The woman’s gaze fluttered from his own, seeking to rest anywhere else in the room: window ledge, bookcases, pigeonhole cubbies, the geography of his desk from inkwell to silver quill nippers.
“Yes? This one, Hannah? Who is she?”
“If I’m not in your employ, Mr. Boott, I’ve nothing to tell you.”
“If you’re not in my employ, Mrs. Hanson, I’ve nothing to pay you.”
The matron huffed and rose to her feet, gathering up her skirts. “The arrogance of great men!” she murmured.
Mr. Boott was quick, rounding the desk in time to catch her arm before she could pass from the room. “Tell me about Hannah Pickering. She’s one of the ringleaders, isn’t she?”
“She,” began the stout woman, stretching upward to her full height (quite equal to the agent’s, as it was), “is a sweet, obedient maiden who’s worked in Lowell for four summers without so much as a ‘boo’ to anyone, and mark me, she’ll die of weak lungs before she’s twenty, no thanks to you or your masters. Now, unless you plan to clap me in irons, sir, unhand my sleeve.”
Abashed, Mr. Boott released her and looked at his polished shoes. Perhaps what she said about this single girl was true, but—
“Aid me, Mrs. Hanson. Be my eyes and ears. You cannot be indifferent to the times in which we live: what if we meet the demands of this Union, and then the river fails, or the cotton wilts, or a hundred mills cover Lancashire to turn out cloth on the cheap? Every corporation in Lowell would be ruined, and that would be the undoing of many an enterprise, from Boston to Charleston—merchants, shippers, planters, all—your boarders included. We are a young nation, newly afloat, with the Empire and all its colonies eager to sink us. Do you think the governor or the president can stand by while their captains of industry are led by the nose? The Boston gentlemen have no wish to quarrel with you, no, nor any of the mill girls. But they must be permitted to lead.”
The speech quite exhausted the agent, and he did not expect a word of it to convince the matron. While he reached for his desk, gasping, to his surprise the woman reached out. Her hand cupped his well-shaved cheek in a motherly fashion.
“Their existence,” she said, “is a quarrel with me and the mill girls. But I shall think on it, Mr. Boott. Good day.”
7: Abigail North
JUDITH AND HANNAH did not return to Mrs. Hanson’s until after supper, their bellies yawning with hunger. Though they intended to make straight for the kitchen, no sooner had they set foot across the threshold than Patience Smith hastened up from the foot of the staircase where she’d been sitting, rushed to Judith, and seized her hand.
“Thank heavens you’re here!” Patience was breathless, her face giving the lie to her name as she tugged Judith inside. Other girls were lining the staircase, leaning over the banister to watch, or seated around the parlor in clusters, heads lifted in attitudes of disturbed conversation. Tonight, there was no evidence of games, no playing cards, no one seated at the pianoforte.
“What’s happened?” asked Judith.
“It’s Abigail—she—we—you’d better come and see. Perhaps you too,” the girl added to Hannah, less certain.
Irritated more than intrigued, intrigued more than alarmed, Judith allowed herself to be pulled up the staircase, past the others waiting in various states of agitation. The third floor, they found deserted except for Sarah Payne, who stood knitting outside the doorway of the dormitory shared by Patience, Abigail, and four others. The needles clicked and clacked menacingly, as if singing the tale of their sharp points. After recognizing the three new arrivals, Sarah stood aside, allowing them to enter the dormitory. She swiftly retook her post as soon as Hannah had passed.
Inside the bedroom—even smaller and darker than the room where Hannah and Judith slept on the fourth floor—Lucy and Lydia flanked a bundle of quilt and pillow, which was shaking with sobs.
“It’s no less than you deserve, you craven little mouse,” Lydia excoriated the sobbing bed clothes. “By heaven, Judith was right!”
“What is this?” asked Judith herself.
Leaving others to explain, Patience went to the fireplace, where she stood worrying a hangnail and watching.
“It’s Abigail. She feared for her family.” With a weary sigh, Lucy sat down on the bed beside the bundle, which squinting Judith could make out was the pitiful shape of a young woman curled up below the quilt, the pillow mashed over her head with two trembling hands. “She tried to go to Mr. Boott.”
All pity that Judith was prepared to feel disappeared. The attitude of the operatives downstairs and Sarah Payne’s armed vigil at the door grew clearer. “To Mr. Boott? Why?”
In response, the bundle wailed, and from the fireplace Patience pled her fellow’s case. “Judith, don’t be too hard on her. All of us have kinfolk at home depending on us.”
“Yes,” Judith agreed thinly, “and yet none of us save her went over to the enemy. But someone tell me what happened.”
Lydia sniffed and Lucy patted what seemed to be the bundle’s shoulder. “Near as we can figure—it’s come out only between sobs, you see—Abigail decided to ask if the mills would take her back, with that five-cent raise Mr. Boott promised,” said Lucy. “She’d no sooner set out for the Boott Palace, however, than she felt a tug on her hair. Well, she turns around and no one is there. So, on she goes. A few steps more, and she feels it again. She looks around, but she’s quite alone in the lane. Of course, now she feels queer and haunted, but cowardice won’t feed her family, so on she goes, determined to ignore the tugging.
“Firmer and more frequent it grows, from all quarters, and she’s sure she’s under attack by spirits or worse. She goes running into town, covering her head as best she can with her arms. She meets Laura and Betsy returning with the groceries for Mrs. H, and begs them to shield her. Well, of course, they don’t know what’s going on, but Laura lends her a shawl to throw over her head, and she makes her way back here like that. Little enough good it did her.”
“What do you mean?” Judith asked, blinking fast, unsure whether she credited Lucy’s account or not. It certainly appeared Lucy believed it.
“Oh, show her, you ninny!” said Lydia, seizing the pillow from over Abigail’s head. The girl’s scalp appeared briefly, pale and bald in the dim firelight, before she pulled herself below the bedclothes again like a tortoise taking shelter.
All of Abigail’s brunette locks were gone.
Judith clapped her hands over her open mouth. Had the spell—her spell, Hannah’s spell—truly worked so well? She wheeled around to look at the Seer, to find that Hannah had sunk to the foot of the empty bed nearest the door, holding herself tightly and staring sightlessly into the corners of the room.
“What do you want to do with her?”
Lucy’s question brought Judith back to the huddled traitor. “Do with her?”
“Some of the Union”—Lucy measured her tone precisely as a new bolt of cloth—“have a mind to run her out of Lowell. Others understand her reasons—they might even do the same if pressed to it—and say she’s been punished enough.”