The Courtesy Arch in the washroom responded right away when Pella drew the bone metal pen across the upper bronze groove, skipping the three-inch compulsory gaps and striking the small ringing notch at the top of the left upright. The quartz slate mounted beside the frame flashed with a cool, steady lavender light. It marked an audio-only transit channel. The air in the cellar didn’t shimmer with the physical oval. Instead, the small punched holes in brass chest muscle at the keystone began to vibrate with the crisp, clean sound texture of a quiet afternoon three worlds away.
Through the speaker came the rhythmic, metal snip-snip of heavy dressmaker’s shears cutting through tweed, with the soft hum of an electric steam iron spitting a tiny burst of dry vapor onto a pressing board. In the background, the tinny sound of a radio broadcast was playing a brass band march. It was followed by the clink of a baked-clay mug being set down on a saucer.
‘Martin, love,’ Jo Saye’s calm, brisk voice came through clearly, speaking to someone in the rear room of her shop. ‘Don’t try to lift that box of winter linings. The doctor said your hip won’t take another strain before November. Leave it on the stool. Elsie will carry it up when she comes in from school.’
Pella leaned close to the brass plate, speaking clearly. ‘Jo? Jo, are you on your break?’
The cutting stopped with a soft clack of shears resting on a wooden table. A chair scraped across linoleum, followed by footsteps approaching the receiver. ‘Pella? That you, love? You’re three minutes early for my tea break, but I was just pinning up the hem on Mr. Garside’s Sunday trousers. What’s that dreadful whistling noise in your background? Sounds like an unvented tea kettle boiling dry on an open gas ring.’
‘It’s a baked-clay sewer main behind the kitchen larder, Jo,’ Pella said. Her voice was tight with tiredness. ‘The High Sanctum is dumping high-pressure cooling overflow through our old drainage gallery. Eren went in twenty minutes ago to take a sound reading on the pipe rim. His wool sleeve caught a steam jet. The wool absorbed the boiling water and cooked his forearm. Sister Merrow had to cut the tunic off him with a boning knife. His skin is blistered from wrist to elbow.’
Over the speaker, Jo let out a sharp, disapproving breath that sounded like a tire deflating. ‘Boiled wool in live steam? Who in heaven’s name let a grown carpenter walk into high-pressure stone vapor wearing heavy fleece? That’s like climbing into a chip fryer wearing a sponge! Wool fibers are hollow, Pella. They’re natural moisture traps. They keep a sheep warm in a Scottish gale because they trap stale air, but the moment you introduce fifty-degree high-pressure steam, those hollow cores fill with boiling liquid. It doesn’t shed heat. It stores it right against the nerve endings!’
‘We don’t have modern boiler suits here, Jo,’ Pella said quietly. ‘The College of Summoners declared a full quarantine on Lowbank this noon. They’ve barred the terrace gates with iron barricades. The guards turned back the sailcloth wagons from the Upper Looms. We can’t buy heavy English canvas, we can’t buy oiled linen, and we can’t buy leather. All we have in the district is two hundred bundles of wild salt-marsh reed sitting in Dima Fen’s drying lofts. Dima says reed-cloth is peasant junk that curls like fried bacon when it gets hot.’
‘Dima Fen is a high-street tailor who thinks like an upholsterer,’ Jo replied, her tone sharpening into skilled power. ‘I’ve seen his stitches on the smock you sent through last week. Beautiful hand-backstitching, but he cuts everything on the straight grain because he’s scared of wasting fabric. You tell Dima that marsh reed is a plant fiber, exactly like flax or hemp, only with a higher quartz dust content.’
Pella heard the rustle of brown parcel paper and the scratching of a soft graphite pencil on wood as Jo began sketching. ‘Here’s what you do, Pella. You tell Dima to cut the reed-cloth on the bias—forty-five degrees across the weave. When you cut reed-cloth on the straight, the fiber nodes act like wooden skewers. They break when the elbow bends. But when you cut on the bias, the weave expands and contracts like a concertina. The natural stretch comes from the shape of the diamonds, not the stretch of the thread.’
‘What about the steam?’ Pella asked, tapping her slate. ‘How do we stop the hot moisture from soaking through?’
‘You don’t try to make it waterproof,’ Jo said firmly. ‘That’s the mistake amateur seamstresses make. If you make a steam suit fully airtight, the poor man inside parboils in his own sweat within ten minutes. You build offset vents.’
The Courtesy Bridge slate chimed, displaying the tracking data of the consultation.
‘Look at the pattern I’m describing,’ Jo continued, her pencil scratching rhythmically. ‘You lay down two layers of bias-cut reed canvas. Between them, you sandwich a loose, uncompressed layer of washed marsh-reed pith. When the high-pressure steam strikes the outer layer, the quartz dust in the reed fibers absorbs a tiny fraction of the moisture and swells by forty percent. The weave tightens itself automatically into a solid, smooth shield that sheds droplets down the slope of the chest. And across the shoulder blades and under the armpits, you leave overlapping flap seams—shingled like roof tiles, facing downward. The rising body heat escapes out the vents, but the steam jets can’t penetrate upward against the flaps.’
‘What about the stone salts, Jo?’ Pella asked, remembering the bitter crust on the gallery bricks. ‘The steam isn’t pure water. It’s heavily bitter-salt water, full of dissolved limestone and sulfur. When Ada inspected the kitchen pipe, she said the water had forty grains of hardness per gallon.’
‘Bitter-salt water,’ Jo repeated, her pencil hesitating for two seconds before resuming its confident strokes. ‘That’s actually in our favor, love, provided you treat the fibers first. Animal fibers like wool and silk rot in bitter-salt water. The skin-burning lime dissolves the protein. But plant fiber thrives in mild bitter salt. That’s why laundresses use washing soda to boil linen. If Dima boils those raw reeds in water with a scoop of soda ash, it leaches out the brittle vegetable pectin and leaves pure, flexible plant fiber that won’t care two pence about lime salt water.’
Pella logged the instructions on her slate. Soda Ash Boil — Leach Pectin — Wood fibers Stabilization. ‘Can you cut a master pattern, Jo? Can you show Dima how to lay out the armholes?’
‘I can do better than that, love,’ Jo said. Pella heard her take a slow sip of tea from her mug. ‘My official lunch break starts at half past twelve tomorrow. Twenty-two minutes. I’ll pack my forged shears, my wooden curve rules, and some proper waxed linen thread. I’ll step across the threshold, and I’ll pin the prototype directly onto your wheelwright. But you tell that carpenter of yours to have a clean table ready. I don’t lay pattern paper on flour-dusted benches. A dirty bench makes a crooked cut, and a crooked cut gets a man scalded.’
‘The bench will be scrubbed, Jo,’ Pella promised. She felt a surge of relief that made her voice thick. ‘We’ll pay the standard consultation rate: one silver coin, logged through Tamsin Drew’s locked deposit.’
‘One silver coin is the rate,’ Jo agreed, her voice warming slightly. ‘And tell Sister Merrow to have a kettle on the hob. Not chicory. Proper black tea, if she has any left behind the barricades. My tea break is up, love. Mrs. Abernathy is walking in the shop door with three bridesmaid dresses that need their waists let out before Saturday. Tomorrow at twelve-thirty sharp.’
The audio link clicked shut with a soft chime. Pella turned from the bench, her slate under her arm. Then she headed up the stairs to find Dima Fen. The tailor was about to learn how an elbow bent in Yorkshire.
She climbed the cellar stairs into the back kitchen. There, Merrow was already laying out clean scrubbing brushes and an iron kettle of soda water. Eren was sitting by the stove, testing the mobility of his fingers beneath the bandages. ‘She’s coming across?’ Eren asked quietly.
‘Tomorrow at noon,’ Pella said. ‘With shears and pattern paper. And she told us to have the bread bench clean enough to eat off.’
Eren gave a dry nod, his eyes fixing on the timber table. ‘Then we scrub until the wood bleeds.’
Pella sat on the bottom step, setting her Courtesy Bridge slate across her knees. She logged the agreed consultation fee. One silver coin, payable to Jo Saye’s locked deposit account through Tamsin Drew’s antique shop on Harrowby High Street. Ada Morland had explained how the arrangement worked. Tamsin weighed the raw silver wire on an assay balance, melted it into registered jeweler’s metal bars, and deposited modern currency directly into Jo’s bank account to pay her shop’s electric bill and Martin’s prescription fees. It was a slow, unglamorous economic link, devoid of miracles. But it was lawful and clean. ‘One silver coin for twenty minutes of pattern drafting,’ Pella murmured to herself. She watched the chalk marks set on the slate. ‘In the High Sanctum, a summoner demands forty gold crowns to bless an empty drain, and the drain still leaks. In Yorkshire, a woman fixes your elbow for the price of two pints of ale.’ Eren grunted in test from the stove, his good hand reaching for the whetstone.