The Household
What every house has
Running water and a drained toilet, a hearth or a closed stove, something cold to keep food in, and light that does not have to be a flame. The House describes all of it. What changes from one house to the next is not whether these things are there but how many rooms they serve and how good they are.
Six kinds of home
- A rented room, or a bed in a loft
- The bottom of the city. A laborer pays one or two Braell a night for a bed in a room with three or four other men, or four to eight a week. A family renting one room has that room and nothing else: they cook on the hearth, draw water from the tap on the landing, and share a privy and a washing place with the floor — a tub, a drain, a tap, and a queue for it first thing. Nobody carries water up stairs, which is what the pipes are for; nobody chooses when they wash either.
- A working family's rooms
- Two or three rooms by the year, water in the kitchen, and a small washroom of their own or shared with one other household — toilet, sink, and tub on one run of pipe. A hearth or, if the family has done well, a closed stove. A washing drum in the corner, the machine a working household buys first. This is where most people in any city live.
- A master's house over his shop
- The shop at street level, the family above, a loft or back room for apprentices. Six to fifteen Goyl a year to rent or a hundred and fifty to four hundred to buy, and buying it is the ordinary ambition of a man who has finished his masterpiece. Its own kitchen tap, a proper bathing room, a wall clock, and a lamp that burns something better than third-pressing oil.
- A townhouse
- Twenty to fifty Goyl a year in a respectable street; a hundred to three hundred for an address that is the point. Piped heat, a tub that fills from its own tap, a toilet in a room of its own, a cold cabinet driven by a steam plant in the cellar, rooms that exist to receive people in. The slave quarters are heated, because a household that let its slaves be ill in a northern winter would be telling the street something.
- A farm household in the ring
- Stone or timber, sturdy, often three generations, because a farm runs on hands and the hands are family. Water piped, waste to the same channels, an icebox rather than a cabinet, a hearth for heat. A seed drill, a small harvester, and a wood-cutter in the barn, better maintained than any city household's machines because nobody sells another before the harvest.
- A Roedhaven household
- A hall and whatever rooms the keeper's family has built off it, inside the wall, with a gate that closes at dark. The household is the keeper's family, some hands, and whoever has come to stay. They eat together, which city households stopped doing generations ago.
Who lives in a house
A wealthy or middling household is the parents and their children. A poor or a farming one is more often three generations, or two brothers and their families, because pooling labor is how it stays ahead.
Most households run the same way: the husband leads, provides, and answers for the household's standing; the wife runs it — the money, the food, the servants, the slaves, and the children — and a man who overrode her on any of it in front of company would be telling everyone he could not manage his own house. It is written nowhere and has never needed to be. It is a pattern, not a rule, and the world says so. Some households are led and provided for by the wife, and the street thinks nothing of it so long as it is well run. A household of two men or two women divides the same work between whoever is suited. What the world judges is whether the household holds together and whether whoever leads it has earned the following — the same standard as every other authority. A wife's earnings are part of most households' income; a wife who out-earns her husband outright is less usual and not unheard of, and the philosophy has never had an argument against it. What the street watches is whether the two are honest about who does what.
Help is hired more often than owned. A free woman in by the day costs a wage and can be let go; a slave costs fifteen to thirty Goyl before she has done anything and then must be kept for life. A slave is what a household buys when it wants the work done permanently, by somebody it trained, or where it can be seen. Apprentices live in, and the master's wife runs them as she runs everyone under the roof.
Sleeping
Privacy is bought, and the point at which a household stops sharing beds is about the point at which it stops counting Braell. Lodging men share a bed in a loft with two or three others. A working family gives the parents a bed and puts the children in another; siblings share. A master's household gives the children a room apiece if it has them, the apprentices the attic, and the slave the kitchen, the foot of the bed, or the quarters. A townhouse has rooms standing empty, the plainest display of wealth in the world. Husband and wife usually share a bed; among the Shining Reach salon class separate chambers are fashionable, and the city can tell you what a particular couple's arrangement means.
The day by the bells
Every city strikes the Spaen sixteen times a day, and every household runs on them. A working family is up at the fourth bell, out before the fifth, works until the eighth when the whole city stops to eat in the street, works again until the twelfth, eats the real meal at home, and is asleep by the fifteenth. A master's house has the apprentices lighting the shop at the fourth, the master at the bench by the fifth, the shop open sixth to twelfth, the household eating together at midday, and the evening given to accounts, the guild, or the tavern. A wealthy house has slaves and hired help up at the fourth, the family rising at the sixth or seventh, dinner at the twelfth or thirteenth running two or three Spaen with guests, and the kitchen banked by the fifteenth whether or not the family is still out — a house where servants worked at midnight would be a house that could not organize itself. Guests are the exception everywhere.
Keeping the house
Water arrives and waste leaves, and neither is thought about until it fails. Washing is the great labor: a working household does its own in a drum; a household with more money sends it to a laundry house at two to four Braell a load; the wealthy do it at home because they have a room and somebody to do it in. Ice comes on a cart. Refuse goes to the Eledh keepers. A household's machines are maintained rather than replaced — the drum repaired by the man on the corner, the clock to the repairman every few years — not from thrift but because that is what one does with a thing somebody made properly.