The St. Jude’s Almshouse sat on the low spit of land where the coal canal met the estuary, a squat, single-story barracks of damp dark rock blocks that smelled of boiled turnips, wet flannel, and the rotten-egg coal smoke from the nearby smithies. Outside, the tide was ebbing slowly across the mudflats, leaving hundreds of rotting timber wooden support posts exposed like the broken teeth of an underwater monster, while flock after flock of grey harbor gulls picked through the sour sludge for dead eels.
Inside the communal ward, twelve elderly men sat on narrow rope beds. They were wrapped in grey wool charity blankets that had been washed until the nap was worn down to coarse string. In the far corner, beside a cast-iron potbelly stove that threw off very little heat and a great deal of greasy soot, sat Renn Vos.
He was eighty-two years old, with skin like cured ox-hide and hands so twisted by sixty years of hauling wet hemp cables that his fingers remained curled into permanent hooks. He was scraping a plug of black twist tobacco into a chipped clay pipe with the blade of an oyster knife when Pella, Eren. Auditor Nenn walked across the damp stone floor. Across the bench from him, two other retired harbor wagon drivers—Joram and old Tom, both well past seventy—were silently mending a split wicker eel trap with tarred hemp twine, their blunt wooden netting shuttles clicking rhythmically in the dim light.
