Eventually he left the tenements and crooked, foul streets and penetrated into places where the streets were clean and kept clean by people whose only job was to sweep them. The transition was amazing to him, and even more amazing was that there were single families that lived in buildings that would serve to house a dozen or more families in his area. He didn’t even try to venture onto those streets; there were all sorts of people there whose only job was to keep people like him out.

Now he went to the alleys, slinking from bit of cover to bit of cover. There was plenty of cover here; permanent rubbish bins where ashes, broken crockery, bits of wood, scraps from food preparation too small or too spoiled for anyone from these houses to consider useful were left for the rubbish collectors. This was where the wood—and possibly some of the foodstuffs—bought by Uncle Londer came from. Skif knew better than to rummage in those bins; they “belonged” to the rubbish collectors who guarded their territories jealously, with curses, kicks, and blows. But the rubbish collectors didn’t care who they saw in their alleys so long as he left the bins alone, and they ignored Skif as if he was invisible. Sometimes there were other things left back here as well, usually weeds, bags of dead plants and leaves, sticks and trimmings from gardens. It all made places for a small boy like Skif to hide. These alleys were faced by blank walls that rose well above Skif’s head, but not all of those walls were as impervious as they seemed.

He had skipped over three or four social strata now; he’d known better than to look for a mark among people like Dolly’s parents or the small merchants. Such folk feared to lose what they’d built up and were as penurious in their way as his uncle; they didn’t share what they had, and when they caught someone trying to get a bit for himself, punished him with fury. No, when Skif decided that he was going to help himself to the bounty of others, he knew he’d need to find someone who had so much that he couldn’t keep track of it all, and so many servants that it wasn’t possible even for them to do so.

The drawback was that in such a rich household, there were privileges that were jealously guarded, and as he knew very well, even those things that the owner thought were refuse had value. The cook and her staff all had the rights to such things as fat skimmed from the cooking, the burned or otherwise “spoiled” bits, and “broken meats”—which last were cooked leftover items that had been cut into or served from without actually having been on someone’s plate. Depending on the household, unless such items were designated to go to the poor, the cook and helpers could sell such items from the back door, or give them to relatives who were less well-provided-for, or a combination of all of these things. “Scrapings”—the leftovers scraped from plates into a slop bucket by the dishwashers—belonged to the dishwashers in some households, or were fed to household animals in others, and again could be sold or carried off, if not fed to animals. Stale bread and cake were the provenance of the pastry cook, sometimes a different entity from the head cook, who had the same options.