The rain that had battered Bellwether all night had eased into a heavy, freezing mist by midday, clinging to the soot-stained brick walls of Tanners’ Row like wet soot. Outside the Reed family washhouse, the cobblestones were packed with an unmoving, silent crowd.
They didn’t carry torches or banners. Working people in Low Bellwether had no money for cloth or oil. They came wearing what they had. Patched wool coats, oilskin smocks stiff with dried machine animal fat, and heavy leather aprons scorched by molten iron. Many walked with carved ash-wood crutches. Others had sleeves pinned neatly to their chests or wore black linen patches over ruined eye sockets.
They were the three hundred casters, molders, and crane-tenders of Blast Furnace Number Four. The men who had poured the iron that built the bridges and railways of the kingdom, and who had been paid for their shattered bodies in yellowed slips of company scrip.
Tomas Reed stood upon the bed of an upturned heavy cart-wagon in the washhouse yard. Beside him stood his father, Emmet Reed. He leaned heavily upon his carved willow crutch. His weathered hands held the wooden ledger box containing the original muster rolls of Year 021.
