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.