The descent through the laundry chute was twenty feet of slick, cold firebrick angled at forty-five degrees. Len slid feet-first, his boots braking his speed against the stonework joints, his right hand shielding the cedar splints on his left forearm from striking the iron chute frame. He hit the concrete floor of the sub-basement washhouse with a soft, rubbery slap, his Surefoot balance catching his weight before his knees could buckle.
The washhouse was cavernous, low-ceilinged, and filled with the damp, choking chill of standing water. Six massive copper boiling vats stood in a row down the center of the room, their hearths dead and cold, coated in thick gray crusts of dried lye and lime scale. Rows of zinc-coated washboards hung from rusted ceiling hooks like rows of iron tombstones, and overhead, three lines of coarse hemp rope sagged beneath the weight of half-dry cotton sheets that smelled of sulfur mold and antiseptic wash.
In the corner behind the cold boiler, an elderly woman sat on an overturned lard barrel. She was wrapped in two gray woolen shawls. Martha, the head laundress, was sixty if she was a day, her fingers swollen and red from forty years of scrubbing quarry mud from hospital linens. She held a cold iron flatiron in her lap like a weapon, her watery old eyes darting between Bram Ash and the two newcomers who had just crawled out of her delivery chute.
