The Coldharbour Supper Court

About this book

Forty years after the lights went out across England, the canals are the roads again, and on the Coldharbour Flight disputes are settled over soup in Ruth Ambler's lock-house kitchen. Ruth is seventy-one, short-sighted, fond of lists, and has just taken on an apprentice: Toby, a horse-boy who notices everything about animals and nothing about people. On the first morning of the Apple Moot, Toby finds kind old Silas Venn dead in the empty chamber of Lock Seven. The flight blames the stranger, Nell Carrow, whose father Ruth herself sent away in the hungry winter of 2032 on Silas's word. By custom the death will be heard on the Moot's last night. Ruth has six days to find the truth, and the truth may not stay politely in the present.