The lane behind the South Ward laundries was quiet and dark, lit only by the warm amber light shining through the curtained rear windows of the brick cottages. The smell of wet wool, lye soap, and boiled starch was thick and familiar in the air. That scent had filled Tomas’s lungs since his fourth year.
At the end of Alley Four stood the two-story brick workshop of the Reed Laundry. The high, arched windows of the washing floor were dark, the copper vats scrubbed and covered with clean canvas for the night, the great wooden mangle-press oiled. Then it locked in its rest position. On the wall beside the back door hung the cast-iron delivery bell that had once summoned young Tomas to take baskets of wet linen to the drying lofts on the bluffs.
Tomas stood on the flat stone slabs outside the threshold, looking up at the weathered top door beam. Above the door. There, the town landlord’s brass rent-plate had once threatened eviction every quarter-day, there was now a small, box-shaped plaque of gray slate carved with four simple letters:
REED
The leasehold had been put out fifteen years before, bought outright with the first payback payments from the Holt hearing and the honest savings of his mother’s wash-tubs. The title deed sat in an iron box beneath his mother’s bed, approved by seven community seals and bearing no debt to any guild or minister in the land.
