The Lace Runner of Nottingham

• Chapter 1 Thread and Candlelight
• Chapter 2 The Narrow Lanes of Nottingham
• Chapter 3 The Sound of the Frames
• Chapter 4 Bread and Bitter Tea
• Chapter 5 Whispers in the Workshop
• Chapter 6 The Name of Ned Ludd
• Chapter 7 Shadows on the Cobbles
• Chapter 8 The Master's Ledger
• Chapter 9 A Secret in the Cellar
• Chapter 10 The Broken Shuttle
• Chapter 11 Night of the Hammers
• Chapter 12 Splinters and Sparks
• Chapter 13 The Watchman's Lantern
• Chapter 14 Blood on the Lace
• Chapter 15 Silence After the Storm
• Chapter 16 Redcoats in the Market Square
• Chapter 17 The Informer's Coin
• Chapter 18 A Hiding Place in the Attic
• Chapter 19 The Trial at the Shire Hall
• Chapter 20 Letters from Sherwood
• Chapter 21 The Midnight Raid
• Chapter 22 Running Through the Mist
• Chapter 23 The Last Frame Standing
• Chapter 24 Ashes and Iron
• Chapter 25 A New Pattern
• Chapter 26 Beyond the Looms

The tallow candle was dying, and it smelled like a boiled sheep.

Hannah leaned closer to the wooden frame, squinting until her eyelashes nearly brushed the taut white net. If the wick guttered out before she finished the final sprig of leaves, she would have to wait for dawn, and dawn in January was a stingy thing that did not arrive until half past seven. By then, Mr. Higginbotham’s warehouse would already be open, and the women who arrived late got the worst pieces of net—the ones with knots in the mesh and grease spots from the machines.

She pinched the wick between her thumb and forefinger, snuffing off the black, mushrooming crust. The flame jumped, steadied, and cast a greasy yellow pool across the table. For a moment, the tiny hexagonal holes of the bobbin-net stood out sharp and clear.

Under two, over one, pull.

The brass needle slid through the cotton mesh with a faint shhhk. Hannah’s fingers were twelve years old, small enough to be nimble and calloused enough not to bleed when the thread pulled tight. Around her, the garret was silent save for the scratch of her needle, the wet rattle of her mother’s breathing from the other side of the table, and the rhythmic, whistling snore of her seven-year-old brother, Billy, buried somewhere under a mound of ragged coats in the corner.

"You’re hunched again, Hannah," her mother said without looking up. Her own needle never paused. "Your back’ll set like a crooked stick before you’re fifteen."

"If I sit straight, I can’t see the holes," Hannah replied.

"Then squint less and feel more. Your grandmother could run a whole veil in the dark."

Hannah doubted that. Grandmother had gone blind at forty, which suggested she had done plenty of squinting in her time, whatever the family legends said. Still, Hannah rolled her shoulders back, wincing as a knot of muscle between her blades gave a sharp, hot pop. She had been at the frame since four o’clock that morning, and before that, from six until eleven the night before. Five hours of sleep on a straw pallet did not do much to unbend a spine.

The net stretched before her was a wedding veil, though Hannah had never seen a bride who looked like the ones in the ladies’ magazines Mr. Higginbotham kept on his counter. Those ladies had waists the size of teacup handles and necks like swans. Hannah’s mother had a neck like a plucked goose, corded with muscle from leaning over lace frames, and her waist had disappeared somewhere between Billy’s birth and the third winter of the French wars.

Under two, over one, pull.

The pattern was a simple one: a border of trailing ivy and small, five-petalled roses. In the trade, they called it "tambouring" or "running," depending on whether you used a hook or a needle. Hannah used a needle. It was slower, perhaps, than the girls who worked the tambour frames down in the Meadows, but her stitches were tighter. Mr. Higginbotham rarely docked her pay for loose ends.

"How much left?" her mother asked.

"Half a rose. Then the stem."

"Good. The tallow won’t last another quarter-hour."

As if it had heard her, the candle flame dipped, turning blue at the base before flaring up again with a faint hiss. A single drop of melted fat detached itself from the rim and slid down the side of the tallow, pooling on the scarred oak table. Hannah watched it harden into a milky, translucent tear. If a drop like that fell on the net, the veil was ruined. You could scrape it with a fingernail, and you could press it with a warm iron and brown paper, but the grease always left a ghost—a dull, yellow smudge that Mr. Higginbotham’s clerk could spot from across the counting room. And if you spoiled a piece of net, you paid for it out of your wages. At three farthings an hour, a spoiled veil meant working a week for nothing.

Hannah blew softly on the flame, steadying it, and returned to her rose.

The garret was cold enough that she could see her breath if she exhaled slowly. Frost had crept across the inside of the single, four-paned window, forming fern-like patterns that mocked the ivy on her frame. There was no fire in the small grate. Coal was sixpence a hundredweight now, and what little they had was saved for the evenings when her father came home from the workshop, his hands stiff from the iron levers of his stocking frame.

He wasn’t home tonight. He hadn’t been home since Tuesday.

Hannah didn’t ask where he was. She knew better than to ask. When the men went out after dark these days, they didn’t go to the Ram or the Trip to Jerusalem just for ale. They went to talk in low voices behind closed shutters, and when they came back, they smelled of damp wool and cold iron, and their eyes were too bright.

"Billy," her mother murmured, glancing toward the corner. "He’s kicked the coat off again."

Hannah set her needle down, careful to thread it through the edge of the wooden frame so it wouldn’t drop through the cracks in the floorboards. Lost needles were another expense. She stood up, her knees cracking like dry twigs, and walked over to the pallet.

Billy was curled into a tight ball, his knees tucked up to his chin, his mouth slightly open. A thin line of drool had frozen—or nearly frozen—on his chin. He was wearing his shirt, his breeches, and two pairs of woollen stockings that Hannah had darned so many times they were more darn than stocking. She pulled the heavy, moth-eaten greatcoat back over his shoulders and tucked it firmly around his feet.

He stirred, muttered something that sounded like pudding, and went back to snoring.

Hannah smiled faintly. Billy hadn’t seen a proper suet pudding since Michaelmas. These days, supper was usually oatmeal porridge thinned with water, or a heel of bread rubbed with an onion if they were lucky. Sometimes, when her father had a good week—which hadn’t happened since October—there was a scrap of bacon fat to melt over the oats.

She returned to the table, rubbing her hands together to coax the feeling back into her fingertips. The skin around her thumbnails was rough and split from the dry winter air and the constant friction of the cotton thread. She had a small tin of goose grease on the windowsill, saved from a Christmas dinner two years ago, though it had gone rancid long since. Still, it kept the cracks from bleeding, and blood on white lace was worse than tallow.

"Here," her mother said, sliding a chipped earthenware mug across the table. "There’s a drop left. It’s cold, mind."

Hannah took the mug. It held weak, twice-steeped tea, the colour of dishwater, with no sugar and no milk. She drank it in two gulps anyway. It wet her throat and settled like a cold stone in her stomach, which was better than having nothing in her stomach at all.

"Thank you, Mam."

Her mother didn’t answer. She was squinting at her own piece of net—a broad length of edging meant for a lady’s petticoat. Her eyes were red-rimmed and watery, the lids swollen from too many hours by candlelight. Hannah’s mother was thirty-four, though the neighbours often took her for fifty. Ten years at the lace frame and five children—only two of whom had lived past their third winter—had pared her down to bone and sinew.

Hannah picked up her needle and bent over the veil once more.

Under two, over one, pull.

The final rose took shape under her fingers. It was a clever thing, really, how a few inches of cotton thread could turn a plain square of machine-made net into something a fine lady in London would pay a guinea for. Hannah had never been to London, and she had never seen a guinea, though she knew what a shilling looked like—and a sixpence, and a penny, and the dull, heavy copper of a farthing. She knew that if she finished this veil before seven o’clock, and if Mr. Higginbotham didn’t find fault with the tension of her stitches, she would get ninepence. Her mother’s edging would bring another shilling.

One shilling and ninepence. That would buy half a stone of flour, a pennyworth of salt, two tallow candles, and perhaps a quarter-pound of cheese if the grocer was in a generous mood. It would not buy coal, and it would not pay the rent, which was three shillings a week and already two weeks behind.

"Listen," her mother said suddenly.

Hannah froze, her needle halfway through a stitch.

Outside, in the narrow court below their window, the cobbles were silent. No cartwheels rattled; no watchman called the hour. Then she heard it—a faint, distant clack-clack-clack, like wooden spoons hitting a table, followed by the heavy, measured thud of boots.

Not one pair of boots. Several. Moving fast, but trying to be quiet.

Hannah looked at her mother. In the dying light of the candle, her mother’s face looked carved from grey tallow.

"Is it Da?" Hannah whispered.

"Hush," her mother said. "Keep your head down. Mind your needle."

The footsteps passed the mouth of the court, muffled by the freezing fog that always clung to the lower parts of Nottingham. They didn’t turn in. Within a few seconds, the sound faded toward the Broad Marsh, swallowed by the labyrinth of alleys and workshops.

Hannah let out the breath she had been holding. Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

"They’re out late," she said softly.

"Too late," her mother muttered. She reached out and snuffed the candle with her wet fingers.

The garret plunged into sudden, absolute darkness.

"Mam! I only had three stitches left!"

"Then you’ll do them by the window," her mother said sharply. "Look there. The sky’s turning."

Hannah blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Slowly, the four panes of the window emerged from the gloom, no longer pitch black, but a dull, bruised purple. The frost on the glass caught the faintest hint of grey from the east, beyond the roofs of the town.

She stood up, lifted her wooden frame carefully, and carried it to the windowsill. Leaning her hip against the cold plaster wall, she tilted the net toward the faint light. It was barely enough to see the mesh, let alone count the threads, so she worked by touch as much as sight, her thumb guiding the point of the needle into the tiny hexagonal gaps.

Under two, over one, pull.

One stitch. Two. Three.

She tied off the thread with a double knot, small and neat so it wouldn’t show on the right side of the veil, and snipped the loose end with her teeth. The cotton tasted dusty and faintly metallic.

"Done," she said.

Her mother didn’t reply at first. She was still sitting at the table in the dark, her hands resting in her lap. For a moment, Hannah thought she had fallen asleep sitting up, as she sometimes did when the work was slow. Then her mother sighed—a long, rattling sound that ended in a cough—and pushed her chair back.

"Fold it," her mother said. "Wrap it in the clean cloth. Don’t let Billy’s boots near it."

Hannah unpinned the veil from the wooden frame. Without the tension of the pegs, the net shrank slightly, becoming soft and cobwebby in her hands. She laid it flat on the table, folded it into neat squares, and wrapped it in a scrap of bleached linen that they kept solely for carrying finished work to the warehouse.

By the time she had tied the bundle with a bit of twine, the grey light at the window had strengthened enough to show the bare, peeling walls of the garret, the cracked hearthstone, and the dark lump of Billy under his coat.

"Should I wake him?" Hannah asked.

"Leave him be," her mother said, reaching for her shawl. "If he’s asleep, he’s not hungry. We’ll be back before he stirs."

Hannah slipped her arms into her own coat—a thin, faded woollen thing that had belonged to her older sister, Sarah, before the fever took her two winters ago. The sleeves were too short now, leaving two inches of red, chapped wrist exposed to the air. She tucked her hands into her armpits to keep them warm and picked up the linen bundle.

She paused at the door, looking back at the table. The stub of the tallow candle sat in a puddle of its own grease, a black, smoking smear on the wood. Tonight, they would need another one. Tonight, she would start another veil, or perhaps a dozen pairs of lace-trimmed cuffs, depending on what Mr. Higginbotham had in the baskets.

Her mother opened the door, and a gust of damp, freezing air rushed up the narrow wooden stairs, carrying with it the smell of coal smoke, horse dung, and the sour, wet wool of a hundred neighbouring cottages.

Hannah stepped out onto the landing, pulled the door shut behind her, and followed her mother down into the dark.

The stairs groaned under their feet, each tread worn into a shallow trough by fifty years of wooden clogs and leather boots. Hannah kept one hand on the greasy plaster wall to steady herself, clutching the linen bundle against her ribs with the other. Below them, a door stood ajar on the first-floor landing, letting out a thin ribbon of cabbage-water steam and the sharp, rhythmic thwack-thwack of a woman beating a rug.

"Morning, Mrs. Gadsby," Hannah’s mother called out, not stopping.

"Morning, Martha," a voice wheezed from the gloom. "You’re off early. There’s ice on the kennel."

"Aye. Best get it over with before the frost turns to mire."

They stepped out into the court. It was a narrow, sunless well of brick and timber called Tinker’s Yard, though no tinker had lived there in living memory. Six cottages faced six others across a strip of cobbles no wider than a handcart. In the centre, the shared privy leaned drunkenly against a coal-house, its door hanging by a single leather hinge. A grey mist hung low over the roofs, trapping the coal smoke from a dozen chimneys so that the air tasted faintly of soot and wet ash.

Hannah shivered, pulling her thin sleeves down over her knuckles. Her boots—cast-offs from a cousin in Sneinton—were half a size too big, and she had stuffed the toes with scraps of old woollen stocking to keep them from slipping off. They were stiff with dried mud from the day before, and the cold seeped straight through the thin soles.

"Keep up, Hannah," her mother said, already turning into the covered passage that led out of the yard.

The passage was so narrow that two men could not have passed each other without turning sideways. Above them, the upper storeys of the houses jutted out, nearly kissing in the middle, blotting out the pale grey strip of sky. Hannah liked the passage well enough in summer, when it was cool, but in January it was a wind tunnel. A gust caught her skirts, whipping the damp hem against her calves.

They emerged onto Narrow Marsh, and the smell hit them at once.

It was a thick, heavy stench that belonged entirely to the bottom of the town—a brew of rotting hides from the tanneries along the River Leen, horse dung, stale beer, and the sour, chemical tang of dye-vats. Hannah barely noticed it anymore, except on mornings like this when the frost held the smells close to the ground.

The street was already stirring. A boy no older than Billy was pushing a barrow piled with turnips, his bare knees purple with cold. Two women in faded shawls hurried past in the opposite direction, their heads bowed against the damp air, each carrying a small bundle wrapped in white cloth just like Hannah’s. They nodded to Martha, their faces pinched and grey.

"Mind the gutter," Martha said, catching Hannah by the elbow.

The open drain running down the middle of the lane was frozen over, a crust of dirty, yellowish ice hiding the sluggish water beneath. Yesterday, Hannah had seen a carter’s horse slip on that same ice and go down with a crash of splintered shafts, cursing the air blue while the driver laid into its flanks with a whip. She stepped carefully over the crust, her wooden pattens—strapped over her boots to keep her skirts out of the filth—clacking loudly on the cobbles.

Clack-clack. Clack-clack.

It was the same sound they had heard in the dark an hour ago, only slower, and without the urgency.

Hannah glanced back over her shoulder toward the mouth of Tinker’s Yard. The mist was thicker down by the river, swallowing the lower roofs. Somewhere out there, in one of the cramped workshops or the back rooms of the alehouses, her father was either sleeping off a night of talking or walking home with his hands in his pockets. She wondered if he had eaten. She wondered if he had his coat buttoned.

"Look where you’re going, girl," her mother snapped, though not unkindly. "You’ll turn an ankle, and then who’ll run the net?"

Hannah turned her eyes forward. They were passing the Old Angel, its shutters still bolted tight, a stray dog nosing at a pile of frozen cabbage leaves by the step. Next to it stood the bakery, where a thin line of women had already formed outside the door, waiting for the first batch of seconds bread. The baker’s boy was chalking the morning’s prices onto a slate hung by the lintel.

Hannah squinted at the figures. Fourteen pence for a quartern loaf. Last winter it had been ten. The winter before that, eight.

"Robbery," a woman in the queue muttered, loud enough for the boy to hear. "Half of it’s alum and sawdust anyway."

The boy didn’t look up. He just finished his four, wiped his chalky fingers on his apron, and went back inside, slamming the door against the cold.

They left Narrow Marsh behind, turning left toward the steep, winding ascent of Drury Hill. This was the old way up into the town, a narrow gorge of leaning timber-framed houses that seemed to climb over one another’s shoulders to reach the top of the sandstone cliff. The cobbles here were slick with frost and grease, tilted at an angle that made Hannah’s calves ache within twenty paces.

Halfway up the hill, they had to press themselves flat against a butcher’s shuttered window to let a coal-cart rattle past. The driver walked beside his horse, a sackcloth cape over his shoulders, his breath pluming white in the cold air. The iron-rimmed wheels ground against the stone, sending up a shower of sparks and a smell of hot iron.

"Morning, missus," the carter called to Martha, touching his cap. "Cold enough to freeze the brass off a monkey."

"Aye, and coal at sixpence," Martha replied tartly. "You’ll be riding in a carriage by spring, Will."

The carter barked a short, dry laugh. "Not me, missus. The master gets the carriage. I just get the chilblains."

He clicked his tongue at the horse, and the cart lurched on down the hill, leaving behind the rich, dark smell of coal dust. Hannah’s fingers itched to reach down and scoop up a few stray lumps that had bounced off the back of the wagon, but she knew better. The street boys would be on them like sparrows before she could even unstrap her pattens.

At the top of Drury Hill, the world changed.

The stench of the tanneries faded, replaced by the sharper, cleaner smell of woodsmoke and roasting coffee. The streets widened—not grandly, for Nottingham was an old town and built tight, but enough for two carriages to pass without scraping their hubs. The houses here were of red brick, tall and straight, with proper sash windows and brass knockers polished until they caught the pale morning light.

Hannah always walked a little slower here, letting her eyes wander over the curtains—heavy damask and crisp white muslin, some of it edged with the very same lace she spent twelve hours a day running in her garret. It was strange to think that a piece of net she had squinted over by a farthing candle might end up hanging in a parlour window on Bridlesmith Gate, or pinned to the bonnet of a merchant’s wife as she stepped into her pew at St. Mary’s.

"Don’t gawk," her mother murmured, though Hannah noticed she was looking too—not at the curtains, but at a maidservant kneeling on a doorstep, scrubbing the white stone with a block of hearthstone. The girl’s hands were as red and raw as Hannah’s, though her apron was clean.

They turned onto Bridlesmith Gate, where the shops were beginning to unbar their shutters. A haberdasher’s apprentice was setting out bolts of ribbon in his bow window, and a chemist was lighting the coloured glass globes in his display, turning the frost on the panes into glowing pools of ruby and emerald.

Outside the Flying Horse, a small crowd had gathered around a wooden post. Hannah craned her neck as they passed. A fresh broadsheet had been pasted to the wood, the paste still wet and glistening at the edges. Most of the men looking at it couldn’t read—Hannah knew that much, for her father couldn’t, though he could count stitches better than any clerk—but one man in a decent woollen coat was reading it aloud in a flat, carrying voice.

"...whereas divers evil-disposed persons, unlawfully assembling in the night-time, have broken and destroyed sundry stocking-frames..."

Martha’s hand tightened on Hannah’s shoulder, urging her past without breaking stride.

"...a reward of fifty pounds..." the man’s voice followed them down the street, before it was swallowed by the clatter of a milkman’s pails.

"Fifty pounds," Hannah whispered, once they were out of earshot. She couldn’t even picture what fifty pounds looked like. It was more money than her father would earn in three years, even if the frames were running full-time.

"Blood money," her mother said shortly. "And no good ever came of it. Keep your eyes on the stones, Hannah."

They turned off Bridlesmith Gate and cut through the churchyard of St. Mary’s. The great church loomed above them, its tower lost in the low grey cloud, the gravestones tilting at odd angles in the frozen turf. A flock of rooks hopped among the tombs, their feathers puffed out against the chill, watching the two women with bright, bead-black eyes.

Beyond the churchyard lay the Lace Market—a warren of narrow streets, tall brick warehouses, and counting-houses where the air hummed with a different kind of business. Even at seven in the morning, Stoney Street was busy. Porters in leather aprons were hauling bales of raw cotton up to the third-floor hoists, shouting warnings to the passers-by below. Clerks in black coats and tall hats hurried along the pavements, their noses buried in woollen scarves, carrying ledgers tucked under their arms like Bibles.

And everywhere, there were women.

They came from the Marsh, from Sneinton, from Broad Marsh and Goose Gate, converging on the warehouses like ants returning to a hill. Some were old, their backs curved into permanent question marks from fifty years over the frame. Some were younger than Hannah, eight or nine years old, trotting beside their mothers with their own small bundles tucked under their chins. None of them wore bonnets; they couldn’t afford the ribbons. They wore shawls pinned tight under their chins, or old men’s caps pulled down over their ears.

"There’s Lizzie," Hannah said, spotting a familiar figure leaning against the iron railings outside Mr. Higginbotham’s courtyard.

Lizzie was thirteen, tall for her age, with a mop of ginger hair that refused to stay tucked under her cap and a gap between her front teeth where a shuttle had caught her when she was six. She was stamping her feet on the cobbles to keep the blood moving, blowing on her bare knuckles.

"Morning, Hannah," Lizzie called out as they approached. "Morning, Mrs. Weaver. You’re late. Cripps has been at the window twice already, looking down his nose like a frozen herring."

"We’re not late," Martha said, glancing up at the clock on St. Mary’s tower, which was just visible through the gap between two warehouses. The iron hands stood at ten minutes past seven. "The doors don’t open till the quarter."

"Aye, well, tell that to Mrs. Fletcher," Lizzie said, jerking her thumb toward the head of the queue. "She’s been here since six. Reckons if she’s first in, she’ll get the fine net instead of the coarse."

"She’s a fool, then," Martha muttered, taking her place at the back of the line. "Cripps gives the fine net to whoever he’s sweet on, or whoever’s husband drinks at the same alehouse as his brother. Time of day’s got nothing to do with it."

Hannah stood close to her mother, sharing the meagre warmth of her woollen shawl. The queue already stretched halfway down the narrow alley that led to the warehouse’s back door. Above them, the brick walls rose four storeys high, blank and soot-blackened, save for the long rows of small-paned windows on the top floor.

From behind those windows came a faint, muffled vibration—a rhythmic, metallic shudder that Hannah could feel through the soles of her boots, even before she heard it.

The heavy wooden door at the end of the alley creaked. A bolt slid back with a sharp clack.

The women in the queue stopped talking at once. Shoulders straightened; bundles were shifted from left arms to right; shawls were adjusted. Hannah’s stomach gave a tight, nervous twist, the cold tea sloshing uncomfortably inside her.

The door swung inward, and Mr. Cripps stood on the threshold, a brass-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his long, red nose, and a ledger tucked under his arm.

"Single file," he barked, his voice cutting through the morning mist. "And wipe your feet on the scraper. I’m not having Marsh mud tracked across my counting-room floor."

The line shuffled forward, one slow step at a time, into the dark mouth of the warehouse.