Epic Historial Collection (225 page)

“And the blue?”

“Like your eyes.”

Her eyes were green, but she did not correct him. “It's such a deep color.”

“English dyers use woad, but we get indigo from Bengal. Moorish traders bring it from India to Egypt, and then our Italian merchants buy it in Alexandria.” He smiled. “Think how far it has traveled—to complement your outstanding beauty.”

“Yes,” said Caris. “Just think of that.”

 

The riverside workshop of Peter Dyer was a house as big as Edmund's, but built of stone, and with no interior walls or floors—just a shell. Two iron cauldrons stood over great fires. Beside each was a hoist, like the ones Merthin made for building work. These were used to lift huge sacks of wool or cloth and lower them into the vats. The floors were permanently wet and the air was thick with steam. The apprentices worked barefoot, in their underdrawers because of the heat, their faces running with sweat, their hair gleaming with damp. There was an acrid smell that bit at the back of Caris's throat.

She showed Peter her unsold length of cloth. “I want the bright scarlet that the Italian cloths have,” she said. “That's what sells best.”

Peter was a lugubrious man who always looked injured, no matter what you said to him. Now he nodded glumly, as if acknowledging a justified criticism. “We'll dye it again with madder.”

“And with alum, to fix the color and make it brighter.”

“We don't use alum. Never have. I don't know anyone who does.”

Caris cursed inwardly. She had not thought to check this. She had assumed a dyer would know everything about dyes. “Can't you try it?”

“I haven't got any.”

Caris sighed. Peter seemed to be one of those craftsmen for whom everything is impossible unless they have done it before. “Suppose I could get you some?”

“Where from?”

“Winchester, I suppose, or London. Or perhaps from Melcombe.” That was the nearest big port. Ships came from all over Europe to Melcombe.

“If I had some, I wouldn't know how to use it.”

“Can't you find out?”

“Who from?”

“I'll try to find out, then.”

He shook his head pessimistically. “I don't know…”

She did not want to quarrel with him: he was the only large-scale dyer in town. “We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she said in a conciliatory tone. “I won't take up any more of your time discussing it now. First I'll see if I can get some alum.”

She left him. Who in town might know about alum? She wished now that she had asked Loro Fiorentino more questions. The monks ought to know about things like this, but they were no longer allowed to talk to women. She decided to see Mattie Wise. Mattie was forever mixing strange ingredients—maybe alum was one of them. More importantly, if she did not know she would admit her ignorance, unlike a monk or an apothecary who might make something up for fear of being thought foolish.

Mattie's first words were: “How is your father?”

“He seems a bit shaken by the failure of the Fleece Fair,” Caris said. It was typical of Mattie to know what she was worried about. “He's becoming forgetful. He seems older.”

“Take care of him,” said Mattie. “He's a good man.”

“I know.” Caris was not sure what Mattie was getting at.

“Petranilla is a self-centered cow.”

“I know that, too.”

Mattie was grinding something with a mortar and pestle. She pushed the bowl toward Caris. “If you do this for me, I'll pour you a cup of wine.”

“Thank you.” Caris began to grind.

Mattie poured yellow wine from a stone jug into two wooden cups. “Why are you here? You're not ill.”

“Do you know what alum is?”

“Yes. In small quantities, we use it as an astringent, to close wounds. It can also stop diarrhea. But in large quantities it's poisonous. Like most poisons, it makes you vomit. There was alum in the potion I gave you last year.”

“What is it, a herb?”

“No, it's an earth. The Moors mine it in Turkey and Africa. Tanners employ it in the preparation of leather, sometimes. I suppose you want to use it to dye cloth.”

“Yes.” As always, Mattie's guesswork seemed supernaturally accurate.

“It acts as a mordant—it helps the dye to bite the wool.”

“And where do you get it?”

“I buy it in Melcombe,” said Mattie.

 

Caris made the two-day journey to Melcombe, where she had been several times before, accompanied by one of her father's employees as a bodyguard. At the quayside she found a merchant who dealt in spices, cage birds, musical instruments, and all kinds of curiosities from remote parts of the world. He sold her both the red dye made from the root of the madder plant, cultivated in France, and a type of alum known as Spiralum that he said came from Ethiopia. He charged her seven shillings for a small barrel of madder and a pound for a sack of alum, and she had no idea whether she was paying fair prices or not. He sold her his entire stock, and promised to get more from the next Italian ship to come into port. She asked him what quantities of dye and alum she should use, but he did not know.

When she got home, she began to dye pieces of her unsold cloth in a cooking pot. Petranilla objected to the smell, so Caris built a fire in the backyard. She knew that she had to put the cloth in a solution of dye and boil it, and Peter Dyer told her the correct strength of the dye solution. However, no one knew how much alum she needed or how she should use it.

She began a frustrating process of trial and error. She tried soaking the cloth in alum before dyeing it; putting the alum in at the same time as the dye; and boiling the dyed cloth in a solution of alum afterward. She tried using the same quantity of alum as dye, then more, then less. At Mattie's suggestion she experimented with other ingredients: oak galls, chalk, lime water, vinegar, urine.

She was short of time. In all towns, no one could sell cloth but members of the guild—except during a fair, when the normal rules were relaxed. And all fairs were held in summer. The last was St. Giles's Fair, which took place on the downs to the east of Winchester on St. Giles's Day, September 12. It was now mid-July, so she had eight weeks.

She started early in the morning and worked until long after dark. Agitating the cloth continuously and lifting it in and out of the pot made her back ache. Her hands became red and sore from constant dipping in the harsh chemicals, and her hair began to smell. But, despite the frustration, she occasionally felt happy, and sometimes she hummed or even sang as she worked, old tunes whose words she could barely remember from childhood. Neighbors in their own backyards watched her curiously across the fences.

Now and again there came into her mind the thought: Is this my fate? More than once she had said that she did not know what to do with her life. But she might not have a free choice. She was not to be allowed to be a physician; becoming a wool merchant looked like a bad idea; she did not want to enslave herself to a husband and children—but she had never dreamed that she might end up as a dyer. When she thought about it, she knew that this was not what she wanted to do. Having started it, she was determined to succeed—but it was not going to be her destiny.

At first she could only get the cloth to turn brownish red or pale pink. When she began to approach the right shade of scarlet she found, maddeningly, that it faded when she dried it in the sun, or it came out when washed. She tried double-dyeing, but the effect proved temporary. Peter told her, rather late, that the material would soak up dye more completely if she worked with the yarn before it was woven, or even with raw fleeces; and that improved the shade, but not the fastness.

“There's only one way to learn dyeing, and that's from a master,” Peter said several times. They all thought that way, Caris realized. Prior Godwyn learned medicine by reading books that were hundreds of years old, and prescribed medicines without even looking at his patient. Elfric had punished Merthin for carving the parable of the virgins in a new way. Peter had never even tried to dye cloth scarlet. Only Mattie based her decisions on what she could see for herself, rather than on some venerated authority.

Caris's sister Alice stood watching her late one evening, with folded arms and pursed lips. As darkness gathered in the corners of the yard, the light of Caris's fire reddened Alice's disapproving face. “How much of our father's money have you spent on this foolishness?” she said.

Caris added it up. “Seven shillings for the madder, a pound for the alum, twelve shillings for the cloth—thirty-nine shillings.”

“God save us!” Alice was horrified.

Caris herself was daunted. It was more than a year's wages for most people in Kingsbridge. “It is a lot, but I'll make more,” she said.

Alice was angry. “You have no right to spend his money like this.”

“No right?” Caris said. “I have his permission—what more do I need?”

“He's showing signs of age. His judgment is not what it was.”

Caris pretended not to know this. “His judgment is fine, and a lot better than yours.”

“You're spending our inheritance!”

“Is
that
what's bothering you? Don't worry, I'm making you money.”

“I don't want to take the risk.”

“You're not taking the risk, he is.”

“He shouldn't throw away money that should come to us!”

“Tell him that.”

Alice went away defeated, but Caris was not as confident as she pretended. She might never get it just right. And then what would she and her father do?

When finally she found the right formula, it was remarkably simple: an ounce of madder and two ounces of alum for every three ounces of wool. She boiled the wool in the alum first, then added the madder to the pot without reboiling the liquid. The extra ingredient was lime water. She could hardly believe the result. It was more successful than she could have hoped. The red was bright, almost like the Italian red. She felt sure it would fade, and give her another disappointment; but the color remained the same through drying, rewashing, and fulling.

She gave Peter the formula, and under her close supervision, he used all her remaining alum to dye twelve yards of best-quality wool cloth in one of his giant vats. When it had been fulled, Caris paid a finisher to draw off the loose threads with a teazle, the prickly head of a wildflower, and to repair small blemishes.

She went to St Giles's Fair with a bale of perfect bright red cloth.

As she was unrolling it, she was addressed by a man with a London accent. “How much is that?” he said.

She looked at him. His clothes were expensive without being ostentatious, and she guessed he was wealthy but not noble. Trying to mask the trembling in her voice, she said: “Seven shillings a yard. It's the best—”

“No, I meant how much for the whole cloth.”

“It's twelve yards, so that would be eighty-four shillings.”

He rubbed the cloth between finger and thumb. “It's not as close-woven as Italian cloth, but it's not bad. I'll give you twenty-seven gold florins.”

The gold coin of Florence was in common use, because England had no gold currency of its own. It was worth about three shillings, thirty-six English silver pennies. The Londoner was offering to buy her entire cloth for only three shillings less than she would get selling it yard by yard. But she sensed that he was not very serious about haggling—otherwise he would have started lower. “No,” she said, marveling at her own temerity. “I want the full price.”

“All right,” he said immediately, confirming her instinct. She watched, thrilled, as he took out his purse. A moment later she held in her hand twenty-eight gold florins.

She examined one carefully. It was a bit larger than a silver penny. On one side was St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence, and on the other the flower of Florence. She placed it on a balance to compare its weight with that of a new-minted florin her father kept for the purpose. The coin was good.

“Thank you,” she said, hardly believing her success.

“I'm Harry Mercer of Cheapside, London,” he said. “My father is the largest cloth merchant in England. When you've got more of this scarlet, come to London. We'll buy as much as you can bring us.”

 

“Let's weave it all!” she said to her father when she returned home. “You've got forty sacks of wool left. We'll turn it all into red cloth.”

“It's a big enterprise,” he said thoughtfully.

Caris was sure her scheme would work. “There are plenty of weavers, and they're all poor. Peter isn't the only dyer in Kingsbridge, we can teach the others to use the alum.”

“Others will copy you, once the secret gets out.”

She knew he was right to think of snags, but all the same she felt impatient. “Let them copy,” she said. “They can make money, too.”