第6章 Fifty Cubic Feet of Standing Water

Sook's room was above a chandler's shop, and the stair up to it went through the shop, which meant everybody in the building came through the shop whether they wanted to or not. "There is no other stair," she said. "I did not build this room. A man with more stairs than sense built it in 1840 and I have been living off the mistake for thirty years." There was a stove with a cracked fire door. There were jars along the wall with the labels gone off, and Ryam counted eleven of them and could not have told a man what was in a tenth. She was sixty and small and she put her thumb into the first jar without looking and brought up something the colour of wet ash. "Take your sleeve off," she said. "Hold your arm up to the window. No — up to the window. I cannot read a forearm in this light and I am not going to make a mess of it because I cannot read it." Ryam held his arm up and she walked round him twice. "Six hundred and forty," she said. "The scar's fresh. Clean work. Somebody used a good knife." She put her thumb on his wrist under the band. "And the skin has gone the colour of a duck's egg right round it, which it did not do when you were twelve. That means somebody has been sitting on you." "Nine hours a week for the coming to." "Nine hours a week for a man to come up a stair and look at her and write down that he looked at her." She let go of his arm. "Do you want to know what is actually in the pot I give her? Because it is not a secret and it is not medicine, and if you are paying nine a week for it you ought to be able to say what it is." "Go on." "Dock leaf. Goose fat. Salt off the wharf at Saltgrave, and I buy the salt across the counter so that you can tell your physician what he is charging you for. That is the whole pot." She set the jar down. "Now you know. And I would thank you not to go up to the ward physician and tell him, because he is a fool, and a careful fool, and you cannot afford a careful fool. You can only afford a careless one." "Then what do I do with the other five?" "Keep them. That is what they are for." She put her hands into her apron. "I have watched people come in here with their five hours and spend them in a fortnight on a bad week, and then come back a year later with nothing and a cough that has gone down into the belly. And the belly is where it stops being a cough." She wrapped the poultice in a cloth and put it in his arms. "How many people in this ward are living off a week of good decisions they made when they were twenty-five?" "Nobody," Sook said. "Nobody at all. It is the most reliable thing I know, and I have never once been able to say it out loud in the room on the ground floor with the table and the chair." There were fifty cubic feet of standing water in the cellars off Cinderbell Row that winter, and it had to go somewhere before the frost. Ropewalk had drained. The coal wharf had drained. The yards drained last, which was not an accident of geography but a matter of who owned the money, and Halbeck is built on a slope, and the south ward is the bottom of the slope. So the water went into the yards by shovel, on a Thursday, for nothing, by whoever was in the ward and needed the hours. On the sixth Thursday a journeyman named Ede came down with a gang of four, a pick, a chain of buckets and a pump, and began building a brick sump in the corner of the yard. "He cannot build it," Coll said. "It is not in any schedule. There is no hour set against it." "He is not being paid to build it," Ryam said. "He is being paid for the hour he would have spent carrying buckets, and he is spending that hour on a sump, and the water goes in the sump, and by the end of the winter the water has cost him nothing and the ward has cost nothing and every man has been paid exactly what he would have been paid if there had been no water at all." "That is not in the schedule either." "No." Ryam watched the man lay the second course of brick by hand in the cold. "That is the part I am trying to get you to look at before I have worked out how to say it." Coll was quiet a while. Then he said the thing he had been carrying since the cellars. "They will make him pay it back." "They will make him pay for it out of his band. Two hundred hours, more or less, off a man who never had two hundred hours to spare. And he will not appeal it, because there is nobody to appeal it to." Ryam set his shoulder under the corner of the yard wall. "Take that end. And do not let go when I count. Whatever happens to your arms, do not let go." Coll took the end. They moved the wall four inches over four hours, which is two inches an hour for a man who can hold a bar, and four for a man who cannot. When the corner was down they stood in the cold with their hands hanging and looked at the new course of brick. "There," Ryam said. "That will still be here at Newyear." "And so will the water." "No. The water's in it now. That is the whole trick of the thing and nobody wrote it down." He wiped his hands on his coat. "Go home. I have to go and be a man with a mother." "After you." "No." Ryam took his band out of his sleeve and looked at the number on it in the grey light, six hundred and forty, and then he put it back under the cloth where nobody in a yard could see it. "After you. That is an order, and I am a journeyman and I am giving it." She went through to the back and Ryam stood in the room with the bowl in his hands. The boy on the trestle opened his eyes. He was about twelve, thin, with the band on his arm too thin to see from this side. "That's Coll's cousin," Sook said from the back. "Coll Tumm's mother is my cousin's sister, so Coll's my cousin, so he gets four hours too and he doesn't have to hear about it." "Is he the only one?" "There's always one." She came back in with a jar. "There's always one in this ward sitting on the edge of the account, and nobody in the building can afford to push them off the edge and nobody above the building can afford to notice that they're there. It is the exact shape of this city and you will not find it written down anywhere." "How do you pay for it?" "With hours, same as everybody. I do the poultices and the births and the washes and the deaths, and people bring me food and coal and occasionally money, which I treat as a joke." She pushed the jar at him. "Take that. Honey and spirits. Half a thimble at night in water, not a spoon. If your mother's cough turns wet this month, come back, and tell me straight, don't sit outside deciding whether you can afford it." "Why do you tell me straight?" "Because you came in here with a new band and a plan, and you have the look of a man who is going to spend himself on something in about four months." She held the door open. "I'd rather see the money spent early. I've watched too many people wait until they can't." ---