CHAPTER THREE

Alice heard it first in her dreams. Coughing. Dry, tired coughing, the deep kind that leaves one’s chest heavy and sore. She didn’t want to be pulled from sleep. Weeks now of working at the mill had taught her to jealously guard her rest. But the coughing pulled her awake. She lay, stiff, listening. Weary heaves, smothered, as if into a pillow.

Then a stirring; Alice squinted. Lovey was standing, wraithlike in her white nightgown, holding Tilda’s head up with one hand, a cup of water in the other. Tilda moaned in her half sleep as Lovey whispered something to her. She took a sip, then fell back onto her pillow.

“Is she sick?” Alice whispered over slumbering Jane’s form as Lovey crawled back into her bed.

“Probably, but she won’t admit it.”

“She should go to the doctor.”

“She can’t do that; he’ll tell the owners.”

“Why?”

Lovey pulled herself up onto one elbow, her voice patient. “You know they don’t want sick girls here; it makes them look bad. The doctor has to report right away when it happens. We’re supposed to be the young, healthy workers of modern industry, remember? She’d be sacked immediately.”

“That’s outrageous, they owe us decency.”

Lovey sighed. “You’re beginning to sound like me.”

Tilda was determinedly bright, though pale, the next morning as the girls took turns washing up, filling pitcher after pitcher with water at the basin. Sunday meant leisurely scrubbing. It meant good manners; lowered voices; stockings without holes. Sunday was church. The sermon at Saint Anne’s usually set everybody dozing.

Jane was standing last in line for the water basin, her thin hands clasped tight. “None of you take worshipping the Lord seriously enough,” she declared.

“Mainly me, of course,” Lovey said.

“Yes, mainly you. And I’m suspecting that you’ll be searching the pews to see if Jonathan Fiske is down from Boston. Am I right?” Her voice turned disapproving. “You flirt with him every chance you get; we’ve seen you. Don’t you have any sense of decorum?”

“Decorum? Janie, you think that bothers me? I’m announcing right now, I’m going to disappear for an hour or so today, and don’t any of you tell,” Lovey replied. She winked to the others, as if it were the most ordinary plan in the world.

“That’s much too daring,” Delia breathed, a look of concern on her face as she tried to dry Ellie’s newly washed hair with a damp towel.

“You’ll come to a bad end,” mumbled Jane. “And if you’re the one who brought crackers in here last night, you should clean them up, or we’ll have mice.”

“Oh, leave me be,” Lovey said impatiently. “There’s little enough fun in our lives.” She grabbed a wet washcloth from the soapy water and hung it on the clothesline strung across that corner of the room. “Anyway, I’m getting some religion. I’m going to the Methodist camp meeting with Mary-o tomorrow night; anyone want to come?”

“Again?” blurted Jane. The others were silent.

Lovey laughed. “Last time, I assure you. I just want to flirt with the preacher. At least he won’t be warning of fire and brimstone.”

“Those revivalists make cheap promises.” Jane was standing her ground.

“They talk about glory; your God is all about hell. Plus, they’re more entertaining.”

The silence grew uneasy, broken only when Lovey shrugged and sauntered out, heading for the dining room.

“How do you feel?” Alice asked as quietly as she could of Tilda at breakfast.

Tilda sat across from her, spooning in mush as if the utensil weighed ten pounds. “Much better, thank you,” she said. But she rested the spoon on the lip of the bowl and seemed at a loss for what to do next.

“You should try to eat more,” Alice began, and stopped. Vacant, empty words to someone as exhausted looking as Tilda.

Dutifully, Tilda picked up the spoon and plunged it into the mush. “Some good news for you,” she said, her lips widening into a bright smile. “Coming tomorrow, I’m giving you more looms. You’ve become quite fast, and you should be proud.”

Before Alice could respond, Mrs. Holloway broke in. “You’ll need to wait until Tuesday,” she said as she put a platter of bacon on the table. “Alice has to get one of those smallpox injections tomorrow morning.”

“Aren’t you lucky,” Lovey teased. “You get to pay a visit to the dashing Dr. Stanhope. Remember—he won’t look directly at you, so be sure he aims right and gives you the shot in your arm and not somewhere embarrassing.”

Tilda started to giggle, triggering a coughing fit. She pushed back from the table and hurried to the front door, banging it shut behind her.

No one else moved. Not quite knowing why, Alice pushed her chair back against the rough floorboards and followed.

Half doubled over, holding on to the ice-covered railing, Tilda was coughing so deeply it sounded as if her insides were being wrenched apart.

“I’m all right,” she gasped. “I just have to get it out.”

“Get what out?”

“The cotton.”

“The what?”

Tilda’s hand went to her mouth. A second later she slowly spread her fingers wide, staring at its contents. A white ball.

“You are coughing up cotton?” Alice asked. Cotton. The fiber the mill girls spun, carded, wove into wonderful patterns and weaves. The magical source of their emancipation from the farm.

“We all do, sooner or later,” Tilda said calmly. She tossed the cotton ball into the bushes and turned back into the house, leaving Alice speechless, shivering on the porch.

The doctor’s surgery was housed in a small building with closed shutters off the main road, on the edge of town. Alice stepped through the front door Monday morning into a vacant, silent room permeated with a faint, acrid smell. She had never had one of these vaccinations, and wasn’t sure she wanted it, but had been told there was no choice. So that was that. She would concentrate on other things to ask the doctor.

A door creaked open. The same strangely constructed man who had rescued her hat stood staring at her from behind large spectacles, looking alarmed.

“May I inquire as to what you want?” he asked, not unkindly.

“I’m told I must have a smallpox vaccination,” she said.

“Well, indeed.” He seemed uncertain what to do next. The white doctor’s jacket hanging on his frame was too immaculately clean, and Alice wondered how many people actually came to see this strange man. “Come in.” He gestured toward the door, fixing his gaze on the far wall of the sparsely furnished room as she entered. “It will only take a moment.”

She winced as the needle went in, her heart pounding. Such a strange way to be kept free of disease. “It is safe, isn’t it?” she asked timidly as Benjamin Stanhope withdrew the needle from her arm.

He gave her a hint of a smile. “Everybody asks that, right after the injection,” he said. “But yes, it is. It saves many lives, and we’re fortunate to have it.” His voice had become less jerky.

“What is in it?” she said, staring at her arm.

“It’s miraculous, really. It’s material taken from a cowpox lesion. A little bit of it gives immunity. All the work of a brilliant man, Edward Jenner, about forty years ago—”

“Could I ask you about something else?”

A flicker of alarm in his eyes. She suddenly had the crazy idea of saying, Nothing to do with what is under my skirt. Lovey would have said it in an instant, and she would have gotten away with it, too.

“It’s the air in the mill,” Alice put forward instead.

“The air in the mill?”

“Yes. You know, the quality of it.” Surely she wasn’t telling him something new.

“Well, yes. It does leave something to be desired,” he said. His voice sounded as if it needed oiling.

“One of the girls in the boardinghouse coughed up cotton yesterday.” She waited, searching his face for some shock.

But Dr. Stanhope’s expression held steady, barely changing. “Yes,” he said.

“You aren’t surprised?”

“It happens every now and then.”

“So what can be done about it? What will happen?”

He began dismantling his injection equipment, wiping the needle with a cloth and putting it back into a narrow leather box resting on a table. “Most will be fine,” he said. “You are a young and healthy group of women.”

“And the others?”

“Lung problems, perhaps.” He snapped the leather case closed, stood, and replaced it on a shelf above the table, his back to Alice.

“Is it because of the bad air?” Pulling responses from this man was getting frustrating. She rubbed her arm, which was getting sore.

“All of you there are breathing in lint, especially the girls who suck thread through the eye of the shuttles that feed the thread into the looms. I understand they do it to get the job done faster.”

Alice remembered watching Tilda performing exactly this maneuver, lauding its efficiency. She thought of her own scratchy throat in the steaming hot room where she worked, the constant tickle and the constant wish that she could open a window. And she remembered something. “The girls were joking last week about something they called the kiss of death. Is that—”

“Yes, that’s what they call it.”

She caught her breath. “Does that describe it correctly?”

Reluctantly, he turned to face her. “I call it one of the hazards of mill work,” he said.

“Doctor—wouldn’t it be the right thing to tell the mill owners how dangerous it is?”

“Miss…Miss—”

“Barrow.”

“Miss Barrow, any health alarm could deprive the girls of their jobs. In this time of economic want? You would want me to do this?”

His indignation sounded practiced, almost as if he were reading from some handbook. This wasn’t hard to decipher—the man was afraid of losing his own job. He worked for the mill owners, same as she did, and Tilda, and all the others. “I wish you felt you could,” she said.

Wordlessly he unbuttoned his crisp white coat and hung it on a hook on the back of the surgery door, smoothing out the very few wrinkles marring its spotless surface. Underneath he wore the same coat exposing his knobby wrists that Alice recognized from when he had saved her hat.

She couldn’t leave without saying something more. “It will only get worse, won’t it?” she asked.

He ran a hand through his hair; pink scalp was showing through the white strands. His voice suddenly sharpened. “I’m a doctor who does his best, and that’s all I need to say to you.” Regaining his composure, he added, “Good day, Miss…ah—”

“Barrow.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good day, Dr. Stanhope.” She donned her coat and walked out of the surgery, pulling the door shut behind her as hard as she dared.

It was a Monday night, perfectly ordinary, except for the fact that there were two empty places at the dinner table.

“Where are Mary and Lovey?” Ellie asked, her voice carrying around the table.

“Hush, they went to a meeting,” her sister replied.

“Who knows what goes on in those tents the revivalists put up,” mumbled Mrs. Holloway. “Those girls are—”

“They’ll be fine,” Alice interjected. The chilly edge to her voice halted the conversation. Why did she feel she had to speak up? Perhaps because there was so often a tut-tut tone to any conversation about Lovey, who was a bit of a risk taker, yes, but as generous as anybody. The other girls didn’t always appreciate that. Anyhow, Alice was still brooding over her encounter with the spineless doctor. There was nothing to do about it at the moment. But at least Lovey would patiently listen to her complaints. She wanted to talk to her now. Where was she?

Midnight. No Lovey or Mary-o. Alice sat up in the parlor, sleepless, worrying. She could hear the rhythmic breathing of the others from the dormitory and wondered if they, too, were listening. Mrs. Holloway had padded around the house at ten o’clock, her face set tight with strain, peering out the window from time to time before finally turning out all the lights.

“It’s long past my bedtime, and I’m locking up for the night,” she finally said. “If there’s any mischief going on, we know who’s causing it, don’t we? I swear, that girl Lovey has no common sense.” After some hesitation, she left one lamp on in the parlor. “I don’t want them freezing out there,” she said when she saw Alice watching her.

“They’ll come,” Alice said.

Mrs. Holloway stared out the window into the blackness. “We do always want to hope for the best, don’t we?” she said.

“No, I truly mean it, they will be here soon.”

Mrs. Holloway stared into the distance, her thoughts on broader territory. “Young women, taking foolish chances, old story,” she said tiredly. “I didn’t take well to a harness, either, but there’s no telling that to the young.” She turned and left the room.

At a quarter past the hour, Alice heard movement on the porch. Slipping out of bed, she hurried to open the door. A shivering Mary-o and Lovey looked up from where they sat on the steps.

“Thank God,” Mary-o whispered.

“We have to get up in only four more hours,” Alice sputtered. “How could you stay out so late?”

“Don’t scold,” Lovey said. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes dancing.

“Weren’t you worried? You broke a major rule, you could be sacked,” Alice protested.

“Please forgive us,” Mary-o said, her voice contrite.

“What happened?”

Mary-o stole a furtive glance at Lovey. “We got separated; I couldn’t find her.”

“It just ran late,” Lovey cut in, yanking at Mary-o’s hand. The three of them walked into the house, standing in the weak light of one lamp.

“I’ve been so afraid we would be thrown out of here,” Mary-o began. “I—”

“Stop it, Mary,” Lovey said, her voice lightly careless. “We had a good time, now pick your chin off the ground and let’s go to bed.”

Mary-o straightened. “Well, you did, more than me.” She sniffed.

“Lovey—” Alice ventured, touching her friend’s hand.

Lovey’s hand softened under her touch for a second, then pulled away. And she would say no more.

The next morning, nothing seemed different. Lovey had hollows under her eyes but laughed and joked at breakfast with the others, ignoring the stony manner of Mrs. Holloway, while Mary-o ate in silence. There were glances exchanged, but no one asked questions, and neither Lovey nor Mary-o discussed their late-night return. By some unspoken group agreement, that event hadn’t happened.

Alice had little time to dwell on this at the mill, for Tilda did indeed hand over to her a second loom that day, and tending two of them for the first time left her breathless. There would be a way through all the questions. It would just take time.

The weeks streamed by, the days beginning to blur, each much the same as another. Almost every night, Alice and Lovey gravitated to the front steps, enjoying the warm summer breezes and then the crisp fall air. Lovey was always in great spirits. She would sneak out extra cookies from the kitchen, and they would argue the merits of sugar versus gingerbread, talking and munching. Lovey teased Alice for being a bit too proper, and Alice confessed to a cautionary approach to rules. “You know what you need to do?” Lovey declared one day. “You need to steal a cookie. It’s your turn.”

The next night Alice dumped half-a-dozen cookies in her friend’s lap.

“You see? You can filch things, too.”

“I learned from an expert.”

“Do you think we should have to start work so early?”

It was habit now, for both of them, to pick any topic and introduce it at any time, and they were always, always able to discuss it together. They could be talking about labor reform, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, or the best way to seam up a shirtwaist. It didn’t matter. To feel free to think and argue and explore was new to Alice and made her euphoric. She had not known a friendship like this.

“I wish I had stayed in school,” Lovey said one night, staring up at the moon. “I’d like to learn things—history, things like that.”

“You know many things I don’t know, especially how to navigate life in Lowell. Sometimes I think you want people to believe you are always reckless and not too smart, and I know that isn’t true. Why?”

Lovey’s reply was light and self-mocking. “It’s my costume,” she said. Then she simply grew quieter, seeming to draw into herself more. She could suddenly not be there, be oddly distracted, her mind somewhere else.

“Where are you?” Alice teased, waving a hand in front of her friend’s face.

Lovey grinned. “Wandering in my head,” she replied. “But you wander in your books. What are you reading?” She pointed at the book of poetry in Alice’s hands. “Is it yours? You brought so many.”

Alice sighed. Probing her friend was like poking at a drop of quicksilver. “It’s mine now, I guess,” she said, staring down at the creased and faded pages of her mother’s favorite book of poetry. It was in such forlorn shape because Alice had left it out in the leaky barn one night when it rained. And she would never forget her mother’s gentle scolding.

“For your punishment, you must memorize them all,” she had said. And so Alice had, and now she would always love poetry. Which was precisely what her mother had hoped would happen, she told Lovey.

“You never talk about her,” Lovey said. “I figured there was some bad story, but from what you’re saying, if she were my mother, I’d be thrilled.”

“She died last year.” The words filled her throat, thickening her breath.

“I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry.” Then with a touch of surprise, Lovey said, “Why haven’t you told me before?”

“I didn’t want to say it out loud.”

“Makes it final, I suppose.”

Alice nodded.

Lovey was silent for a moment. “It must have been wonderful to have a mother who read,” she offered.

“That’s all I have left of her, the books she loved.” There weren’t that many left, but Alice hadn’t been about to leave a single one in her father’s farmhouse for him to throw away.

“You told me she taught you to stand up for yourself,” Lovey said. “That’s a good legacy, I’d say.”

“Yes.” There would be no awkward platitudes from Lovey, for which she was grateful. But Lovey’s next comment startled her.

“I wish there had been someone who loved me.”

“Oh, Lovey, there must—”

Lovey cut her off. “Who wrote the poems?” she asked.

“A woman named Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They’re quite wonderful, especially the ones about love.”

“Is it sinful love? That’s always interesting.”

“Love isn’t sinful.” Alice pointed to a sonnet and read the first two lines, then handed the book to Lovey. If thou must love me, let it be for nought, except for love’s sake only.

Lovey read in silence, absorbed as she began to turn the pages. “May I copy some of these?” she asked.

“Only if you promise to memorize them.”

Lovey broke into a wide grin. “You just watch me,” she said. “Lovey is going to learn about love.”

There was something strange about the way she said it. “Are you all right?” Alice asked. “Something—”

The swift tenderness of Lovey’s glance stopped her. “You really do care, don’t you? I’m fine, Alice. Remember, I’m the one who is always fine.”

“You seem pale. The cotton—”

“Not me.” Lovey patted her rib cage. “Lungs of an ox,” she said with a laugh.