by Emma Newman
“Thank you,” Charlotte said, falling into step with her. “I’m Charlotte. But everyone calls me Charlie.”
“Pleased to meet you, Charlie. Keep yer ’ead down, do as yer told and don’t complain. You’ll be ’right.”
Charlotte saw a broad-chested, well-dressed man come round the side of the mill and go over to a shorter man watching the workers leave. He was wearing the same cravat as her brother and had collar-length light brown hair. Mags noted her interest in him. “That’s Apprentice Paxton,” she whispered. “Keep out of his way, love. He likes nothing more than to lord it over us all, and if he don’t like the look of yer, yer out. We don’t ’ave nothin’ to do with them magi, and that’s the way it should be.”
So that was the man determined to see her brother transported. Charlotte tore her eyes away from him, lest he notice her. Would he see a family resemblance between her and Ben? The thought made her turn away completely.
Mags steered her through the process of being confirmed as a new employee, taking her to the “right people to ’ave the right things written in the right books,” as she put it. Her first shift started at five the following morning. It had been a while since she’d been up that early. Since moving house, Charlotte hadn’t had to get up to light the stove. She had a new appreciation for the maid her mother had hired.
“What time does my shift finish?” She hoped to go and find where Hopkins was staying, just so she knew where to find him if she dug up something particularly damning.
Mags gave her a strange look. “Eight o’clock. You saw us all comin’ out, didn’t yer?”
“I thought that would be the second shift.”
Mags cackled. “Oh, you poor lamb. You’re in for a shock. Working in t’mill is tougher than any fancy-pants London jobs, I can tell you that now. Let’s find Dotty, she can take you round. I’m shattered.”
Mags took her up two flights of a dingy stairwell and down a long corridor. Most of the doors off it were open and Charlotte could see rows of beds inside, about twenty to a room. There was no privacy to speak of. She followed Mags to a room at the end, where Mags waved a hand at the bed nearest to the window. It looked onto the red-bricked wall of the mill next door, practically in arm’s reach. “That’s yours, Charlie. Dotty, come and say ’ello to the new girl.”
There were several women there, most of them younger than her, lying fully clothed on top of the beds. The chatter had stopped and everyone stared at Charlotte. Mags was the eldest, and from the way Dotty leaped up from her bed, it seemed authority came with age.
“’Ello,” Dotty said with a shy smile as Charlotte went to her bed.
“Hello,” Charlotte replied. “Don’t you want this bed? It’s by the window.” Even though there was no view, there was fresh air to be had.
Several of the other women sniggered. “Now you lot,” Mags said sternly. “Charlie’s new and won’t ’ave any of you lording over her just cos she don’t know ’er arse from ’er elbow. Charlie, love, no one wants that bed cos it’s cold as buggery by the window when winter comes. It’s all yours.”
The narrow metal-framed bed was covered with a scratchy grey wool blanket. When Charlotte pulled that back, she saw that old, dirty sheets were still on it. Thank goodness Ben had given her clean bed linen. She opened the window and started to strip the bed as Dotty watched.
“Where you from then?”
“London. I’ve never worked at a mill before. Have you been here long?”
“Since I were ten. Me family stuck it out on the farm for as long as they could, but it were ’opeless. When my brother died, we upped sticks and started again.”
“I’m so sorry. About your brother.”
Dotty shrugged. “He were little and the ’arvest failed that year. It were ’orrible. Only me left now. What about you?”
Charlotte almost said she had a brother, but it seemed insensitive, and besides, she had to be careful. She needed a cover story, something to make it sound plausible for her to have ended up here. “My mother and father died a couple of years ago. I was married, but my husband . . .” she hesitated. Lying was something she did far too much of as it was, hiding her magical abilities and her art, but this felt even more sordid.
“Drink or gamblin’?”
She couldn’t decide. “Both,” she said, fixing an image of the archetypical villain from some penny dreadful story. “He gambled away all our money and drowned in the Thames.”
Dotty’s brown eyes were huge with horror, tinged with a hint of grim fascination. “So what brought you up ’ere, then?”
Charlotte was briefly distracted by the stains on the sheets and the stench of urine. She had to sleep on this? “Oh, well, I had relatives nearby, but they died, too. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. What should I do with these sheets?”
“There’s a washing room downstairs. Want me to show you round? It’s nearly time for supper anyway.”
Charlotte nodded and started off for the door, but Mags rested a hand on her shoulder. “Take yer bundle, love,” she whispered. “There’s some light fingers ’ere.”
Blushing, Charlotte retrieved her belongings. Dotty gathered up the dirty sheets, rolling them up without even wrinkling her nose.
“This is one of the better mills,” Dotty said as Charlotte retraced her steps back to the stairwell. “They take twelve shillings a week from yer pay but you get three meals and yer bedclothes washed for you. You can use the washing room on Sundays if you wish, but you can pay a shilling to add something to the group wash and it’ll be cleaned and dried with the sheets. Boil wash and all.” She leaned back to whisper, “I do my own smalls, though. Can’t stand the thought of anyone else goin’ near ’em.”
Charlotte nodded, hoping she would be gone before she had to wash anything. She was shown the washroom and the courtyard at the back, with its dozens of washing lines. The old sheets were dumped in a big basket with others and soon forgotten about.
“Supper’s at ’alf eight,” Dotty said. “And the food’s really good. You get a bread roll with every meal! Not like them other mills where they don’t put on any food at all. You get an egg in the morning with a rasher of bacon on Sundays, meat and potatoes for lunch and soup for supper. You’re dead lucky they had an openin’ for you. I’ve heard that Cartwright’s mills ’ave started puttin’ food on for the workers, but it’s all the old scraps that no one else wants to buy from the ’olesalers. And there’s maggots in the meat! I’ll show you where the privy is and the water pump so we can wash up for supper.”
The privy was a stinking shack at the far end of the yard. Charlotte resolved that she would just have to hold everything in. Her face must have said as much.
“We all use the pot. There’ll be one under yer bed. If you pay a penny a week to the cook’s son, he’ll collect yours up with ours every morning and every evening. Don’t look like that! It could be so much worse! Them’s that work at Cartwright’s end up in the slums. They ’ave to put bricks down to stand on so you can get across the street without treading in shit. People just chuck it out onto the street there.”
Dotty took her to the hand pump at the back of the building, and they drew water for each other to wash their hands and faces. Charlotte noticed how hard it seemed for Dotty to work the handle. “I’m no use to man nor beast by the end of shift,” she said with grim cheer. “I’ll be ’right after supper. We tell stories and have a sing-song sometimes, in the dorm, y’know. They’re not a bad bunch, really. In the dorm I was in before, one of the women took a disliking to me and ’it me all the time.”
Charlotte was glad she had her bundle to cling to as they queued at the hatch to the kitchen. The dining room was filled with long tables and benches and in the last of the evening light, it didn’t seem too bad. She’d always known she’d been lucky to have the life she did. Her parents had always made it clear that she and Ben had a much easier childhood than they had had. And her grandparents had all been farmers, so she knew how hard a life i
t was. But it was only now, as she stood in borrowed clothes, that Charlotte really, truly appreciated how lucky she was.
She listened to the chatter around them, but there was no mention of any incidents. Dotty told her about the foreman and how horrible he was. She talked about the looms she managed and how to work them, but for every word Charlotte recognised, there were three she had never heard before.
Supper was watery soup with cabbage and anaemic chunks of what might have been mutton. Charlotte hoped it was mutton. It smelt of dishwater. Dotty tucked in with relish, but Charlotte was unable to muster the will to even try it. Thank goodness Ben had taken her out to eat earlier; her belly was still full from the steak and kidney pie she’d enjoyed with him.
“Do y’not want that?” Dotty asked as she finished her bread roll.
“I think I’m a bit nervous,” Charlotte said truthfully. “I haven’t got any appetite. You have it.”
She pushed it across the table and Dotty stared at her. “Really?” At Charlotte’s nod she spooned the soup into her mouth like she hadn’t eaten for days. The way her eyes sparkled with happiness made Charlotte want to cry.
“I’m going to go and make my bed,” she said to Dotty, unwilling to sit there and watch her eat for a moment longer.
“I won’t be long,” Dotty said through a mouthful of soggy bread. “I’ll see y’up there.”
Charlotte went the wrong way to start with, but then realised there was more than one stairwell and eventually found the correct corridor. The gas lamps had been lit, but they were so widely spaced she had to go through pools of darkness to get to the dorm. With relief, Charlotte didn’t hear any conversation coming from the room as she approached. She wanted a few minutes alone to gather her wits, steady herself and find somewhere to hide her sketchbook.
But there was someone on her bed when she arrived at the doorway; a woman with her back to the door, lying on her side. For a moment, Charlotte thought she’d made another mistake, but then she saw the open window and recognised the fresh bed linen. “Excuse me,” she said, but the woman didn’t stir. “Excuse me,” Charlotte repeated, stepping inside the room. “I’m afraid that’s my bed.” The woman continued to ignore her. She was probably asleep. Charlotte approached the bed, feeling bad for disturbing her. “I’m so sorry, but that’s my bed,” she repeated.
“Who are yer talkin’ to?”
Dotty was standing at the entrance to the door, frowning at her.
Charlotte pointed at the bed. “That lady—” But when she looked back, the bed was empty. She shivered. “I thought someone was on my bed.”
“Want an ’and tuckin’ in your sheets?” Dotty asked.
“Thank you,” she mumbled. It was probably just a shadow playing tricks with her eyes. Charlotte had the feeling she wasn’t going to sleep well that night.
Chapter 4
WHEN THE BELL RANG to rouse the workers from their rest, Charlotte groaned. She’d lain awake most of the night, listening to the snoring and coughing and creaking beds of the other women around her. When she’d heard the chimes of the clock tower bells at midnight, she wondered where Hopkins was and what he would have to say about this. None of the imagined comments were very nice.
She shuffled about with the others, dressing and readying themselves for the day, all too tired to care about who saw or heard what. It was still dark outside. In the dining hall the bread rolls and boiled eggs were there to collect, peel and eat. Charlotte almost asked where the salt was and thought against it. She didn’t want to draw any attention to herself.
More than anything, though, even more than sleep, she wanted the opportunity to sketch what she saw. She wanted to study the lines on these women’s faces and capture the way their bodies had been shaped by their labour. As she picked a rogue fragment of eggshell from her teeth, Charlotte daydreamed about teaming up with a London journalist to put together an exposé of life behind the mill walls, or perhaps creating an oil painting that actually showed the truth, rather than the sanitised, romantic depictions of mill ladies she had seen. She remembered the crowd gathered around one picture set in an absurdly clean street, all the women with Rubenesque bodies and flawless white skin, hair attractively tousled instead of hanging limp and greasy. Now she knew why that painting had been so popular. That portrayal reassured people who didn’t like to think about what life was really like for those less fortunate. No one wanted to see what the cotton mill workers really looked like, because then they’d have to think about why they looked this way.
Another bell rang just as she was finishing her roll. “Come on, then!” Dotty said, heaving her up. “Time to get goin’!”
They joined the press of people trudging into the mill. Charlotte drew looks and comments from a variety of people, which she’d expected as the new girl, but that didn’t make it any easier. If George saw where she was now, he’d have a heart attack.
The foreman, a red-cheeked man with an impressive set of jowls and a receding hair line, was just outside the doors. Now that she was standing next to him, instead of looking at him from across a courtyard, Charlotte realised she was slightly taller than him. He looked her up and down, looking doubtful. “’Ave you ever worked a Lancashire loom before, lass?” When she shook her head he puffed out his cheeks. “What about cardin’?” At her blank expression, he added, “Gettin’ the wool ready to be spun.” He tutted when she shook her head. “Well, you’re too big to clean underneath . . .”
“I can teach ’er the looms,” Dotty said. “I don’t mind.”
“I don’t want you distracted.”
“I won’t be. You know ’ow quick I am.”
The foreman scratched his chin. “I won’t make any allowances for yer.” When Dotty nodded, he looked at Charlotte. “You can watch an’ learn. Y’won’t get paid until you’re manning the looms yerself, so pay attention. A’right?”
Charlotte nodded and they were ushered inside.
“Thank you,” Charlotte whispered to Dotty. “That was very kind.”
“We all ’ave to start somewhere,” Dotty whispered back.
The room spanned the entirety of the ground floor, save the space given to the stairwell that ran to the upper floors, and there were dozens and dozens of looms in perfectly straight rows. Charlotte had never seen anything so daunting. There were huge shafts of metal running along the ceiling above each row of looms, with wide belts of leather running from the shaft to each loom. Each one was the size of the old kitchen table, with hundreds of threads stretched over two wooden frames. There were cogs and levers and none of it made any sense to her.
The air was stuffy, even though the sun was only just coming up, and none of the windows were open. The foreman was making sure everyone was in position, and there was a strange tension in the air. Everything felt far too still.
“I look after these ones,” Dotty said in a whisper as she pointed to four in front of her and four behind her. “You’ll ’ave to watch closely, as I ’ave to move quick when I’m workin’ and I won’t be able to talk to you.”
“Why not?” Charlotte whispered back.
“I ’ave to keep it clean, check for thread breakages and replace the empty bobbin. The wooden thing the bobbin goes into is called the shuttle. These new looms stop when the thread runs out, but I ’ave to get it going again as quick as possible, otherwise I get a strappin’.”
“A what?”
She didn’t seem to hear that question, either. “The little uns’ll be crawling around, getting the fluff and piecin’ for me if it’s one of the lower warp yarns that’s broke. So watch where y’step, ’right?”
Another bell was rung. Everyone seemed to hold their breath. Then the noise began. The shafts running along the ceiling started revolving, which in turn drove the belts that set the looms off. The clattering din hurt Charlotte’s ears, and she covered them in surprise, making Dotty laugh and roll her eyes.
Charlotte was amazed at the speed of the looms. She soon worked out that
the two frames held the warp yarns apart so the shuttle could be passed between them before being switched over for the shuttle to pass back, forming the weave of the cloth. The shuttle went so fast she couldn’t see it, and if Dotty hadn’t pointed it out before, she never would have spotted it.
The temperature in the room began to climb, and soon Charlotte could feel sweat running down her back. It wasn’t just the heat, but also the humidity, and it felt as if it were getting harder to breathe. The air seemed to thicken, motes of dust and tiny fibres from the cotton sparkling in the first shafts of sunlight hitting the room. As the sun climbed, Charlotte simply couldn’t understand why no one was opening the windows. Thinking they were too tied to their duties at the looms, she headed towards the nearest one, only for Dotty to grab her arm and shake her head, mouthing a definite “no” to her.
Small girls and boys were crawling beneath the machines, gathering up clumps of cotton fluff and stuffing them into cloth satchels. She watched one boy scoot over to a machine that had been stopped. Charlotte crouched to see his little fingers deftly tying a broken strand of yarn. The machine was soon started again, the operator not even checking if the child’s fingers were clear. It was only then that she noticed one of them missing the top half of an index finger.
Charlotte bit her lip. Had it been lost in an accident here? And now that she was looking, she could see other people with maimed hands. One man’s right arm hung limp at his side, yet he was still managing eight looms with the help of a small girl who did the thread tying for him.
Dotty tapped her shoulder and pointed at one of her looms which had stopped working. She pulled out the shuttle and dropped a new one into place, tied something and set the loom off again in a matter of seconds. Going back to the shuttle she’d just removed, she lifted up the empty bobbin and pulled it off a spike of metal in the centre, then dropped it in a bucket by the side of the loom. She pulled a new bobbin thick with spun thread from a metal bucket resting nearby, dropped it over the spike of metal and flipped that back into place, then put the end of the shuttle to her mouth. When she moved it away, Charlotte could see the end of the thread coming out of a hole at the shuttle’s tip. It was put into the place the replacement bobbin had been, ready to be swapped in again. In moments, the next machine along needed to have its bobbin replaced and Charlotte trailed after Dotty, trying to work out where the new thread was tied.