The Happy Days of Being a Factory Owner in London – Chapter 7
by MonoThe Plan
One Zhuge Liang, two smelly cobblers.1
Considering the rather long walk from the East End back to Baker Street, and considering the offer of a free carriage ride was too good to pass up, Arna accepted a lift from Mr. Green, the solicitor. She returned with him to his office in the city center, planning to walk home from there.
But after they arrived at the firm, Mr. Green stopped Arna just as she was about to leave, eagerly handing her the box containing the old deed.
“Keep this safe,” he said. “If you have other ideas later on, say… transferring this land to someone else, you’re welcome to consult with me.”
Upon receiving the deed, Arna saw a new notification light up on her panel.
【New Item: Deed to the Dilapidated Old Factory x1】
【Dilapidated Old Factory: A precious inheritance left to you by your grandfather through his hard work. Of course, even if it’s now overgrown with weeds, land is still land.】
【Unlock Profession: Factory Owner?】
【Yes/No】
Arna stuffed the box into a storage slot and tapped the confirmation button with one hand.
The panel flashed red, bluntly informing her that she did not meet the unlock conditions.
【Basic conditions not met. Lacking prerequisite “Hired Workers,” lacking prerequisite “Clean and Tidy Factory Building.” No way, no way, surely no one actually thinks they’re a Factory Owner just because they have a piece of land?】
Below that, it helpfully listed the current market price for hiring workers.
The currencies weren’t interchangeable, so the money she’d saved up before was useless. All she had was the cash from selling sandwiches and fish, plus the reward from today’s extra mission. At this rate, Arna’s current savings would only be enough to employ a worker for a few months.
Arna, now being mocked by the system, was speechless. Enough! I know I’m poor, stop rubbing it in!
The thought of the locked panel made her skin crawl. She wished she could earn all the money today, finish renovations tomorrow, and have the factory up and running the day after. Even fishing and picking up trash had lost their appeal.
She walked back to Baker Street with a heavy heart, trudged up the stairs with a heavy heart, and collapsed onto the sofa with a heavy heart, letting out a sigh.
“Ah,” Arna said mournfully, “making money is so hard.”
Watson, who was sitting by the fireplace annotating his medical journal, nodded in profound agreement.
“Easy to spend, hard to earn. It’s always the way,” he remarked. “I remember my first few months practicing in London. I’d get a message for an emergency house call at night and have to trudge through the foggy streets with my medical bag, just to save a little on carriage fare.”
He set his pen down, stood to stretch his body, and then brought a plate of biscuits over to Arna, along with a cup of hot tea. “Since you’ve already missed lunch, have some simple afternoon tea.”
Arna took the opportunity to grab a biscuit and take a bite, replenishing the stamina she’d lost in the fight.
“Thank you, Dr. Watson,” she said, her voice muffled. “You’re too kind.”
Watson returned to his seat and took a leisurely sip of tea. “You’re welcome.”
From the other end of the sofa, Holmes, who was examining a newspaper with a magnifying glass, couldn’t stop the corner of his mouth from twitching at this heartwarming scene.
“Ah,” he said without looking up. “I hear the sound of coins colliding in your pocket, Aisas. Before you swindle the poor doctor out of all his afternoon tea, why don’t you tell us how many ribs you broke today?”
Watson choked. “…What?”
“I don’t know,” Arna said honestly. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
She chewed her biscuit and casually tossed one to Holmes. “And it wasn’t much money, anyway. Not enough to repair the factory.”
“So now you’re worrying about factory repairs,” Holmes said cheerfully, catching the biscuit without even a glance. “Then just sell it.”
He studied the biscuit for a moment. “Bribe accepted.”
With a clink, Watson set his teacup down.
“So,” he said, bewildered, “would someone care to explain to me…”
“It’s quite simple,” Holmes said, finishing the biscuit and raising a single finger. “As I said before, Aisas inherited a property from his grandfather—a factory. But due to mismanagement, the factory is in poor condition and completely shut down.”
He continued, “And our fishing champion had a rather… vigorous exchange with a few squatters there, and successfully obtained some compensation.”
“Two of them,” Arna said listlessly. “I was wondering if I should find their main hideout, earn some money to fix up the factory. The kid said Fagin sent him.”
Like a hound catching a scent, Holmes instantly straightened his back and turned to her.
His sharp eyes scanned Arna from top to bottom. Then he shot to his feet and began to pace the room, his greatcoat flapping behind him like an over-energized crow beating its wings.
“Theoretically, you’ve come into contact with the infamous pickpockets and robbers of Little Saffron Hill2—cunning, shrewd, leaving no trace, using nimble-fingered children to steal,” he said slowly, a dangerous glint in his eyes. He was clearly intrigued. “But if you intend to use the same… less than respectable methods as you did today…”
Watson, finally understanding what they were talking about, at last reacted.
“Holmes,” he said, quite seriously, “absolutely not! You cannot encourage—”
“I am not encouraging anything, Doctor,” Holmes waved a hand breezily, as if to brush away the words of caution. “And the bravery Aisas displayed today has already proven his capabilities, has it not?”
“You need something—false information, or some world-shaking treasure—to draw their attention,” he went on, his fingers plucking at the air as if arranging an invisible web of connections. He turned to his bookshelf, flipping through the complex diagrams of power structures he had recorded in a notebook. “First, obtain evidence through certain means, then catch them red-handed. The police arrive, and the whole lot is rounded up. I have a few acquaintances at Scotland Yard who would surely be willing to pay a handsome reward for this service.”
Arna listened intently for a moment.
“So,” she asked, “what happens to the children?”
Holmes suddenly froze.
“Ah,” he breathed out, long and slow. “That, I suppose, is the most… unfortunate part of this plan, my dear friend.”
Uncharacteristically, he tossed the book in his hand aside and turned to sit in his armchair, pressing the fingertips of both hands together.
“Lestrade will arrest these people—including the children—and then pat himself on the back for a job well done,” he said. “Then the courts will send the children to a reformatory3, where they will learn how to be properly exploited as slaves by their employers. I’ve seen this process a hundred times.”
Watson cleared his throat.
“Actually,” he interjected, “there are charitable orphanages.”
“The overcrowded ones?” Holmes shot back sharply. “Like the many workhouses4, where you can take a few apprentices without paying a penny and have them crawl under machinery for wages that can only buy scraps of leftovers?”
Watson’s mustache twitched. He sighed heavily and said no more.
A silence fell over the room.
After a moment, Arna asked hesitantly, “Is hiring child labor illegal?”
In fact, she had a new idea.
As if hearing a starting pistol, Holmes’s gaze shot up. He leaned forward, studying Arna with great interest.
“Of course not!” he declared. “The Factory Act5 only prohibits child labor under the age of nine—and even then, in many cases, only if they do not ‘show sufficient maturity’.”
He shook his head contemptuously and looked at Watson. “The difference between the law in practice and the law on paper, is it not?”
Watson made a noncommittal sound, slowly exhaling through his nose.
Holmes changed tack, his fingertips tapping the arm of his chair as he turned back to Arna. “However, you have a better option.”
He spoke slowly. “Apprentices. For children nine and older, providing them an environment to learn a trade under strict supervision is a rather respectable thing to do—”
A message flickered on the panel, a new pop-up appearing. Arna ignored it, having already understood his next words.
“And an excellent reason to pay them an extremely low wage,” she said with certainty.
The solution to her current predicament, a method better than stealing a thief’s loot, was to steal their far more valuable labor force.
And hiring apprentices was so much cheaper than hiring adults. It was a very tempting prospect.
“And perfectly legal,” Holmes added.
“Good heavens, Holmes,” Watson murmured. “You can’t teach him how to exploit legal loopholes. This is… this is…”
He swallowed the inappropriate rebukes that came to mind. “There must be a better way.”
“No. This method is also an excellent pretext,” Holmes continued. “A cover for rounding up the whole gang of thieves. Stealing factory property, Watson. You know, the law only appears when a gentleman claims his things have been stolen.”
But his next sentence followed on the heels of the last, like a hound sniffing a new trail. “But how do we ensure that a much larger monster isn’t lurking in the shadows, ready to devour those children whole?”
Arna paused.
The game panel flashed before her eyes, indicating a major story node that required her to choose her free-form dialogue carefully.
Arna quickly saved her game, then said with a serious expression, “You two are right to be worried.”
To the stunned expressions of her two NPC flatmates, she declared with a straight face, “I will guarantee they get meat only once every two days. After they’ve eaten their fill, they must engage in sufficient mental exertion, spending half the day in agony over books with a teacher. Only then can they return to mindless mechanical work and sleep for the other half. They will be worked until the last dregs of their souls are squeezed dry.”
Holmes and Watson stared at each other.
A few seconds later, Holmes burst out laughing.
“Well, it seems the last little problem has been solved, Doctor,” he said cheerfully, leaping fluidly from his chair. “The new factory owner is a blind, soft-hearted country fool who plans to hire some cheap apprentices to work for him.”
He spun on his heel, pointing dramatically into the distance. “Then, the arrogant country fool leaves his valuables right in the factory, forgetting to guard against these little rascals. The most valuable item is on your person, worth enough to send them all abroad to a new life. At that moment, the master thief appears with his accomplices, ready to embrace his new life. I imagine the doctor would be willing to help you with the rest of the work. Right, Watson?”
“…While I admit it’s a good plan,” Watson said wearily, “you can’t use the children as part of the evidence.”
“As coerced young witnesses,” Holmes said with a wink. “And I think we can also send our loyal little division out to spread some news.”
He snapped his fingers. “Now, all is ready. We just need something valuable. I suppose you could borrow something that looks very precious to serve as your family heirloom…”
Speaking of valuable, Arna’s spirits lifted.
She first pulled her Golden Sword, which had lost 1 durability, out of her storage slot. Then she went back to her room and brought out the hammer, axe, and hoe as well, placing them enthusiastically on the table.
“These should look pretty expensive, right?” she asked.
Staring at the table full of gleaming golden farm tools, Holmes and Watson exchanged a look of astonishment.
Finally, it was Watson who managed to speak. “…This, this isn’t solid gold, is it?”
“No,” Arna said honestly.
“But it appears to be at least half gold ore,” Holmes said, picking up the Golden Hammer. After a careful inspection, he glanced deliberately at Watson. “Hm, worth about the same as Dr. Watson’s annual salary.”
The next second, he received a fierce glare from the good-tempered doctor.
The author has something to say:
This chapter’s MVP: a .gif of Holmes jumping up and down and sitting and standing all in one chapter.
- Little Saffron Hill is a place from Oliver Twist. Honestly, the name itself sounds a bit cute. Here’s a little red flower for you.jpg
- London already had reformatories at the time (early juvenile detention centers), but the conditions were not much better than the workhouse Oliver had lived in before.
- The Factory Act prohibited child labor under the age of 9, but this law was widely violated at the time, and as for actual inspections… well… According to my research, “by law, the employer was not actually required to demand any reliable proof of the child’s age; it was sufficient for him to judge the child’s age by his appearance.” Thus, when factory owners advertised, they would mention that the child should at least look older than thirteen (from Marx and Engels’s visit to London in 1854, yes, those two).
- The apprentice part is mainly a reference to the chapter where Oliver is taken away by the coffin-maker.
- At that time, maintaining a respectable gentleman’s life required an annual income of at least 300 pounds. Dr. Watson’s annual income was about 400 pounds, plus occasional extra income from cases with Holmes.
Footnotes
- A variation of the Chinese proverb 'Three smelly cobblers are equal to one Zhuge Liang' (sān ge chòu píjiàng, dǐng ge Zhūgéliàng). Zhuge Liang was a master strategist from the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 AD). The saying means that ordinary people can match a genius if they pool their wisdom.
- A location from Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, based on the real-life Saffron Hill, a notorious slum or 'rookery' in 19th-century London.
- Reformatories (gǎnhuà yuàn) were early forms of juvenile detention centers in the Victorian era. Conditions were often extremely harsh, little better than prisons.
- Workhouses (jìpín yuàn) were institutions that provided housing and employment for the destitute. In exchange for food and shelter, residents performed manual labor in often brutal conditions.
- The Factory Acts were a series of laws in the UK to regulate factory conditions. The 1833 Act, for example, prohibited the employment of children under nine. However, as the author's note points out, enforcement was lax, and employers could often judge a child's age by appearance alone.
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