At eleven o’clock at night, after Dima Fen had bolted his shutters on Weaver Street and Eren Tal had gone back to the wheelwright yard to grease his saw blades, Sister Merrow’s washroom was supposed to be the quietest room in Lowbank. The birch fire under the copper laundry kettle had burned down to gray ash. A cold mug of boiled tea sat beside Pella Rook’s elbow on the pine drafting table, next to a dry heel of sourdough crust and a tin of grease pencils.
Instead of silence, a low, rhythmic knocking was coming from the dry fine china rinse basin in the corner of the wet stonework wall.
Pella sat still on her tall stool, her steel pen poised above the open master ledger, a drop of black dark oak-ink trembling on the nib. Four days ago, when Ada Morland first inspected the washroom plumbing, they had unbolted the lead trap beneath that second basin and capped the wastewater stub with a threaded brass plug to keep sewer gas out of the kitchen. The basin was fully cut from the town drain. Nothing flowed into it, and nothing drained out of it.
Yet the sound was clear: three slow, hollow taps against the underside of the brass stopper. It was followed by a long, rasping breath out, like river water being drawn backward through a bed of coarse gravel.
