The Mill Girls

Chapter 1: The Brick City

The coach lurched over frozen ruts and Abby Mott pressed her forehead against the cold glass, watching Lowell rise from the river valley like something the earth had not quite agreed to.

Brick. Everywhere brick. Red-brown walls climbing four and five stories above the Merrimack, their windows catching the last grey light of a December afternoon. Chimneys trailed smoke into a sky already the colour of pewter. The river itself seemed harnessed, its water diverted into canals that ran straight as ruled lines between the mill complexes, feeding turbines she could not yet see but could somehow feel—a low vibration transmitted through the frozen ground, through the iron wheels of the coach, through the soles of her shoes.

Beside her, Susannah pressed a gloved hand against her own window and said nothing.

Abby watched her sister's reflection in the glass: the fine jaw, the dark hair pinned beneath a bonnet that had belonged to their mother, the expression that managed to look both determined and affronted, as though Lowell had committed a personal offence simply by existing.

"It's larger than I expected," Abby said.

Susannah's reflection blinked. "It's uglier than I expected."

"You expected it to be ugly."

"I expected something closer to a town. This is a machine that someone has put roofs on."

The coach slowed as it entered the commercial district. Abby could see shops, a church steeple, women walking in groups along the plank sidewalks with their shawls pulled tight. The women moved quickly—not the hurried scramble of someone late, but the practised efficiency of people who had learned that standing still cost something they could not afford.

Abby had one carpetbag between her feet. Inside it: two serviceable dresses, both let out at the seams and taken in at the waist so many times the fabric showed a history of alterations like rings in a tree trunk. Stockings. A comb. A Bible with their mother's name written inside the cover in fading ink. A packet of letters from their father, tied with kitchen string.

And tucked into the Bible's spine, a folded sheet of paper on which she had written the figures.

The mortgage: one hundred and forty-seven dollars in arrears.

The bank's deadline: April 15, 1845.

Mill wages for a spinner, first year: approximately three dollars and fifty cents per week, less board of one dollar and twenty-five cents.

Net weekly wage: two dollars and twenty-five cents.

Weeks until April 15: approximately seventeen.

Seventeen weeks at two dollars and twenty-five cents equalled thirty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents. If Susannah earned the same—and weavers sometimes earned more—together they might send home seventy-five dollars before the deadline.

It was not enough.

Abby had done the arithmetic on the kitchen table in New Hampshire while their father sat in the next room, silent as a man who has already been told the diagnosis and is merely waiting for someone to say the word. She had done it again on the coach, using the margin of a newspaper someone had left on the seat. The numbers did not improve with repetition.

But seventy-five dollars was better than nothing. Seventy-five dollars plus whatever their father could scrape from the sale of the remaining livestock might bring them close. Close enough that the bank might extend the deadline. Close enough that the word "foreclosure" might be replaced by the word "arrangement."

Might.

The coach stopped.

"Lowell," the driver called. "End of the line."

Abby picked up her carpetbag. Susannah gathered her own bag and a small trunk that contained, Abby suspected, at least one dress that was not serviceable but beautiful—something Susannah had hidden from their father's accounting of what could be sold.

They stepped down into cold that bit through their coats. The air smelled of coal smoke and something else, something sweet and fibrous that Abby would later learn was raw cotton.

"We're to ask for Boardinghouse Number Eight," Abby said, consulting the letter from the Boott Cotton Mills' hiring agent. "Mrs. Almira Dyer, keeper."

"I can read, Abby."

"I know you can read. I'm reading it aloud so we both remember."

Susannah adjusted her bonnet. "I intend to remember as little of this place as possible."

They asked directions from a woman carrying a market basket. The woman pointed them toward the Boott complex—a series of connected brick buildings stretching along the Eastern Canal—and told them the boardinghouses were arranged in a row behind the mills, each numbered and each belonging to the corporation.

"Number Eight is the one with the blue door," the woman said. "Mrs. Dyer keeps a tight house. You'll want to arrive before supper or you'll hear about it until Easter."

They walked. The streets were laid out in a grid that suggested someone had designed them with a ruler and a conviction that human beings ought to move at right angles. Workers streamed past in both directions—women mostly, with a few men in mechanics' aprons or overseers' coats. The women's faces were young, some as young as Abby, some younger. Their hands were red. Their breath came in white clouds.

Abby counted them without meaning to. It was a habit. On the farm, she had counted fence posts, apple trees, eggs, coins. Her mother had called it Abby's blessing and her father had called it useful, which in his vocabulary meant the same thing.

Here she counted women. Forty-three passed them in the three blocks between the coach stop and the boardinghouse row. Thirty-nine wore shawls. Four wore proper coats. Twenty-six carried dinner pails. Eleven walked alone. The rest moved in pairs or groups, talking in voices pitched to carry over the ambient noise of a city that never quite stopped humming.

Boardinghouse Number Eight had a blue door, as promised. It was a two-and-a-half-story frame building, clapboarded and painted white, with a front yard the size of a tablecloth. The yard contained a bare elm tree, a woodpile and a boot scraper shaped like a dachshund.

Abby knocked.

The door opened precisely four inches, revealing a woman with iron-grey hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to be holding her entire face in place. Her eyes were the colour of slate and moved with the efficiency of someone conducting an inventory.

She looked at Abby. She looked at Susannah. She looked at their luggage.

"Mott?" she said.

"Yes, ma'am. Abigail and Susannah Mott, from—"

"Thornton, New Hampshire. I have your letters. Wipe your feet."

They wiped their feet.

Mrs. Dyer led them through a narrow hall that smelled of boiled potatoes and lye soap. The wallpaper was a pattern of blue flowers that had faded to the colour of old bruises. A staircase climbed steeply to the upper floors. To the left, a dining room held two long tables set for supper. To the right, a parlour contained a stove, a settee, three straight-backed chairs and a shelf of books that looked as though they had been arranged by someone who valued alignment over content.

Beside the dining-room door, a sheet of paper was pinned to the wall. The handwriting was precise and slightly larger than necessary, as though the author suspected her audience of poor eyesight or wilful ignorance.

Mrs. Dyer stopped before it.

"The regulations," she said.

She read them aloud.

Residents must attend worship on the Sabbath.

Visitors of the opposite sex are restricted to the front parlour and must depart by eight o'clock.

Curfew is fixed at ten o'clock. The front door will be locked at that hour.

Candles and lamps are to be extinguished at half past ten.

No spirits, tobacco or unseemly literature are permitted on the premises.

No woman of questionable conduct may remain under this roof.

Mrs. Dyer read the final rule twice, as though it were a verse of Scripture that bore repeating. Her voice carried the absolute authority of a woman who had personally authored the Ten Commandments and considered them carelessly phrased.

"Questions," she said. It was not an invitation.

"No, ma'am," Abby said.

Susannah said nothing, which Mrs. Dyer appeared to interpret as either agreement or insolence. She studied Susannah for a moment with the expression of a woman who had seen enough insolence to catalogue it by species.

"You'll share a room on the second floor," Mrs. Dyer said. "Six beds. Your bedmates are already assigned. Supper is at half past six. The bell for the mills rings at half past four in the morning. I do not ring a second bell. If you are not awake when the corporation bell sounds, you will answer to the overseer, not to me. I have enough to answer for."

She led them upstairs.

The room was small and contained three double beds arranged with their headboards against the walls, leaving a narrow aisle down the centre. A single window looked out onto the mill yard. The beds were covered with quilts that had been washed to a state of aggressive cleanliness. Beneath each bed, a wooden trunk provided the only storage.

Four of the beds were already claimed. Personal items marked the territories: a sewing basket, a stack of newspapers, a pair of spectacles on a folded cloth, a daguerreotype in a tin frame showing a family arranged before a farmhouse.

Abby and Susannah were given the bed nearest the window. They would share it.

"The mattress is corn husk," Mrs. Dyer said. "It rustles. You will become accustomed to it or you will not sleep. Either way, you will work."

She left.

Susannah sat on the bed and the mattress protested.

"Temporary," she said quietly. "This is temporary."

Abby set her carpetbag on the floor and looked out the window. The mill yard was empty now, the workers inside for the final hours of the afternoon shift. She could see the brick wall of the Boott complex, the canal, and beyond it, the river. Somewhere upstream, the water was free. Here it had been put to work.

"We should unpack," Abby said.

"There's nothing to unpack. We own two dresses and a Bible."

"Then we should go down to supper."

Susannah looked at her. In the grey light from the window, her sister's face showed the same fine bones as their mother's, the same dark eyes that could shift from warmth to distance in the space of a breath. Susannah was twenty and beautiful in the way that made people assume she must also be content. She was rarely content. She had come to Lowell not because she believed in the work but because she believed in the farm—in the particular arrangement of stone walls, apple trees and stubborn soil that constituted the only home she had ever known.

She had not come to stay.

She had come to earn enough money to leave.

"Abby," she said.

"Yes?"

"Don't get attached to this place."

"I won't."

"I mean it. Don't start thinking of these people as family. Don't start thinking of this room as home. We are here to save the farm. That is the only reason we are here."

Abby nodded. But she was already counting: six beds, four roommates yet to be met, seventeen weeks until April, one hundred and forty-seven dollars between them and home.

The supper bell rang.

They went downstairs.

The dining room was full. Twenty-two women sat at the two long tables, passing dishes of boiled beef, potatoes, bread and butter with the coordinated speed of a military operation. Conversation was loud, overlapping and conducted in at least three different regional accents. Someone was laughing. Someone else was arguing about the price of calico. A girl at the far end of the table was reading a letter and crying quietly into her napkin while the woman beside her buttered her bread for her without comment.

Mrs. Dyer stood at the head of the first table and said grace in a voice that suggested the Almighty had better be listening.

Abby and Susannah took the two empty chairs.

The woman to Abby's left had red, work-roughened hands and hair the colour of dark copper pulled back in a knot that was already coming undone. She was perhaps twenty-five, with a face that seemed designed for argument—sharp chin, sharp eyes, a mouth that looked as though it had recently finished saying something that made someone uncomfortable.

"Harriet Prue," she said, extending one of the red hands. "Weaving room. You're the Mott sisters?"

"Abigail. Abby."

"Welcome to paradise, Abby. Don't eat the beef too fast or it fights back. How old are you?"

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen." Harriet said it the way someone might say "December"—acknowledging a fact while privately noting that it was colder than it had any right to be. "First time in the mills?"

"Yes."

"You'll be in the spinning room. They always put new girls in spinning. It's loud enough to make you forget your own name, but the work is simple once your hands learn it. Your hands will learn it before your mind does. Trust your hands."

The woman across from Abby was older, perhaps thirty, with pale skin and shadows beneath her eyes that looked permanent. She held her fork carefully, as though her fingers ached.

"Ellen Pease," she said. Her voice was soft and slightly hoarse. "Carding room. Don't let Harriet frighten you. She frightens everyone, but only half of what she says is true."

"The important half," Harriet said.

Ellen smiled. It was a gentle expression that seemed to cost her something. She had a cough—Abby heard it twice during supper, a small, dry sound that Ellen covered with her hand and dismissed with a shake of her head.

Supper lasted twenty minutes. Then the dishes were cleared by a rotation system that Mrs. Dyer administered with the precision of a battlefield commander, and the women dispersed.

Some went to the parlour. Some went upstairs. Some sat at the cleared tables with sewing or writing materials.

Abby learned the names of her roommates.

Besides Harriet and Ellen, there was Lydia Kimball, a quiet spinner from Vermont who read novels behind her Bible so Mrs. Dyer would not confiscate them; and Martha Flagg, a doffer who had been in the mills since she was thirteen and spoke about the work with the flat practicality of someone describing weather.

The sixth bed belonged to a girl named Sadie Phelps, who was seventeen and had arrived three days before the Mott sisters. Sadie was from Maine, had a round face and an anxious disposition, and had already memorized Mrs. Dyer's regulations because she was afraid of being sent home.

"My mother said if I'm dismissed, I shouldn't bother coming back," Sadie told Abby. "She said there are enough mouths already."

Abby unpacked her carpetbag. She placed her mother's Bible on the narrow shelf above the bed. She folded her second dress into the trunk. She tucked the packet of letters and the sheet of figures into the Bible's pages.

Then she lay in the dark beside Susannah and listened to the sounds of Boardinghouse Number Eight settling for the night: the creak of bedframes, the whisper of turning pages, the small cough that came from Ellen's side of the room at intervals as regular as breathing.

Outside, the mills were silent for the first time since their arrival. The machinery had stopped. The waterpower had been diverted. The great brick buildings stood dark against the winter sky.

But the silence felt temporary, like the pause between heartbeats.

At half past four, the bell would ring.

Abby closed her eyes and began counting the hours.