Princess of the 19th Century Department Store - Chapter 20

Chapter 20

At the serving window, the cook rang the brass bell, and a waiter came over with a tray of food, weaving around an old man smoking a cigar and dodging a newspaper boy charging blindly through the room before setting the steaming macaroni in front of them.

The macaroni was coated in sauce, with a layer of grated cheese floating on top and bits of black olive and mint leaves scattered over it as garnish.

It tasted passable. The macaroni set meal that cost only a few pence even came with a cup of espresso-though it had no flavor to speak of, only bitterness.

The shop was thick with smoke and fumes, but this hot plate of pasta was just enough to drive away the hunger and cold of the early morning.

Daisy gathered her focus again, and she and Mary quickly finished breakfast.

They first went to a nearby wholesale shop and bought several pounds’ worth of daily necessities. Since they were buying more than usual this time, the wholesale price was a little cheaper too.

Daisy also found a blackboard at a secondhand shop and bought several boxes of chalk, planning to hang a sign outside the door.

As for stamps, she had two sets made at a dedicated seal-carving shop.

One bore the name Nash Grocery, while the other was a rolling number stamp whose digits could be turned.

Customizing a stamp was not expensive, but they would have to come back in two days to pick it up.

Only after that did they leave the busy market streets and walk along Whitechapel Road, beginning to purchase the raw ingredients for making ready-to-eat food.

The best-performing butcher shop nearby was called Balpini Brothers Butcher Shop.

It occupied its own premises, and the storefront was very spacious. All kinds of fresh meat could be bought there, and eggs could be ordered as well.

On top of that, diagonally across the street stood the Commercial Street Police Station, which was responsible for security in the Whitechapel area. Its presence provided a certain deterrent, so there was no need to worry about pickpockets.

Daisy and Mary needed to buy ingredients for making meat broth pudding.

When it came to buying meat, Mary was the expert. She walked into the shop, pushed her way through the people crowding around the counter and picking things over, and began choosing cuts of meat.

Daisy, meanwhile, stood by the door with the basket in hand, observing the shop.

Several wooden display cases were set up inside, with all kinds of meat hanging from them for customers to choose from.

At a glance, beef and mutton were the most prominent, but there was also plenty of pork and poultry. The rest consisted of various kinds of game.

Everything had been cut into different parts, and each part had a different price. Even all sorts of organs and offal were prominently displayed.

Sure enough, as long as people were poor enough, they would eat anything so long as it was meat. There was no such thing as offal being unsellable and waiting for her to pick up a bargain.

The meat here covered a wide price range. The cheapest Australian frozen pork was only six or seven pence a pound.

Chickens and ducks, however, were all sold at fixed prices, and the difference between a fat duck and a scrawny one could be as much as a shilling.

The most expensive cuts were beef and mutton ribs. Locally raised English beef ribs cost more than twenty pence per pound.

There was even more expensive meat, but this was the East End, and what sold best was still cheap meat.

Several butchers, wearing suits under cotton-linen aprons, bustled behind the counter.

Some were deboning, some were weighing meat, and some were settling accounts. The division of labor was clear, and Daisy could not tell which two of them were the brother owners.

From the news she had gathered from the major newspapers, Daisy was clearly aware that even England, which had long relied on animal husbandry to uphold the foundations of its empire, was currently caught in the ongoing shockwaves of a full-scale agricultural and pastoral depression.

At the Port of London, frozen meat from Australia, the United States, and New Zealand was brought into England by steamship.

Most of this meat came from vast pastures overseas and was extremely cheap, dealing a heavy blow to domestic livestock farming.

At the same time, prices for England’s own livestock and grain had also been impacted. Every kind of cheap grain visible on the market came from imports, including feed for livestock.

This was something that had only become possible after the Corn Laws were repealed decades ago, and it had greatly weakened the value of land in England.

For industrialists and merchants, this was a good thing.

The more choices the market had, and the less it depended on land, the more favorable it was for business.

But for the old aristocratic class, this upheaval had become a catastrophe.

Land depreciated too quickly, the crop market was battered by imported goods, and the landed aristocrats of the country, who had held their heads high all their lives, finally had their necks snapped.

Every few days, the newspapers would carry a marriage notice for some earl with an ancient title marrying the daughter of a merchant from one country or another.

At present, Daisy was a lower-class shopkeeper of Irish descent, and she had no sympathy for the tragedies befalling those noble lords. If anything, she felt they had not suffered enough.

In the memories Mr. Nash had recounted from his youth, Ireland decades ago had been ruined precisely by these English landed nobles and landlords.

Relying on an unequal system, they had occupied most of Ireland’s good farmland and pastures.

They had pushed out local tenant farmers and landowners, leaving them able to grow only potatoes on barren land.

Later, when late blight broke out and continued for several years, that man-made disaster starved millions of Irish people to death, while two million more fled.

Meanwhile, the English government stood aloof, going to every length to block aid from reaching Ireland, and continued exporting Ireland’s own grain in order to protect England’s agricultural market.

Whenever Mr. Nash recalled those bleak years of famine in Ireland, and the relatives who had starved or died of illness during them, he always said it had been a deliberate ethnic cleansing.

Now, these noble lords who owned half a county’s worth of land at the drop of a hat, these landlords and country gentry, these bureaucrats from aristocratic backgrounds-not one of them had clean hands.
Even now, the Irish in London were still no better than weeds in the eyes of the powerful.

While she was still silently letting her thoughts wander, Mary had already finished shopping. She squeezed her way out with a basket of meat in hand.

Mary had bought four or five pounds of pork and offal to make meat pudding, along with a twenty-penny chicken for dinner.

Mother and daughter slowly started back, quickening their steps toward Clark Street before the rain could fall.

…

Clark Street. They had only just arrived home when a light drizzle began pattering outside.

Mr. Nash was entertaining a guest, so Daisy and Mary carried the ingredients into the kitchen, ready to roll up their sleeves and give the place a proper cleaning.

The Nash family kitchen was neither large nor small. But because it also served as the dining room and washroom, and was crowded with all sorts of odds and ends, there was often barely room to turn around.

Now that they had a large stove with all the proper functions, however, many of those little miscellaneous items had become useless.

Daisy cleared out everything they would never use again and sold it all to the widow who owned the secondhand furniture shop.

From her shop, she also exchanged them for a wooden rack, then arranged all the kitchen items they still needed on it.

As for the washing supplies, Daisy moved them into the storeroom that had originally been set aside for Mary to use as a nursery.

Mary no longer needed to help people mind their children, so Daisy had also pushed the crib from the storeroom out and sold it secondhand.

She traded for several sets of wooden shelves from the secondhand shop and placed them deep inside the storeroom to hold their stock.

After working soap into a lather on a rag, Daisy washed the kitchen windows and door, then carried in two buckets of water and scrubbed the floor clean.

After half a morning of tidying, both the kitchen and storeroom had been completely transformed.

The kitchen, once packed tight with household clutter, now had a space set aside for the large stove and a generous open area left over.

Even after they put in the dining table, chairs, and stools, it would not be crammed full.

By the time Daisy finished all this work, she was so tired she could barely straighten her back.

Still, Mr. Nash had to go out at noon to deliver milk.

So Daisy could only brew a strong pot of black tea with a blank expression and eat a few biscuits with it for lunch.

Once she had pulled herself together, she first settled the accounts with Mr. Nash.

Mr. Nash had watched the shop all morning and taken in two hundred and sixty-eight pence, with eighteen customers coming through the door in total.

Only after Daisy counted the money clearly did she begin preparing to receive the large pile of goods ordered that morning.

At that moment, however, Mary was perfectly at ease. Even after doing all that work, she still had the energy to hum a tune while cooking.

She tied on an apron and held the chicken they had bought over the stove, singeing it to remove the down.

Today would be her last time using this little stove. She planned to make a stewed chicken with it, their once-a-week improvement to the meals.

Rain began falling outside. The delivery carts from each wholesaler came and went with their canopies propped up, bringing over the items they had ordered.

Daisy handled the handoffs with the delivery drivers smoothly. After counting everything clearly, she signed the slips and casually gave each driver a few packets of the new three farthings goods.

Then, taking the opportunity, she struck up casual conversations with them.

These cart drivers, who were generally treated with little respect, actually knew quite a bit of gossip. Once one became slightly familiar with them, it was possible to pick up all sorts of information from a few stray remarks.

In her previous life, when Daisy had dug up her competitors’ contract factories and raw material suppliers, she had used a method just this simple: bribing truck drivers.

Business was a battlefield, a constant struggle of life and death. She had never cared much for benevolence or morality.

The driver who delivered the last batch of goods in the heavy rain at noon was named Ronald. He was a plain, honest old man who worked for a large grain and oil wholesaler.

After unloading the goods, he stood crookedly off to the side smoking a cigar, waiting for Daisy to finish checking the delivery, and also waiting for the rain outside to ease a little before heading to the next house.

Daisy weighed the two or three hundred pounds of flour before signing the paperwork.

As usual, after signing, she grabbed a handful of tea bags, stuffed them into a paper packet, and handed it to the old man.

She said, “This is floral tea made in our shop. You can take it home and let your wife try it.”

Old Ronald, leaning idly by the counter, looked a little stunned.

“For me?”

The old man raised his eyebrows, clearly surprised, but still accepted the tea bags from Daisy, wrapped them up, and stuffed them into the pocket of his worn tweed coat.

Perhaps because he felt that the person before him had actually noticed him, Ronald straightened up and even put out his cigar.

He casually began chatting, clearing his throat before saying, “Is your family planning to start making prepared foods yourselves?”

“Yes. We plan to bake our own bread, make meat pudding, biscuits and jam, and candies and such.”

Daisy pointed toward the kitchen behind the curtain.

Ronald nodded and said, “That’s good. It’ll save you quite a lot in costs.”

He looked back behind him. The heavy rain was still pouring down from the eaves in sheets, shattering against the ground like strings of crystal beads.

“Why won’t this rain let up a bit? I still have to deliver flour to Penochi Shirt Factory.”

…