Letting her feet carry her back to the boardinghouse in a daze, she left the building to join her mill sisters for dinner. So befuddled, she barely noticed she was going against the tide as everyone was jostling their way back to the mill.
“Briar!” called Ethel. “You’re late. Here, I slipped out some food for you.” Ethel handed her a sausage wrapped in a flapjack, then turned Briar around to go back to the mill. “Don’t tell Miss Olive. You okay? You’ve been acting strange ever since the meeting last night. I didn’t scare you off, did I? I don’t expect you to plunge right into a campaign. I just want you to realize your potential. We can get tied up in our work, becoming machines ourselves if we’re not careful.”
Ethel preached on and on until they climbed the stairs and had to part ways. Briar had mindlessly nodded to keep Ethel going while she tried to understand what had happened to her frame and the spindle. She put her hand in her pocket and felt the whorl with its carved roses. It was buzzing, the way the floor in the spinning room felt when all the machines were on and the vibrations worked their way up her body. She yanked her hand out.
What had she done? Had she fought further upstream like Elizabeth Cady Stanton encouraged, or was this an example of giving in to temptation? This was no normal spindle. By placing it in the frame it was as if she had turned it on the way the overseer turned on the power each morning.
When she stepped into the room, she was afraid to even look at the spinning frame. What if it had started to grow like Jack’s beanstalk and taken over the room? She glanced down her row. Her frame looked as it always had. An inanimate object waiting for Briar to turn it on and set its spindles to spinning. She laughed nervously. Her anxiety over getting caught had given her an imagination as wild as the twins’.
There had to be some rational explanation for how the spindle stuck in the frame. The wood swelling from the high humidity in the room, for example. And the whorl didn’t start its buzzing until she crossed the threshold. It might have been reacting to the looms above, which were turned on and off in shifts and could be felt below.
The bell sounded and the machines around her roared to life as the girls threw their shipper handles. Maribelle, who had come to finish the doffing she’d started before the bell, pointed to Briar’s silent machines. “Aren’t you gonna start?” the girl yelled over the din.
Briar shook herself out of her musings and rushed to get all four machines up and going. When she turned on the power for number four and the spindles began to whirl, she sucked in a breath and waited for something bad to happen.
Little Maribelle, after finishing her doffing, wandered off to find someone to play with. Briar paced up and down her frames, fixing the odd broken thread on numbers one, two, and three, but keeping her distance from number four. She didn’t want to get too close, and she didn’t have to.
For the first time ever, the threads never broke. Just as the peddler said.
Soon, Maribelle joined her to exchange the bobbins again. She started with frame number one. For a moment, Briar wondered if she should volunteer to take care of the work, but that would raise suspicion if the other spinners happened to notice what she was doing. Instead, while biting her lip, she watched Maribelle lift up a bobbin, drop it in her cart, and load an empty one in its place. Over and over as she worked her way toward the fairy-wood spindle.
Chapter Eighteen
Maribelle was one spindle away now. Briar watched, bouncing on the balls of her feet, ready to step in if there was a problem. She didn’t want to call attention to the new spindle, but she didn’t trust that small piece of fairy wood. It did something unexpected and that made her almost as worried as getting caught.
Maribelle’s chubby hand reached for the bobbin atop the wooden spindle. Briar’s heart beat against her chest. She rushed over and reached for the same bobbin. “This one is tricky,” she yelled over the noise of the machines. “I’ll help you with it.”
Maribelle shook her head, clasping the bobbin before Briar could get to it. “I can do it. I don’t need help anymore. Honest.”
Briar thought of Pansy as she looked into Maribelle’s earnest eyes. The girl was trying to show how grown-up she was. Fine. Briar wouldn’t take the burgeoning pride away from her, but she would stick close.
Grinning, Maribelle zipped off the bobbin, an empty one ready to replace it. A slight hesitation was the only indication that she’d noticed something amiss. She dropped the new bobbin and moved on.
Briar lowered her hands and backed away. Maribelle, with her tongue sticking out in concentration, finished the line, pushing her cart as she went. The full cart took all her strength, and again Briar was tempted to help her. But the girl was determined, and she made steady progress.