Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Read Free

moderately respectable, for the moderately prosperous and very respectable, and for the very rich who needn’t trouble themselves with respectability, the year of Our Lord 1882 was begun.

Part I: The Black Triangle

Chapter 1
    On a narrow short bed in a narrow short room lay a young woman whose freckled skin was pale and blotched, whose unrefined features were slack and heavy, whose long red hair spread tangled and disordered over the thin coverlet. Two children of eight years, each with a penny taper in a tin holder, approached the bed cautiously. The light flickering across their faces showed identical features and only the barest differentiation of sex.
    The little girl, who was called Ella, poked a sharp finger into the ribs of the red-haired woman to make sure that she was dead. Ella nodded to Rob, her twin brother, and they set their candles, identical as themselves, on a rickety table by the head of the bed.
    While Ella struggled to remove the coarse woolen skirt of the dead woman, Rob fetched a sharp pair of scissors from the dresser that stood near the hearth. He lifted the corpse’s head, twisted the wiry red hair around his fist, and then snipped the tresses free, close to the scalp. Ella, plucking gingerly at the blood-drenched undergarments, breathily chanted: “No ’rings, no watch, no jew-la-ry . . .”
    “No ’rings, no watch, no jew-la-ry,” echoed her brother in an identical accent, and sharply turning aside the heavy head with his elbow, he cut the last thick strand of hair from behind the ear. The woman’s shorn head dropped back onto the pillow, and the filmed eyes flew open as if in outrage at the indignity.
    Rob loosely twisted the hair and carried it to the dresser, well away from the candle flames. Then he assisted Ella in stripping the dead woman naked. Her clothes they folded and placed in a shallow basket, pulled from beneath the bed.
    As her brother stretched and rolled the checkered cotton stockings, Ella went off briefly and came back with two wetted rags with which the children methodically wiped the corpse, paying particular attention to the clotted blood that colored the inside of her thighs. In a wandering melodic counterpoint, Rob and Ella Shanks continued their refrain: “No ’rings, no watch, no jew-la-ry . . .”
    When finished, they undressed themselves, stacking their garments neatly upon the dresser. From a wooden box in the corner of the room, they took filthy, vermin-infested tatters of cloth and hung them upon their bodies in some mockery of attire. Then at the grate, where a small fire of coals burned smokily, Ella scraped the walls of the hearth with a poker to dislodge soot. After the children had smeared their faces and hands with the ashes, they appeared indistinguishable from any two street Arabs perishing of cold that night on the streets of New York.
    Taking one another’s hands, they pulled aside a corner of the curtain over the room’s single window and peered out into the night but could see nothing more than the cold bright stars, the flat angular expanses of smoke-darkened brick, and the rotting fences that enclosed the blasted yard behind the house.
    As they turned around again, a tall angular woman with harsh set features slipped noiselessly into the room. She had dark skin, black eyes set wide apart in a flat face, and a low beetling brow with greasy black hair crimped severely down over it. Louisa Shanks’s dress was of heavily starched yellow bombazine and shone metallically in the scant firelight.
    She approached the bed, bent forward from the waist, and passed one of the children’s candles slowly up the length of the corpse. She eyed the dead woman with more of a critical than a moral or religious interest. She righted herself, turned to the children, and nodded her approval.
    At this signal from their aunt, Ella unlatched the door that opened into the tiny yard in the back of the house. A blast of frigid air blew out the candles. The little