Currently Reading

This week I read Premeditated Myrtle by Elizabeth C. Bunce.

This was an Edgar Award winner in the Children’s category. It reminded me strongly of the Enola Holmes books and Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series. Here’s an interesting fact. Although all the protagonists are young girls (opinionated and very bright, it goes without saying), the Bradley mysteries are considered adult while the Enola Holmes and Myrtle Hardcastles are classed as children’s lit.

Myrtle is a bright twelve year-old with an obsession for criminal justice. In the interest of science, she Observes (she always capitalizes this word) her neighbors. When her next door neighbor, an eccentric older lady who breeds lilies, dies under Mysterious Circumstances, Myrtles sees her chance to investigate. Armed with her mother’s microscope, and accompanied by her governess, Miss Judson, Myrtle sets about proving that Miss Woodhouse was murdered. No one believes her, not even her father, but Myrtle perseveres, putting not only herself in danger but also her father.

I really enjoyed the mystery and Myrtle is a great character. However, a young reader would have to be a very good reader to enjoy Premeditated Myrtle.

Recommended with reservations.

Just a reminder: I will be at Rensselaer Public Library Saturday, 1 to 3. The event is free. I will be giving away a copy of Death in Salem to all who buy a book.

Families

As I looked around the table at Christmas dinner, and saw people who had not spoken to one another for years, I thought of how complicated families could be.

In Murder, Sweet Murder, I set the mystery against Lydia’s family, but Will Rees’s is no less difficult.

Lydia, estranged from her father and step-mother, left her family years ago. Her father is a wealthy Boston merchant engaged in the Triangle Trade. He owns a distillery that distills molasses into rum as well a fleet of ships that run slaves from Africa.

Lydia cannot accept her father’s profession and after some problems in her personal live, runs away. She lands at Zion, a Shaker community in Maine. In Murder, Sweet Murder I bring her back to Boston, and her family. She is no more tolerant of her father’s profession now than she was then.

Rees’s father was an abusive alcoholic who died by falling off a wagon in a drunken stupor. Rees is not an alcoholic but he makes other mistakes with his children. Before the action begins in A Simple Murder, David, Rees’s oldest son runs away from home, and takes refuge in Zion with the Shakers. Rees had left David (he would say his father abandoned him) with Caroline and her husband. When Rees returns home and recovers the farm, sending Caroline’s family packing, she never forgives him.

In A Devil’s Cold Dish, Caroline does her very best to destroy her brother and his family.

As the stories go on, and Rees’s history unfolds, his family expands. But it also changes. By the time of Murder, Sweet Murder, Jerusha, Rees’s oldest daughter, wants to leave home for school. David and Simon have already left for a farm in a distant town.

Families are complicated, even in fiction.

Shakers and Orphans

Throughout my books, I reference the number of orphans, runaways, semi-orphans and other children who were raised by the Shakers. This group took in children from their very beginning right to 1966, when the United States government passed a law forbidding it.

Since the Shakers were celibate and did not reproduce themselves, they relied upon converts to increase membership. They also took in orphans or semi-orphans. Although the Shakers might have wished for the orphans to ‘make a Shaker’, they did not insist and many of the children married out of the community.

In a time when there was no safety net, no foster care, no food stamps, the injury or death of the man of the family was a catastrophe. No unemployment or workman’s comp either. Women had few options for work outside the home (wet nurse was one!) and when they did work they made far less than a man. Add in the prevalence of disease, some of which carried off both parents, and there was a frightening number of orphans.

Semi-orphans, what was that? Well, if a single father or more often a single mother couldn’t support her children she had a few options. Depositing them on the Shakers’ doorstep was one. Indenturing them out if they were old enough (and children as young as six were indentured) was another. Babies couldn’t be indentured unless a premium was paid to the employer for the extra care. Orphanages? The first and for many years the only was set up in Charleston, SC in 1793. Black orphans were not welcomed. However, they did not apprentice children out before they were twelve which, for those days, was enlightened. Although these were children they were still worked hard and as susceptible to accidents and death as an adult. One account describes a thirteen year old boy apprenticed to a ship maker. A load of lumber fell upon him, killing him. They found a series of strange bruises on his leg, bruises it turned out from a bag of marbles in his pocket. He was still a child who wanted to play. Sometimes the employers were called up before the town fathers for excessive cruelty to their indentured servants but not often. Many of the children perished.

And where did you go if you couldn’t suppor yourself? The workhouse. The descriptions in Dickens’s novels, although they take place at a later time, are unfortunately all too accurate.  Sometimes, if a woman remarried, she would be able to recover her children.

So the lot of poor children was dire, for orphans and semi-orphans it was almost a death sentence. Babies were especially at risk. They are so vulnerable and if they were nursing especially so. In those days there really was no good alternative to mother’s milk. Many women survived by wet nursing infants. Some managed to nurse both their own and the others. Some wealthy woman put out an infant to nurse if they were ill or if their husband wanted a male heir. Since nursing confers some contraceptive effect they handed off an infant girl to a wet nurse so they could conceive again. What happened to the infants of the wet nurse? Many or the wealthy women did not want to have the child in their household or to share. Some of the wet nurses sneaked off to feed their child. Another option is to hire a cheaper wet nurse. There are many accounts of women who did so and while they were nursing another child their own died.

So the Shakers were by far the best and safest alternative for orphans. The fact that they educated these children, not only in all the skills they would need to live in the agrarian world, but also to read and write is amazing. They truly lived by their altruistic beliefs.