Gideon Spragg’s Odd Remainder

The band-leader at Tenter Wharf, a stout woman called Faith Ormerod, would take only round measures. Everyone in grey crossed the same weight of light, poured into the same plain tins, so that no tin could be told from its neighbour. Gideon Spragg had been saving since harvest and came up short of a round number by nothing. He came up over it by a little.

“The overspill goes in your own pocket,” Faith said. “It crosses beside the band, not inside it. Anyone who wants to can see it’s yours.”

“It’s hardly anything.”

“It’s the only thing about you anyone will be able to see. That’s what makes it something.”

He paid his two drops a span, twice what his cousin had paid the day before, and grumbled about it the whole way down the steps like everyone else. Up on the ridge the Antswarm’s lamps had begun to tighten. People said Ilse Marrow ran her floor like a hive, every hand on the glass at once, and the glare off the ridge was hard and white. Gideon stood among two thousand strangers and turned the odd remainder over in his waistcoat pocket, a small warm weight with his name all over it.

At the bottom step a boy was selling hot chestnuts by the twist. Gideon bought six he didn’t want with the whole remainder and went aboard with nothing on him but grey. The chestnuts were burnt. He ate them anyway on the far bank, where nobody could say whose tin was whose.