The town washhouse at the South Docks was filled with a dense, billowing fog of rotten-egg river steam, smelling of bitter-salt wood-ash lye, boiled linen, animal fat soap, and wet stonework. Overhead, thirty massive cedar drying racks hung from iron pulleys, draped with heavy woolen blankets and draymen’s smocks dripping water onto the flat stone slabs. Along the western wall stood eight brick boiler coppers. Their cast-iron firebox doors glowed a dull, angry orange.
Hesta, the senior washhouse mistress, stood on an overturned soap tub, her sleeves rolled to her muscular shoulders, a heavy iron wrench clutched in her right hand. Beside her on the wash bench sat a clay pot of boiled tea and a half-eaten slice of sourdough crust, kept warm by the steam rising from the rinsing vats. On the wall above her, Korr Var had carved the town check stamp and Law Six in bold, chisel-cut letters, filled with black dark oak-ink.
“Listen to me, girls and boys!” Hesta shouted, her gravelly voice cutting through the roar of boiling cooking pots and the rhythmic slap of wooden laundry bats. “For twenty years, the academy land-mappers told us that if a washhouse copper starts to shudder, you run into the alley and wait for an apprentice to come down the hill with a silver wand. And what happened two days ago when the lower bypass surged? Mally took four quarts of boiling lye across her shins because she couldn’t reach the overhead screw valve!”
