Out in the narrow flagstone corridor between the taproom stairs and the back treatment chamber, the soft, rhythmic tap of a hickory walking stick paused before the corner door.
Jon stepped to the threshold of the treatment room and watched sixty-two-year-old Widow Clara Moss set her wicker spinning basket and her polished ashwood distaff down inside the small ground-floor chamber she had claimed under Share Number Fourteen of the town compact. Eight-year-old Nell was helping her spread a clean patchwork quilt over the low feather-bed, while Button hopped up onto the interior window ledge and gave two raspy, contented clicks of its beak against the wainscot.
“Is the draft off your knees in here, Mistress Moss?” Jon asked, resting his hand on the doorjamb.
Clara Moss adjusted her horn spectacles and looked around the snug, whitewashed ten-by-ten room, which backed onto the warm bricks of the kitchen chimney breast and required not a single step of stair-climbing from the street door.
“It is dry as a bishop’s vestry, Jon Hale, and warm enough that my fingers will not cramp on the spindle,” the old weaver’s widow said approvingly, sitting down on the edge of the bed and arranging her wool skirts over her ankles. “And I told Joran Finch when we left the market cross that if the horns blow on the river before dark, five of his orphan loom-girls can bring their straw pallets right in here on my floor. Go back to your sick soldier in the next…
