“I’d hate you to leave,” Lyddie said quietly.
Betsy snorted. “I’d be gone a month and a half before you’d ever notice,” she said.
* * *
* * *
The overseers were being offered premiums—prizes to the men whose girls produced the most goods in a pay period—which was why the machines were speeded and why the girls hardly dared take time off even when they were feverish.
“If you can’t do the work,” Lyddie heard Mr. Marsden say to a girl at the breakfast break, “there’s many a girl who can and will. We’ve no place for sickly girls in this room.”
Many girls—those with families who could support them or sweethearts ready to marry them—went home, and new girls came in to replace them. Their speech was strange and their clothing even stranger. They didn’t live in the corporation boardinghouses but in that part of the city known as “the Acre.”
The Acre wasn’t part of the tour for foreign dignitaries who came to view the splendor of Lowell—the model factory city of the New World. Near the Northern Canal, sprouting up like toadstools, rose the squat shacks of rough boards and turf with only a tiny window and a few holes to let in light. And each jammed with Irish Catholics who, it was said, bred like wharf rats. Rumor also had it that these papists were willing to work for lower wages, and, since the corporations did not subsidize their board and keep, the Irish girls were cheaper still to hire.
Diana was helping the new girls settle in, teaching them just as she had taught Lyddie in the spring. Lyddie herself was far too busy to help anyone else. She could not fall behind in her production, else her pay would drop and before she knew it one of these cussed papists would have her job.
Often, now, the tune came unbidden to her head:
Oh! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave …
It was a dreary December without the abundance of snow that Lyddie yearned for. What snow fell soon turned to a filthy sludge under the feet of too many people and the soot and ashes from too many chimneys. Her body itched even more than it usually did in winter. The tub of hot water, that first night in Mrs. Bedlow’s bedroom, proved to be her only full bath in the city, for, like most of the companies, the Concord Corporation had not seen fit to provide bathhouses for their workers. The girls were obliged to wash themselves using only the wash basins in their rooms, to which Tim hauled a pitcher of cold water once a day.
Despite the winter temperatures, the factory stayed hot with the heat of the machinery, the hundreds of whale oil lamps lit against the winter’s short, dark days, and the steam piped into the rooms to keep the air humid lest warp threads break needlessly and precious time and materials be wasted.
Lyddie went to work in the icy darkness and returned again at night. She never saw the sun. The brief noon break did not help. The sky was always oppressive and gray, and the smoke of thousands of chimneys hung low and menacing.
At the Lawrence Corporation, just down the riverbank from the Concord, a girl had slipped on the icy staircase in the rush to dinner. She had broken her neck in the fall. And the very same day, a man loading finished bolts of cloth onto the railroad cars in the Lawrence mill yard had been run over and crushed. There were no deaths at the Concord Corporation, but one of the little Irish girls in the spinning room had caught her hair in the machinery and was badly hurt.
Diana took up a collection for the hospital fees, but Lyddie had no money on her person. Besides, how could she give a contribution to some foreigner when she had her own poor baby sister to think of? She vowed to send her mother something next payday. She had opened a bank account and it was growing. She watched it the way one watched a heifer, hardly patient for the time to come when you could milk it. She tried not to resent withdrawing money to send to her mother, but she could see the balance grow each payday. She hadn’t seen her mother for two years. She had no way of knowing what her true needs were. And surely, as mean as Judah was and as crazy as Clarissa might be, they would not let their own sister or her child go hungry.
Christmas was not a holiday. It came and went hardly noticed. Amelia had a New Year’s gift from her mother—a pair of woolen gloves, which she wrapped again in the paper they had come in and hid in her trunk. Only someone fresh from the farm or one of the Irish would wear a pair of homemade gloves in Lowell. Betsy’s brother sent her a volume of essays “to improve my mind.” She laughed about his gift, knowing that it had been bought out of the money she sent him each month for his school allowance. “Oh, well,” she said. “Only a few more months and our golden lad will be on his own. Ah, if only our sexes had been reversed! Imagine him putting me through college.”
Lyddie received no gifts, indeed expected none, but she did get a note from Triphena, who thanked her for returning the loan. There was little news to report from Cutler’s. She asked after Lyddie’s health and complained that the mistress was as harsh as ever. Willie had run off at last, and the new boy and girl weren’t worth two blasts on a penny whistle. Lyddie had to smile. Poor Triphena.
Was she thinking of Triphena when it happened? Or was she overtired? It was late on Friday—the hardest time of the week. Was she careless when she replaced the shuttle in the right-hand box or had there been a knot in the weft thread? She would never know. She remembered rethreading the shuttle and putting it back in the race, yanking the lever into its slot … Before she could think she was on the floor, blood pouring through the hair near her right temple … the shuttle, the blasted shuttle. She tried to rise, she needed to stop the loom, but Diana got there almost at once, racing along the row, tripping with both hands the levers of her own machines and Lyddie’s four as she ran. She knelt down beside Lyddie.
“Dear God,” she said, cradling Lyddie’s head in her lap. She pulled her handkerchief from her pocket and held it tight against Lyddie’s temple. It filled immediately with blood. She eased her apron out from under Lyddie’s head, snatched it off her shoulders, and pressed it against the soaked handkerchief.
Girls had begun to gather. “Get me some cold water, Delia—clean!” she cried after the girl. “And handkerchiefs, please. All of you!” she cried to the girls crowding about them.
Mr. Marsden’s head appeared in the circle of heads above them. The girls shifted to make room for the overseer. “What’s this here?” His voice was stern, but his face went ashen as he looked down at the two girls.
“She was hit by the shuttle,” Diana said.
“What?” he yelled above the noise.
“Shuttle—shuttle—shuttle.” The word whished back and forth across the circle like a shuttle in a race.
“Well … well … get her out of here.” He clamped a large blue pocket handkerchief over his nose and mouth and hurried back to his high stool.
“Not partial to the sight of blood, are we?” The speaker was kneeling on the floor beside Diana, offering her the dainty white handkerchiefs she had collected from the operatives.
The cool water came at last. Diana lifted her apron from Lyddie’s temple. The first gush of blood had eased now to a trickle. She dipped a handkerchief into the water and, gently as a cow licking its newborn, cleaned the wound. “Can you see all right?” she asked.
“I think so.” Lyddie’s head pounded, but when she opened her eyes she could see nearly as well as she ever could in the dusty, lamp-lit room. She closed her eyes almost at once against the pain.