Джо Аберкромби - A Little Hatred - Book One (The Age of Madness)

‘How long do they work here?’ she croaked out, over the hand she had unconsciously pressed across her mouth.

‘Shifts are fourteen hours. Any longer has proved unsustainable.’

She had boasted of her toughness, but a few moments in there was enough to make Savine feel dizzy, and she clutched at the rail. Fourteen hours’ hard labour in that dust and noise, day after day. And hot as the Maker’s forge, as her father liked to say. She could already feel the sweat tickling at her scalp beneath her wig. ‘Why is it so hot?’

‘Any cooler and the yarn becomes sticky, the machines can be fouled.’

She wondered if so much wilful human misery had ever been created in one space before. She put a hand on Vallimir’s shoulder. ‘When it comes to business, profit is the only right. Loss the only wrong.’

‘Of course.’

Something told Savine they both had their doubts. But she could blame him, the bloodless bastard, and he could blame her, the flint-hearted bitch, and no doubt the profits would lubricate any grinding gears in both their consciences. If they did not make efficiencies, after all, there would always be some other owner whose stomach had been strengthened by failure. Would their workers weep for them when they went out of business? Or would they rush to find some new employer to whine their petty grievances at?

‘Well done,’ she shouted in Vallimir’s ear, though her voice sounded somewhat strangled. The heat, of course, and the noise, and the dust. ‘I asked you to make a profit and you have done so, regardless of sentiment.’

‘Sentiment is even more dangerous in a mill owner than a soldier.’

They were cooking something somewhere, and Savine caught a whiff of it. Like the food they gave her mother’s dogs on the estate. She pressed one hand to her still-aching stomach, but hardly felt it through the bones of her corset. She wondered about her button and buckle manufactory in Holsthorm, where little fingers were best suited to little tasks. Was it like this? Was it worse? She licked her lips, swallowed sour spit.

‘You might consider improving their conditions, however. Perhaps some separate living quarters could be constructed in the yard? Somewhere clean for them to sleep. Better food.’

Vallimir raised one brow.

‘Luxury is wasteful,’ said Savine, ‘but hardship can reduce productivity. In my experience, there is a balance to be struck. With better conditions, you might manage longer shifts after all.’

‘An interesting suggestion, Lady Savine.’ Vallimir nodded slowly as he looked down at the children, jaw-muscles working. It should have been a heartbreaking spectacle. But there is no room in business for hearts. Not ones easily broken, anyway.

She hitched up the corners of her smile. ‘If I might look over the books now?’

A great frame occupied the middle of the first and largest shed, a spinning shaft through its centre that brought power from the river, via an engineer’s nightmare of cogs, gears, cranks, belts, to the great looms that ran in two rows along the floor. A web of thread was reeled in from giant spindles, cloth of different patterns and colours grinding off the rollers. Around the looms the men were gathered, sweat-beaded and grease-smeared, tight-lipped and hard-eyed. If the occupants of the third shed had been apt to break her heart, she imagined the occupants of the first would rather smash her skull.

Savine did not expect affection from the workers. She had made her reputation from flagrant displays of wealth, after all, and those tended to sit badly with the poor. But there was something about the way these particular men watched her. A cold, quiet focus to their fury more troubling than any outburst. Rather than too many guards, she began to wonder whether they had brought too few.

She touched Lisbit gently on the elbow. ‘Would you mind stepping outside and bringing the carriage to the gate?’

The heat had turned Lisbit’s rosy cheeks an angry, blotchy red. ‘Sure we shouldn’t leave now, my lady?’ she muttered, worried eyes darting to the workers.

Savine kept blandly smiling. A lady of taste always smiles. ‘Better not to show weakness. To our employees or our partners.’ She was not a woman to be deterred by hatred: not from her workers, not from her rivals, not from the men she bullied, bribed or blackmailed to get her way. It is when they truly hate you, after all, that you know you have won. So she met the seething dislike with effortless superiority, paraded past with her shoulders back and chin high. If she was to be cast as the villain, so be it. They were always the most interesting characters anyway.

Vallimir’s office was at the very end of the shed, a kind of box up on a frame with barrels and crates stacked haphazardly beneath, a balcony outside from which an owner might look down upon their employees like a king upon his subjects. Or an empress upon her slaves.

The colonel bowed stiffly as he offered her the way up. ‘Take as long as you need.’ He turned to frown at the scores of sullen workmen. ‘Though perhaps no longer.’

The door was fitted with two locks and a heavy bar, so sturdy it was an effort for Savine to swing it shut. She tore open the hook at the collar of her jacket, trying to flap some air onto her sweaty neck, but the atmosphere in the office was hardly less stifling than on the manufactory floor, the nerve-shredding chatter of the machines hardly less oppressive.

A loose board groaned under her boot as she made her way to Vallimir’s desk and its cargo of ledgers. She hated to see anything shoddily made, especially in a building she had helped pay for, but at that moment she had larger worries. She slipped past the desk to the window, one hand rubbing at her throat where the worry had become an almost painful pressure.

The street outside was deserted. All at work, of course, and what but work would bring anyone to this lane of spiked walls and barred gates, of towering mills and rumbling machinery? Yet there was something wrong about the quiet. A weight on the air, like the calm before a thunderstorm. Savine frowned out at the empty lane, biting at her lip, wondering if she could leave now without—

A man slipped around the brick corner of the next mill. Others followed, a group of twenty or more. Working men in colourless clothes, much like the ones Savine had seen in Holsthorm, in Adua, in all the cities of the Union. Much like the ones at work below, but moving furtively, as if they were one animal with one purpose.

Then she caught a glint of bright steel and became aware, with a strange shiver, that they were all armed. Some carried sticks beside their legs, some heavy tools. The leader had what was quite clearly an old sword. He knocked at a gate in the wall; it swung open as if by prior arrangement and the men rushed inside.

She spun around at a shout from the shed behind her, then more, and louder. A commotion even over the roar of the engines. She crept to the door, put a tentative hand to the latch, wanting to open it, fearing to open it.

‘Back!’ she heard Vallimir roar as she eased it open. ‘Back, damn you!’

The workers had abandoned their tasks and crowded towards that end of the mill, a solid mass of men all facing her, faces twisted with anger, tools, iron bars and stones gripped in their fists. Her jaw dropped.

Vallimir’s guards were holding them back in a desperate crescent at the bottom of the steps but they were outnumbered twenty-to-one. Savine’s eyes darted in horror over that ugly swarm. That mob.

Vallimir stood facing them on the balcony, the back of his neck turning red as he bellowed at them. ‘Step away at once !’

A man in a stained vest whose arms looked like they were made from old rope pointed at Vallimir with a club and screamed, ‘ You step away, you old fucker!’