Old Gaunt Must Come Down

About this book

Maud Corran is seventy-one, half-blind, and the last licensed bellfounder in a moorland village whose bells rang across the Lissen kingdom for nine generations. The kingdom is gone. The guilds are gone. Now the new Commonwealth needs copper coin before winter, and it has ordered three hundred and twelve bells taken down and melted. Her apprentice, Tobiah Reyne, is conscripted to run the melting yard in the capital, under the orders of the son who walked away from her forge thirty years ago. Maud cannot follow him, so she teaches him by letter: how to break a bell, how to read its metal, how to be a founder in a country that no longer wants founders. First on the list is Old Gaunt, the great bell that cracked on its first morning, forty-seven years ago. Maud was there when it was cast. She has never said what happened.