- The Shape of the Place
- Water, Air, and the Cost of Living in It
- Drink, Physic, and the Shabby Houses
- Very Few Houses of God
- Violence, and What Is Actually Tolerated
- The Burning Ground, and What a Family Buys Instead
- Where a Household Goes for a Favour
“The shape of it is that the ground falls to the river and everything that runs, runs down to us. That is the shape. A gentleman would say it differently and mean the same thing without noticing he had said it.”
The Shape of the Place
Sarrum has a spine and no centre, and whoever would understand the shape of the place must begin at the water. The spine is the Sarr. Along its eastern bank the Long Wharf runs for the better part of two miles, with the barge traffic tied up three and four abreast at the busy hours. Everything else has grown outward from the river in the order in which it was needed, and in no order a mind arranged. Nearest the wharf lie the Bonded Rows: warehousing, mostly of two storeys, brick and slate, long terraces with cart lanes between them and a guard at either end. No ground in the county is worth so much, nor watched so closely; and because the Rows are watched, the rest of the city is let alone. North of the Rows lies Enginemead, where the railway ends.
West of the water and landward of the wharf stands Black Stone, the oldest ground in the city and the smallest quarter in it: eleven streets of dark grey stone, low and plain, holding the offices of nearly everything that has an office. Beyond it lies Fleecegate, the wool quarter, which is the grading halls, the Weavers’ hall and the staple houses, and behind them the fulling and dye yards along Scour Lane. South of that the housing spreads, Ninefields, Hollowgate, Candlewick and Sweetwater, the last named before the works were built and kept in use because the inhabitants find it funny. Eastward, beyond a district of yards and small trades, the ground rises to the ash tips and the Cinders, where the coal spoil goes and where the poorest of the city live among it, in sheet metal rather than in brick. Past that is the Straggle, and past the Straggle the estate ring.
Of a ceremonial quarter or a processional way there is nothing. The council meets in the Mayoral Manor in Black Stone, which is a manor house and was somebody’s; the bank council meets in a private house; the two churches of any size stand at opposite ends of the town, and both are smaller than the Weavers’ hall. A Briton who looks for the seat of authority will find no building that announces one. The want is not modesty. Authority here is held by bodies rather than by places, so that every one of those bodies sits in a building put up for something else.
What the missing gate-books mean for the count is that nobody has one. Oxford knows to within a few hundred how many souls stand inside its liberty. Cambridge knows what has come through each of its gates for a century. Sarrum does not know its own population to the nearest tens of thousands, and has never once conducted a count; the council’s standing estimate of forty thousand is a figure the surgical houses arrived at from their own returns, not the city’s knowledge of itself but its surgeons’ knowledge of who comes to them hurt.
The city has grown outward at perhaps a hundred yards a year in every direction that is not river, and the growth is unplanned in the strictest sense, for no authority holds the power to plan it. New streets are laid out by whoever owns the ground, to whatever width suits him, and joined to whatever drainage there is, whence a street pattern that changes its character every few hundred yards, and a number of thoroughfares that simply stop. No adequate map has ever been made. Every carter in the county therefore carries the whole of it in his head, and nowhere else.
Water, Air, and the Cost of Living in It
“I have practised in this city eleven years. I can tell a man’s street from his lungs and his age from his teeth, and I am wrong about neither more than once a month.”
The river enters drinkable above the wharf and leaves lethal below Scour Lane, and the line between the two moves. Water for drinking therefore comes by conduit, and nothing in the county is so tender a matter as the conduits, which is why the first article of the Bill of 4551 concerns them and nothing else. The council keeps them; the hall bands guard them; and since 4551 they have not been cut for any cause whatever, repair included, so that two of them now stand in a condition the surgeons call scandalous. The water has never once stopped. Nor, for that very reason, has the worst of it ever been mended.
The air is the other standing cost, and the close week is where it is paid. Beneath the reckoning lies coal smoke, from the engine houses, the fulling coppers, the dye works and an uncounted spread of hearths, held down in a river valley with nowhere to go for some thirty days in the year. In those days the old and the young die at three times the ordinary rate. The city knows it, yet sets it against the wage, and bears it.
The city’s tolerance of its own condition is nowhere plainer than in what it does with its filth. Of general drainage it has none. The Rows and Enginemead are drained because cargo and machinery must be kept dry, Fleecegate because the trade requires it, and the housing districts wherever a neighbourhood has organised and paid for the work, and nowhere else. Roughly half the city therefore has some manner of covered drain, and the other half has the street; and from that comes a mortality the belt does not discuss and the Cambridge guarantor rooms have set down. A child born in Ninefields has substantially worse prospects than one born in a valley village, and considerably better than one born in the Cinders. Against this Sarrum offers work, sometimes food and a place to lie, and the certainty that nobody will ask a question. For those things people have come in a steady stream for a century, knowing the price or learning it.
The rooms began to set it down in 4588 A.C., and the reason does them credit. The Well Fever moved perhaps six hundred people out of Sarrum in a season, a great many of them Afflicted who had been living unrecorded in the Cinders. Cambridge took them, because Cambridge alone in the belt had the means to take anybody. The cost has never been recovered. The rooms have been short every year since, and have never asked the county to contribute, since to ask would be to say aloud how many came and from where.
The city’s true public places are the conduit cisterns, and they serve it for forums. A cistern is a stone tank under a roof with standing room about it, and at each a queue waits for the most part of the day. People meet there, hear the news there, and organise there. It is no accident that both risings began at a cistern, nor that the negotiation of 4551 was conducted within sight of one. The associations keep their notice boards at the cisterns. So, since 4560, does the council.
What the city does with its waste is a patchwork, and the patchwork explains the mortality. Night soil is carried off by contract in Fleecegate and the Rows, by subscription in the organised neighbourhoods, and in the Cinders not at all. Refuse goes to the tips. The slaughterhouses discharge to the river below Scour Lane under an agreement with the Fullers to which the council was not party. And the old burial grounds beyond the Cinders lie on rising ground above the eastern wells, which is the other thing 4588 was about.
The Well Fever began in the eastern quarters at the end of a dry autumn, when the wells were drawn low and the ground above them had been receiving the city’s dead for sixty years. It was smaller than 4543 A.C., the Halls’ figure being eleven hundred, and worse in one respect: it could be traced. Ellis Mow’s predecessor at Ninefields walked the eastern wells with a Cambridge physician and set down the connection in a report that has never been answered and never been disputed. The surgeons have added nothing to it in thirty-three years, nor needed to. The council answered it in 4590 by ceasing to add to the ground rather than by moving it, which was not what the report asked for, and was free. The nine acres already in the ground are there yet. They lie still above the water, and the wells are still drawn.
Drink, Physic, and the Shabby Houses
“We have four hundred licensed houses and I could not tell you how many that are not. We have two churches. A man who understands that proportion understands Sarrum, and a man who does not will be robbed inside the week.”
Sarrum drinks, and drinks in public. The public house is to this city what the close is to Oxford and the yard to Cambridge, the one institution wholly its own. Some four hundred houses are licensed and a large uncounted number are not: shabby, loud, open at hours that would shut a valley inn for good, many tied to a hall, gang, yard or neighbourhood. Hiring, petty credit, settlement of quarrels and news all pass through them. So does much of the cash that reaches the rubble. A worker with a few shillings after food and lodging is more likely to spend them on drink, powders, gambling, a hot meal, a room, sex or some other pleasure that ends before the next shift than to save them against a future he has little reason to trust. A Briton who wants work goes to a public house and not to an office.
Drugs are ordinary here as they are nowhere else in the belt. Opium and its preparations come up the river and through the railhead. The fulling and dye trades run on stimulants the guilds neither supply nor forbid, and the surgeons will tell anyone who asks that a third of their serious cases have something of the kind behind them. The council has never legislated, nor have the guilds ever wanted it legislated, since a workforce that manages its own exhaustion is cheaper than one that does not. Nobody in Sarrum says an uglier thing aloud, or a truer one.
Against all of that stands the surgery, the second article of the Bill and the only free medicine in Britannia. Four public surgical houses stand at Fleecegate, Ninefields, Hollowgate and the Cinders, paid for by a levy on the halls and the banks. Each keeps two surgeons, four dressers and a midwife, works from dawn to dark and through the night for accidents, and takes whoever presents in the order they present, a bleeding case alone going first, without fee and without question. They do not physic, nor can they, for the article specifies setting, cutting, stitching and delivery, so that a man with a wasting illness is sent away with sympathy and nothing else. The Ninefields house alone sees some nine thousand cases in a year. The four are staffed by people who could earn four times as much elsewhere, and who even so stay.
It stands in the Bill because of the Fleecegate Sickness. In the wet summer of 4543 a fever came up out of the fulling yards and went through the low city in eleven weeks, and the figure the Halls settled on afterwards, compiled as always from the burial returns, was four thousand one hundred. No physic ordinary Sarrum people could reach existed: the halls kept two physicians between them, the banks one, the estates withdrew to the ring and shut their gates, and the associations buried their own dead because there was nobody else to do it. Eight years later, with the cistern held and the days of negotiation under way, the associations came to the table with three demands, and the second was surgeries. Nobody at the Halls needed it explained.
The senior surgeon at Ninefields is Ellis Mow, the best-known medical man in the county, whose casebooks are the nearest thing Sarrum has to a public record of itself. He came from the Cambridge schools. He has refused three offers to return. His notes take a form he devised himself: street, trade, age, injury, outcome. Eleven years of them are the only evidence anybody possesses of what living here does to people. He has twice laid them before the council. He has twice been thanked.
Very Few Houses of God
“The chapitre hath sent us nyne men in fourty yeer and we have kept thre. It is nat that Sarrum wil nat here hem. It is that Sarrum wil nat feed hem, and a preest that must worke a shift is a preest the chapitre wil nat leve here.”
Two churches of any size serve a city whose official rolls acknowledge forty thousand locals and whose actual population may be three times that. The Church of the Hundred Virgins in Black Stone is the older, under Father Oswin Marr; Saint Eadric’s at the Fleecegate end is poorer, newer and served by Father Clement Dene. Neither can pretend to parish the ground around it in any ordinary sense. Oxford’s province contains one of its largest settlements and staffs it with two incumbents, eleven mission rooms and a proctor whose posting is generally understood as a punishment.
The causes lie in the bones of the thing and not in any simple hostility. A parish is endowed from land, and the city grew on ground that carried almost none; the tithe of wage-earners is thin where a valley village’s is substantial; and an incumbent sent to Sarrum is sent to poverty, overwork and congregations that keep the hours of the turns. Canon Martin Elwick, the present proctor, has two churches, eleven mission rooms he cannot meaningfully govern, the Black Lantern house at Fleecegate, and a standing instruction to report irregular practice which obeyed literally would consume his life. He arrived severe in 4614 and is now accused at Oxford of accommodation, which is the ordinary history of the office.
What the city has instead is chapel and mission: guild chapels in three halls, chaplains retained by several charter chapters, eleven mission rooms in the housing districts, and a considerable number of unlicensed congregations above public houses or inside company compounds. Sister Bridget Hale at Ninefields and Anne Dowsett in the Cinders possess more practical religious authority among the rubble than either incumbent, because they are present where the parish is not. Brother Anselm and the Black Lanterns occupy another category altogether. They are called when ground, bodies or workings become dangerous in ways nobody wishes to name, and their relation with the companies is paid, wary and old.
Where all this comes to ground is burial, and burial is the city’s quiet grievance and the thing its inhabitants care for most. Sarrum’s two churchyards were full a century ago; the two grounds beyond the Cinders that replaced them were closed in 4590; and since then the city has burnt its dead, all of them, every week of the year. The grievance is what matters. A family that wants a grave must buy carriage and ground in a county parish. Every family in Sarrum knows that its dead are laid irregularly by valley reckoning, and the valleys know it too; which is why a Sarrum man will not be lectured about religion by anybody, least of all by those who left him no churchyard to be regular in.
Godless the city is not, and whoever writes it so has mistaken it. It is unchurched, which is another condition altogether and breeds other conduct: a great deal of private devotion, a strong attachment to the few clergy who stay, an unusual respect for the mission women, and a settled conviction that the institution abandoned the place while the faith did not. The eleven mission rooms deserve more notice than the two churches, and do more; and the licence they hold has twice come near to being withdrawn over a rite said at a burning, a thing for which the chapter has no form and will write none.
What the chapter does keep in Sarrum is a proctor, and Oxford generally regards the office as a punishment. He has no cathedral, two incumbents, eleven mission rooms he cannot govern, a city that holds his authority to be theoretical, and a standing instruction to report upon irregular practice which, obeyed to the letter, would consume the whole of his life. Proctor after proctor has arrived determined and left accommodating. The chapter has ceased to remark on it.
Violence, and What Is Actually Tolerated
“The rule has never been written and every man in this city could recite it. Touch the Rows and you will be hanged. Touch the conduits and you will be hanged. Everything else is between you and your neighbours.”
By the standards of the belt Sarrum is violent; by those of the capital’s worse districts it is nothing remarkable. Assault is common, seldom prosecuted unless a guild interest is touched, and for the most part settled between neighbourhoods or between the parties. Murder is looked into seriously when the victim is anybody the halls or the banks care about, and perfunctorily when he is not, so that the worth of a life here is reckoned less by the life than by who will miss it.
What is enforced absolutely is a very short list, and about it the city is wholly clear. The Bonded Rows are inviolate. The conduits are inviolate. The railhead and the wharf gear are inviolate. To interfere with any of the three is capital, is prosecuted by the halls rather than by the council, and is dealt with quickly; beyond the list the city is policed lightly, unevenly, and for the most part by the neighbourhoods themselves. Both sides hold this for a bargain, and a bargain it is. The guilds and the banks require that goods be safe and carriage run, care little what happens in Hollowgate on a Saturday night, and have concluded over a century that a light hand on the second buys them the first. The inhabitants have concluded that a city which does not much govern them is a city that does not much interfere with them either. A great many came to Sarrum for precisely that.
Twice the bargain has broken, both times over water and both times catastrophically. The second breaking produced the Bill and fixed the council’s real purpose: keep conduits, burning, surgery and enough common order functioning that the city does not stop. Local constables take bodies and complaints; hired outside men collect assessments and clear serious obstruction. Neither force is large enough, or intended, to police the rubble as an ordinary town would.
What fills the gap is settlement between the parties, and settlement is the law the county is known by. A killing in Hollowgate is far likelier to end first in a payment negotiated by two associations than in the hands of the assize. That payment settles retaliation, burial cost, household obligation, and the peace of the street; it does not pardon murder if Crown or assize officers later take the case, and a proved murder remains a hanging matter. The halls settle between members, the neighbourhoods between households. The council settles nothing, and writes down what it is told. This is not the absence of law but another kind of it, older than the guilds and considerably older than the Bill, and those who conduct it hold it to be perfectly proper, whatever the assize may think.
The Burning Ground, and What a Family Buys Instead
“Eleven hundred and forty last year and I can weigh you every one of them. The council has never asked me for the figure. The surgeon asks me for it twice a year and pays for the copying himself.”
Sarrum burns its dead, all of them, always, and has done since 4590. Three furnaces stand east of the tips beyond the closed grounds, under a contract the council has renewed at seven-year intervals for thirty years, and everything the city dies of goes to them. What shocks a visitor is not the burning but the manner of it. Half the parishes he has ever lived in have burnt somebody, for the reasons that are the same everywhere in Britannia, and he knows it. He has not seen the thing done in the open, on a contract, by weight, at a gate with a yard and a bench, by a woman who keeps a book of it, with the heat sold to pay for the doing; nor a city in which nobody has ever once proposed that any of this is a thing to be ashamed of.
The decision of 4590 is regularly told wrong, and the council regularly credited with more invention than it showed, for the report that produced it was an engineer’s. Nothing about burning had to be argued. Every alderman at that table had known since childhood what burning was for; several of them had buried nobody in a bad year; and the practice was already ordinary in the pit villages the city draws its people from. To move nine acres of unmarked pits would have cost more than the town has ever spent on anything. The one novel thing the council did was to make burning municipal, permanent and contracted, and it could do so only because the fuel paid.
The heat is the whole of the arrangement, and nothing about it is ornament. The furnaces raise steam for the Cinders conduit pumping engine and for a drying floor the dye works pay by the season to use. The city’s dead therefore pump the city’s water. Nobody in Sarrum has ever said that sentence aloud, and it is nevertheless the plain description of the plant. Nobody arranged it as a figure of speech. It is simply the only shape in which the council could be brought to adopt anything at all, which is to say a shape that pays.
A family gets the burning for nothing, and with the burning it gets a gate, a yard, a bench and whatever office can be had. The mission women say a great deal of it, since the chapter has no form for the occasion and has twice declined to write one. A family that wants a grave must buy carriage out of the city and ground in a county parish, and the grave is worth wanting for reasons that have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with what the rite is. The two come to about thirty shillings. That is what the association burial funds now pay for; the funds kept the old name, and Hester Quill has remarked that a burial fund which buys no burial is the most honest thing in her book, since it says what it is for and not what it does.
The weighing book is the consequence nobody intended, and it is the most valuable muniment in the county, its value coming precisely from the openness. A burning anywhere else in Britannia leaves no record of any kind, which is what a practice nobody will admit to must always leave; hence the one city that burns without concealment is the one place in the realm where the burnt are counted. Frane is paid by the load and sets down every load, with a weight, a date and a district, and asks no name, because the contract does not require one and the districts would not give one. On that book Ellis Mow’s estimate of the population is built. A city that recorded its dead badly for four hundred years while it buried them has recorded them exactly for thirty because they became worth something. The woman who holds the only reliable figure Sarrum possesses has never been asked to sit on anything.
The chapter has never approved any of it, nor was ever going to, having condemned burning everywhere for four hundred years without stopping it anywhere. The council did not ask. The proctor reported the practice to Oxford in 4591 and has never been answered. The valleys’ objection is not the one an outsider expects, for they burn too, quietly, when the ground has proved bad. They hold against Sarrum that it burns openly, for money, without shame, and without ever having had the decency to call it a failure. A Sarrum man’s answer is that the chapter did not endow him a churchyard and may not now instruct him what to do for want of one. The grievance is a century old.
The one body qualified to object on principle does not object, and its silence is the only evidence anybody has. In thirty years the Black Lantern house has attended the burning ground twice. It has attended the closed nine acres four times. Brother Anselm has never been drawn on the comparison, and the suppression book records both figures without a word of gloss on either.
Where a Household Goes for a Favour
“They come because a child is bad, or a man is not coming back from a shift right, or the luck has gone out of a street. It is the asking that is the whole business, and there is nowhere else in this city to do it.”
A city with two churches for well over a hundred thousand probable souls wants what people everywhere want. The parish cannot supply it. The want is easier to set down than the supply: what a household asks for, where it carries the asking, what it pays, and what it will take for an answer.
The thing asked for is remarkably constant, and Bridget Hale keeps the record of it. A sick child. A safe delivery. A man’s return from his turn. A blessing on a new room, asked oftener in the metal streets than anywhere else, for the reason the metal streets give, that a wall which can be sold is not a wall anybody trusts. The lifting of what a family calls a run of bad luck, and describes in terms that leave no doubt they mean something has settled on the house. And, four or five times in a year in every room, that somebody be got out of the ground beyond the tips.
The spring comes first, and is not thought of as a favour at all, which is itself worth the noticing. A household with a sick child fetches its quart before it does anything else, and nobody can account for the water. Beyond that, where the asking goes depends on what a household can afford and how frightened it is. The mission rooms take everything and charge nothing, which is why eleven rooms serve a city with two churches. The two incumbents do what the rite provides and are asked less often, partly for distance, and mostly because a family that has been to the parish twice in its life does not go a third time about a sick child. Below both lies a small unlicensed trade in charms, waters and written papers. Above all of them lies the county.
For anything serious the county is the answer, and everybody knows it. A household with a real fright and eleven shillings will send somebody four days out to a valley parish with a shrine that answers, or to a Lady, if it can find one that will see a stranger from Sarrum, which is not certain. The thing the valleys keep costs a stranger more than it costs them. The thing that matters is that the traffic exists, is constant, is invisible to the chapter, and runs wholly one way, from the industrial city outward into the devout country it is supposed to be corrupting.
The part a visitor gets wrong is what counts as an answer, for Sarrum applies to a favour the same measure it applies to everything else. Nobody here expects a wonder, nor is impressed by one. The thing looked for is that the thing asked about stops: the child mends, the man comes home, the street’s luck turns, the room settles. A family that gets that will say the room answered and will not enquire how; a family that does not will go somewhere else next time, without a word against anybody. What is paid is nothing. The two orders take no fee for anything. They receive instead what keeps eleven rooms open in a city that will not endow a parish: the districts feed them, mend their roofs, watch their doors, and would turn out in numbers for them. Everybody concerned understands that this is a better arrangement than a tithe, and one neither the chapter nor the council could match.
A company should understand that this is the door it will be asked to come in by. Nobody in Sarrum commissions a company about a haunting, because no body here commissions anything of the kind, and that shapes the work to be had more than anything else in the city. Instead, a mission woman who has written the same complaint in her room book eleven times mentions it to somebody she trusts. Every unseen matter a company is offered here arrives by that road, and no other. Bridget Hale’s room book is therefore where a company that means to work in Sarrum should begin.