William Monk 15 - Dark Assassin

and hot pies. They were obliged to slip out over the gutter onto the cobbles to pass them, and were nearly run down by a cartload of vegetables pulled by a horse whose breath was steam in the air.
    At the corner half a dozen men huddled around a brazier, talking and laughing, tin mugs of tea in their hands.
    “Not sure as I like so much change,” Sutton said dubiously. “Still, can’t be ’elped.”
    Hester did not argue. They had only a few yards further to go before she saw the vast crater of the new tunnel. It would carry not only the sewer but beside it the gas pipes for the houses that had such luxuries. Skeletons of woodwork for cranes and derricks poked above it like fingers at the sky. There was a faint noise from far within of grinding and crushing, scraping, slithering, and the occasional shouts and the rattle of wheels.
    Hester stood on the freezing earth and felt the freshening wind from the tide on the river, with its smell of salt and sewage. She turned to her left and saw the roofs of houses in the near distance, and closer, the broken walls where they had been flattened to make way for the new works. To the right it was the same, streets cut in half as if they had been chopped by a giant axe. She looked at Sutton and saw the pity in his face, as well as the fury he was trying to suppress. To build the new they had broken so much of the old.
    “Keep close and don’t meet no one’s eyes,” he said quietly. “We’ll just walk through like we got business. There’s ’em as knows me.” And he led the way, making a path through the rubble and keeping wide of the groups of men. Every now and again he put out his hand to steady her, and she was grateful for it because the rubble was crumbling and icy. Snoot trotted along at their heels.
    There was a thick fence around the actual pit in which the men worked, possibly to keep out the idle and to prevent the careless from falling in.
    “Got ter go round the end there.” Sutton pointed and then led her through a shifting, slithering wasteland of debris. The line of pipes was easy enough to trace with the eye by the wreckage that lay in its path. Twice they were stopped and questioned as to who they were and if they had any business there, but Sutton answered for them both.
    She kept silent and followed him patiently. At last—her feet sore and her boots and skirt splattered—she reached the point below which the men were actually working by flares at the face of the tunnel. The earth was excavated deeper than she had expected. She was close to the edge of the drop, and a feeling of vertigo overcame her for a moment as she stared down almost a hundred feet to the brickworks at the bottom of the abyss. She could quite clearly see the floor of what would be the new sewer, and the arching brick sides already laid and cemented. There was scaffolding over it holding the walls apart all the way up. Here and there other pipes crossed it. Fifty yards away, well on the other side, a steam engine hissed and thumped, driving the chains that held heavy buckets and scoops to draw up and empty the rubble and broken brick.
    She turned and met Sutton’s eyes. He pointed down to where she could see men below, foreshortened to funny little movements of hands and shoulders. They walked, pushing barrows. Others swung pikes or heaved on shovels of soil and rock.
    “Look.” Sutton directed her eyes towards the walls on the far side. The earth itself was held firm by planks of heavy wood, supported by crossbeams every few yards. Then she followed Sutton’s gaze and saw the water seeping through—just a dribble here and there, or a bulge in the wood where the boards had been strained and were coming away.
    On the bank opposite, stokers were keeping the great steam engine going. She could hear the wheeze and thump of its pistons and smell the steam, the oil.
    She was aware of Sutton watching her. She tried to imagine what it would be like to work down in that cleft in the earth, seeing nothing but a slit of sky above you and knowing you couldn’t get out.
    “Where’s the way up?” she asked almost involuntarily.
    “ ’Alf a mile away,” he answered quietly. “All right ter walk ter, if yer in no ’urry. Nasty if yer need ter move quickish—like if ’em sides spring a leak.”
    “A leak? You mean a stream…or something? You don’t mean just rain?” The picture of that bulging wall giving way filled her mind—a jet of water gushing out, not just