Chapter 2
The Weaver of Canterbury
Marie sat back, her arms yet flung over the beater, her hands floating in mid-air, perfectly still as she drifted away from her work not for the first time today. It was hot. Hot and she wanted to be outside, with her feet bare and immersed in the River Stour. She closed her eyes, feeling the cool mud envelope her feet and the shallow water at river’s edge caress her ankles.
“Marie!”
She started, listed left, and hit her head on the frame of Monsieur Clarisse’s loom.
Jeanette snickered.
“If you do not warp that loom correctly and finish today, you will pay when Master Clarisse returns to it tomorrow.”
“It is so hot, Madame. Can we not open a window?”
“It is hot outside as well.”
“But there will at least be wind.”
“There is no wind,” Madame Clarisse replied. Marie gazed up from the heddles to meet her Mistress’s stern gaze. The woman’s mouth was perpetually drawn down in a frown, but not from a life of ill-temper. Marie always mused it was from the weight of her double chin, which was substantial. Something as weighty as that was bound to draw down what was above.
Marie smiled weakly. “Please?”
With a sigh, Madame Clarisse walked to the window. The wooden heels of her shoes clicked in time with the rhythmic banging of the beaters from her three other looms. She opened the window behind Marie and as she turned on her heel, she said, “Now you’ll have the insects to distract you.”
“Merci,” Marie said.
“Now work.”
Madame Clarisse shuffled across the weaving floor. Jeanette giggled again.
“Get to work, Jeanette,” she ordered over her shoulder as she threw open another window. Marie gazed in that direction and found Monsieur Faidherbe grinning at her, his long, gray hair hanging loosely from the ribbon at his neck.
“It is quite an act of trust, Marie Sedt, to be given the task of warping Monsieur Clarisse’s loom. Best not let love’s distraction send the threads twisting through those heddles.”
The man winked as he pulled the beater. Daniel, his draw boy, moved forward and began lifting and lowering the heddles to set up the next row to be woven. Marie pulled herself up from her knees and leaned further into her Master’s loom.
“I was not thinking of love, Monsieur. I was thinking of the river.”
Marie had threaded sixty-two heddles of the one hundred and eighty-two heddles needed for this work. She quickly inserted the last eight red, silk threads in her left hand through the remaining eight heddles and reached for the next bundle of ten.
She hadn’t lied, really. She was thinking of the river. But that was only in the few seconds before being barked at by her Mistress. Three seconds before that, she had been thinking of that Frenchman and as he passed through her mind again, she shook her head with a frown and focused on the work in front of her.
That Frenchman. That is what her father called him and he only called him that once, one and a half months ago. On a very, cool Sunday in early June, Marie and her family were at service in the French Church. She was singing and was overcome by a strange itch on her forehead. She moved her hand over her face as if brushing away an annoying insect, but it remained. So she looked up and found the warmest, brown eyes fixed upon her. She stared at them and they at her and in the silence between them, she could hear mumblings about God and Jesus Christ floating in the still air. Suddenly, the warm, brown eyes flicked away to her right. Startled, Marie followed them and found her father’s glare bearing down on her. Quickly she gazed down at her hands and dared not look up again until the service was over.
As they stepped from the church, her father growled under his breath, “Never are you to look upon that Frenchman again, Marie.”
Marie hadn’t meant to look at him. She hadn’t known of him or that he was French. Her gaze was an accident really. But Marie did know, of all things, her father’s dislike for the French and now that she knew the warm, brown eyes were French, she would never look upon them again. She knew better.
Her father, Corneille Sedt, had come over from the Spanish Netherlands in 1588 with his wife and two, young sons. He had been moving before that, endeavoring to stay clear of the religious conflict between the growing population of Protestants on the continent and the Catholic Church and its followers. He, himself, was a Protestant, but did not agree with the violent fervor of his Huguenot cousins. And it was those, especially in France, who made being Protestant more difficult – nee impossible – for Corneille.
They destroyed statues and defaced paintings. Idolatry, they called it, was abhorrent to their faith. Unfortunately, that idolatry was but the art of the soul to the Catholics and if there wasn’t distrust and dislike before, this destruction of property in the name of God brought on a fiery wrath. Thousands of Protestants were hunted down and murdered in France and this battle spilled right into the path of the young Corneille and his growing family. Thus, as many had been doing for several decades, Corneille, his wife, Jeanne, and his sons, Isaye and Samuel, boarded a boat in Antwerp and landed in Canterbury.
Here, as with most immigrants to a new place, they sought out their kind. In Canterbury, many of the French-speaking Protestants refugees had landed and the people of England in that area made a little room for them. Not out of kindness, mind. They were commanded to do so by their Queen. For these people, those the local folk called “the Strangers”, brought with them the master skill of fine silk weaving. No need to look to France any longer to import such things. Now England had their own, living in a French-speaking enclave known as, “The Weavers”.
There was no need to hurry to learn English in The Weavers. Everyone spoke French and that community was composed of French and Walloons, Corneille’s people. And so Corneille set up his house, began his work, and stayed enveloped in the Walloon community of The Weavers.
His first child born there was Marie, his first daughter. As she grew, he kept her insulated from not only the English, but the French as well. How many nights had Marie sat by the fire, listening to her father speak of those Huguenots and their religious war. In Corneille’s mind, he wouldn’t have had to leave his home had it not been for them.
Thus, Marie was born far from her father’s homeland and she grew and the number of her siblings grew and as they did, she, being oldest daughter, helped care for them. Soon it came time to find her a husband and her father began looking around at all the available Walloon young men. Marie referred to this time as “the war”. The men who were agreeable to her father were not to her mother. The men who were agreeable to her mother, were not to her father. And none of them were agreeable to Marie because above all things, she wanted to be a weaver.
She lived in The Weavers after all. Her father was a loom maker and knew many of the weaver families. So when she was not attending to her younger siblings, she was in his workshop, watching him with his lathe. But the most precious days of her own childhood were spent delivering new looms to the growing population of the area.
The first day she stepped into a master weaver’s shop, she knew what she wanted for her life. There thousands of tiny, gossamer threads hung like the web of spider on the morning mist – a rainbow of color spun around and through and over and under. The perpetual click of the beater sounded as a heartbeat and the living work of the weaver rolled forth from the loom – a fabric of a life ready for a purpose in the wide, world beyond.
“Weaving is a man’s skill,” her father said.
Her mother, on the other hand, replied, “The girls weave passementerie.”
“Orphans,” her father scoffed. “And what use are ribbons and frills?”
“She will make money for the family.”
Her father thought long on this. As a maker of looms, he knew many of the families, including French, who were occupied in the weaving business. Thus, into one of these French houses, Corneille sent his first daughter. The day he agreed was the greatest day of her life.
Marie stepped out of her house, alone that day for the first time. She hadn’t slept a wink. And as she crossed the street and knocked on the door two houses away from her own, she felt the first breath of freedom in her life. The door opened and Marie Sedt walked into the world of the weaver.
So here she had been now for twelve years in the house of the Clarisse’s. French they were, but Madame Clarisse’s people were from Lille, in Nord, France. Marie’s mother had been born there. Such was her luck and such was her life until that day at church with the Frenchman.
Marie had no intention of disobeying her father. But wasn’t it the next day after church, Jeanette arrived, saying, “A Frenchman has asked after you.”
Marie tossed her shuttle across the warp, replying, “He need not ask after me and you are late.”
“How do you know which Frenchman?” Jeanette giggled.
“I don’t. Any Frenchman.”
“You do and you are lying.”
“Work, Jeanette,” came Madame Clarisse’s voice down the hall.
And that was the end of that. Or so she thought.
Two days later, Marie was sent to the spinners for wool. Her seven-year-old brother, Jean, as per usual, tagged along. As she came around the corner and left her father’s street, she heard a man ask, “What is your name?”
Marie turned around and her heart tripped with her tripping feet. The warm, brown eyes of that Frenchman met hers. He reached to stop her fall. Quickly, she pulled away as her brother replied, “Jean”.
“Ah!” he said, smiling down to Marie’s brother. “Mine, too, is Jean. And is this your sister?”
“Yes,” little Jean said. “Her name is Marie.”
“Come, Jean,” Marie commanded and grabbed his arm, pulling him toward the spinner’s shop.
“Ouch!” he yelled, wiggling from her grasp.
“One does not speak with strangers,” she hissed. Worry filled her mind. What if Jean mentioned that Frenchman to her father? She squeezed a little tighter.
“Let go!”
She didn’t until they were safe in the spinner’s shop. She fretted and waited and fretted and waited and when she had the pale, spun wool in her hand, she stepped from the spinner’s shop with great trepidation and hurriedly walked back to her Master’s house.
The next Sunday, Marie caught the Frenchman out of the corner of her eye. She entered church and made sure to keep her head bowed the entire service. After church, she found Monsieur Faidherbe in deep discussion with the man as she gathered up her siblings and headed home, walking quickly behind her mother and father.
So it was a shock when, on Monday, as Marie busied herself at the warping board, the Frenchman walked right onto the weaver’s floor with Monsieur Faidherbe. As fast as she had looked in their direction, Marie looked away. She heard Jeanette catch her breath and Marie prayed – prayed as she never had before – that Jeanette would keep her mouth shut.
What would her father say? What if he walked in right now? What would she do? There was talking behind her and she heard the Frenchman’s voice, but what was said was lost as her mind reeled with the anger of her father. Thread after thread she spun around the warping board until finally someone grabbed her hand.
She jumped and, as she did, the thread in her hand broke. Jeanette burst out laughing.
“He’s gone,” Monsieur Faidherbe said, quietly.
“W-who?”
“Jean Despaigne. The dyer.” He let go of her hand.
“I don’t kn-”
“Of course you don’t. It wouldn’t be proper and your father would be upset.”
Marie made no reply.
“I do have one suggestion, Mademoiselle Sedt.”
“A suggestion?”
“Yes. You’ve wound that warp into a knot and it is far more than needed for the ribbon you are making.”
Marie spun her head back to the warp board. There she found no less than sixty threads wound erratically upon the pegs.
“I believe you only need twenty and it might be good to get all that off of there before Madame Clarisse comes back up here.”
“Y-yes.”
As Monsieur Faidherbe turned to go, Marie said softly, “Monsieur?”
“I will not mention this to your father.”
“Thank you, Monsieur.”
“Especially because I brought him here.”
At that, Monsieur Faidherbe chuckled and slid onto the bench of his loom.
“Daniel!” he called and from the stairs, Monsieur Faidherbe’s draw boy came flying.
The next day, when Marie crossed the street and made her way to Monsieur Clarisse’s house, she found a yellow flower on the doorstep. Thinking nothing of it, she took it inside and set it on her loom. The next day, she found another yellow flower and another the next day and one the day after that.
She should have left them there. She shouldn’t have picked them up. But every day, someone left a flower for her and thus every day she thought of that someone. And Jeanette, Monsieur Faidherbe, and now Madame Clarisse knew who that someone was.
A flower every day until the following Sunday when, arriving at church, Marie spied Jean Despaigne. He had his back towards her and his hands were clasped there. And between the index finger and thumb of his right hand, she found a flower just like the six she had received over the course of the week.
She smiled to herself as she made her way into church. She sang and prayed and God and Jesus Christ floated around her at a distance, because all she could think about was the little, yellow flower. So she stepped from the church, following her father closely and into her right hand, someone slipped something small and secret. She closed her hand gently around it and when she gazed to the right, she found the back of Jean Despaigne walking away. And there in her palm was a yellow flower.
The next Wednesday, Monsieur Clarisse fell ill and Marie was sent to get his red warp thread for his next project from the spinner’s shop. With hope, she left the shop, skirted past her own house, lest her mother send her brother, Jean, with her, and rounded the corner of the next street. She walked slowly, lingering now and then, but Jean Despaigne was nowhere to be seen. She was entirely disappointed as she stepped into the shop, but as she waited for the thread to be wrapped, she remembered her father’s glare and his growl of an instruction.
Never are you to look upon that Frenchman again, Marie.
So perhaps it was good that Jean Despaigne wasn’t on the street this day and as Marie walked out of the spinner’s shop and crossed the street, she looked up to the cloudless sky and wiped her brow.
“It is hot,” she whispered to herself.
“Mademoiselle?”
Marie froze. What to do? She knew her father’s instructions. There was so much noise in her ears from the surging of her heart, she couldn’t be sure he hadn’t said something more.
“Monsieur?” She inquired without turning around.
“Did you drop this?”
Slowly Marie turned and there was Jean Despaigne and his warm, brown eyes, holding out a yellow flower.
“I – I believe not, Monsieur.”
“Ah. I was certain this was yours.”
He smiled. Marie smiled.
“I must return before my Mistress misses me.”
“May I walk you back?”
Marie shook her head, backing away.
“No. No. I – thank you. My house is on the same street.”
“There is a problem walking you past your house?”
“We have not been introduced, Monsieur.”
“Ah! Indeed.” He looked down at his feet and clasped his hands behind his back. He nodded. “That is true.”
“A –and you are French.”
Without raising his head, Jean Despaigne looked up at her from under his brows.
“And?”
“And we wouldn’t be here in this place if the French didn’t cause all those troubles with the Catholics back home.”
He lifted his chin now and his warm eyes sparked. “Is that so?”
“It is so, Monsieur. According to my father, anyway. I am – I am sorry.”
Marie stepped back, curtsied, and turned away. Something deep inside her believed she would receive no more yellow flowers and as she rounded the corner of her street, tears fell from her eyes.
And as expected, this day? There was no yellow flower. So Marie had spent this entire day dressing Monsieur Clarisse’s loom. The entire day as the sun now sat on the horizon.
“Marie?”
She sat back on her heels and looked up into Madam Clarisse’s face, tears in her eyes.
“Everyone has gone home.”
“I am not finished.”
“Yes. Monsieur Clarisse will not be well enough to work tomorrow anyway.”
Marie nodded, wiping her eyes as she lifted herself from the floor.
“It’s hot,” she said.
“I see. Your eyes are damp.”
Marie nodded and said, “Yes. I have – I have weak eyes.”
“I see.”
“Good night, Madame Clarisse.”
“Perhaps it will rain tonight.”
“Perhaps.”
Marie reached the stairs.
“Good night, Marie.”
She descended and walked out into the failing light. There were clouds overhead and a damp smell upon the wind.
“Please let it rain,” she whispered as she crossed the street. Her back hurt from leaning all day. Leaning all day and still not done. Tomorrow would be heavier, she was sure.
She stepped up to her door and when she opened it, her heavy heart stopped beating entirely. There her three brothers and one sister who were yet at home were seated around the dinner table in absolute silence. Her father was standing in front of the fireplace. Her mother was to his right. And standing to her father’s left was – Jean Despaigne.
Marie lifted her hand to steady herself in the doorway and did not even look at the Frenchman. Instead, her eyes met her father’s fixed gaze.
“Marie? Know you this man?”
Marie shook head, whispering hoarsely, “I do not.”
“This is Jean Despaigne. Monsieur Despaigne. This is my eldest daughter, Marie.”
“A pleasure,” Jean said as he bowed low. Marie tried to curtsey, but her ankles twisted around each other, disobediently. Instead, she shrugged a little shrug.
“Your mother and I are aware that there is nary a Walloon man of your age that is not married or has not been considered for marriage to you.”
Marie leaned a little heavier on the door post.
“Monsieur Despaigne’s mother comes from Nord, France as was your mother’s family.”
Was she?
Marie thought to say this but there was no air in her lungs to make a sound.
“Yes.” It was her mother’s voice that said this and Marie gazed in that direction. There was such a smile upon her mother’s face.
“Monsieur Despaigne has proposed marriage to you,” her father said.
He has?
Her mother’s smile grew until her entire face shined like the halo of God.
“Your mother and I are agreeable. He is of the honorable family of dyers here and he has promised not to take you away from this place.”
Marie did not answer. Instead she glanced back to her father and watched his eyes turn moist. Ah! So. This was it. She hadn’t seen it before, but here was why Marie Sedt had not been married off. Her father was yet a stranger, without a home, and it was the fear of losing her in the wide unknown of England that forbade him from marrying her to anyone. Marie tilted her head with a small smile.
Her father swallowed hard and asked hoarsely, “Will you, Marie, marry this man?”
Behind Marie, in the world of the open door, rain began to fall gently upon the street. She felt its cooling breeze on her back.
“It’s raining, father,” she said.
“Yes, Marie. It is,” he replied, quietly. A tear dropped from his eye and rolled down the deep line on his right cheek.
“Your eyes are weak.”
He nodded a single nod.
“I will marry him, father.”
Marie turned around, stepped through the open door, and out into the rain. It fell on her neck as she bowed her head.
“Thank you,” she whispered to it and there, standing in the rain, a hand slipped into hers and Marie Sedt took it.
c 2017 Nicole R Dickson all rights reserved
