Entering the forge had been an assault on the senses. Noise and heat and an alien odour competing with the smell of burning coal, a metallic tang like the taste of a bitten tongue. The far wall was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling metal cylinder being fed coal by two shovel-wielding men in rolled-up shirtsleeves, their forearms muscular and blackened by dirt. Halfway down the long room, a burly man manipulated a series of pulleys to fasten the handle of a bucket to a massive iron hook. Not five feet from where he stood, boiling metal was being poured into crucibles, sweat pouring down the faces of the men handling arm-length ladles.

Fred set him on the job of hauling back the furnace door to allow molten steel to be ladled out to transfer into the casts, where, Fred explained, it would cool until the metal was supple enough to be shaped into knife blades. The molten steel was orange in the furnace, brightening to yellow as it was poured into the crucibles.

At snap time, he’d sat with the men watching them open their tuck boxes, hungrily, his landlady’s feast a distant memory. Fred had shared with him a piece of bread and a wedge of cheese and another man had thrown to him a hardened chunk of salted ham that was the best he’d ever tasted.

Now, exhausted, the sound of the scrape of a shovel came to him as the hiss of a snake. He wondered if the bucket catching water at the foot of his bed would be full to the brim by morning, whether he could sneak Shandy into the attic, if tomorrow he would share another evening meal with pretty Louisa Leigh—

‘Ey, ey ey!’

He jerked awake. Fred Sharrow, his bald head shining with sweat, had a painful grip of Silas’s shoulder.

‘Go on, lad, see yonder? That door? Out tha goes, get a bit of fresh air in tha lungs. Tha’s dead on thee feet and a splash o’ this stuff… well, it’ll open tha flesh to the bone.’

‘I’m right, sorry.’ Silas was chastened.

He stumbled away and through the side door Fred had indicated. It opened onto a narrow strip of ground alongside the river. In the distance, a pair of slim black fingers pointed like sentinels in the sky. Chimney stacks, the smoke they were belching yellowed by the light of the moon. He slid down the wall to rest on his haunches, inhaling the sulphurous air, so foreign to the smells he’d grown up with, the odour of slurry and scent of hedges heavy with pollen which irritated his nose. He was satisfied he’d made the right decision. Why else would he have had such a run of good luck if it was not fate that placed him here, in this spot, bone-tired and elated? It was meant to be.

Silas tipped his head back against the cold brick. It had stopped raining.

In the black sky, the moon hung silent and still.