Sister Merrow didn’t run down the upper cellar steps. People who ran on wet stone carrying two-gallon clay pot pitchers broke their ankles and spilled the water. She dropped with the fast, flat-footed, rolling glide of an old ship’s surgeon on a pitching deck, her gray wool skirts pinned up above her ankles and a wide-mouthed heavy clay crock cradled against her apron.
She had smelled the burst pocket the moment the first gust of vapor blew up the coal chute into the back washroom. You couldn’t work forty years in the Lowbank infirmaries without knowing the stench of deep-well stone lime when it hit live steam. Plain hot water scalded and stopped as soon as the skin cooled. Lime-salt water kept eating into the fat layers underneath long after the steam cleared, saponifying the tissue like lye in a soap kettle unless you killed the bitter salt on the spot.
“Clear the step, Pella,” Sister Merrow commanded, her voice cutting through the roar of the deflected steam jet below without rising an octave.
Eight. Seven.
Pella scrambled sideways out of the chalk circle. She pressed her back against the damp brick wall of the stairwell as Sister Merrow dropped to both knees beside the third flat stone slab step. Carefully keeping her own knees two inches outside the glowing blue animal fat line so the threshold wouldn’t drag her into Yorkshire when the pawl tripped.
