Cinder Row

East of Sarrum, on the ash tips that make the highest and poorest ground in the city, lie the Cinders, a district of streets roofed and walled in sheet iron. Cinder Row is the longest of them, running along the foot of the tips where the grey spoil slides down to meet the doors. Wind off the ash fills every crack, and the iron walls tick and groan as the day warms and cools.

The street keeps its own custom over lodging, the reverse of the respectable houses elsewhere. Widow Agnes Brearley lets floors here by the week at two shillings and sixpence, and no rules are painted inside her doors. She asks a newcomer's name once, does not write it down, and the extra sixpence above the usual rate is understood to buy exactly that forgetting. Rent goes into her tin on Saturday; a lodger who misses a Saturday will find his bundle outside the door come Monday. Nobody fetches the watch to her house, and a lodger who does fetch it goes away with it.

No one on the Row pretends that the floors truly belong to anyone. The keeper of the Tip House and one of the city's collectors have quarrelled over these rooms for years, and on rent day the collector's men walk the street with hired escort. The saying on the ash is that a room is owned by whoever happens to be standing in it.

A stranger with honest business is advised to call first at Mistress Anne Dowsett's mission, the one fixed point in the Cinders, and only then to walk the Row. Lodgers who prosper here are those who pay on the day and have noticed nothing.