Breadspotting

Historical fiction, set in the East End of London in 1856, in which a gang of delivery drivers for a family owned bakery take on a big firm moving into the area with bad bread and strong-arm tactics.

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As the sun approached, the traffic rose, and with it the pong. One living in London becomes inured to the manure, so to speak, but on warm, wet days, the collective stink from thousands of cart horses, backyard pigs, loose dogs, and more humans in one space than is really healthy can bring tears to the eyes of the most hardened Whitechapel slum dweller. Nathaniel Femster exited the Underground station, and as the coal-smoke rolled away and he put distance between himself and the train, he regretted his hurry to get away from the choking fumes. Which was worse, to drown in coal-smut or smother in dung?

"Here!" He held out a penny to a passing girl with a basket of greenery over her arm. "Whatever you've got with a strong scent!"

The girl, a slip of a thing who couldn't have been more than twelve, skinny, growth stunted from an intermittent diet, smiled, keeping her lips closed as the poor knew their teeth both marked their social class and repelled the upper classes who had the ready coin for their goods. She held up the basket, a great wicker thing nearly the size of her torso, straining to keep it aloft with her right hand only, while with her left she deftly snared a posy and brought it up to view.

"Mint and lavender, and calendulia, that'll do it!" she chirped, mouth safely hidden behind the basket handle.

Femster took the proffered plants, dropped the penny into the girl's waiting palm, and strode away without another glance for her, burying his nose in the bit of greenery and stepping quickly to be away from the station before a cab could find a puddle. There was always a puddle in Bethnal Green, but rarely of water.

He paused at the far side of the street, stepping off to the side in the shadow of a cast iron column with a clock atop (he had a minute, he noted), and checked his shoes. Good, he'd gotten across the street without picking up anything he'd need cleaned off before going into the bakery. Keep to the inside of the pavement the rest of the way and he could, God willing, save a penny and not have to pay one of the urchins with the bootblack's kits that hung about the front entrances of the factories.

Around the corner, a hard glare at the newsboy who stood in his way shaming the child into stepping closer to the street, and he was almost to the haven of Stickney and Putnam's Industrial Bakery, Affordable Bread for the Masses. Sad, really, that he thought of this three story fortress of sooty brick and coalsmut-darkened windows as any kind of welcoming. It fronted directly onto the lane like the rest of the factories along Gossett Street, staff and customer entrance where the upper crust could alight from their cabs and carriages and gain the door without fear of detritus.

Femster detoured around a pile of horse-dung some idiot had shoveled onto the walkway instead of into the gutter, closer to the road than he would have liked, flinched back as a cart rumbled past full of empty beer kegs returning to the brewery down at the other end of the street. A bump in the road, a loose cobble sticking up or more like some hard lump of garbage not yet pounded flat by horse's hooves, and a spray of stale beer flicked out, just the tail end of the droplets landing across Nathaniel's jacket. He swore a round oath, glanced about to make sure nobody from Management had heard it, and dabbed ineffectually at the mess with his pocket handkerchief as he hurried into the shelter of the vestibule.

As he entered the building, he took a roll from the tray to his right, and nodded to the elderly woman monitoring it, making sure the managers took one and the labourers didn't. Rather than biting into it, he slipped the lump of hard-baked wheat into his coat pocket, as many did. Later, his would go to the pigeons at a nearby park, when he went out to get his lunch at a neighborhood slap-bang. Stickney's bread was edible and cheap, but that was really all that could be said for it. Just because he made dog food didn't mean he had to eat it. And dash it all, somewhere along the line he'd dropped the posy, that would have looked nice in the bud vase on his desk, and he was out a penny for it.

Regretfully, he dropped the handkerchief, a good five pence of fabric, into the bin by the tray. It had, hopefully, the worst of the beer on it, and he had to get rid of the smell. Management knew there were beer wagons going by, and people got splashed sometimes, but they wouldn't take that as an excuse for coming in smelling of beer first thing in the morning. No, the Spiders wouldn't accept that at all, sour dried-up old ...

"Oy!" Big Tony's cheerful hail interrupted his mental tirade.

Femster nodded to him, and walked on a few steps to get past the timeclock (he didn't punch in, he was a manager, he signed a book upstairs) and the line waiting for it. Producing a key, he opened a door on the left, before the big double doors at the end of the passage that let into the two-story factory floor, and let Big Tony through it and up the steps beyond before following and making sure the door closed behind him.

They halted at the first landing, Femster going past Big Tony and up two more steps to put him above the other man's eye level. Big Tony came to a halt with a bit of difficulty, nearly bouncing up and down on his toes like a child on Christmas Morning. He grinned up at his boss, eyes still a little manic from the earlier action.

"You should of seen it, boss. The Bappers'll be takin' us a 'ole lot more serious now!"

Nathaniel's eyes narrowed. This sounded far too enthusiastic. "Tony." He stated the name, flat and low. "What did you do?"

The tone warned Big Tony that he was moving onto dangerous ground, but he was still far too buoyed by his successful violence to realize the ground had already begun to crumble beneath his feet.

"I broke his bloody leg, is what I did! You said to stomp'im, and when I stomped didn't it make the most amazing noise, an' he did too!" His gleeful grin twitched, lost the joy, became the simpering smile of a dog hoping to please its master.

No such luck. "You bloody moron." Nathaniel raised a hand to his forehead, closed his eyes, tried to massage away a pain that wasn't physical.

The grin fell away entirely. "What?" Big Tony protested. "I did what you said, I stomped'im, and the lot of us, we held off the Bappers and left'em for the Peelers."

"The police got involved." Nathaniel's tone grew dangerous.

Big Tony knew he was out past the edge, now, but lying would only make it worse. He went for minimization. "We heard'em whistlin' and runnin' toward us, so we scarpered. They didn't see owt of us, just the Bappers."

Nathaniel sighed. "The good news is that the Bappers won't give a useful description to the Peelers. The bad news is that you've drawn blood, and you know the Bappers won't take that quietly."

"Let'em come," Tony blustered, puffing up a bit with arrogance and bravado.

This time Nathaniel looked up, looked Tony straight in the eye. "You're a moron," he explained patiently. "I don't give a rat's arse about them trying to slit your throat in the night, but this could make the papers, or draw the Peelers, or both. That's a reputational hit that Stickney and Putnam's wasn't ready to take."

He straightened up, realizing he'd been literally leaning into the tirade. Looming over Big Tony a bit seemed to have finally taken the wind out of the man's sails, at least. Tony's shoulders slumped, his gaze redirected to his boots, and he shuffled a foot as if he'd really like to take a step back.

"I have to go tell the Spiders you idiots crossed the line and started a war," Nathaniel went on, no longer patient, now scolding, "and they're going to peel the hide off of me in strips for it. You fools, you and your lot, make yourselves scarce for a couple of days. Go work on the loading dock like it says on your pay packet slip. I have to think about how I'm going to present this." Anger and fatigue fought over who had more weight here.

Tony slumped round, upset at being dismissed, still confused over where he'd gone wrong, but glad for the chance to get away from something that had gone entirely not like he had expected. Nathaniel watched him go, waited until the door had clicked shut behind him, then went on up the stairs like a man trudging up to the gallows.

At the top, he signed the book, putting the exact time he was supposed to be there rather than when he actually arrived, as everyone did. Management knew full well the times were the purest fiction. Nathaniel had figured out that what the Spiders were looking for was the daily attendance to the required ritual. He ran the blotter over his signature, set it and the pen aside, capped the ink-well, and headed for his office, thinking of the gin-flask in the bottom drawer. He already smelled like stale beer, might as well be shot for a sheep as a lamb.