8
Number Five, Concord Corporation
At first she thought it was the bear, clanging the oatmeal pot against the furniture, but then the tiny attic came alive with girls. One struck a stick against a box, making the flash and odor of a tiny hell. And all this was just to light a candle that barely softened the predawn gloom of the attic. In the clatter of five girls dressing and squabbling over a single basin, Lyddie was forced fully awake and began to remember where she was.
Filthy as she had been, Mrs. Bedlow, the coachman’s sister, had kindly taken her in. The boardinghouse keeper hurriedly gave her brother a cup of tea and sent him on his way. Then she had her son, a boy about Charlie’s age, fill a tub of hot water in her own bedroom and ordered Lyddie to bathe. The mud-caked dress and shawl she carried away as soon as Lyddie shed them and plopped them directly in a pot of boiling water on the black iron cook stove.
And what a stove it was! Lyddie had only heard rumors of such modern wonders. When she came in from the boardinghouse keeper’s bedroom, her face scrubbed barn red, her warm, lazy body straining every seam of her one remaining dress, the first thing her eyes lit upon was the stove. She stared at it as though it were an exotic monster from the depths of the sea. If she could have chosen, Lyddie would have pulled a chair close to it and felt its wonderful warmth and studied its marvels, but Mrs. Bedlow urged her into the dining room, which was soon filled with a noisy army of almost thirty young women, still full of energy after their long day in the factory. Lyddie’s own head nearly settled into the plate of pork and beans, so that long before the others had finished, Mrs. Bedlow helped her up the four flights of stairs to the attic room, where she fell into bed hardly awake enough to mumble thanks for the woman’s kindness.
And now, on this first morning of her new life, she lay in bed a few minutes to relish the quiet of the empty attic. Three days rattling in a coach, then to share a room with five others—indeed, a bed with a stranger who woke Lyddie in the middle of the night with her tossing and snoring—to be clanged awake by a bell, and to have her head punctured by shrieks and squeals and the rattle of voices—it made the windowless alcove she had left behind at Cutler’s seem a haven of peace. But she would not look back. She threw off the quilt. She had nothing to wear but her much too small homespun. It couldn’t be helped. She dressed herself and padded down the four flights of stairs in her darned and redarned stockings.
The front room was crowded with the two large dining tables that Tim, Mrs. Bedlow’s son, was scurrying to set. Wonderful smells of coffee and apple pie and hash and—would it be fish?—wafted through the house from the magical stove as though to prove how many separate wonders it could perform at once.
“I’ve left my boots …” Lyddie started.
Mrs. Bedlow looked up, her round face radiant from the heat. “They’re by the stove drying, but they won’t do, you know.”
“Ey?”
“Your clothes. Your boots. They simply won’t do. That dress is only fit now to be burned. Or what’s left of it. I’m afraid it turned to mud stew in my kettle. What could my crazy brother have been thinking of letting a mere girl …?”
“Oh, it wasn’t his fault, ma’am,” said Lyddie, slipping her feet into Triphena’s boots, now stiff from a night beside the stove. “It was the men. They were so stupid …”
“You needn’t tell me. I know that brother of mine. He was sitting up on top laughing, not giving a word of direction.”
“But he had the coach and team …”
“Nonsense. He does it to amuse himself and humiliate his betters. He’d wreck a coach if he thought it would give him a rollicking story to tell in the tavern that night. And all at the cost of your clothes and dignity.”
“Well, I ain’t lost much either way.”
“Have you any money at all?”
Lyddie hesitated. She really didn’t. It was Triphena’s money, not her own.
“If I’m to recommend you to the Concord Corporation, you need to look decent. They like to hire a good class of girls here.”
Lyddie reddened.
“Of course, you’re as good as anyone, a better worker than most, I suspect, but at the factory they’ll look at your clothes and shoes to decide. The Almighty may look at the heart, but ‘man looketh on the outward appearance’ as the Good Book says, and that goes for women too, I fear. So you’ll have to do better than …” She looked sadly at Lyddie’s tight homespun and stiff, worn boots.
Lyddie hung her head. “I have a bit left over from the trip. But it’s on loan.”
“You can pay it back after you’re working. Now, would you like to give me a hand? I think the girls will be home for breakfast early. The river’s too high and the mill wheels are likely slowing. It means a holiday for them, but not for me.”
Lyddie hastened to grab a cloth and take a pie Mrs. Bedlow was removing from the bowels of the stove. “Yes,” Mrs. Bedlow continued, “there’ll be a few days off now till the water goes down.” She smiled. “Time enough to get you proper clothes and a place in the factory as well.”
If the girls had seemed noisy before, it was nothing compared to their entrance to breakfast. They burst through the door, each high-pitched voice shrieking to be heard over the others. There was an air of holiday that hardly paused for a blessing over the food and that erupted full blast before the echo of the “amen” died.
Lyddie, her feet alternately sloshing about and being pinched by Triphena’s shoes, determinedly helped Tim serve both large tables. They brought in great platters of fried cod, hash, potato balls, pumpkin mush with huge pitchers of cream, toast and butter, apple pie, and pitchers of coffee and milk. Lyddie had never seen harvesters eat so much or so noisily. And these were supposed to be ladies.
“Hello, there,” a voice cut through the din. “We didn’t really meet you.”
The room was suddenly quiet. “Don’t be rude, Betsy,” another said. “She was tired last night.” Lyddie turned to see who had said this last because it was her idea of a lady’s voice. The young woman who had spoken was smiling. “You only came in last night, didn’t you, my dear?”
Lyddie nodded.
“There, don’t be shy. We were all new once, even our Betsy.” There was a titter from the rest. “I’m Amelia Cate.” Her name was aristocratic—Amelia. It suited her. She was almost as pretty as the lady in pink that had come through the inn last year. Her skin was white and her face and hands long and delicate. And she was respected, or the others wouldn’t have stopped chattering when she spoke.