Piers Hadley had been a wool-factor for twenty-six years, and in all that time he had never once got his hands the colour he meant them to be. Indigo came out of the vat the shade of a bruise. Madder turned his nails the colour of a rusted nail. Woad, which the Lowgate dyers swore by, took three days to set and then faded in a single wet week, so that a skein dyed on Monday was the palest blue in the lane by Saturday. He had come to think that wool did not want to be dyed at all. It wanted to be left grey and sold to people who did not look closely.
But the Hold had taken to wearing it again, and the Lowgate vats were going all summer, and so he stood at the stream’s edge in his shirtsleeves with a paddle in both hands and his forearms stained to the elbow, and he moved a skein through the blue with the slow steady turn that Osk’s grandmother had taught him when he was a boy in the Lowgate fields. The water was warm. Flies hung over the vat in a cloud. Somewhere behind him a girl was singing the Roll’s first line, not quite in tune, and getting the third word wrong every time.
