Morning rain dripped from the lead gutters of the Municipal Board of Works Annex onto the worn granite steps of Lower Guildhall Lane.
Pella Rook stood before the scarred deal counter of the third-tier drainage wicket. She held her canvas-bound survey folio against her bottle-green apprentice tunic. Meanwhile, Foreman Eren Tal rested a wooden carrying tube of rolled linen drawings upright beside his boot.
Inside the high-ceilinged room, the air smelled of wet sheep’s-wool cloaks, sour dark oak-ink, and the harsh carbolic lye the night porters used to scrub harbor mud from the public flat stone slabs.
Behind the brass wicket sat Senior Drainage Clerk Orwin Pell, a stoop-shouldered official of fifty winters whose horn-rimmed glasses sat low on a nose reddened by coal smoke and whose cuffs were pinned back with paper sleeves to protect his linen shirt.
Pella unfastened the web strap of her folio and laid three measured drawings across the green baize counter.
The top sheet showed the bricked check gallery behind Sister Merrow’s communal kitchen washroom, complete with the dimensions of the eighteen-inch salt-glazed baked-clay trunk and the newly discovered bronze saddle bearing the seal of the Summoners’ College.
The second sheet recorded the rhythmic pressure pulse Ada Morland had isolated with her brass Bourdon gauge during her twenty-four-minute lunch crossing from Harrowby.
