The morning fog rose from the black mud of the river quays like steam from a cart driver’s kettle. It settled over the broad limestone steps of Saint Jude’s Cathedral in cold, clinging sheets. By the sixth hour of the morning, two hundred parish sextons, sixty parish priests in frayed woolen cassocks, and nearly two thousand commoners from the South Ward had packed the lower terrace. Their breath rose together in pale, ragged plumes against the dark granite facade.
For one hundred and eighty years, the High court of Crown-Reach had levied the infamous dead-house excise. A forced tax of fifteen silver coins on every corpse interred within the town walls. To a royal duke or a grain merchant, fifteen silver coins was the cost of a flagon of spiced Rhenish wine at an evening tavern. To a cart driver, a river lighterman, or a weaver’s widow whose husband had died of the loom-cough, it was three months of bread money. Those who couldn’t pay were turned away from consecrated soil. Their dead were hauled in night-carts to the lime pits beyond the North Gate, tipped into common trenches without a pine board, a prayer, or a carved marker to tell a child where a father’s bones lay rotting.
