By half past eleven on the seventh morning, the narrow cobbled courtyard of the Nine Lanterns boarding house smelled of wet coal slack, boiled cabbage, and the warm chalky steam rising through the cellar hatch.
Pella Rook knelt beside the cast-iron floor trap in the lower cellar with two wooden water buckets, a twelve-foot length of braided canvas hose. Her handheld slate laid out on an upturned herring barrel.
Three paces away, Foreman Eren Tal was checking the mortised joints of a four-inch bored elm trough he had shaped in his timber yard before breakfast, while two ground-floor tenants—Mistress Vane the seamstress and Old Hob the retired waterman—watched from the bottom steps of the stone stair.
At the portable brass resonator frame Eren had wedged between the cellar piers, the green numerals on the top door beam clicked to twenty-four minutes. Ada Morland stepped through in her navy overalls and steel-toed safety boots.
Master Corley, the proprietor of the Nine Lanterns, stood on a dry plank near the wine-racks clutching his leather coin pouch to his wool waistcoat.
Corley had first hired Pella to stop his cellar flooding during dry weather. Then, he had assumed that summoning a foreign specialist meant a single wave of a wand that included unlimited labor and free timber.
