“Do we?” Hannah asked, blinking hard, so that Judith suspected she was not trying to See, but to hide angry tears. “So many times, standing in the work room, I’ve blinked to See my own self leaking away and filling up my looms. It’s like watching my very breath sucked away.” Her indignation proved too much for her thin form to contain, and she doubled over in a coughing fit.
“Then we take it back!” Judith declared, as she thumped her back.
When she could breathe again, Hannah straightened and shook her head. “It’s as I’ve been saying, Judith, the machines don’t belong to us. Nothing in the mills does.”
“Why not? They’re more ours than some men in Boston who’ve never laid hand to thread.”
“Capitalists have their paper-craft. They may not See it any more than Mrs. Hanson can See the craft in her tonics, but contracts and deeds conjure too. Like the . . . demon . . . at the slave auctions.”
“Oh, Hannah, please, won’t you at least try to See a way around it? Else why did we start all this?”
The Seer gazed back with a face forlorn, which Judith half-wanted to kiss and half-wanted to slap, as the new-struck wellspring of feeling continued to bubble inside her.
“Hannah,” she began instead, “indulge me: do you know why I am so determined? When I first went to school, I knew my arithmetic better than the schoolmaster’s son, who was twice as old. When I finished my sums ahead of all the others, Master Hills was sure I had conned the answers somehow. Without waiting for any explanation, he laid his rod right across my hands!”
She was gratified to observe a wince on the older girl’s face. “How did you know your sums so well?”
“My oldest brother taught all of us at home. It was our game.” Judith touched each knuckle of her finger, remembering how she had learned to count and add. “Ever since that beating, I’ve hated masters, overseers, bosses—all these men lording it over, thinking they know best, thinking they have the measure of us! I couldn’t give up the fight now, even if they flayed me alive.”
She waited, to see how this speech would impress and inspire her co-conspirator.
All Hannah replied was “The schoolmaster beat me also.” She coughed. “And my parents did.”
“Why?” Now it was Judith marveling, for she could hardly imagine Hannah as a mischievous child.
“The reverend told them they must, if I said I saw things that weren’t there.”
The bubbling spring in Judith’s stomach reached her eyes.
“It didn’t make me fierce like you,” said Hannah. “I only stopped telling anyone what I Saw. And when I could, I left.”
Gently, Judith gathered both of the Seer’s hands in hers. “All the more reason to make a stand now. This is your home, Hannah. This is your place. Oughtn’t it be a place that treats you well?”
The tall girl sighed. “I’ll try, Judith. I’ll try to See a way to make the looms faithful.”
Judith dropped Hannah’s hands to clap hers in delight. “That’s all I ask!”
6: The Boardinghouse Keeper
QUILL IN HAND, MR. BOOTT considered the woman before him. She must be past sixty—certainly beyond any epoch when youthful humors might have led her astray. A distinguished spider’s web of wrinkles bloomed from the corners of eyes and mouth, segmenting her somber—even sour—face. Her gray dress was clean and her hair neatly tucked below the matching bonnet, in much the same costume worn by the other matrons of Lowell.
Nevertheless, here she was, to plead the case of mutiny.
“You’ve no cause to stop payment to us keepers.” Neither the depth of her chair nor the height of Mr. Boott’s desk impressed her. “We aren’t on strike.”
“Ah. Mrs.—Hanson, was it? Yes.” He’d noted her name and her position in his diary as soon as she arrived. “You must understand, Mrs. Hanson, that my employers cannot make payments out of nothing. With the mills at a standstill—”
“Surely the Lawrences and Appletons of the world have a line of credit when they need it? We’re working hard as ever to feed and shelter your operatives. Or do you want a thousand girls starving in the city streets?”
“No, no, no, not in the streets.” Mr. Boott cleared his throat and fluffed his cravat. “Naturally, some of the overseers rejoiced to hear that a few of the most—troublesome—girls have been evicted, but I hoped, Mrs. Hanson, I hoped that the matrons might exercise a wiser, motherly influence and persuade the young women back to work.”
“I’m paid to feed and house them, not to bully them.”
“At present, you’re not paid for anything.” The agent could hardly help showing his impatience when the woman insisted on misunderstanding him.
“Indeed,” said the matron, her thin eyebrows disappearing below the peak of her bonnet. “That is the sole and complete substance of my complaint to you today.”
“There will be no money until the mills are running again. I regret I cannot satisfy you.”
“Then satisfy the Union girls.” She placed one hand on either arm of the chair, squaring up. “Give them what they want—it isn’t much—and spin your cotton into gold again. What are you searching for, sir?”
Mr. Boott had risen to the capacious bookshelves, where years of records were bound and collected. “Ah. Here it is: Merrimack Corporation, Number Seven.”
The woman blinked at the invocation of her house, and Mr. Boott nodded approvingly to himself. If she insisted on being heard, he would have some questions of his own answered. “Since you object to having any moral influence upon your charges, perhaps you might not object to influencing me, on their behalf?”
Now the lady’s eyes grew round, as she watched him open the bound records of her lodgers, and turn the pages. “What do you mean?”
“It’s quite simple.” He returned to his throne behind the desk. “I am inquiring into the character of your boarders, Mrs. Hanson. Shall we proceed alphabetically? Emelie Adams: tell me about her. Is she a good, churchgoing girl? Ever late for curfew, or gone at odd hours?”
The matron’s lips became thin and bloodless. “You may skip Emelie.” By her tone, she had lost all taste for this interview. “As well as her sister Sarah. Both left Lowell before the strike began.”
“Very well,” said the agent, determined to press his advantage. “Who’s this, then? Elizabeth Bagley. Tell me about her, for surely you know something. A boardinghouse keeper cares as much for the soul as for the body.”
“I can’t tell you a thing about their souls,” the woman replied. “Only what they eat and where they sleep at night.”
If Mr. Boott had begun this exercise with any mirth, it was long since exhausted. “Florinda Bright,” he announced. “Laura Cate. Mary Cook,” he went on, searching for some reaction. “You must hear them whispering on the staircase or chattering in the parlor. Surely, you can tell which one introduced this infernal Union business into the house. Lucy Larson. Sarah Payne,” he said, choosing names at random now, searching for a reaction. “Hannah Pickering.”