“I thought it time you and I practice together, don’t you think?”
Anne was more interested in the peppermints Hattie had ordered from Auchtermuchty.
“Angel, why are you hobbling?”
The girl had been skipping alongside her; now that she moved normally, her limp was plainly visible.
“Is it your legs? Your feet? A blister?”
A shrug.
As soon as they were in the classroom, she ordered Anne onto a chair. “Let me see.”
The girl stuck out her leg, dispassionately watching Hattie’s examination as she sucked on her candy. The problem was quickly determined. “Your shoes are far too small, my dear.”
In the left shoe, the girl’s toe was about to break through the careworn leather. On the right, the shoe had won. The removal of the dirty stocking revealed small toes, curled and bruised.
She looked down at the pale little foot in her hand and fought the urge to kiss it better. Anne didn’t need sympathy. She didn’t need shortbread or photographs, she needed shoes. New stockings. A warmer coat. Her mother needed a week of leisure by the sea.
She was unfocused under her dark cloth, wasting dry plates with poor exposure timing. She wanted to take off her pearl earrings and send them home with Anne, but she couldn’t just dispense random charity. She gave Anne the whole bag of peppermints.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. Lucian was behind her, holding her and dozing after exhausting himself over her. Her mind was going in circles.
“Lucian,” she whispered into the dark.
A grunt was the reply.
“Am I a hypocrite?”
Her question pulled him back from the brink of sleep. “What can you mean?”
“I like to be warm and have lovely things,” she said. “But I cannot stand for children, or anyone, working themselves to death for my comforts. And …” Her breathing was shallow. “I think I’m afraid—afraid of what will become of me if I don’t wish to be a hypocrite.”
“Ah. You’re afraid of becoming a radical.”
“Is that what it is?”
He gave her a light squeeze. “Afraid of having to live naked in a barrel to not feel guilt?”
“It almost appears to be the most consequent consequence.”
His chest shook against her back, as though he was laughing quietly. “Nah.”
“But isn’t it? What good is frippery when there is misery?”
“Wasn’t it you who said every woman needs something just because it’s pretty?”
“Perhaps I was misguided,” she whispered.
He rose on his elbow and looked down at her in the dark. “If no one purchased frippery anymore, how would the seamstress make her bread?”
She considered it. “Perhaps she wouldn’t have to work for her keep if we all lived in a barrel.”
He scoffed softly. “You think everyone living off the land, hand-to-mouth, like the days of the clans, was an easy life, or a good life?”
“Probably not?”
“Trust me, it’s not,” he said. “You know what drives inventions that keep everyone warm, not just the inventor? Or the progress in the medical sciences? Or systems that govern groups of people beyond family size?”
“Clever minds?”
“Time,” he said. “Spare time. Because the clever mind can think and tinker instead of foraging for food and doing battle with other clans who try to steal your cattle all day long.”
She contemplated it. “The same is true for the arts,” she then said. “Written stories and music … paintings.”
“Yes,” he said. “So, I cannot think of a division of labor or owning the means of production as the root of evil.”
“But some people paint,” she said, “and others are stuck in a tunnel.”
“You’d be worse at wielding an ax than Boyd, just like Boyd wouldn’t have patience with a brush or camera,” he replied. “But you enjoy a warm hearth, and Boyd will enjoy your photographs. What you must do is pay a fair wage and provide good working conditions. When your seamstress loses her eyesight because she works long hours without pause to put food on the table—then you should feel guilt. That’s something you shouldn’t stand for.”
“I don’t,” she said. “But who decides what’s fair?”
There was a long pause. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I tried to read the works of men who are more educated than I to understand it when I first owned property. Locke and Coleridge and such. What I know is that market forces alone are never fair. Which is why we need regulation and systemic wealth redistribution.”