“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 magistrate 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.
“Tie! Tie!” he ordered.
The next girl shouted something incomprehensible, and the first yelped and pulled her hands back, sparing herself a nasty bruise at least as the shuttle came darting across. Curtis did not escape injury, as the power belt on the loom beside him snapped, lashing him across the temple.
Curtis’s man, meanwhile, moved desperately up and down the rows, throwing the brake at one machine after another as more threads broke, belts slipped, and heddles jammed against one another, creating an uncomfortable, smoky friction as they continued striving. The braver and more industrious girls learned by example and threw the braking levers themselves.
Curtis bellowed with rage, clutching at his wounded head. His man gave up on singling out the offending machines and ran for the front of the room. Lifting the overseer’s crook once more, he decoupled the entire fleet from the river’s might.