Luke Stevens says he has had no reply. Do think kindly on him, Lyddie. You need someone to watch out for you as well.

Your loving brother,

Charles Worthen

She almost tore this letter up, but stopped at the first tear. She had nearly ripped the page across Charlie’s name.

*  *  *

September came. Some of the New England girls had returned to the weaving room, though the room now was mostly Irish. No Diana, of course, though there was something in Lyddie that kept waiting for her, that kept expecting to see the tall, quiet form moving toward her through the lint-filled room. She had taken something from the weaving floor with her going. There was no quiet center left in the tumult.

A letter arrived in September, on thick, expensive paper, the address decked out in curlicues. “We regret to inform you of the death of Maggie M. Worthen …” They hadn’t even got her name right. Poor Mama. Nothing ever right for her in life or death. Lyddie squeezed her eyes closed and tried to picture her mother’s face. She could see the thin, restless form rocking back and forth before the fire, the hair already streaked with gray. But the face was blurred. She had been gone so long from them. Gone long before she died.

Fall came. Not the raucous patchwork of the Green Mountains, but the sedate brocade of a Massachusetts city. The days began to shorten. Lyddie went to work in darkness and came back to supper in darkness. The whale oil lamps stayed on nearly the whole day in the factory, so water buckets were kept filled on every floor. Fire was a constant dread while the lamps burned.

As the days grew short, breakfast came before the working day began. There was, as always, barely time to swallow the meals, though the food was not as ample as it had been a year ago. At the end of the day now, she waited for Brigid, and they would go out together. Often all the other girls passed them on the stairs or in the yard, for they would be talking about what Brigid had read since the day before, and Lyddie would solve the mystery of an impossible word or the conundrum of a sentence.

Then one evening, she realized that Brigid was not beside her on the crowded stairs. She tried to wait, but the crowd of chattering operatives pushed her forward. She went down to the bottom of the stairs and stepped out of the stream. A hundred or more girls went past.

She was puzzled. Surely Brigid had been right beside her. They had been talking. Brigid had asked her what “thralldom” was. She was trying laboriously to read Mr. Douglass’s book, but was yet to get through the first page of the preface.