The shift from the heavy-duty mud of Tram Ward to the lower terrace of High District was a stone-built lesson in country hierarchy.
Here, the streets were not paved with crushed fire melted rock waste or rotten timber corduroy. They were laid in tightly fitted blocks of dark stone, swept clean of coal dust by town labor gangs and bordered by cut-granite gutters. The overhead copper lamps were mounted on fluted cast-iron standards six paces apart. It burned with a rich, emerald-trimmed radiance fed by high-pressure kerosene lines that bypassed the ration meters of the poor. Every sixty paces, a polished copper reflector directed a beam of intense, shadowless light down the side alleys. That got rid of the dark pockets where a claimant could pool.
Len, Ivara, and Bram kept to the narrow service lane behind the High District terrace, moving beneath the overhanging stone props of the town granaries where the reflectors couldn’t reach.
The contrast between this manicured enclosure and the starving wards below tasted like ash in Len’s mouth. In the tram sheds, forty families shared three peat stoves, scraping frost from turnip rinds and nursing children whose coughs rattled with bitter salt fibrosis. Here, five hundred paces up the slope, brass carriage scrapers were polished daily. The warm, fatty scent of roast mutton drifted from the air-flow grates of the judges’ mess halls. It was an island of artificial peace kept by the systematic cannibalization of everything down-valley.
