Mail Order Josephine - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides) Read Online Free Page B

effort of manipulating it and hoisting it up proved too much, and she left it lying at her feet while she evaluated Josephine critically.
    “Can I help you, Miss?” the woman said.
    “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Josephine apologized. “Please let me help you. I’m so sorry!”
    “Don’t think anything of it,” the woman insisted. “Are you looking for somethin’ here, Miss?”
    “I heard there was a laundry here,” Josephine told her, “but I can’t find it.”
    “Oh, well, then, you can help me with these, because I’m going there myself,” the woman stooped to her bundle again, and between her and Josephine, she succeeded in lifting it back into her arms.
    “Where is it?” Josephine peered around the poor little alley.
    “It’s just here,” the woman nodded toward the end of the alley. “Do you need something laundered, Miss?” With her eyes, the woman indicated Josephine’s empty hands.
    “No, I just want to see it,” Josephine whimpered, aware now of the inappropriateness of that request, so deceptively innocuous, to a lady of her class. The poor and the working class took offense at her desire to bridge the gap between those who work and those who do not. To them, her presence degraded them even more than the work itself.
    The woman frowned at Josephine over her bundle, but unlike the man at the forge, she made no effort to discuss it with her. Maybe she understood enough to realize the futility of arguing about it. Or maybe she thought a lady so far above her own station ought to know her own business well enough not to explain it to the likes of her. “Well, it’s right over there,” she concluded. “You can follow me, if you like.”
    Josephine nodded her assent and the woman continued down the alley to a rough door sunken into the side of the building out of sight. She dropped her parcel on the ground again to free her hand to rap at this door. When it groaned open from the inside, she tugged at the burden and indicated to Josephine with her eyes to heave it up again. Then the door swallowed up the woman and her package of linen. Josephine tiptoed up to the door and stooped to look inside. Immediately, an overpowering blast of hot steam hit her in the face, almost knocking her back into the alley. The scorching cloud reeked of a toxic mixture of laundry soap and unwashed human bodies. The stench alone compelled her to run for her life, but her curiosity restrained her. A morbid impulse seized her and thrust her back toward the darkened door where, as low as she leaned down to look inside and strain her eyes, she couldn’t penetrate the cavernous obscurity. She took one step inside, then another, before a light of sorts brightened the interior of the room. As far in as she went, she still bent over to avoid cracking her head on the low ceiling.
    Eventually, the character of the place revealed itself to her. More than a dozen women occupied the gloomy room, but contrary to her father’s interpretation of the senior Mr. Stockton’s letter, they were not Chinese, but ordinary white women, all bent over steaming wash tubs, their sleeves rolled up around their elbows, scrubbing laundry. Josephine judged by the cut and wear of their dresses, as well as the creased lines of worry scoring their faces, that they represented the poorest women in the town. Some appeared quite young, but their eyes could hardly be said to rest in sunken pools of black circles in their pallid faces, and when they glanced up from their work to identify the stranger in their midst, no flicker of righteous resentment or cowering deference enlivened their eyes. After acknowledging her presence with their briefest glances, they bent to their work. Josephine choked in the steam, more revolted and shocked by the scene in the laundry than by the scene at the forge. This encounter with the women of the town in the slavery of their employment rocked her sense of decency and the concept of justice in the system of social hierarchy