Read Online The Case of the Left-Handed Lady by Nancy; Springer - Free Book Online

me? A runaway upstart of fourteen? True, half the domestics and mill-hands in London were my age or younger, and true, also, that any of us who committed a crime would be imprisoned, tried, and hanged right along with Jack the Ripper should the police ever find him – but we had no rights, none, not even a right to the money we earned, until we turned twenty-one. Legally, at age fourteen I did not yet exist. So who on Earth did I think I was – Enola Ivy Holmes Meshle Mrs. Ragostin – to attempt the monstrous hoax that was my life?
    Such were my thoughts as I slipped through the secret entry into the locked room where I transformed myself back into Ivy Meshle. My subdued frame of mind lasted through the rest of the afternoon into the evening, when I returned to my lodging with Lady Cecily’s casement photograph and journals done up, as if I had been shopping, in a brown paper parcel tied with string.
    After Mrs. Tupper had provided me with a meal of herring stewed with parsnips – most unhelpful to one attempting to grow plump – I retreated upstairs to my room, made myself comfortable in warm socks and a dressing-gown, settled myself in my armchair by the hearth, and with the aid of a hand mirror began to read Lady Cecily’s most recent diary.
    The content was not at all what one might expect from a baronet’s daughter. I found nothing about Sunday phaeton rides in Hyde Park, holidays at the seaside, shopping along Regent Street, the latest fashions in millinery, or even a mention of a new dress. Nor did I find any accounts of her diversions with her friends. Instead, the entries were mostly troubled musings:
    . . . a great deal of talk about the Poor Law, the “deserving poor” versus those who are undeserving. Unfortunates who have been blinded, crippled, et cetera through no fault of their own are regarded as worthy of charitable aid, but all of those who are physically able, Daddy says, must be morally deficient, lazy, and undeserving of consideration; the beggars should continue to be whipped out of town as has been the custom, or else go to the workhouse. But if work is such a great good, why, then, does the workhouse punish its inmates with dinners of thin gruel after their long hours of the hardest possible labour?
     
     
    . . . social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest would hold that there is no such category as “deserving” poor. Those who have showed themselves unable to support themselves should be let alone as Nature takes its course, eliminating them, making way for a superior human race. Of which we of the titled classes, I suppose, are examples? Because we can quote Shakespeare, play Chopin upon the piano, and keep our gloves clean while taking tea?
     
    What of the babies? For the most part, the poverty-stricken people who are succumbing to Darwin’s selective process have already reproduced. By this way of thinking, should the babies also be abandoned to perish?
     
    . . . the Great Unwashed of the East End are not themselves intellectually capable of organising unions and marches, Daddy declares; some outside influence, very likely foreign and enemy, must be to blame for the disturbances, and the police are fully justified in bloodying heads in order to put a halt to any further and more serious uprisings. He does not deny that the mill-workers live in fever-nests unfit for pigs and toil until they fall down, like galley-slaves under the whips of heartless foremen – but he does not seem to feel that they deserve any better. He does not seem to feel that they are people like us at all. It is so difficult for me to sit and fold my hands in my lap, smile sweetly and listen . . .
    After reading this and much more, I still considered myself a fraud, for my weary brain, while sympathetic to Lady Cecily’s point of view, could make nothing practical of it.
    Slumber, I decided, was needful. Sleep would knit up the ravelled sleave of care, to quote some Shakespeare myself. Or, in this case,