Reblogged from raconteur and poet extraordinaire, Tallis Steelyard:

Old ‘Ordan’ was dead. It had to happen sooner or later, and in his case, he’d have said, the later the better. But now it had happened.

I’d known him for a few years, an old man who limped a bit. He’d been a seaman until he had a fall from a yard. He lived purely because he’d missed the deck and hit the water because the ship was heeling in the right direction. He limped because he celebrated his escape from death so enthusiastically that he fell through an open hatch and broke his leg. Still, as everybody said, he’d had a good innings.

When he came back from the sea he’d taken to the vocation of ‘shore-comber.’ Each day he’d go out onto the estuary with his mud flange slung from his belt and pattie turner over his shoulder. He wasn’t as successful as some but he was more successful than others.

Off the estuary he was a fund of good stories about times past, drank sensibly, his drinks mainly paid for by those listening, and managed to keep a roof over the head of both himself and his wife. Admittedly it was not much of a roof, their rented house had two rooms, but it was weatherproof and snug enough. But now he’d gone. I had sat beside his bed in those last hours, listening to his laboured breathing and making sure his wife didn’t slip into widowhood on her own.

So what now? His wife was going to go and live with her daughter and son-in-law, and all that remained to do was to sell their few sticks of furniture. I looked around the two rooms and it seemed to show a poor return on a lifetime of hard work.

We wrapped ‘Ordan’ in his shroud and she gave the man who came to collect it for the boat the vintenar needed. Spending that one small silver coin left her purse with nothing but a lot of copper. I looked at her effects. “So when is the sale?”

“I’ve got old Yass Tileforth to drop by and we’ll have a sale in six days time.”

I knew Yass, his was a small business with small margins. He had no auction room, merely a handcart and a crate. He’d park his handcart outside the house, stand on the crate and auction off the contents as the family carried them out through the door. Occasionally if something seemed too cheap he’d buy it himself and it’d go on the handcart. I suspect he made as much reselling those things as he did from his commission.

“You go off with your daughter now, I’ll take care of things until the sale and then Yass will drop round with the money. There’s nothing here for you now.”

She left with her daughter, carrying a small bundle of clothes and wearing the thin silver ring that Ordan had given her more years ago than I’d care to remember. I looked around the room. There wasn’t much to work with but it was probably enough. His old sea chest still stood there under the bed. There was even a key in the lock. When I opened it, there was nothing but a few strangely shaped stones he’d picked up on beaches in his travels. I left; leaving the door locked behind me and went to the barge to collect some bits and pieces. I took these back to Ordan’s house and set to work. By noon I’d finished and made my way to the Misanthropes Hall.

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