“Lyddie, tell her not to be foolish.”

“I’d hate you to leave,” Lyddie said quietly.

Betsy snorted. “I’d be gone a month and a half before you’d ever notice,” she said.

*  *  *

The overseers were being offered premiums—prizes to the men whose girls produced the most goods in a pay period—which was why the machines were speeded and why the girls hardly dared take time off even when they were feverish.

“If you can’t do the work,” Lyddie heard Mr. Marsden say to a girl at the breakfast break, “there’s many a girl who can and will. We’ve no place for sickly girls in this room.”

Many girls—those with families who could support them or sweethearts ready to marry them—went home, and new girls came in to replace them. Their speech was strange and their clothing even stranger. They didn’t live in the corporation boardinghouses but in that part of the city known as “the Acre.”

The Acre wasn’t part of the tour for foreign dignitaries who came to view the splendor of Lowell—the model factory city of the New World. Near the Northern Canal, sprouting up like toadstools, rose the squat shacks of rough boards and turf with only a tiny window and a few holes to let in light. And each jammed with Irish Catholics who, it was said, bred like wharf rats. Rumor also had it that these papists were willing to work for lower wages, and, since the corporations did not subsidize their board and keep, the Irish girls were cheaper still to hire.

Diana was helping the new girls settle in, teaching them just as she had taught Lyddie in the spring. Lyddie herself was far too busy to help anyone else. She could not fall behind in her production, else her pay would drop and before she knew it one of these cussed papists would have her job.

Often, now, the tune came unbidden to her head:

Oh! I cannot be a slave,

I will not be a slave …

It was a dreary December without the abundance of snow that Lyddie yearned for. What snow fell soon turned to a filthy sludge under the feet of too many people and the soot and ashes from too many chimneys. Her body itched even more than it usually did in winter. The tub of hot water, that first night in Mrs. Bedlow’s bedroom, proved to be her only full bath in the city, for, like most of the companies, the Concord Corporation had not seen fit to provide bathhouses for their workers. The girls were obliged to wash themselves using only the wash basins in their rooms, to which Tim hauled a pitcher of cold water once a day.