The rear delivery door of the tram communal kitchen was a heavy, iron-strapped slab of two-inch oak, set flush into the foundation stonework beneath the raised rail viaduct. When Bram lifted the latch with his pry bar, the door groaned inward on rusted pintles. That let in a swirl of freezing drizzle and coal smoke that mingled instantly with the thick, domestic aroma of boiling turnips, chicory root, and wood ash.
Inside, the vast underground shed was lit up only by the four green-flamed copper lanterns hanging from the iron roof ties. Eighty children lay huddled beneath coarse gray blankets on the wooden pallets that lined the eastern brick wall, their breathing shallow and rattling with the damp cough that afflicted every household in the lower wards.
In the center of the hall, standing beside the long zinc prep table, Doma Reel was not stirring the soup cooking pots.
She was standing with her boots apart, her flour-dusted hands resting on her apron. She stared down at the stone floor. Between her feet, a fresh, jagged crack ran through the lime mortar between two massive granite flat stone slabs. The fissure was two feet long, half an inch wide, weeping a thin trickle of gray river slurry that pooled around the legs of the table.
