At twelve-fifteen on the twenty-fifth day, when the noon lunch hour arrived across Harrowby and the three brass deep ring chimes on St. Jude’s Lane, Station Road. Nelson Street remained dark and silent, Ada Morland, Jo Saye, and Imran Bell didn’t sit staring at an empty wall waiting for a miracle. The very foundation of the Courtesy Bridge was that their lives in Yorkshire were real, paid commitments that no crisis in another world had the right to swallow.
In the cab of her Ford Transit van outside the Station Road builders’ merchant, forty-three-year-old Ada Morland unscrewed the lid of her stainless-steel thermos, poured a steaming cup of homemade red-lentil soup. Then she ate two thick cheese-and-pickle sandwiches while reading the afternoon job sheet her nephew Ben had clipped to the dashboard.
Once she had finished her meal and bent the fingers of her left hand inside the buckled calfskin squeezing brace Sister Merrow and Jo had designed for her burned forearm, Ada put the van into gear and drove ten minutes across town to the Laburnum Grove council estate. There, an elderly widow’s upstairs radiator valve had seized shut before the November frost.
Meanwhile, in the warm back parlor behind Threadbare Alterations, Jo Saye set out two plates of cold roast beef, pickled beetroot, and buttered brown bread for herself and her sixty-four-year-old husband Martin. Twelve-year-old Elsie had left a stack of three navy school-choir skirts on the side table to have their hems let down an inch before…
