The Crimson Thread (14 page)

            A short, very old man was waiting for them when the carriage reached the front of the mill. John climbed down and opened the carriage door for her to get out. “Good day,” the man greeted her formally, without warmth. “I am Eustace Henley, the mill foreman. I have been with the Wellington family since they bought this mill ten years ago.”

            Bertie introduced herself as the fiancée of James Wellington Jr., which brought only a disgruntled grunt from Eustace. “Thank you for agreeing to show me the mill,” she said.

            With a curt nod, he beckoned her to follow him into the building they were standing in front of. “This here is the original building that was destroyed by Union troops during the war.”

            “Your Civil War?” she inquired, remembering what Finn had told her about it one day.

            “Yep. The War Between the States is what we call it here,” he told her. “This building was rebuilt by Wellington and is now used for carding, spinning, and spooling. The other building that we’ll come to is just for carding and weaving.”

            Bertie followed Eustace through the high-ceilinged, narrow halls of the dark, hot mill. The entire building seemed to throb with nearly deafening sounds of machinery. She trailed him into a huge, open room where row upon row of gigantic machines with moving parts performed different functions.

            A row of barefoot, dirty children stood perched on machines, reaching practically into their moving parts. They were no older than Liam. “What are they doing?” she asked.

            “They’re doffers,” Eustace informed her. “They take the full spindles of thread from the spinning frames and replace them with new ones. It’s best to use children because they’re just the right size to reach the spindles without having to bend.”

            “The machine is moving and they’re right on top of it,” she observed. “Couldn’t they get hurt?”

            he shrugged philosophically. “Some careless ones do. But there are always more to replace them. Most live in town and their parents all wok here at the mill, so it’s a good place for them to be.”

            “Everyone in town works here?” she questioned.

            “It’s a company town,” he explained. “The company owns the stores and the houses, and some even say that the pastor of the church answers to J.P. Wellington faster than her answers to God.” He snickered a little at his own bitterly irreverent joke. “In Wellington you wither work in the textile mill or in the clothing factory down the road.”

            Bertie knew of mining towns in Ireland where everyone worked for the same mining company, and they were not so different from this town. Once she made the comparison, she understood exactly what she was looking at.

            She knew these places employed a lot of people and they were not all bad. But the workers labored long hours and they weren’t paid much. They bought everything from the company-owned stores until they became so indebted to the company that they couldn’t think of looking elsewhere for a living. After a while, it was ad if the company owned their lives.

            She smiled at the children, who grinned back at her. One boy was the spitting image of Liam. Tedious though it might have been for him to take care of Eileen, she wouldn’t have wanted to think of him, merely eleven, cooped up here near this unforgiving machinery – a soulless monster that would remorselessly rip his arm off if he got too close- placing and replacing spindles of thread all day.

            She got to work explaining to Eustace just how Ray had used the packing materials to weave the new fabric. Though she found the man off-putting, he knew his business and seemed to understand exactly what needed to be done and how to do it. “I’ll put the littlest girls on this right away,” he said. “They’re good at picking and sorting, with those tiny fingers they got.”

            “It’s a job they could do outside,” Bertie suggested.

            “Naw,” Eustace disagreed. “They would just skip off and start to play if you let them outside.”

            Bertie figured that was probably true. Who could blame them? They were children, after all.

            As John drove Bertie back to the estate, she felt more tired than if she had worked an entire day, though really she’d done nothing. It was as if the textile mill had sucked something out of her. This drained sensation was something she couldn’t explain, even to herself, but she felt it.

            The thought of seeing James again lifted her spirits when they came up the front drive, but when she got inside, she discovered that he was not yet home.

            She met with the nanny, Nancy, a young French-woman about her own age. On a table, Bertie noticed a small stack of books, some in English and some in French. Inside were colorful pictures. “Well, aren’t you the lucky girl to have such lovely books,” Bertie said to Eileen as she sat with her in the nursery.

            “Eila love books,” said Eileen, bending down to kiss a volume of Mother Goose rhymes with a loud smack.

            “Nancy, would you mind if I looked at the book with you while you read these to Eileen?” Bertie requested.

            Nancy seemed bewildered by this, but nodded in agreement. “Yes, miss, as you like.”

            “Don’t call me miss, please,” Bertie said. “Bertie will do.”

            “All right… Bertie.” She opened the book, and with Eileen on her right and Bertie on her left, she began to read: “Simple Simon met a pieman, going to the fair…”

Bertie sat forward alertly, her eyes riveted to every word in the book, determined to learn to read. 

A Revealing Conversation
 

The next two weeks were the busiest that Bertie had ever known. All day she supervised things at the textile mill, checking the fabric that was woven and constantly adjusting it. It was perplexing. The fabric never took on the luminously magical quality that Ray had somehow embedded into it.

           
It’s these machines
, she decided one day as she stood in the spinning room watching them work.
They suck the magic out of the thing
. “What if we hired local weavers to make this by hand?” she suggested to Eustace.

            He laughed scornfully. “Do that and it will take five times as long and cost ten times as much to make,” he scoffed. “You’ll miss the season and lose your profit margin.”

            “What if we only did the trim by hand?” she asked.

            “You take that up with your boyfriend,” said Eustace, walking off. “I can’t make that kind of decision.”

            That night Bertie waited up for James. She hadn’t seen much of him since they came down to Georgia. He would go into the office and not come home until after she was asleep. Every morning at breakfast he promised to return earlier, but he never did. “You are working too hard,” she said. In fact, there were circles under his eyes, and he had grown pale and thin.

            Now she sat in the rocker on the front porch and waited. She took a banknote from her pocket and put it into an envelope. The amount consisted of the entire salary she had earned to date, plus the hefty bonus J.P. had paid her. J.P. had proven true to his word, and it was a significant amount.

            Also in the envelope was a letter to Finn. Since he and maybe Liam were the only two in the family who could read and write. They were the only ones to whom she wrote letters.

            She was able to do this because Nancy did not mind writing the words Bertie dictated. Since realizing that Bertie couldn’t read or write but wanted to learn, Nancy took opportunities to teach Bertie while Eileen napped or played. Nancy and she grew closer by the day. Bertie was glad to have a friend in this big, lonely house.

            New Bertie reviewed the letter she’d dictated, trying to identify the words she recalled speaking:

            My Dear Finn, This is to help you support Liam. Eileen’s and my needs are generously met here, so I have no expenses, and there is no need to save since I am about to marry James, who is the son of a wealthy man. I know you are working, so if there is money left over, please use it to send Liam to school. I see the children in the mills here and it breaks my heart to see how hard they work and for so little money. Many of the young boys remind me of Liam, and I hope that his money will make it possible for him not to have to work so that he might finally get the education that will enable him to have a less harsh life.

The moon was  high in the sky when a hired carriage pulled up to the porch. James tumbled out the carriage door, nearly falling. She stood to help, but he righted himself before she could reach him. “Hello, Bertie,” he mumbled, staggering drunkenly off to the right.

            “I thought you were working,” she said, outraged that he was in this condition. “You said you’d come home early, but you’ve been out drinking.”

            He waved her away. “You don’t need me here. You’ll do better without me. I’ll just muck everything up like I did when I ordered all that wrong fabric. You had to save me from that one, didn’t you? You’re a smart girl. You handle the work.”

            “I thought we were supposed to be a great team,” she reminded him.

            “We are,” he insisted, throwing himself heavily down onto the front steps, where he sprawled out, legs splayed. “You have the brains and talent. I inherit the money. You make me look good and I make you look good ‘cause you get to spend my money on dresses, houses, and anything you want. It’s perfect.”

            “But why don’t you ever come home?”

            “This place is dull. Dull. Dull. Dull. It’s more fun in the city.”

            “Don’t you want to see me? We’re getting married. I thought you loved me,” she said, sitting alongside him on the step.

            “Mmmm,” he equivocated. “I don’t know that I ever said
love
. I thought you were pretty and I wanted to kiss you. But I would never have proposed to a girl like you.”

            “What do you mean ‘like me’?” she asked cautiously. Something insider her head had turned cold at his words. Deep down inside, she was pretty sure she knew what he meant, but she wasn’t so sure she wanted to admit it.

            He laughed thickly, rolling his eyes. ‘Don’t you know,
Bertrille
?” he taunted. “What’s your real name, anyway? Colleen? Bridget?”

            She gasped. “How did you know?”

            “It’s Bridget, then! All you girls are named Bridget! Do you think that I never met an Irish servant girl before? The Miller family from Wales! There’s a laugh! My father’s man may be too stupid to tell the difference, but anyone with half a brain could tell you and your father are Irish. You and I might have had our fling, but I never would have proposed to you if you hadn’t worked your magic with those dresses.”

            “why are you telling me this?’ she demanded, her feelings wounded to their core. “Are you always so mean-spirited when you’re drunk?’

            He considered that a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe I am.”

            “Well, you needn’t marry me,” she said indignantly. “I can be employed by Wellington Industries without being married to you.” Turning sharply, she hurried into the house and up the stairs.

            Throwing herself onto the satin covers of her bed, she sobbed heavily until sleep overcame her.

In the morning she was awakened by a rapping at her door. “Who is it?”

            “James. Let me in.”

            She didn’t want to see him and turned on her side with her back to the door without answering.

            He knocked again. “Go away,” she muttered.

            He pushed the door in slightly. “I’ve come to beg for forgiveness,” he stated in a penitent tone.

            “Do as you like,” she snapped, pulling her blanket up over her shoulder. “I am done with you.”

            He sat on the edge of her bed. He looked almost yellow, and his eyes appeared sunken. “Bertie, I don’t remember what I said exactly, but I recall enough to know it was probably awful.”

            “Awful indeed,” she confirmed angrily.

            “Bertie, don’t hate me,” he begged pitifully. “It was the bourbon talking, not me. I didn’t mean a word of it.”

            “How do you know if you can’t remember?” she challenged.

            “I can tell you’re angry with me.”

            “
That
I am, to be sure.”

            “I’m sorry, so sorry. I’m so sick that I’m suffering as it is. Don’t punish me further.”

            “You said you didn’t want to marry me!” she exploded, “that you didn’t love me. You said I wasn’t high-class enough for you. What am I supposed to think now?”

            “That I was being a drunken fool?”

            She nodded vigorously. “Well, yes. Right! I think that for certain.” Tears pooled in her eyes, although crying was the last thing she wanted to do. “I’ll not marry a man who does not love me!”