A Piece of Justice (Imogen Quy Mystery 2) by Jill Paton Walsh

Author:Jill Paton Walsh [Walsh, Jill Paton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-11-24T06:00:00+00:00

13

Holly's lecture on the dating of fabric was at five in the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms. It was a cold and blustery evening, with bursts of rain on the gusts of wind, and a wintry feel to the world. When Shirley and Pansy arrived to pick up Imogen the three friends decided to drive, and park in the Lion Yard, if there wasn't any room in Silver Street. A sullenly dramatic light overhung the city; wet streets, gleaming, a cloudscape above full of lowering blackness and silver cloud rims; people scuttling under rain-glossed umbrellas; the buildings looming in the daylight dimness – the few shops on their route showing golden rectangles of warm lighting, and casting angled rectangles of light across the pavements.

The lecture room was very thinly packed; not more than thirty people at most, but the weather gave a painless alibi for that. Imogen sat between Shirley and Pansy, and all three of them had brought notebooks and pencils, in the expectation of enlightenment. Holly was sitting at the table at the front, putting slides into a carousel, while a technician set up the projector. She looked up and waved at someone, and looking round Imogen saw Professor Maverack, making his way to the front. The lecture room had filled up considerably in the last few minutes. Professor Maverack stood out somewhat, since the audience was predominantly of women, and Imogen was briefly surprised to see him, until she remembered that Holly had talked of him as a friend. Presumably it was the lecturer rather than the subject that had brought him. At the very last minute a group of dignitaries filed in; governors of the Fitzwilliam, committee members of the friends of the Fitzwilliam, and Holly stood up to the microphone, and began.

Imogen learned an enormous amount in the next hour. How wildly desirable to Europeans Indian printed calicos had been, right through the eighteenth century – soft, wearable, washable with their lovely printed patterns in fast dyes. How the Indians had mastered the skills of mordant dying long before western manufacturers. How frantic attempts to proscribe the wearing of calicos, and impose huge tariffs on them in protection of the wool and silk weavers at home had failed miserably. All that had been achieved was making people hoard every scrap and cutting of the precious calico, to reuse in quilts. Holly's slides traced the progress of printed designs – the East India Company's men in London sending requests for patterns in the English taste: ‘Those which hereafter you shall send we desire may be with more white ground, and the flowers and branches to be in colours in the middle of the quilt as the painter pleases, whereas now the most part of your quilts come with sad red grounds which are not equally sorted to please all buyers ...’

The English needlewomen were soon imitating Indian patterns in their needlework, and the Indian print makers imitating English needlework in their printed cottons, until it was impossible to disentangle the taste of the makers from the taste of the wearers of the fabrics.

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