Chapter 11
Word that Victoria was the new owner spread through the mills quickly.
She could feel the men’s distrust. She could sense their anger and resentment of her every time she walked through the buildings with Hubert Maddox.
She didn’t let it stop her. She followed him everywhere, and learned everything she could from him.
She refused to be beaten by the men, or their feelings about having a woman employer.
At times, she asked herself what her father or Bert would tell her to do.
She followed her own instincts and Bert’s advice every step of the way.
The other mill owners resented her too. The bigger ones were furious at her.
They had all wanted a piece of Bert’s operation, had wanted to divide it up like vultures.
None of them could afford to buy all of it, and she was in the way of their getting what they wanted.
By all rights, she belonged at the mill owners’ dinner meeting that they held every month at the Union Club.
Bert had gone to it faithfully, no matter how boring and antiquated he thought it was.
Despite his innovative and bold ideas, he believed in the proper order of things and in respect for traditions, and so did Victoria.
She would have liked to go to the dinners, but they never invited her, which was no surprise.
And the club where it was held didn’t allow women to be members or enter its doors.
She was too tired to have a social life by the time she finished work every night.
She fell into bed, exhausted, and started again the next morning.
She was relentless in the pursuit of the knowledge she needed to run the whole operation one day.
She wanted the wool mills in Yorkshire to grow bigger, and she wanted to keep their silk mill going, in memory of Bert because he loved it.
But cotton was still their bread and butter, and she tried to find every way she could to make production better.
Many of her ideas were sound and Hubert adopted them.
Bert had been right. She was incredibly smart, applying her intelligence to her late husband’s business, and many of her ideas improved the volume of production, the quality of the products, or working conditions for the men, although they didn’t know it.
She streamlined everything for the best results.
She was improving on what Bert had done, and the mills were more productive than ever, which infuriated her competitors, and even the men who worked for her.
No one appreciated the improvements she’d made.
But the increased sales spoke for themselves.
Word of what she was doing had reached London too.
The people she had grown up with and who had claimed to be her friends decided that she was insane.
Her marriage to Bert had tainted her in their eyes, but becoming an industrialist and engaging in commerce herself was infinitely worse.
It was unforgivable in their eyes. They closed their doors to her again, and she didn’t care.
She had no desire to ever rejoin their ranks.
She went to London when she had business there, and the rest of the time she stayed in Manchester where she belonged now and had work to do.
There was nothing for her in London anymore.
She kept the house out of sentiment and so she had a place to stay.
Her whole life and everything she cared about was in Manchester.
She hadn’t been to Hampshire since August, but she held on to both her London home and her country estate, and lived in Bert’s house in Manchester.
She no longer went to his cottage in Yorkshire.
It was too sad without him. When she had business in Yorkshire at the wool factory, she stayed at a hotel, and didn’t mind.
She often went there alone for meetings.
Most of the time, Hubert went with her when she had business in other cities, but not always.
And Yorkshire was close to home. He was vastly impressed by Victoria’s natural instincts and her head for business, her courage, and how hard she worked.
One of the loudest voices against her was Ed Wheaton’s.
He was afraid she might tell people about their exchange in September, but she never told anyone about it.
She felt too sorry for his wife to expose him, although he deserved to be.
She just didn’t accept anymore that she had to be limited, that only men could rule the world she lived in.
Increasingly, she believed that women could do everything that men did, at least mentally if not physically.
And sometimes they did it better. She was proving it every day, in her quiet steady way.
Victoria remained Hubert’s dedicated pupil all through the winter, and whenever he had the opportunity, Thor Lindqvist opposed what she was doing, as vocally as he could.
He was the leader of her critics and did all he could to make things harder for her.
She went around him as if he were a rock in the stream, didn’t engage in combat with him, and achieved what she wanted to anyway, which enraged him even more.
Nothing could stop her, and Bert’s assessment of her ability to run his business was proving to be right, day by day.
Victoria took fewer vacations than the men and worked twice as hard.
She led a lonely life, but she didn’t mind.
It was for a worthy cause. She strengthened Bert’s business and improved sales.
She maintained a civil relationship with the millworkers’ union, which the other owners didn’t, though they were constantly threatened with strikes.
As much as the men who worked for her hated her on principle, she didn’t let it stop her or slow her down, and by June of 1914, some of her workers secretly admired her, although they didn’t admit it.
She had improved working conditions wherever she could.
She was as tough as they were and sometimes stronger. And smarter.
She was consulting Maddox less and less.
Bert had been gone for a year by then. Victoria spent the anniversary of his death alone at the house, thinking about him and hoping he would have approved of what she’d done so far.
It was hard thinking back to that night, but she had used the time well and honored him in the meantime.
* * *
A week after the anniversary, the men in all eight of Victoria’s factories walked out and staged an unexpected rogue strike for higher wages, and she couldn’t come to terms with them.
She had negotiated with the head of the union for days to no avail, and was at her main factory when violence broke out.
The workers broke windows and hurled broken glass into the crowd.
Victoria was trying to get through a wall of factory workers to meet with the union men.
She was pushed and shoved as the workers’ fury mounted, and she saw that there was no way through them.
She was trying to make a path through the violence when a powerful arm grabbed her and dragged her into an alley, and she was sure she was going to be killed.
The man, who was masked, shouted at her and told her to run, and he ran with her.
She ran with him until she thought her lungs would explode.
She could tell that he was leading her either to safety or to slaughter, at times she wasn’t sure which.
At last, in a back alley in the slums, he pulled her through a narrow fence.
They both were winded, gasping for air, and when he yanked his mask off, she was stunned to see that it was Thor Lindqvist. They were standing in the barren front yard of a small, dilapidated shack, and he replaced the missing board in the fence so no one would see them in case they’d been followed.
They were a mile from the riot by then. As soon as his mask was off, he berated her as she leaned against the fence to catch her breath.
She had managed to keep up with him and they both ran fast.
“Are you insane, going to the factory tonight?” he shouted at her.
“They were all drunk and crazy, they would have killed you.” She nodded, still stunned that it was Thor who had saved her.
She thought he hated her. But apparently not enough to let his co-workers kill her.
It had been a close call and she knew it, but she couldn’t have gotten through the crowd of angry men on her own.
“I went to negotiate with the head of the union and they ambushed me,” she said, still breathless.
“They’re all out of their heads, they would have murdered you.
” As he said it, they both noticed that the sleeve of her blouse was torn and drenched in blood.
She’d been hit by a piece of flying glass and it had cut her arm.
It was an ugly cut and fairly deep. He tore off what was left of the sleeve and examined the cut.
“You may need stitches, but if you try to get to the hospital, they’ll see you.
” He disappeared into the shack, came back with a bottle of Irish whiskey, and poured it over her arm.
It hurt like hell and she clenched her teeth and winced, but she didn’t make a sound.
He wrapped her arm in a clean bandage afterward, and tied it in a neat knot.
He was impressed by how brave she was. She didn’t cry.
“Why did you save me tonight?” Victoria asked Thor, mystified by his behavior and impressed by their narrow escape. They would have killed him too, for aiding the enemy.
“I liked your husband a lot,” he admitted with a defiant look, as they both calmed down.
“He liked you too, he admired you,” she said, sitting on the front steps of the shack, feeling dizzy. She realized that they were in the slums behind the factories, where he apparently lived.