At last the room quieted. Mr. Boott clutched his heart.
Above him, the power belt continued to spin as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Below, bobbins lay over the floor. The girls who had attempted to follow Curtis’s instructions to repair the broken threads were tangled up, witless kittens in yarn.
At the nearest machine, the snow-white warp hung loose from the harnesses like a cobweb in a doorframe. Beside it cowered a blond maiden, a stranger to Lowell, likely on her very first day of paid work.
She wept like she’d seen the Devil himself.
12: Hannah’s Genius
JUDITH PRESSED HER PALMS to Hannah’s cheeks as she pulled away, lacking breath more than enthusiasm for the cause. The wellspring inside her had become a geyser; she wanted to hug and kiss, to invade with a singularity of purpose she was accustomed to feeling only from righteous indignation.
For her part, the Seer’s face was pale as Mrs. Hanson’s good china, yet the kisses and the witchcraft they were weaving together seemed to have put color in her cheeks and her lips.
“Who are you in love with, Judith?”
“You witch,” Judith gasped, tears springing again, “you know full well!”
Hannah smiled at Judith and bit her bottom lip in the most irresistible ways. And she collapsed.
Judith shouted and strove to catch her beloved, only managing to wrestle Hannah into a slump against her shoulder, while she pressed her hip into Mr. Boott’s desk for leverage. “Hannah!” Judith patted her pale cheek, and the Seer’s eyelids fluttered, but for the rest, she was insensible.
“Wait, hold her still,” Mrs. Hanson ordered sharply, taking time to blow out the candles before letting Judith cross the chalk circle or entering herself. “Now, then.” She stepped forward and took Hannah’s face between her palms.
Judith panted anxiously. “Is she . . . ?” she asked, when she could not wait any longer.
“Don’t be foolish,” said Mrs. Hanson. “She’s only exhausted. But if she keeps on like this, forcing out magic when her fires are burning so low—”
“Her looms!” Judith interjected.
“What about them?”
“Hannah said that working in the mills, she could See her genius going into her looms; she said it was like watching her own breath sucked away! What if I could get it out again?”
Mrs. Hanson frowned. “Even if you can get her there before one or both of you are arrested, what spell will you invoke? I cannot tell you. I’m no—”
“But will you help me get her there?” Fortunately, Judith had never made any promise of honesty to Mrs. Hanson, because she certainly would not have liked to admit that she had no special plan or knowledge either.
The matron looked between the two of them, Hannah quite unhearing and Judith quite desperately listening, before she nodded. “Very well. But we’d best clear this mess first, or Mr. Boott really will see you both hanged. Bring the chalk and the candles.”
* * *
They moved slowly, for they had to hold Hannah up between them, one of her arms draped across Judith, the other over Mrs. Hanson’s elderly shoulders. They had only reached the top of the lane when they spotted Mr. Boott himself, at the head of a crowd. There were Curtis and other overseers, as to be expected, but also Reverend Miles of St. Anne’s and several of the boardinghouse keepers, and girls Judith was sure she had never seen before. Beside them were members of the Factory Girls’ Union, easy to spot with their flowing hair and their armbands. Were they marching with Mr. Boott now too?
No. A few of the men had mill girls by the arm or the hair, forcing them along, and the other Union girls were trying to reach their captured comrades. At once, Judith felt a distinctive tug, urging her to run and help, but Hannah’s weight held her to the spot.
Mr. Boott called out, “There they are, Reverend, the Devil’s brides!”
The reverend, leaning heavily on his walking stick, waved in their direction. “Is that Mrs. Hanson I see? Good lady, tell us the meaning of this?”
“They’ve bewitched the mills!” Mr. Boott interrupted. “The belts keep slipping, the rolls won’t wind, the looms miss every other pick!” He marched directly to Judith, his cravat askew, his jabbing finger stopping just short of her chest. “You did this!”
Judith spoke into the cravat, because his face was an ugly thing without his customary decorum. “I won’t be charged for a crime you cannot prove.”
“Hah! Cannot . . . ? And what of your friends expectorating all morning, what of the machines’ behavior, what of the threads snapping on the harnesses? Are we to believe these all coincidence? Reverend, you hear, you see—”
“Do you want to destroy Lowell, Mr. Boott?”
The question came from Lydia. With Abigail and Lucy alongside, she had fought her way to the front of the crowd, and now she addressed the agent herself, sleek black hair and rosebud lips as beguiling as ever.
“Careful, young lady. I’ll see these two flogged before the day is out; I won’t scruple to add a third.”
“If you ever want so much as a bolt of cloth out of Lowell again, you’ll sign and agree to our demands,” said Lydia, producing a fresh copy out of her pocket.
“What demands?”
“You’ve seen them,” said Abigail, who’d lost her cap somewhere, leaving her bald head exposed. “We are the Factory Girls’ Union of Lowell.”
“There’s hundreds of us,” added Eliza, of the Concord Mills, “and not a one will work until you and your masters agree.”
Mr. Boott wouldn’t have it. “We have already hired new operatives—”
“Who can’t use a single one of your machines. No one can, save us and those we choose to,” said Lydia.
It worked, then. Judith couldn’t have been sure until she heard it from one of her sisters’ mouths. “The spell worked,” she whispered to Hannah, who gave no sign she could hear.
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Boott. “I’ll hang these two if I have to and break their glamour.”
“Go ahead!” said Lucy—a bit too enthusiastically for Judith’s taste. “Flog them, hang them, drown them like rats. It won’t change the facts: we are the ones who poured our sweat and souls into your looms. We have rights to expect a little loyalty.”
“Reverend?” Mr. Boott tried desperately.
“Well, it isn’t—it doesn’t—it could be Satan’s work, but—”
“Satan’s work or not, you won’t free yourselves from the laborers of Lowell unless you raze the town and start again somewhere else. We’re in the mills and in the river, and we’ll get ours back again if it’s the last thing we do.”
Judith had never expected such a speech to leave Lydia’s mouth, of all people. Lucy clapped her on the back, but Abigail hadn’t moved, staring at Mr. Boott.
The agent snapped like dry thread.
His face turned from purple as a beet to white as cotton. Judith knew he must be imagining what he would have to tell his employers now, that all their machines and their industrial town were useless without the striking girls. Well, wasn’t that his job: conveying unpleasant messages to powerful men?