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A Bolt of Red Tafetta

A short story

By C.A.H.Published 2 years ago 20 min read
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The rich, crisp red cloth moved under her fingers, shot with two tones of color - rose red and a fiery scarlet - so it appeared almost to be a flame when it moved in the light. Under the lamps of the tailors workshop, it moved like a river rustling material. What a dress it would make for a ball, Mary thought as she unrolled it once to look at it while she was alone and her employers were at asleep. Deft at filling in the account books and sleight of hand at removing this and that from the business, she could quietly take buttons, threads and small off cuts of pieces to make things for people who came to her after hours where she lived. But this would be at least one bolt, ‘just once’ she thought - ‘just once, I’ll take it just once’. The roll unraveled before her and flipped out on the table, the very last of it left over from another dress. One gas lamp petered out and the room went dark. Mary blew out the candle by her side and hurriedly folded the cloth into her sewing bag.

Dreams had troubled her lately, even when she was awake she felt their shadow as she made her way home through the streets of the great city she lived in and stopped once at the bridge crossing the river. Horses bright with shining fur and glistening with the damp of autumn air and fog, trotted past her as they pulled fine carriages. Mary had no pennies left for the coach to her suburb, she would have to walk. Her boots were worn and her feet were tired so she stopped a to look over the edge into the deep inky waters of the river flowing through the city.

‘Where are you?’ the mans’ voice kept asking, soft insistent but with ever increasing urgency like a question some person was asking themselves over and over not expecting as answer, not really. Except, she heard this voice in her dreams more often lately. Sometimes she saw strange things in these dreams too, a stair way to a wealthy parlor, where women with far more social standing and money than her would gather, the sort of place to exchange gossip if you were a bored merchant’s wife or something like it. Often she saw the ocean, and the shadow of a man placing a top hat on as if about to leave for the day and go out. But no face, nothing concrete. There were halls, underground like an old temple from a fairy tale or a crypt - Mary sometimes felt herself running through it with a terrible sense of dread and she would wake, heart pounding and see her child beside her in the bed sleeping and she would wait for her thudding pulse to subside, telling herself it was just a dream.

It made no sense.

She couldn’t stop stealing things. At first it was desperation, and little things her employers never noticed. But there was a thrill to it she was becoming hungry for. To catch even larger treasures, to get away with it and not be caught - it was starting to compel her in ways she knew she could not control.

Mary turned from the waters rushing under the bridge as the great tower clock struck eleven. It was dark and she did not want to be seen to be a street walker, she kept going and pushed the the troubling thoughts from her mind.

One week later.

Mary put Arrabella down on the bed and looked around the tiny sparse room she lived in with one table and chair and a sagging bed by a window. She looked out the glass a moment to clear her thoughts and saw the damp, cold grey alley way filled with lines of laundry crossing from one building to another. Her four year old daughter was hungry again and there was nothing to eat. The knock on the door persisted and Mary quickly folded away the cloth of a dress she was working and hid it under the pillow. She opened the door and a young pretty woman stood in the door with a red luscious dress folded over her arms. Edwina Longbottom, the most difficult to please, and uppity of her secret customers.

“Mary, I have to bring back the dress,” gasped Edwina, frantic.

“Is there something wrong with it madam? I thought you loved it.” Mary answered, a flutter of anxiety rising in her.

“I did, but Mary, he’s left me! He’s gone back to his wife. He’s left us with nothing. I have no money for my boy for food. The debtors are coming for our furniture. It’s a disgrace what they are doing to us. I must give it back to you and ask for my money back.” Edwina said in one great long speel.

“But Mrs Longbottom I do not have it. The money is long gone. I cannot refund you.” Mary answered.

“You have to Mary, I am desperate.” Edwina pushed the dress in its folds into Marys’ hands. Arabella started to watch the pair talking and bite her finger.

“Mama” she cried confused.

“There is nothing wrong with the dress. Surely you can make use of it.” Mary suggested.

“What’s the point when he has abandoned us? There will be no balls to go to or theatre. We will be on the streets!” gasped the woman as she pulled a hand to her throat and crossed her waist with her other arm as if to reassure herself.

“Is it as bad as all that?” Mary asked.

“You don’t understand. You’re used to being poor. I can’t go back to…this,” said Edwina as she grimaced at Mary’s small room. In the echoes of the tenancy building people could be heard squabbling and children crying.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Longbottom, but I haven’t got it. I haven’t got the money you need. I’m sorry.”

The woman looked around the room and out the window. She turned to Mary with a stony look on her face.

“I’ll tell those shopkeepers you work for just what you’ve been doing with all their bolts of cloth - you little strumpet - if you don’t give me my money back!” Edwina menaced as she put her hands on her well dressed hips.

Mary’s pulse leaped. There was evidence of her thievery all over the room with dresses and jackets made from left over pieces of material and extra cuts she had not documented in the record keeping books at the tailors’ shop.

“Look at you with your little racket of clothes. I wager all this came from that shop you go to. I’ll tell them!”

Mary felt as if the floor beneath her was falling away. If she was betrayed to her employers the punishment would be severe. She might be sent to a penal workhouse, or bolted in irons for months. She had heard of petty thieves sent to Botany Bay on the other side of the world for less.

“You wouldn’t dare!” Mary roared before she could stop herself. The woman pulled back and dropped the dress. Arabella started to cry quietly. Edwina too began to sob hysterically.

“What shall I do? What shall I do?” she cried.

‘I shall take it from her for what I have and sell it to the Barrington's for more’. Came the thought it Marys’ head.

“Mrs Longbottom, I can only give you six shillings for this dress. It is all I have. I have nothing for my girl and she is hungry. I have nothing for the rent or for flour and tea. But I can give you six shillings and you can return the dress to me. I am sorry, that is all I can do…”

The woman looked a little appeased, but disappointed

The words rung in her head like a bee sting ‘you’re used to being poor.’ This customer had been haughty, rude and intemperate from the start but Mary had endured it for the money. Now the money was gone. Who would she find to fit into the dress? The only woman she knew who had the same shape without alterations was herself.

She loved the way a dress transformed her. It was like a conjurer’s trick in a circus, the feel of luxurious material swishing around her legs, the illusion of wealth and status. She could take her latest work to one of her better paying clients and wear the red gown at the same time, do her hair in curls, perhaps fossick around for some old pretty hair pins she had found at a market and show off her finest creation to them, she may even be able to sell it. Would she seem improper? Dressed so finely?

*has Edwina left yet?

She placed Arabella on her lap and bounced her while she cooed some reassuring words. She placed her under the threadbare blanket. Her daughter sucked her thumb and watched quietly as Mary slowly laced herself into the fine red dress, deftly twisting her arms behind her back she realized she would need an assistant.

*

“My word where are you going in that?” said her friend, Susie from across the hall as she pulled on the laces at the back of the dress and tied her in. Mary leaned on the edge of the iron cast bed knob and held her waist so the dress could fit tight around her middle and splay out, dropping to the floor in a pool of rose red.

“To customer to settle my account with them, before Mrs Longbottom tells the whole world I’m a thief”

“Oh, I see.” Susie said as she pulled the dress tighter at Marys’ back. Mary turned her head to her side to answer Susie, “Nothing like that. I’m not a trollop yet. Just want them to see what I can do. Doesn’t look like much flopped on a chair.”

Mary turned and face her friend. She held out her arms to model herself.

“You look like a lady, Mary, a proper lady” said Susie, she smiled and then her smile dropped. She tried to hide to worry on her face.

A small hand reached for hers from below her waist. She looked down and felt Arabella press into the folds of her dress and look up at her with a beguiling smile, “I want one too mama.”

Mary looked at Susie, “Can you look after her for me while I go out? I won’t be long.”

Susie reached down and took Arabellas’ hand, “Come on miss, time to come and play with my boys. You can have some porridge what do you say to that ay?”

Arabella nodded shyly and went with Susie to the door.

“You watch yourself in that fine stuff madam, a gent might find you and you might never come back.” she said to Mary, playfully

Mary felt a wave of gratitude as she watched Susie take her child down the drab grey dim hall to her own room. Beneath them a rickety stair well descended to the stories below. Mary took one look about her tiny room for props, desperately wishing she had the hat and parasol to match. She took a silk reticule she had been making for another lady and placed it over her wrist.

“Nothing in it anyway so nothing to steal” she said to herself.

Mary shut the door and went down the stairs.

*

Outside in the streets, dirty grey air from the factories filled the sky. It was not long before any traveler on foot had a film of grayish dust from the industrial areas coated on their clothes and white mop caps and shirts took on a sad unwashed look. Mary glided through the streets, avoiding horse dung and mud as best she could in her one plain pair of shoes. She held her fine red taffeta skirts up as best she could and picked her way across the slums. She ignored the cat calls, leers and outright propositions from passing men. One man smoking a pipe in a doorway winked at her. She winked back, she couldn’t help it. Another reached for her backside in the street and she thumped him with her fist and told him to get lost before she hurried along.

“What’s the matter – too expensive for me?” He shouted at her as she ran, disappearing into the city fog.

It took her an hour to walk, perilously through the poorer parts of town to a street corner where she turned onto a busy road into the merchant class of town. Her feet were tired and the grey skies were growing darker. She knew the addresses of all her clients. Those she had stolen from the shop where she worked for. Or had they stolen her? She held her arms around herself a moment shivering the spring evening chill set in. She had slipped into stealing cloth and ribbons, needles and thread, slowly from the shop. After her wages as a seamstress were given to her each month, she never had enough for food or rent, it was one or the other. If her girl needed new shoes it was impossible. She had not turned to a whorehouse or a work house yet. Clients had enjoyed ‘stealing’ her from the shop where she worked for private fittings, and she hoped to hold the poverty at bay with one more suit, one more shirt, one more dress until her fingers were raw and her eyes were sore and her neck was stiff from working over a candle well into the small hours. She was a thief and she knew it.

She came to the town house of a merchants’ family where she hoped to call in her fine dress and maybe they would take up an order with her for another one, if she could get the fabric. She knew they had a daughter who would be coming out for the season next year and would adore the dress she wore.

But when she came to the door she lost her nerve.

“Please come back when the Barrington’s are returned from abroad, and send note first of your visit,” said the parlor maid.

Mary felt a fool as the door closed and realized her desperation. There were other drapers and tailors she could sell it to and the grand department store might take it in the morning but she was already tired. She made her way back through the civilized street with a curve of pretty town houses and carriages gently trotting past. ‘If only I could wave a magic wand’. She thought, her heart sinking.

On her way back she knew she would pass Edwina Longbottom’s establishment. Well what of it? She dismissed to herself. The woman was done with her and didn’t deserve her work in any case. Mary walked down the darkening street and saw ahead, on the footpath, spilling out onto the road, workmen carry furniture from the town house she recognized as Edwinas’. The chaise lounge was being carried from the steps and onto the road where a horse and cart waited. Mary glanced up at the windows of the house and saw Edwina at the window holding a kerchief to her eyes and a frazzled look of despair clear, even from the high window. Then she spotted Mary below walking towards the gathering of furniture. Mary stood tall, threw back her shoulders and sucked her corseted stomach in even tighter. She would walk grandly past this disaster with her head held high. The workmen stopped to take a second look at her as she strolled past and picked her way through the scattering of belongings on the pavement, her dress flowing about her like red water as she passed.

She hoped Edwina could see her in her elegant dress.

She kept walking along the street and continued on, for streets upon streets until worlds changed and she was nearing her own neighborhood. The factory horns blew and throngs of workers, dressed head to toe in grey drab rags emerged from their work, trudging home, a sea of exhausted women from the textiles mills spilled out before her as she weaved between them. Little girls - Mary could not tell how old exactly, she only knew girls her own child’s age had been forced into the work she had tried to protect her daughter from - stared into the air before themselves, dirty and tired as if they had gone blind with tedium.

Mary kept going, hurrying her pace as the darkness of late evening sunk around her and glowing lamps were lit in the streets. A carriage, sleek, wealthy and almost pitch ink dark in color, slowed down beside her and a gentleman in evening attire opened the door and stared at her with a predatory gaze. He held a spyglass to his eye and it appeared to be mechanical, exquisitely crafted, and it moved ever so slightly like a perfect bronze machine as it turned at his eye and a strange light flashed from it that startled her.

Mary noticed a pretty dark red ruby pin on his cravat sparkle. The man’s stare was eerie as it seared right through her and she suspected he was a lord or some high- up gentleman of means with his deep set eyes and slicked back hair, It appeared the carriage would stop and this creature would reach across and pull her in, when a dragonfly flew out of nowhere and fluttered around his face irritating him so much he lost his concentration and waved it away to no avail. A woman from inside the carriage made herself visible, clothed in the very latest fashions, her hair looped and coiled in perfect ringlets of deepest jet, she was a an icy beauty and it almost took Mary’s breath away as the woman glared at Mary and then laughed with disdain at her escort, most likely her husband, and pulled the door shut herself with a long hooked cane. Mary held her head high and ignored the prickling feeling of unease growing in her as the carriage continued to follow her, it’s elegant lanterns flickering with light as dusk began to settle.

Thankfully she came to an alley that turned into deep stairway – no safer than the street she walked on but enough to throw off her pursuer.

*

When she climbed the rickety creaking steps to her tenancy building, she longed for bed and a cup of black tea, the comforting feeling of her child beside her asleep and in the morning she would have to go to the shop and begin her day proper in the store. At the top of the stairs, two police men stood. They wore black uniforms with shining metal buttons that lined their chests, simple black top hats and batons at their sides. One had manacles in his hands.

Mary froze.

Her employers, a man and wife, Mr and Mrs Pritkins also stood at the open door of her tiny room, the splay of clothes inside obvious. They were dressed soberly, in finely stitched clothing she knew she had made for them herself once.

“Mary, how could you? After everything we have done for you!” said Mrs. Pritkins.

“I’m sorry” Mary said as she felt the shame of her doings upon her.

“Are you Mary Shywood?” asked the constable, gruff and unyielding look in his eyes.

Mary was about to say yes, to collapse into feminine despair on the floor and perhaps weep and wail while she begged for mercy. But it only worked on the stage. In real life she could not bare to give in. She turned and ran. She ran back down the terrible breakings steps in the dark, trying not to tumble over her dress as the constables clodded after her. Running in an abundantly gorgeous dress was not easy and before she had got far on the street they had her.

“Mary Shywood, you are under arrest for the felony of….”

Mary could hear the constable recite the list of fabrics, ribbons and buttons as if he had a shopping list. Her ears grew numb as she looked up the towering dilapidated building where she knew somewhere Arabella would be wondering what had happened to her mother.

The iron cuffs where clamped around her wrist as if she were the worst of criminals. She had seen women arrested in the streets before for petty thievery and misdemeanors and clamped in irons right there in public, marched along with the law enforcement to their imprisonment. She never heard of those girls again – it was known where women were sent now. The colonies, new female fodder for the building of the nation. Mary had just never thought it would be her in chains.

She pulled against the tight stern grip of the police men, who frog marched her down the street to her fate.

“She is a fine one ‘aint she?” said one officer to the other. “Won’t be needing that where you’re going” said the other.

A man’s hand held her wrist gently for a moment, Mary heard a voice. One that did not belong to either of the officers… it was kind and rather insistent, fearful even.

“Come with me Mary, come with me now.”

Mary thought for a second, ‘someone has come to rescue me, there has been a mistake’ as warm prickles of something unearthly shivered down her spine. She looked to see no one to answer for the voice except two thugs with uniforms who pushed her into a horse drawn cart with two other girls who had been caught for thievery, all shame faced and defiant with chains about their wrists and ankles. Neither had such a rich dress on. They looked at her with envy.

The cart passed onlookers in the streets but no one really paid much attention, thieving young women were caught every day of the week. Hungry young boys. Scrounging young girls. Men stealing meat hocks. They all ended up in the cart one way or the other. It rattled through the suburbs and crossed a square of well -to -do shops. Now this Mary didn’t like, so close her place of work and all the customers that knew her. She felt her face burn with the sting of it and her very self dismantle as she was paraded past her local street in horse drawn police cart. Reality was dawning. Everyone knew how it went. She was headed for the watch house, then the courtrooms, then the sentencing would be passed, from there it was the work houses or worse still, transportation. Surely not for a first offence she thought, surely sixty days tilling over thistled ropes in a work house or the thread looms of a factory would not kill her if she was quick and careful. Then Mary thought of the piles of secret tailoring in her rented hovel, the threads, the cloth, the look on her employer’s faces that they had unmasked her secret trade. And then the bolt of red taffeta, sewn to perfection and robed around her like a glorious rose and Mary knew she would never seen England again.

Fantasy
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About the Creator

C.A.H.

watch this space for my website.

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