“Yes,” he said, “of course you do. It would only be for a day or so. I wouldn’t let anyone hinder you.” He smiled with his mouth and not his eyes. “You’re my prize girl here.”

I’m not your girl. I’m not anybody’s girl but my own.

“So—it’s settled,” he said, reaching out as though to pat her again, but Lyddie quickly shifted her arm to escape the touch.

*  *  *

The new girl, Brigid, was from the Acre—an Irish papist through and through, wearing layers of strange capes and smelling even worse than Lyddie herself. Lyddie scented more than poverty and winter sweat. She whiffed disaster. The girl’s only asset was a better command of proper New England speech than most of her lot. Not that she spoke often. She seemed deafened by the machinery and too cowed to ask questions even when she needed to.

As for tying knots, a basic weaver’s knot, the girl simply couldn’t do them. Lyddie demonstrated—her powdered fingers pinching, looping, slipping, pulling—all in one fluid motion that magically produced a healed warp thread with no hint of a lump to betray the break.

“You don’t even watch!” the girl cried out in alarm. And, of course, Lyddie didn’t. She had no need to. Her fingers could have tied that knot in a privy at midnight, and it would have held. It would have been invisible as well.

“Here,” she said, barely clinging to patience. “I’ll do it more slowly.” She slapped off all four machines. With her scissors, she cut two threads from a bobbin and, taking the girl to the window where the light was best, she wasted at least five precious minutes tying and retying the useless knot until, finally, the girl was able, however clumsily, to tie a lumpy knot herself.

Lyddie jerked a nod. “It will get better with practice,” she said gruffly, anxious to get the stilled looms roaring once more.

Threading the shuttle was, if anything, worse. Lyddie popped the full bobbin into the shuttle and then, as always, put her mouth to the hole and sucked the thread through, pulled it to length, wrapped it quickly on a hook of the temple, dropped the shuttle into the race, and restarted the loom. The next time the quill had to be replaced, she had Brigid thread it, and, as she watched the girl put her mouth over the hole and suck out the thread, the words kiss of death came to mind. She had always thought the words a joke among the weavers, but here was this strange-smelling foreigner sucking Lyddie’s shuttles, leaving her spittle all over the thread hole. Lyddie wiped the point quickly on her apron before she banged the shuttle against the far end of the race. “We don’t want any flying shuttles,” she yelled, her face nearly as crimson as the Irish girl’s.