WHEN THE BELL RANG to rouse the workers from their rest, Charlotte groaned. She’d lain awake most of the night, listening to the snoring and coughing and creaking beds of the other women around her. When she’d heard the chimes of the clock tower bells at midnight, she wondered where Hopkins was and what he would have to say about this. None of the imagined comments were very nice.
She shuffled about with the others, dressing and readying themselves for the day, all too tired to care about who saw or heard what. It was still dark outside. In the dining hall the bread rolls and boiled eggs were there to collect, peel and eat. Charlotte almost asked where the salt was and thought against it. She didn’t want to draw any attention to herself.
More than anything, though, even more than sleep, she wanted the opportunity to sketch what she saw. She wanted to study the lines on these women’s faces and capture the way their bodies had been shaped by their labour. As she picked a rogue fragment of eggshell from her teeth, Charlotte daydreamed about teaming up with a London journalist to put together an exposé of life behind the mill walls, or perhaps creating an oil painting that actually showed the truth, rather than the sanitised, romantic depictions of mill ladies she had seen. She remembered the crowd gathered around one picture set in an absurdly clean street, all the women with Rubenesque bodies and flawless white skin, hair attractively tousled instead of hanging limp and greasy. Now she knew why that painting had been so popular. That portrayal reassured people who didn’t like to think about what life was really like for those less fortunate. No one wanted to see what the cotton mill workers really looked like, because then they’d have to think about why they looked this way.
Another bell rang just as she was finishing her roll. “Come on, then!” Dotty said, heaving her up. “Time to get goin’!”
They joined the press of people trudging into the mill. Charlotte drew looks and comments from a variety of people, which she’d expected as the new girl, but that didn’t make it any easier. If George saw where she was now, he’d have a heart attack.
The foreman, a red-cheeked man with an impressive set of jowls and a receding hair line, was just outside the doors. Now that she was standing next to him, instead of looking at him from across a courtyard, Charlotte realised she was slightly taller than him. He looked her up and down, looking doubtful. “’Ave you ever worked a Lancashire loom before, lass?” When she shook her head he puffed out his cheeks. “What about cardin’?” At her blank expression, he added, “Gettin’ the wool ready to be spun.” He tutted when she shook her head. “Well, you’re too big to clean underneath . . .”
“I can teach ’er the looms,” Dotty said. “I don’t mind.”
“I don’t want you distracted.”
“I won’t be. You know ’ow quick I am.”
The foreman scratched his chin. “I won’t make any allowances for yer.” When Dotty nodded, he looked at Charlotte. “You can watch an’ learn. Y’won’t get paid until you’re manning the looms yerself, so pay attention. A’right?”
Charlotte nodded and they were ushered inside.
“Thank you,” Charlotte whispered to Dotty. “That was very kind.”
“We all ’ave to start somewhere,” Dotty whispered back.
The room spanned the entirety of the ground floor, save the space given to the stairwell that ran to the upper floors, and there were dozens and dozens of looms in perfectly straight rows. Charlotte had never seen anything so daunting. There were huge shafts of metal running along the ceiling above each row of looms, with wide belts of leather running from the shaft to each loom. Each one was the size of the old kitchen table, with hundreds of threads stretched over two wooden frames. There were cogs and levers and none of it made any sense to her.
The air was stuffy, even though the sun was only just coming up, and none of the windows were open. The foreman was making sure everyone was in position, and there was a strange tension in the air. Everything felt far too still.
“I look after these ones,” Dotty said in a whisper as she pointed to four in front of her and four behind her. “You’ll ’ave to watch closely, as I ’ave to move quick when I’m workin’ and I won’t be able to talk to you.”
“Why not?” Charlotte whispered back.
“I ’ave to keep it clean, check for thread breakages and replace the empty bobbin. The wooden thing the bobbin goes into is called the shuttle. These new looms stop when the thread runs out, but I ’ave to get it going again as quick as possible, otherwise I get a strappin’.”
“A what?”
She didn’t seem to hear that question, either. “The little uns’ll be crawling around, getting the fluff and piecin’ for me if it’s one of the lower warp yarns that’s broke. So watch where y’step, ’right?”
Another bell was rung. Everyone seemed to hold their breath. Then the noise began. The shafts running along the ceiling started revolving, which in turn drove the belts that set the looms off. The clattering din hurt Charlotte’s ears, and she covered them in surprise, making Dotty laugh and roll her eyes.
Charlotte was amazed at the speed of the looms. She soon worked out that the two frames held the warp yarns apart so the shuttle could be passed between them before being switched over for the shuttle to pass back, forming the weave of the cloth. The shuttle went so fast she couldn’t see it, and if Dotty hadn’t pointed it out before, she never would have spotted it.
The temperature in the room began to climb, and soon Charlotte could feel sweat running down her back. It wasn’t just the heat, but also the humidity, and it felt as if it were getting harder to breathe. The air seemed to thicken, motes of dust and tiny fibres from the cotton sparkling in the first shafts of sunlight hitting the room. As the sun climbed, Charlotte simply couldn’t understand why no one was opening the windows. Thinking they were too tied to their duties at the looms, she headed towards the nearest one, only for Dotty to grab her arm and shake her head, mouthing a definite “no” to her.
Small girls and boys were crawling beneath the machines, gathering up clumps of cotton fluff and stuffing them into cloth satchels. She watched one boy scoot over to a machine that had been stopped. Charlotte crouched to see his little fingers deftly tying a broken strand of yarn. The machine was soon started again, the operator not even checking if the child’s fingers were clear. It was only then that she noticed one of them missing the top half of an index finger.
Charlotte bit her lip. Had it been lost in an accident here? And now that she was looking, she could see other people with maimed hands. One man’s right arm hung limp at his side, yet he was still managing eight looms with the help of a small girl who did the thread tying for him.
Dotty tapped her shoulder and pointed at one of her looms which had stopped working. She pulled out the shuttle and dropped a new one into place, tied something and set the loom off again in a matter of seconds. Going back to the shuttle she’d just removed, she lifted up the empty bobbin and pulled it off a spike of metal in the centre, then dropped it in a bucket by the side of the loom. She pulled a new bobbin thick with spun thread from a metal bucket resting nearby, dropped it over the spike of metal and flipped that back into place, then put the end of the shuttle to her mouth. When she moved it away, Charlotte could see the end of the thread coming out of a hole at the shuttle’s tip. It was put into the place the replacement bobbin had been, ready to be swapped in again. In moments, the next machine along needed to have its bobbin replaced and Charlotte trailed after Dotty, trying to work out where the new thread was tied.
She worked so fast that each loom was still for only about fifteen seconds. And she didn’t rest between the bobbin changes. Dotty was constantly vigilant, checking the cloth being produced, wiping the edges of the machine down, constantly checking and rechecking the state of the threads.
And all the while, the temperature rose. Charlotte’s head was pounding. Her feet hurt. The noise was unbearable. No one could talk to each other but she did notice a couple of people mouthing words across looms and seeming to understand each other. She could see people coughing, even though she couldn’t hear them, and by midmorning she was coughing, too, feeling a persistent tickle at the back of her throat that she simply couldn’t shift.
Surely there had to be a break soon? It felt like days since the shift had begun. The sun’s steady rise, something that usually lifted her heart, filled her with dread as the factory’s temperature became unbearable. She had to get outside and breathe in some fresh air! She had to tell Ben that this was never going to work!
The bell was rung and the shafts stopped turning, bringing the drive belts to rest and the looms to a stop. Charlotte’s ears were ringing and she could still hear the clattering of the looms even though they’d stopped. Dotty said something to her and she couldn’t hear her. Panicking, she pushed her way through the press of workers, fearing she was about to collapse as she was squeezed in the throng, and then she was staggering into the cobbled yard, sucking in great lungfuls of air.
Gradually, Charlotte became aware of people laughing at her, but instead of being embarrassed, she could only be grateful she could actually hear their jeers. Dotty hurried over and rubbed her back as Charlotte braced her hands on her knees, coughing.
“I knew you’d find it ’ard,” Dottie said. “Bugger off, you lot!” she shouted at some of the kids who were mocking Charlotte’s distress. “It’ll get easier. I promise. Come on, we ’ave to get our lunch. We’ve only got twenty minutes.”
“I thought it was half an hour!” Charlotte said, but Dottie shook her head.
“We ’ave to clean the machines before they start up again. Only quick like. C’mon.”
The food was being served at the long tables this time—there was no time for queuing after all—and soon there was a plate of some fatty beef chunks and a helping of boiled potatoes in front of her. A pitcher of water was passed down the table to refill glasses and Charlotte was so thirsty she drank it, despite the fact it was cloudy. She could imagine George’s rage if he saw her do that, given his friend’s beliefs.
Her feet throbbed and her ears were still ringing. She’d been in that mill for only seven hours and hadn’t even been working, just learning the job, but she was exhausted. Her heart pounded too fast at the thought of going back into that oven. She simply couldn’t bear the thought of it. She picked at the meat, unable to stomach it, had a couple of the potato chunks and then pushed the plate over to Dotty. “Here,” she said. “You have this. Thank you for looking after me.”
Dotty looked up from her own plate, mouth full. “What y’doin’?”
Charlotte put her bread roll next to the crumbs left on Dotty’s plate. “No one should live like this,” she muttered and got up.
“Where y’goin’?” Dotty called, but Charlotte kept walking, unable to say that she was going to find her brother.
She left the dining hall, ignoring the foreman who watched her go by with a frown on his face, and went back to the mill. She had to find where the magi worked.
She’d arranged to meet Ben at sunset back at the worker’s cottage where she’d changed her clothes the day before. She couldn’t wait until then.
Ben would be involved in making the line shafts turn; he’d said as much and from what she’d seen in there, it was the only thing a magus of the Dynamics college could do. The looms contained too many parts in concert for anyone other than a Fine Kinetics magus to control, though a Dynamics magus could turn the drive belt. It was far more efficient for them to turn the main line shafts, however, driving hundreds of looms at once.
She’d noticed how the ends of the shafts went through square gaps in the far wall to allow them to turn unimpeded, so whatever the magi did to turn them had to be on the other side of it. Having endured the morning in that place, she now knew why they were kept separate. She reasoned that they must have their own way in round the back of the mill.
There was indeed another entrance, with doors that had ornate brass handles and a dressed stone portico framing them. Leading up to the doors was a neat flagstoned path running from the boundary of the mill site, an entirely separate set of iron gates at the end of it. They were, unsurprisingly, more ornate than the gates she’d passed through the night before.
The ground floor windows on this side of the mill were larger, but the lower sills were too high for her to be able to look inside. She tried the doors but they were locked. She didn’t even know if Ben was in there. She couldn’t shout for him; she didn’t want to draw attention to herself or, more important, to him. He’d get into trouble if people discovered the relationship between them.
Leaning against the wall, Charlotte wished she could just go home. Then she felt guilty, and selfish and pathetic for wanting to run away when Dotty and Mags had nowhere to run to. How lucky she was to even have somewhere to go!
She couldn’t abandon Ben, either, but she wasn’t going to uncover a saboteur in that mill, not when it was impossible to hold a conversation in there. If there was a plot to disrupt production, it would have to be discussed in the evenings, and no one seemed to have the energy to do that. And even if they did, no one would tell a new girl. She’d been so concerned about following Ben’s plan, she hadn’t stopped to consider if it was actually a good one.
It was hopeless, and she had to tell him so. Charlotte listened at the doors in the vain hope of hearing something, and then decided there must be another way in; surely there would have to be a door between the main mill and where the magi worked? For emergencies, if nothing else.
By the time she got back round to the worker’s entrance to the mill, most people were returning to their looms. She saw Dotty wiping hers down and clearing lint, too absorbed to notice her go past and slip down the far side so she could get a better look at the wall between the mill and the magi’s section. There was a door right at the far end, but without any legitimate reason to go through it as a mill worker, she stopped, frustrated.
“Oi!” The foreman’s shout made her jump. “What are you up to?”
He was staring at her from the other end of the row of looms. With no good answer to give him, she hurried back to Dotty.
To Charlotte’s dismay, the foreman was waiting by Dotty’s looms when she arrived. “There ain’t nothin’ for you over there,” he said. “What were you lookin’ for?”
“Nothing, I—” The words died when she saw the thick leather strap he was holding. Charlotte had a horrible feeling she was about to find out what getting “a strapping” meant.
“She’s new, Mr Foreman,” Dotty said, a quiver in her voice. “She just got turned about in ’ere, that’s all.”
“I saw you sniffing about the other entrance,” the foreman said. “’Opin’ to catch someone’s eye, were yer? There ain’t no jobs ’ere for pretty things lookin’ for rich husbands, I can tell yer that. Don’t y’know them magi can’t marry? Unless you were ’opin’ to lift yer skirt for a bob or two?”
Charlotte gasped. “How dare you!”
The strap was raised and came down so quick that Charlotte had no hope of avoiding it. It hit her across her left arm and shoulder, sending her into the nearest loom and making a sharp pain explode through her hip where she hit the cast-iron upright.
“You’re ’ere to work!” the foreman bellowed. “Not flutter yer eyelashes at some magus, ’opin’ he’ll let y’off a shift!” The strap whooshed through the air a second time, this time catching her forearms as she tried to defend herself.
The blow was hard enough to make tears come to her eyes. As the third came down, the bell rang and the shafts turned once again. Her sleeve caught on the loom’s drive belt, snagging on a rough piece of leather that had patched up an earlier tear, and her arm shot up towards the line shaft with it. For a terrifying moment she felt her feet leave the floor, and then without even considering the consequences, Charlotte snapped the drive belt with a thought. She tumbled free, landing with her sleeve torn as the loom juddered to a halt.
The foreman’s strap came down again, catching her across the head this time, as she was too shaken to defend herself. She couldn’t hear the crack of it against her, the sound stolen by the din of the looms weaving again, but the pain was even more intense. She raised her arms again, but when the expected blow didn’t come, her fear was rapidly replaced by rage. At the back of her mind, there was the faintest memory of one of her lessons with Hopkins.
“Your temper will be the end of you,” he’d said. “Unchecked rage can turn a Latent wild, and it only takes a moment for control to be lost. That’s why you need the marque.”
Her marque was the furthest thing from her mind. She was going to wrench that strap from the foreman’s hands and beat him to death with it.
Someone was screaming at a high enough pitch to rise above the clatter of the looms, and it snapped Charlotte from her murderous fury. It was Dotty, and for an awful moment she feared the foreman had turned on the poor girl for defending her. The foreman was nowhere near Dotty, though—he was still standing where he had been before, but now the strap was hanging from his hand at his side. Charlotte saw the wide-eyed terror on his face as he stared at something behind her.
She whipped her head round just in time to see the loom rise a couple of feet off the ground and then slam down again, making the floor shake. She scrabbled away on her backside as it rose a second time, only to buckle in the middle before being dropped again, as if a giant’s invisible hand were squeezing it.
For one terrifying moment, Charlotte thought she was doing it, that she’d lost control like she had during Ben’s test when she smashed a window and broke the dining room table. She tried to remember her marque, but the visualisation exercise was impossible when the loom’s wooden frames were splintering apart right in front of her.
The shuttle had fallen to the floor, as had the roll of fabric collected at the side of the machine, and the broken threads were already a tangled mess. Half the frame lifted into the air again and Charlotte saw a wispy form above it, just for a moment, before the wood dropped to the floor and splintered into kindling.
Wondering if she’d imagined it, Charlotte stared at the air above the broken loom, but the violence seemed to be over. The foreman, visibly shaking, looked at her and Dotty and then beckoned to them to follow him out of the mill.
Dotty helped Charlotte to her feet, both of them shivering. With arms wrapped around each other, they went outside, Charlotte studiously avoiding making eye contact with the nearby workers. Even though those working the looms around them had seen it all happen, they still kept an eye on their own work. Now Charlotte knew why; they were keen to avoid a beating.
She wanted to cry. She could feel welts burning beneath her dress, her cheek was stinging where the end of the strap had caught it and her head throbbed. But she wouldn’t give that man the satisfaction of seeing her upset. She gritted her teeth when she saw him outside, promising herself that she would tell Ben about him and see to it that he lost his job. It was the least she could do for Dotty.
“I don’t want either of you t’say anything about what y’saw,” he said, still gripping the strap. “None of it, d’yer ’ear?”
“But other people saw it too!” Charlotte said, and he scowled at her.
“They already know not to talk.” His voice was more a growl. “Now get back in there and get on w’yer shift.” He pointed the strap at Charlotte. “Any more wanderin’ about and yer out. There’s plenny more who’d give their eye teeth to work at this ’ere mill. I want t’see you workin’ a loom by the end of today, else it’s the cardin’ room for yer and y’won’t like that, either.”
Dotty pulled at Charlotte’s hand. “C’mon Charlie,” she said timidly. “You can load the next empty shuttle, for practice.”
Charlotte levelled an angry glare at the foreman and the strap twitched, making Dotty pull her harder. She let herself be guided back into the ovenlike mill, deafened once more, but more motivated to stay now. She didn’t know what she had seen above the loom, nor whether it was even real. Whatever it was, she feared she’d started it off when she’d lost her temper.
Resolving to stick it out to the end of the shift, Charlotte made a mental list of grievances to take to Ben. He had to know what it was like here. He had to understand how badly the people were treated. And she had to keep her temper, or saboteurs would be the least of her brother’s problems.