When Women Were Dragons(43)
I turned back to my father and refused to look away, daring him to meet my eye. He took two steps backward, toward the door. He paused, leaned back on his heels. He took another step toward the door.
I shook my head in disbelief. “I can’t do this alone, Dad,” I said. I wasn’t much of a crier, even when I was little. But I almost cried then. I clamped my molars together and set my face.
“You won’t be alone. I’ll be here every day to check on you and see how you’re doing. And you’ll have all the money you’ll need to run a household.”
“Do you promise?” My breath caught. Beatrice reached over and curled the edge of my shirt into her hand, pulling it into a fist. She hung on tight. She didn’t say a thing.
“I promise.” My father said. His voice was thin and vague as smoke. I was not reassured.
He shook my hand, as though we were business associates and not father and daughter. And he closed the door behind him.
My father was a liar. I was alone. He never once came by to check on us.
Only his last promise was true. My monthly allowance was generous and utterly reliable, automatically paid into an account in my name. He paid our rent in a large, lump sum once a year with a little something extra for the landlord’s discretion. He set up separate funds in our names at his bank to pay our tuition and bills, and installed clerks to manage them so he didn’t have to bother himself. And while he continued to call us most Sundays to exchange awkward hellos and to remind Beatrice and me to be good girls, I didn’t lay eyes on my father for almost three years after that. The only time he ever came to the apartment was to leave the occasional package or bag of mail or box of supplies at the door while I was at school.
I nearly forgot the shape of his face.
But I knew exactly what his money looked like.
The Pinsley Mill of Herefordshire, England, was built in 1675 as a corn mill. It was retrofitted in 1744 as a state-of-the-art cotton mill, with one of the first industrial applications of John Wyatt’s revolutionary roller spinning machines. Mr. Wyatt, known more for his attempts at poetry than his attempts at engineering, had designed his roller spinning machine to operate using eight donkeys, one ox, one falling river, and approximately 220 very young women and girls—some as young as twelve—to jigger the machinery, as they were able to climb into small spaces when the gears became stuck.
Mr. Wyatt boasted to his friends at the tavern that his secret to the production of the finest possible cloth available on the market was the purity and beauty of the girls in his factory. He insisted that they dress entirely in white, and wash their clothing in lime every Sunday, to remove the dirt of sin. They lived in close quarters in a windowless dormitory, half a league from the factory, where their matron read to them from the Bible each evening, so that they might know what happens to good girls when they forget themselves and fall from grace. At the age of eighteen, they were sent away, before their faces began to coarsen and their beauty to fade—but to where, no one knew. Or if they did, they did not say.
No one in town had ever seen the girls—Mr. Wyatt would never allow it. He arranged that they be brought to the factory in covered wagons from deepest Scotland and darkest Wales. It was whispered that there were even some godless Irish girls somewhere in the mix. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the girls, but Mr. Wyatt turned gawkers away at the door, and set the constable on over-curious young men who tried to penetrate the dormitory. There were rumors, though, that a few people had seen the faces of girls peering from the ventilation shafts near the top of the building, their faces pale as cotton, and their mouths stained indigo from bringing their yarn-dyed fingers occasionally to their lips. “Princesses in the tower,” the men at the tavern said, “making cloth fit for a king.” Whether these were their own words or quotations from the florid odes that Mr. Wyatt composed in the girls’ honor—often while drunk—is still unknown. In any case, the point became moot after the fires.
The first fire occurred in 1754. It destroyed only a portion of the building, and the matron had been able to herd most of the girls out of harm’s way. The fire had caused a small collapse in the north wall, and a singeing of the plaster, and the smashing of a few outbuildings (though no one could figure out why, given that fires rarely smash things), and some damage to one of the machines—specifically one of Mr. Wyatt’s famous roller spinners. The constable, in his report, wrote, “The illu?trius machine built by Mr Wyatt, by hand and mind, lay buckled in the middle, as though a Gorgon or a Troll did wander by and mi?took it for a plea?ant ?eat. A shame it was, that ?o noble a creation might be laid low, reduced to nothing but crumpled rubble.” Mr. Wyatt, nearly—but not entirely—financially ruined, took to the tavern, screaming of dragons. After several calming drafts of strong spirits, he composed, for all assembled, an epic poem about a crafty businessman who stood firm against the monstrousness of Nature, with the swords of Industry and Modernity aiding in his eventual triumph. Many men in the tavern wept at its conclusion.
That night, the constable took several corroborating statements from the neighbors who lived within earshot of the dormitory, reporting the sounds of whipping and the wailing of girls. But no one could come to their assistance as the doors were, as usual, locked.
Over the next two years, several other fires damaged either the building or the machines, and each one precipitated another drunken ode—for the benefit of the patrons or to put off creditors, no one could say. The final twin fires happened in the middle of the night. According to county records, a monstrous blaze consumed the girls’ dormitory, and then later that night, a second fire whipped through the mill. Both buildings were utterly destroyed. The girls, every last one of them, were lost. The matron managed to survive, but at a great loss to her dignity—she was seen, as the brigade raced to the scene with buckets, tearing across the town in the nude. It had been assumed, of course, that her clothing had burned away in the fire, but her skin was curiously unburned. In any case, she spent the rest of her days in the lunatic asylum, as she could not stop raving about dragons. Mr. Wyatt, too, in his bankruptcy hearings, also claimed injury by dragons. But given his preferred career as a poet, this was largely disregarded as a mere metaphor.