Lyddie

A letter arrived in September, on thick, expensive paper, the address decked out in curlicues. “We regret to inform you of

the death of Maggie M. Worthen …” They hadn’t even got her name right. Poor Mama. Nothing ever right for her in life or death. Lyddie squeezed her eyes closed and tried to picture her mother’s face. She could see the thin, restless form rocking back and forth before the fire, the hair already streaked with gray. But the face was blurred. She had been gone so long from them. Gone long before she died.

Fall came. Not the raucous patchwork of the Green Mountains, but the sedate brocade of a Massachusetts city. The days began to shorten. Lyddie went to work in darkness and came back to supper in darkness. The whale oil lamps stayed on nearly the whole day in the factory, so water buckets were kept filled on every floor. Fire was a constant dread while the lamps burned.

As the days grew short, breakfast came before the working day began. There was, as always, barely time to swallow the meals, though the food was not as ample as it had been a year ago. At the end of the day now, she waited for Brigid, and they would go out together. Often all the other girls passed them on the stairs or in the yard, for they would be talking about what Brigid had read since the day before, and Lyddie would solve the mystery of an impossible word or the conundrum of a sentence.

Then one evening, she realized that Brigid was not beside her on the crowded stairs. She tried to wait, but the crowd of chattering operatives pushed her forward. She went down to the bottom of the stairs and stepped out of the stream. A hundred or more girls went past.

She was puzzled. Surely Brigid had been right beside her. They had been talking. Brigid had asked her what “thralldom” was. She was trying laboriously to read Mr. Douglass’s book, but was yet to get through the first page of the preface.

At last the stairs were empty of clattering feet and the shrill laughter of young women at the end of a long workday. But still there was no Brigid. Lyddie hesitated. Perhaps the girl had gone ahead? Or perhaps she had forgotten something and gone back. Lyddie started across the nearly deserted yard. Her supper would be waiting and Mrs. Bedlow was insulted by tardiness. She had got nearly to the gate when something made her stop, nose up, like a doe with young in the thicket.

She hurried back and climbed the four flights to the weaving room. The lamps had been extinguished by the operatives as they left their looms, so at first her eyes could make out nothing but the hulking shapes of the machines.

Then she heard a strained, high-pitched voice. “Please, sir, please Mr. Marsden …”

Lyddie snatched up the fire bucket. It was full of water, but she didn’t notice the weight. “Please—no—” She ran down the aisle between the looms toward the voice and saw in the shadows Brigid, eyes white with fear, and Mr. Marsden’s back. His hands were clamped on Brigid’s arms.

“Mr. Marsden!”

At the sound of her hoarse cry, the overseer whirled about. She crammed the fire bucket down over his shiny pate, his bulging eyes, his rosebud mouth fixed in a perfect little O. The stagnant water sloshed over his shoulders and ran down his trousers.

She let go of the bucket and grabbed Brigid’s hand. They began to run, Lyddie dragging Brigid across the floor. Behind in the darkness, she thought she heard the noise of an angry bear crashing an oatmeal pot against the furniture.

She started to laugh. By the time they were at the bottom of the stairs she was weak with laughter and her side ached, but she kept running, through the empty yard, past the startled gatekeeper, across the bridge, and down the row of wide-eyed boardinghouses, dragging a bewildered Brigid behind her.

21

Turpitude

By morning the laughter was long past. She was awake and dressed, pacing the narrow corridor between the beds, before the four-thirty bell. Her breath caught high in her throat and her blood raced around her body, undecided whether to run fire through her veins, searing her despite the November chill, or freeze to the icy rivulet of a mountain brook.

She could not touch her breakfast. The smell of fried codfish turned her stomach. But she sat there amidst the chatter and clatter of the meal because it was easier to pass the time in the noise of company than in the raging silence of her room.

She was the first at the gate. It wasn’t that she was eager for the day to begin, but eager for it to be over, for whatever was to happen—and she did not doubt that something dreadful must happen—for whatever must happen to be in the past.

She tried not to think of Brigid. She could not take on Brigid’s fate as well as her own. If only she had not come back up the stairs. Monster! Would I have wished to leave that poor child alone? Better to feed Rachel and Agnes to the bear. And yet, Brigid was not a helpless child. She might have broken loose—stomped his foot or … Well, it was too late for that. Lyddie had gone back. She had, mercy on her, picked up that pail of filthy water and crammed it down on the overseer’s neat little head. And all she had need to do was speak. When she had called his name, he had turned and let Brigid go. But, no, Lyddie could not be satisfied. She had taken that pail and rammed it till the man’s shoulders were almost squeezed up under the tin. The skin on her scalp crawled …

Why didn’t they open the gate? She was as weary of the scene in her head as if she’d actually picked up that heavy bucket and brought it down over and over again and run the length of the yard dragging Brigid behind her a thousand times over. Laughing. Of course he must have heard her. She had howled like a maniac. He must have heard.

The other operatives were crowded about, jostling her as they all waited for the bell. And still, when it rang, she jumped. It was so loud, so like an alarm clanging danger. She tried to turn against the tide, to get away while there was still time, but she was caught in the chattering, laughing trap of factory girls pushing themselves forward into the new day. She gave up and allowed the press of bodies around her to propel her to the enclosed staircase and up the four flights to the weaving room.

Brigid was not at her looms. Mr. Marsden was not on his high stool. Her execution was delayed. She felt relief, which was immediately swallowed up in anxiety. She needed it all to be over.

One of the girls from the Acre approached her. “Brigid says to tell you she’s feeling a wee bit poorly this morning. You are not to worry.”

The little coward. She’s going to let me face it all alone, ey? When I was the one risked all to help her.

The girl glanced back over her shoulder and around the room. She bent her face close to Lyddie’s neck and whispered. “The truth be told, she got word not to report this morning. But she had no wish to alarm you.”

Now Lyddie was truly alarmed without even the slight armor that resentment might provide. Would they, then, be punishing Brigid instead of her? What sin had Brigid committed? What rule had she ever trespassed? And she with a sickly mother and nearly a dozen brothers and sisters to care for?

Mr. Marsden had come in. Lyddie kept her eyes carefully on her looms. The room shook and shuddered into life. Lyddie and the Irish girl beyond kept Brigid’s looms going between them as best they could. She was almost busy enough to suppress her fears. And then a young man, the agent’s clerk in his neat suit and cravat, appeared at her side and asked her to come with him to the agent’s office. The time had come at last. She shut down her own looms and one of Brigid’s, and followed the clerk down the stairs and out across the yard to the low building that housed the counting room and the offices.

The agent Graves was seated at his huge rolltop desk and did not at once turn from his papers and acknowledge her presence. The clerk had only taken her as far as the door, so she stood just inside as he closed it behind her. She tried to breathe.

She waited like that, hardly able to get a breath past her Adam’s apple, until she began to feel quite faint. Would she collapse then in a heap on the rug? She studied the pattern, shades of dull browns, starting nearly black in the center and spinning out lighter and lighter to a dirty yellow at the outer edge. Dizzy, she stumbled a step forward to keep from falling. The man turned in his chair, as though annoyed. He was wearing half spectacles and he lowered his massive head and stared over them at her.