The scrubbed beechwood table in Sister Merrow’s washroom had been cleared of tea mugs, bread boards, and animal fat pots, its four corners weighted down with clean bricks wrapped in flannel rags. Stretched flat across the timber was a four-foot sheet of pale, semi-clear oiled linen that smelled sharply of boiled linseed, spirits of turpentine, and the gum-arabic sizing Pella used to keep her dark oak-ink from feathering.
Ada Morland leaned over the southern edge of the table with her yellow bright jacket draped over the back of a chair, her blue work shirt rolled up to the elbows to keep the cuffs out of the wet ink. Clipped to the bridge of her nose were a pair of half-moon reading glasses, and in her right hand she held a stainless-steel technical pen with a zero-point-tiny tubular nib, guiding it along the bevelled edge of Hal Rook’s thirty-inch brass parallel rule.
“Pass me that thirty-sixty set square, Pella—not the wooden one, the clear celluloid one out of my green zip-case,” Ada said, without lifting her eyes from the cross-hatched stone courses she was ruling across the center of the sheet. “And don’t breathe too hard over the lower left side. I just laid in the heavy black wash for the glass-fused brick plug. The ink’s still standing proud on the oil.”
