Star Hill

East of Eastgate, where the last lamps of the High Street give out, the Hulkham road starts to climb, and that climb is Star Hill. It is Old Green's good address. The men who have done well out of the river and the dockyard live along it: officers of the yard, factors, and shipwrights who have risen far enough to want a view of the Medway rather than the smell of it. North of the hill the cathedral's old walled vineyard, the Vines, lies under grass and elms, and on summer evenings the hill's households stroll down to it to watch the sculling.

Nowhere in the town are rooms dearer. A poor room in Troy Town goes for two and three a week; nobody on Star Hill will let one for less than five shillings, and most ask more. Madam Phoebe Norgate's house of pleasure, known by its green door and the brass lamp beside it, is handsome and expensive, and its callers are yard officers, attorneys in town for the sessions and gentlemen killing an hour before a coach; and by an understanding nobody ever set on paper it closes for sessions week. Further along, a pensioned yard surveyor, Mr Ezra Pollexfen, gives over a whole room to what the river has handed back, dredged engine parts, ruin-glass, coins and bones, and a visitor rash enough to praise one piece will be walked past forty more.

The talk of the hill this past year has been its door marks. Through nine years Doctor Felix Waddilove, a charming man and the best partner at the assemblies, marked doors up the hill and down the slope toward the Hard, charging eight shillings a mark as any honest bench would and three pounds for a sealed ward, and showing for his authority a London licence number copied out of a shop book. Then in 4620 the mark over one Star Hill door failed entirely. Wardwright Cecil Amory, fetched down from London to look at it, told the company in the Ship and Shears that the cutter had plainly never been bench-taught, and by Michaelmas the Collegium had an information laid against the doctor. The doctor has not been seen on the Hard since. Eleven households now sleep under marks they no longer trust; a licensed cutter will recut each for eight shillings, and all eleven mean to have their money back from somebody. Old Green expects Waddilove to return some night to finish the Hulkham store door he left open, and more than one householder on the hill sits up later than he used to.