Colourfast

Chapter One: The Colour and the Cough

The dyehouse woke before the city did.

Catrin Bowen came down the stairs in the dark with her sleeves already pinned, and the smell met her the way it always had: bran and stale urine and woad, the sour breath of the fermenting vat, over it the clean bite of alum. Other people wrinkled their noses. To Catrin it smelled like a made bed, like bread, like the inside of her own life.

She crossed the flagstones to the big vat by the far wall and laid her palm against its side. Blood-warm. Good. A woad vat was a living thing and it could be killed by carelessness; let it chill and it sulked for a week, overheat it and it died outright, and then you had thirty livres of ruined liquor and a master dyer weeping into his hands.

She fed the fire under it three sticks of beech, no more, and lifted the lid.

Beneath the surface the liquor was the colour of an old bruise, greenish-amber, and across it lay a skin of coppery froth. She drew a little up in the tasting cup and let it run back. The flower stood well. She counted under her breath while it settled, the way her father had taught her to count, in Welsh, because Welsh numbers went slower in her mouth than French ones and slowness was the whole art. "Un, dau, tri, pedwar—"

"Pump," said Michel Bowen from the doorway, and coughed.

He had been coughing since Martinmas. At first it had been the ordinary winter cough of a man who had spent forty years bending over hot liquor in a cold room. In January it had begun to sound like something being torn.

"You should be in bed," Catrin said, without turning.

"I should be in Wales, on a hill, with a dog." He came in slowly, a big man gone light, his hands too large now for his wrists. He wore his working apron over his nightshirt, which told her everything about how the night had gone. "How is she?"

"Ready. Perhaps a little sharp."

He dipped a finger, touched it to his tongue, and made a face that was half grimace, half approval. "A little sharp. Add a handful of bran and give her an hour. Sharp vats bite the silk."

"I know."

"You know," he agreed. "You know more than I do about half of it and I have never said so to a living soul, so do not tell anyone." He lowered himself onto the stool by the mordant tubs and sat there breathing, and Catrin busied her hands with the bran so that she would not have to look at how long it took him.

They had a commission on the frame: eight lengths of taffeta for a mercer on the rue Mercière, to be dyed in the colour that had made them. In the ledgers of the great merchant houses of Lyon it was written down simply as *violet Bowen*. Bowen violet. A deep, cool, luminous purple that seemed lit from underneath, like the last of the sky over the Fourvière hill after the sun has gone. Other dyers made violet. They made a dusty violet that went grey in three washings, or a red-violet that turned to the colour of raw liver in strong sun. Bowen violet held. Wash it, sweat in it, walk it through a July afternoon, and it stayed.

"Colourfast," her father used to say, tapping a swatch against his knuckles. "Any fool can make a colour. It is holding it that they pay for. A colour that runs is a lie you have sold to a lady."

He had been a lie-teller himself once, he admitted, when he was young in Bristol. Then he had come across the sea and up the rivers to Lyon because Lyon was where silk was, and silk was where colour mattered most, and he had spent thirty years learning not to lie.

By first light the apprentice Grivel had come in and lit the lamps, and the quarter above them had begun to knock and clatter and groan as the looms took up their day. La Croix-Rousse in the morning sounded like a great wooden animal shifting in its sleep. Down here on the lower slope, where the water ran and the ground could take the run-off, the dyers had their vats and their stinks and their perpetual quarrels with the neighbours.

Catrin worked. The silk came out of its scouring bath and went into the mordant, alum and cream of tartar and, at the last moment, four drops from the small brown bottle her father kept in the locked press: spirit of tin, tin dissolved in acid, which no one in the quarter but the two of them used for violet and which made the difference between a colour and a jewel. Then the first bath — cochineal, ground to a rose-coloured dust that cost more by weight than pepper — and the silk came up out of it a hot, singing crimson, and Grivel laughed out loud, because he was fifteen and it never stopped being magic to him.

"Don't laugh yet," said Michel from his stool. "Any Piedmontese can make a red."

Then the blue. This was the part that could not be taught out of a book. The crimson silk went into the woad vat, into that ugly greenish liquor, and came out looking sickly and wrong — and then you lifted it into the air and shook it, and the air did the work, and the colour rose through the wet cloth as you watched, blue climbing into red, red drinking blue, and the whole thing turned in the space of ten heartbeats into that impossible violet.

Catrin held the length up and turned it slowly. Behind her, her father was silent, which was how she knew it was right.

"And now?" he said at last, hoarse.

"And now the stone."

"And now the stone."

The stone was theirs alone. A purple-grey mineral earth, ground finer than flour, steeped overnight in soft water with a very little potash. It did nothing to the eye — you could not see the stone in the colour. What it did was make the colour stay. Michel had brought the first sack of it from home when he was twenty-four, out of the hills of Meirionnydd where his uncle had quarried slate, and after that he had it shipped in, four pounds a year, through a man in Lyon whose name appeared in Michel's private ledger and nowhere else.

Catrin lowered the silk into the last bath and began to count.

Behind her, Michel coughed. It went on longer than the others, and there was a sound in the middle of it like a boot pulled out of mud. When she turned around he had the back of his hand pressed to his mouth and there was blood on his knuckles, bright and unmistakable, the exact hard scarlet of a first cochineal bath.

Grivel dropped a paddle.

"It is nothing," Michel said. "Count. You will lose your count."

"Naw, deg," said Catrin, and lifted the silk, and laid it over the rail, and went to her father with her hands still purple to the elbow.

***

He lasted nineteen days.

The physician from the rue Tupin came twice, bled him, charged four livres, and said the words *phthisis* and *humours of the lung* in the tone men use when they are being paid to have an opinion. Père Arnaud came from Saint-Bruno's more often, and was more use, because he sat and talked about nothing and did not pretend.

Catrin ran the workshop and nursed him and slept in the chair. Laurent Picard, her father's journeyman these eleven years, came in each dawn without being asked and worked without being told, and finished the mercer's eight lengths, and did not once suggest that anything be hurried.

On the fourth of March, in the late afternoon, Michel Bowen made his daughter sit down on the edge of the bed and put a key into her hand. It was the small key, the one to the press.

"The book is in there," he said. "You know the book."

"I know the book."

"Nobody else can read it. That is not an accident." He had to stop and gather himself. His voice had gone down to a whisper with edges. "They will come, Catrin. Joubert will come with his seals and his statutes. There is no help for it. A woman cannot be a master dyer in this city, and I could not make you a son, and God knows your mother tried."

"Tad—"

"Listen. The colour is not in the book." He tapped the back of her hand, twice, the way he tapped a swatch. "The book is only words. The colour is in your hands and your eyes and your counting. Do you understand me? They can take the shop. They can take the vats and the copper and the seal off the door. They cannot take the colour unless you give it to them."

She was crying by then, silently, in the way she had learned as a child in a house where crying was not forbidden but was thought to be a waste of good salt.

"Now," said her father, "tell me the last bath again. From the beginning. Slowly."

So she told him, and he listened with his eyes shut and corrected her twice, and somewhere in the middle of the third telling he stopped correcting her.

He died before the bells rang for Compline. Outside, up the hill, the looms went on until dark, because silk waits for nobody.