Sister Merrow moved through the low-ceilinged basement of the weaver apartments on lower Fish Street with the steady, quiet power of a woman who had spent thirty years measuring human misery in inches and grains. She held an animal fat lantern in her left hand, its yellow flame enclosed in a punched holes in tin shroud that cast dancing patterns of light across the damp granite stonework. In her right hand, she carried a thick stick of carpenter’s chalk and a brass sounding rule notched with quarter-inch marks.
Pella followed three paces behind, Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs in her apron pocket and an unrolled roll of coarse hemp paper under her arm. The basement smelled heavily of wet wool, damp river silt. The sharp, bitter-salt tang of fresh pipe lime washed down from the ceiling vaults. Four hours earlier, the river had forced its way through the foundation floorboards here. It filled the undercroft to the third floor beam course. Now, thanks to the venturi suction created by the open Third Gate, the water had drained back through the cry holes into the river gravel. That left the broad granite flat stone slabs slick with gray mud but entirely clear of standing water.
