Bram Ash stepped forward until the toes of his heavy service boots touched the bottom rail of the carpenter’s workbench.
The pine bench was stained black with old machine oil and fresh dark blood, the dark fluid settling into the lengthwise grooves left by three decades of hand saws. The room had cooled rapidly since Brant Sallow left. With the fire chimney pipes outside venting steam directly into the lower under-road drain, the drafts that slipped beneath the forge shop door smelled of wet sulfur, dead ashes, and the sharp, iron tang of stale rainwater.
Bram reached inside his unbuttoned uniform coat with his sound left hand. His fingers, calloused by twenty winters of handling steel handcuffs and iron cell keys, searched the inner pocket until they found a square of folded white linen. It was a clean handkerchief, hemmed in plain cotton thread. It Heth had laundered for him two mornings before using boiled rainwater and wood ash. He shook it out with a crisp snap of his wrist.
He looked down at Doma Reel’s face.
In the dim, greasy light of the hanging animal fat lamp, the violent trauma that had ended her life seemed to recede behind a strange, sudden quiet. The painful grimace that had twisted her lips as she braced the locomotive screw-jack in the scalding flood had vanished. Without the crushing weight of the oak timber pressing against her broken ribs, her jaw had relaxed, the deep, permanent furrows between her brows smoothing out…
