The new canvas awning in front of the Red Vein Relief Society took up nearly half the street. Its roof had been blackened by coal smoke and its four corners were tied to wall nails and salvaged wooden posts, so that every gust set it slapping dully.
The injured from yesterday's factory clash had not all been dealt with yet. One man sat against the wall with a bandage seeping through at his forehead, eyes shut, breathing hard. Another had his trouser leg cut away above the knee while several Red Vein workers knelt half down on the ground to see to the wound.
Two stretchers lay across the entrance, the work clothes on the men stuck over with coal dust and blood, their breathing heavy enough to hear from several paces off.
All of them were workers hurt in the clash during yesterday's march over wages.
Viola had been walking ahead. When she saw one man's arm hanging out over the side of a stretcher at an unnatural angle her step visibly slowed.
She looked away quickly, as though her only objection were that the entrance was too crowded, gathered her skirts and went in along the other side. Elaine still noticed that her gloved hand never let go of the edge of her skirt, and that when they passed a basin of bloody water and cloth scraps her body leaned instinctively towards Elaine's side.
Inside, the clinic was in worse disorder than the street. Herbs, spirit, sweat and blood all together, and on the stove near the back courtyard a great pot of bandages boiled, white steam rolling continuously over the rim.
The benches for waiting had long been full and later arrivals could only stand against the wall, with lunch tins and mining lamps and old tools carried out of the factory heaped at their feet.
Viola looked at the stains left on the seat of a bench and chose to stand after all. She raised a hand to straighten her cuff, her expression no different from usual, except that she never touched the wall or the edge of a table again.
Two workers near the window were waiting for their dressings to be changed, one with an arm slung across his chest, the other with a thick round of bandage at the knee.
"So, I heard from the foreman the wages are coming through tomorrow."
"Is that right? Then what about the ones who got hurt yesterday?"
The two were plainly just passing the time. Elaine turned an ear towards them.
"They're compensating for that too. Said it'll all be settled together in a few days. From what the foreman says, House Roland fronted the money."
The worker let out an obvious breath of relief and leaned back against the wall.
"House Roland, whoever they are. Never mind. Makes no difference who takes over, so long as the wages come out."
House Roland... That was the family of Elaine's betrothed. As for whatever remained of House White's affairs, she did not know much about it.
The outstanding debts and the rest of the family's dead weight were something she had not yet had time to put in order.
With her body turned into this, she was probably not Elaine White any longer in any case.
The pair moved on to when work would resume and what came after it, and by the end were even having a go at House White.
Standing there listening, Elaine felt distinctly awkward.
She remembered now. Back before House White had gone entirely bankrupt, the family had held several perpetually loss-making factories in the Lower City that nobody had been willing to take on, and plots of land whose management fees never stopped.
Hearing these workers talk about yesterday's march, hearing them mention Roland and then get their digs in at House White, Elaine had a fair idea that these were the workers from House White's own factories...
And she remembered clearly enough. Those factories had run at a loss for as long as she could recall, and had not paid wages in several months.
That was not blackheartedness on Elaine's part. She had simply had no money left to give.
The workers had even stripped machinery out of the factories to sell. What she had not expected was that House Roland would put up the money.
The man by the window finished speaking, checked the bandage on his knee again, and only once he was sure it had not started bleeding through did he pick up the water at his feet, long since gone cold, and take a mouthful. The other braced himself on the bench and got up to work some stiffness out of his shoulder, pulled at the wound doing it, and swore a few times with a hand against the wall.
Then the pair of them heard the relief workers announcing that food was ready, and went off leaning on each other to collect their meals.
Watching them go, Elaine felt thoroughly gloomy.
House Roland's willingness to front wages and injury compensation was very obviously not an act of pure charity. She could not claim to understand Elvira completely, but she did not believe the woman would do it for the sake of some old affection... No, wrong. There had never been any old affection between her and Elvira in the first place.
Which made it even less likely that they would take on House White's wreckage out of sentiment.
She turned her face and looked out through the misted window at the street. There were still surveyors from the city hall driving stakes along the wall, and further off, fresh white lines had been painted on the outside of several old houses.
The notices about widening roads, moving out old works and relaying pipes that she had seen coming into Arosa began to connect up in her head.
House White had bought a good deal of land in the Lower City in the past.
Those plots sat near warehouses, the old river course and the freight lines, cost management fees every year and could not be sold. When Elaine used to turn them up in the ledgers she had thought of them as the most useless burden the family carried. But once the Lower City's redevelopment genuinely began, once roads and factories pushed south, land nobody would look twice at would become valuable overnight.
At that thought, Elaine understood.
House Roland covers the factories' unpaid wages first, then takes on the compensation for the injured, and then the various debts behind that.
On the surface it is clearing up after a House White that has nobody left to answer for it. In practice it puts them in perfectly natural reach of the accounts, the contracts and the deeds. And since House Roland has taken on House White's debts, the estate that corresponds to those debts ought by rights to be inherited along with them.
She pinched lightly at the space between her brows. Those decayed old noble houses might not immediately grasp how important a link industrialisation was in human history, but Elaine, a reincarnator out of the modern world, understood its importance perfectly well.
What she had truly not anticipated was that House Roland would end up picking up House White's leavings. And thinking of the letter of annulment... Elaine remembered that it had been confirmed and never notarised.
Never notarised meant the dissolution of the betrothal had never taken effect, which meant that the woman called Elvira was still, in name, Elaine's betrothed...
And since she was the fiancée, with her fiancé vanished in mysterious circumstances, Elvira and House Roland behind her could quite properly come into all of House White's estate, and all of its debts.
With any other noble house there might have been conflicts of interest with somebody else. Unfortunately, what House Roland was setting out to swallow was House White.
Almost nobody wanted anything to do with House White, and that was exactly why House Roland could act with such confidence.
It had never once occurred to Elaine that a family fallen this far could still have someone standing over the corpse, working out how to pick it clean.