At noon, the work in Weaving Barn Number Two stopped fully for Sister Merrow’s forced thirty-minute dinner interval. Two heavy oak frame stand tables were cleared of reed waste and set with platters of cold boiled salt beef, pickled onions, yellow mustard, and thick crusts of dark turnip bread.
Jo Saye sat cross-legged on a pile of raw flax bobbins between Master Dima and Mistress Kessa, chewing a beef sandwich while comparing fabric stiffness samples with her pocket hair-width.
‘This reed warp has a beautiful hand, Mistress Kessa,’ Jo remarked. She held the sample up to the high window row window. ‘It has the stiffness of four-ply sailcloth, but when you wet it with pine oil, it flexes like oiled calfskin. We don’t have reed cloth like this in Yorkshire. Everything back home is man-made nylon or imported cotton.’
‘My great-grandmother brought the reed pattern from the northern marshes, Mistress Jo,’ Kessa answered proudly. She poured tea from a clay pot pitcher. ‘She taught us to soak the reed ribbons in wood ash water for three days to leach out the brittle sap. That’s what keeps it from cracking when you bend it cold.’
Around the tables, the eighteen loom apprentices laughed, argued over stitch counts, and shared tobacco with Eren Tal’s timber-cutters. For thirty minutes, there was no terror of the flood, no academy hierarchy, and no despair—only the warm, grounding solidarity of working people eating good bread together while preparing to defend their own town.
