.

Christmas came and with it the annual supper for staff. Sir George lent her to Mrs Carey so that together they could organise both the family gathering and the purchasing of suitable gifts for all the staff. She’d already found Bridget Carey to be a sensible and practical woman, now she found that she was indeed rather lonely and came to enjoy her company even more. She was sharper and more demanding than Mary-Anne, but with the same quality of forthrightness and a quickness of wit that took Sarah by surprise until she’d got to know her better.

It was only when the family went back to Dublin in January that she realised the winter that she had been dreading had been busy and productive and was now moving forward at great speed. There were times when she felt she missed John even more as the months went by, but the loneliness she had imagined was certainly mitigated by all the new friends she had made.

Often, after a taxing morning, Sir George would insist she left for home before it was fully dark, so she indeed had the long dark nights she had dreaded. But when she’d been dreading them, she hadn’t been able to think that those same long evenings would give her time to make a third new dress, to sew small garments for the Thursday market and to write to her friends, particularly Helen in South Carolina, Ben in Peterborough, Ontario, Jonathan Hancock in Yorkshire and her brother Charles in Lurgan.

Charles had never been a keen letter-writer, unlike Jonathan, who had asked her permission to write to her privately as well as via Sir George and their correspondence over the workhouse, but Charles had now become a regular correspondent for the happiest of reasons.

Sometime after Sarah’s meeting with Jonathan and her telling him about her plan to encourage women to make garments for sale, she had a long and very cheerful letter from Charles. He said he’d had good news, but it had been totally unexpected and he hadn’t quite taken it all in as yet.

He explained he’d been advertising in a local Lurgan paper to try to sell surplus stock and he’d been contacted by a prospective buyer. What emerged from their meeting was that rather than simply buy the stock, this gentleman wanted to rent his workshop, use the existing stock and then bring in fabric from a source he already had in order to give employment. What he needed, he said, was a skilled labour force, stock to make a beginning and someone to manage the process.

Charles was clearly delighted. It was obvious that he didn’t want to go to America and leave his elderly adopted parents, but that, as he explained subsequently, was the only way he’d been able to imagine of supporting them, albeit from afar.

Sarah had never known Charles so animated or so full of ideas. He seemed genuinely interested in her own efforts to sell clothes and to give women the chance to earn a decent wage from their work. He plied her with questions and kept her up-to-date with both his successes and frustrations.

It was when he told her that his well-spoken and mature gentleman had contacts with some charitable society in Yorkshire that Sarah felt sure it was thanks to Jonathan that this project had been put in hand, a project which benefitted not only Charles, but all the weavers and finishers who had lost their employment in the Lurgan workshop over the last failing months.

But her suspicions could certainly be kept secret, even if she did share Charles’s good news with Jonathan in the regular letters they now exchanged.

The winter was tedious at times with grey skies and misting rain but there was never any need for Sarah to stay overnight at Castle Dillon or even to be prevented from getting there on time in the first place. Only on one morning did a sudden flurry of snow catch them on an exposed part of the road. She slowed down immediately, but Daisy seemed indifferent to the unexpected white flakes that swirled around them, melting as they touched the rough surface of the road. On the hawthorn hedges, the light flakes settled, creating a crisp dressing that then melted as suddenly as it had come, when the sun reappeared from behind the passing cloud.

‘Jewels on the tree,’ Sarah said aloud, thinking of her grandmother as the drops shimmered, catching the light, hanging suspended in the still air until they grew too large, then dropped, still shining, into the tangled grass of the hedgerow.

But that was the only snow to come in what was to be a mild winter leading into an early spring. Sarah was grateful for the harmless weather. She knew it made life easier for everyone – she was especially aware of the cost of keeping a fire going and how hard it was for poor people who could sometimes buy food but could seldom pay for fuel as well.

Reading her Armagh Guardian, a part of her work now, as well as something she would have chosen to do, she read of the increasing distress in areas where the textile industry was failing. She had never been to Belfast, but a report on the state of the weavers of fancy goods in Ballymacarrett was perfectly intelligible to her even if she didn’t know either the Queen’s Bridge, Conn’s Water or the lanes on both sides of the Holywood road.

Out of 411 looms, 266 were unemployed, while of the remaining 175, a considerable number will be idle this week, for there is little or no prospect at present of webs being procured.

She copied out the extract carefully into a letter she was writing to Jonathan.

Tears sprang to her eyes completely unbidden. Yes, it was the sad plight of these families with no income but also, she admitted, she had seen in an instant her beloved John, a web of cloth on his shoulder after he had bumped into her in the main street of Lisnagarvey – an unromantic first meeting which had become a joke between them.

She dried her tears and tried to go on with her letter, but her eyes misted over yet again. It was not simply the stark message of the newspaper she was copying into her letter:

It was the thought that she had a comfortable home, more friends than ever she’d had in her whole life, and that she had enough to eat and money in the bank. How could she return in love and give thanks for all she had without John, whom she had loved so dearly?

And yet again she thought of her grandmother. ‘Do what you can, do it in love …’ Yes, there were things she could do, but she didn’t have to do it all herself. The important thing was to do what she could. She should give thanks every time she counted a pile of money to go out to women sewing by their own firesides.

Mary-Anne had been doing most of the collecting of clothes for the market and the delivering of money from their sales, but then Scottie had offered his help. He would drive her to work on a Saturday morning, take Daisy out of the shafts and fit her up with a saddle lent by Sir George from the stables. Then, thanks to Sam Keenan who said he could always manage a day or two on his own, Scottie would deliver little envelopes of money to all the women on this side of Armagh, while Lily and Harry Magowan did the same job for the women in the city.

‘Ask and it shall be given,’ another of grandmother’s sayings.

She smiled suddenly, her sadness passing as she thought of Sam Keenan’s more robust version. ‘Well, if ye niver ask, ye’ll niver get!’

He had a point, and perhaps it was one she should pay more attention to. Being self-reliant was one thing, but not accepting graciously your own limits was another. Perhaps there was more she could do to address the ocean of need she knew existed if she asked for help.

Smiling again, she went back to her letter to Jonathan and asked him what he thought could be done for the weavers of Ballymacarrett, and indeed all the textile workers in Ulster at present in such distress.