Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Michael McDowell

trays, ornaments, and much tableware.
    “Some pieces, girl,” said Lena, “and throw them in.”
    Melting the silver was always a treat for Ella. She took up half a dozen forks from the box, of different patterns but all bearing monograms, and dropped them into the crucible. Her grandmother replaced the lid and then sat in a straight-backed chair near the fire. Ella knelt at the side of the box and rummaged through the silver, picking out the pieces she thought prettiest and setting them aside to be melted down. Every few minutes she took the tongs and lifted the lids of the crucibles to check the progress of liquefaction.
    Rob and Ella had been carefully brought up. The children of most criminals in New York ran wild about the streets in gangs sycophantic of older ruffian groups, calling themselves, for instance, “The Little Dead Rabbits” and “The Forty Little Thieves.” They learned to rob dead men on the street, and attack drunken revelers, and set up distractions in crowds so that pickpockets might work more easily. But Rob and Ella were being trained in their family’s occupations. Rob, well versed in the secrets of the female anatomy, was continually delighted with the succession of ladies in and out of the tiny room on the fourth floor of the house. Ella spent most of her day in the pawnshop, close at her grandmother’s hand. At eight years of age, she could tell silver plate from real silver at a glance, grade silks to a nicety, swiftly knot a new fringe for a stolen cambric shawl, and make fair appraisals of glass, plate, jewelry, and feminine clothing.
    For companions, Rob and Ella had only one another, but they never seemed to want to know other children; the thousands of Arabs and urchins who enjoyed the freedom of the street were frivolous, doomed creatures in the critical eyes of the young twins. In a part of the city full of want and misery and sickness they appreciated the superfluities of their existence, the health and prosperity of their own family: their mother, their aunt, and their grandmother. Louisa and Lena’s occasional harshness toward them was nothing compared to what they glimpsed on the street, in cellar dives, and in tenement rooms. They had been made to understand that their well-being was due to their family’s diligence; and to avoid the misery that moaned on every side of the two buildings on West Houston Street, Rob and Ella early settled into little lives of strange industriousness. They never, however, gained any sense that what they did might be considered wrong—their understanding of the law was imperfect. Judgments and jails, though certainly they knew of them, seemed afflictions as arbitrary as disease and death. It was the fortunate and the hardworking, not the good, who survived these vicissitudes.
    After Ella had set two small salvers chased with patterns of twining grapevines into the crucible, she brought a blanket from the corner of the small bare room in which they sat, spread it at her grandmother’s feet, and lay down upon it. The noise of the fire and the gentle sound of the bubbling silver soon sent her off to sleep.
    Lena Shanks, however, sat bolt upright in her chair, staring into the fire; though she was close to the bright flames, she neither felt their heat nor traced their dancing patterns. The news that Maggie Kizer had brought that evening had been of a serious and unfortunate nature; but it was not upon this trouble that Lena’s thoughts were fixed. She was cold, quite cold, because her mind irresistibly pictured a pair of brilliant light-blue eyes. They had seemed out of place in the sallow face of the weak young man at Harry Hill’s, for Lena remembered those eyes as belonging to another—to one whom she hated more than any other man upon earth, the man responsible for her husband’s death.

Chapter 7
    When she left Lena Shanks’s pawnshop, Maggie Kizer went back along West Houston in the direction of Harry Hill’s place. She paid no