Mr. Curtis stepped into her path. On her first day in Lowell, it was he who’d stood over her while she signed away her waking hours to the Merrimack Corporation, while Hannah was petitioning Mrs. Hanson to board them together.
“Judith Whittier. I might have guessed. Where’s your ginger shadow?”
She blinked, breathed, and looked up into Curtis’s familiar, rheumy blue eyes and that long, crooked nose, which he enjoyed sticking into the girls’ faces if ever he caught them daydreaming. The weavers fancied he’d tried it once with a male hand, who punched him hard and fast, giving the nose its permanent crook.
Judith wished she had the strength and reach to do the same. Her face was barely higher than Curtis’s chest, which was not over-broad but thick and immovable enough.
“My friends are going to pass,” said Judith.
For a long moment, no one stirred. Mr. Curtis smirked.
“My friends,” Judith repeated, louder, hoping at least one of her fellows would take her meaning, “are going to pass.”
Behind her, at last, she felt another girl—it might have been Abigail North—test her words and press by. Curtis didn’t move, but the working men opened room for her along the bridge.
“What? No!” Beside the overseer, Mr. Boott sputtered like a water pump. “Stop them!”
Other girls followed Abigail, flowing through the group of men like fog through silent trees. Judith felt the girls go one by one as she held Mr. Curtis’s gaze. It was as if she were one knot in a loosely woven net: she felt a tug on her scalp as each girl passed, and yet she was unmoved.
“Stop them! Arrest them!” Mr. Boott continued to shout, until one of the men finally spoke up.
“Sir, we’re outnumbered five to one.”
Feeling the last of her comrades pass through the ranks of the working men, Judith let a smile turn her lips. “Good day, Mr. Curtis,” she said. “Mr. Boott.” She nodded to the agent and prepared to depart.
It was Boott who stepped into her path this time, desperate to compose himself as he straightened the cravat that bloomed below his chin. Judith held in a laugh. Did he think he could frighten her where Curtis could not?
“It doesn’t matter,” he said aloud, though whether to Judith or Curtis or the general crowd, he himself perhaps didn’t even know. “All of you witches will be arrested soon enough.”
“Witches?” Judith replied. “We mill girls are God-fearing churchgoers. As much is written into our contracts.” Which was quite right: to keep her place, every girl in Lowell was required to attend one church or other on Sunday.
Truthful as her words might be, without the other girls at her back, Mr. Boott and the men around him had no trouble keeping Judith on the bridge. “I know all about your wicked spells now.” His hand seized the band around her arm. “And they won’t work any longer, not without the queen of your coven. That one is already in custody.”
He gave a yank, to tear the band off her arm. The force wrenched her shoulder, and she felt herself stumbling precariously on the edge of the bridge. To avoid falling, she seized Mr. Boott’s shoulders. Still the woven band would not yield.
When she’d righted herself, she stepped backward, until she had both the agent and the overseer in view, Boott sweating below his wig and Curtis smirking at her—
They had someone in custody.
Hannah!
Judith lowered her head and charged between the two men at the front of the crowd. Boott and Curtis shouted again, but she had already pressed into the knot of working men and was dodging her way across the bridge. The mill hands were far less interested in keeping her there than the gentry of Lowell, and cleared a way as quickly as they could.
Hannah Hannah Hannah, beat Judith’s heart. She met the lane, turned on her heel, and ran. That weasel Curtis must have told Boott to suspect Hannah, if Judith were leading the strike. How many times must he have seen them together, walking arm in arm through the gates, or stealing a moment of fresh air on the staircase between weaving rooms? But Mr. Boott had called Hannah a witch, and he couldn’t have heard so much from Curtis, who didn’t know about Hannah’s Sight and certainly couldn’t know about their spell-making. Unless one of the other mill girls—
A knot of the other Unionists were waiting for her not far, ready to embrace her for her courage. “You were wonderful!” Georgie beamed.
“What’s the matter?” asked Lydia.
“Hannah!” Judith gasped, without pausing. Could one of them have betrayed her? No—the spell must prevent that treason as it prevented Abigail from returning to the mills.
Judith shook her head. Finding Hannah was the task at hand. Where would they keep her? Lowell had no jail. Perhaps the post office?
Mary Paul, the Vermonter from the Lawrence Mills, caught her by the hand, running in the opposite direction. “The new workers!” She gasped. “New workers coming down the river!”
Distinctly, Judith could feel the threads of the Union pact tugging at her, pulling her toward the dock.
“Tell the other girls to spit,” she told Mary, resisting. “Spit in the river. Spit in the canal.”
“Spit?”
“Ask Lydia!” Judith called over her shoulder. Like a shuttle passing through warp threads, she went dodging lines of her fellow mill girls, who were gathering under the poplars that followed the canal. They are the warp, she thought. And Hannah and I—we are the weft.
She let her feet take her, following, she realized at last, the path to the Boott Palace itself.
* * *
Perspiring and bewildered, Judith stepped into the shade of the columned porch and stopped. Nervously, her hands rose, and she turned the braided ring of Hannah’s and her own hair around her pinky finger.
Surely, whomever Mr. Boott had left on guard would not simply hand over the prisoner. Perhaps Judith ought to fetch Mrs. Hanson from the boardinghouse, to plead their cause. Perhaps she ought to have gathered some of the operatives to assist her.
Before she could think any further, the door swung open, revealing the figure of Dr. Green and his medical bag.
A voice spoke from the interior of the house. “Thank you, Doctor, yes, we’ll be sure she gets fresh air.”
“See that she does,” the doctor replied, exiting reluctantly. As the door began to swing shut behind him, Judith darted forward and stuck her foot between the door and the lintel.
“Doctor,” she said brightly. “Thank you so much for coming.”
Her appearance startled both the doctor and Mrs. Hanson, who proved to be the owner of the voice from within. Judith paused to stare.
None of the mill girls had betrayed them. Mrs. Hanson knew as much as they did about the spellcraft, but the boardinghouse keeper was under no bond of loyalty to the Union.
Recovering her presence of mind, Judith spoke to the doctor. “Poor Hannah kept us up all night with her coughing. But Mr. Boott has been so kind to look after her personally, and Mrs. Hanson is one of the Lord’s own angels.”
Dr. Green looked between the mill girl and the matron, as if he trusted neither, but both smiled back benignly, and Judith slid over the threshold with the grace of a cat slipping into forbidden rooms. Mrs. Hanson couldn’t very well stop her while the doctor was watching.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” said Dr. Green. “Good day, young lady. Mrs. Hanson.”
After thanking the man, Judith took the door and shut it, sealing herself inside the Boott Palace. At once she turned on the matron.
“You traitorous hag!”
The older woman backed away, raising her hands before her face in the nick of time, before Judith’s claws could reach her cheeks.
“All that talk about Hannah’s gift! All your awe for magic, and old ways, and your granddam the wise woman! All while spying and sneaking and preparing to betray us!”
Judith landed a flurry of blows on the matron’s arms before, with a quickness and strength that belied her age, Mrs. Hanson caught the girl’s wrists and held
her firm.
“What did you think, my girl?” Mrs. Hanson’s face was harder than Judith had ever seen it, and she shook the younger woman to rattle her teeth in her head. “That one coin from Georgie’s family could keep thirty mouths fed? That I run a charity house, with no belly nor family of my own to think of? I have daughters, married off younger than you are now; they risk their lives in childbed every year, to please their husbands. I have sons, who’ll die at sea like as not. Call Sunday the Lord’s day if you want to, I never had a day of rest in my life, not from work and not from trouble. You radicals—I ought to sell the lot of you and hire myself out to witch for the corporations when the next cotton mouse gets it in her head to strike. Least then, I might hold two dimes to rub together before I’m dead.”
Judith was stupefied. In all her grumbling, all her muttering, Mrs. Hanson had never said so much to one of her boarders, and all Judith could do was burst into tears.
Mrs. Hanson was shocked enough to let her go. “What are you crying for?”
“Where’s Hannah? I need Hannah.”
The matron groaned and shook her head. “In there.” She pointed, then, seeing that the younger woman’s tears hadn’t stopped, took Judith’s hand and led her through a parlor that was as unlike the matron’s own as an oyster to a pearl. The walls were papered in pale green, to match the sofas and the gold-and-green carpets, and the golden frames around the portraits of Mr. Boott and his wife. Beyond this room opened a library, with a writing desk and a row of pigeonholes and looming bookcases, which must serve as the agent’s workplace when he was at home. Inside, a figure clad in a white shift and surrounded by long locks of coppery hair was unrolling papers one-handed.
“Hannah?” Judith brushed tears off her cheeks.
The Seer turned, dropped a handkerchief pressed to her mouth to smile at Judith, and immediately lifted it again. She made the cruelest hacking sound ever heard. Judith ran to her.
“Judith,” she wheezed, “good. Help me. We must find the plans.” Her voice had hardly enough vigor in it to make out words; Judith couldn’t think what she was talking about.
“Hannah, I must get you away from here, and then you must rest. You’re ill, you’re—” When Hannah dropped the handkerchief again, Judith saw a vivid spot of blood, red against the white cotton.
“There isn’t time,” Hannah wheezed. “Mr. Boott will return soon to question me. He wants me to denounce all the Union as witches. Of course, our spell won’t let me, but he hardly knows that.” Her coughing turned into laughter and back into coughing. “Help me.” She pulled yet another roll of paper from the desk and thumbed through the pages.
“What are you looking for?” Judith asked at last. “Plans?” Meanwhile, Mrs. Hanson had picked up a piece of chalk and was drawing a ring on the floor to encircle both girls and the desk. “What is happening?”
Hannah had to hack and spit in Mr. Boott’s inkwell before she answered. “Our spell. There!” She unrolled a sheaf and weighted the papers on the desk with a brass candlestick.
Hannah shut her eyes, in the gesture Judith knew meant she was using her Sight to examine the document; unable to do the same, Judith squinted with her very ordinary gaze. The script was too fine to read at a glance, but the illustrations were clear.
“Looms?” she asked.
Hannah’s hair had never spread more wildly about her as she opened her eyes and met Judith’s gaze. “It’s as you said. Many years ago, the city’s namesake, Mr. Lowell, went spying all the way to England and took down the plans, then claimed the patents here.” She stretched out her free hand to Judith, and Judith took it. “This is the papercraft that gave the corporations mastery over our looms. I can See it now: this is how they conjured it.”
Judith’s heart beat faster, as she began to understand Hannah’s meaning. “Conjured what?”
“The great maw that lurks in each machine, swallowing up our labor and our lives, that returns nothing.”
The vision chilled Judith in spite of herself, but the pressure of Hannah’s fingers on her own, and the new horizon of understanding, filled her with a trembling joy. “Can we make the spell work? Can we make the looms faithful to us?”
“They were seduced away from their owners once. Why not again?” Hannah could say no more, as coughing overcame her again.
Mrs. Hanson came around again, this time placing candles along the ring she had traced, five in all. Judith caught the matron’s eye. “You aren’t a traitor, are you?”
“Oh, I am,” the older woman grunted, straightening up. “But it’s not you I betrayed. Only Boott and my own good sense.”
“Why did you say all that, then?”
“What would you say to an enraged harpy scratching at your eyes?”
Judith swallowed, as the unpleasant sensation of an apology owed overtook her. “I . . . Please, I didn’t . . .”
“Don’t go on and on. Goodness! You’re more foolhardy than I thought if you never suspected I’d give you up. I thought about it more than once. Then this one up and asks me to.”
Judith looked at Hannah sharply. Hannah gave another small cough and lifted one shoulder. “I couldn’t think of another way into Mr. Boott’s sanctum. I was coughing a fit last night, but I convinced Mrs. Hanson to take me here instead of the doctor’s.”
“But I saw Dr. Green. You aren’t pretending, Hannah, that’s real blood—”
The Seer nodded. “I’m dying,” she said, between coughs, “so I need you to kiss me quickly.”
The two phrases met Judith’s ears like fists, making her vision swim, and she reached out to hold Hannah by the shoulders, both to keep her feet and to be sure that the other girl was real. “That’s neither a thing to joke about.”
Hannah dropped the handkerchief on the desk so that she could take a lit taper from Mrs. Hanson. “When have you ever known me to joke?” To the five candles now blazing along the ring, she added the sixth, in the brass candlestick atop the plans of the power looms. She leaned in close to Judith. “These machines need an example.” Her clean hand touched Judith’s chin, tilting her face up slightly. “May I?”
With new tears in her eyes, Judith nodded.
11: God in His Heaven
SPITTING!
Still!
The display that morning at the bridge was but an overture. From his vantage at a sixth-floor window of the Merrimack Mill, Mr. Boott could see dozens more operatives ranged along the banks of the canal, expectorating into the current.
He couldn’t stop them. There weren’t loyal men enough in Lowell both to prevent the young women from making beasts of themselves and to escort the new operatives to the mills as they arrived from Boston. If not for the escorts, these striking hellcats might well attack the fresh workers. Or corrupt them.
“It’s only spittle,” said Curtis, as the overseer approached from behind. Under his command, dozens of men were downstairs, unloading, cleaning, and carding the bales of cotton, engaged in productive work after weeks of idleness. Clerks were already interviewing the first of the new girls, giving them contracts and assigning them a place in the spinning and weaving rooms.
Mr. Boott turned, overlooking the overseer to gaze instead at row upon row of power looms, like soldiers at attention. Even amidst the present trial, he allowed himself a moment’s reflection on the majesty of the integrated factory: every step from cotton boll to cut-and-dyed fabric, under one roof and one corporation, bottom to top. Truly, Man, whose mind could design such marvels, was made in the image of God.
The reflection made Curtis’s dismissive words all the more irritating. “It’s witchcraft,” said Mr. Boott. “It’s unnatural.”
“Then hang these mules,” said Curtis. “The new girls will start and no one will mind. Or at least hang Judith Whittier and her ginger friend, and let the rest beg for their jobs again.”
“Judith who?” asked Mr. Boott, ignoring, for the moment, that he had no license to hang anyone. That would have to wait for the magist
rate from Boston.
“The ringleader. The one who challenged me on the bridge.”
The same girl (Mr. Boott thought) who had handed him the operatives’ demands at his doorstep. He would have to question the matron Hanson and the self-proclaimed Seer about her.
Newcomers were climbing into the weaving from the staircase—one of Curtis’s hands, and then a pack of young women, ill-fed Irish by the look of them. Mr. Boott watched from his post at the window while Curtis joined his man to assign them to their looms, just one machine to a girl to start out. That was more lost time and profits; experienced weavers could manage three or four machines at a time.
Mr. Boott watched Curtis explain the harnesses and take-on rolls. The new girls assented in brogue voices that put Mr. Boott in mind of foggy days and endless moors. He had never been in Ireland itself but observed plenty of its people when he visited Lancashire. Well, these “lassies” would be glad of the regular wages and clean accommodations this side of the ocean.
At last Curtis returned to the front of the room, lifting a crook to reach the catch and affix the room’s machines to the power belt and thereby to the might of the waterwheel below.
Now! thought Mr. Boott, with bated breath. Looms would channel river power; girls would tend the looms. God was in His Heaven, and all was right with the world.
Ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk. The machines commenced their industrious song, the heddles danced while the shuttles darted between. The overseer and his assistant roved up and down the rows, minding the new girls minding the looms. Squinting, Mr. Boott could see the beginnings of a hundred new yards of cotton cloth, and sighed.
Twang! Thwap! No sooner had Mr. Boott released that puff of breath than there came from every quarter ghastly sounds. Several weavers screamed. Others ducked to the floor, as if they faced a division of firing Redcoats.
Mr. Boott stood dumbstruck.
“What’s this?!” Curtis demanded from the far corner of the weaving room, but his words thundered across every row. “What’s this!?” He advanced to the nearest loom. Half a dozen warp threads snapped like over-wound harp strings. At once he grabbed two of the offending ends, attempting to tie them together again. But finding the work too fine for his fingers, he seized the stunned maid who was meant to be minding the contraption and thrust her hands to the task instead.
The Factory Witches of Lowell Page 6