Above, she heard the laughter of the coachman. The men beside her were not smiling, but they did push together. The wheel rolled over the stone, and the coach was free to continue the journey.
She was filthy, but she hardly cared. She could only think of how ignorant, how useless her fellow passengers had been. None of them thanked her, but she hardly noticed. She was eager to be going, but not to ride inside. She looked up at the still smiling coachman. “Can I come up?” she called.
He nodded. Lyddie scrambled up beside him. None of the gentlemen offered her a hand, but she needed none, having spent her life climbing trees and ladders and roofs.
The coachman was still chuckling as he gave the horses a crack of the whip. Cries of protest rose up from the passengers below. He jerked the reins, his eyes twinkling, as more cries came up from the irate inmates as they tried to disentangle their bodies in the carriage and settle themselves on the seats once more.
He shook his head at Lyddie and held the pawing team for a few moments until the jostling in the carriage finally ceased. “You’re a hardy one, you are,” he said, reaching into the box behind him to pull out a heavy robe. “Here, this will keep the chill off.”
She wrapped the robe around her head and body. “Silly fools,” she said. “Not the common sense of a quill pig ’mongst the lot of them. Why didn’t you tell them what to do, ey?”
“What?” he said. “And lose the entertainment?”
Lyddie couldn’t help but laugh, remembering the sight of those sweating, swearing, filthy gentlemen, and now they were further poisoning the already stale air of the carriage with their odor and road mud. Indeed, someone was already raising the shade to let in a bit of cold, fresh air.
“So, you’re for the factory life?”
Lyddie nodded. “I need the money.”
He glanced sideways at her. “Those young women dress like Boston ladies,” he said.
“I don’t care for the fancy dress. There’s debts on my farm …”
“And it’s your farm, now is it?”
“My father’s,” she said. “But he headed West four years ago, and we haven’t heard …”
“You’re a stout one,” he said. “Ain’t you brothers to help?”
“One,” she said. “And he’d be a great help, only my mother put him out to a miller, so until—”
“Have you someone to look out for you in Lowell? A relative, or a friend?”
She shook her head. “I’ll do all right on my own.”
“I’ve no doubt of that,” he said. “But a friend to put in a word can’t hurt. Let me take you to my sister’s. She runs a boardinghouse, Number Five, it is, of the Concord Manufacturing Corporation.”
“I’m obliged for your kindness, but—”
“Think of it as payment for your help.”
“You could have had it out in no time, had you—”
“But never such fun. Coaching can be a wearisome, lonesome job, my girl. I take my pleasure where I can. Did you see those gentlemen’s faces, having to be rescued by a slip of a farm girl?”
* * *
* * *
They crossed the bridge into the city late that afternoon. And city it surely was. It seemed to Lyddie that there were as many buildings crowded before her as sheep in a shearing shed. But they were not soft and murmuring as sheep. They were huge and foreboding
in the gray light of afternoon. She would not have believed that the world contained as much brick as there was in a single building here. They were giants—five and six stories high and as long as the length of a large pasture. Chimneys, belching smoke, reached to the low hanging sky.
And the noise of it! Her impulse was to cover her ears, but she held her hands tightly in her lap. She would not begin to be afraid now, she who had stared down a bear and conversed easily with a runaway slave.
The other passengers in their muddy clothing and with their various trunks alighted at the Merrimack Hotel. Lyddie could tell at a glance it was too grand for her purse and person.
In the end, she waited until the coachman had seen the horses and carriage taken care of and then let him walk her to his sister’s boardinghouse. “I’ve brought you a little chip of Vermont granite,” he explained to the plump, smiling woman who met them at the door. Then he added, “We’d best come in by the back. Run into a little muddy stretch on the way down.”