The Sister's Tale by Beth Powning (e reader for manga .txt) 📕

know. How parents suffer their rage and always, always, always forgive their cruelty.

—

June 12, 1888

Dear Cousin Carrie,

I write to tell you about Lucy in the hopes you will look out for her. She has taken a position at the St. John Cotton Mill. She left this morning on the train. She will be residing at a boarding house. 15 King Street. She tells me the house is at the bottom of the street overlooking the water. I beg you to go look at it and meet the owner and see whether it is a safe place. I could do nothing to stop her. She blames me for my situation.

I cannot think what I should do to support myself.

Love,

Your cousin,

Josephine

—

Carrie stood on her doorstep, pulling on summer gloves. Elms arched over a grass strip dividing the street, where two gardeners knelt, planting geraniums. She set off towards the city centre. As she turned down the hill towards the harbour, brick houses with bay windows and decorative detail gave way to rows of Italianate commercial buildings.

A few square-rigged ships lay at anchor. She viewed them critically, comparing their shabbiness to her father’s ship, Traveller. Rigging creaked as the ships rocked on the rising tide; and memory came to her of the time Traveller had been boarded by pirates in the South China Sea.

It was a horror that had awakened her from nightmares all her childhood and, occasionally, did so even now: her nursemaid’s searing wail as she was carried off—Madame, Captain, Madame; her mother, Azuba, forcing her to feign death in a pool of her father’s blood; her mutism, and an English doctor, in Hong Kong, looming over her with an anxious expression, unsure of the cure. She knew that Azuba blamed herself for these terrors and for Carrie’s childlessness, as if the two were related; and yet had never said I should not have gone to sea. Carrie had overcome her resentment of this, respecting the risks her mother had insisted upon taking, understanding how a woman might feel trapped by a life into which she did not fit.

One day, she thought, Lucy will understand her own mother, as I now understand mine.

She reached the bottom of King Street. Number fifteen was a shabby, three-storeyed, flat-roofed wooden house. Horses stood in a yard next to it, harnessed to slovens; beyond was a maze of shed- covered wharves where water sucked and slapped, filthy with tobacco leaves, vegetable peelings and dead fish.

A woman let her in. Thin, unsmiling.

“First room on the right.”

Carrie climbed the stairs. Knocked. Lucy opened the ill-set door; she stepped back, startled. Carrie swept into the room. Another girl curled on the single bed, sleeping.

“That’s Min,” Lucy murmured, pulling out a chair for her cousin. “We have to share the bed.”

Min, evidently a sound sleeper, did not stir.

Carrie sat, arranged her skirt, surveyed the room.

“Good for you, Lucy. I’m proud of you.”

Lucy slipped onto the remaining chair. Her forehead bore a red crease from the elastic of a mill worker’s mob cap. Her face had lost flesh; her dress was loose on her frame. Intense eyes bore the narrowed focus of fatigue. The window was set in a crooked frame, or perhaps the house had shifted. Salt air seeped over the sill, bearing the squabble of gulls.

“Tell me about your work,” Carrie said. “What do you do?”

“It is loud. So loud.” Lucy fanned her hands beside her ears. “I can still hear them. The looms.”

Carrie, along with other reform-minded, well-to-do women, was working to improve the Factory Act legislation, passed but not yet in effect. She had toured cotton mills, rope manufacturers. She had visited confectioners, shoe factories, biscuit companies, box and match makers, brush and paper factories, potteries—all within the city of St. John. She and the others planned to tour the province and speak on the conditions. Lack of separate toilet facilities for men and women. Underage children. Unequal pay, unsafe conditions. Molestation. Punishment.

“I tend a spinning frame,” Lucy said. “Just one frame, till I learn. I have to draw out the carriage and revolve the spinner. I have to actuate the fallers. Check for broken threads; if there are any, call for the doffers. They come racing down between the looms, the little girls.”

Carrie nodded. She had seen this, on her tours. Wearing soiled aprons, the gang of doffers scuttled between the looms with their boxes, tearing off the full bobbins, replacing them with empty ones.

“It’s hot, too. They keep it hot and moist so the thread won’t snap. There are rules posted everywhere.”

Lucy glanced at Carrie, who was more like an aunt than a cousin. She looked down at her hands, worried at a welt. Carrie, for her part, gazed at this girl upon whom she had showered gifts. They sat listening to the gulls.

“I came, Lucy, because your mother is worried.”

“I’m all right.”

“I know you are, Lucy. I’ll tell Josephine that you are.”

Carrie was certain that Lucy was hungry; that she had not expected to have a strange girl in her bed; that she was appalled to be living in a place that stank of the privy and was liable to flooding by any exceptionally high tide; that she was shocked by the factory conditions. She saw, too, that the girl was fiercely animated by the death of her father, which she had not yet grieved or accepted.

She handed Lucy a slip of paper.

“This is my address. Women meet at my house every Thursday evening at seven p.m. We are trying to change the laws so that what happened to your mother—having no custody over you children, you know, and all the rest of what happens to a woman when her husband doesn’t…when a will can’t be found—can never happen again.”

Lucy did not take her eyes from Carrie’s face.

“We want to make laws so that no children will work in factories or be without education. So that not only young men will be expected to attend university or to become doctors and