saintlygames

The nail of the candle clock clanged onto the metal tray, signalling that another half-hour had passed. She leaned the broom against the wall and made a poor attempt to beat the wool fibres and dust from her smock. 

Typically, women and children worked the mills, but at this hour the children were at home and the women were looking after them and cooking their dinner. And Emmy, being neither married nor a mother, was happy to take the shift for the slight extra pay. Working alone had terrible safety risks and everyone knew it, but Emmy regarded herself as skilled and not stupid. She was qualified enough. 

Each loom stood two feet clear over her head. They were laid side by side in four rows of ten, reminding her of horses in stalls. Emmy felt like machines were akin to horses too; large and useful but dangerous if one got too close without a skilled hand and an understanding of its temperament. 

She got dizzy watching the machine weave the weft and warp over the frame, so she looked instead at the finished cloth being fed out of the mouth. Fine and precise, worth days of what a weaver could do on a hand-pumped loom at home. She dragged the tips of her fingers along the front where the fabric was coming off the reed, feeling for frays and breaks in the threads, and did that for the thirty looms she was responsible for. 

When the children were working to help their mothers or older sisters, Emmy played a game with them. At the start of the shift she lined them up like a governess and had them tuck in shirts, roll up sleeves, braid away all hair and keep it behind their heads, even the boys. Taking the end of the broom, she drew a wide border in the yarn-snow around the loom. Their main job was to cut and trim threads too small for the older women to see, but if for any reason they needed to cross the border to reach the weaving or untangle the yarn from the pegs, they had to call an adult. The more instances they called for real help the more points they got—recorded on a chalkboard at the front doors of the mill—and subsequently fewer fingers were put at risk of being eaten by the gears. Whoever got the most by the end of each week got a tart. 

It was arduous for the women to keep up with every child’s summons, but it was far more laborious to care for a terrible workplace injury and have both child and caregiver out of a job. Emmy had seen enough gruesome mill injuries. 

She cocooned her shawl around her shoulders to trap her arms, keeping them well away from the churning mechanical loom and cleared herself another step back for good measure. She’d long been unafraid of the machines, but one could never be too careful. A broken horse could be tamed but still deadly if spooked. 

When she was done, she screwed another nail into the candle wax to wait another half hour.

Her ears rang dully from the clang-chang of the active looms. When she went home some nights her ears rang, so she resorted to stuffing her ears with a mix of scrap cotton mixed with wax because if not she would be deaf before she turned thirty. 

And because they worked so well to drown out the looms, she almost didn’t hear the window behind her shatter, only felt the cold and the sharp glass rain on her back before she swung around.

She had a clear three seconds to stare at the destroyed window until a man with a hammer hauled himself through. He wore a coat that looked too big for him which billowed heavily like a cape. If he hadn’t been wearing it his arms and shoulders would have been shredded by the glass.

Logic was crushed between the gear teeth. Her first thought was that she was so small that a swing of a hammer would kill her instantly.