By five o’clock in the afternoon on the twenty-sixth day, the front room of Sister Merrow’s medicine room smelled of wet wool, wood ash. The heavy, savory steam of boiled river greens. A thirty-gallon cast-iron cooking pot, suspended from a soot-crusted crane above the peat hearth, rumbled with a slow, thick boil that sent plumes of white vapor into the low pine rafters.
Sister Merrow stood before the hearth, her linen sleeves rolled above her muscular forearms. She grabbed a long-handled ash wood paddle. She didn’t wear the spotless white habit of cathedral sisters. She wore a stained leather work apron over a coarse gray wool tunic, an iron skimmer tucked into her rope belt beside a horn bottle of carbolic vinegar.
With steady, rhythmic strokes, she stirred the cooking pot. That turned over two pecks of dried white field beans, four salted pork briskets, and two bushels of shredded river cabbage harvested from the lowbank allotments before the water rose.
“Don’t crowd the bench, Bran!” Merrow barked over the hiss of the fire. She pointed her dripping paddle toward a table in the corner. “Take your wet boots off at the threshold and put on a pair of dry wool socks from the wicker hamper. If you sit at my table with river mud on your shins, you eat your beans standing on the porch.”
