Resurrection Row - Anne Perry [44]
“Sorry,” Carlisle said lightly. “Shouldn’t spoil a good meal by talking politics.” He smiled.
Dominic was completely unguarded. “P-politics?” he stammered.
“Most distasteful,” Carlisle agreed. “Much pleasanter to talk about horseracing, or fashion. I see your friend Fleetwood has adopted that new cut of jacket. Rather flattering, don’t you think? I shall have to see if I can get my tailor to do something of the sort.”
“What in hell are you talking about?” Dominic demanded. “You said ‘rats.’ I heard you!”
“Perhaps I should have said ‘workhouses.’ ” Carlisle chose the words carefully. “Or pauper-children laws. So difficult to know what to do. Whole family in the workhouse, children in with the idle or vagrant, no education, work from waking to sleeping—but better than starvation, which is the alternative, or freezing to death. Have you seen the sort of people that get into the workhouses? Imagine how they affect a child of four or five years old. Seen the disease, the ventilation, the food?”
Dominic remembered his own childhood: a nurse, recalled only hazily, mixed in his mind with his mother, a governess, then school—with long summer holidays; rice pudding, which he loathed, and afternoon teas with jam, especially raspberry jam. He remembered songs round the piano, making snowballs, playing cricket in the sun, stealing plums, breaking windows, and receiving canings for insolence.
“That’s ridiculous!” he said sharply. “Workhouses are supposed to be temporary relief for those who cannot find legitimate work for themselves. It is a charitable charge on the parish.”
“Oh, very charitable.” Carlisle’s eyes were very bright, watching Dominic’s face. “Children of three or four years old in with the flotsam of society, learning hopelessness from the cradle onwards; those that don’t die of disease from rotten food, poor ventilation, cross infection—”
“Well, it should be stopped!” Dominic said flatly. “Clean the places up!”
“Of course,” Carlisle agreed. “But then what? If they don’t go to schools of some sort, they never learn even to read or write. How can they ever get out of the circle of vagrant to workhouse, and back again? What can they do? Sweep crossings summer and winter? Walk the streets as long as their looks last and then turn to the sweatshops? Do you know how much a seamstress earns for sewing a shirt, seams, cuffs, collars, buttonholes, and four rows of stitching down the front, all complete?”
Dominic thought of the prices of his own shirts. “Two shillings?” He hazarded a guess, a little on the mean side, but then Carlisle had suggested as much.
“How extravagant!” Carlisle said bitterly. “She would have to sew ten for that!”
“But how do they live?” The goose was going cold on Dominic’s plate.
Carlisle turned his hands up. “Most of them are prostitutes at night, to feed their children; and then when the children are old enough, they work as well—or else it is all back to the workhouse, and there’s your cycle again!”
“But what about their husbands? Some of them have husbands, surely?” Dominic was still looking for rationality, something sane to explain it.
“Oh, yes, some of them do,” said Carlisle. “But it’s cheaper to employ a woman than a man; you don’t have to pay her much, so the men don’t get the work.”
“That’s—” Dominic searched for a word and failed to find one. He sat staring at Carlisle over the congealing goose.
“Politics,” Carlisle murmured, picking up his fork again. “And education.”
“How can you eat that?” Dominic demanded; it was repulsive to him now, an indecency, if what Carlisle said was true.
Carlisle put it into his mouth and spoke round it. “Because if I were not to eat every time I think of sweated labor, uneducated children, the indigent, sick, filthy, or destitute, I should never eat at all—and what purpose would that serve? Parliament. I ran for it once and failed. My ideas were remarkably unpopular with those who have the vote. Sweated labor doesn’t vote, you know—female, mostly, too young, and too poor. Now I have to try the back