“Oh,” Lydia replied, surprised, as if she hardly expected Judith to remember a word she said. “Something about kissing no other men?”
“Yes,” Judith nodded. “Hair is the perfect vessel for oaths of friendship and camaraderie. Blood for family. But spit”—she added another drop of her own—“is for the passions. We’ve been kissing our machines for so long—”
“And you expect the machines to behave like faithful paramours?”
Judith nodded. Lydia shook her head, but she could not forbear a smile. If any girl knew the power of holding a lover enthralled, it must be Lydia.
“Hannah and I have circled every mill in Lowell, saying the incantations, bidding the looms to weave for no others.”
“And this?” Lydia asked, gesturing to the expectorating mob around them.
“To invoke the spell.” Judith smiled, leaving out that Hannah had left her with no confidence of its efficacy, while the looms still belonged to the Boston owners.
“Look there!” shouted someone on Judith’s left.
The sun’s first light was paling from orange to yellow, casting its rays over a phalanx of men in working cottons, marching over the footbridge. Judith shielded her eyes to see them properly. It was twenty or more of the mill hands, to move the cotton bales from the warehouses to the carding and spinning rooms, and finally from the backlogged skiffs. Judith thought of Mr. Reed, unhappily following orders. Even now, the girls might delay the men and convince them to join their striking sisters.
She lost that hope when she spotted what looked like an English dandy among them. Mr. Boott marched at the head of the crowd in a dark jacket and pale pants—stirrupped below his shoes so as not to break the pleasing line of the leg. A magpie among wrens.
“Stop! You there! Girl! Stop that!” he shouted. Many of the girls ignored him, or were so carried away in the pleasure of spitting on the corporation’s property, they had yet to notice they were caught. Around him, the working men were a buzz of confusion and uncertainty.
The overseer, Mr. Curtis, added his own exulting shout, “Little hussies, there’s no escape for you now!”
Judith’s blood rose, though she realized at once that Mr. Curtis might, in the strictest sense, be correct. With the mill walls behind them and the men blocking the bridge, there was no escape aside from trying their luck in the canal’s current.
“I can’t swim,” Lydia informed her.
“No need,” said Judith. “We’ve done what we came here to do.” She edged past Lydia, careful not to lose her footing on the pitched stones of the headrace, and made for the footbridge. “Come along. Come along,” she murmured to the others.
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.