Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Read Online Free

jackets with black lace edging. She was slow-moving, deliberate, and always walked with the help of a cane, which on occasion doubled as a weapon. The neighborhood knew her as “Black Lena,” because of her jackets, but sometimes—more poetically—she was called “My Female Uncle,” for “uncle” denoted a pawnbroker, and “pawnbroker” was a transparent euphemism for a receiver of stolen property, her primary occupation.
    When the gold clock upon the golden lambrequin that covered the painted mantel chimed one o’clock, her daughter Daisy appeared in the doorway of the room.
    “Girl and boy ought to be back,” said Lena. Her German-accented voice was slow and thick and she did not look up from her work.
    “Well, I hope they ain’t been stopped!” cried their mother from the doorway. “How do you think Ella would explain the girl in her cart?” she laughed.
    The girl whose corpse was tumbled in the corner of the medical student’s single room, awaiting a sober dissection by the five friends, was one of Daisy Shanks’s rare failures. For Daisy, a careful abortionist, there was rarely the necessity to dispose of a corpse, whether by depositing it on Bleecker Street, in the rooms of a succession of medical students, or in the cold lap of the North River. The unfortunate young woman had been a waiter-girl at a saloon on Bayard Street; she had died in the fourth-story chamber where the actress now slept fitfully.
    It was Lena Shanks who had established the abortion trade on West Houston Street in 1874 , when her younger daughter was fourteen. Daisy had quickly found out everything there was to know of the methods of arresting a pregnancy, and her manner with the understandably nervous clients was so fetching and reassuring that in five years Lena entrusted the entire practice to her daughter and gratefully retired to the more congenial occupation of fencing stolen merchandise.
    Daisy Shanks was twenty-two years old, a pretty young woman with a full figure that was always heavily trussed. She had flaxen hair, flaxen brows, but shamelessly dark eyes. Her lips were thin and colorless and needed paint to be seen at all. Daisy was bustling and energetic and wore a perpetual smile. Nothing cast her down, nothing could rouse her anger beyond a brief breathy petulance, and nothing could mitigate the love she bore her stern mother and her mute sister Louisa. She tended to dress in clothes that were certainly too tight and not very short of gaudy. But since she had expressed no interest in any man since the policeman—dead in an anarchist bombing—who had fathered Rob and Ella, her finery was evidently assumed only to please herself. Daisy was affectionately fond of her twins, but had never interfered with the strict upbringing and careful education of the pair by their aunt and their grandmother.
    Daisy was adept in her illegal craft. She was always successful in aborting the unborn child, the mother rarely died, and her fees were not exorbitant. Depending upon her whim—or the needs of the household—she charged between fifteen and thirty-five dollars. Occasionally, in an attempt to attract a better class of client than the prostitutes and petty thieves who were her mainstay, Daisy advertised her service in the daily papers:
    MADAME SHANKS, Professor of Midwifery, over 10 years successful practice in this city, promises and guarantees certain relief to ladies, with or without medicine, at one interview. The unfortunate are encouraged to apply for sure relief. Please write Box 445 .
    Her results, for the most part, were procured by the use of powerful purgative drugs, which was certainly safer than the more prevalent expedient of sharp instruments. Though these drugs sometimes resulted in the dilapidation of the pregnant woman’s nervous system, the collapse would not occur for several days, long after the client had safely returned home. The drugs produced fewer corpses than the forceps, and for that reason Daisy