July wore on its weary way into August. It seemed a century since the summer just a year ago when she had read and reread Oliver Twist and dreamed of home. She had been such a child then—such a foolish, unknowing child. As always, many of the New England operatives had gone home. Brigid took on her third loom. More Irish girls came on as spare hands, some of the machines simply stood idle. The room was quieter. Lyddie took to copying out passages from Mr. Douglass and the Bible to paste on her looms.

She liked the Psalms best. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills …” and “By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …” The Psalms were poetry, no, songs that rode the powerful rhythm of the looms.

Sometimes she composed her own. “By the rivers of Merrimack and Concord there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered …” I must forget, she thought. I must forget them all. I cannot bear the remembering.

*  *  *

Lyddie was strong again. Her body no longer betrayed her into exhaustion by the end of the day, and she was past shedding tears for what might have been. It was a relief, she told herself, not to carry the burden of debt or, what was worse, the welfare of other persons. A great yoke had been lifted from her shoulders, had it not? And someday the stone would be taken from her breast as well.

Between them, she and Brigid coached several of the new spare hands, all of them wearing far too much clothing in the suffocating heat. “But me mither says me capes will cape me cool,” one of the girls insisted. Lyddie let it be. She hadn’t managed to persuade Brigid to take off her silly capes, how could she expect to persuade the new girls? Still, she was more patient with them than she had ever been with poor Brigid at the beginning. She had to be. Brigid herself was a paragon of gentleness, teaching the new girls all that Lyddie and Diana had taught her, never raising her voice in irritation or complaint.

Lyddie watched her snip off a length of thread from a bobbin and lead one of the clumsier girls over to the window and show her in the best light how to tie a weaver’s knot. It was exactly what Lyddie remembered doing, but she knew, to her shame, that her own face had betrayed exasperation, while Brigid’s was as gentle as that of a ewe nuzzling her lamb.

She smiled ruefully at Brigid as the girl returned to her own looms. Brigid smiled back broadly. “She’s a bit slow, that one.”