Lyddie

“I—I’ve come to hate factory life. Oh Betsy, I hate what it’s doing to me. I don’t even know myself anymore. This corporation is turning me into a sour old spinster.”

“It’s just the winter.” Betsy’s voice was kinder than usual. “It’s hard to stay cheerful in the dark. Come spring you’ll be our resident saint once more.”

Amelia ignored the tease. “I’ve been through winter before,” she said. “It’s not the season.” She sighed again, more deeply than before. “I’m tired, Betsy. I can’t keep up the pace.”

“Who can? Except our Amazonian Lyddie?” Betsy’s laugh turned abruptly into a cough that shook the whole bed.

Lyddie scrunched up tightly into herself and tried to block out the sound and the rusty saw hacking through her own chest. Had Betsy been coughing like this for long? Why hadn’t she heard it before? Surely there must be some syrup or tonic, even opium …

“You must see the doctor about that cough,” Amelia said. “Promise me you will.”

“I’ll make a pact with you, Amelia. I’ll see the doctor if you’ll promise to stay until summer. I can’t think of Number Five without you.” She stopped to cough, then cleared her throat and said in a still husky voice, “How could I manage? You’re the plague of my life—my—my guardian angel.”

There was a funny kind of closeness between her roommates after that night, but even so, Amelia went home the last week of January to visit and didn’t come back. She wrote that her father had found her a teaching post in the next village. “Forgive me, Betsy,” she wrote. “And do, please, I beg you, go to see the doctor.”

* * *

* * *

With a bed to herself, Lyddie was less distressed by Betsy’s coughing. And though Betsy never quite got around to seeing Dr. Morris, she was better, Lyddie told herself. Surely the cough was less wracking than it had been. Lyddie missed Amelia. She would have imagined that she’d feel relief to have her gone, but Betsy was right. They both needed her in an odd sort of way—their nettlesome guardian angel.

Her cut was quite healed. Her hair grew out and covered the scar. She was working as well and as hard as ever. Her January pay came to eleven dollars and twenty cents, exclusive of board. Everything was going well for her when Mr. Marsden stopped her one evening as she was about to leave. The machines were quiet, so she could not pretend deafness.

“You’re feeling fine again? No problems with the—the head?” She nodded and made as if to go. “You have to take care of yourself. You’re my best girl, you know.” He put his hand on her sleeve. She looked down at it, and he slipped it off. His face reddened slightly, and his little round mouth worked a bit on the next sentence.

“We’re getting new operators in tomorrow—not nearly so clever as you, but promising. If I could put one in your care—let her work as a spare hand on one of your machines.”

Oh, hang it all. How could she say no? How could she explain that she must not be slowed down? She couldn’t have some dummy monkeying with her looms. “I got to make my pieces,” she muttered.

“Yes,” he said, “of course you do. It would only be for a day or so. I wouldn’t let anyone hinder you.” He smiled with his mouth and not his eyes. “You’re my prize girl here.”

I’m not your girl. I’m not anybody’s girl but my own.

“So—it’s settled,” he said, reaching out as though to pat her again, but Lyddie quickly shifted her arm to escape the touch.

* * *

* * *

The new girl, Brigid, was from the Acre—an Irish papist through and through, wearing layers of strange capes and smelling even worse than Lyddie herself. Lyddie scented more than poverty and winter sweat. She whiffed disaster. The girl’s only asset was a better command of proper New England speech than most of her lot. Not that she spoke often. She seemed deafened by the machinery and too cowed to ask questions even when she needed to.

As for tying knots, a basic weaver’s knot, the girl simply couldn’t do them. Lyddie demonstrated—her powdered fingers pinching, looping, slipping, pulling—all in one fluid motion that magically produced a healed warp thread with no hint of a lump to betray the break.

“You don’t even watch!” the girl cried out in alarm. And, of course, Lyddie didn’t. She had no need to. Her fingers could have tied that knot in a privy at midnight, and it would have held. It would have been invisible as well.

“Here,” she said, barely clinging to patience. “I’ll do it more slowly.” She slapped off all four machines. With her scissors, she cut two threads from a bobbin and, taking the girl to the window where the light was best, she wasted at least five precious minutes tying and retying the useless knot until, finally, the girl was able, however clumsily, to tie a lumpy knot herself.

Lyddie jerked a nod. “It will get better with practice,” she said gruffly, anxious to get the stilled looms roaring once more.

Threading the shuttle was, if anything, worse. Lyddie popped the full bobbin into the shuttle and then, as always, put her mouth to the hole and sucked the thread through, pulled it to length, wrapped it quickly on a hook of the temple, dropped the shuttle into the race, and restarted the loom. The next time the quill had to be replaced, she had Brigid thread it, and, as she watched the girl put her mouth over the hole and suck out the thread, the words kiss of death came to mind. She had always thought the words a joke among the weavers, but here was this strange-smelling foreigner sucking Lyddie’s shuttles, leaving her spittle all over the thread hole. Lyddie wiped the point quickly on her apron before she banged the shuttle against the far end of the race. “We don’t want any flying s

huttles,” she yelled, her face nearly as crimson as the Irish girl’s.

By the end of the first day, the girl was far from ready to operate her own machine, but Lyddie had run out of patience. She told Mr. Marsden to assign the girl a loom next to her own. “I’ll watch out for her and tend my own machines as well.”

Before the noon break of the next day, a flying shuttle had grazed the girl’s shoulder, and she had let the shuttle run out of weft, ruining several inches of cloth. When a warp thread snapped, instead of instantly hitting the lever to stall the loom, she threw her apron over her head and burst into tears.

“Shut off your loom,” Lyddie yelled over to her. “You can tie the knot this time. You should know how by now, ey?” The girl burst into tears again, and before Lyddie could decide what to do with her, Diana was there, slapping off the loom. Burning with shame, Lyddie glanced over as Diana, without a quiver of impatience, helped the girl retrieve the broken ends and tie a weaver’s knot. When, finally, Diana stood back and told the girl to pull the lever into place, Lyddie touched Diana’s shoulder. “Sorry,” she mouthed.