After lunch, Shard left the house after reading for an hour.
He found a carriage at the street corner and traversed the entire urban district to reach the cemetery outside the city. During the ride, the extremely bored Shard discussed the recent weather with the coachman and together they complained about the soaring prices before touching on their respective jobs.
Perhaps it was Shard's relatively young face and his approachable tone that made the coachman willing to chat with him a bit more. Of course, the carriage was not his own; the coachman rented it from the Tobesk Carriage Rental Association in the city, operated it within a designated area, and handed over a portion of the daily earnings to the association, using the rest to support his family.
Though this job paid better than that of the porters who lug bags around near the station, it hadn't alleviated the coachman's family from poverty. The main reason was that he had five children at home.
