Read Online Effigy by Alissa York - Free Book Online Page B

was fit to burst with Baby Joe and thereafter keeping their husband to herself. It was all but painless, being cast aside. Five babies in as many years had gone a long way to dulling what little wifely feeling Ruth had known. By the time Hammer took his third wife, his second was dwelling more and more frequently on the life she’d led before meeting him. Or, more precisely, on the sense of future she was then possessed of, the promise she had yet to fulfill.
    Of her actual life, she missed nothing. Not London—though in truth she knew little of the great city beyond her home district of Spitalfields. Certainly not the close quarters she’d shared with her mother until her sixteenth year, when the older woman died gasping in her sleep.
    Every day but Sunday, Ruth navigated the pinch and racket of Brick Lane. Weavers’ cottages stood chockablock, their high banks of windows fitted not for anyone’s pleasure, but to keep the workers within from going blind. Mr. Humphrey ran as good an operation as any. Ruth knew a decade’s employ there, from the time she was nine years old. Her mother had started six years before that. The pair of them would sit back to back in their corner of the attic loomshop, each tying on a warp. Until Ruth sat alone. Fifteenthousand threads give or take. A donkey’s workday. A pauper’s wage.
    As she turns to cool the other temple, the face of her employer rises unbidden, long and wavering as a wraith’s.
    Miss Graves, you strike me as an intelligent young woman. Tell me, are you interested in silk?
    I am, sir
.
    She answered without pause, without gauging the layers of his intent. He was old enough to have fathered her—to have fathered her poor dead mother, come to that. And he was married, even if Mrs. Humphrey, martyr to a trick heart, rarely left her bed. Ruth sees now how it ought to have been clear to her. It was fitting that an employer should stoop close to inspect his worker’s technique, but no man’s eyesight is that near.
    “In that case I shall instruct you in the subject. It is, as you can well imagine, a particular passion of mine.” He smiled thinly. “Come down to my office when you finish here.”
    So began an education. Weeks passed without so much as a hint of suspicion to cloud her mind. This was in part because Mr. Humphrey advanced upon her at a glacial pace—knuckles brushing her elbow, then nothing for days—but in the main because the matter of his talk so stirred her imagination that she grew dull to her actual surrounds.
    One lesson in particular impressed itself upon her mind.
    “You will recall, Miss Graves, the topic of our last discussion, the domestication of
Bombyx mori.”
    “I do indeed, sir.”
    “Excellent. Now, common as this little fellow is, you mustn’t imagine his to be the only species responsible for producing the world’s silk.”
    Mr. Humphrey had in his possession a selection of books, the pages of one of which he now laid open. Coming to stand alongsideRuth in her chair, he lowered the exposed folio into her line of view. The engraving thereon was so delicate, so compelling, she couldn’t help but trace it with her finger’s tip.
    “Life-size, if you please,” he murmured.
    Here were no pale, captive insects. The Tusseh silk moth of India spanned an entire page, fully six inches from wing tip to wing tip. The caterpillar was an arching monster, strung together out of sacs rather than segments, bristling with starry tufts of hair. What was more, the species was untamed, untameable. Those who would harvest its fine produce were obliged to watch over the great worms wherever they chose to spin.
    In the dream it is Ruth who stands shepherd to the pendent cocoons. The jungle is hot and dark. For a time all is quiet.
    The bats come first, chittering patches of night. Then their opposites, the white and whistling birds. Snakes brighten the leaf litter. Cats—several times tabby-weight—balance in the overhead boughs.
Mangrove, crepe