Her friend Ruth, who worked beside her, greeted her with a smile. It was too noisy to hold any conversation but they managed to convey their thoughts with sign language, Ruth making it plain she was cold, tired and wished it was time to go home already.

Bessie had worked hard to progress to being a four-loom weaver, but running four looms took a lot of concentration and she was kept busy all day knowing that the cost of any mistakes or flaws would be docked from her wages and make her father cross. It was very different from her grandfather’s handloom that she’d been thinking about earlier. There was no chance here to take ten minutes for a breath of fresh air and a cup of tea. Once the engines began to turn, the looms worked without stopping until dinner time.

Bessie was a conscientious worker and she prided herself on her skills. She found it difficult to hide her jealousy of her sister though. All her life she’d seemed to live in Peggy’s shadow, with their father telling everyone that Peggy was the clever one, the quick one, the pretty one. There’d been no question of Peggy leaving school at thirteen to work a twelve hour day in the mill. Their father had been adamant about that. No, Peggy was to be a schoolteacher and so she’d stayed on at the Girls’ School as a pupil-teacher. At first Bessie had enjoyed the reflected esteem. The other girls had admired her for having a big sister who was their teacher even if Peggy had sometimes been intolerably bossy. Bessie had hoped that her father would do the same for her. But as her thirteenth birthday had approached, he’d made it very clear that she was to go into the mill to learn to weave.

‘Book learnin’ won’t suit her,’ he’d told her mother as she’d hidden behind the kitchen door listening to them discuss her future. ‘She’s good with her hands. Weavin’ll suit her better.’

Her mother hadn’t argued. Not much anyway. And no one had asked her what she wanted. Once she was old enough, she’d had no choice but to leave the calm of the classroom for the frantic, deafening world of the cotton mill.

Lancashire, 1826

When Jennet and Titus Eastwood are forced to move from their idyllic cottage into the centre of Blackburn to find work in the cotton mills, their lives are changed in ways they could never have imagined and their new home on Paradise Lane is anything but …

Then Titus is arrested and sent to prison for attending a Reform meeting. Jennet is left to fend for herself and things go from bad to worse as she finds herself pregnant and alone – with another man’s child …

‘An engrossing tale of hardship, struggles, love and family. Well researched, perfect for fans of Catherine Cookson.’

Kitty Neale

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