The Three Wheels

The Three Wheels stands on the Enginemead side of Sarrum, a plain public house with smoke-dark rafters and long benches worn pale where men lean their elbows. It has no hiring hall above it and no register behind the bar, for Sarrum keeps neither. What it has is Tuesday. On that morning, by a custom older than anyone drinking there, the Three Wheels is where the engine trades take on their men.

Every working man in the city carries the same calendar in his head: Monday means the Barrow, Tuesday means the Three Wheels, and the Fleece yard serves whenever the wharf wants hands. A newcomer who learns it is seldom idle for long, and one who does not may stand about the quays for a fortnight and never be chosen. So by six on a Tuesday the rooms are full of fitters, stokers and engine hands in their working coats, and of foremen with a pint in front of them and a number in their heads, wanting half a dozen men by Thursday. A man hired by eight is reckoned to have had a good morning. The regulars say a Tuesday at the Wheels is worth a week of asking at gates.

Because so many engine men pass through, the house hears every rumour the works produce, and lately it has heard one above all. For four Tuesdays in a row the Three Wheels has been certain that Saint Aldwyn's will shut down the second of its green-coal engine houses by Christmas and put three hundred men out of work. The works office says nothing either way, and since Michaelmas Works Director Rafe Holloway has twice gone up to London, which the benches take as proof. Older drinkers remind the room that the very same tale went round in 4616 and nobody lost his place.

Still, the sum is talked over at every table. Seven shillings a week for each of three hundred men comes to more than a hundred pounds gone from the district every week, and the associations have begun counting what that would mean for the streets. Until the matter is settled one way or the other, the Three Wheels will go on hiring on Tuesdays and worrying on every other day.