Mercer Girls Read online

  If she could only find a job! Then she’d show the world what she was made of—then everyone would know her mettle, her spirit, the broad, strong force of her worth. If only she had the chance, she would prove that Dovey Mason could work as hard as any girl. She’d show them all that she could earn her keep, and then some. She could make her own way in the world—if only someone out there would give her the opportunity.

  The ache from her long day’s fruitless search crept from her legs up into her back. Dovey would have sunk into a parlor chair with a sigh, but there were no chairs in the parlor—not anymore. Her father had sold the last of the fancy seating three days ago, along with the beautiful carved-oak bureau, the one that had stood beside the parlor window ever since Dovey was a little girl. Just as well, she told herself. Lately the bureau had only infuriated her with its empty top. It used to hold two lovely, slender candleholders—silver, fashioned like the trunks of birch trees—and a long silk runner with tasseled ends. The candleholders and the runner had been among the first items sacrificed and were followed by the parlor’s ornate Persian rug.

  As in the parlor, so in the rest of the Mason house. Once the finest home in all of Lowell, now it was grand on the outside alone. The only sticks of furniture that remained inside were Dovey’s bed and her father’s, and a small, plain table with two chairs where they took their skimpy meals. Father had even begun prizing the plaster molding from the edges of the ceilings. The plaster would bring in some money—not much, but every penny was a fortune in these dark days.

  Dovey swallowed the hard lump in her throat. It’s a good thing after all that Mother fell ill, she told herself stoutly. If Mother hadn’t gone off to Boston last May, to live under the care of her second cousin—a nurse who had done plenty of work with consumptives and knew just how to bring them back to health—then her heart would surely break now, to see her once-fine home reduced to bare planks and lathing. It would be the death of her, to watch her world torn up and sold off, piece by piece. The war ground on and showed no signs of ending. Dovey could bear the sight of this carnage—of the Mason family being crushed first to rubble and then to dust. But Mother would never have been able to bear it, and Dovey thanked God for sparing her the terrible sight.

  It was, however, a cruel enough prank on God’s part that all three of Dovey’s brothers had been sent off to fight the Confederates. From there, divine malice had only escalated. Last spring, when they’d received word that John, the eldest, had been killed at Chancellorsville, the news was enough to drop Mother into a faint. She never had recovered from that shock.

  In fact, she had grown paler and weaker by the day, and when Father finally sent word to the Boston cousin and hustled Mother away, Dovey had her doubts whether the move had been for Mother’s good, or for Father’s. Everyone knew that consumption was an illness of the poor. If word got around Lowell that Mary Mason had gone consumptive, well—that would be all the proof anyone needed that John Mason Sr. was no longer the lord of the factories. To Father, Mother’s illness seemed a presentiment—or a judgment from God. It was a portent of the fall to come, of his long, slow, unremitting slide into poverty.

  Of course, John Mason had not forestalled the inevitable by sending his wife away. In fact, Dovey rather suspected he might have hastened his own downfall. Dovey was only sixteen, but she was wise enough to perceive that a mere man—even a very rich one—couldn’t hornswoggle the Almighty with a trick as simple as stashing his consumptive wife away. God was a mite too clever to fall for such a trick.

  The sunset’s glow sent a pallid flush creeping over the windowsill, lighting the skirt of Dovey’s green dress as if to emphasize its expensive fabric, the uselessness of her finery. She refused to look around the parlor, refused to see the warm light playing upon the unadorned walls. As the house’s walls grew barer, Dovey felt them closing in around her, squeezing with a terrible pressure that fuddled her up so badly, she didn’t know from one minute to the next whether she wanted to cry or scream. She had hoped that if she could find work, she might contribute to the family’s needs—ease some of the burden from her father’s shoulders and slow the disassembly and sale of the only life she had ever known. But what work could Lowell offer a girl of sixteen? None but the mills. And the mills, as Father knew all too well, were rapidly closing.

  Dovey turned her head sharply at the slow, dejected tread of footsteps on the stairs. She adjusted the high lace collar of her dress and smoothed the pleats of her green woolen skirt, then fixed a bright smile to her face as Father entered the parlor. His coat was carelessly unbuttoned, and the fringe of dark hair that ringed his bald pate was flattened and disheveled, as if he’d been napping and had only just rolled from his bed. His heavy mustache drooped from the corners of his mouth.

  “Doreen—where have you been? I looked for you this morning, but you were nowhere in the house.”

  “I … I went out, sir.” She clutched her hands more tightly behind her back. All that inquiring had amounted to dirty work. She hadn’t had time yet to wash the grime from her hands or to soothe knuckles scraped from knocking at countless mill doors. She had a sudden childish fear that Father would disapprove of her scuffed, sooty appearance, and that he would chide her for it.

  “Whatever were you doing out?” he asked mildly, shaking his head in amazement. “I do hope you weren’t spending money. We haven’t anything to spend.”

  Dovey sighed. “Give me more credit than that, Father. I’m not a simpleton.”

  “What, then?” He stepped toward her, and his eyes narrowed in a suspicious squint. “Were you consorting with a young man? I’ve told you—”

  “I wasn’t visiting with any young men, so you needn’t think—”

  “I’ve told you how important it is, Doreen, for our family to maintain appearances. My mills may have closed, but this is only a temporary situation. The Masons are still a family of good breeding and high class. You cannot comport yourself like a doxy! You risk your future by—”

  Dovey’s hands unclasped and balled themselves into fists. Before she quite knew what she was doing, she was shaking both of them in the air before her—almost threatening her father, who stared at her quivering, raw-knuckled fists with an air of genteel surprise.

  “How dare you call me such a name!” Dovey cried. “I’m no strumpet! I’ve done nothing to sully the family name.”

  In the weak glow of the sunset, Father stroked his mustache, watching Dovey in expectant silence, his stare both wary and knowing.

  “But I was out looking for work,” she admitted in a rush. “Good, honest work, so you needn’t worry.”

  Father’s hand stilled, then fell. A frown like a thunderhead creased his brow, dark and intimidating. “Work?”

  “In the mills,” Dovey explained. “I thought if I could find a job on the jennies, or—”

  “No daughter of mine will work,” Father said. His voice was fiercely low, his hand clenched and motionless at his side. “No woman in my family need ever take a job.”

  Dovey’s shoulders sagged; she cast a helpless sigh up to the few imprinted tin ceiling tiles that still adorned the parlor. “Father, there’s no shame in it. A good many girls work in the mills.”

  “You are not ‘a good many girls.’ You’re a Mason—my own daughter, my only daughter. If I can’t care for you, then what use am I?”

  Dovey shook her head mutely. In the face of his buckling pride, his wounded masculinity, she felt helpless to assert herself. He was at the end of his wits and his resources—and she was able-bodied and clever, and more than willing to earn her keep. Couldn’t he see the sense in that? Didn’t he welcome an easing of his burdens? What did it matter if relief came from his sixteen-year-old daughter? A hand was a hand, and Dovey would give Father hers, gladly—if only he would humble himself enough to take it.

  “I will not stand for this.” Father’s voice rose with every word. “I’ll not be humiliated; I’ll not have all of Lowell knowing that I sent my on
ly girl out to the mills to work like some unfortunate immigrant!”

  “You didn’t send me out,” Dovey protested. “I went of my own accord!”

  Her words could not reach him; he seemed deafened by the force of his anger—by the hopelessness of their circumstances. “And your mother already beyond my reach,” he ranted on, “in Boston, where—”

  “In Boston, where you sent her!” Dovey shouted. “Don’t play the martyr where Mother’s concerned. I simply won’t hear it, Father! You sent her away.”

  “For her own good,” he insisted. “With my prayers that she will recover her health. I am not coldhearted, Doreen.”

  “Aren’t you? I wonder! Did you send Mother away for her health, or for your own?”

  He took one slow step toward her, towering in his superior height, the air crackling between them with the tension of a fierce winter storm. His familiar smell—pipe tobacco, cedar, and warm, soft wool—was undercut by a faint, sourish reek, an odor that reminded Dovey of restless sleep, of sickness, of despair. “Whatever are you talking about, girl?”

  “You didn’t pack Mother off to Boston for her good. You did it so no one would know consumption had fallen on our house. Consumption—the poor man’s plague!”

  Father flinched; his face seemed to crumple for an instant, and vulnerability gleamed through the hard lines of his glower like raw, painful flesh showing through the cracks of a crusted wound.

  Dovey pressed her advantage. “But we are poor now, Father. Just look around you! Our house is bare, your mills have failed, and our prospects are gone. There’s more dignity in accepting what the Lord has dealt us than in trying to carry on as if nothing in our lives has changed.”

  Father’s face softened—smoothed into a mask of well-controlled calm. He even managed a smile. It was thin-lipped and pinched, but still his satisfaction seemed genuine to Dovey. Grim but genuine. “My prospects may be gone—for now. But yours are not.”

  A wary chill settled into her stomach. She resisted the urge to press her hands there, to drive the creeping sensation away. “What do you mean?”

  Father’s expression grew stern, and his shoulders squared—a sudden turn of temper that Dovey knew well. He had put on his businessman’s facade, the stiff, unyielding aspect that had earned John Mason his reputation as the hardest driver of deals in all of Lowell—in all of Massachusetts, in fact. “Just this morning, Norris Stilton approached me to inquire about your temperament and skills. It seems his son, Marion, has taken notice of you. Only a few hours ago, I thought you not yet mature enough to take on the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. But after all, if you are out traipsing the streets, looking for work—”

  Dovey gasped. “Father!”

  “You’re sixteen. Early to wed, perhaps, but if I cannot care for you properly, as you were so quick to point out, then perhaps Marion Stilton will do a better job of it.”

  “An arranged marriage? After all, Father, this isn’t the Orient!”

  Father huffed. “Don’t put on dramatics. You know an arrangement is perfectly commonplace.”

  It certainly was not commonplace, except in very old-fashioned families—or among immigrants. Dovey had always thought of her upbringing as quite stylishly progressive. She did not relish the idea of being shoved in the direction of some dolt of a husband, as if she were a sheep prodded along by a drover. That sort of thing was for the Catholic girls—the daughters of the Irishmen who had dug the canals that served Lowell’s factories. Imagine—John Mason’s only daughter, traded off like some Irish chit! What was Father thinking?

  Then the rest of his odious proclamation caught up to her speeding thoughts, and Dovey goggled at her father, rendered speechless by the terrible possibility. Marion Stilton—speaking of dolts! He was the most perfect specimen of a dullard the Lord had ever made! And he was vain in the bargain, always fussing over his suit and his oiled hair at parties. And that was to say nothing of his selfish nature, which was enough all by itself to turn Dovey’s stomach. Marion was twenty-two now—more than old enough to fight in the war. Yet he had commuted instead—paid a fee of three hundred dollars to dodge the mandatory enrollment. It wasn’t fair, nor right, that all three of Dovey’s brothers had gone off to service—and poor John Jr. dead in his grave!—while Marion Stilton skipped carefree down the lane, tossing dollar bills out casually in his wake. Dovey would never marry a man like him—never!

  She rounded on her father with a scornful laugh. “Aha! Marion Stilton—because his father’s mills are still running. I suppose that’s your reason for choosing that coward as my husband—to get a share of his family’s business.”

  It was a cruel thing to say, and Dovey knew it. Father’s brows knitted up and he turned his face away, as if Dovey had struck him across the cheek. For an instant she regretted her words. She knew how the closing of all his factories ate at Father’s soul. He was so possessed by the desire to revive his business that he had little attention for anything else—he would not even speak of Ewing and Bart, his two living sons who were out there somewhere, toiling in the trenches, still wearing the blue and fighting on—or so Dovey prayed, night and day. She doubted whether Father even spared a thought for the boys—whether he was capable of considering anyone other than himself. He had thrown everything he had into trying to restore his business—money, connections, and every waking moment he could spare.

  And now he’s thrown me in, too, Dovey realized. I’m his last possession of any value—his final gambling chip. And he’d gladly sell me to the Stiltons to gain a share of their mills.

  All her guilt evaporated, leaving her conscience as dry as her throat. She turned a look of perfect contempt on her father, her chin held high and her nostrils flaring with rage. “I will not wed Marion Stilton.”

  Father’s face darkened. His mustache bent steeply along the curve of his frown. “You will.”

  “Just wait and see!”

  “Listen to me, Doreen. The war has been hard on us all—”

  Dovey snorted—most unladylike, she knew, but she could find no verbal expression for her disgust at Father’s audacity. Father—who wouldn’t even speak of Ewing and Bart!

  “—but I fear its longest-reaching effects aren’t truly felt yet.” Father took Dovey’s hand, making a bid for sincerity. She pulled her fingers from his grasp. “There are so few young men,” he went on. “And virtually none of them are as well positioned as Marion Stilton. When the war finally ends and all the young ladies of Lowell find themselves without suitors, Marion will have his choice of any girl he pleases.”

  “So I should lock him in now, is that it?” Dovey tossed her head, sending her dark curls flying. “Get him into a contract where he can’t budge and pin him up against the wall? Turn the whole deal to my advantage?” It was businessmen’s talk. Dovey had heard her father sling such phrases often, back when he was still the Lord of Lowell.

  “You don’t know what’s best for you!” Father’s voice was rising by the moment, increasing again to an angry bellow that echoed from the parlor’s blank, cold walls. “I am your father, and I only have your interests in mind!”

  “I do know what’s best!” Dovey shouted back. Tears stung her eyes, and she cursed herself for going weak and soft. She knew there was nothing Father despised more in negotiations than a weak opponent. She balled her fists; the bite of her nails against her palms drove the tears away and helped to focus her speeding thoughts.

  “I don’t care if there are no husbands left when the war is over,” she said, cool and composed now. “I’ll be an old maid. I’d far rather never marry than spend my life strapped to Marion Stilton.”

  “You won’t feel the same way when your anger settles. You’ve always been headstrong, Doreen, but you’re not a fool. Once you’ve calmed yourself, you’ll see the sense in what I propose.”

  “Oh? Is that what you think?”

  “It is.”

  Father reached out before Dovey could twist away from him. He
seized her by the upper arm, and his grip was steely—painful. She tried to jerk out of his grasp, but his hand only tightened until she gave a hiss of pain. He marched her out of the parlor, their shoes clattering on the naked floorboards, and pointed her toward the stairs.

  “Go up to your room until you’ve calmed yourself,” he said.

  Dovey wrenched her arm again, and this time she managed to break Father’s grip. She pulled her sleeve straight with an indignant glare. “I will not be ordered off into confinement like a child.”

  “You are a child, and an unruly one at that.”

  “If you think I’m old enough to parcel out in marriage, then I am not a child.” Sensing that she had gained the upper hand of logic, Dovey folded her arms pertly. “I wonder what Mother would say to this idea. I’ll write her, and then we’ll just see what she says! Fixing me up a marriage like I’m some Irish filly—!”

  Father’s slap caught her on the cheekbone with a breathtaking sting. She clamped her hand against her face, staring at him through the blur of shocked tears. She didn’t know whether he’d struck her because she had mentioned Mother, or because she’d compared him to the Irishmen—who made up by far the greater population of the poorhouses. Either way, the hot throb of her cheek was proof that she’d done it this time, and good. She turned away from him, running up the stairs as fast as her heavy skirts would allow, hating every tear that spilled down her cheeks and every sob that strangled in her chest.

  “I only want to care for you properly,” Father called up the stairs. His voice was heavy with regret, thick with exhaustion and despair. “You will be far happier with a husband to care for you, Doreen, than you ever could be out there in the mills, working for a few meager pennies per day. What are fathers for, if not to give their daughters the best lives possible?”

  “I can give myself the best life possible!” Dovey turned at the head of the stairs and glared down at him, the tears of her futile defiance burning her eyes. “I should have the chance, at least—a chance to prove I can!”