A very extraordinary lady compleats this malicious group. She does not appear to have any Christian name, but by the gang is termed the Glove Woman, as she constantly wears cotton-mittens. Sir Archy dryly insinuates that she keeps her arms thus covered because she has got the itch. She is about 48 years of age, is above the middle height, and has a sharp face. On her chin and upper lip there is a considerable quantity of fine downy hair, and she is somewhat pockfretten. Always dressed in a common fawn-coloured Norwich gown, with a plain cream-coloured camblet shawl, and wears a chip hat covered with black silk. The glove woman is remarkable for her skill in managing the machine. She frequently goes abroad. The rest of the gang, but particularly Sir Archy, are constantly bantering and plucking at her, like a number of rooks at a strange jack-daw: she has never been known to speak.

The Workhorse Section

Just before the transport capsized she gave me a ring in two parts. Her coat stained heavy with residual slag.

Much later: checking the prints amassed on the band's circumference I find a great deal of reference to her past. A nauseous pause trips these investigations, imagining her hips sunk below us. Kettle-lice jetting through clothespegs.

A ring in two parts hangs from the monitor, a screen displaying records of her crimes and a boy kneeling in the mud outside an old station. Eyes dim as he makes his discovery. In the ground another sign of her labour, another heavy relic thieved from industry, a monstrous ingot chained in dirt and gravels. Listening to its weight he hears machinery. A ring in two parts maintains our distance.

He follows the soot, the tracks, to the station, its broken roof blackened by coke deposits (choked rain). A horny crow pocks holes in the sheet-metal.

And I have never been insensitive to a nostalgia for crumpled industry. My mother. She'd haul sleepers in the night to break paths for her children; building vagabond railroads until that final collapse. Tyres with the burst running out of them. Purse of tears when she fell into the steam.