While the rain lashed against the leaded panes of Sister Merrow’s medicine room in Lowbank, two hundred miles and an entire universe away in the heavy-duty town of Harrowby, Martin Saye stood at his kitchen counter, executing an act of domestic building that rivaled the construction of the Great Sluice.
Martin, a retired town postman of sixty-one years with bad knees and a pension from the General Post Office, wore a faded cardigan with leather buttons and his reading glasses pushed down onto the bridge of his nose. Before him on the scrubbed pine board lay a fresh crusty tin loaf from the bakery on Station Road, a heavy clay crock of Colman’s English mustard, and four thick, rosy slices of cold salt beef he had simmered with bay leaves and peppercorns the last evening.
Jo Saye sat at the small kitchen table, her sewing basket on her lap. She used a small brass needle-point arrow to pick out a misplaced hem stitch on a pleated skirt. The kitchen smelled wonderfully of toasted crusts, boiling tea, and the sharp, eye-watering tang of fresh yellow mustard.
“You’re putting too much mustard on that bottom slice, Martin,” Jo said without looking up from her needle-point arrow. “One swipe across the butter is plenty. If you lay it on with a trowel like that, my eyes will be watering while I’m trying to align Dima’s band-clamps. I’ll end up sewing my own apron to the canvas.”
