By nine o’clock the following morning, Sister Merrow’s kitchen courtyard looked like an apothecary’s potting shed.
Forty large clay pot pickle crocks, scrubbed free of salt water with boiling vinegar and sand, stood in neat ranks of ten along the flat stone slabs. Tavi and three young apprentice weavers from Fish Street were kneeling over timber tubs, carefully washing handfuls of green sphagnum moss gathered from the freshwater springs above the High Tor.
“Wash it twice,” Pella told the boys, inspecting a clump of moss against the pale autumn light. “If there’s any river silt clinging to the roots, the rot will ferment inside the sealed jars and suffocate the eggs. Shake it out until it’s damp as a clean towel, not dripping.”
Tavi held up a clump of green moss, his young brow furrowed with serious concern. “Miss Pella, how does the moss keep the eggs from hatching? If it’s warm in the cellar, won’t damp moss make them sprout like barley?”
“The moss doesn’t make them sprout, Tavi,” Pella explained. She knelt beside his tub and showing him how to separate the stringy peat from the dead twigs. “The moss maintains what Imran calls eighty-five percent humidity. If the egg shell dries out, the larva inside suffocates. But once the jars are carried to the chapel crypt, the forty-eight-degree air cools the moss. The cold slows down their heartbeats. In the cold, they sleep until spring.”
