The stone stairs leading down into the lower wash-house beneath Track Two were steep, narrow, and slick with an ancient crust of hardened lye and lime dust. Len Vey dropped slowly. He held the iron handrail with his good right hand. His sounding pole was tucked under his arm, his boots finding the worn hollows in the center of each step.
Ahead of him, two broad-shouldered dockers in grease-stained canvas coats guided Magistrate Halden Pell down the flight. The judge’s beaver-skin cloak was gathered in a filthy bundle in his arms. His thin legs shivered inside his soiled trousers, his eyes wide and white in the lantern light.
At the foot of the stairs lay the old railway bleaching cellar—a vaulted stone chamber thirty paces long by twelve paces wide. It was built in the first decade of the rail line to boil and sterilize the linen from the sleeper cars. In the center of the room sat four huge copper boiling vats, their iron support legs cemented into the bedrock, now drained and scrubbed clean to serve as rainwater water tanks. The air was cold, fifty degrees below the warmth of the upper kitchens. It smelled sharply of sulfur, dry lime, and cold limestone water.
