Today, Judith and Hannah crossed the footbridge alone. Only the flat-bottomed skiffs in the canal broke the stillness, bobbing on the ends of their tethers. Each was piled high with burlap-covered cotton, nowhere to move it because the warehouses were already bursting at the seams.
Judith was more interested in the mill gates. “Closed and padlocked, of course,” she muttered, though she tried the iron bars to be sure. The hinges whined, but the gate didn’t budge but an inch.
“You plan to bewitch the machines, to be part of the strike?” Hannah’s voice rasped.
“Why not? If a person’s genius is not only in them but in their things.”
The Seer frowned. “With the Union now, it’s a new pattern. We’re all everywhere”—she lifted her arm with its band of hair-cloth—“and I have to look very carefully to find one person. It’s like trying to follow one thread in a field of calico.”
Judith didn’t have the gift, but she’d felt what Hannah was describing: all of the girls together, warp and weft, so tightly woven, no capitalist could pick them apart. “If a thing is full of our genius, it ought to be a simple thing to cast our spell over it, shouldn’t it? The wheels and the looms very especially. Thirteen hours a day, six days a week, we tend them, we feed them, we kiss that damn shuttle! They’re full of us, aren’t they?”
Hannah turned away. “Of course they are, the greedy things.”
Judith pressed on, taking the Seer’s left hand again and capturing the right as well for good measure, pulling Hannah to face her. “This gate is padlocked, as I can see. But can you See any way for us to influence the machines? We used our hair for solidarity and friendship, to weave ourselves together into a union. Is there not some vessel for loyalty, so that the machines refuse the hands of another?”
She stared into the Seer’s heart-shaped face, so pale and freckle-less, willing the remarkable girl to conjure a solution. Hand-in-hand, their palms warmed and softened like candle wax, and a strange bubble of feeling rose from the pit of Judith’s stomach.
Hannah’s cheeks turned pink and she laughed—suddenly and loudly—and shook herself loose once more.
“What is it?”
“Spittle,” said Hannah.
“Spittle?”
“Yes. All spells use genius, but the vessel shapes them. Hair is different from bone is different from blood. Shadows even have some genius in them, but only for spells of seeming, strongest near dawn and dusk. At noon and midnight, the truth would be plain.
“But for loyalty . . . Loyalty needs the passions.” Once more, Hannah turned that charming shade of pink, this time from the roots of her copper-hued hair down as far as her collar—and farther, Judith presumed. “The deepness of the lover’s kiss.” Hannah’s gaze met Judith’s briefly, before cutting away, looking off into the canal.
Judith ignored the bubbling feeling inside herself, aiming instead for the solution which appeared on the horizon. “Of course! If I didn’t know better, I would have said Lydia shares your Seer’s gift.”
“Lydia?”
“She invoked the Kiss of Death when we wove the Union.”
“I recall.”
“How do we do it, then? There must be a way to reach the machines.” Without hesitation, Judith stepped off the edge of the footbridge, onto the slick stones of the canal’s headrace, searching the mill’s walls for another portal.
“Judith!” Hannah called. “Judith, be careful! What are you looking for?”
With her right hand against the mill wall for balance, Judith walked along the narrow edge, one foot’s heel at the toe of the other, following the canal’s flow. Though the fortification showed no obvious weak points, just ahead stood the tower-like housing of the mill wheel, its paddles dipping into the water with each turn, then disappearing upward and inside. The aperture there might be enough to admit one short mill operative and her taller, but willowy, companion. Their feet might get wet.
Or they might brain themselves against the housing, catch limbs in the gear works, or snare themselves below the paddles to drown in the canal.
A hand over her own broke Judith’s concentration and she nearly slipped. Hannah’s grip steadied her.
“Think, Judith: spells are built on metaphor and connections,” the Seer told her. “Find a connection to the mill’s machinery, even outside the walls, and they’ll be influenced inside.”
“The water!” Judith grinned. “It gives the machines their spark.”
Hannah nodded without returning the smile. “But not for us. We cannot work magic on the looms and spindles.”
“But you said! The machines are full of us, our genius—”
Hannah shook her head fiercely. “Judith, look at those bales of cotton you see floating there. Whose genius fills those? Whose blood and sweat?”
“Well—”
“If witchcraft is all so simple as you imagine, did you never wonder that the enslaved wretches who pick that cotton don’t lay hexes on the whole White race?” Now Hannah’s voice rasped with the conviction of an abolitionist, and Judith marveled that she had never heard the Seer speak on the subject before this moment.
“I—I hadn’t considered it,” she replied, bewildered.
“All magic is mastery and command, isn’t it? You have to have a claim to something before you can cast spells over it, even your own self.” Next, she pointed at the laden skiffs in the canal. “That cotton is full of men and women, like snow that’s been tramped over, with all their tracks on it. But it doesn’t do them a lick of good unless they have the ownership.”
Judith clicked her tongue. “Which the law of the land won’t admit.”
Hannah sighed deeply, and began sidling carefully back to the footbridge. “Let’s go before someone spots us and we’re both in the stocks for trespass.”
For the young woman of action, it galled to retreat now, the plan hardly begun, but she could not continue alone.
They came back single file but walked side by side over the bridge, as they had done daily since Judith’s arrival in Lowell; although any other morning would have seen their arms entwined, fond friends. In this mood, Judith shrank to touch Hannah at all.
“Is the law of the land so incontrovertible?” she asked instead. “Not even witchcraft can slip its yoke?”
“The law is witchcraft, Judith,” Hannah said quietly. “I’ve Seen auctions. When the captive stands on the block and the auctioneer begins the bidding, it conjures something . . . something that sucks away at a person’s soul. At the end, when the master has his slave bought and paid for, he owns them like a mule or a dog.” Her shoulders shook.
Judith swallowed, and lengthened her steps, putting herself where Hannah couldn’t help but look at her. “It’s a terrible wrong,” she said, lifting her arm and its hair-woven band, “but that isn’t us. We’re fortunate to still belong to ourselves. And to each other.”
Her own words shocked Judith to stillness. Though she meant to say the members of the Factory Girls’ Union, all belonging to one body, the words also seemed to mean something particular about the two of them, flowing from that same mare incognitum in her belly that Hannah’s blushes had found.