Emerald Noose

Extract from the young adult historical adventure novel

Emerald Noose is a powerful and absorbing historical adventure. It's a story of freedom and belonging, and how both can equally constrain you.

EXTRACT

1

 

The old highwayman hung from the charred elm. Upside-down he was a lethal branch, thrashing in the glare of the moon. But he couldn’t stop his nightgown from cascading over his head.
    The highwayman’s bed-sock flew off. My uncle’s thugs hallooed. They let the rope bound to his ankle run loose, and he dropped to the gravel. 
    He scrambled to his feet and burst from the giant white bloom of his gown. ‘Lesson learned,’ he said.
    One of the thugs hurled the frayed rope.
    ‘Whatever it may be.’ The highwayman dodged the whipping tail.
He tottered a few steps in his withered sock, until the thug snatched the rope and dragged him. Then they strung him up the right way.
    When finally he stopped thrashing, they ripped off his nightgown with a hay hook. It wouldn’t do for the people of Fairy Cross to think a man murdered fresh from bed, to think it could happen to them as easily. They left him there, my secret highwayman – his secret out – but they never saw me in my dip beside the rutted road.
    I cut down the gent from the lightning tree, eventually. I hauled him to the deer den Tom and I were building in the woods, then went back to cover my tracks. I tucked that poor kindly highwayman into his forest bed of birch and moss.
    Nighty night, sleep tight the longest sleep. If you get bit by bugs now, who’s ever to mind.

2

 

I wanted to be happy for Tom. I was trying.
    ‘You’ll start the week after next?’ I said, picking a frond of moss from his blond hair, which these days he wore neatly-parted.
    We were huddled together in the deer den. After four years of building and tending, Tom had announced he’d outgrown our hide.
    ‘So soon…’ I said.
    Tom shuffled on the mossy ground, away from me. He leaned backwards into the corner of the den, and threaded fresh birch twigs into the lattice of the roof.
    ‘Mr Greenwood thinks I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Even though it’s not due for another year.’
    I had suspicions about my uncle’s motives for promoting Tom earlier than was usual for apprentices. But Tom was proud to have exceeded his elder brother in something, and his father had given him an heirloom tool in recognition.
    I said, ‘Mr Greenwood?’ and laughed. ‘What happened to ‘Uncle Caesar’, or ‘Robin Bobbin’?’
    ‘I canna call him those things anymore.’
    ‘They’re your nicknames.’
    ‘Lizzie, I have to be serious now, if I want to get along.’ He sat up and handed me the remaining twigs for the roof repairs. He fussed with the buttons of his new waistcoat, and said, ‘I’m not a child, I canna go around calling people daft names. I’m fifteen.’
    ‘So am I. But I’ve got a whole two weeks on you.’ I looked at the thin, pliable sticks in my hands as if they were baby snakes momentarily at rest.  
    Things had been changing between Tom and me for over a year, but his being made a bobbin turner was different – this was a leap. Within a few weeks his skills would surpass my own, within a few months he’d completely forget what it was like to be an apprentice. These few months were all the time I had left, or I’d have to fight Tom too.
    ‘That’s two more weeks,’ I said, ‘of running the fells, climbing the lightning tree and swimming to swamp island.’ Then I added: ‘No wonder I’m faster than you.’
    ‘Two weeks makes nay difference,’ he said. He pointed at my knee, where I’d ripped my breeches earlier. ‘You’re unravelling.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Any road, I canna do those things with you any longer. I’ll be working, like me Da, twelve hours a day, six days a week now, Lizzie.’
    ‘Stop saying my name like that.’ I twisted the birch twigs, wringing the necks of those baby snakes before they could turn on me. ‘Tom. You’ve only been made a bobbin turner, you’re not running the stupid mill. You’re not better than me.’
    For three years, Tom and I had been learning and skivvying alongside one another: stacking coppice wood in the barn while sleeping bats dangled above; delivering swills of wooden blanks for the turners to shape; sorting and packing the finished bobbins. And whenever we could, watching the skilled craftsmen, like Tom’s father, Mr Kirke, turn bobbins on the lathe, perfectly, rapidly, mesmerically…  
    ‘Lay off your gawping,’ Mr Kirke said, time and again, ‘and get scampering with them swills. I’m not stopping work till knocking-off-o’clock, e’en if it’s your own fingers I’m gouging in place o’ them blanks.’
    Big, small or unusual, from every blank emerged a precisely-carved bobbin destined for a cotton-spinning factory in Manchester, and ribbons and ribbons of beautiful creamy birch wood. Each type of cutting tool made a different shaving – wide and long, or frilly and coiled, or so thin as to be translucent as the wings of a fly.
    On Saturday evening, when production had finished for the week, the workshop was as a forest after snow. I loved the workshop most like this – when everything was clean and white and still.
    Fine sawdust coated the leather belts, which connected each machine to the power shaft overhead. These belts criss-crossed the workshop, branches reaching for the sky, and they sprinkled you with their snow when you bumped them. On the workshop floor, the shavings were piled so high you had to wade knee-deep through the springy white coils, releasing the aroma of freshly-cut birch.
    When everyone else had gone home for Saturday tea, I snuck in, to feel the mill as mine, and mine alone. But only Tom would ever move up through the ranks.
    Tom sighed and threw himself flat on his back in the den. He reached up to the woven branches and tugged at the wilting leaves. His hands and fingers were already marked with the nicks and cuts of a craftsman.
    He said quietly, ‘But it’s alreet for you to be better than me?’
    ‘That’s not what I meant. Just that, you know, nothing’s changed, we’re still friends…even though–’
    ‘Even though what?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘What, Lizzie?’
    ‘You’re my uncle’s man.’
    ‘I’m not your uncle’s man,’ Tom snapped. He sat up, and rubbed his eyes like his father did, circling inwards, ruffling his thick eyebrows against their grain. ‘I’m me own person. Like me Da’s always been, nay matter what you think. It’s you who wants everyone to pick sides.’
    ‘But you have to pick sides. If you’re not against my uncle, then you’re for him.’
    ‘Lizzie–’
    I glared at the side of his head.
    I’d never told Tom what Uncle Robin had done to the kindly old highwayman. Neither had I told him that I’d buried the fellow, in the hole Tom and I had dug while looking for giants’ treasure. Even after four years of keeping the secret, I was too ashamed to tell anyone why the man was lynched.
    ‘There’d be nay need to pick sides if you’d just let everything be,’ Tom said, looking beyond the den to the trees, amongst which we’d played so many games over the years. Growing with the saplings, reaching for the sky, intertwining our roots.
    ‘That’s not true. What about Billy? It’s only me and Gran, and Mabel, who stopped him being sent back. My uncle called him ‘defective’ because of his bad leg, said he’d be no good.’
    ‘He isn’t.’
    ‘It’s only been three months.’
    ‘In three months I’d started on the hand-boring lathe.’
    ‘But that was because of your da,’ I said. ‘Oh, never mind. You want to hate Billy.’
    ‘I don’t hate him. Why would I? He’s just not pulling his weight.’
    ‘Well, he doesn’t weigh much.’
    Tom laughed. ‘Why’re we arguing about Billy?’
    ‘Don’t know,’ I said, relieved. I discovered a pulled thread on my untucked shirt. I tried to pinch the thread through to the underside where it wouldn’t get caught, and create yet another tear for Tom to notice. I said, ‘He’ll get better at his jobs, you’ll see.’
    ‘I won’t be in the packing loft to know one way or the other.’
    ‘As you keep reminding me. You don’t have to be so keen to leave me behind.’
    ‘It’s not that, Lizzie. If I get me wages docked…’
    ‘My uncle won’t really do that, it’s just a threat, to get at me.’
    ‘I’m not chancing it.’
    ‘So, you are picking sides.’
    ‘Urgh.’ Tom dipped his head under the over-hanging roof of the den and climbed out, brushing crumbled leaves from his breeches. ‘Lizzie, I know you’re not asking me to choose. Are you? Because you know I canna. I work for your uncle, have done since I was nine–’
    ‘I know that.’
    ‘Me Da works for him, and me brother. Me Mam does the teas–’
    ‘I said, I know. But still…’
    ‘We live in a mill cottage. There’s no place for us but the mill and Fairy Cross.’
    ‘Me and Gran are just as dependent.’
    ‘Yes, mebby, but in a different way. You’re something else.’
    I considered this. Something else good? Or something else bad? Before, I would have asked. I edged further back into the den so I couldn’t see Tom’s freshly-shaven face when I said, ‘If the mill were mine, I’d treat everyone better.’
    ‘But the mill’s not yours, it was gone before you were born.’
    I recoiled against the earthen wall of the den. A tree root jabbed me in the back.
    ‘Sorry.’ Tom crouched at the entrance. I kept my eyes fixed on the toes of his polished boots. He said, ‘I didn’t mean to– Sorry.’
    ‘S’alright.’
    ‘It’s not, Lizzie, and I’m sorry. But tis the way it is.’

*

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