Again, his thoughts flitted back to the Pieters kids, and that there seemed to be a never-ending supply of mean boys and girls like lumps of dough, as if someone in the kitchen was making them, all alike, and then only baking them halfway. There were the four oldest boys, two girls married off, a couple more that did the teaching, and it seemed like a dozen small ’uns. Surely Cole’s wife didn’t litter them like kittens! Yet there they were, a horde of them, from the eldest that worked at cutting the sparklies to the youngest that bossed each other in endless and pointless games until the boys were put to work in the sorting house and the girls began learning household duties under the housekeeper’s watchful eye.

“Wonder why there’s so many Pieters,” he muttered, not realizing he had said it aloud until the kiddy next to him—Davey, almost sixteen, and still not crippled, not addlepated, and making no secret that he was leaving when the priest next came—laughed out loud. Davey was a good head taller than Mags, and like all the kiddies, he was so coated in dirt that it was hard to tell what his skin tone actually was. But his eyes were hard and cold and brown, like pebbles. His hair, matted, with bits of straw still in it, was hacked off short, as Mags’ was and, like Mags’, was dark, somewhere between brown and black.

“ ’Cuz ol’ man Cole can’t keep his hands off’n the housemaids,” the older boy guffawed. “An’ don’ it make the right-wise born ones hoppin’ mad! The boys, anyhow. Ever’ time one of them maids squirts out a kid, you kin tell, ’cause they look like thunder.”

Mags blinked, spotted a sparkle in the water, and fished out a bit of pale blue like a fingernail paring. “Huh? Why?”

“ ’Cuz ol’ man Cole likes t’ tell ’em, when he don’ like what they’re doin’, that he’ll leave the mine an’ all t’ the bastards if they don’ do what they’re told.” Davey snickered this time. “He got Jarrik t’ say he’d marry some ugly stick come spring thataway, instead of some pretty piece that don’t come with money. He wasn’t half hot about it, an’ I hear the girl had some things t’ say!”