Before sunrise the lane still breathed in bread and wet stone. The first bell of St. Magnus drifted through mist, soft as a handkerchief waved from a window. Eliza Hart stood in the doorway of her father’s little shop, scraping soot from the iron pot where tallow had cooled overnight. A film of white fat broke like thin ice under her knife and curled against the blade. The smell clung to her sleeves no matter how hard she scrubbed. She tied back her hair with a strip of blue linen and grinned at the cat dozing under the counter.
“Mind you don’t singe your whiskers, Mister Flint,” she said. The cat blinked once, unbothered. From the loft came her father’s cough, a hollow sound that made the floorboards tremble.
The summer had been dry. Rain teased in streaks on the horizon and never reached the roofs. Dust lay in thin furrows on the window glass; when Eliza dragged her fingers across it, the grooves showed like writing. She set the kettle over a small blue flame, the kind that promised steady heat, and laid out cotton wicks tied in long ladders. Each knotted rung was counted. A good candle burned clean and didn’t smoke. Her father had taught her that before his breath failed and his hands began to shake.
He eased himself down the stairs now, a thin man in a threadbare shirt, leaning into the bannister as if the wood would share its strength. “You’re early,” he said. “Bells haven’t reached six.”
“I want to take a bundle to St. Michael’s before the clerk changes his mind,” Eliza replied. “He said he’d pay if we could spare a dozen tapers for the christening.”
“You can’t live on promises.” He smiled with one side of his mouth and coughed again. “Nor can you stand in front of the Wardmote and be heard, not with Alderman Cricklow sitting like a fat hen on every petition.”
Eliza’s jaw tightened. She had argued in the spring for the right to keep the shop in her name, should her father’s cough carry him past doctors and broths. The Candlemakers’ Company men had shuffled papers and cleared throats. Cricklow had pressed his ring into the wax seal as if to mark it forever. Petition denied. “He can sit on his own hat for all I care,” she muttered. “People need light. They do not ask the sex of the hands that make it.”
Outside on Pudding Lane a baker’s boy trotted past with a pail. He tipped his cap at Eliza and would have kept going, but she lifted a small loaf from yesterday’s delivery and pressed it into his hands. “For your mother,” she said. He blushed, bobbed a bow, and darted away. Bread, tallow, soap, the river’s tide—all the rhythms that kept the city together beat on in their quiet way. The day smelled of yeast and promise, of limestone warmed by the first rays and old rope kept coiled by doors. Eliza touched the window latch, then looked up toward the strip of pale sky and whispered, as she often did before work, “Keep my father’s breath steady. Keep the flame true.”