The smell of wet river lime and sour mash had soaked into the timber top door beam of Sister Merrow’s kitchen washroom, but by mid-morning on the fifth day, it was smothered by the odor of wet wool and panic.
Twelve men and women stood packed into the flat stone slab passage that connected the back kitchen to the rear alley. They didn’t shout, because people who lived below the High Tor water line knew that shouting brought court guards and town clerks. Instead, they crowded forward with the dry, scuffling persistence of sheep pressed against a shearing gate. Their boots left grey smears of canal clay across the scrubbed boards. Every one of them held a paper, an iron lease token, or a handful of cold copper wrapped in a grease-stained handkerchief.
“My water tank’s weeping salt from the lower courses,” said Master Kett, who ran the dry-salting shed near the ferry slip. His wool cap was crushed in two blunt, salt water-cracked hands. “Not fresh slow leak, Pella. It’s warm. It tastes like boiler blow-down, and the cellar mortar is turning to porridge. If the floor heaves, fifty barrels of cod go into the bilge.”
“The malt floors at the North Reach are sweating,” said a younger woman behind him. Her voice was tight with the strain of five nights without sleep. “The grain is sprouting on the stone before we can turn it. Three days more and the whole autumn steep rots on the floor. We have…
