All Hannah replied was “The schoolmaster beat me also.” She coughed. “And my parents did.”
“Why?” Now it was Judith marveling, for she could hardly imagine Hannah as a mischievous child.
“The reverend told them they must, if I said I saw things that weren’t there.”
The bubbling spring in Judith’s stomach reached her eyes.
“It didn’t make me fierce like you,” said Hannah. “I only stopped telling anyone what I Saw. And when I could, I left.”
Gently, Judith gathered both of the Seer’s hands in hers. “All the more reason to make a stand now. This is your home, Hannah. This is your place. Oughtn’t it be a place that treats you well?”
The tall girl sighed. “I’ll try, Judith. I’ll try to See a way to make the looms faithful.”
Judith dropped Hannah’s hands to clap hers in delight. “That’s all I ask!”
6: The Boardinghouse Keeper
QUILL IN HAND, MR. BOOTT considered the woman before him. She must be past sixty—certainly beyond any epoch when youthful humors might have led her astray. A distinguished spider’s web of wrinkles bloomed from the corners of eyes and mouth, segmenting her somber—even sour—face. Her gray dress was clean and her hair neatly tucked below the matching bonnet, in much the same costume worn by the other matrons of Lowell.
Nevertheless, here she was, to plead the case of mutiny.
“You’ve no cause to stop payment to us keepers.” Neither the depth of her chair nor the height of Mr. Boott’s desk impressed her. “We aren’t on strike.”
“Ah. Mrs.—Hanson, was it? Yes.” He’d noted her name and her position in his diary as soon as she arrived. “You must understand, Mrs. Hanson, that my employers cannot make payments out of nothing. With the mills at a standstill—”
“Surely the Lawrences and Appletons of the world have a line of credit when they need it? We’re working hard as ever to feed and shelter your operatives. Or do you want a thousand girls starving in the city streets?”
“No, no, no, not in the streets.” Mr. Boott cleared his throat and fluffed his cravat. “Naturally, some of the overseers rejoiced to hear that a few of the most—troublesome—girls have been evicted, but I hoped, Mrs. Hanson, I hoped that the matrons might exercise a wiser, motherly influence and persuade the young women back to work.”
“I’m paid to feed and house them, not to bully them.”
“At present, you’re not paid for anything.” The agent could hardly help showing his impatience when the woman insisted on misunderstanding him.
“Indeed,” said the matron, her thin eyebrows disappearing below the peak of her bonnet. “That is the sole and complete substance of my complaint to you today.”
“There will be no money until the mills are running again. I regret I cannot satisfy you.”
“Then satisfy the Union girls.” She placed one hand on either arm of the chair, squaring up. “Give them what they want—it isn’t much—and spin your cotton into gold again. What are you searching for, sir?”
Mr. Boott had risen to the capacious bookshelves, where years of records were bound and collected. “Ah. Here it is: Merrimack Corporation, Number Seven.”
The woman blinked at the invocation of her house, and Mr. Boott nodded approvingly to himself. If she insisted on being heard, he would have some questions of his own answered. “Since you object to having any moral influence upon your charges, perhaps you might not object to influencing me, on their behalf?”
Now the lady’s eyes grew round, as she watched him open the bound records of her lodgers, and turn the pages. “What do you mean?”
“It’s quite simple.” He returned to his throne behind the desk. “I am inquiring into the character of your boarders, Mrs. Hanson. Shall we proceed alphabetically? Emelie Adams: tell me about her. Is she a good, churchgoing girl? Ever late for curfew, or gone at odd hours?”
The matron’s lips became thin and bloodless. “You may skip Emelie.” By her tone, she had lost all taste for this interview. “As well as her sister Sarah. Both left Lowell before the strike began.”
“Very well,” said the agent, determined to press his advantage. “Who’s this, then? Elizabeth Bagley. Tell me about her, for surely you know something. A boardinghouse keeper cares as much for the soul as for the body.”
“I can’t tell you a thing about their souls,” the woman replied. “Only what they eat and where they sleep at night.”
If Mr. Boott had begun this exercise with any mirth, it was long since exhausted. “Florinda Bright,” he announced. “Laura Cate. Mary Cook,” he went on, searching for some reaction. “You must hear them whispering on the staircase or chattering in the parlor. Surely, you can tell which one introduced this infernal Union business into the house. Lucy Larson. Sarah Payne,” he said, choosing names at random now, searching for a reaction. “Hannah Pickering.”
The woman’s gaze fluttered from his own, seeking to rest anywhere else in the room: window ledge, bookcases, pigeonhole cubbies, the geography of his desk from inkwell to silver quill nippers.
“Yes? This one, Hannah? Who is she?”
“If I’m not in your employ, Mr. Boott, I’ve nothing to tell you.”
“If you’re not in my employ, Mrs. Hanson, I’ve nothing to pay you.”
The matron huffed and rose to her feet, gathering up her skirts. “The arrogance of great men!” she murmured.
Mr. Boott was quick, rounding the desk in time to catch her arm before she could pass from the room. “Tell me about Hannah Pickering. She’s one of the ringleaders, isn’t she?”
“She,” began the stout woman, stretching upward to her full height (quite equal to the agent’s, as it was), “is a sweet, obedient maiden who’s worked in Lowell for four summers without so much as a ‘boo’ to anyone, and mark me, she’ll die of weak lungs before she’s twenty, no thanks to you or your masters. Now, unless you plan to clap me in irons, sir, unhand my sleeve.”
Abashed, Mr. Boott released her and looked at his polished shoes. Perhaps what she said about this single girl was true, but—
“Aid me, Mrs. Hanson. Be my eyes and ears. You cannot be indifferent to the times in which we live: what if we meet the demands of this Union, and then the river fails, or the cotton wilts, or a hundred mills cover Lancashire to turn out cloth on the cheap? Every corporation in Lowell would be ruined, and that would be the undoing of many an enterprise, from Boston to Charleston—merchants, shippers, planters, all—your boarders included. We are a young nation, newly afloat, with the Empire and all its colonies eager to sink us. Do you think the governor or the president can stand by while their captains of industry are led by the nose? The Boston gentlemen have no wish to quarrel with you, no, nor any of the mill girls. But they must be permitted to lead.”
The speech quite exhausted the agent, and he did not expect a word of it to convince the matron. While he reached for his desk, gasping, to his surprise the woman reached out. Her hand cupped his well-shaved cheek in a motherly fashion.
“Their existence,” she said, “is a quarrel with me and the mill girls. But I shall think on it, Mr. Boott. Good day.”
7: Abigail North
JUDITH AND HANNAH did not return to Mrs. Hanson’s until after supper, their bellies yawning with hunger. Though they intended to make straight for the kitchen, no sooner had they set foot across the threshold than Patience Smith hastened up from the foot of the staircase where she’d been sitting, rushed to Judith, and seized her hand.
“Thank heavens you’re here!” Patience was breathless, her face giving the lie to her name as she tugged Judith inside. Other girls were lining the staircase, leaning over the banister to watch, or seated around the parlor in clusters, heads lifted in attitudes of disturbed conversation. Tonight, there was no evidence of games, no playing cards, no one seated at the pianoforte.
“What’s happened?” asked Judith.
“It’s Abigail—she—we—you’d better come and see. Perhap
s you too,” the girl added to Hannah, less certain.
Irritated more than intrigued, intrigued more than alarmed, Judith allowed herself to be pulled up the staircase, past the others waiting in various states of agitation. The third floor, they found deserted except for Sarah Payne, who stood knitting outside the doorway of the dormitory shared by Patience, Abigail, and four others. The needles clicked and clacked menacingly, as if singing the tale of their sharp points. After recognizing the three new arrivals, Sarah stood aside, allowing them to enter the dormitory. She swiftly retook her post as soon as Hannah had passed.
Inside the bedroom—even smaller and darker than the room where Hannah and Judith slept on the fourth floor—Lucy and Lydia flanked a bundle of quilt and pillow, which was shaking with sobs.
“It’s no less than you deserve, you craven little mouse,” Lydia excoriated the sobbing bed clothes. “By heaven, Judith was right!”
“What is this?” asked Judith herself.
Leaving others to explain, Patience went to the fireplace, where she stood worrying a hangnail and watching.
“It’s Abigail. She feared for her family.” With a weary sigh, Lucy sat down on the bed beside the bundle, which squinting Judith could make out was the pitiful shape of a young woman curled up below the quilt, the pillow mashed over her head with two trembling hands. “She tried to go to Mr. Boott.”
All pity that Judith was prepared to feel disappeared. The attitude of the operatives downstairs and Sarah Payne’s armed vigil at the door grew clearer. “To Mr. Boott? Why?”
In response, the bundle wailed, and from the fireplace Patience pled her fellow’s case. “Judith, don’t be too hard on her. All of us have kinfolk at home depending on us.”
“Yes,” Judith agreed thinly, “and yet none of us save her went over to the enemy. But someone tell me what happened.”
Lydia sniffed and Lucy patted what seemed to be the bundle’s shoulder. “Near as we can figure—it’s come out only between sobs, you see—Abigail decided to ask if the mills would take her back, with that five-cent raise Mr. Boott promised,” said Lucy. “She’d no sooner set out for the Boott Palace, however, than she felt a tug on her hair. Well, she turns around and no one is there. So, on she goes. A few steps more, and she feels it again. She looks around, but she’s quite alone in the lane. Of course, now she feels queer and haunted, but cowardice won’t feed her family, so on she goes, determined to ignore the tugging.
“Firmer and more frequent it grows, from all quarters, and she’s sure she’s under attack by spirits or worse. She goes running into town, covering her head as best she can with her arms. She meets Laura and Betsy returning with the groceries for Mrs. H, and begs them to shield her. Well, of course, they don’t know what’s going on, but Laura lends her a shawl to throw over her head, and she makes her way back here like that. Little enough good it did her.”
“What do you mean?” Judith asked, blinking fast, unsure whether she credited Lucy’s account or not. It certainly appeared Lucy believed it.
“Oh, show her, you ninny!” said Lydia, seizing the pillow from over Abigail’s head. The girl’s scalp appeared briefly, pale and bald in the dim firelight, before she pulled herself below the bedclothes again like a tortoise taking shelter.
All of Abigail’s brunette locks were gone.
Judith clapped her hands over her open mouth. Had the spell—her spell, Hannah’s spell—truly worked so well? She wheeled around to look at the Seer, to find that Hannah had sunk to the foot of the empty bed nearest the door, holding herself tightly and staring sightlessly into the corners of the room.
“What do you want to do with her?”
Lucy’s question brought Judith back to the huddled traitor. “Do with her?”
“Some of the Union”—Lucy measured her tone precisely as a new bolt of cloth—“have a mind to run her out of Lowell. Others understand her reasons—they might even do the same if pressed to it—and say she’s been punished enough.”
“At least,” said Lydia, all righteous fury, “we should show her head to the other boardinghouses, to see what happens to oath-breakers.”
Judith gasped, for she felt much the same as Lydia. In a fortnight, had the gap between the staunch radical and the belle of Lowell narrowed so much?
“No one outside of this house has seen her or knows what’s happened,” Lucy explained. “We agreed to let you decide.”
Judith scowled. “We can’t parade her around—much as I’d like to, Lydia,” she added, when the other girl’s rosebud mouth opened to object. “Surely, the tale of invisible demons plucking a girl bald won’t serve our reputation any. That really might get someone hanged.” She sighed and sat on the bed opposite Abigail, and pulled the quilt off the accused.
The miserable creature lifted her face, bald and tearful as a newborn.
“Abigail, are you sorry?”
“Sorry! Lord.” The girl let out a bitter laugh. “Yes, I’m most contrite and regretful. I am sorry I ever met you, Judith Whittier, or that ginger-haired witch!”
Judith twisted to look for Hannah and saw the words hit the Seer with a force that doubled her over. Without a thought, Judith twisted back and let her hand fly, straight across Abigail’s cheeks.
The blow landed with a crackling smack! At the same moment, a desperate cough exploded from Hannah’s lungs. Startled, Lucy, Lydia, and Patience drew together in a circle around Abigail, clutching at one another’s hands, while Judith rushed to Hannah’s side. The first cough became a fit, ragged breaths sawing through the Seer’s throat as she gasped.
“Hannah, Hannah,” Judith soothed, patting her back. She could feel the older girl’s ribs, even through her calico dress.
Hannah recovered, finally finding breath to sit up straight. She stared across the room at Abigail, who quailed, turned her gaze away, and began to cry again. Lucy sat down on the bed and yielded her shoulder for the miserable prisoner to cry into.
Judith’s hand, with its banded pinky finger, rested on the Seer’s shoulder. “If you put it to me,” she began, “I say it’s up to Hannah. What do you think we should do with her? Is she part of the Union, or isn’t she?”
Hannah reached up and covered Judith’s hand with her own. Her eyes shut once more.
“Part of the Union,” wheezed the Seer. “She was only trying to protect her family.”
The other girls—even Lydia—gave a sigh of relief. Hannah stood up and moved for the door. Judith made as if to follow, but the Seer shook her off. “Apologize to her,” Hannah murmured, gently pushing Judith away. “You’re hungry and tired, and you didn’t mean it.”
Then Hannah left, leaving Judith standing clumsily before the weeping girl she had struck.
After a moment, Abigail swallowed. “It’s all right. I didn’t mean it, either,” she said. “If there’s none swifter, I know the Union is the better way to earn for my parents. I don’t regret knowing you. Or Hannah.” She rubbed tears off her cheeks, then settled her fingers on her head, pitifully feeling for the hair she must know was no longer there. It was strange, how domed and egg-like her pate. With her brunette locks intact, many would have called Abigail as beautiful as Sarah Payne or Lydia.
“It isn’t so bad.” Lucy chucked her on the chin. “Phrenologists are sure to discount your next reading.”
Abigail moaned, while Patience and Lydia shook their heads at Lucy.
“I’ll loan you a cap,” said Judith, unable to force her mouth into words of any more contrite disposition.
8: Kitchen Magic
BREAD DOUGH SMACKED AGAINST the kitchen table with a great thwap, sending forth an explosion of floury smoke within which Mrs. Hanson might well have concealed herself, except that continuous muttering betrayed her position. In fresh curses she protested the crick in her neck, the fatigue in her feet, the indifference of young people, and the arrogance of rich. Most specially that great potentate of Lowell himself, Kirk Boott! Her fingers, so arthritic and unwilling as they kneade
d the dough, itched to seize and twist the man’s silk cravat until he choked. She might have known he’d turn their interview into an interrogation. More fool her, for marching upon him without reinforcements or artillery. A mistake she would not repeat.
At least no harm had yet come of it. For here was Hannah, gobbling her supper as hastily as any night, her narrow backside propped against the windowsill.
There’d been some fuss among the girls over that little mouse Abigail North, who’d come in with Betsy and Laura and the groceries, a shawl over her head, and scurried upstairs at once. She did not reappear for supper. Mrs. Hanson felt no inclination to investigate; she had kept the Lowell house long enough not to involve herself in all the little dramas of her wards. One more plate of beans and gravy remained on the sideboard, for Abigail or Judith Whittier, whichever had the stomach to come for it. Hannah—Hannah the Gifted, Hannah the Fire-Kissed—never went to bed hungry. Well, house matrons (like mothers) were entitled to their favorites.
Four years earlier, when the ginger-haired maid came to Lowell, Mrs. Hanson had never seen a child so haunted. Hannah was mute among the robust crowd of girls at meal times, and first to retreat to the dormitories while the others took turns at checkers and cards. Finally, the matron told her that the washing-up after supper fell to the newest tenant in the house, and so drove her into the refuge of a task each evening. There, among the scrub brushes and buckets, Mrs. Hanson talked to her. Idle stories. Gossip from the Acre and English Row. The rising price of butter and the waste of modern fashions. The uselessness of Baptist and Methodist ministers alike. It was no more than the matron would have said to herself, if she were alone. She might as well have been, the ginger girl worked so silently.
Not until she witnessed Mrs. Hanson’s tonics and potions did Hannah speak up. One of the Sarahs was carried home from the mills fainting, and her friends begged the matron not to call the doctor, who would charge much, help little, and report every cough and shiver to the corporation. Mrs. Hanson was not inclined to fetch the man anyhow, but instead brewed a tea for Sarah—Hemingway, she thought it was—to answer the trouble. That night, the good woman discovered Hannah staring into her cabinet of herbs as if to memorize every leaf and root, except that her eyes were shut.
The Factory Witches of Lowell Page 4