She rushed back to her room. What could she do? The damage was done. If only she had known what was going on when she was in the agent’s office, how that vile man was lying. Oh, the agent was quick to believe him. When I cried out, it was I who was made to seem in the wrong! I was unladylike. That was my crime.
She wrote the letters in a fury, burning herself with sealing wax, her hand was shaking so. She rushed out of the house, her bonnet ribbons loose, her shawl flying. By the time she got to the Acre she was out of breath and could hardly ask the children playing in the streets where Brigid’s house might be.
The first child she asked looked up with wide, frightened eyes and ran away without speaking. She stood long enough to tie her bonnet properly and catch her breath before asking another. He pointed dumbly to a shack that turned out not to be Brigid’s house at all, but the housewife inside knew Brigid and gave Lyddie proper directions.
Brigid herself answered the door. “Oh Lyddie, what have they done?”
“I’m dismissed,” Lyddie said.
“No, it cannot be.”
“It can’t be helped. It’s done. But they must not dismiss you. I’ve already written a letter to Mr. Marsden. I told him if he dismissed you or bothered you in any way I would tell his wife exactly what happened in the weaving room. Now here is the letter addressed to her. If there is any problem you must mail it at once.” Brigid stared at her, mouth open. “At once. You must swear to me you will.” The girl nodded. “And now, I’d like to sit down if I could.”
“Oh, I’m terrible rude.” Brigid stepped aside and let her into the tiny shack. The smell was strong of food and body sweat. It was dark, but Lyddie could see children’s eyes large and staring. “Me mother’s housecleaning today.” Brigid picked up a pile of what looked like rags, but might have been clothing, off a rough stool, and Lyddie sat down gratefully. She was still tired from last night. Tired as she had been after her sickness, her bones aching with it.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Where will you be going? Not far from here, I hope.”
“They didn’t give me a certificate, so I have to go.”
“And it’s all me fault.”
“No, you musn’t blame yourself.”
There was no place else to sit except the beds, so Brigid stood, watching her. In the darkness of the room, the only noise was the rustle of the children shifting, staring.
She had stopped gasping for breath. It was time to leave. “I’ll be going, Brigid. Oh, yes. I nearly forgot.” She handed the girl the parcel containing Brigid’s old primer and Oliver Twist. “So you won’t forget me altogether, ey?” she said, and fled so she wouldn’t have to listen to Brigid’s sobs.
That evening, just at the closing bell, she made her way down the street beyond the boardinghouse row to the trim, frame houses of the overseers of the Concord Corporation. She didn’t know which house was his, but it didn’t matter. He would have to come this way. She stood in the shadow of the first house and waited.
There was no mistaking his walk. Like a little bantam rooster, he came, all alone. Does he have any friends at all? She shoved the thought aside. She mustn’t let anything dilute her anger. “Mr. Marsden?” She stepped out of the shadow and stood in his path.
He stopped, alarmed. They were nearly the same height and she stood close to his face and spoke with deadly quiet, the long brim of her bonnet nearly brushing his cheeks. “Yes, it’s me, Lydia Worthen.”
“Miss Worthen.” He breathed out her name.
“I am mean and I am cheap. Sometimes I am a coward and often times I’m selfish. I ain’t a beauty to look at. But I am not vile, shameful, base, or depraved!”
“Wha-at?”
“You accused me of moral turpitude, Mr. Marsden. I am here to say I am not guilty.”
He stepped backward with a little puff of a gasp.
“I have here a letter I wrote. I will tell you what it says. It says if you cause Brigid MacBride to lose her position I will see that your wife is informed about what really happens in the weaving room after hours.”
“My wife?” he whispered.
“Mrs. Overseer Marsden. I figure she ought to know if there is moral turpitude occurring in her husband’s weaving room.” She jammed the letter in the overseer’s hand and closed his reluctant fist around it. “Good night, Mr. Marsden. I hope you sleep easy—before you die.”
* * *
* * *
She took a stage to Boston. Hardly anyone did these days. The train was so much faster. But she had nowhere to go in such a hurry, and the ride gave her time to compose herself. Boston was a terrible place, older and even dirtier and more crowded than Lowell. The streets were narrow and Lyddie stepped gingerly around the refuse and animal droppings, lifting her skirt with one hand and trying to balance her new trunk under the other arm. She should have found a safe place to leave it, but how did one do that in an unknown city?
At last she found the address. She looked through a glass-windowed door and saw Diana herself, tall and pale, but no longer thin. She was speaking to a customer, her head slightly bent toward the short woman, a polite smile on her face.
Lyddie shifted the heavy trunk under her left arm and pushed open the door. A bell rang and Diana looked up at the sound. At first she nodded politely, her attention still with the chattering customer. Then she recognized Lyddie and her face was transformed.
“Excuse me a moment,” she said to the woman, and came over and took the trunk. “Lyddie.” Her voice was still quiet and beautifully low-pitched. “How wonderful to see you.”
There was no time to talk until the customer’s order was complete and the bell rang, signaling her departure. “How are you, Lyddie?” Diana asked.
“They dismissed me,” she said. “For ‘moral turpitude.’ ”
“For what?” Diana was almost laughing.
“It means—”
“I know what it means,” Diana said gently. “I’m intimately acquainted with the term myself, but you … surely—”
“You are not vile, base, or depraved,” Lyddie said.
“Thank you.” Diana tried not to smile, but the corners of her mouth betrayed her. “And neither are you. What I can’t imagine is how—”
“It was Mr. Marsden.”
“Ah, yes, dear Mr. Marsden.”
When Lyddie told the whole story, nearly crying again in her rage, she realized suddenly that Diana was shaking with laughter.
“It weren’t funny, ey!” she protested.
“No, no, of course not. I’m sorry. But I’m imagining his face when you pounced out at him last night. Just when he thought he’d won—when he’d rid himself so neatly of the evidence.”
Lyddie saw the rosebud mouth shaped into an O of fright. It was satisfying, wasn’t it?
“And his wife is a perfect terror, but you know that—”
“I didn’t think anyone else would believe me against him.”
“Oh, she’s a terror, all right. Everyone says so. She’s a fright, I promise you.” She got up and poured them each a cup of tea. “Let’s celebrate, shall we? Oh Lyddie, it’s so good of you to come. How can I help you?”
But she had come to help Diana. “I thought—I thought to help you if I could.”
“Thank you, but I’m doing all right, as you can see. It was hard at first. No one seemed to want a husbandless woman expecting a child. But the proprietress here was ill and desperate for help. So we needed one another. It’s worked out well. She’s been so kind. And her daughter will look out for the baby when it comes.” She smiled happily. “Like family to me.” She reached over and patted Lyddie’s knee. “But you understand.”
Lyddie spent the night with Diana. Everyone was kind. Diana had her family at last. Then why had something snapped like a broken warp thread inside Lyddie’s soul? Wasn’t she happy for Diana? Surely, surely she was—happy and greatly
relieved. “You must write to Brigid and tell her you are fine, ey?” Lyddie said as they parted the next morning. “She can read now, and she worries.”
* * *
* * *
It rained all the way through New Hampshire, a steady, wearying drizzle. Lyddie rode inside the coach. There was only one other passenger, an old man who took no notice of her. She was grateful because she cried most of the way. She, tough-as-gristle Lyddie, her face in her handkerchief, her head turned toward the shaded window. But the tumult that had raged inside her damped down more and more as though beat into the muddy earth under the horses’ hooves. When they finally crossed the bridge into Vermont, the sun came out and turned the leafless trees into silver against the deep green of the evergreen on the mountain slopes. The air was clean and cold, the sky blue, more like a bright day at winter’s end than November.
23
Vermont, November 1846
One more night along the way and the sky had turned into the underside of a thick quilt. The coachman pressed the team, eager to get to the next stop before the snow began to fall. It was nearly dusk when the coach took the final dash around the curve in the road that brought it to the door of Cutler’s Tavern.
Nothing had changed except herself. At first Triphena pretended not to recognize her at all—“this grand lady come from the city of looms and spindles.” But soon the game was over, and the old cook gave her a warm embrace and drew her to a seat by the giant fireplace.
“I would’ve thought you’d have a cook stove by now,” Lyddie said half teasing, as she looked around the familiar kitchen.
“Not while I’m cook here,” Triphena said fiercely. “I reckon everyone has those monstrosities in the city, ey?”
“They work fine. We had one at the boardinghouse.”
Triphena sniffed. “They’ll do, maybe, for those who ain’t real cooks.” She handed Lyddie a cup of her boiled coffee, thick with cream and maple sugar. “So you’re for a visit home, ey?”
Lyddie was brought back with a pang to her present state. “I’ve left the factory,” she said, “for good.”
“So it’s back to the farm, is it?”
“My uncle sold it.”
“But what of your poor mother and the little ones?”
“Mama died,” Lyddie said. There was no need to tell Triphena where. “And baby Agnes as well.”
“Oh, dear,” said Triphena softly.
“So Charlie took Rachel to live with him at the mill. The Phinneys have been good to them both. So—” She took a long drink from her coffee. It scalded her throat but she shook off the pain of it. “So—for the first time, I’m a free woman. Not a care—not a care in the world.”
She paused, not knowing how to say, then, that she wished therefore to become once more a housemaid in Mistress Cutler’s Tavern. “So—I thought to meself—what fun to work with Triphena again.”
The cook threw her head back and laughed. She thinks I’m joking. How to explain? How to say I’ve nowhere else to go?
And then the girl came in. She was no more than twelve or thirteen, dressed in rough calico with ill-fitting boots. Lyddie’s heart sank. That was the housemaid. There was no room for her at Cutler’s Tavern anymore.
As it was, she spent the night in one of the guest rooms, paying full price, although Mistress Cutler pretended for a moment that she couldn’t possibly take payment from an old and valued employee. Lyddie lay awake, wondering at the silence outside the window, the only light, the cloud-veiled moon. How could you sleep in such a quiet place with no rhythm and clatter from the street? Nothing at all to distract your head from wondering what on earth you could do, where you could go in a world that had no place for you, no need for you at all.
* * *
* * *
“Then you’re off to see the children today?” said Triphena as she fed her breakfast at the great kitchen table. Lyddie was grateful to have plans for at least one day. “The snow is no more’n a dusting. I can get Henry to take you in the wagon.” Henry was Willie’s successor.
Lyddie chose to walk. The day was cold and clear, but her shawl was warm and her boots stout and well broken in.
She was at the mill by mid-morning. Mrs. Phinney greeted her kindly, but Charlie and Rachel were gone to school in the village, so she just kept walking, her feet taking her up the hill road, past the fields and pastures of Quaker Stevens’s farm, and on, up and beyond, until she rounded the last curve and saw it sitting there, squat and homely against the green and silver of the November mountain.
A tracery of snow lay on the fields and in the yard, but it was not true winter yet. In a week or so, everything would be sleeping under a thick comforter, but for now, the cabin stood out in all its sturdy homemade ugliness. Just like me, she thought, and blinked back tears. It was good to be home.
There was no wood piled against the door. Someone had stacked it neatly again in the woodshed. The door itself had been repaired and fit snugly now into its frame. She raised her father’s wooden latch and pushed it open.
Even at the brightest midday, it was never really light inside the cabin. On a November afternoon it was truly dark. She found the flint box—no sulfur matches here—and lit the neatly laid tinder and logs. It was as though someone had prepared for her coming. She pulled her mother’s rocker close and stared into the flames. Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire. It was so full of cheer, so welcoming. Lyddie stretched her toes out toward the warmth of it and sighed, nearly content. She could almost forget everything. She was home where she had longed to be. Perhaps she could just stay the night here. No one would care. How could they deny her just one night before she left forever?
“Lyddie?”
She jumped up. There was the shape of a man, bent over low so as to clear the doorway. He stepped into the cabin and straightened tall. “Lyddie?” he said again, and she knew him for Luke Stevens. She was more angry at the interruption than ashamed to be caught.
“Lyddie?” he said a third time, “is it thee?” He took off his broad Quaker hat and held it over his stomach, squinting a little to see her through the darkness.
“I meant no harm,” she said. “I just come to say good-bye.” It sounded silly as she said it, coming to say good-bye to a cabin.
“Mother thought she saw thee pass. She sent me to fetch thee for supper and to stay the night if thee will.”
She wished she could ask him just to let her stay here—for this one night. But there was no food, and she had no right to use up the Stevenses’ kindling. She would not be beholden to them more than she could help. “I’ll just be going back—”
“Please,” he said, “stay with us. The dark comes so quick this time of year.”
Her pride fought with her empty belly. But the truth was it had been hours since Triphena’s breakfast, and the walk back would be long and dark and cold. “I’ve no wish to impose—”
“Thee must not think so,” he said quickly. “It would pleasure our mother to have another woman in the house.” He smiled shyly. “She often complains that none of us boys can seem to find a woman who will have us.” He came to the fireplace and knelt to separate the logs and put out her small fire.
She was glad his back was to her and there was no chance that he could see her face flush red in the shadowy light of the cabin. “About your letter …” she began.
He shook his head without turning to her. “It was a foolish hope,” he said quietly. “I pray thee forgive me.”
They walked side by side down the road, the sun a blazing pumpkin as it fell rapidly behind the western mountains. Luke’s long legs purposefully shortened their stride so that she would not have to skip to keep up. For a long time, neither spoke, but as the sun disappeared, and the dusk began to gather about them, he set his gaze far down the road ahead and asked softly, “Then if thee will not stay, where will thee go?”
“I’m off
…” she said, and knew as she spoke what it was she was off to. To stare down the bear! The bear that she had thought all these years was outside herself, but now, truly, knew was in her own narrow spirit. She would stare down all the bears!
She stopped in the middle of the road, her whole body alight with the thrill of it. “I’m off,” she said, “to Ohio. There is a college there that will take a woman just like a man.” The plan grew as she spoke. “First I must go tomorrow to say good-bye to Charlie and little Rachel, and then I’ll take the coach to Concord, and from there”—she took a deep breath—“the train. I’ll go all the rest of the way by train.”
He watched her face as though trying to read her thoughts, but gave up the attempt. “Thee is indeed a wonder, Lyddie Worthen,” he said.
She looked up into his earnest face as he leaned to speak to her and saw in his bent shoulders the shade of an old man in a funny broad Quaker hat—the gentle old man that he would someday become and that she would love.
Tarnation, Lyddie Worthen! Ain’t you learned nothing? Don’t you know better than to tie yourself to some other living soul? You’d only be asking for trouble and grief. Might as well just throw open the cabin door full wide and invite that black bear right onto the hearth.
Still—if he was to wait—
He was looking right at her, his head cocked, his brown eyes questioning. His face was so close she could see a trace of soot on it. Like Charlie. The boy could never mess with a fire without getting all dirty. She held her hand tightly to her side to keep from reaching up and wiping his cheek with her fingers.
Will you wait, Luke Stevens? It’ll be years before I come back to these mountains again. I won’t come back weak and beaten down and because I have nowhere else to go. No, I will not be a slave, even to myself—
“Do I frighten thee?” he asked gently.
“Ey?”
“Thee was staring at me something fierce.”
She began to giggle, as she used to when she and Charlie had been young.
Lyddie Page 17