The underground washhouse of the Reed family laundry was an inferno of white steam, boiling copper vats. The sharp, choking reek of packed wood-ash lye.
Sera Reed stood over the great twelve-foot copper vat, her ash wash-paddle moving with rhythmic, inexorable power. She turned eighty pounds of coarse hotel bedding in the boiling lye water. Six South Ward washerwomen, their arms red and corded from decades of wringing scalded sheets, worked beside her, their voices singing a low, slow cart hauling hymn that drowned out the shouting of the watchmen in the street above.
When Tomas, Nessa, and Rowan emerged from the coal chute in the cellar wall, Sera didn’t drop her paddle.
She wiped the boiling steam from her weathered forehead with her coarse linen apron, looked at Tomas’s braced arm and the mud on his boots. Then looked at the heavy satchel of town evidence resting on his shoulder.
“The watch has search warrants for every porter’s cottage between Awl Court and the Timber Basin, Tomas,” Sera said. Her voice was calm, deep, and steady as an anvil. “They came through here twenty minutes ago with iron pikes, poking into the dry linen bins. I told the lieutenant if he dipped his greasy coat into my clean rinse vat, I’d scrub his hide with skin-burning potash until his ribs showed. They moved on to the brewery.”
Emmet Reed stepped from behind the woodpile, holding two massive wicker laundry hampers four feet long and three feet deep, lined with greased sailcloth.
“The watch has thrown a cordon across the Canal Bridge,” Emmet said. He leaned on his carved willow crutch. “Every cart is being turned out, every sack of meal probed with bayonets. But they don’t probe the hampers of boiling hotel sheets. Even a city watchman knows that three gallons of boiling lye water will blind a man for life.”
Sera looked at Nessa, then at Tomas. “Get into the hampers. Both of you. Pack the evidence boxes in the bottom. We have two drays of wet hospital linen cleared for delivery to the North Sickroom at nine o’clock. The drivers have official town health passes.”
Tomas knelt on the cellar floor. He placed his haversack, the four hazel tally rods, the brass float gauge, and Nessa’s land-mapper’s instruments into the bottom of the first hamper. He wrapped them in three layers of dry oiled canvas.
He climbed into the basket, curling his body tight to accommodate his braced left forearm. Nessa climbed into the second hamper, holding her sound horn beneath her chin.
Sera and the washerwomen right away covered them with six layers of scalding, dripping sheets, freshly pulled from the rinse vats. The heat was choking, the bitter-salt steam biting into Tomas’s nostrils and stinging his eyes. But the heavy, wet linen formed an iron-hard barrier of heat and smell that no search dog could penetrate.
The wicker lids were slammed shut and secured with heavy hemp lashings.
Tomas felt the hamper hoisted onto the heavy cart bed by Rowan’s massive arms. The heavy timber wagon shuddered as the horses were whipped into motion. It rolled out of the laundry yard into the cold autumn night.
Through the wicker weave, Tomas heard the clatter of iron-shod hooves and the harsh voices of the watch cordon at the Canal Bridge:
“Halt the heavy cart! What’s your freight, old man?”
“Town hospital wash from the South Ward,” Emmet’s voice rang out, raspy, tired, and fully convincing. “Two hampers of infected smallpox bedding from the lower docks, Officer. If you want to put your hands inside, take the top sheet first.”
A pause. A hasty muttered curse. The sound of watchmen stepping back into the mud.
“Pass through! Keep that filth moving north!”
The wagon rumbled across the wooden planking of the Canal Bridge. That left the watch cordon behind.
Ten minutes later, the heavy cart turned into the pitch-black bottleneck of Tanner’s Alley. The wagon halted, the lashings were cut, and Rowan’s calloused hands hauled Tomas out into the freezing night air.
Leth was waiting in the shadows, holding a crowbar.
“The cutter is at the boat ramp, Tomas,” Leth whispered urgently. “Holt’s private guards are bringing the hardwood chest out of the manor’s rear cellar gate right now. They’re going to load it onto the river boat at midnight!”
While Rowan and the six South Ward wagon drivers lifted the leftover wicker hampers from the heavy cart bed to convert the heavy timber wagon into a mobile barricade at the mouth of Tanner’s Alley, Emmet Reed handed Tomas a dry wool smock and a pair of thick leather cart driver’s mittens lined with rabbit fur to replace the clothes soaked by the scalding lye steam. Even here in the pitch-black shadow behind the tanyard wall, the old porter’s eyes measured the load spreading on his son’s shoulders with lifelong habit. Emmet adjusted the brass buckle of Tomas’s cross-belt by one notch so the bronze hook-plate on the cedar splint rode two inches higher against his breastbone. That kept the healing left radius clear of the quarterstaff’s swing arc. Before climbing back onto the driver’s box of the laundry heavy cart to lead the watch patrols away toward the North Sickroom, Emmet pressed his rough, calloused palm briefly against the back of Tomas’s neck—no speech, no warning, only the silent transfer of the road from father to son.
Beside the overturned heavy cart bed, Nessa Vale knelt in the rain to unroll her oilskin wraps from the bottom of the second hamper, checking that the boiling potash vapor had not pierced the dark wood presentation case containing Station Three’s copper graph tape or the four hazel tally rods. Verifying that the red wax seals of Master Bela Tern and Ada Fen were hard and dry. Then, she strapped the evidence satchel directly across her own spine rather than letting Tomas carry the extra thirty pounds into close-quarters combat. She then took a three-jointed hardwood leveling staff shod with heavy brass ferrules from her survey tube and screwed the sections together. She tested its balance in both hands. Meanwhile, her brass sound horn hung ready on its silver chain at her throat.
Leth led Tomas ten paces forward under the dripping timber roof edges of the lower sheep-washers’ shed to point out the tactical shape of the alley ahead. Because the twelve-foot granite retaining wall of Holt Manor formed an unbroken upright cliff on the east side and the rotting pine planks of the sheep-wash pens hemmed in the west, the hired blades wheeling the four-hundred-pound hardwood chest down from the cellar back gate would be trapped in a ten-foot stone chute with no room to form a wide shield-wall or swing long cavalry sabers. Also, the autumn downpour had washed piles of slick, greasy oak tan-bark from the leather pits across the middle cobblestones. That created a dangerous footing where heavily armored men in chainmail hauberks would slide at the first sideways shove of an ash staff.
At the canal end of the lane, four veteran South Ward lightermen sent by Orrin Hale had quietly swum under the stern of Holt’s thirty-foot timber lighter in the darkness and fouled its rudder pintles with a loop of rusted iron chain, ensuring that even if a single guard broke past the heavy cart barricade, the trade ring boat couldn’t steer out into the Western Canal current. Every bolt-hole was plugged. All that remained was to meet the hardwood chest in the mud and take delivery under the law.
Tomas jumped down from the wagon bed, his hobnailed boots biting into the wet cobblestones of Tanner’s Alley. His left forearm throbbed with a cold, sharp ache. But his right hand caught his six-foot ash quarterstaff with iron-hard grip.
“The fifth docket is on the move,” Tomas said, his voice ringing low and fierce in the rain. “We take the chest in the alley.”