The morning whistle of the South Foundry District didn’t sound like a church bell or a watch horn. It was a screaming, steam-driven shriek that tore through the freezing river fog at five o’clock, followed instantly by the deep, rhythmic THUD-HISS of the Grand Steam Hammer striking its first forging metal bar of the day.
Tomas Reed stood with Nessa Vale on the greasy cobblestones of Foundry Lane, fifty paces from the North Gate of Blast Furnace Number Four.
The gate was a huge barrier of heavy, riveted iron plates, twelve feet high, hung from massive stone pillars of rough-dressed dark rock. The top of the iron wooden wall was crowned with rows of jagged, triangle-cut melted rock waste teeth. Brittle, glassy black glass spikes cast from fire waste that would tear a man’s hands to ribbons if he tried to scale the outer edge.
Through the iron turnstile, the inside yard was a landscape of fire and ash.
Huge brick stoves, sixty feet tall and banded in forged iron hoops, towered over the casting sheds like the castle walls of a castle. From the top of the fire stacks, great tongues of orange and violet flame roared into the low gray clouds, lighting up the swirling sleet with an angry, unnatural glare. Below, across the black dirt floor of the yard, gangs of fifty men in soot-blackened leather aprons and wooden clogs hauled carts of coke and ironstone toward the skip-hoists. Their breath rose in ragged white clouds against…
