The Bone Loom of Blackwater

• Chapter 1 The Heir of Blackwater Hall
• Chapter 2 Ash and Ivory
• Chapter 3 The First Strand
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Shed
• Chapter 5 The Crimson Shuttle
• Chapter 6 A Disappearance at the Mill
• Chapter 7 Marrow and Silk
• Chapter 8 Patterns of the Ancestors
• Chapter 9 The Scent of Old Blood
• Chapter 10 The Hunger Awakens
• Chapter 11 Strangers on the Fen
• Chapter 12 Tension on the Warp
• Chapter 13 The Drifter’s Tithe
• Chapter 14 Tapestry of the Missing
• Chapter 15 Secrets Beneath the Floorboards
• Chapter 16 The Broken Skein
• Chapter 17 A Bargain in the Mire
• Chapter 18 The Weft Tightens
• Chapter 19 Echoes of the Dead
• Chapter 20 Flesh, Bone, and Spindle
• Chapter 21 The Town's Suspicion
• Chapter 22 The Chosen Harvest
• Chapter 23 The Loom’s Masterpiece
• Chapter 24 Severed Ties
• Chapter 25 The Final Thread
• Chapter 26 The Unraveling

The rain in the Blackwater fens did not fall so much as it hovered, a cold, gray suspension that coated wool coats in beads of grease and turned the peat roads into troughs of brown porridge. Alethea Ward knew the weather of the marsh the way a spider knew the vibration of its radial threads. She had spent twelve years in the high, dry draftiness of Norwich, working until her cuticles cracked and her knuckles swollen under the relentless speed of industrial jacquards, but the dampness of Blackwater remained stamped into the marrow of her shins. It took a single afternoon in the carrier’s wagon to undo a decade of clean linen and city coal smoke.

She paid the driver with two tarnished shillings and a brass button that had slipped from her sleeve. The man looked at the button, looked up at the looming gables of Blackwater Hall, spat a thick plug of tobacco juice into the gravel, and left her trunk on the verge without offering to haul it past the iron gates.

"Ground’s sour," the driver muttered, wiping his chin with a sleeve that smelled of wet straw. "Has been since the old lady took to her bed. Has been longer than that, if you listen to the tavern folk at the Cross Keys."

"The tavern folk at the Cross Keys drink ditch water when the cider runs thin," Alethea replied, her voice clipped, carrying the brisk economy of an overseer’s daughter. "I know the road, Thomas. Mind the ruts by the weir, or you’ll lose your off-side axle before you make the turnpike."

She didn't wait for him to turn the horses. She took the iron handle of her wicker portmanteau in one hand and gripped the greasy strap of her traveling trunk with the other, hauling the dead weight through the gate. The hinges screamed—not with dramatic terror, but with the flat, ungreased friction of thirty years’ neglected rust.

Blackwater Hall was not an estate in the grand sense; it was an overgrown yeoman’s manor that had swallowed a timber-framed workshop three centuries ago and never fully digested it. It crouched on a rise of gravel amidst three thousand acres of sodden reeds, its lower courses built of flint nodules set in mortar so lime-rich it looked like curds. Above the stone sat two stories of black oak timbers, warped by the salt winds blowing off the Wash, their infill panels of lath and daub bulging like the bellies of dead cattle. A single chimney smoked from the western gable, a meager feather of pale birch smoke that smelled of wet bark and loneliness.

Alethea set her boxes down on the flagstones beneath the porch. Her great-aunt, Maude Ward, had been dead twelve days. The letter from the parish bailiff had taken six to reach her lodgings over the dyer’s shop in St. Giles, and it had taken another six for Alethea to settle her contracts, sell her spare reed-hooks and shuttles to the apprentice girls, and pack her life into two boxes.

She had not loved Aunt Maude. No one had loved Maude Ward, except perhaps the sheep she kept on the saltings, and even they were said to scatter when her shadow crossed the dykes. But Maude had been the last of the Blackwater weavers who understood the old double-cloth technique—the true English damask that didn't run when soaked in river water, the kind that had clothed bishops before the Reformation and guildmasters after it. More importantly, Maude had left no will, which meant the Hall, the marsh rights, and whatever machinery remained in the high loft fell to Alethea by the simple, brutal arithmetic of blood.

The front door was not locked. Locks in the fens were useless things; the wet swelled the oak frames until the iron bolts seized in their keepers. She shoved it with her shoulder, bracing against the resistance of three years of accumulated mold along the sill, and stumbled into the low-ceilinged hall.

The air inside was colder than the marsh. It smelled of elderberry wine gone to vinegar, tallow, and dry wool—that distinctive, greasy musk of unwashed fleece that never entirely leaves the nostrils of someone born to the trade.

"Alethea?"

The voice came from the settle beside the hearth. It was thin, like greaseproof paper being torn, but it didn't belong to a ghost. An old man rose with considerable difficulty, his knees clicking in the gloom like dry sticks snapping under a boot. He wore a waistcoat of coarse drugget that had lost its buttons, pinned together with a rusty bodkin.

"Master Clout," she said, letting her bags drop with a solid thud onto the floorboards. "You’re still here. I had assumed the cousins from Ely would have turned you out by Sunday."

"The cousins from Ely came as far as the second ditch," the old man said, shuffling forward with the help of an ash stick. His eyes were milky at the rims, cataract-ringed, but his hands were steady enough. They were the hands of a warper: long-fingered, scarred across the webs by the friction of high-twist linen. "They saw the water rising in the sheep-dip and went home to their beer. Said the roof was rotten. Said the whole place smelled of old mutton."

"They weren't wrong about the roof," Alethea said, looking up at the dark timber ceiling. Water had left tea-colored maps across the plaster between the joists. "Is she buried?"

"In the churchyard at Blackwater St. Jude. Under the nettles by the north wall. Parson didn't want her inside the ditch, but I gave him five yards of the gray twill she finished at Michaelmas, and he found a dry corner behind the tithe barn. Didn't say no service to speak of. Just read the collect for the dead and took his cloth."

"That was like her," Alethea murmured. She took off her bonnet, shaking the cold mist from its ribbons. Her hair, dark as peat-water and pinned with steel bodkins, slipped slightly over her forehead. She was twenty-eight, but her skin had the pale, toughened look of women who spent fourteen hours a day between the loom-bench and the sizing tub. "Did she leave the loft open?"

Clout stopped his shuffling. He looked at her through his rheumy eyes, his jaw working on nothing as if he were trying to remember the taste of bread.

"She kept the key on her stay-busk until the day the rattle took her," he said quietly. "I took it off the corpse before they put the winding sheet on. Parson didn't see. Undertaker didn't see. It’s on the dresser, behind the pewter salt."

Alethea didn't ask about food, though her stomach had been hollow since dawn. She didn't ask about the debts, or the salt-hay crop, or the three leasehold cottages that were supposed to come with the marsh title. She walked across the flags, her boots leaving damp oval prints on the dry dirt that covered them, to the tall dresser where six lead-spotted plates stood like gray moons. Behind the salt cellar lay an iron key, four inches long, its bit cut into three unequal steps like the teeth of an old hound. It was cold, colder than the room, and heavy enough to crack a man’s skull.

"She didn't work it these last two years," Clout said, following her with his eyes as she moved toward the narrow staircase built into the chimney breast. "Her wrists were swollen like turnips. She just sat up there in the dark, turning the wheel with her left hand, listening to the ratchets. Sometimes she’d talk to it."

"To the loom?"

"To whatever was in the timber," Clout said, and for the first time, his voice lost its dry, old-man’s rasp and took on a flat, ugly weight. "You ought to sell it to the museum in Norwich, Alethea. The gentlemen from the Antiquarian Society came down two summers back with their measuring tapes and their little notebooks. Offered eighty pounds for the frame alone. Said it was Flemish work from the time of the third Edward."

"Eighty pounds wouldn't pay the back-cess on the dyke repairs," she said, her fingers curling around the key until the iron bit into her palm. "And the antiquarians would dismantle it. They'd take the heddles down and hang them on a white wall for clerks to stare at on a bank holiday. A loom that isn't working is just firewood that hasn't found an axe yet."

"It isn't an ordinary frame," Clout whispered, but she was already on the third step, the oak creaking under her weight.

The stairs were steep and curved like the inside of a snail shell, winding around the massive central flue that heated—or failed to heat—the core of the house. The air grew drier as she climbed, losing the salt-marsh damp and taking on the sour, oily heat that always gathers under lead flashing on a summer afternoon, preserved here despite the autumn chill.

At the head of the stair was a single door of three planks, held together with clinker-nails and banded with strap-hinges that ran the full width of the wood. The keyhole had no escutcheon, just an eye-shaped slit cut directly through the oak.

Alethea inserted the key. It did not turn easily; there was a thick, greasy reluctance in the mechanism, as though the wards were packed with tallow or lard. She leaned her weight into the turn, her small, muscular shoulder driving the iron home. With a sound like a pistol shot in an empty barn, the bolt threw back.

The great loft of Blackwater Hall ran the entire length of the building, sixty feet from east to west, lit only by three round windows set into the gables like the ports of a ship. The rafters were exposed, giant boughs of unpeeled oak that still bore the adze marks of men who had been dust before the Spanish Armada sailed. Dust lay an inch thick over the floorboards, except for a narrow track worn bare between the door and the center of the room.

There stood the engine of the Ward family’s obscure, centuries-old prosperity.

It was vast. Modern power-looms were low, crouched iron beasts that chattered and shook the brick mills of Manchester, but this was a cathedral of wood. The corner-posts were squared timber, ten inches on a side, sinking into mortises cut directly into the main tie-beams of the house. It did not sit upon the floor; it was part of the architecture, anchored to the bones of the hall itself.

Alethea stepped into the gray light, her boots making no sound in the soft dust.

She had seen the loom only twice before in her life: once when she was six, brought up by her father to be shown the shuttle before she was sent away to her aunt in the city, and once through a crack in the door when she was fourteen, running away from the school at Lowestoft. Both times it had seemed terrifyingly large, but she had assumed the impression was the natural exaggeration of childhood.

It was not.

The breast-beam was chest-high to a grown woman, smoothed by centuries of bellies leaning against it until the grain of the wood looked like the ripples in brown river ice. The castle—the high superstructure that held the pulleys and the harness-cords—rose twelve feet into the gloom of the rafters, strung with hundreds of lead weights that hung like drying fish from hempen cords.

"Well," Alethea said aloud to the empty loft, the single syllable falling dead among the beams. "You haven't shrunk."

She walked around the side frame, running her fingers along the timber. Most looms were made of seasoned beech or straight-grained ash—woods that stayed true and did not warp with the tension of five hundred pounds of stretched warp-threads. This frame was different. The uprights were made of bog oak, black as bog-butter and hard as basalt, but the horizontal members—the side-rails, the lay-cap, and the massive batten that swung the reed—were of an entirely different material.

They were pale. Not the yellow-white of boxwood or the clean, creamy white of holly, but a dull, porous ivory-gray, mottled with irregular brown streaks that looked like water-stains on old parchment.

She stopped by the batten. The wood here was cold, noticeably colder than the bog-oak posts. Where her fingers rested on the cross-beam that held the comb, the surface felt oddly oily, though no grease came away on her skin. It had a grain, but it was not the straight, parallel vascular grain of an ash tree. It was dense, convoluted, filled with microscopic pits like the end-grain of an antler, yet turned and planed with an exquisite, monstrous precision that no country carpenter could have achieved with a hand-adze.

"Walrus," she murmured, remembering a story an old sailor had told in the taproom at Yarmouth about the bone carvings the Greenlanders brought south. "Or whale-rib."

She looked closer at the joint where the batten met the swinging swords. There was no iron bolt there. The pivot was a simple pin of the same pale, dense substance, fitted so neatly into its mortise that after three hundred years of swinging, there was scarcely a hair’s breadth of play in the action.

The loom was not empty. A warp was mounted on it—five hundred yards, by the look of the massive warp-beam behind the heddles, though it was covered with a piece of tarred sailcloth to keep off the swallow-droppings from the rafters.

Alethea took the edge of the sailcloth and drew it back.

The dust rose in a slow, sparkling puff in the gray light from the gable window. Underneath lay three feet of finished cloth, still held under tension between the reed and the cloth-beam, untouched since Maude had laid down her shuttle for the last time.

Alethea drew her breath in through her teeth.

She had worked in the finest silk mills in Spitalfields during her three years in the south; she had handled French damasks that cost twenty guineas a yard, woven with threads so fine forty of them could pass through the eye of a needle together.

This was not silk. It was not wool, nor linen, nor any cotton that ever came out of the Indies.

The fabric was a twill, three-ply, woven with a density that seemed impossible for a hand-loom. It had no color—or rather, it had the color of an unwashed sheep’s fleece seen through milk, a pearlescent, curdled white that caught the gray light from the window and turned it faintly silver. But it was the thread itself that held her.

It was impossibly smooth. It lacked the tiny, fuzzing hairs of wool; it lacked the slight, irregular slubs of linen; it lacked the cold, glassy uniformity of silk. When she touched it with the ball of her thumb, it did not feel like cloth at all. It felt like cool, wet stone that had been dried in a warm wind. It had an elasticity that made the breast-beam hum slightly when she pressed down on the web, a low, resonant vibration that travelled up through her forearms and vibrated behind her collarbones.

"What did you spin, Maude?" she whispered.

Beside the seat-board sat a wicker basket containing three shuttles. They were long, boat-shaped things, fifteen inches from tip to tip, tipped with iron points that were rusted into red scabs. But the bodies of the shuttles were made of that same pale, hard material as the batten—curved, hollowed out with small gouges, the grain running longitudinally like the fibers of a great beef-bone split for the kettle.

In the belly of the top shuttle, a quill was still mounted on its steel spindle.

The thread remaining on the pirn was thin as a horsehair, wound with an evenness that spoke of a miraculous spinning-wheel. Alethea lifted the shuttle. It was heavy—twice the weight of a pear-wood shuttle of the same size. She pulled two inches of the thread free from the eyelet.

It didn't snap. She wrapped it around her forefinger and pulled, expecting the brittle failure of old flax or the dry rot that takes wool after five years in a damp house.

The thread cut into her flesh.

She gasped, dropping the shuttle. A single, bright drop of red welled from the groove the strand had bitten into the side of her knuckle. She put her finger to her mouth, tasting the sharp, metallic salt of her own blood, her eyes fixed on the thread hanging from the shuttle’s eye.

The strand was unbroken. Where it had sliced into her skin, it had not parted; it had merely taken a faint, pinkish smear, which seemed—she blinked, leaning closer in the dim light—to disappear. The curd-white fiber did not hold the stain. It absorbed it. Within five seconds, the thread was as pale and blank as before, though it seemed slightly less stiff, curling in the draft from the floorboards like an eel in a puddle.

"Alethea!"

The shout came from below, muffled by the ceiling timbers. Clout was hammering on the bottom of the stairs with his ash stick.

"There’s a man here from the parish!" the old man bawled. "Brought a cart! Says he’s come for the dead-dues!"

Alethea wiped her hand on her apron, her thumb still throbbing with that clean, paper-cut sting. She looked at the loom once more—at the vast, silent cage of bog-oak and bone-colored timber, at the pale web waiting under the gray dust, and at the long, empty shuttle resting on the bench like an open jaw.

"I’m coming," she called back, her voice level and steady, though her heart was hammering against her ribs like a treadle in an apprentice’s hand. She reached out and pulled the tarred sailcloth back over the warp, covering the white cloth until the loft was once more nothing but dust, shadows, and the smell of ancient fat.

The parish collector was a small, sour man named Hobb whose woollen coat had turned the color of ditch-water under the unending fen mists. He stood by the cold hearth, turning his felt hat around in his hands as though searching for a dry spot to set it down. A two-wheeled handcart waited outside the porch, its floorboards slick with rain and carrying nothing more than three empty sacks and an iron-rimmed shovel.

"The churchwardens have an account, Mistress Ward," Hobb said, his voice whistling through a gap where his canine tooth should have been. "Three years of drainage tithes, the grave-pence for the north wall, and five shillings for the bell-toll. The late woman paid in twill when her fingers served her, but the vicar cannot eat wool, nor can he patch the vestry roof with yard-goods."

Alethea did not invite him to sit. She descended the final step of the chimney stair, her hands tucked inside the sleeves of her apron to hide the stinging cut on her knuckle. "The late woman left four sheep on the saltings," she said. "Take two for the tithe and one for the bell-toll. If the parson dislikes mutton, he may sell them to the drover from Wisbech."

"The sheep on the saltings are half-wild, mistress. No man with good sense goes chasing old Maude’s wethers through the samphire pools."

"Then you may learn sense by running after them," Alethea replied evenly. "Or you may take the road back to the village on an empty stomach. There is no silver in this hall, Master Hobb. If there were, the roof would not be weeping into the porridge bowls."

The collector squinted past her toward the stair, his eyes resting on the heavy oak door above. "The gentlemen from the Antiquarian Society spoke of timber. They said the parish might claim against the contents of the house if the arrears exceeded twenty sovereigns."

Clout, still perched on the settle with his ash stick across his knees, let out a dry sound that might have been a laugh or an old cough. "The gentlemen from Norwich would find their backs broken before they carried half a beam down that snail-stair," the old man wheezed. "And the rot has got into the mortises. You'd have nothing to show for your trouble but three sacks of gray sawdust."

Hobb hesitated, glancing between the young woman’s steady, unyielding stare and the old man’s dismissive posture. In the fens, men did not press the Wards lightly; the family had inhabited the gravel rise since the great drainage works of the Dutchmen had first broken the bog, and their eccentricities were viewed with a mixture of neighborly contempt and superstitious caution.

"I will take the wethers," Hobb said at last, setting his jaw with ill grace. "Two for the parish, and the third for my trouble in herding them off the salting. But the grave-pence remains on the ledger. Parson will want his five shillings come Lady Day, or the sexton will be out with his mattock."

"He will find cold clay where he digs," Alethea said. "Good day, Master Hobb."

She watched through the leaded panes of the casement as the man dragged his handcart toward the sheep-folds, his boots throwing up greasy clods of fen mud. The encounter had bought her time, but nothing else. The house was bare, the larders were empty, and the thin skin of credit that had sustained her great-aunt was gone.

When the collector’s cart had vanished behind the gorse-covered dyke, Alethea turned back to Clout. "Where are the journals?"

The old man stroked his chin with a crooked thumb. "Which journals would those be?"

"Do not play the fool, Master Clout. Aunt Maude kept no books for the bailiff, but she was an apprentice of the old guild. No weaver mounts a five-hundred-yard warp without a draft-book. I saw the cloth upstairs. It was not drawn from memory. The pattern is too complex, the tie-up too dense for an old woman’s head."

Clout sighed, his cataract-ringed eyes drifting toward the hearth. The chimney breast was massive, built of rough-dressed stone taken from some ruined priory, its mantle an oak balk six feet across. In the soot-blackened recess where the crane hung, a small iron plate was set flush with the masonry.

"She kept the draft-books in the ash-hole," Clout muttered. "Said the damp wouldn't reach them there, so long as the birch-logs kept burning. She was particular about the wood, was Maude. Never burned willow. Said willow smoke made the heddles cough."

Alethea knelt on the cold hearthstone, disregarding the gray powder that coated her skirts. The iron plate was stiff with grease and carbon, but it yielded when she worked the edge with her bodkin. Behind the plate lay a dry cavity lined with sheepskins, their wool turned yellow with age. Inside the wraps rested two thick volumes bound in thick, alum-tawed calfskin that had resisted the rot of the fens.

She lifted them out. They were heavy, their covers stamped with no title, only a series of small, geometric indentations that resembled the teeth of a comb. The upper cover bore a faint, persistent scent—not of leather or paper, but of animal grease and lime, the same clean, mineral odor that lingered about the upper loft.

Carrying the books to the rough deal table beneath the window, she opened the first volume. The paper was Dutch rag, thick and creamy, but the ink was an odd, faded sepia that lacked the purple tinge of iron-gall.

The pages were filled with intricate weaving drafts: grid patterns of astonishing density, showing eight-shaft and twelve-shaft arrangements, tie-ups, and treadling sequences that defied every principle of standard English manufacture. Beside the drafts were short, terse notes written in her great-aunt’s sharp, spidery hand.

1794. Michaelmas. Set forty score in the reed. Weft taken from the drover’s boy who drowned in the High Fen lode. Short staple, brittle in the draw, but took the tension after three washings in lye. Spun twelve bobbins. Cloth finished firm, without luster.

1802. Martinmas. A good yield from the cellar at the old mill. Ten score warp, four-ply. The comb runs clean. No knotting in the sheds. A cloth of great endurance.

Alethea turned the leaf, her brow furrowed. The technical diagrams were impeccable; the mathematics of the harness-ties were worked out with an elegance that would have earned a prize from the Society of Arts in London. Yet the margin notes spoke of the material in terms that made no sense in any mill she had ever known. Weavers spoke of long-wool, of greasy fleeces, of tow, of reetted flax, of organzine and tram. Maude Ward wrote of the boiling, the scrape, and the pressing.

She opened the second volume. Here the hand was different—older, broader, written with a quill that had split and been re-cut many times. The dates ran backward into the previous century, through the reigns of the Georges to the year of the Great Frost.

To Prepare the Core, a heading read, lettered in stiff, formal black-letter that looked like an apothecary’s receipt.

Take only the long pipes of the limbs, where the tallow is thick and clear. Let them not lie in the soil until the black rot enters, for the black rot makes the thread snap at the heddle-eye. Boil three times with potash and the ashes of burnt elder-wood until the grease floats free upon the copper. The white marrow that remains within must be drawn while warm, through the horn plates, before the cold thickens the fat. Thus is the strand made that will neither rot in the salt nor burn in the brazier.

Alethea sat motionless, the book held flat beneath her thumbs.

The light from the fen was dying, the gray afternoon sinking into an early, watery dusk that made the black timbers of the room seem to lean inward. Down in the hearth, an ember of birch-wood broke with a small, brittle snap, sending a brief spark up the chimney.

"Master Clout," she said, her voice dropping into the quiet of the room.

The old man did not look up from his stick. He had pulled his woollen scarf higher around his neck, until only his tufted gray brows and the red tip of his nose were visible in the shadow of the settle.

"She told you where she found the wood for the frame, did she not?" Alethea asked. "The pale wood. The batten and the swords."

"I was a boy when her father brought the timbers in from the Wash," Clout said, his words coming slow and measured, like the tick of an ungreased clock. "A Dutch schooner had broken her back on the sand-spit two miles out. The sea-bailiff took the brandy, and the carters took the salt-beef, but old Reuben Ward took the ballast from the floor of the hold. Said it was Spanish work. Said the Spaniards knew how to build a frame that wouldn't yield to the damp."

"That is not timber, Clout."

The old man remained silent for a long space. Outside, the wind had begun to move through the reeds, producing that dry, rattling hiss that sounded like hundreds of knives scraping together in the dark.

"I have wound the bobbins sixty years, Alethea," he whispered. "I know what goes into the creel, and I know what comes off the cloth-beam. When the trade went south to the coal towns, and the folk in Norwich took to wearing Manchester cotton that falls apart after three washings, the Wards kept their roof because the cloth from Blackwater does not wear out. A coat of that twill will keep a man dry in the middle of the Wash. It will turn an adder's bite. It will outlast the flesh that wears it."

"And the thread?" she asked, her hand moving unconsciously to the cut on her knuckle. The skin there felt tight, the flesh around the scratch pale and devoid of the usual swelling that accompanied a wound from dirty machinery. "Where did she get the fiber?"

"From where the marsh gives it," Clout said, his voice flat and hard. "The fens are deep, girl. They have been burying men in the peat since the Romans built the banks. Sometimes the water cuts a new ditch, and things come up that haven't seen the sun since King Harry broke the abbeys. Sometimes a stranger loses the track between the Cross Keys and the churchyard. The earth does not keep what it cannot hold."

Alethea closed the book with a heavy, dead sound. The alum-tawed leather was cool against her palms. In Norwich, she had seen men lose arms to the driving belts of the steam engines; she had seen girls cough their lungs into their aprons from the flax-dust until their faces turned the color of lard. The textile world was not gentle; it fed on human labor with an appetite that was measurable in bushels of grain and hundredweights of coal.

She stood up and walked to the window. Across the flats, three miles to the west, the lantern of Blackwater church tower glowed like a dying coal against the purple peat-hags. The damp was already climbing through the stone footings of the house, bringing with it that sharp, clean scent from the floor above—a smell that was neither meat nor wood, but the lime-dry residue of something that had ceased to be living long ago.

"The warp is dry," she said, looking out into the gathering dark. "It has been standing in the cold too long. If it is not worked, the sizing will cake, and the heddles will stick."

Clout raised his head, his milky eyes catching the last gray gleam from the window. "You mean to treadle it?"

"I have twelve shillings to my name, Master Clout, and the parish bailiff knows the path to our door," Alethea replied, turning back toward the cold center of the room. "I am a weaver of the seven-year guild. I do not let a good harness sit idle while there is weft in the basket."

"There is only one pirn wound," the old man said, his jaw working again. "The one in the boat-shuttle. She finished that before she took to her bed. There is nothing left in the chest to fill another."

Alethea looked at the small iron door in the chimney breast, then down at the book bound in white hide that lay upon the table.

"Then we will have to look to the cellar," she said. "The late woman was thrifty. She would not have warped sixty yards of reed without leaving the means to fill the web."