Coal-Men Left Waiting

Edda Pike set the loan purse on the Foundry’s pay-table at the Kilnrows, and Brannoch Vell did not open it. Below the window the coal-men stood in the yard with their caps in their fists. They were owed since midsummer, and they had come up the hill the moment the Foundry’s bell rang.

The link had come in fat with nothing in it to love: three grey bands, hundreds of identical hoods apiece, and somewhere among them one hand passing two hundred and eighteen coins to another without a word to anybody. The oil was a drop and a fifth a span. Cheap for the Throng, and near enough nothing for the House. The gift was all the light there was.

“The coal-men want the arrears,” Edda said. “That’s what Faull’s money was for, on the paper.”

“On the paper it was for keeping the Foundry lit.” Vell nodded across the terrace toward Spider’s chimney, where two of Thornmere’s stokers were leaning on the wall and watching his floor. “Coal-men will wait. They’ve nowhere else to sell coal. Stokers have Spider, and Spider has an empty purse.”

He untied the cord and counted out a week’s wages for two, then for four. Edda wrote each sum down in her plain clerk’s hand. In the yard the coal-men watched her pen move and understood it wasn’t moving for them.

“Tell the yard next Book,” Vell said. Then he went out onto the terrace to wave the Spider stokers over.