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“Move,” the cook said. The large woman was beginning to take the food from the fire. She gave Lyddie a quick glance. “Lucky you’re so plain. Guests couldn’t leave the last girl be.” She was ladling stew into a large serving basin. “Won’t have no trouble with you, will we?”
Lyddie picked up the stool and moved to a corner of the room. She knew she was no beauty, never had been, but she was a fierce worker. She’d prove that to the woman. Should she offer to help now? But the cook was too busy moving the food from the fire to the long wooden table in the center of the room to pay her any mind. Lyddie scrunched her body into itself and tucked her bare feet under the low stool, fearful of seeming in the way. Would all the guests come in here to eat? And if so, where should she hide?
As if to answer her question, the mistress pushed through the door with a boy behind her. “Hurry,” she said. She supervised while the last of the food was transferred from the iron kettles into great china basins, which the cook and the boy carried from the kitchen to some other part of the house. The mistress mumbled and grumped orders, and in between complained of the guest who made herself out to be a lady when she was nothing but a factory girl putting on fancy airs.
If the mistress saw Lyddie sitting in the corner, she never let on. Lyddie was glad to be ignored. She needed time and a chance to wash and change her dusty clothes. If only she hadn’t worn her better homespun to travel in. The one in the gunnysack was even tighter and more ragged. She hadn’t had a new dress since they sold the sheep four years ago. Since then, her body had begun to make those strange changes to womanhood that exasperated her. Why couldn’t she be as thin and straight as a boy? Why couldn’t she have been a boy? Perhaps, then, her father would not have had to leave. With an older son to help, maybe he could have made a living for them on the hill farm.
But, hard as she wished, hard as she tried, she was only a girl. She was, as girls go, scrawny and muscular, yet her boyish frame had in the last year betrayed her. Her breasts were small and her hips only slightly curved, but she couldn’t help resenting these visible signs that she was doomed to be female.
Even the last year before Papa left, he had begun sending her in to help her mother. “She never really got over the baby’s birth,” he’d say. But once there was no more wool to spin, she felt as though her presence in the house just made her mother try less. One by one, the household tasks had been turned over to Lyddie—cooking and churning and cleaning and caring for the babies. For a while her mother spun the flax. They had no loom and paid the village weaver in spun flax for cloth. Her father had left them in a new shirt her mother had made. But that was the last garment her mother sewed. Lyddie tried to keep up the spinning, but when she had to take her father’s place outdoors, she was too exhausted to try to spin and sew in the dim candlelight.
Last winter she sewed one shirt. She had made it for Charlie because he, too, was outgrowing his clothes, and the old wool shirt their father had left behind hung on him like a nightdress.
As it turned out, Mistress Cutler provided her with a store-bought calico gown. It was softer than her rough brown homespun and fit her much better, but somehow it suited her less. How could she enjoy the garment of her servitude? She was fit with new boots as well. They pinched her feet and made her long to go barefoot, but she wore them, if not meekly, at least with determined obedience. After a few weeks and many blisters, they softened a little, and she was able to forget them for an hour or so at a time.
The people at Cutler’s were not so easy to forget. The mistress was large in body and seemed to be everywhere on watch. How could a woman so obviously rich in this world’s goods be so mean in the use of them? Her eyes were narrow and close and always on the sharp for the least bit of spilt flour or the odd crumb on the lip.
Not that Lyddie would stoop to steal a bite of bread. But the boy, Willie Hyde, was given to snatching the last of the loaf as he carried the breadbasket from the table to the kitchen. He was a year or so older than Charles and growing like red birch, and to hear the mistress carry on, about as useless. He was sent to shed or barn or field whenever he was not needed in the tavern itself. Lyddie would n
ot have said so, but she envied him the chance to be outdoors and out of boots so often.
Mistress Cutler watched Lyddie like a barn cat on a sparrow, but Lyddie was determined not to give her cause for complaint. She had worked hard since she could remember. But now she worked even harder, for who was there to share a moment’s leisure with? Who would listen with her to a bird call, stare at the sunset, or watch a calf stumble on its long, funny legs toward its mother? Missing Charlie was like wearing a stone around her neck.
She slept under the eaves in a windowless passage, which was hot and airless even in late spring. She was ordered to bed late and obliged to rise early, for the mistress was determined that no paying guest in the windowed rooms across the narrow passageway should know that they shared the floor with the kitchen girl.
She spoke rarely, but she listened intently, storing up stories for Charlie. She didn’t consider writing him. She was ashamed to have Charlie see her poor penmanship and crude spelling and, besides, there was no money for paper or postage—nothing except the calf money, and she would not spent a half penny of that. Indeed, at night when she was too tired or too hot to sleep, she would take the gunnysack out from under her straw mattress and count the money in the darkness. It’s like little Agnes sucking her thumb, she scolded herself, but she didn’t stop. It was the only comfort she had that summer.
* * *
* * *
It was nearly September when she saw the pink silk lady again. She had come this time on the coach from Burlington, and was headed, Lyddie overheard her say at supper, for Lowell, Massachusetts. When another traveler asked her business in Lowell, she smiled and said, “Why I work in the Hamilton Mill there. Yes,” she added, answering her questioner’s stare, “I’m one of those factory girls.”
The man murmured something and turned his face toward his bowl of stew.
The lady watched him, still smiling, and then, catching Lyddie’s eye, smiled even more broadly, as though to imply that Lyddie was a comrade in some peculiar way.
Indeed, when the men had left the dining room to go into the taproom, she stayed behind, reading a book she had taken from a small silk purse that matched her lovely dress.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”
Lyddie looked around to see to whom the lady was speaking, then realized the room was empty except for the two of them.
“In late May, when I was headed home to the farm for the summer.”
Lyddie cleared her throat. She had lost the habit of conversation. She nodded.
“You’re not one of the family here.”
Lyddie shook her head.
“You’re a good worker. I can see that.”
Lyddie nodded again to acknowledge the compliment and turned again to loading the dirty dishes on her tray.
“You’d do well in the mill, you know. You’d clear at least two dollars a week. And”—she paused—“you’d be independent.”
She was lying, Lyddie was sure of it. No girl could make that much money in a week’s time.
