The Daring Ladies of Lowell (10 page)

“Well, who else can?”

“Talk to Samuel Fiske. I think he’ll listen.”

“They’ll listen when we fight back.”

She trudged on home, empty and weary. She wanted her friend. She wanted Lovey.

ON COOPER ISLAND

The morning had dawned sunny and crisp. Just the kind of morning for taking care of such chores as looking for a missing calf, which is what John Durfee had set out to do, heading through the fields of his farm on Cooper Island, a short distance from Lowell. As he herded his animals toward the yard where he kept his winter hay, he noticed a strange shape, what looked first like a bundle of clothes, hanging from a pole that supported the roof of a haystack. He moved forward. What was he seeing?

It couldn’t be. But it was.

A woman’s body, suspended from a rope around her neck, hung frozen, her knees bent and her toes just above the ground. One hand was pressed against her breast; the other hung stiffly by her side. A rope was looped tightly around her throat.

He turned her slightly, pushed her dark hair back, and gazed at her face. Gently, he let go, ashamed of his immediate relief. No, he didn’t know her. He straightened and stared down at the woman, wanting to say some kind of prayer. So young. He looked around, realizing he was alone in this isolated place. Suddenly nervous, he thrashed his way through winter-dry bushes toward his farm to run for help.

I
t took two men to lift the frozen body and carry it across the winter-hardened earth and hoist it into the mud-splattered wagon. They had stood self-consciously around the dead girl for a few minutes, charged with another uncomfortable duty. “Take note of everything,” the sheriff demanded. “For the inquest.”

The woman’s cloak was properly fastened, but her shoes, one soiled with mud, had been neatly placed eighteen inches to the right of her stockinged feet. The ribbons of her bonnet were caught under the cord hung tight around her neck. Durfee—with a nod from Hector Borden, the sheriff—then cut the cord and lowered the body to the ground.

Borden directed the loading with as much cool precision as possible. There were four of them, and they worked gently, in a state of embarrassment at their own vaporous grief. A girl, not much more. The morning light made them want to avert their faces; to think of their children, still asleep, left them teetering on the edge of the fear that all parents share.

The reins snapped sharply; the cart lurched forward.

At the farmhouse, three women dressed in fresh white aprons stood in the doorway, watching the wagon bounce over the rocky ground toward them. Nobody spoke much. Not at first.

“Suicide,” the sheriff said to one of the women, who happened to be his wife. “Probably destitute.”

Clara Borden stared at the rope still tight around the girl’s neck. “She hung herself?” she asked.

“I would think so,” he said.

“Who is she?”

“Don’t know, but she’s dressed like a mill girl. We’re checking.”

His wife pointed toward a man down on knobby knees praying in the vegetable garden, a frown spreading across her well-worn face. “He’s doing a good job of flattening my pumpkin vines,” she said.

“Don’t mind him, Clara. He’s a preacher, name of Wilbur Ralston. Started praying as soon as we brought her in. These Methodists, I don’t know what to make of the stagy ways of some of them.”

“How did he hear so fast?”

“Everyone in town knows by now. Says maybe she was a member of his church.”

“Well, if she was, it didn’t do her much good, did it,” Clara said. She turned and walked into the kitchen, the other two women following dutifully. They had a job to do.

The body was laid out on the bright red-and-white oilcloth covering the kitchen table, which only recently—and hastily—had been cleared of hot oatmeal and pitchers of cream. Clara stared at the girl before them, noting the calluses on her fingers. A mill girl, of course. With a pretty, finely drawn face. The clarity of her young features framed by strands of frost-dampened hair was a bit unnerving; they seemed to still hold the fleeting ghost of animation. She looked like a girl used to smiling and laughing.

“Well, let’s get to work,” Clara said.

None of them had done this washing before. Each worked gently, as if not wanting to hurt the girl, massaging warm water into the folds of her small, young breasts and between her legs. They stared at her swollen eyes, her belly, her arms; mostly at her neck, darkened with bruises. They could see what appeared to be the indentation of fingers and thumbs. Silently, each put her own hand over the indentations; they looked at one another, lips tight. Finally, only Clara could say it out loud. “Suicide?” she said in a troubled tone.

“Maybe murder?” said another.

“Maybe.”

“There are no murders here,” protested Mariba Ford, the third woman. “We’re a peaceable lot.”

“Always a first time.”

They continued their work, plucking out twigs from the dead girl’s hair, brushing away dirt from her arms and legs and cleaning blood from under her fingernails. They stared at the results of their work. A clean, naked girl.

“I’ll get my good nightgown, it’s white,” said Mariba.

“Hurry,” said Clara. She pulled a worn comforter over the body, up to the girl’s neck. “There will be people here very soon. Poor thing, she deserves some shielding from view.”

Her husband cleared his throat from behind her. “The doctor and the coroner are here,” he said. “Dr. Stanhope, from Lowell. Doing his rounds up here; we got him as he was leaving.”

“No good he can do,” his wife responded.

“We need confirmation of death.”

Clara looked at the tall older man standing, hat in one hand, a cane in the other, next to her husband. She had little confidence in his skills, but she had little confidence in any medical skills. At least he didn’t pretend to be important. She stepped aside.

Benjamin Stanhope looked down at the girl, the color draining slowly from his face. Silently he handed his cane to Hector Borden. With a slight tremor in his hands, he turned her head. The rope around her neck was imbedded a good half-inch into her flesh. He did not pull down the comforter; instead, he stepped back.

“You know her?”

He nodded.

“A mill girl?”

He nodded again. “Lovey Cornell, a patient of mine,” he said heavily.

“What do you know about her?” John Durfee pressed. “Mr. Hicks here”—he nodded at an elderly man squinting over glasses—“is the coroner. Needs a little observational help, I feel free to say.”

“She was with child,” the doctor managed. His face was stiff as he lifted his hat to his head and turned away. “I’ll notify the Fiske family.”

Gasps from the women. “Poor thing,” Mariba finally managed.

“Pregnant?” The clergyman from the garden had followed the coroner inside. He looked horrified. “She’s not one of ours, then.”

“What do you mean?” snapped Clara.

“We take no one of low virtue.”

“You and your kind. Just leave my house,” Clara said.

Elihu Hicks, the elderly coroner, stepped forward next, peering shortsightedly at the body; his examination was brief. He studied the blackened bruises on Lovey’s arms and legs. He examined her swollen lower lip where she had bit down, probably as the rope went taut. He probed her belly. An autopsy would be performed before burial to confirm her pregnancy, but all seemed in order. In silence, he scribbled out his verdict in a worn black leather notebook, nodded, and walked out.

T
hat evening, Benjamin Stanhope stepped slowly up onto the porch of Boott Boardinghouse 52. He took his hat off, clutching it tightly, and knocked on the door.

Alice had seen him through the window, noticed the slump of his shoulders and the way he clawed at his hat, and knew. Right then, as she took in a deep breath, Alice inhaled for the first time the smell of her own grief. It would be the moment she would remember most vividly: the darkened sky, the crisp air, the sharp corners of the chipped glass doorknob cutting into her hand, the sound of Benjamin Stanhope’s boots shuffling reluctantly up the steps. A page of Mary-o’s songbook had come loose and been blown into a corner of the porch by an errant wind.

She opened the door.

“I bring sad news,” he began. His words had been carefully rehearsed, but it didn’t matter. Alice slumped against the door, banging the wood with her fists as he delivered the news.

She didn’t want to believe it. No, not Lovey.

O
ne by one, tiptoeing silently, arms crossed tightly in front of their chests, the girls in the boardinghouse gathered in the parlor. Pressing themselves almost self-protectively to the walls, they leaned against one another. No whisperings or questions. The sight of the company doctor in their midst told them all they needed to know. The warnings and scoldings of disapproving relatives when they came here, the brazen daring of pulling on aprons and walking into a factory for the first time, excited and free, eager to pocket pay and stay respectable—all of it was jumbled together in this room as they waited for the doctor to confirm their fears.

Benjamin Stanhope recited the facts. Alice rocked back and forth in one of the chairs, pulling her knees to her chest as she listened, holding them tight.

“Are you saying this was suicide?” Mary-o asked, tears trickling down her cheeks.

“That’s what the coroner says,” Stanhope replied.

“No,” Alice said forcefully. “Lovey would never commit suicide, never.”

“There was a particular circumstance,” he began, and then stopped.

No one spoke. But instant understanding swept the room, the kind that comes without language, that sends a fist into the gut.

“Dear Lord, the same old story,” Mrs. Holloway said. Her voice held a deep, sad weariness. She stood in the doorway, still in her dinner apron, arms folded in front of her.

Stanhope started to speak, then paused, obviously hoping Mrs. Holloway would save him the trouble. She did.

“The girl was pregnant, of course,” she said.

There were moans around the room.

“You knew?” asked Stanhope.

“No. But why else? I’ve seen it many times before, poor girl.”

Benjamin Stanhope cleared his throat, vaguely unsettled now at losing the center of attention. “That is correct,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“She came to see me. I asked her symptoms and confirmed it for her.”

“Oh, God, we would have helped her.” It was Jane, pious, disapproving Jane, wringing her hands. “We would have done something.”

The room went silent as they thought of what that might be, of what it could not be, of their own helplessness. “She couldn’t tell anybody, I know how it works,” Delia said. “One whisper, and you lose your job. I know.”

“No,” Alice said. It was as if she hadn’t heard any of them. “She didn’t kill herself. It didn’t happen that way.”

Benjamin Stanhope was now in a hurry to leave. He put his hat on his head and stood, reaching for his cane, edging toward the door. “My condolences to her family,” he muttered.

“There is none that we know of,” Alice said.

The girls stared at one another in confusion, realizing how little they knew about Lovey.

“She has at least a mother, I think in Fall River,” Alice went on. “They were not on good terms.”

“Where will she be buried?” Tilda, always the practical one, asked.

“On the farm where she was found. After the inquest.”

“No church service?”

Again, Stanhope cleared his throat. “They called in a preacher who said first she might be a member of his church, but when he heard she was pregnant, he refused to do a service.”