“Yes,” said Caris. “Just think of that.”
The riverside workshop of Peter Dyer was a house as big as Edmund’s, but built of stone, and with no interior walls or floors – just a shell. Two iron cauldrons stood over great fires. Beside each was a hoist, like the ones Merthin made for building work. These were used to lift huge sacks of wool or cloth and lower them into the vats. The floors were permanently wet and the air was thick with steam. The apprentices worked barefoot, in their underdrawers because of the heat, their faces running with sweat, their hair gleaming with damp. There was an acrid smell that bit at the back of Caris’s throat.
She showed Peter her unsold length of cloth. “I want the bright scarlet that the Italian cloths have,” she said. “That’s what sells best.”
Peter was a lugubrious man who always looked injured, no matter what you said to him. Now he nodded glumly, as if acknowledging a justified criticism. “We’ll dye it again with madder.”
“And with alum, to fix the colour and make it brighter.”
“We don’t use alum. Never have. I don’t know anyone who does.”
Caris cursed inwardly. She had not thought to check this. She had assumed a dyer would know everything about dyes. “Can’t you try it?”
“I haven’t got any.”
Caris sighed. Peter seemed to be one of those craftsmen for whom everything is impossible unless they have done it before. “Suppose I could get you some?”
“Where from?”
“Winchester, I suppose, or London. Or perhaps from Melcombe.” That was the nearest big port. Ships came from all over Europe to Melcombe.
“If I had some, I wouldn’t know how to use it.”
“Can’t you find out?”
“Who from?”
“I’ll try to find out, then.”
He shook his head pessimistically. “I don’t know…”
She did not want to quarrel with him: he was the only large-scale dyer in town. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she said in a conciliatory tone. “I won’t take up any more of your time discussing it now. First I’ll see if I can get some alum.”
She left him. Who in town might know about alum? She wished now that she had asked Loro Fiorentino more questions. The monks ought to know about things like this, but they were no longer allowed to talk to women. She decided to see Mattie Wise. Mattie was forever mixing strange ingredients – maybe alum was one of them. More importantly, if she did not know she would admit her ignorance, unlike a monk or an apothecary who might make something up for fear of being thought foolish.
Mattie’s first words were: “How is your father?”
“He seems a bit shaken by the failure of the Fleece Fair,” Caris said. It was typical of Mattie to know what she was worried about. “He’s becoming forgetful. He seems older.”
“Take care of him,” said Mattie. “He’s a good man.”
“I know.” Caris was not sure what Mattie was getting at.
“Petranilla is a self-centred cow.”
“I know that, too.”
Mattie was grinding something with a mortar and pestle. She pushed the bowl towards Caris. “If you do this for me, I’ll pour you a cup of wine.”
“Thank you.” Caris began to grind.
Mattie poured yellow wine from a stone jug into two wooden cups. “Why are you here? You’re not ill.”
“Do you know what alum is?”
“Yes. In small quantities, we use it as an astringent, to close wounds. It can also stop diarrhoea. But in large quantities it’s poisonous. Like most poisons, it makes you vomit. There was alum in the potion I gave you last year.”
“What is it, a herb?”
“No, it’s an earth. The Moors mine it in Turkey and Africa. Tanners employ it in the preparation of leather, sometimes. I suppose you want to use it to dye cloth.”
“Yes.” As always, Mattie’s guesswork seemed supernaturally accurate.
“It acts as a mordant – it helps the dye to bite the wool.”
“And where do you get it?”
“I buy it in Melcombe,” said Mattie.
Caris made the two-day journey to Melcombe, where she had been several times before, accompanied by one of her father’s employees as a bodyguard. At the quayside she found a merchant who dealt in spices, cage birds, musical instruments and all kinds of curiosities from remote parts of the world. He sold her both the red dye made from the root of the madder plant, cultivated in France, and a type of alum known as Spiralum that he said came from Ethiopia. He charged her seven shillings for a small barrel of madder and a pound for a sack of alum, and she had no idea whether she was paying fair prices or not. He sold her his entire stock, and promised to get more from the next Italian ship to come into port. She asked him what quantities of dye and alum she should use, but he did not know.
When she got home, she began to dye pieces of her unsold cloth in a cooking pot. Petranilla objected to the smell, so Caris built a fire in the back yard. She knew that she had to put the cloth in a solution of dye and boil it, and Peter Dyer told her the correct strength of the dye solution. However, no one knew how much alum she needed or how she should use it.
She began a frustrating process of trial and error. She tried soaking the cloth in alum before dyeing it; putting the alum in at the same time as the dye; and boiling the dyed cloth in a solution of alum afterwards. She tried using the same quantity of alum as dye, then more, then less. At Mattie’s suggestion she experimented with other ingredients: oak galls, chalk, lime water, vinegar, urine.
She was short of time. In all towns, no one could sell cloth but members of the guild – except during a fair, when the normal rules were relaxed. And all fairs were held in summer. The last was St Giles’s Fair, which took place on the downs to the east of Winchester on St Giles’s Day, 12 September. It was now mid-July, so she had eight weeks.
She started early in the morning and worked until long after dark. Agitating the cloth continuously and lifting it in and out of the pot made her back ache. Her hands became red and sore from constant dipping in the harsh chemicals, and her hair began to smell. But, despite the frustration, she occasionally felt happy, and sometimes she hummed or even sang as she worked, old tunes whose words she could barely remember from childhood. Neighbours in their own back yards watched ner curiously across the fences.
Now and again there came into her mind the thought: Is this my rate? More than once she had said that she did not know what to do with her life. But she might not have a free choice. She was not to be allowed to be a physician; becoming a wool merchant looked like a bad idea; she did not want to enslave herself to a husband and children – but she had never dreamed that she might end up as a dyer. When she thought about it, she knew that this was not what she wanted to do. Having started it, she was determined to succeed – but it was not going to be her destiny.
At first she could only get the cloth to turn brownish red or pale pink. When she began to approach the right shade of scarlet she found, maddeningly, that it faded when she dried it in the sun, or came out when washed. She tried double-dyeing, but the effect proved temporary. Peter told her, rather late, that the material would soak up dye more completely if she worked with the yarn before it was woven, or even with raw fleeces; and that improved the shade, but not the fastness.
“There’s only one way to learn dyeing, and that’s from a master,” Peter said several times. They all thought that way, Caris realized. Prior Godwyn learned medicine by reading books that were hundreds of years old, and prescribed medicines without even looking at his patient. Elfric had punished Merthin for carving the parable of the virgins in a new way. Peter had never even tried to dye cloth scarlet. Only Mattie based her decisions on what she could see for herself, rather than on some venerated authority.