The Kitchen’s long table was scrubbed every morning with lye and sand, and by the afternoon of the twenty-ninth day it had been pressed so many times with flour that the grain of the oak had gone white in the middle and dark at the edges, like a path worn across a field.
Pell had eleven children at it. She had counted them herself, at the door, with her hands on her hips, and had sent two back out to fetch their mothers’ shawls and one back to wash his face, since a child with a flour-marked nose was a child who had been in the flour and not on the bread. That left eight, and a ninth who had come in on her own, with her hair in a tangle and a loaf-tin under each arm, and had been told that she could knead or she could wash the tins, and had picked the tins and then, after a while, quietly put them down and taken up a lump of dough instead.
“You push,” said Pell. “You push it away from you with the heel of your hand, and you fold it back, and you turn it a quarter, and you push again. It is not a game. It is a survival skill, and you will all have it by the time the siege is over, or I will know why.”
