In Harrowby, on the wet Tuesday afternoon of October fourteenth, the kitchen clock above Ada Morland’s cast-iron Aga clicked from 12:22 to 12:23 PM.
One moment the blue-and-white Cornishware mug of tea she had poured before her lunch break was sitting alone on the scrubbed oak table, a thin skin forming across the cooling milk. The next moment the air between the pantry door and the cellar rug gave a sharp, metal crack that rattled the brass saucepans on their hooks. Ada dropped six inches onto her knees on the braided rag rug. She smelled of boiled limestone, malt vinegar, and charred canvas.
For three seconds she didn’t try to stand. The thirty-second ringing unwind had spared her inner ears from dizziness. So the kitchen walls stayed mercifully still. But without the roaring fight-or-flight rush of the blowing museum vault, the pain in her left forearm hit her all at once. A deep, throbbing, white-hot ache that felt as though someone had laid a freshly welded cast-iron pipe across her radius. Then it left it there.
“Right,” Ada muttered aloud to the empty kitchen. Her voice shook only slightly as she hooked her right heel against the leg of the oak table and levered herself upright without touching her left arm to anything. Sister Merrow’s folded linen compress was still clinging wetly from her wrist to her elbow, dripping weak vinegar onto the linoleum. “Right. Tap first. Then Jean Garside’s car.”
