Free Chains by A. J. Hartley Page A

was all the boys in the gang. Though I was still three months shy of my seventeenth birthday, I had been a steeplejack for more than five years and had learned a good deal about architecture and construction. Apart from Tanish, who treated everything I said as profound, my crewmates found my curiosity about such things comical. Another indicator, if any were needed, that I did not belong among them.
    To me, each stage of the bridge was a step toward a glittering new order. But after the great caissons had been opened up in the riverbed and the main pilings had been erected three years ago, the work had slowed to a trickle. Now the two main towers were in place—though they had yet to receive their stone cladding—and the great chains from which the bridge itself would hang had been rigged and stretched to their desired tension, dragged into place by great steam-driven engines built into the anchorages at each end. Great mechanical cranes, floated in on barges and moored in place, loomed over the river like vast, ponderous herons, dipping and rising, rising and dipping. At that moment, where the bridge would be, only a rickety catwalk of planks and cables connected the towers, dangling precariously from the great chains overhead. It was hard to believe that the thing would ever be the primary railway route between the city to the northwest and the docks to the southeast.
    Right now the problem was the chains. The original architect had wanted steel cable, but Malden and Company—headed by Sir William Defarge—had decided that massive chain links would bear more weight and were cheaper to produce.
    They also rusted.
    As the project dragged on, the incomplete bridge—standing skeletal and forlorn a mile from where the Kalihm met the sea, a monument to various kinds of mismanagement and yet to bear so much as a single wagon of coal—was starting to fall apart. With each passing week the great chains corroded and flaked till it seemed impossible that the great towers would ever be more than the perches for fish eagles.
    That was where I came in. Not just me, of course, but Tanish and the whole Seventh Street gang as well as the Sidings boys and the East Spires crew. Half of the steeplejacks in the city had been conscripted to sand and paint every colossal link before lasting damage was done.
    To me it was more than a wage. I was proud to be a part of so noble a project, which was perhaps why I got on with my painting with a dedication unknown among my workmates. When I felt the wind pick up I doubled my efforts, determined to finish my section of the chain, because that was my job, and I always did my job. Every day I was the first in position and the last to leave when the rain got too heavy. There were days when I painted twice as much as some of the boys. Morlak, our gang leader who usually presided over my work on the chimneys and tall buildings of the city, always claimed not to notice the speed and quality of my efforts, but this was not Morlak’s project. He had merely hired me and the rest of the gang out, and other people were watching. Closely, as it turned out.
    I clambered down to refill my can. I was paint streaked, my arms and shoulders trembling from the exertion of the work. In my exhaustion, I almost collided with the white foreman standing beside a man in a heavy coat whose face was shaded by a massive black umbrella. Under the foreman’s appraising gaze, I felt myself shrinking, muscles tightening in case he was going to strike me. The umbrella shuddered, collapsed, and folded. Sir William Defarge emerged from under it, scowling at the raindrops which spattered his highly polished shoes.
    A tide of panic flowed through me. He was a big man in his sixties with a pouchy pink face and side whiskers so wild and full that they were almost a mane.
    â€œYou are Anglet Sutonga,” said the foreman, a blunt, hard-faced man. I had never heard him speak below a shout before. He made my