Diana nodded and went back to work. At the last bell Lyddie found herself going down the stairs beside Diana.
“She’s going to do fine, your Brigid,” Diana said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lyddie said, wondering how Diana knew the girl’s name and then annoyed that the foreigner should be “hers.” Surely Lyddie had never wanted her. “She seems all thumbs and tears. They be such fools, those Irish.”
Diana gave a wry smile. “We’re all allowed to be fools the first week or two, aren’t we?”
Lyddie blushed furiously. “I never thanked you proper for taking care of me before,” she said. “And your doctor—he never sent a bill. Mind you, I’m not complaining, but—”
Diana didn’t comment on the doctor. “Your head seems to have quite recovered. How do you feel? No pain, I hope.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” Lyddie said. “Just ornery as a old sow.”
“Ornery enough to add your name to the petition?” Diana whispered.
She was teasing her, Lyddie was sure of it. “I don’t reckon I aim to ever get that ornery,” Lyddie said.
* * *
* * *
Betsy signed the petition. One of the Female Labor Reform girls caught her in an apothecary shop one evening and got her to write in her name.
Lyddie was furious. “They got you when you was feeling low,” she said. “They go creeping around the city taking advantage when girls are feeling sick or worn out. Now you’ll be blacklisted, and what will I do without you?”
“Better to go out with a flourish than a whine, don’t you think?” But Betsy was never allowed her imagined exit. She was to be neither blacklisted nor dismissed.
Her cough got no better. She asked for a transfer to the drawing room. The work of drawing the warp threads from the beam through the harness and reeds had to be done painstakingly by hand. The air was cleaner in the drawing room, and there was much less noise. Though the threading took skill, it did not take the physical strength demanded in the machine rooms, and the girls sat on high stools as they worked. The drawing room was a welcome change for Betsy, but the move came too late to help. The coughing persisted. She began to spend days in their bedroom, then the house infirmary, until, finally, when blood showed up in her phlegm, Mrs. Bedlow demanded that she be removed to the hospital.
On Sunday Lyddie went to see her, taking her botany text and a couple of novels that cost Lyddie twenty cents at the lending library.
“You’ve got to get me out of here,” Betsy said between fits of coughing. “They’ll bleed me of every penny I’ve saved.” But where could Betsy go? Mrs. Bedlow would not have her in the house, unwilling to bear the responsibility, and Dr. Morris had declared her too weak to travel to Maine to her uncle’s.
Lyddie wrote the brother. He was only in Cambridge—less than a day away by coach or train—but there was a three-week delay before he wrote to say that he was studying for his final examinations and would, perhaps, be able to come for a visit at the end of the term.
Betsy only laughed. “Well,” she said, “he’s our darling baby boy.” Then she fell to coughing. There was a red stain on her handkerchief.
“But you sent him all the way through that college of his.”
“Wouldn’t you do as much for your Charlie?”
“But Charlie is—” Lyddie was going to say “nice” and stopped herself just in time.
“Our parents are dead, and he’s the son and heir,” Betsy said as though that explained everything.
Betsy grew a little stronger as the weather warmed, and in April her uncle came to take her to Maine. By then her savings were gone, along with her good looks. “Keep my bed for me, Lyddie. I’ll be back next year to start all over again. Someday I’ll have enough money to go to college no matter how much the piece rate drops. I may be the oldest girl in the corporation before I have the money again, but if they let women into Oberlin at all, surely they won’t fuss about gray hair and a few wrinkles.”
She’ll never come back, Lyddie thought sadly as she watched the buggy disappear around the corner, headed for the depot and the train north. She’ll never be strong enough again to work in a mill thirteen, fourteen hours a day. When I’m ready to go myself, she thought, maybe I could sign that cussed petition. Not for me. I don’t need it, but for Betsy and the others. It ain’t right for this place to suck the strength of their youth, then cast them off like dry husks to the wind.
* * *
* * *
He was standing by the front door of Number Five when she came with the rush of girls for the noon meal. “Lyddie Worthen …” He said her name so quietly that she almost went past him without hearing. “Miss Lyddie …”
She turned toward the voice, which didn’t seem familiar, to see a tall man she didn’t know. Later she realized that he had not been wearing his broad black Quaker hat. She would have known him at once in his hat. His hair in the sunlight was the rusty red of a robin’s breast. Several girls nudged her and giggled as they pushed past her up the steps to the boardinghouse.
“I was hoping thee would come,” he said. He was so tall he had to stoop over to speak to her. “I’m Luke Stevens.” His grave brown eyes searched her face. “Has thee forgotten?”