The iron-shod wheels of Tobin’s flour wagon rattled down the narrow cobbles of South Lane at fifteen minutes before the fourth bell, pulling up beside the wide oak double-doors of the Harl bakehouse where a cloud of warm, sweet-smelling steam drifted out into the afternoon drizzle.
Inside the brick-paved workroom, the heat of the two great beehive ovens pushed back the Flood Month chill like a thick wool blanket. Forty-four-year-old master baker Dunstan Harl stood in his sleeveless canvas singlet at the central kneading trough, his thick, flour-dusted forearms buried to the elbows in a sixty-pound batch of sour rye sponge, while his wife Marta Harl worked the long-handled ash-wood peel at the mouth of the left-hand oven, sliding round six-pound loaves onto the hot hearth tiles with crisp, practiced flicks of her wrist.
In the corner beside the dry birchwood stack, nine-year-old Pip Harl was scraping dried dough from the wooden proofing baskets with an iron horn-blade; six-year-old Lark sat on an upturned flour firkin braiding a strip of torn sack-linen around her doll’s shoulders; and four-year-old Brin toddled along the raised brick curb of the ash-pit, banging a flat wooden butter-paddle against his knee and chanting, “Bread warm! Bread warm!”
