Dusk had settled over Bellwether by the time Tomas and Nessa reached the West Bridge. The street lamps along the low roof wall were being lit by a city lamplighter with a long brass taper. Their yellow gas-jets cast warm, trembling circles of light across the damp flat stone slabs.
The bridge was crowded with the evening shift leaving the foundries and timber docks. Men in soot-stained canvas aprons, washerwomen with wicker baskets of dry linen balanced on their heads, and boys driving donkey carts laden with empty cabbage crates. It was the loud, plain life of the working wards, filled with the clatter of clogs on stone, the smell of fried river fish, and the banter of neighbors greeting each other after ten hours of labor.
Near the fourth pier. There, the bridge arched highest over the dark, swirling waters of the river, an overloaded hand-cart had come to a halt against the stone curb. Its single iron wheel had caught in a wide drainage joint. A massive hundred-and-twenty-pound sack of winter seed oats had shifted sideways across the wooden side-rails, threatening to tip the entire cart into the gutter.
A young porter, barely eighteen years old, was struggling desperately with the hemp binding ropes. His face was scarlet with hard effort, his thin wool smock soaked with sweat. His knees shook as he tried to lift the dead weight of the sack with his bare hands while holding the cart’s shafts steady with his hip.
