A short flight of stairs brought Malden up to the high street, where he bought a day-old loaf and three gulps of wine ladled out of a barrel. It was better fare than he often ate, but he was hungry enough to spend the extra coin. He picked apart the bread as he wended his way up the street, careful not to step in anything that might ruin his newly clean shoes. The houses here leaned over the roadway, their upper stories built out so far they were nearly touching. Even in the midday the shadows were thick under the eaves. He sat for a while on a horse trough to finish the meal, and watched the comings and goings of his neighbors.

The people of the Stink dressed plainly, and few among them had clean faces—in fact, most bore the pockmarks of long-healed disease, or other signs of bad diet and unsanitary living. None of them could read or write, and by the age of twenty-five even the most comely of girls looked old and stooped.

“ ’Ware below,” someone shouted from above his head, and a cobbler’s apprentice in the street had to dodge a cascade of garbage and filth poured out a second floor window. His leap sent him sprawling into a sawyer and they both went down in a heap, the woodchopper’s load of firewood spilling out onto the cobbles. The man pulled the boy’s ears for that, and demanded that he help pick up the wood, but the boy merely made a rude gesture and hurried on. Across the street a goodwife stepped out into her dooryard, her face flushed from the heat in her kitchen. She fanned herself with her apron for a moment, then hobbled back inside and back to her endless tasks. She had to work constantly to feed her family, and to have enough left over to sell so she and her husband could make the rent.

These people were miserable, and their lives meant nothing. Malden had never felt like one of them, even if he lived among them. And yet he wondered, as he often did, what his life could have been had he tried to be an honest man.