“The gap between rich and poor has never been wider. The chasm has never yawned so deep! But one woman dares to bridge the divide!” Sworbreck gave a delighted cackle. “Bridge the divide, that’s lovely. She, like few others among the wealthy and noble, goes forth among the people. She, like few others, understands their plight!”
Savine did understand it. But if she truly went to a place of honesty, all she really felt was glad she was no longer one of these wretched ghosts. All she really wanted was to get back to her palatial rooms and her conscientious servants as soon as possible. That familiar smell of sweat, piss, damp and rot, mixed with the acrid scratch of the furnaces, was hard to ignore as they worked their way deeper into the gloomy maze of streets. Strange, how smells can bring memories back so sharply. She realised she had her box of pearl dust in her hand. Forced herself to push it back up her sleeve. She was free. She was safe. She told herself so, over and over.
“Calm, calm, calm—”
“These buildings…” Leo gazed up at the slumping offences against architecture crowding over them, blooms of green damp flaring from their leaking gutters.
“The land is short-leased so it isn’t worth the landlords’ while to build well, or to repair what’s built badly. The houses fall apart with the families inside.” Who would know better than Savine? She owned dozens of similar buildings herself.
“Why no window frames?”
“The tenants tear them out in the cold months and burn them for firewood.”
“By the dead…”
Behind them, Sworbreck scratched on in his notebook. “We speak, of course, of none other than Her Grace—and grace is the right word, dear friends—Savine dan Brock! Wife to the Young Lion! Bride, maybe?”
“Bride is youthful,” said Carmee Groom, plucking out one of the pencils shoved through her shambolic bun and causing half of it to collapse across her face. “Bride bursts with potential.”
“Bride of the Young Lion and the new Lady Governor of Angland!”
They had made it to the very heart of the slum, an unpaved square with stagnant water gathered in puddles, thick with scum and blooms of multicoloured oil. A strange building stood at one side, an ancient low house with a sagging, moss-covered roof.
“What is that?” asked Leo.
“One of the three farms,” said Savine, “that stood here before the city swallowed them.”
“Hard to imagine anything ever grew here…”
One pig screamed at another as they fought in a mound of filth. Someone shouted drunken abuse in a tongue she did not recognise. A cheap flute tooted hopelessly, blending with the mindless music of steam hammers in a foundry across the way.
Zuri waited with Haroon and Rabik and two of Broad’s men. She had gathered a queue of the most wretched, a lot of dark faces among them. Refugees from the collapse of the Empire of Gurkhul, seeking safety and sanity and finding little of either.
“Thank you, Zuri.” Savine swallowed her nausea. “You’ve done a miraculous job, as always.”
“I fear there are no miracles down here.” Zuri frowned towards the procession of the desperate. It reminded Savine of the queues she had stood in for one of the few working pumps in Valbeck. The long walk back with the heavy buckets bruising her calves, water slopping at her legs, the unbearable aching in her shoulders with every step.
“Calm, calm, fucking calm…”
Rabik watchfully held her purse while she took coins from it and pressed them into filthy, calloused, broken hands. Hands missing fingers and thumbs from mishaps at machinery. Hands of beggars, children, whores and thieves.
With Haroon’s help, Leo was handing out loaves from a cart, clapping people on the back, shaking his head at their thanks, throwing open his brimming heart and spraying well-wishes. Savine said nothing. She was worried if she opened her mouth she might drown the neighbourhood in spew.
“As Lady Brock moves through those darkened streets, it is as if a lamp shines. No, a beacon! Lighting the way to a better life for these neglected unfortunates. As if the sun breaks through the smoke of the manufactories. She gives out bread, yes, she gives out comfort, surely, she gives out silver with an open hand, but more valuable than all, she gives out hope.”
“Very nice,” murmured Carmee Groom, eyes flickering over the scene as she pinned her hair back up with a clip from her drawing board and began to sketch.
“Isn’t it!” said Sworbreck. “All shrouded in secrecy, though, we must make that point. We have stumbled upon her anonymous generosity! She would blush to hear it spoken of. For she is the personification of humility… or modesty? Modesty or humility?”
“Why not both?”
“Is this what Valbeck was like?” Leo muttered at Savine.
“Before the uprising, maybe. Then it got worse. We picked through the dung heaps for something we could eat.”
“What can we do for them? I should’ve brought my purse. Never use the bloody thing.”
He really did have a big heart. It made her strangely glad to know that someone did. A big heart, but not the biggest brain. Help to these people was a coin tossed in a pool. It might make a few ripples, but they would quickly vanish as though they had never been. The bread would be gone in one swallow. The money would be wasted on drink and husk, a moment of sweet oblivion. Perhaps, at best, some tatty heirloom temporarily reclaimed from the pawn shop.
“Who, on account of her charity… no, selflessness… on account of her remarkable charity and selflessness, has become known among the common folk of Adua, as, hmmmm…”
A little urchin with a scabby rash across her face gazed up as Savine pressed a coin into her palm. She felt crushed, like a swineherd being smothered by hungry pigs. “Do you need much more?” she snapped.
“Almost there,” said Carmee Groom, freckled face wrinkled with concentration as she drew.
“Benefactor?” mused Sworbreck. “The benefactor of the Three Farms?”
“Too cold.”
Savine flinched at a shower of sparks from an open shed door. She felt trapped in this stinking gloom. She felt almost as trapped as she had in Valbeck. She had to get out.
“The… saint?” Sworbreck raised his brows high. “Of the hovels?”
“Too religious. We’re not in Gurkhul.”
“No, we are very much in the slums of Adua…”
That girl with the rashy face had caught Savine’s skirts. Clutching at the only kindness that had ever been shown her, perhaps, no matter how much of a sham it was. Leo was watching with tears in his eyes. If they stayed much longer, he would probably adopt the little limpet. Savine’s greasy skin was crawling. She wanted nothing more than to kick the girl off into the gutter. Forced herself by a towering effort of will to keep the smile nailed to her face as Rabik tried to gently peel her dirty hands away.
“How about…” Carmee Groom narrowed her eyes at the scene, scratching thoughtfully at the side of her nose with her pencil. “The darling… of the slums.”
“Oh, my dear.” Sworbreck looked up wide-eyed from Carmee’s paper to Savine, holding up his hands as though framing a painting with her as its subject, that desperate orphan clinging to her feet. “You should be a writer!”