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July was hot, as Diana had so inelegantly predicted. Reluctantly, Lyddie spent a dollar on a light summer work dress as her spring calico proved unbearable. Her other expenditure was at the lending library, where she borrowed Oliver Twist. This time she would read it on her own. It didn’t occur to her that she was teaching herself as she laboriously chopped apart the words that had rolled like rainwater off Betsy’s tongue. She was so hungry to hear the story again that, exhausted as she was after her thirteen hours in the weaving room, she lay sweating across her bed mouthing in whispers the sounds of Mr. Dickens’s narrative.
She was grateful to be alone in the room. There was no one there to make fun of her efforts, or even to try to help. She didn’t want help. She didn’t want to share this reading with anyone. She was determined to learn the book so well that she would be able to read it aloud to Charlie someday. And wouldn’t he be surprised? His Lyddie a real scholar? He’d be monstrous proud.
During the day at the looms, she went over in her head the bits of the story that she had puzzled out the night before. Then it occurred to her that she could copy out pages and paste them up and practice reading them whenever she had a pause. There were not a lot of pauses when she had three machines to tend, so she pasted the copied page on the frame of one of the looms where she could snatch a glance at it as she worked.
July was halfway gone when she made her momentous decision. One fair evening as soon as supper was done, she dressed in her calico, which was nicer than her light summer cotton, put on her bonnet and good boots, and went out on the street. She was trembling when she got to the door of the shop, but she pushed it open. A little bell rang as she did so, and a gentleman who was seated on a high stool behind a slanting desktop looked up at her over his spectacles. “How may I help you, miss?” he asked politely.
She tried to control the shaking in her voice, but in the end was unable to. “I—I come to purchase the book,” she said.
The gentleman slid off his stool and waited for her to continue. But Lyddie had already made her rehearsed speech. She didn’t have any more words prepared. Finally, he leaned toward her and said in the kindliest sort of voice, “What book did you have in mind, my dear?”
How stupid she must seem to him! The shop was nothing but shelves and shelves of books, hundreds, perhaps thousands of books. “Uh-uh Oliver Twist, if you please, sir,” she managed to stammer out.
“Ah,” he said. “Mr. Dickens. An admirable choice.”
He showed her several editions, some rudely printed on cheap paper with only paper backing, but there was only one she wanted. It was beautifully bound in leather with gold letters stamped on its spine. It would take all her money, she knew. Maybe it would be more than she had. She looked fearfully at the kind clerk.
“That will be two dollars,” he said. “Shall I wrap it for you?”
She handed him two silver dollars from her purse. “Yes,” she said, sighing with relief, “Yes, thank you, sir.” And clutching her treasure, she ran from the shop and would have run all the way back to the boardinghouse except that she realized that people on the street were turning to stare.
* * *
* * *
The Sundays of July were too precious to think of going to church. She didn’t even go to the big Sunday School Union picnic on the Fourth, though the sound of the fireworks sent her running from her room to the kitchen. There was no one at home to explain the fearsome racket, but she satisfied herself that the iron cook stove had not blown up, and returned to her sweltering bedroom to continue reading and copying. Mrs. Bedlow gave a general reminder at breakfast on the third Sabbath that many of her boarders were neglecting divine worship, and that the corporation would be most vexed if attendance did not soon improve among the inhabitants of Number Five.
Lyddie slipped a copied page of her book into her pocket and managed to read through the long Methodist sermon. In this way, she only lost a little study time during the two-hour service. She was startled once into attention during the Scripture reading. “Why do you, a Jew, ask water of me a Samaritan?” the woman asked Jesus in the Gospel story. Jesus a Jew? Just like the wicked Fagin? No one had ever told her that Jesus was a Jew before. Just like Fagin, and yet not like Fagin at all.
Lyddie studied on it as she walked home after the service. “Will you watch where you’re going, please.” She had walked straight into a stout woman in her Sunday best. Lyddie murmured an apology, but the woman humphed angrily and readjusted her bonnet, mumbling something under her breath that ended in “factory girls.”
The sidewalk was too crowded for daydreaming. Lyddie packed her wonderings away in her head to think about some other time and began to watch where she was going.
It was then that she saw Diana, or thought she did. At any rate she saw a couple, a handsome, bearded gentleman with a well-dressed lady on his arm, walking toward her on the opposite side of Merrimack Street. The woman was Diana, Lyddie was sure of it. Without thinking, Lyddie called out to her.
But the woman turned her head away. Perhaps she was embarrassed to have a girl yelling rudely at her across a public thoroughfare. Then several carriages and a cart rolled past them, and before Lyddie could see them again, the man and woman had disappeared into the crowd of Sunday strollers. She must have been mistaken. Diana would have recognized her and come across to speak.
12
I Will Not Be a Slave
She was good at her work—fast, nimble-fingered, diligent, and even in the nearly unbearable heat of the weaving room, apparently indefatigable. The overseer noticed from his high corner stool. Lyddie saw him watching, and she could tell by the smile on his little round lips that he was pleased with her. One afternoon a pair of foreign dignitaries toured the mill, and Mr. Marsden brought them over to watch Lyddie work. She tried to smile politely, but she felt like a prize sow at a village auction.
They didn’t pause long. One of them spent the whole time mopping his face and neck and muttering foreign phrases which Lyddie was sure had to do with the temperature rather than the marvels of the Concord Corporation. The other stood by blinking the perspiration from his eyes, looking as though he might faint at any moment. “One of our best girls,” Mr. Marsden said, beaming. “One of our very best.”
The pay reflected her proficiency. She was making almost $2.50 a week above her $1.75 board. While the other girls grumbled that their piece rates had dropped so that it had hardly been worth slaving through the summer heat, she kept her silence. With Diana gone, she had no friends in the weaving room. She worked too hard to waste precious time getting a drink at the water bucket or running out to the staircase to snatch a breath of air. Besides, her Oliver was pasted up, and any free moment her eyes went to the text. She read and reread the page for the day until she nearly had the words by heart.
In this way, she found that even the words that had seemed impossible to decipher on first reading began to make sense as she discovered their place in the story. The names, though peculiar, were the easiest because she remembered them well from Betsy’s reading. She liked the names—Mr. Bumble, a villain, but, like her bear, a clumsy one. You had to laugh at his attempts to be somebody in a world that obviously despised him.
Bill Sikes—a name like a rapier—a real villain with nothing to dilute the evil of him, not even Nancy’s love. She did not ask herself how a woman could stay with a man like Sikes. Even in her short life she had known of women who clung to fearsome husbands.
Fagin she understood a bit. If the world despised you so much, you were apt to seek revenge on it. The boy thieves—what choice did they have with no homes or families—only workhouses that pretended Christian charity and dealt out despair?
She knew with a shudder how close the family had come to being on the mercy of the town that winter her mother had fled with the babies. Was it to save them from the poor farm that she had gone? Lyddie had not thought of it that way before. Her mother might have realized that she and Charlie on their own were stout enough to manage, but with the extra burden of their mother and the babies … Had their mother really thought the bear was the devil on earth? Had she really thought the end was near? Lyddie wondered if she’d ever know the truth of that, anymore than she would ever know what had become of their father.
A letter came to Number Five in her mother’s handwriting. Lyddie felt a pang as she ran to fetch the coins to reimburse Mrs. Bedlow for the postage. She hadn’t yet sent any money to her mother. She’d been meaning to. She even had a few dollars set aside for the purpose, but her head had been tied up in other things—her work, the boardinghouse, the dream world of a book—and she had neglected the poor who were her own flesh.
She wanted not to have to open the letter. She wanted the letter never to have arrived, but there it was, and it had to be faced.
