Just before the first wave reached us, I looked at Bee, and Bee looked at me. We needed no words to share what must have been obvious to both of us. It simply had not occurred to either of us that the mills would shut down for the night, because they relied on daylight for their workers to see. Then the wash hit us, men and women and children in faded and mended clothing, the women with their hair covered by scarves and faces pallid or ashen, depending on their complexion. So thin they were, faces pinched, hands trembling; one young woman was rubbing her right ear, and a man with stooped shoulders leaned heavily on a comrade, as though he were about to faint. A boy no older than Hanan passed, his gait made awkward by the evident pain caused him in his right leg, for he grimaced each time that limb pressed into the ground. A very small girl passed holding a bloody rag to the back of her head and crying, although not one soul paid the least attention to her.
Bee pushed forward against the tide, and with an elbow here and a shoulder there, we pressed through the crush toward the mill’s doors, where a pair of foremen watched as the workers departed. In such a commotion, it was easy enough to be what I was not. I was not walking into the mill but rather was part of the outward flow; Bee was twisting her bracelet, as if anxious about a missed tryst, no one important. Hidden within the glamor of misdirection, we got inside the stairwell; very dim it was, with no windows and only one lamp burning midway between each floor. The clomping of many feet echoed in the stairwell as folk pushed down.
Shoved against the brick wall, we swam like birds against the current upward, for laborers from the upper floors were only now coming down. At the first landing, we slipped into a vast, low room with big windows where the encroaching dusk gave us little enough light to see by. Brushes were hung from a rack on the wall. Spinning mules stood in their ranks, fiber pulled in long threads but now still. Bee knocked her knee against a wheel, and I jammed my toe when I kicked a runner lying so low along the floor I had not expected it. White flickers of lint drifted and warmth lingered. Dust tickled in our nostrils. A bloody knot of human hair lay on the floor.
“Did you see how young those children were?” whispered Bee.
Footsteps clumped behind us. We turned.
A night watchman with a lantern and a knotted whip walked in. “Here, now, off you go, girls! I’ve no time for your malingering! We’re closing up!”
We hurried away down the long room to the opposite door, by now drowned in gloom, down the cold, silent stone steps, and again outdoors. Out back, connected to a one-storied annex, rose the engine house, where the engine still hissed and wheezed. A pair of watchmen stood by the door, talking and laughing. Bee grabbed my arm and tugged me with her as she marched to the door. As they looked up to see her, she bobbed her head and rubbed her hands as if nervous.
“Begging your pardon,” she said in a soft, un-Bee-like voice, “but we’re come up from the country for we were told we could get jobs here.”
“What kind of job were you thinking?” asked the younger man.
The elder gave a frown. Bee burst into tears.
I said, “Oh, please, we’re good girls. We were sent up to live with our cousin on Wellspring Terrace and take a job here, for there’s no husbands for us at home. But she died, and her husband said a terrible thing to my sister, like he meant to… to mistreat her. We’ve just enough coin to make the trip home, but nothing for a roof tonight, and it’s so cold, and we’re so frightened.”
Bee bleated out another anguished sob.
“All we ask is one night. In a safe, warm place, like you’d hope for your own sisters and daughters.”
“Probably that bastard Tom Carter,” said the elder. “For his wife died three months back. Some say he shoved her down the stairs, and her pregnant! The baby died, too.”
Bee wept noisily.
“All right, then,” continued the elder with a sigh, “and don’t you go being disrespectful,” he added, with a stern nod at the younger man. To us, he said, “I’ll tell them to let you lie on the floor just inside the door. But how much sleep you’ll get I could not say, for it’s a cursed din.”
“Do they keep the furnace lit all night?” I asked, hoping he would say yes.
“Yes. It’s easier that way than drawing it up each morning.” He opened the door.
And, indeed, inside the stone walls of the engine house it was smoky and noisy and hot, but it was combustion, and if anything would hide us from the mansa, it was combustion.
We curled up against a wall, out of the way, in our coats. The workers in charge of the furnace ignored us. It was smoky, and noisy, and hot, but we slept.