“Fourteen hours a day we laboured there. Sixteen when business was brisk. Well, we thought we knew what work was, had all of us been picking oakum for years, but this was different. Cotton yarn will snap in the cold so they keep the machine room hot enough to grow lemons. And the air is thick with fly, little bits of cotton that get up your nose, get in your throat, wad up your lungs. As for the noise in there, I did not hear the equal of it until I stood in my first battle.”

Medina listened closely, in part because he was interested, in part because he knew Calley wished him to, that he was saying more perhaps than he had said before to anyone. Many of the words were new to him—the strange language of the work—but he let them go, not wanting to interrupt. The creeler, the gaffer, the carding room. The winding stroke. Doffing and piecing. As they rode under the broken green roof of a larch coppice, Calley stopped his horse to sketch in the air the wheels and pulleys of the frames. He was angry when Medina said he understood. He began again. “Here are the bobbins, here are the spindles. When it does this it’s called drawing out. When it does this it’s called putting up.”

They went on, bare hills now, and to the left of them, the distant crystal bloom of sea light.

“My first employment,” said Calley, “was as a piecer. I would mend broken threads . . . ” He raised a hand to show Medina how it was done, the quick twist between thumb and finger. “A piecer must also serve the machine by cleaning it and this is the most dangerous work. You run in low under the yarn, never letting it touch your back. Miss your timing you lose your fingers, or worse. There was a girl called Lizzie Bentley from the spike in Southwark. It pleased her to call me her brother though I was no more her brother than I am yours. She had ginger hair for a start. Anyway, the dozy cow slipped when she was under the machine and the belt caught her hand and took off her arm at the shoulder. She was nine. The blood was like water spun from a twirl mop . . . ”

“But she lived?” asked Medina.

“She lived. They gave her a job running messages, one arm being enough to carry a piece of paper with.”

He was quiet then. Medina dozed in the saddle, was roused by rain on his cheek. Ahead of them the road ran down into another valley—a church, a bridge and five tall chimneys, their smoke slightly paler than the sky. Calley started to talk again—or perhaps he had been talking all the while. His theme now was discipline.