Not, of course, that he’d had much choice in the matter. The son of a whore—the bastard son of a whore—could never rise far. He had learned both letters and figures as a child, and kept the books for his mother’s house, but such skills were useless to one of his station. No merchant would ever have trusted him to add up accounts. By the time he’d left the brothel, he was too old to apprentice in any lucrative trade. He could have given himself over to unskilled labor, and broken his back unloading ships or carrying goods to market for farmers too poor to own a cart. He thought he would not have lasted long at that business, though. He would have turned to drink, to soothe his sore muscles, and wasted that tiny pittance of money he earned.

He finished the last of his bread and got up again. He headed up a side street, a narrow, winding passage between two closes, piles of houses built around tiny, stinking courtyards full of livestock. He heard voices from all around him, snatches of conversation dripping from every window thrown open to catch a breath of air. Hundreds of people lived in the closes, pressed into a space the size of a rich man’s parlor. Some of the houses were six stories high. Imagine, he thought, to every day go down to the river to fetch water and bring it back up all those stairs. He saw in his mind’s eye an endless course of pails, sloshing and losing a bit of their contents with every step they climbed, a river of water moving up and down inside those tall houses every day. And every pail needed a poor blighter to carry it.

He shook his head and hurried up the street. His own room was in the next block over, above a waxchandler’s shop. The shop turned out candles, whole barrels full of them every day made of beef tallow that stank when it burned or more expensive and reliable beeswax. His room stank always of paraffin, and the stairs leading to it were used to store extra spools of wicking and blocks of rancid tallow. Still, the room at the top of those stairs was warm all winter from the heat of the wax kettles underneath, and he didn’t have to share with anyone else. He headed up the exterior stairs to his door and lifted the latch, thinking only of his bed. It was a simple mattress stuffed with straw and sagging in a frame of ropes. He wondered if he would care enough to tighten them before he climbed inside. He wondered how long he would stay awake once his head touched the scratchy sheets.