It was dark outside the high, barred casements of the Lowbank back kitchen. Just then, the sound speaking tube finally clicked open at quarter past six that evening.
For five hours, Pella had not left the washroom. She had helped Eren Tal and Korr Var pump out the flooded coal sump into the night street, she had swept up the broken shards of the glazed fine china collar once the museum pocket spent its pressure and cooled to a sullen trickle. She had washed the soot and lime-water from the dark wood case of Ada’s Budenberg pressure gauge three separate times. Yet her hands still smelled of boiled chalk and vinegar.
On the corner of the scrubbed pine table sat a heavy canvas drawstring pouch tied with red twine. Inside it were forty-five silver Guild sovereigns. Every coin left in the Lowbank neighborhood defense reserve, plus the twelve silver pieces Pella had saved from her father’s estate to pay the winter coal tax on the yard. By Imran Bell’s metalworking conversion rate, forty-five high-purity silver sovereigns weighed just under forty Troy ounces. Worth roughly nine hundred pounds sterling on the bullion scales in Leeds, enough to cover a full month of Ada Morland’s lost domestic plumbing contracts and private physiotherapy twice over.
