Ducking my head, I skulked away from them like a beaten dog: The guard had threatened to kill me should I expose the hoax to anyone, even inadvertently, and in my jangled state, I feared I might. Once again there were demands for work. I thought I recognized the callers’ voices, and stealthy glances at their faces revealed they were the same men who’d taken the lead before. My eyes bulging, I observed their manipulations and realized these men weren’t captives but hirelings, hirelings charged with helping the spider to lure us the way Bo See did silkworms. Our family used to transfer our worms from dirty paper onto clean by brushing them with a quill. Of course we were careful. But many of the worms—no thicker than a thread when hatched—would be injured anyway. Bo See showed us how to place one side of a soiled sheet at the edge of a fresh piece on which she’d spread finely cut mulberry so the worms, attracted by the smell of the leaves, would quit the old paper of their own volition, crawling unharmed onto the new.
