The kitchen beneath the tram sheds had ceased to sound like a shelter long before the third pocket watch reached forty-five minutes past eleven. It sounded like a stuffy pump gallery waiting for a burst pipe. The heavy cast-iron soup cooking pots had been banked with wet ash to kill their glow. Their leftover steam condensed along the underside of the flanged heavy beams and falling in cold, greasy drops that smelled of boiled turnips and sheep fat.
Doma Reel had put out seven of the wall sconces herself with a damp hemp rag, moving down the outer edge with the deliberate, heavy stride of an overseer checking coal bins before a blizzard. She had left only four copper-jacketed safety lamps burning, all four clustered around the scarred pine worktable in the middle of the room. The green halo cast by the burning copper was thin, flat, and sharp-edged. It didn’t bleed into the corners. It carved a bright, box-shaped island out of the gloom. Then it left the stacked cabbage crates, the flour bins. The overhead steam bypasses buried in iron-hard black.
Down in the lower boiler pit, behind two layers of fire-curtains soaked in river lime, thirty-two people sat in total silence. Doma had herded the children and the fever cases down the stone ladder at the second ringing of the tenth bell, warning them that any cough, any scrape of an iron spoon against a tin plate, or any match struck after eleven would bring down the…
