In the clean, curtained nook at the rear of the staging shed, Sister Merrow had set up her field dressing station on a scrubbed deal table. The small space smelled of dried lavender, boiled vinegar. The sharp, pine-scented tang of pine pitch salve. A clean linen towel was spread across the wood, upon which Merrow had arranged her instruments. Three bone spatulas, a pair of polished iron dressing scissors. A wide-mouthed heavy clay jar of witch hazel emollient.
Ada Morland sat on a three-legged stool, her left sleeve rolled above the elbow and pinned to her shoulder with a safety pin. Sister Merrow was carefully cutting away the transit dressing she had applied four hours earlier at the height of the flood crisis. The old linen, stained with yellow ointment and river damp, came away with a soft, tearing sound.
‘Hold steady, Ada,’ Merrow murmured, her touch gentle but firm as she peeled the final layer of gauze from the inside of the forearm. ‘The skin is tender, but the weeping has stopped.’
Ada didn’t flinch, though the muscles along her jaw tightened. The scald—the result of a burst steam pipe rim during the emergency pipe hub bypass—showed as a three-inch oval of angry, mottled pink skin across the muscular belly of her forearm. The blisters had been drained and flattened, and around the edges a clean, pale rim of new epithelial tissue was already beginning to form. White traces of pipe lime dust clung to the hair on her…
