The recessed brick awning beneath the laundry delivery platform was two feet deep. It smelled of damp limestone mortar and frozen cabbage leaves that had blown in from the kitchen gardens. Cold drafts whistled through the gap above Len’s shoulders. But the overhang kept the fine, freezing drizzle from touching the paper on his knee.
Inside the chute, Bram Ash’s heavy boots had vanished down the incline with the dry, muffled scrape of corduroy trousers sliding across brick. Below, in the sub-basement washhouse, a woman’s startled gasp had been cut short by the low, urgent rumble of Bram’s familiar voice: Martha. It’s Ash. Keep your apron over your mouth. Don’t strike a match.
Len had three minutes before Bram returned to the opening to signal them down.
He didn’t waste the interval. He eased his courier satchel from beneath his right arm, resting the oiled leather across his thighs. From the inner waterproof pouch—lined with hardened rubber cloth to protect registered paper from road water—he withdrew a clean, unused dispatch sheet of heavy northern postal paper, treated with beeswax along the reverse to resist moisture.
His left arm, bound tightly in its cedar splints and linen wraps, rested stiffly against his ribs. He held the dispatch sheet flat against the stiff leather cover of his route book with his braced wrist. His fingers curled just enough to keep the paper from fluttering in the wind. At the same time, his uninjured right hand produced a four-inch carpenter’s lead pencil from…
