Free Light of the Diddicoy by Eamon Loingsigh

known chiefly as the bloodculler of Columbia Street’s bulkhead. My stomach makes a curling sound and I am overcome with a terrible cramp in my bowel. Reynolds looks at me again, then steadies himself.
    The Swede leans over us and looks out the window, his attention caught by a gaggle of brown trenchcoated men accumulating around a two-horse dray that stops out front, mingling among the crowd below.
    â€œEverybody get away from the window.” The Swede breaks the reserve.
    The widow refuses to acknowledge, the mother shrieks knowingly, Maher takes a pan from the kitchen and puts it over his head while peering down street level, Meehan gently pushes the sisters toward the foot of the coffin in the middle of the room.
    â€œFour o’ ya come wit’ me, rest stay here,” The Swede says and instead of naming his followers, points to each as they shoulder toward the kitchen door.
    â€œJust a broken shoe,” I whisper to Vincent Maher.
    â€œWhad ya say? Kid, whad ya say?” Meehan answers for Maher.
    Shaken by the room’s attention, I look down.
    â€œSay it, what did you say?”
    â€œI . . . heard it coming up here, broken shoe on the horse. Like glass, I heard it on the cobbles before we come up.”
    Dinny Meehan walks over to me with his eyebrows pushed down, interested. “How you know it’s broke? Was it broke when you walked past?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    â€œDid ya hear it break?”
    â€œI didn’t, but . . .”
    â€œGo look then, go look out the window,” he says, rushing me over.
    â€œIs it broke?” Vincent Maher asks.
    â€œLooks so . . . it is. It shattered off the hoof. I can see it did.
    That man has another shoe hanging out of his back pocket. Hoof knife and pincers too. He’s a horsefarrier,” I say looking back.
    â€œNot a gangman?”
    â€œI . . . I don’t know that, but I can tell you he’s no blacksmith, that’s for sure.”
    Dinny Meehan turns to Maher, “Tell ’em all to come back up. It’s nothin’.”
    â€œYeah,” Maher agrees and shoulders around the mother and crowd toward the door, then thumps down the stairs.
    Meehan puts his hands in his pockets, looks me over. His handsome face built around the pose of a chieftain’s stolid stance. Under dark brown brows and hairline, his green eyes shone like archaic stones in the window room’s dull shine.
    â€œYou from Ireland?”
    I nod.
    â€œFarm boy?”
    Nod.
    â€œHow do you get stronger shoes? So they don’ break so easy?”
    I shrug. The room had lost interest and some of the men itch their faces nervously while the widow stares out the window. Her tiny daughter stands between her and the coffin with uncombed hair partially covering her eyes, ears stuck out of the light blond strings like a gnome with pursed, wet lips and large eyes. She seems smaller than a normal five-year-old.
    â€œG’on, say it,” Meehan presses, putting his full attention on me.
    I look around but only Meehan’s face waits. “Well, to break down the iron ore you have to smelt off the rock and slag to keep the iron. Flux it,” I gulp.
    â€œLike potash?”
    â€œPotash is a flux, it is. Or charcoal even. So, you have to scrape off the gangue or turn it to gas in the heat. Then you have to forge it. Bend it to your need when it turns orange but if there’s too much carbon in it, it won’t bend . . . too brittle. It’ll just snap off, doesn’t connect to anything either but you can cut away the iron in the shape of a shoe or if you have a mold. It’s lesser quality and it makes bad shoes, especially cobble-walkers like you have here. Muscular perch-erons have too much weight for bad shoes. You need wrought for them, cast iron won’t make it. Sounds like glass on the pavestones, that’s what I heard downstairs.”
    Dinny Meehan watches me speak. Not so much to listen to what I