The smell of warm wet chalk and old iron scale hung heavy in the Deep Basin gallery, thirty feet below the cobbles of Lowbank’s Cooperage Row. It wasn’t the cold, salty stink of harbor tidewater that usually seeped through the lower cut stone courses during the autumn neaps. It smelled like the inside of a laundry copper that had been boiled dry three times. Then it left to crust over with grey river lime.
Pella Rook knelt on the slick limestone apron in front of the bricked-up Third Gate, her wool skirt pinned up above her ankles with two brass safety pins Jo had brought over from Harrowby the week before. Between her knees sat a shallow tin pan half-filled with clear rainwater she had carried down from Sister Merrow’s water tank. Even in the dim orange glow of the horn lantern, the surface of the water was not still. Nested rings marched inward from the tin rim toward the center, pulsing in a tight, relentless rhythm that matched the dull throb inside Pella’s back teeth.
“Hold the rod higher on the header course, Pella,” Ada Morland said, her voice echoing flatly off the vaulted ceiling of the gallery. “Right where the red glass-fused brick meets the old granite springer. Don’t let your knuckles touch the wet stone, or your pulse will muddy the reading.”
