Lyddie

Dear Datter,

I was exceding surpriz to get your letter consern yr mov to Lowell. I do not no to say. if you can send muny it will be help to Judah and Clarissa. They fel a grate burdun. Babby Agnes is gone to God. Rachel is porely. Miny hav died, but Gods will be dun.

Yr. loving mother,

Mattie M. Worthen

She tried to remember Agnes’s little face. She strained, squenching her eyes tight to get a picture of her sister, now gone forever. She was a baby. She couldn’t have been more than four the winter of the bear, but that was now nearly two years past. She would have changed. Maybe she didn’t even remember me, Lyddie thought. Could she have forgotten me and Charlie? Me, Lyddie, who washed and fed her and dear Charlie who made her laugh? She wanted to cry but no tears came, only a hard, dry knot in the place where her heart should have been.

She must work harder. She must earn all the money to pay what they owed, so she could gather her family together b

ack on the farm while she still had family left to gather. The idea of living alone and orphaned and without brother or sister—a life barren of land and family like Diana’s …

So it was that when the Concord Corporation once again speeded up the machinery, she, almost alone, did not complain. She only had two looms to tend instead of the four she’d tended during the summer. She needed the money. She had to have the money. Some of the girls had no sooner come back from their summer holidays than they went home again. They could not keep up the pace. Lyddie was given another loom and then another, and even at the increased speed of each loom, she could tend all four and felt a satisfying disdain for those who could not do the work.

Prudence was the first of the roommates to go home for good. The suitor in Rutland was urging her to give up factory life, but there was a more compelling reason for her to return. She had begun coughing, a dry, painful cough through the night that kept both Betsy and Amelia awake, though not Lyddie. She slept like a caterpillar in winter. Indeed, she was cocooned from all the rest. Betsy had not offered to read another novel to Lyddie since the summer. She and several other operatives had formed study groups, one in Latin and another in botany. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings they commandeered half the parlor of Number Five and hired their own teacher. When Betsy wasn’t downstairs with her group, she was in the room preparing for her next session. “Would you like me to read the text to you?” she asked Lyddie once, taking her nose out from between the pages of her botany book.

Lyddie smiled and shook her head. She knew about plants and flowers, at least as much as she craved to know. She didn’t know enough about Oliver Twist.

With Prudence gone and the parlor congested, Amelia was often in the room. She insisted on talking, though Betsy, when there, ignored her and Lyddie tried hard to.

“The two of you should be exercising your bodies instead of holing up in this stuffy room reading,” Amelia said.

No answer.

“Or at the least, stretching your souls.”

No reply, though both Lyddie and Betsy knew that Amelia was reminding them that it was the Sabbath and neither of them had gone to services earlier.

“What are you reading, Lyddie?”

Maybe if I pretend not to hear, she’ll leave me be.

“Lyddie!” This time she spoke so sharply that Lyddie looked up, startled. “Get your nose out of that book and come take a walk with me. We won’t have many more lovely Sunday afternoons like this. It will be getting cold soon.”

“I’m busy,” Lyddie mumbled.

Amelia came closer. “You’ve been reading that same book for months.” She reached over and took Oliver Twist out of Lyddie’s hands.

“That’s my book, ey!”

“Come on, Lyddie. Just a short walk by the river before supper. It will do you good.”

“Will you get her out of here before I gag her with my bonnet ribbons and lash her to the bedpost?” Betsy said tightly, never taking her eyes off her own book.

“She can walk by herself. I got to read my book.” Lyddie stretched her hand to take the book back, but Amelia held it up just out of reach.

“Oh, come,” she said. “You’ve already read this book. I’ve seen you, and besides, it’s only a silly novel—not fit for reading, and a sin on the Sabbath—”

Lyddie could feel the gorge rising in her throat. Silly novel? It was life and death. “You ain’t read it,” she said, forgetting her grammar in her anger. “How can you know?”

Amelia flushed and her eyes blinked rapidly. She was no longer teasing. “I know about novels,” she said, her voice high and a little shaky. “They are the devil’s instrument to draw impressionable young minds to perdition.”

Lyddie stared at Amelia with her mouth wide open.

It was Betsy who spoke. “For pity’s sake, Amelia. Where did you ever hear such pompous nonsense?”

Amelia’s face grew redder. “You are unbelievers and scoffers, and I don’t see how I can continue to live in the same room with you.”